by Sonia Faruqi
She then reached eagerly for her stone-sticks, pleased his “special occasion” announcement had been made, and she could finally eat her supper—
“I wish to marry you.”
Coralline’s stone-sticks clanged against her plate, and her gills fluttered wildly along the sides of her neck. She looked at her parents. Her father’s eyes shone with happiness, the lines around them spreading like sea fans. Don’t ruin the best day of your life, her mother mouthed to her. Coralline tried to pull the muscles of her face into a semblance of normality as she turned back to Ecklon. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to have noticed her reaction, for he was extracting something from his waistcoat pocket.
His hand unfurled before Coralline to reveal a shell with a pale pink center melting into smooth alabaster along the edges, like a slow summer dawn. The symbol of engagement, a rose petal tellin.
“Cora,” Ecklon began solemnly, “will you make me the happiest merman in the Atlantic by marrying me?”
Before this day, marriage had been a vague concept to Coralline, something in the distance, like the clouds in the sky. Now, she felt as though the clouds had descended suddenly upon her and struck her with lightning. Her mind churning, she considered the changes to her life that would be wrought by marriage. Her name would change, for one; she would go from Coralline Costaria to Coralline Elnath—the new name just didn’t have a ring to it. More importantly, she would no longer live in this home with her parents and little brother; she would live with Ecklon and his parents in the Mansion—the largest home in Urchin Grove. But she didn’t want to live in the Mansion.
“Cora?” said Ecklon.
His hand trembled under the tellin shell, Coralline noticed through her haze. It was that slight movement that shook her; it told her that, for the first time since she’d known him, he was nervous.
She thought back to the day last week when she’d been sick with a cold. She hadn’t told Ecklon, and she still didn’t know how he’d learned it, but he’d come knocking at her door with a bowl of buttonweed. “How did you know I was sick?” she’d asked. “I’m a detective—it’s my job to know,” he’d said. “Well, I’m a healer,” she’d countered, “and it’s my job to not make you sick.” His eyes glinting, he’d wrapped his arms around her waist. In contrast to her words, her body had melted against his, and her fingers had tangled in his hair. “I wouldn’t care if I was sick every day as long as I was with you,” he’d said, and given her a long, languorous kiss.
What was she thinking? Did she have dementia like her patient Mola? This was Ecklon, proposing to her—Ecklon, courageous and kind, Ecklon, as her mother often reminded her, the most eligible bachelor in the village of Urchin Grove. She would be fortunate to marry him. His proposal was a surprise, that was all, and she hated surprises.
“Yes,” Coralline said, raising her blue-green eyes to his. Then, more emphatically, “Yes.”
Ecklon smiled at her, then at each of her parents. They beamed back at him. Coralline found that, like a star, his smile could swing any satellite into orbit, even her mother and father, who otherwise rotated in opposite directions.
The rose petal tellin was strung on a translucent vine, and Ecklon held it out toward Coralline so he could clasp it around her neck. She turned away from him, grateful to have a moment without her face in full view. His fingers brushed her shoulder blades as they closed the clasp at the nape of her neck. The click of the clasp made her think of handcuffs, and her heart pounded in her ears. Turning back to face the table, keeping her gaze down, Coralline raised the rose petal tellin off her collarbone and ran her index finger over its surface, back and forth. The shell’s texture was smooth, its ridges gentle—as their relationship had been.
When Coralline looked back at Ecklon, she found that he had heaped dulse onto his plate, as had her mother and father. Finally, it was time to eat, but, though Coralline was hungry, she had no more appetite for the fronds she otherwise loved. She continued to examine the rose petal tellin, as if it would show her the future.
Suddenly, a tremor distilled into the living room through the window, its pressure that of a drumbeat, its vibrations throbbing through the stone of the house and pulsing through Coralline’s very marrow. A stone-stick slipped out of her father’s hand. It skittered slowly toward Coralline’s tailfin, but she did not dare retrieve it for him.
