“I know you love him, Coralline, but control your heart; don’t let it control you.”
“Oh, I wish I could!” Coralline’s head dropped in her hands, and tears streamed down her cheeks in sticky trails. “But I can’t help it!”
“In time, you’ll forget all about him. Now, what did you want to tell me?”
“I wanted to tell you that there’s no time. I’m about to die.”
“There’s no need to be dramatic!” Pavonis snapped.
“But I am about to die, I know it. In the cavern, Mintaka said that I would die soon after the light died. Just before you arrived, the light died, which means I’m going to die soon.”
“You’re usually quite humorless. Is this a convoluted attempt at a joke? If so, I must say it’s pathetic.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because I’m happy I’m dying.”
She regretted the words as soon as she’d said them, for it sounded as though she did not care for him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
Whenever her mother had advised her to find herself another muse, Coralline had said she would consider it after Pavonis died, and she’d laughed inside, for whale sharks lived longer than merpeople. “I hope you find yourself another best friend after I die,” she said tearfully, “someone who enjoys travel and adventure as much as you.”
“How can you leave me alone in this world?” Pavonis cried. “You are my entire world.”
His tail slammed against the wall, then the waters rippled, and he vanished.
The door opened. It was the taller of Serpens’s two lackeys, Izar saw. Whistling a low tune to himself, the man bent down to place a tray on the floor. He then collected the old, empty tray and closed the door behind him, causing bundles of dust to liberate themselves from the doorjamb and sprinkle about the room.
The place was vast but dark, lit by no more than one naked, low-hanging yellow lightbulb of the kind Izar imagined in torture chambers, casting a jaundiced glow over a prisoner’s head. It made a constant whirring racket, a steady drone that seemed to penetrate Izar’s eardrums and grate against his brain. Another sound cracked through the whine of the bulb—a gurgle. Izar looked up at the ceiling, for he knew the gurgle spewed out of the pipes in the ceiling of his Invention Chamber, directly above this room. Imprisonment was a strange thing. His Invention Chamber on B2 held the precise proportions as this room and had the same untiled floor and unfinished walls, but Izar considered that room a haven and this room on B3 a dungeon.
Izar strode over to the tray the lackey had placed next to the door: two heaping bowls of soggy cereal—breakfast. Returning to the vicinity of the lightbulb, Izar squatted and carved a notch in the floor. The breakfast told him it was the start of a new day in his imprisonment, and the five earlier notches told him it was the sixth day. There were no windows on B3, three levels underground, and so it was not through sunrises but mealtimes that Izar gauged the passage of time.
There was just one day left to Coralline’s wedding, and to his escape attempt.
The celebration will be a funeral, Mintaka had told him. It was possible that she’d been referring to Coralline’s wedding. But she had not specified whose funeral it would be. Perhaps it would be Izar’s own—he would prefer that to Coralline’s.
He heard a rasp from the other side of the room. He collected the breakfast tray and marched in the direction of the sound. Zaurak Alphard sat hunched on the floor, leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out before him. Izar barely recognized his fifty-seven-year-old mentor, the director of operations, not only because his face was now bearded, but because his nose was broken, the nostrils encrusted with blood. The shin of his right leg was broken as well, a thick, angry red welt stretching diagonally across it. The leg had already been lame, but now, it was also injured and infected. A cloud of yellow pus circled it like growth in a petri dish, and flies buzzed around it, feeding, breeding. When the flies had first appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, Zaurak had twitched his leg at intervals to shoo them away, but he was too weak to do so anymore.
Izar plopped down cross-legged next to Zaurak’s leg and swatted the flies away. If Coralline were here, he thought, she would know what to do. She could not bear to watch anyone suffer.
He passed a bowl of cereal to Zaurak and ate his own cereal absentmindedly.
“I’m not hungry,” Zaurak said.
“We’ll need the energy for our escape tomorrow.”
Zaurak proceeded to take a few half-hearted mouthfuls of his cereal.
When Izar was done, he put his bowl down and said, “Let’s practice walking. You’ll need to be able to run tomorrow.”
“Not now,” Zaurak said, resting his head against the wall.
When they’d practiced walking yesterday, Izar had supported Zaurak with an arm around his shoulders, and Zaurak had hobbled about for a few minutes, then, crying out in pain, had collapsed.
Four days ago, when Serpens had shoved him through the door of this room, Izar had fallen flat on his chest. Closing his eyes, he’d rested his forehead on the floor—its coolness had reminded him of the ocean. A scuttle had sounded across the room. The place must be infested with rats, Izar had thought, but the scuttle had approached him steadily, an unevenness to its scurry. It had not been something, but someone, who was hobbling over to him, Izar had realized. He had risen to his knees and squinted at the man emerging from the shadows, his face like a rock with scraggly moss sprouted over it: Zaurak.
Over the last four days, Izar and Zaurak had shared with each other everything that they knew. After the derrick had fallen on Dominion Drill I, failing to crush Izar, Zaurak had spent the night double-checking parts of the drillship. He had marked off everything in his checklist and had placed it on Izar’s desk. He had been about to leave for home when he’d noticed a flashlight on the drillship. He’d clambered back upon Dominion Drill I to investigate and had discovered Serpens there, switching out a blowout preventer. He’d tried to stop Serpens, but Serpens had broken his leg and knocked him unconscious. His pen had fallen out of his shirt pocket during the skirmish and gotten caught in the stopper of the borehole. When he’d awoken, hours later, he’d found himself locked in this room.
Zaurak’s account complemented Izar’s own. The night Izar had discovered the gray tin on his desk, he’d heard a series of sounds coming from below. He’d taken the private elevator down from B1 to B3, and had flashed his identification card before the scanner, but the elevator bars hadn’t opened. Izar had assumed the sounds must be coming from the gassy pipes in his Invention Chamber on B2, but he knew now that Zaurak had been the source of the sounds, as he’d tried to escape.
Izar shifted such that he sat next to Zaurak, his back leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out before him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
It was Izar’s fault that Zaurak was trapped here, and in this condition. He had been double-checking the drillship to protect Izar, he had confronted Serpens to protect Izar. Serpens had imprisoned him here so that Zaurak couldn’t interfere any more with further attacks on Izar’s life. And yet, despite everything Zaurak had been doing for him, Izar had doubted Zaurak, believing him to have been responsible for the attempts on his life. His most loyal friend, he’d viewed as his most suspect.
“I don’t know whether I’ll survive our escape tomorrow,” Zaurak said, “but—”