Izar’s hand reached toward the elixir on the palm of her hand. Coralline feared he would snatch it away, but instead, he closed each of her fingers around it.
Should I become human again, Izar asked himself in the guest bedroom, or should I remain a merman? In other words, should I return to the helm of Ocean Dominion or remain with Coralline?
Sitting at the foot of the bed, Izar examined his identification card. His name was written in small letters below the company name, as though Ocean Dominion were his primary identity and his name a secondary one.
The night of the press conference, Izar had been shattered at the thought of being forced out of Ocean Dominion. Now, when he was co-president, could he truly leave it all behind? All those long nights in his Invention Chamber, all those long days in his office and aboard ships—were they all to amount to nothing? To not lead Ocean Dominion to new heights, to not plunder the ocean floor to new depths, to not see the things Castor was capable of—would that not be as good as death? Could Izar give up everything he’d ever worked for—and that, too, for a mermaid?
No. He’d told Coralline he belonged to Ocean Protection, and he seemed to have come to believe it. His time in the water had muddled him—
The doorknob turned. The identification card in his hand slipped from his fingers. Catching it, he lurched off the foot of the bed and extended his arm toward his satchel on the desk chair, dropping the card just above the satchel—it would waft down into the satchel on its own, as everything lilted and wafted in the water. Coralline slipped into the room just as he plopped down again on the foot of the bed.
“Venant has the flu,” she said, speaking more to herself than him. “It’s severe, but not life-threatening. The waters are getting dark now, and it’s hard for me to tell fronds apart at night, but I’ll prepare a remedy for him first thing in the morning. Probably Virus Vanquisher or Flu Fighter. . . .”
Izar thought of their times together: The moment he’d first seen her, staring at him with her big blue-green eyes; the turbulent morning in Bristled Bed and Breakfast, when he’d saved her from the lecherous brothers; the nervous concentration in her face as she’d prodded his wrist before agreeing to extract the platinum chip; her arm draping his chest when he’d awoken in the Laminaria guest bedroom; the shimmer of her silver-sequined corset at the Ball.
Since the Ball, he’d wondered why he’d kissed her. Now, his mind began to create a list of attributes to describe her—kind, fair, intelligent—but his heart told him that such a list was pointless. His feeling for her could not be reduced to a formula; it was more like a fragrance—impossible to disassemble into constituents. She was a healer, and, somehow, she had healed him. Through her presence, she could continue to heal him.
He would return to Menkar to see his brother and father, he decided, to tell them he was still alive. It would be risky to return to land—Zaurak and Serpens might well try to kill him—but Antares and Saiph must be worried sick about him, and he did not want them to spend the rest of their lives searching for him. He would tell them that he’d met a mermaid and wanted to see if they could have a future together. It went without saying that he would no longer be able to work for Ocean Dominion.
It also went without saying that he would have to destroy Castor.
But the thought of destroying Castor was like stabbing one’s own son, for he’d spent six years developing Castor. He had no other choice, though—it was either Coralline or Castor, and it had to be Coralline. She would never come to know it, but, because of her, merpeople would be saved; they would continue to live.
Upon his return from Menkar to Meristem, Izar would tell Coralline the truth about everything. He would tell her that he had worked not at Ocean Protection but Ocean Dominion, and that he was responsible for the oil spill that had sickened her brother and the dynamite blast that had severed her father’s hand. It was possible she would not forgive him, and, by then, he would already have detached himself from Ocean Dominion. Her refusal would leave him hopelessly adrift, like a log of wood on the waves, belonging neither to land nor to water, but it was a chance he was willing to take.
Coralline approached him, hovering just before him at the foot of the bed. “What shall we do about the elixir?” she asked quietly, her hand unfurling. The elixir’s light broke through the room, making her eyes glitter like liquid crystals.
“The elixir is yours,” Izar said, “for your brother.”
“But how will you become a human again?”
“I think I can transform without the elixir, actually.”
“What? But how?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. When that Ocean Dominion ship strung me up in the air in a fishnet, my gills prickled, and my tail hurt as though a saw was cleaving it into two. I believe it’s because I was about to transform into a human again. When you slashed me out of the net and took me into the water, the merman-human transformation was thwarted, and so I ended up remaining a merman. It’s just as well, because the men would have shot me if they’d seen me come back to life in the net. In the air, my body seems to automatically become human, and, in the water, it automatically becomes merman.”
“How can that be?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Did you realize this before the deep sea or after?”
“Hmm . . . Before, I suppose. Why?”
“Because if you didn’t need the elixir, I don’t understand why you would enter the deep sea with me and risk your life to look for it.”
Izar chuckled. His contemplation moments ago had clearly been an exercise in mental circles, for his actions suggested that his decision was made—he chose Coralline over Ocean Dominion. “I love you,” he said softly.
Coralline’s heart fluttered.
As a healer, she had always cared for others. No one had ever cared for her as Izar had in the deep sea. In Mintaka’s cavern, when she’d looked at Izar’s face, in that true light, she had felt as though she were glimpsing his true self. She had felt as one with him, and it was that oneness that she’d wanted to preserve, she realized now, when she’d refused to leave his hand in front of Pavonis, Altair, and Nacre.
“I think I love you, too,” Coralline whispered.
23
Hummer
Half a dozen luciferin orbs traveled above Izar and Coralline, but their glow was beginning to dull, for rays of dawn had started to lash the waters outside. It was an ingenuity of nature, Izar thought, that the bacteria inside the glassy spheres glowed automatically in the dark and faded automatically in the light; it was equivalent to lightbulbs switching themselves on and off and also moderating their own intensity.
Izar turned his head to look at Coralline, next to him in bed. Though one hand of hers was clasped with his, her other hand was tracing circles over the pale-pink shell at her throat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, but she did not meet his eyes.