Her parents and Ecklon sat still and stiff—the standard reaction to passing ships, in order to reduce the possibility of detection—but Coralline clutched the rim of the dining table. Goosebumps climbed from her wrists to her shoulders, and her stomach clawed at itself. She longed to hide under the table, but it would look cowardly. In an effort to distract herself from her terror of the danger above, she started counting her breaths. But she’d managed to count only to five, when the grasp of her fingers started to loosen, and her head started to feel as light and bouncy as plankton. She was beginning to feel faint; it happened to her often. Her father said it was because she did not take the time to eat adequately; her mother said that fainting occasionally was fine, so long as she remained thin.
Coralline tried to anchor her thoughts onto something, for it would help her remain conscious. Her glance fell on her father’s right arm.
It was a narrowing rod that culminated not in a hand but in a bony swelling of a wrist. There was a filmy softness to the skin of his wrist, like that of a newborn; though her father was fifty years old, the skin over his stump was just months old. Coralline shuddered to remember the day his hand had been severed: His wrist had been a mangled mess of bone and sinew, blood spurting out of it like the ink of an octopus. Her mother called it his haccident—an abbreviation for “hand accident”—but Coralline considered the term misleading (though she’d grudgingly come to use it as well). What happened to her father had not been an accident: Ocean Dominion, its ships ever-present on the waters, had planted dynamite in a coral reef in Urchin Grove, in order to kill and collect schools of fish.
Coralline’s father, a coral connoisseur, had been studying the reef with his microscope. He’d made a note on his parchment-pad that coral polyps, the tiny, soft-bodied organisms whose exoskeleton formed the reef, were finding it difficult to absorb calcium carbonate from the waters, due to ocean acidification. When he’d looked up from his parchment-pad, he’d spotted dynamite tucked in a crevice of the reef. Immediately, he’d inserted his hand into the crevice to extract it. He’d managed to wrest the dynamite out and had raised his arm to hurl it away, but it had exploded, taking his hand with it.
Coralline’s mother had told him he should have bolted the scene instead of risking his hand and life.
“My hand exploded, so the reef wouldn’t,” Trochid had replied. “I would do it again, Abalone.”
“Well, I don’t want a handless husband!” she’d snapped, her amber-gold eyes flaming. “And if you have such poor judgment, I must insist you retire, Trochid.”
Applying steady pressure over the next days like a tightly bound tourniquet, Abalone had compelled him to resign from his role in the Under-Ministry of Coral Conservation. In his retirement, he had become a shadow of his former self, in Coralline’s opinion. He drifted aimlessly through the living room in the early hours like a ghost. His desk, previously stacked with books like The Animated Lives of Anemones and Love of Limestone, now sat empty, except for one volume: Handling a Difficult Adjustment to Retirement.
Coralline looked at her father’s stone-stick on the floor. It divided into two, then three, until it looked like an array of fingers. Her head started to loll, but, just then, the tremors in the waters ended. The ship had passed. Her daze dissipated slowly. . . . Once she was mentally steady again, she bent at the waist, collected the stone-stick, and handed it to her father. He took it, but rather than eat with it, he set it to the side of his plate. He clasped his left hand around his stump, as though his wrist throbbed with a phantom pain in proximity to the phantoms on the waters.
“Humans are a menace,” Trochid
said. “Our only solace is that they cannot disrupt our lives any more than they already do.”
“Why not?” Coralline asked.
“Because they’re fire, and we’re water. Fire vaporizes water, and water vanquishes fire. The two can never truly meet.”
Izar stepped out of his small basement office and looked right and left down the hallway. Satisfied that he was alone, he turned on his heel and strode down the dimly lit corridor to the private elevator, where he flashed his identification card before the scanner. The elevator was right there—Izar was the only person to ever use it—but it was so old and ramshackle that its bars moved as slowly as arthritic knees.
