“Enough with your nonsense, Minions!” Pavonis snarled. The glassy circle of his eye hardened as his gaze swiveled to each of them, before rushing back to Coralline. “The constables have a warrant out for your arrest for the murder of Tang Tarpon.”
“B-but how?” Coralline stuttered. “How do they even know my name?”
“I don’t know,” Pavonis replied.
“If they know my name,” Coralline said hoarsely, “it means that they have my portrait, or will have it soon, which means they’ll recognize me on sight.” Her mind was whirling, but she tried to calm down and rationalize through the situation as Ecklon would. “They have no motive,” she said.
“But they do,” said Nacre. “They believe you were trying to rob Tang and stabbed him when he refused to give you carapace.”
“But that’s absurd!”
“I agree,” said Pavonis, “but we have to stay focused if we want to make it out of here. They’re checking all the rooms, starting with room number one.”
Coralline was in room number forty-two; that bought her a little time to escape.
“I looked for potential exits last night,” Pavonis said, “but it was dark, and it was tough to tell. I’m going to circle this place now and try to find you a back door. Once I find it, you’ll hear my dual thumps in the corridor outside your door. Slip out of your room as soon as you hear them, then I’ll guide you out of this labyrinth through further taps on the walls. In the meantime, pack your satchel and close your shutters, in case constables decide to peek through windows.”
“What about us?” Altair said. “Where will we go?”
“Given the murder charge,” Nacre said, her tentacles waggling down in his direction, “we’re safer with the Ogre than with Coralline. Bring your snout to the wall, Ogre, so I can climb on it. As for you, Pole Dancer”—she laughed—“you’ll have to get inside the Ogre’s mouth!”
Pavonis glowered at them but touched his snout to the wall, so Nacre could crawl atop it. When she was settled, she looked like a red-and-white bump on his head. He then opened his mouth for Altair to enter; the seahorse did so tremblingly.
“Don’t worry, Altair,” Coralline said. “You’ll be separated from Pavonis’s throat by the filtering pads in his mouth.”
That didn’t seem to bring Altair any consolation. Pavonis closed his mouth, gave Coralline one last look, then left. She closed her shutters with quivering fingers. Then she swam to the dresser in a daze and changed out of her chemise into the sky-blue bodice with cloud-white ribbons that Ecklon so liked. It was an outfit for a happy day, a happy time—ill-suited to today—but she wore it so she could pretend he was with her.
She packed and closed her satchel, finding that its zip moved as smoothly as an eel. Something was wrong—missing, rather. When she’d first packed the satchel in Urchin Grove, it had been so full that she’d had to tug at the zip to get it to budge at all. What was missing?
She opened the satchel and rummaged quickly through its contents. She should have heard the jangle of carapace, but there was not a sound. Her carapace pouch was missing.
When had she last seen the golden purse? Not last night, when she’d paid for this room, because she’d paid with a moon snail shell and wentletrap shell that she’d kept aside, in an outer pocket, for easy access. No, she’d last seen the pouch in Tang Tarpon’s home: She’d taken it out of her satchel in order to extract the apothecary arsenal beneath. In her rush to leave Tang’s home, she must have forgotten it there. Her full name was stitched onto the fabric of the pouch; that must be how the constables knew it. And the pouch must be the reason they thought she’d tried to rob Tang.
How could she have forgotten the pouch there? And what would she do now over the remainder of the Elixir Expedition? Not only was she suspected of murder, but she had not even a moon snail shell to her name anymore. Where would she sleep? What would she eat?
The doorknob turned. Her head swiveled toward it. How could the constables be here already? Could someone have given them a clue, leading them to skip most other rooms and arrive directly at her door? But the door did not open, despite their efforts with the doorknob—she’d locked it, of course. She thought the constables would rap on the door and announce themselves, in which case she would be required by law to open the door—but not a word transmitted through the oval slab of slate. Instead, the doorknob kept moving—were they picking the lock?
They were—the door opened suddenly. Coralline put her hands up.
Two orange tails filled the doorway, then the door closed. The mermen were not attired in the deep-purple waistcoats of constables; their breast pockets did not carry the circular black seal of the Under-Ministry of Crime and Murder. These mermen were not constables. Instead, they were the mermen Coralline had seen lingering just outside the door of Bristled Bed and Breakfast last night. Their eyes traveled over her now in parallel, from the tip of her tailfin to the top of her head and back down again.
“There are constables in the corridors,” Coralline said, trying to control the tremor in her voice. “They’ll arrest you if you try anything.”
“I think they’ll arrest you, mermaid,” said the fat merman, his jowls juddering. “I reckon she’s a criminal on the loose, Sparus; otherwise, she wouldn’t have put her hands up when we entered.”
“I reckon you’re right, Eliphus,” said the skinny merman, Sparus. “Otherwise, she would also have screamed by now. Go ahead, mermaid, scream if you dare.”
Coralline’s lips parted, but no sound emerged. If she were to scream, constables would hear her and arrive at her door. But at no cost could she risk capture—if they caught her, she’d be detained at the Wrongdoers’ Refinery indefinitely, awaiting trial for days or weeks, unable to continue on the Elixir Expedition, unable to save Naiadum. No, she could not scream. Now that she was suspected of breaking the law, she could no longer expect it to protect her.
Eliphus’s and Sparus’s mouths prickled into smiles.
“What shall we do with her?” asked Sparus.
“Let’s start by slashing her corset off,” Eliphus suggested. He extracted a dagger from his waistcoat pocket and rotated it in his hand. “We can kill her after we’re done with her.”
As stealthy as squids, the two brothers approached Coralline from out of the shadows of the doorway.
Every nerve in her strained to flee, but there was nowhere for her to go. As an apothecary, she’d focused so resolutely on enhancing the survival of others that she had never bothered to learn any survival skills herself. She retreated slowly through the small room. All of her senses were alive. She felt acutely aware of every object in the room—her satchel, the desk, the bed, the mirror, the luciferin orbs, the pillows. But nothing could help her. She had no dagger, no voice, no Ecklon, no Pavonis.
But there was Izar, in the adjoining room. She’d been planning to leave before he awoke, but what if she woke him up now? He might help her. But how could she wake him up? She would have to make a noise loud enough for him to hear but low enough not to draw the attention of anyone else at Bristled Bed and Breakfast. But how? She looked at the wall separating their rooms. The topsy-turvy desk stood against the wall. If she hit the desk repeatedly with her tailfin, the desk might thud against the wall, and the noise might wake him up.
She sidled toward the desk and jumped when her shoulders grazed the wall behind. The shale was cold, but she pressed her back to it in order to get as far away from Sparus and Eliphus as she could. They arrived easily to either side of her, though, clasped one of her arms each, and jerked her forward, away from the wall. Sparus positioned himself behind her and grabbed both her wrists in one hand, pinning her arms to her sides. But her tailfin remained close to the edge of the desk, fortunately. She slapped the desk. It didn’t thud against the wall. She flicked her tailfin harder. The desk thudded gently against the wall this time. She flicked her tailfin twice more; the desk hit the wall with a light, grating tempo.