Abalone released Coralline’s hand.
Coralline tilted the flask at Naiadum’s lips. Just as soon as half of it was empty, she tilted her own head back and swallowed the rest.
The potion burned a twisting path down her throat. The sun itself seemed to be licking her to flames from the inside. She started to writhe, every muscle in her body shaking, as though attempting to escape the burn. Naiadum thrashed as well, so hard that his bed frame thudded against the wall.
She’d made a huge mistake. They were both going to die. Coralline’s eyes closed, and she folded to the floor.
Izar rummaged through his satchel for his identification card. It must be in some under-compartment, he thought. Giving up on finding it, he knocked on the glass door to Saiph’s office.
Saiph glanced up. The pen fell from his hand, and he blinked at Izar repeatedly, as though he was looking at a spirit returned from the dead. Then Saiph pressed a button under his desk; the door buzzed, and Izar walked in.
The sight of Saiph in the same room as him filled Izar with a sense of such relief and safety that he paused midstride over the cream carpet. Izar had transformed physically on shore, but not until this moment, when he was looking into Saiph’s charred-kale eyes, did he transform psychologically: He became Izar Eridan, co-president of Ocean Dominion.
He wanted to hug Saiph, but it would require taking two extra steps into the office, and he could not conjure the strength. He collapsed in the chair across from Saiph’s mahogany desk.
“Father and I thought you were dead,” Saiph said in an accusatory tone. “What happened?”
“I was thrown overboard and transformed into a merman.”
The transformation to a human had been much more difficult than that to a merman. Izar had swum for a day straight to reach the shores of Menkar, stopping not even for the night, so eager had he been to leave Coralline and her world behind. From the sea, he’d recognized his city by its skyline of skyscrapers, standing straight and parallel like pushpins. He’d dragged himself out of the waves onto a secluded cranny of the coast, separated from the rest of the beach by rocks to either side. There, he’d died a most tormented death, his gills closing, his tail throbbing like it was being sawed down the middle.
When he’d awoken, he’d discovered that he had legs again and that his chest was rising and falling—his lungs were again functioning. The transformation was complete—or so he’d thought. He’d attempted to stand, but he had felt as though he was trying to support himself on cotton balls—his bones had been as soft and malleable as a baby’s. Crawling on his belly to the froth, he’d dipped himself in to remove the residual slime from his legs. He had shivered, the water frigid against his skin; he was warm-blooded again. He had thought to crawl back to the rocks, but his strength was depleted. He’d lain his head down on the sand and slept.
When he’d awoken, the droplets of salt water on his skin had transformed to a sheen of perspiration, as a result of the sizzling heat. He’d risen slowly and, after falling numerous times, had taught himself to walk again. Every step had felt like nails were being hammered into the soles of his feet. The adjustment to being a merman had been much easier than that to being a human, perhaps because in the water one always hovered—the lack of contact with the floor meant there was little impact on newly shaped bones.
His limping had eventually turned to strolling, and he’d ambled about on the beach in search of scraps of clothing, just as a scavenger might seek carcasses. He’d eventually discovered a smudged cotton shirt and khaki shorts. He’d then walked barefoot to the bronze glass arrow that was Ocean Dominion. Along the way, he had found himself looking at Menkar not through the eyes of the man he had been but through the eyes of the merman he had become—and through the eyes of the mermaid with whom he had been.
What he’d always assumed to be a wisp of clouds over the city was actually, he’d seen, a layer of smog. And there was something stifling about all the glass buildings, about their concentration—he’d had the impression he was trodding among shards of glass. The tinted windows rising from the ground to the sky had made him think of coffins stacked one upon another unto infinite. Was this the city he’d loved? What had he loved about it?
“How did you transform?” Saiph asked.
“I’m still figuring that out.” According to Osmundea, he’d transformed because he was a hummer.
“How was life in the ocean?”
“I fell in love with a mermaid, Coralline,” Izar said in a harsh, self-condemning voice, “but she turned out to be engaged to someone else. She’s getting married on the twenty-ninth of July in a place called Kelp Cove, in her village of Urchin Grove—Zone Ten, to us, the site of the oil spill. . . . Oh, Saiph, I’ve been betrayed twice in as many weeks, first by Ascella—whom I discovered cheating on me—then by Coralline.”
“I’m sorry, brother,” Saiph said softly. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”
Izar nodded. Saiph strode across the cream carpet and out the door.
25
Murder
Coralline’s eyes opened groggily. She was not in her own room but Naiadum’s, her tailfin dangling over the end of his bed because of its small size. But where was her little brother?
She turned her head to the door and cringed to see her flask in the doorway. Sea oak and desmarestia: that was what she’d poured down his throat. It must have killed him—that was why he was not here. Her parents were likely burying him at this moment, without waiting for her. She couldn’t blame them.
“Coralline!”
A tawny tail materialized in the doorway. Coralline rubbed her eyes; no, she was not imagining it. She hardly recognized him because of the hollow pits under his eyes and his skinny frame, but it was Naiadum. She bolted upright, and he darted over to her, wrapping his arms around her neck. She felt his arms up and down; they were real—not the pudgy arms she recognized, but still, they were his arms.
She had saved him, she realized dazedly. The elixir had not saved him—she had, with her own mind and skills. Halfway across Meristem, she had traveled to find the elixir, but the solution had been right here in Urchin Grove all along—the solution had been her. She would not have known it, though, had she not left on the elixir quest.
Trochid and Abalone swam into the room and, beaming, joined Coralline and Naiadum in their embrace.
“I knew it!” Trochid said. “You’re the best apothecary in the world.”
A gentle, wistful smile lighting her face, Abalone stroked Coralline’s hair. “I’m so very proud of you,” she said. “I’m sorry I doubted your solution.”
Coralline looked at her mother with surprise, for her mother had never once apologized to her before. Coralline wished she could remain in this moment forever—her mother’s hand on her hair was the most soothing sensation she’d ever experienced—but a knock sounded at the front door.
“I’ll get it.” She sighed, rising reluctantly from Naiadum’s bed. “It’s probably Ecklon.”
Naiadum collapsed on his now-vacated bed, and, in the time it took Coralline to blink, he fell fast asleep. After the week he’d spent comatose, his bones and muscles would require time to rebuild their strength, Coralline knew. She tousled his hair, then swept into the living room, trailed by her parents. She pulled the door open.