Tears blurred Coralline’s vision, and she blinked them away; she did not want her vision to cloud now, during her last moments with Rhodomela. Her face crumbling, she clasped Rhodomela’s hand. Her fingers met no resistance in Rhodomela’s, nor any response—she did not have the strength to clasp back. With every passing moment, Rhodomela was becoming less and less anchored to the fleshiness of life.
There was a rustle to the other side of the kelp. Coralline looked up sharply. The fronds were parting before her. Castor must have located her; he must be stomping toward her in order to kill her, but she held Rhodomela’s hand more tightly—she would not leave her side, not even if Izar’s monster shot her a dozen times.
The fronds parted more, then it was not Castor but Abalone and Trochid who burst through the kelp. Cringing to see Rhodomela’s condition, they came to hover horizontally over her.
“Thank you,” Trochid said, his dark-brown eyes moist. He removed Rhodomela’s hand gently from Coralline’s, and grasped the limp fingers with his own. “Thank you for saving my life when my hand was severed. And thank you for saving my daughter today, and for guiding her into becoming the lovely mermaid she is.”
Coralline looked from her father to Rhodomela. The two of them could not glance away from each other; it was as though they were alone in the kelp forest. Coralline wondered whether they were thinking back to when they’d been young, when they’d held hands just like this, when they’d dreamt of a life together.
The sound of weeping broke their gaze. “I’m sorry,” Abalone wailed. “I’m so sorry.”
Her mother rarely cried, and Coralline had never seen her cry as she was crying now, her cheeks flaming, her eyes liquid gold. From beneath a scrunched forehead, she met Coralline’s eyes. Coralline nodded emphatically—her father and Rhodomela needed to know.
“It’s my fault the two of you weren’t together,” Abalone said. “Rhodomela, the day Trochid was supposed to propose to you, I lied to you that he’d proposed to me. I stole him away from you!”
Trochid and Rhodomela looked at Abalone, but only fleetingly. The light vanished from Rhodomela’s eyes, and the final scale of her tail turned from black to white.
Abalone and Trochid sobbed, hovering to separate sides of Rhodomela. Coralline closed Rhodomela’s eyes with a hand, then shifted out from beneath her. Abalone and Trochid extended a hand down in unison, such that Rhodomela’s head was now cradled in their joined hands. “Where are you going—” Abalone began, but Coralline did not hear any more, for she’d darted out of the kelp forest.
Facing away from her, Castor was stomping steadily toward the kitchen; with every step he took, the pearl-white sands quivered. People inside the kitchen were screaming—they’d assumed the space a refuge, but it had become a cage—they could not escape, for he would simply shoot them if they swam out the door or window.
Castor was looking for her, Coralline knew, and he seemed to think she’d be inside the kitchen. She’d left Ecklon for Izar, and here was Izar in the form of this demon, trying to kill her—the thought made her laugh without mirth. All of this was her fault—Rhodomela’s death was her fault, any other death today would also be her fault—because if not for her, and Izar’s desire to kill her, Castor would not be here.
Swimming toward Castor, Coralline hurled herself at his leg from behind. It was like hurling herself at a boulder—she felt the impact more than he did, and, sliding aside, rubbed her shoulder. But the collision served its purpose. Castor began turning around with small, stuttering steps—he seemed to find it difficult to balance on the uneven ocean floor. His eyes had an easier time than his body, though, and located her swiftly. The Ocean Dominion insignia across his chest rotated ten degrees, in preparation to shoot.
“Coralline!” a voice called. Ecklon arrived beside her, his waistcoat stained, his hair rough and tousled. He grabbed her hand as though she was his bride.
A click sounded. Ecklon jerked Coralline’s arm. A bullet sailed past her side, traveling so close to her skin that she felt its heat.
Pavonis and Menziesii materialized above Coralline and Ecklon. The whale shark and spotted eagle ray swam together toward Castor from overhead. Bullets exploded out of Castor’s navel, but there was a confusion to them—he did not seem to know at which of them to aim, and he seemed unable to shoot overhead, for his navel could not point up, but only forward.
Pavonis stopped behind Castor, and Menziesii stopped to the side of Castor’s neck. His whip of a tail flashing, Menziesii fluttered his wide, navy-blue wings next to Castor’s head. The resulting ripples seemed to blur Castor’s vision, for he started shaking his head side to side, as though to clear his eyes. Pavonis, meanwhile, swung his tail powerfully into Castor’s back.
Castor fell to his knees. It was as though a house had fallen—Coralline felt the impact in each of her bones, even the narrow bones of her fingers. But Castor did not stay down long. Placing one leg in front of him, he started to rise onto the other.
Coralline could try to make some sort of algal paste to smear over his eyes, she thought. She could not think of the specific algae now, but if she rummaged through the kelp forest, ideas would come to her. And she was not carrying her apothecary arsenal with her at the moment, but there would be implements in the kitchen that she could use to grind algae, including a mortar and pestle. Pavonis would continue to slam into Castor from behind, Menziesii would continue to distract him through his ripples, and Coralline, together with Ecklon, would find a way to blind him—
A bullet tore through Coralline. Her chest convulsed, her tiara flew off. She looked down numbly. The bullet had struck her in almost the same location it had struck Rhodomela, among the ribs, to the left side. A red splotch was expanding through the pink and ochre shades of her bodice. A stinging pain was radiating through her, but she found that did not mind it. She’d longed to die; finally, death had found her. Mintaka had been truthful, after all, in her curse: You will die soon after the light dies.
Ecklon pulled Coralline into the kelp forest, as Coralline had earlier pulled Rhodomela. He settled among the holdfasts of kelp with her head on his lap. His hand landed gently on her forehead and smoothed back her hair, which was coming loose now that her tiara had tumbled off. His silver-gray eyes held an unforgiving expression, but Coralline knew their ire was directed at himself: He’d saved her from life in prison, but he’d been unable to save her from death.
Her parents came to hover horizontally over her, as they had over Rhodomela, both of them continuing to weep. Naiadum sat next to her, staring at her with a befuddled expression; though he’d come within a hair’s breadth of death himself in the black poison spill, he was still too young to understand the finality of it.
Coralline felt a slight movement on her right shoulder—it would be Nacre, clambering on. Altair and Kuda, meanwhile, were somewhere on Coralline’s left; she could see their orange and red colors from the corner of her eye. Pavonis’s white belly started rollicking above everyone, his eye trained on her. He would have liked to speak, Coralline knew—they’d been best friends since she was two; she’d known him longer than she’d known Naiadum—but he could not open his mouth, because Altair and Kuda’s hundreds of children were in it. She was glad he could not speak, for then she would cry—if she could.
She had always hoped her death would be a little like falling asleep, but it felt more like a rapidly spreading fever. Her body was paralyzing from the inside-out—first the bones, then the organs, then the muscles. Her tail was bleaching fast, the bronze giving way steadily to white, remnants of color lingering primarily around the corners of her tailfin. She could smell her blood in her own nostrils, and she felt dizzy, but not from the smell of her blood—rather, the loss of it. For what it was worth, she had finally conquered her fear of blood, as Rhodomela had noted. Blood was simply what her body was composed of, she saw now, just as the ocean was composed of water.