His mind churning, Izar thought of telling Coralline that he didn’t know Zaurak. But she was looking directly at him and would know he was lying. “Yes, I know Zaurak,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I consider him an enemy.” It was true, unfortunately. “But why were you there, in the oil spill?”
“Oil? Do you mean black poison?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“I was there to find my brother, Naiadum. Black poison is what made him terminally ill and led me to embark on this Elixir Expedition to find a way to save him. I’ve never wanted to murder anyone before, but I would like nothing more than to strangle this man Zaurak with my own hands.”
Sick to his stomach, Izar regretted all the felty fingers he’d gobbled up for breakfast. Coralline had mentioned the term black poison to him during their first conversation, when he’d asked her why she was looking for the elixir, but he hadn’t understood the term until now. He had assumed from the word poison that her brother must have gotten sick from what he’d eaten. But it was Izar’s oil spill that had sickened him; it was Izar who had obligated Coralline to leave her home and confront all manner of danger in an effort to save him.
The oil spill had been in Zone Ten, which meant that Urchin Grove fell under Zone Ten in Ocean Dominion’s map of the Atlantic Ocean. There were no names of merpeople settlements on the Ocean Dominion map, only neat little squares dividing the Atlantic from North to South Pole. Now that Izar thought about it, the map was the sort that colonialists might once have drawn, with arbitrary lines dividing people into countries. Well, at least Zone Ten was relatively under-exploited, Izar consoled himself. Other than the oil spill, Ocean Dominion had done little in Zone Ten in recent years except for a coral reef dynamite blast about seven months ago—in which they’d caught few fish, but a merman’s hand.
Her father’s hand.
Coralline continued to swim, but Izar stopped, his tailfin appearing to have turned to stone. He had lulled himself into a sense of peace and security with Coralline, but there could be no peace or security between them. There was an enmity between their worlds, there always had been. As a leader of Ocean Dominion, Izar was at the forefront of that enmity. He had temporarily crossed over to the other side and seemed to have forgotten the sharp divisions that existed between their two worlds.
He looked at the city all around him, the city that reminded him of his hometown. He imagined the buildings around him as a pile of fragments; he imagined Needle-to-the-Sky, where he and Coralline were staying, as a heap of rubble.
He had never seen Coralline’s home, but given that she lived in a village—and extrapolating from the Purple Claw village they’d visited—he imagined her home as a semicircular mound, like half of a bubble. His army of Castors would trample it and burn it, destroying her books, her desk, her bed. She would have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat. For a while, perhaps weeks or months, she and her family would find other places to stay, but, eventually, all settlements in Meristem would lie in ruins, and there would be nowhere else for them to go.
At that stage, Coralline, like all other merpeople, would die. Izar would have killed her as surely as though he’d stabbed her with a knife. But how could he bring himself to stab her with a knife, given that she’d saved his life not once, not twice, but thrice—cutting him out of a net on two occasions, then extracting his platinum chip.
“What’s the matter, Izar?” Coralline asked. Hovering vertically ahead, she waited for him, tailfin flicking.
He turned and swam away.
Jellyfish floated above Coralline like watchful ghosts, translucent, effervescent. Below her, garden eels bobbed in the sediment, their heads poking out of their burrows while the rest of their bodies remained hidden.
“Oh, look at that hammerhead!” Nacre commented from her perch on Coralline’s shoulder. Her tentacles waggled in the direction of a fifteen-foot-long shark with a wide, flattened head resembling a hammer. “How hideous. Thank goodness I was born a beautiful snail rather than a misshapen beast. Oh wait, is that monstrosity actually a mermaid’s muse? And I thought your Ogre was bad!”
Coralline saw that the hammerhead shark was accompanied by a young mermaid, whom she hadn’t noticed at first because the mermaid was swimming to the shark’s other side. The sight of the two of them made her smile—it was the first time she’d seen a mermaid other than herself mused by a shark. Her smile widened to spot another mermaid, farther ahead, swimming out an apartment window. Coralline’s mother always reprimanded her for swimming in and out windows rather than doors, but in Blue Bottle, there seemed to be no such rules for female social etiquette. Coralline was liking the capital more and more as the day passed.
“That corset is so fashionable!” Nacre commented, her tentacles pointing at a mermaid wearing a bodice shimmering with black-and-white sequins. “I know your mother would just love it. Don’t you think so? . . . Can you believe the Pole Dancer—Altair, I mean—will give birth in just a week and a half to hundreds of little nuisances? In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I think his delivery date is your wedding date. . . .”
Coralline sighed, trying to block out Nacre’s voice. Snails were often private and quiet, spending much of their time inside their carapace, but not Nacre. Coralline had been exploring Blue Bottle alone, perfectly happy, when she’d happened to pass Needle-to-the-Sky. Nacre had called to her from the wall of the building, crawled up her arm, settled on her right shoulder, and ordered: “Show me the capital.” Coralline would much rather have explored the city with Pavonis, but he’d left early in the morning, saying: “There’s so much to see, and such little time—I’m going to make the most of my day.” He’d said he’d be back late at night and would meet her and Izar at the Laminaria apartment after the Ball of Blue Bottle. As for Altair, he was spending the day alone in a square of paddle-grass close to Needle-to-the-Sky, trying to regain his “moral compass.”
“Where is Izar?” Nacre asked.
“We were swimming together, then he left quite suddenly. I can’t imagine why.”
“I can. It’s because he has feelings for you and is conflicted about them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Coralline scoffed, her eyes crossing to look at Nacre.
“I have an eye for such things. I’ve often kept my tentacles trained on him during our swims. I’ve noticed how often he looks at you when he thinks no one’s looking. This is an advantageous position for you.”
“How so?”
“If he thinks you return his feelings, he might give the elixir to you, if or when the two of you find it. Do you return his feelings?”
“I’m engaged to Ecklon, Nacre. What do you think?”
“Be honest, Coralline.”
“I am being honest!”
“I think you might feel more for Izar than you’re letting on—even to yourself.”
“If you say so.” Nacre was light in weight but heavy in every other way, and Coralline would rather have carried three satchels than this one snail.
“Oh, what’s that?” Nacre exclaimed.
Among the buildings, one structure stood out, for it was not tall; it was stout, a house rather than an apartment. Specifically, a house shaped like a snail. The snail’s flesh was fashioned of light-brown shale, and its carapace of blush-pink shale, set in the shape of a series of whorls ending in a spire. A tall cylinder marked the front of the home, culminating in two long windows meant to resemble snail tentacles.