Izar examined his identification card as he waited for the elevator bars to part. A circular bronze-and-black insignia glowed on the back of his card, the letters O and D intertwined over a fishhook that slashed the circle in half. The front of the card stated: Izar Eridan, vice president of operations. Underneath the words was a faded picture of him—light-blue collar, chestnut curls, indigo eyes staring at the camera somewhat anxiously, for the day the photo had been taken six years ago had been his first at the company where he’d decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
The elevator bars groaned to a halt. Izar stepped inside the decrepit cage and rode it from the first floor of the basement, B1, down to the second floor, B2. The thirty floors of Ocean Dominion aboveground were sleek and modern—the building formed a bronze glass arrow pointing toward the sky in Menkar—but the three underground floors had always intentionally been excluded from renovation. B1 contained Izar’s office and those of other key men in the operations department; B2 was accessible only by this private elevator, to which Izar shared access only with Antares Eridan, the president of Ocean Dominion. But Antares had never descended into B2 after Izar’s first day at the company, so Izar considered B2 his private asylum. As for B3, it was accessible only to Antares, but Antares had no use for it, so it lay dark and dusty.
When the elevator opened again, Izar marched three steps to the one door on B2 and stepped inside the room. It was a windowless warehouse with unpainted walls and untiled floor, but he felt as comforted to enter it as though it were a penthouse—this room was his Invention Chamber. Every night, as soon as the responsibilities of his vice president day job were complete, after other employees had grumbled their way out the doors of Ocean Dominion, Izar slinked into his Invention Chamber to start his night-shift: Castor.
Outside the Invention Chamber, Izar existed; in the Invention Chamber, he came alive. But not tonight.
Instead of stomping into his lair like a lion onto a savannah, Izar closed the door and leaned against it, his shoulders sagging. Looking resolutely away from Castor, he took off his pin-striped suit jacket and dropped it to the floor. He then uncuffed his white, starched-cotton shirtsleeves and rolled them up to his elbows. His glance fell upon his watch; the luminescent hour markers told him the time was close to eleven at night. He unclasped his watch and dropped it upon his suit jacket on the floor, finding the concept of time too manacling in a place where sparks of innovation appeared and disappeared as suddenly as the glimmers of fireflies.
Izar continued to stand there, leaning against the door, for how long he did not know. He despised procrastination, but this night, the odds were stacked so high against him that he could not bear to face them . . . not yet. If he succeeded in what he intended, he and Antares would become the richest men on earth; if he failed, his life to date would have been a waste, like the dirt under his shoes. Not only the years of his adulthood but also his childhood would have been a waste, for he had been preparing for this purpose for the last twenty-five years, since the very day Antares had adopted him at three years of age.
Izar still remembered the moment like it was yesterday: Kneeling before him, Antares had lit a match. Izar had been mesmerized by the flame—it was a drop of suspended sunlight, a tiny golden phoenix—but Antares had dropped the match in a glass of water. Izar had plunged his fingers into the water to try to rescue the flame, but it had died instantly. Izar had snatched the glass out of Antares’s hand, raised it over his head, and smashed it to the floor. He could still feel the droplets of water splattering his shins.
Antares had not rebuked him. Instead, he had smiled. “I believe you’re a very clever boy,” he’d said in his hoarse smoker’s voice. “When you grow up, I want you to invent underwater fire.”
Izar had nodded, and, from that day, become obsessed with the idea of underwater fire. He had played incessantly with matchsticks; he had switched the stove on and off, staring at the crown-shaped blaze for hours; he had torn apart wires and sparked them against one another, reveling in their fumes. Throughout his early childhood years, the question that had driven him was how—how he would invent underwater fire; it was not until his adolescence that he had thought to ask Antares why.
“Because trillions of dollars’ worth of jewels lie beneath the ocean floor,” Antares had answered. “But they lie so deep that they cannot be accessed without blazing a path down. And yet no man on earth has found a way to sustain fire underwater. I myself have hired dozens of scientists at Ocean Dominion to attempt it, men with prestigious degrees and accomplishments, but, without exception, all have failed. You will invent underwater fire, boy. Gold and diamonds will form the embers of your flames.”
This night, the eighth of July, marked the end of Izar’s underwater-fire journey. If a fire didn’t flame today, not only would he consider his past to be a dead, dry slate, a barren wasteland, but also his future. It was not written anywhere on his business card, but his true role, the one for which he lived, was not vice president of operations but inventor. He had given the title to himself; this night, he would learn whether he’d earned it.
