“But what if we’re attacked by a ship again today?” she persisted.
“If we were attacked yesterday, what are the chances we’ll be attacked again today?”
Izar swallowed his twinge of guilt. None of them knew that the ship attack yesterday had been not a random incident but a targeted attempt to kill him. But Izar shared Pavonis’s rationale toward probability—Serpens had caught him yesterday by a stroke of sheer luck. The chance of another such capture today would be no greater than that of two meteors striking the earth on consecutive days.
Glancing again at Coralline, Izar tried to think of something to say. . . . What had he ever talked about with Ascella during their dinners at Yacht? Art, jewelry, Castor.
“From an early age,” he said, “I’ve had a fascination with fire.”
“That’s an odd fascination,” Coralline said, frowning. “My father says that fire vaporizes water, and water vanquishes fire, and the two can never truly meet.”
“They can. I’ve invented underwater fire.”
“That’s impossible.” She said it not in a conflagratory tone but in the way she would counter someone telling her the earth was square.
“I assure you—”
A net fell over him.
Again.
His tail lashed like a sword within the net, but he only succeeded in entangling himself further. It was a different net than yesterday’s, not the lightweight one he’d invented but a net of thick, strong twine. Izar had designed his lightweight fishnet to capture schools of small fish; this more old-fashioned net was intended to capture large, powerful creatures like Pavonis. Attached to a beam of a rod like those used for construction cranes, it worked by means of lifting its prisoner into the air and letting him suffocate there.
Suddenly, Izar found himself wrenched out over the waves and suspended in air, curled within the net like a fetus in a womb. Because it was a cloudy day and the glare of the sun was less pronounced, his eyes adjusted more quickly than they had yesterday. Serpens was staring at him from the bow of the Silk-fleet Ocean Dominion ship, Izar saw, his eyes glittering cheerfully above his red beard. He could easily shoot Izar with the gun in his hands, but Izar knew he wouldn’t—he would instead watch him suffocate slowly, painfully, to death.
Coralline stared up at Izar from just below the waves, her hand wrapped around her dagger. His body was thrashing spontaneously for oxygen, his gill slits flat against the sides of his neck, his scales bleaching one by one from indigo to a dead white. He dangled four feet above her, in the air, so she could not simply cut him out of the net as she had yesterday. She could do nothing for him, yet she could not do nothing—the quandary made itself felt as sharp pangs in her tail.
“We have to leave!” Pavonis said in a panicked voice. “We’re so close to the surface that they’ll attempt to catch us next.”
“They won’t,” Coralline said. She surveyed the three men’s faces through the screen of froth—they were laughing at Izar, especially the red-haired one. “Yesterday, I thought the attack was random, but now, I think they’re targeting Izar specifically.”
Izar became perfectly still, his head lolling in the cradle of the net. An idea fell into Coralline’s mind as suddenly as a drop of rain upon the ocean: She could try something she’d never heard of anyone trying before. If it worked, Izar might live. If it didn’t, she might die.
“Do me a favor, Pavonis,” she called. “Lurch the ship.”
“Lurch the ship! Are you out of your mind?”
“Please.”
Her request was unfair, Coralline knew. Given his tremendous size, Pavonis was difficult to miss, easy to shoot. He recognized the danger, too, but, giving her a caustic look, positioned himself beneath the ship. At thirty feet long, he was almost the length of the ship itself. He became as still as a boulder—clenching his muscles and gathering his strength, Coralline knew—then he suddenly pushed himself up, his yellow-spotted back slamming against the base of the ship. The vessel rose askew over the waves and landed at an angle, the three men rolling over its platform like unmoored rocks.
It was exactly what Coralline had envisioned.
“Whatever you’re planning to do, Coralline, don’t!” Nacre cried from the satchel.
“Just look at Izar,” Altair added. “He’s already dead.”
Every one of Izar’s scales was bleached, Coralline observed with a small shock. But she’d seen him that way once before, she reminded herself. He’d returned to life then; he might again.
Smacking her tailfin right and left for propulsion, she cracked out of the water and into the air—first her hands, then her face, neck, torso, and much of her tail. The wind slapped her cheeks and flattened her gills against the sides of her neck. Her eyes started to bulge from the oxygen deficit, but her fingers managed to crook around the bottom of the fishnet and cling on.
Dangling by her arm, she raised her dagger and slashed through the weaves of the net, cutting through the side rather than the bottom in order to avoid gashing Izar’s scales by accident.
A bullet whistled past her ear. “You’re getting yourself killed for a dead man, sweetheart,” yelled the red-haired man. A bullet roared past her hip, but she managed to slash the fishnet one final time. Izar tumbled down through the gap, and they fell together into the froth.
Extending one arm in front of her, clasping Izar’s shoulders with her other arm, Coralline fled straight down. Pavonis dove in front of her, creating a well that helped reduce water resistance, for Coralline was fighting water resistance for both herself and Izar.
When they reached the seabed, she tried to flap Izar’s gills open with her fingers, but it was like trying to massage a heart into beating with one’s hands.
“He’s dead,” Altair said solemnly. Coralline glanced up to find that the seahorse had turned practically white himself, as though to pay his respects by trying to match Izar’s bleached condition.
“Look!” Nacre said, tentacles waggling in the direction of Izar’s tailfin.
His tailfin was twitching. It had to be a post-mortem spasm, Coralline thought, even though, in all her medical textbooks, she’d never come across such a spasm before. But then Izar gasped, and his eyes flew open.
18
The Chip
He had died. He had felt his heart squelch out its last pulse. Yet he remained alive. How, he did not know.
Coralline was staring at him with the attention of a doctor. Her expression made him think of the other doctor he knew, Doctor Navi, who had inserted the platinum chip in his wrist three years ago—that had to be it! That had to be how Serpens had found him! The platinum chip Doctor Navi had inserted in his wrist must be a tracking device.
Frowning at the waters above, Izar thought back to that day three years ago: In addition to Antares, Zaurak had visited Izar just before the chip-implant procedure. Doctor Navi and Zaurak had conversed at length in a corner of the room, out of Izar’s earshot. They had developed a rapport since the time of Zaurak’s leg accident twenty-seven years ago, and Izar had assumed they were simply catching up. But no, Zaurak must have been telling Doctor Navi to insert a tracking device in Izar. He must have paid him well for it, too. Doctor Navi had shifty eyes that scurred right and left like a rat’s—Izar could not imagine him as being difficult to persuade.