On the day of the oil spill, Izar had told Deneb that mermaids would not exist much longer. Deneb had not understood Izar’s words then, but he understood them now. From having read Izar’s crimson-covered journal, its yellowed pages spilling with notes and formulae, he had come to learn that Izar called this room his Invention Chamber, and that, in this Chamber, Izar planned to produce an army of Castors that would plunder the ocean floor for gold and diamonds—meanwhile extinguishing the civilization of merpeople.
Deneb could prevent it all, if he chose. He could save the mermaids he so adored. All he would have to do would be to light a match and throw the flame upon some combustible chemicals. Then Castor, the crimson-covered journal, this Invention Chamber, the thirty-floor bronze-glass building itself, would all blaze like a bonfire.
A clanging noise made him jump. He glanced at the floor, for the sound seemed to have come from just below his feet. It had sounded like someone was trying to rattle a door open. But the floor below this, B3, was accessible only to the president of Ocean Dominion—Saiph, at present—and was known to be empty. No, Deneb must be mistaken. His long hours alone in the Invention Chamber must be playing tricks with his mind. The clang must have issued from the maze of pipes in the ceiling, for they burped and gurgled constantly, to his irritation.
Turning his attention back to the flammable liquids and powders, Deneb pulled a set of matches out of his pocket.
19
Enmity
The rug to his side of the bed was white pile. The windows were shuttered, but the blinds were pink rather than the usual shades of gray he’d seen so far. An ornate copper dresser stood along the wall, scattered with miscellaneous hair combs and ropes like the kind Coralline used to tie her hair, along with a bowl of little pewter-colored shells. Two books were stacked to one side of the dresser: A Hair Dresser’s Collection of Ultimate Updos and Egregious Egregia: A Novel.
The room was cloyingly feminine but cozy. Last Izar remembered, he’d been lying on the pebbles, swallowing the anesthetic Coralline put to his lips—
Coralline. She lay wrapped over the right side of his body, he saw, her head tucked into the hollow of his shoulder. Her arm lay over his chest, and her hair cloaked both of them over the blanket.
A confused smile spread on Izar’s lips. Their first night, in Hog’s Bristle, they’d taken separate rooms; their second night, in Rainbow Wrack, they’d shared a room, but he’d slept on the floor; now, at the culmination of their third night, here, wherever it was, they were sharing a bed, and she was in his arms. He seemed to have done himself a great service by being unconscious.
Izar glanced at his wrist. It was covered in some sort of gauze and tied with red strings.
He lifted his hand from the blanket with caution. Pain did not prickle through his nerves, even when he slowly, experimentally, started to flop his hand about and angle it. Coralline was clearly good at her job, despite her low confidence about it.
She stirred. Her head rose from his chest, and her gaze struck him with the force of a collision. She sat up, declaring, “You’re alive!” She was wearing an ivory chemise with short, slit sleeves that fluttered about her shoulders. She threw the blanket off both of them. Looking down at himself, Izar saw with a small shock that she had unbuttoned his waistcoat before putting him to bed.
Was it possible something had happened between them that he could not remember?
Coralline shifted to hover horizontally over him. She looked as though she were levitating above him, held up by invisible strings from the ceiling. Her eyes roved over him as though he was an object—he did not mind being an object, he found. Like a slippery fish, she was entirely unpredictable, Coralline.
Through his undone buttons, she pressed her hand flat against his heart, her long locks falling upon his face. Even the ends of her hair were soft and supple, and there was a particular, sweet scent to them as they tantalized his nostrils. His hand rose to twirl a strand of hair around his finger, but she shifted to the side.
Her eyes darted from his wrist to his face; their blue-green color made him think of water swirling at the base of a teacup. “I’ve made a major medical breakthrough,” she whispered.
His stitches had faded well into his skin, and the skin around them was not even puckered, as though the chip-extraction had occurred not a day, but months, ago. His wrist had fully recovered.
Coralline tried to delineate the mechanism of her medication. Desmarestia was acidic, and sea oak was saline; the latter must have neutralized the acids of the former. Desmarestia was the pivotal ingredient in the reaction, but its potency and power made it poisonous when swallowed by itself. The acid kelp was so universally reviled that no apothecary had ever experimented with it before, not even someone as unconventional as Rhodomela.
What would Rhodomela say when Coralline told her she’d invented an unparalleled healer, a miracle medication? Rhodomela would apologize for having fired Coralline; she would plead for her to return. Coralline would demur at first, just to make the master apothecary squirm, then she would accept, on two conditions. First, she would request to skip a rung in her career, to travel straight from apprentice apothecary to senior apothecary, without the intermediate title of associate. Then, she would request a tripling—no, quadrupling—of her wages, from fifty carapace per week to two hundred carapace.
Coralline’s tailfin quivered with anticipation; she could not wait to make a dramatic comeback at The Irregular Remedy.
“As a result of having treated you with desmarestia, a poisonous algae,” she gushed to Izar, “I’ll be able to get my job back—with a raise and promotion. Thank you!”
“Thank you,” he said huskily.
Following the direction of his gaze, she glanced down to see that she was clad only in her chemise; she’d been so stunned at his being alive that she hadn’t paid any attention to propriety. Now, she bolted under the blanket. When she’d entered this guest bedroom last night, dragging Izar by a hand, it had seemed cruel to make him spend the last night of his life on the floor. So she had deposited him in bed and had unbuttoned his waistcoat to check his heartbeat. Modesty hardly mattered where a dead male was concerned, and she’d been unable to resist changing into her chemise for her comfort.
“Don’t look at me as I change,” she warned Izar now as she sprang out of bed. Full of zest, she slapped her tailfin to her backside, feeling herself shrouded in a brilliant, invisible glow in the wake of her medical discovery.
The day called for celebratory color, and she browsed her satchel with twittering fingers. But there were only two corsets she hadn’t yet worn on the Elixir Expedition, and the more vibrant of the two was hardly vibrant at alclass="underline" It was a sleeveless honeydew with tawny strings.
Once she was ready and had turned around to face Izar, he rolled out of bed. He shrugged off his waistcoat and swung his arms through another he found in his satchel, a stiff sable piece with spirula shells for buttons. “Could you help me do up the buttons?” he asked Coralline, holding his wrist out as explanation.
Coralline frowned. As far as she could tell, the joint was fully healed, but perhaps Izar feared overextending it. Flitting over to him from across the bed, commencing with his lowest buttons, in order to align the two halves of the waistcoat, Coralline inserted the tiny white shells through the slits. By the time she’d slid the last spirula into its buttonhole, at his collar, her cheeks were flushed, as they had been when she’d unbuttoned his waistcoat in Rainbow Wrack.