He longed to know whether he’d succeeded or failed with his underwater-fire mission, but he could not summon the courage . . . not yet. Now that he was at the end of this road, he thought it fitting to pay tribute to the lampposts that had lit his path over the last six years. Most people retained pictures as mementos; he retained implements, which lay scattered all over the floor of his Invention Chamber—ores of iron, sheets of magnesium, rounds of bullets, panes of sensors. An onlooker might view them as dangerous tripping hazards, but Izar knew precisely what each object signified.
He knelt next to a low mound of ash and swept his hand through the granules, watching them trickle through his fingers like black sand. They were the cinders of creators—the cinders of not one person but dozens—and not their bodies but their theories.
Izar had commenced on his underwater-fire journey by consulting scientific manuals, engineering treatises, and technical articles about combustion. They had all asserted, implicitly or explicitly, that underwater fire was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms. “Oxygen is the catalyst for fire,” one chemist had stated, “and water does contain oxygen, but it might as well not, for the act of combustion requires oxygen in gaseous form, not liquid.” “Even a child recognizes that the role of water is to devour fire,” had claimed a physicist, “not to nurture it.” “When it comes to fire,” had declared an engineer, “water acts as the wolf, not the sheep.”
Izar had piled up all the papers and thrown a lit match upon them. A fire had blazed, and its smoke had scorched his eyes but straightened his vision. In his new clarity, he had resolved that the only applicable laws in the universe of his Invention Chamber would be those that he proved or disproved himself.
Now Izar rose to his feet, strode four steps, and, kneeling, thumbed through a crimson-covered notebook that lay half open on the floor with its spine up, like an injured cardinal. Some of its pages were crumpled, others had corners that were softened by water, a few had burnt edges, and all were yellowed, but Izar grinned at the notebook. The night of the cremation itself, he had started scribbling in this notebook. Over the next years, he had written countless chemical and physical formulae into its pages, logging also the outcomes of all his underwater-fire ex
periments.
Though Izar had chosen the notebook arbitrarily—it had happened to be lying around that night—he seemed to have chosen well, for its length was just right: only one page remained. If Izar succeeded today, he would jot his final note on that page, and it would consist of just two words: Mission accomplished. With those two words, the journal would become the most important object in the Invention Chamber, for it would make his work replicable. If he failed, he would destroy the journal.
A burble sounded. Rising to his feet, Izar glanced at the labyrinth of pipes in the ceiling high above. In his first month at Ocean Dominion he had found the sporadic noises of the pipes irritating—they sounded like explosions of dysentery from a maze of intestines (sometimes, he could hear them even from his office upstairs)—but he smiled at the pipes now as at an ailing relative. The pipes had been with him all these years, their sounds his only source of companionship in his Invention Chamber.
His glance landed on the shelves along the walls. The shelves at least were more organized than the floor, though it was more out of safety than any punctiliousness on his part: The shelves were stocked with hundreds of flasks of flammable liquids and powders, potent enough to burn down the entirety of Ocean Dominion, all the way up to the thirtieth floor. Izar had collected them from all over the world and had experimented with each of them in his underwater-fire mission.
But his favorite memento of his journey lay not in the room but in his bone itself, in the form of a platinum chip. He had obtained the chip three years ago, soon after he’d begun experimenting with melting points for all types of metal—lead, tungsten, titanium, cobalt, iron—and had concluded that magnesium was optimal, for it was able to reach and sustain the highest temperature. He had molded himself a torch of magnesium and stuffed it with an array of combustion powders. With his right hand, he had pulled the trigger of the torch in a pail of water, placing his left wrist directly before the barrel to detect viscerally if any heat emerged. With the first iteration of his torch, he had felt no more than a wisp of smoke. The second iteration had singed the hair right off his wrist. He had then doubled the diameter of the internal gas chamber of the torch, to increase its storage capacity for oxygen. When he’d pulled the trigger in water the next time, the resulting flame, though ephemeral, had shot out so sharply that it had burned the inside of his left wrist clean to the bone.