“What do the three of you think?” Coralline asked. She looked from Pavonis to Altair, his tail wrapped around her pinky finger, to Nacre, on her right shoulder. The four of them had left Izar twenty feet below on the seabed, but Coralline still spoke softly, in case he could hear. “Should I help Izar by removing the chip?”
“You’ve already helped that ingrate more than enough,” Pavonis rumbled. “You have an instinctive desire to save everyone you encounter, and while this instinct might be helpful to you in your career, you need to remember that your role now is not that of an apothecary. You need to be single-minded on your elixir quest if you want to save your brother. Yes, we are not at the Ball of Blue Bottle yet, but still, sometimes I look at you and get the sense that you’ve forgotten why we’re out here anyway. The elixir and its attainment must be foremost in your mind at all times. Whether the human lives or dies is not your concern.”
“I would like to offer another angle,” Nacre said. “We could use all the help we can get on this Elixir Expedition. You seem to be assuming the Ball of Blue Bottle will mark the end of your quest, Coralline, but I believe the Ball will form the gateway to the greatest test of your life. And I think Izar will help you triumph in that test. As such, my vote is that we keep him alive.”
Coralline glanced at Altair.
“I’m simpler in my views,” said the seahorse. “To me, it seems wrong to let him just die, human or not. If you can help him live, I think you should.”
“I think so, too,” Coralline said.
“Well, I hope the surgery kills him!” Pavonis huffed.
Coralline patted his side, then swam down to Izar. “I’ll do my best to remove your chip,” she said, “but I can’t promise you’ll live.”
He grinned at her. She did not smile back. To increase her chances of success, she would pretend she was Rhodomela. The first thing Rhodomela would have noted, were she here, was that the arrangement was unprofessional. Had there been a surgical bed, even if a makeshift one, Coralline would have hovered vertically next to Izar. Now, in the absence of a bed, Izar was sprawled over the pebbles, and she had no choice but to hover over him horizontally.
She opened her apothecary arsenal next to him. She pressed his wrist again and, with her pen, drew a black rectangle over it to mark the boundaries of the chip. Then she extracted a vial of anesthetic from her case and emptied it into his mouth. He winced as he swallowed it, but, in a matter of moments, his eyes closed.
Drawing a deep breath, as though she was about to slit her own wrists, Coralline extracted her scalpel from her case and made an incision over one side of the rectangle she’d drawn. Blood oozed out. Her fingers trembled. Focus, she told herself sternly. She cut along a second side of the rectangle, then a third. His blood flowed now like the ink of an octopus—it invaded her nostrils.
Coralline forced a tiny pair of clippers through the hole she’d made in his skin. The clippers soon encountered the chip and grasped its edge, but it was as embedded in his bone as olivine stones in her hair comb. She loosened the chip’s edges painstakingly with her clippers, then tugged again, and again. The chip released its hold on him abruptly. Breathing a sigh of relief, Coralline dropped both the bloodied chip and the clippers onto the pebbles.
“This is the perfect opportunity to kill him,” Pavonis said from above, speaking softly, as though to convince her the voice was coming out of her own subconscious.
Coralline extracted needle and thread from her arsenal and turned back to Izar’s wrist. The five fingers of his hand suddenly swelled to ten. She blinked; the ten became five again. She shook her head—it felt as light and loose as a jellyfish. She felt herself drifting downward, such that she was almost lying atop Izar, scale to scale, shoulder to shoulder. No longer possessing the strength to hover horizontally over him, she sat down on the pebbles next to him, her back slumping, her tail extended in front of her.
She was not just faint-headed; she would soon faint, she recognized. From the numerous occasions on which she’d fainted before, she knew she had only minutes before her mind would force a shut-down—minutes in which to stitch, salve, bandage, and anti-infect, tasks that would otherwise consume the better part of an hour.
“Skin is just a fabric,” Nacre said encouragingly. “Pretend you’re a seamstress, like your mother.”
Coralline thrust her needle into Izar’s skin. Stitch upon stitch she made, concentrating on each tiny cross as though it were a universe in and of itself. When it was all complete, she sat back and surveyed her crosshatching. The sutures were messy and crooked, but they were serving their purpose: They stopped the bleeding. At least he would not die of blood loss.
Blinking heavily, Coralline unlidded her vial of toothed wrack salve and dabbed the balm onto his wrist. She then sheared strips of pyropia with her snippers, wrapped the gauzy swaths tightly over his wrist, and tied it all in place with two strands of spiny straggle.
Her vision blurred into overlapping circles. She pinched her hand to remain conscious for the final step, anti-infective. She dumped the contents of her vials of sea oak, golden-brown in color, and dabberlocks, olive-brown, into a flask, and clamped a stopper atop the flask. The two algae sputtered and spewed upon contact—they sounded like they were shrieking at the top of their voices. She had once prepared precisely this anti-infective before, but the reaction had been far milder then, more of a simper than a screech.
She must be hallucinating, her mind exaggerating the reaction.
“Kill him, Coralline,” Pavonis whispered from above.
Coralline cradled Izar’s head with one hand and emptied the contents of the flask into his mouth with the other.
At last the operation was complete, she thought, sitting back dizzily, her hands to either side of her on the pebbles to prevent her from collapsing flat on her back. Though she was disbarred, she had now reached a new level as an apothecary—she had performed her first surgery. Rhodomela would be proud—
Izar’s arms shuddered and his tail quaked, his body writhing as though in the midst of an internal attack. Such writhing was known to occur only after consuming desmarestia. But Coralline hadn’t given Izar the acid kelp. Her head jerked down to the row of vials in her apothecary arsenal. There was the vial of desmarestia, untouched. Picking it up, she looked at it until her eyes crossed, and the tip of her nose almost touched the vial. She gasped.
She hadn’t labeled the vials earlier and, in her faintness now, had mistaken dabberlocks for desmarestia, both of them olive-brown in color. No wonder she hadn’t recognized the screeching reaction in the flask.
She looked at Izar again. His back was rattling against the pebbles, which were rattling against one another, creating a discordant cacophony. He wasn’t dead yet, but he soon would be. Coralline had saved him from the fishnet, then poisoned him herself.
“I knew you could do it, Coralline!” Pavonis roared.
“You’re wilier and trickier than I ever imagined,” Nacre said.
“Let me warn you,” Altair whispered, “murder does not sit easy on the conscience.”
Coralline’s head swiveled, and she folded into unconsciousness, her cheek landing gently against Izar’s chest.
Coralline swam out the lobby of Big Blue Bed and Breakfast. Named and shaped after the big blue octopus, each of its eight arms formed a twirling, three-story tower, with the lobby of the hotel serving as the head of the octopus. It was the sixth hotel Coralline had tried in Blue Bottle. The concierge had just told her what they all had: With the Ball of Blue Bottle tomorrow night, there were no accommodations to be had anywhere in the capital.