“After you,” Izar said, opening the bedroom door with a flourish. Coralline slipped into the living room, trailed by him.
“Glad to see you’re feeling better!” came Linatella’s voice from the kitchen.
Coralline had liked Linatella and Limpet’s apartment at night, and she found that she liked it even more during the day. It was a home rather than a hotel, for one; in that sense, though they shared little direct similarity, the apartment made her think of her own home in Urchin Grove. Second, it was brightly lit: Dozens of windows, the size of supper plates, were carved into the walls, offering a tenth-story view over the capital. Third, placards with inspirational proverbs dangled on the walls: Scratch the surface of your dreams; like a whale, you were born to make a splash.
Even had the apartment been a hovel, Coralline would have been happy in it, because if constables in Blue Bottle were searching for her, they would be looking in hotels, not homes. Linatella and Limpet Laminaria were, without their knowledge, harboring a fugitive from the law. A part of Coralline felt guilty to be putting them in such a position, but another part felt relieved—they would come to no harm from harboring her, and she would benefit.
“Limpet’s gone to work,” Linatella bubbled, “but I have some breakfast ready for you.”
“Thank you!” Coralline smiled.
She and Izar swam to the dining table and took seats across from Linatella. It had been difficult to tell at night, but Coralline saw now that Linatella was buxom and pretty, perhaps in her mid-thirties, with waist-length white-gold hair and a somewhat maternal manner, such that Coralline felt as though she was in the home not of a stranger but of an older cousin.
Linatella piled heaps of felty fingers onto Coralline’s and Izar’s plates. She then stared as they devoured the slender green fronds. Neither of them had had a bite to eat since a rushed breakfast in Rainbow Wrack yesterday, and they ate voraciously. Linatella herself ate ulva, and she offered the sea lettuce to Coralline. Coralline shook her head vehemently at the diet food. She would probably be eating big bowls of ulva soon, though, she thought with a gulp—her mother would give her nothing but ulva in the days before her wedding.
“What brings you two to Blue Bottle?” Linatella asked.
“The Ball of Blue Bottle tonight,” Coralline replied.
Linatella’s stone-sticks clattered against her plate. “It’s an event for the most illustrious and successful people in Meristem, most of them twice to thrice your age. How ever did you two manage to get an invitation?”
“We were just lucky, I suppose.” Coralline didn’t want to mention Tang Tarpon to Linatella, given that she was the principal suspect in his murder.
“Attending the Ball of Blue Bottle would be a dream come true for me,” Linatella said. “I adore fashion, and the Ball is considered the very height of fashion. What are you wearing to it?”
When Coralline had packed her satchel for the elixir quest in her bedroom, she had not planned on attending any parties, let alone the Ball of Blue Bottle. The prettiest corset she’d brought with her had been the sky-blue one that Ecklon had liked, which now lay in tatters at the bottom of her satchel.
“I have nothing to wear,” Coralline said, somewhat worried.
“I don’t know my origin,” Izar said. “I was adopted by a benevolent businessman, Antares, whom I consider my father and whose son, Saiph, I consider my brother. . . . I’ve always been passionate about inventing things. . . . I suppose what drives me is the idea of connecting two things no one has connected before—it’s similar to your medical breakthrough this morning, the thrill you got from connecting two kinds of algae no one has connected before. . . .”
Izar listened to his own words with some incredulity, for though they were true, they sounded foreign—he had never spoken much about himself to anyone, not even Ascella. Now, as he chatted with Coralline, the darkness of his childhood, the desperate loneliness of it, seemed a lifetime away—like glass that had shattered at a distance, unable to draw blood.
The Ball was to take place in the evening, and he and Coralline had had nothing to occupy them after breakfast with Linatella, so they’d set out to explore Blue Bottle. As she swam next to him, Coralline’s hair formed a swaying rope over her shoulders, and her scales shimmered like panes of tiny mirrors, her tailfin fluttering like a silk fan.
Of all the settlements Izar had seen so far in Meristem, Blue Bottle, with its tall buildings, most resembled his hometown of Menkar. Buildings underwater were similar to buildings on land, he saw, except for their frequently bizarre shapes. The building in front of him resembled a prickly cactus, and the one to his left looked like a snake slithering upward.
“I’ve never seen this algae before!” Coralline exclaimed. Hovering horizontally, she fingered something that Izar thought looked like a cross between a wrinkled gnome and a head of broccoli. Though she was not looking at him, he could not help but smile at her state of rapture—she was as passionate about algae as Ascella was about jewelry.
Turning vertical again, Coralline grabbed his hand and peered at his wrist. There was nothing to see there anymore, not even a scar to mark the procedure. “Any pain?” she asked, flopping his wrist back and forth then right and left, such that he appeared to be waving.
Izar shook his head, finding himself speechless. Coralline placed two fingers to the side of his neck beneath his earlobe. “Your heart is beating fast,” she observed in a dispassionate voice. “Perhaps after the procedure yesterday, even the moderate pace of our swim through town today is too fast for you.” And then, just like that, she turned and started swimming again—at a slower pace, for his sake—her tail a carpet of traveling coins.
Her effect on him was heady; he felt like he was an adolescent spending the day with his first crush. Catching his breath, he caught up with her. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, tracing the line of the scar along his jaw. “Do merpeople ever drown boats?”
“No. I’ve never heard of that before.”
So, if merpeople had not drowned his biological parents’ fishing dinghy, how had his parents died? Could someone—a man rather than a merman—have bludgeoned them, as their neighbor Rigel Nihal had insisted on the island of Mira? If so, who could the man have been?
“I’ve told you a little about my life,” Izar said softly. “Will you tell me about yours?”
“Sure,” Coralline began with a smile. “I’m from a little village called Urchin Grove. I have an eight-year-old brother, my mother is a seamstress, and my father is—or was—a coral connoisseur. As I focus on merpeople anatomy, my father used to focus on coral reef anatomy, studying reefs and trying to heal them—because of human activities, reefs have really been suffering. But my father’s hand was blown off in a coral reef dynamite blast seven months ago.”
A coral reef dynamite blast . . . a hand . . . Izar thought it should mean something to him, but he could not imagine what.
Coralline stopped and looked at him, her eyes more serious than he had yet seen them. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you as well,” she said quietly. “Do you know a man named Zaurak Alphard?”
“What?” Izar said, his face blanching.
“I found a pen in the midst of the black poison spill in my village.” Coralline rummaged through her satchel and handed Izar the pen he recognized well, engraved with Zaurak’s name in block letters and the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion. As Izar clasped the pen, he felt as though he was holding Zaurak’s face in his hands.