“Mintaka.”
“What are you?” Coralline whispered.
“A fragment of a star.”
Izar looked at Coralline, then turned back to the stardust.
“When I was a whole star,” Mintaka continued, “I yearned to nourish planets with my energy. My desire to nurture life outside of my own was the desire to become a mother, in essence. But I could not be a mother—unlike most stars, I was not blessed with a family of planets. One day, my despondence reached such an abyss that, I’m ashamed to say, I exploded. I had hoped to die, but I learned that stars don’t easily die—our energy is boundless, practically immortal.
“Shattered, I floated about the universe, trying to decide where I wished to settle. After thousands of years of wandering, I happened to pass the earth. I saw that it harbored life. Life was what I most cherished, what I’d most wanted to birth, and here, I saw that it existed in absurdly lush abundance. I glided down to earth. Once here, I decided to settle in the deep sea because it most resembles the universe, with its darkness broken by sparks of light. In this hidden universe I created my own hidden universe. The particles all around you possess the power to heal, because every particle of a star creates light in darkness, something in nothing.”
Numerous particles coalesced in front of Izar and Coralline, forming a silver ball with the diameter of a quarter. They extended their clasped hands toward the ball, but it shifted out of their reach. They tried again; the ball moved farther away.
“The elixir is a blessing that comes accompanied by a curse,” Mintaka said. “Would you still like to have it?”
“Yes,” Izar and Coralline said simultaneously.
“Very well. I will tell each of your curses to you alone. Only you will know it, not the other.”
The celebration will be a funeral, Izar heard.
What could it mean? he wondered. What celebration? Whose funeral? Would it be his own celebration or his own funeral—or both? There was no celebration he was anticipating in the near future. It did not have to be the near future, though, he reminded himself: Tang Tarpon’s curse—Beware of the serpent—had materialized thirty years after Mintaka’s pronouncement of it. There was no reason for Izar to assume that the celebration and funeral in his own future would occur in a matter of days rather than decades. The thought brought him relief.
He turned to Coralline. Her lips were dejected, her eyes drooping. Whatever Mintaka had told her, it seemed more serious than what she had told him.
Izar looked at the elixir dangling in front of them. It was so light yet so heavy, life-saving but potentially also life-taking. He and Coralline reached for it together with their joined hands. Izar’s hand was over Coralline’s, and so it was the palm of her hand that wrapped around the elixir, but energy from the elixir transmitted through to his own fingers—he felt stronger even just holding the elixir.
“Thank you, Mintaka,” he and Coralline said.
Together, they ascended through the cavern and slipped out of the blinding light into the blinding darkness. They continued to rise steadily up, the elixir acting as a tiny but powerful torch illuminating their path.
22
Healer
To Coralline, the sight of the Telescope Tower was not just the sight of the Telescope Tower—it was the sight of reality. The voyage into the deep sea had started off a nightmare, and then, in Mintaka’s cavern, had turned into a dream. The only evidence that it had all actually happened was the elixir in her hand.
“Well, finally,” drawled a voice. “I thought my tail might lob off while I waited.”
Coralline looked up to see Pavonis’s great white belly swooping down, generating a ripple that pushed her back. His snout arrived before her, and she patted it eagerly, resting her cheek against it for a moment. “I missed you!” she said. “I’m sorry for what I said to you before I left. I didn’t mean a word of it.”
“I’m sorry, too. You’re right—you don’t need my protection. Your return from the deep sea proves it.”
Coralline cringed to see a dark bruise almost as long as her on his side, a souvenir from the constable altercation at the Laminaria apartment. She pressed her fingers into the bruise—his muscles tensed. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Only when you prod it.”
“You’re back!”
Nacre. Turning away from Pavonis, Coralline located the snail’s red-and-white carapace not next to a window, where she would have expected it, for ease of snooping, but in a spot of short, stubbly grass.
Altair favored grass, Coralline knew, because he could wrap his tail around a strand and thus anchor himself against the currents. As such, Coralline sought him in the same patch, for it was the only patch of grass in the vicinity of the Telescope Tower. He materialized momentarily, glowing orange.
“I owe the two of you an apology as well,” Coralline said, looking from the snail to the seahorse.
They didn’t seem to be listening—they were staring at Coralline’s and Izar’s clasped hands. Nacre’s tentacles fell perfectly still. Altair paled, as though by being unseen, he could unsee. Pavonis swerved his enormous head to study their joined hands with his second eye, as though to ensure the first eye had not become defunct.
Coralline became aware of the location and angle of each of her fingers as they lay intertwined with Izar’s. What were the two of them doing holding hands? And why did it feel so natural that she had not stopped to think about it before now?
“Do you have the elixir?” Nacre demanded.
“Yes!” With a smile that flooded her whole being, Coralline jutted her and Izar’s clasped hands forward. Both sets of fingers opened in unison, and there it glimmered, as dazzling as a spot of sunlight.
“Victory is ours at last!” Pavonis yelled, his tailfin thumping against the shale of the Tower.
“Careful!” Nacre said. “You’ll wake Venant up.”
“Why is Venant sleeping at this hour?” Coralline asked. “It’s not even dark yet.”
“He’s sick,” Altair replied.
Continuing to clutch Izar’s hand, Coralline peered through Venant’s bedroom window. The stargazer lay curled and slumped in bed, his fingers clasping the edge of his blanket. His complexion was pastier than before and made Coralline think not of a green moray eel anymore, but a wrinkled turtle. He coughed in his sleep, so hard that the entire bed frame rattled. She should have examined him before she’d left; had she done so, maybe he would not be so sick now.
“I’ll check on him,” Coralline said, turning her head to look at Izar.
He nodded at her and started to disentangle his fingers from hers. It was necessary, for she would be unable to check on Venant while holding hands with Izar, but they had held hands for so long—they’d been in the deep sea for the better part of two days—that their fingers seemed to have molded around each other’s. As their hands separated, Coralline cringed first with pain, then with anxiety. As long as they’d both held the elixir, it had belonged to both of them. Now, would it belong to him or to her?
An argument could be made that it should belong to him, for she had been useless in the deep sea, flopping about limply. Nacre had been right in what she’d said earlier: The Ball of Blue Bottle had served as the gateway to the greatest test of Coralline’s life—the deep sea. Nacre had also been right about the crucial role Izar had played in the test—Coralline would have been unable to voyage through the deep sea without him. In the environment of starvation and sleep deprivation, he had formed her sole sustenance—his hand in hers had served as her only reminder that there existed consciousness outside of herself. He could have abandoned her at any point; exhausted, faint-headed, she would quite possibly not have had the strength to find her way out of the deep sea and would have died there, in the dark.