Cleansing #4
Lilianne rolls her eyes, more because she knows it’s the expected reaction than out of any actual distaste. “Whatever,” she says, and keeps walking.
“Don’t you have a doctor’s appointment tonight?”
She stops. “What?”
“You wrote it on the house calendar.”
“Ah. Yes. It’s virtual. I’ll be in my room. Please keep Snake and Raven from bothering me, at least if they get home before you leave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“But—”
“Goodnight, David.” And on she goes, heading for the hall, heading for her room, heading for the point where she’ll be safe from questions and expectations and everything else the world has got to offer.
She’ll call her endocrinologist in a few hours.
For right now, she just wants to lie on her bed and disassociate so hard she feels like she’s dissolving, breaking down into motes of dust and floating away with the languid movement of the indoor air.
She’s been in this apartment for almost two months, and yet her room is still a wonderland of cardboard boxes piled high not only against the walls, but in freestanding towers throughout the rest of her carefully apportioned space.
When she packed and took her things away from Alabama, she’d been so sure that she was limiting herself to the essentials, that she was keeping herself lean and light and ready to pivot on a moment’s notice.
Now, crammed in with absolutely everything she owns, it feels like she’s on the verge of becoming a hoarder.
(How do her parents handle having an entire house to fill with the leftovers of their lives?
It seems irrational to stay in one place for that long, to put down roots so deep and strong that pulling them up becomes virtually unthinkable.
But it is, for them. She’s tried to bring up the idea of moving out to the coast, of leaving Alabama behind.
They’ll certainly see her more if they move to California.
The political climate is shifting. Some of her classmates want to say that transphobia is over, that the world is changing, but she can see the writing on the walls.
History likes to repeat itself. She’d rather not be standing in the refrain, and she wants to see her parents again before she dies.)
Lilianne drops onto the bed, books still clutched to her chest, eyes on the spiderweb network of cracks in the ceiling.
There was a massive earthquake in Berkeley a few years back, and it’s harder to find a building that hasn’t sustained some light structural damage than one that has.
She’s the newest arrival to this city; all three of her roommates wave off the possibility of a collapse like it’s nothing, like only a fool would be concerned about the ceiling coming down in the middle of the night.
They’re not worried, and so she shouldn’t be, either.
She’s not worried. She knows why the earth shook here in Berkeley, and what that motion signified.
It’s the reason she’s here. It always has been.
The UC Berkeley History department is good enough, but it’s not world-famous; there were better places she could have gone to study if all she wanted was an impressive name on her resume.
No. Berkeley matters for other reasons.
With a sigh, she rolls onto her side and stacks the books on the floor next to her bed, then rolls back into her original position.
She’ll meet them soon enough, Reed’s cuckoos.
They’re both in Berkeley, according to the information she’s been able to find, the son of Ethos and the daughter of Kairos, the two halves of the Doctrine of Ethos made manifest and walking the world like the people they’re pretending to be.
Their existence is the proof of all Asphodel Baker’s theories, the ones too wild and too ambitious for the American Alchemical Congress.
The ones that left Baker effectively ostracized for the latter part of her life, that drove her to create James Reed to continue her work.
The theories that, in a very real, causally traceable way, killed her are alive and well and making their lives here in Berkeley, and Lilianne hates them for that, even as she yearns to know them, to position herself close enough to see into their nest and understand what fuels them, first and finally.
She has more experience with incarnations than most young alchemists, self-trained or no: her mother and father have been serving the autumn and spring since much longer than she’s been alive.
It’s their service to the seasons that has allowed her to live her own life at the asynchronous tempo she prefers, skipping over the bad parts, stretching out the good ones like a tape played in slow motion.
Time has a generous relationship with its most loyal servants.
But she wasn’t tapped for that same service.
There’s nothing of the summer or winter in her, no seeds of spring or acorns of the fall.
She is as human as they come—blood and bone from side to side—and any mysterious transformations she undergoes must come from the outside.
She can do part of it on her own. If she can catch Asphodel’s cuckoos, learn the last secrets of their creation, and apply them inward, she can achieve the rest. The cuckoos were vessels made to contain the uncontained, to hold what the universe hadn’t seen fit to embody on its own.
If she modifies her own vessel in the right directions, she may be able to catch her own embodiment.
They’re somewhere in this city. She doesn’t know their faces and she doesn’t know their names, but she knows the Alchemical Congress abandoned this place after their losses reached a certain unforgivable volume, after they had to decommission and desert a hard-won urban lab location.
She’ll find the lab first, locate the door, and work her way down to where the Congress spun their secrets like spiders crouching in a darkened corner.
They must have left something behind in their rush to flee the city. They must have given her something.
This would be so much easier if she had anyone she could talk to, but she’s entirely self-taught.
She learned about alchemy from her parents, who dismissed it as people playing party tricks with power, the efforts of the unhappily natural to become something more than what they were.
Oh, her parents hated alchemy, had so many stories of unsuspecting seasonals and their attendants being swept up and taken apart to use in tests and tinctures.
They said it was cheap, said it was cruel, said it was beneath her.
They might as well have signed her up for classes.
She found all the basic texts she could, found enough to learn that Asphodel Baker had encoded all her secrets in the Up-and-Under books, and then threw herself down the rabbit hole of children’s literature, dead alchemists, and the battle between Baker and Baum.
There was so much to learn, in the beginning.
There still is, but she no longer has the novice’s wide-eyed awe, the ability to be so amazed that the world drops away and leaves her swimming in her studies, drifting miles from the shore.
Now she learns page by agonizing page, honing her studies in secret, conducting her first clumsy experiments based on what she can decode from the writings of alchemists past. That is the one thing her mother has always seemed to at least halfway admire about the alchemists, the one part that makes her think she might be forgiven when the veil slips and her parents eventually, inevitably learn what she’s become.
The secrets are here, in Berkeley. She knows it. Everything she’s ever wanted is here. She just needs to find it.
She’s still thinking about her next steps when sleep slides in and steals her away, down into the deep places where all secrets are kept for as long as the world endures.