A small white fish fluttered past Izar. A black dot on the fish’s tail, and black lines along its face, made him think of a magician with a pencil-thin moustache. He thought of yesterday, when he and Coralline had passed all manner of animals during their swims. In an encyclopedic voice, Coralline had told him their names: bluehead wrasse, fairy basslet, green razorfish, gray angelfish, roundel skate, turbot, tarpon. He’d nodded at her occasionally, curtly, until she’d discerned his disinterest, and her voice had trailed off.
She had spoken more broadly about other things and had used certain expressions while doing so. Izar had managed to interpret the expressions as follows: Alewives circling the stomach was equivalent to the human expression butterflies in the stomach. A snake in an eel’s crevice was the parallel of a square peg in a round hole. Collecting two shells with one hand was equivalent to killing two birds with one stone.
Coralline’s analogies to animals had been less easy to interpret, and Izar had asked her for explanation. To be a sinistrum whelk meant to be different, she’d said, because sinistrum whelks were in the one percent of snails whose shell coiled exclusively to the left. To be a starfish meant to rebound quickly, because they regrew limbs that were hacked off. To be a rockfish meant to live a long life, for they lived more than a century. To be an octopus meant to be defensive, for they had plenty of defenses, including black ink and camouflage. To be a jellyfish could mean one of multiple things—to be short-lived, flimsy in loyalty, or skinny in form. To be a whale did not mean to be large but to be confused about one’s identity, for whales straddled the boundary between water and air: They lived in water but breathed air.
Now, Izar wished Coralline would say something, anything, no matter how confusing it might be. But she hadn’t spoken a word to him since he’d left her room.
“This is the fourth time today I’ve had to yell at you to keep pace, human!” Pavonis bellowed. “I’m not going to say it a fifth time—if you fall behind again, I’m going to start tossing you around. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” Izar muttered, catching up again with Pavonis and Coralline.
He looked up at the waves crashing just above him. Two otters frolicked among them—sleek, slippery, long-whiskered. Through the waves, Izar could make out the sky. When seen through a screen of water, the sky looked like a series of photographs taken one after another, forming an animated film of disparate pictures; every time a wave landed, the sky broke and reassembled. Just as uncomfortable as Coralline seemed to feel at the waves, Izar felt comfortable. He could almost convince himself that he’d simply tumbled off an Ocean Dominion ship and would climb back aboard any moment, his legs braced apart firmly below him.
Something fell over him, a lightweight fabric. He fingered the mesh-like material curiously. Smooth and strong, it seemed to be the fishnet he himself had invented when he’d been an assistant engineer—the net that had doubled Ocean Dominion’s catch of schools of small fish. But how could his own net ensnare him? He flung his arms and tail in all directions but found that he could not move forward; he was simply flailing in the confines of the net. The net was utterly inescapable—it had to be his own.
The net jerked him up through the waves. For the first time since he’d been hurled into the ocean, his head erupted over the surface. He gasped at the glare of the sun, a torturing flashlight that parched his eyes and fragmented his vision. Without the buoyant medium of water, his head felt loose upon his neck, as though it might detach and float away. Blinking profusely, he focused his gaze on the ship about twenty-five feet in front of him.
It had a bronze-and-black insignia along its side, but it was not an ordinary Ocean Dominion ship—Izar recognized it as part of his Silk fleet. Upon his having become co-director of operations, Izar had designed the Silk fleet—fifteen narrow, light-bottomed, streamlined watercraft, intended to be as sleek in their movement as sharks, creating hardly a ripple. Like the lightweight fishnets he’d invented, the Silk fleet had increased Ocean Dominion’s fish catch. Beyond that outcome-based evidence, however, Izar had had no way of knowing whether they truly were as stealthy as he’d intended. He saw now that they were, for he hadn’t sensed this ship’s presence at all.
Two men stared at him from the bow of the Silk ship, men with large, shaved heads and over-muscled arms. Izar did not recognize them. That was not surprising—hundreds of men worked in operations at Ocean Dominion, and he could not possibly recognize all of them. They did not seem to recognize him either, though. Perhaps it was because he was in the form of a merman, he thought.
From behind and between the two men emerged a third, one with blood-red hair and beard, and spears through his earlobes: Serpens Sarin, the thirty-five-year-old manager who, in alliance with Zaurak, had tried twice to kill him—through the fall of the derrick on the drillship, then through switching out the blowout preventer and almost drowning Dominion Drill I.
Serpens’s arms held a gun, aimed at Izar.
Izar knew he should try to escape, but he could not move, even if he hadn’t been trapped in a net. How had Serpens known he was in the ocean, in the form of a merman? he wondered. Serpens must have learned it from Alshain—which meant that Zaurak knew it, too. Zaurak did not seem to be aboard this Silk ship, but he must be directing Serpens from a distance. This would be the fourth attempt on Izar’s life. It would be successful, air-tight—no one in Menkar would know he was dead, not even Antares and Saiph.
But how had Serpens located him in the Atlantic Ocean? It was the equivalent of locating a needle not in a haystack but in a forest. The chances were so low as to be negligible. There was something vital Izar did not know, there was more here than was meeting his eye—
Serpens fired his gun. A bullet roared past Izar’s shoulder, missing him by an inch. But Izar still felt injured: Ocean Dominion was so much a part of him that it was as though his own body was attacking him in the form of an autoimmune disease.
Another bullet fired, traveling past his ear.
Floundering within the net, Izar pushed his weight down in an attempt to sink, but he found that he could descend no more than two feet—it was he who’d designed the net to enable flotation. But with his head again submerged, even if by only two feet, his first feeling was relief—his eyes were again moist, their vision crisp. In his present form, as much as he disliked it, he belonged underwater.
A bullet careened through his hair, hot against his scalp.
Where was Coralline? he wondered, his eyes seeking the scarlet color of her bodice. He’d forgotten all about her and Pavonis when he’d seen the ship. Now, he discovered her and the whale shark far below, at least a hundred feet down. Her eyes were staring straight at him, a dagger glinting in her hand.
Coralline’s heart beat so turbulently that she felt certain the men aboard the ship could hear it.
“Let’s get out of here!” Pavonis said, his tailfin billowing.
But Coralline remained in place. As she watched, a bullet zoomed past Izar’s scar, a finger’s width away from grazing his jaw. Upon missing its mark, the bullet slowed, then glided about as haplessly as plankton. It made Coralline think of birds who swooped down into the ocean to catch fish—their flight was always fast at first, then slowed rapidly with water resistance. The greatest protection any creature of the ocean had was the ocean itself.