Death #5
It’s still unclear what he was hoping to accomplish by locking one of the more powerful aspects of the Moon into a permanent ascension, rather than just killing her when he was done with his research.
Maybe he’d been planning to use her like a hunting hound, a way to flush lesser Lunars out into the open for the harvest. Or maybe he’d been following the plans Asphodel left behind, obscure and unknowable, moving toward the cosmic conquest that had been his goal since his own creation.
It had something to do with access to the everything, the all-space no-space channels that the Lunars use to reach the Impossible City.
Whatever it was done for, it’s left them with an Artemis who’s far older and more powerful than she should have been, who’s only really controllable by her incarnate Hind, a sheltered former lab experiment who’d believed herself to be an alchemist transformed by careless research.
The thought that Artemis might take over the Berkeley-area Lunars after Diana’s death had been more optimistic than logical, and even then, the optimism had been severely tempered by the knowledge that letting her run things might be uncomfortably close to handing power over to the Alchemical Congress.
And none of this matters now, because Artemis is gone, haunting the wilds where she belongs, her Hind beside her, and she has ceded this territory to Chang’e. Chang’e, who is now taking her hand away from Máni’s face and stepping backward, leaving him suddenly cold, suddenly alone in the world.
His eyes don’t want to open. The thing they most recently beheld was divinity in the purest form he may ever experience, and they’re still savoring the sight.
He manages, with an extreme effort, to convince them to obey his commands, and he sees that Chang’e is still there, a few feet away now, but still gleaming like the Moon itself. She has never been this beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I know,” she replies. “And I understand. Your concerns are not unreasonable, not after Diana, not after everything. We live in complicated times, and that leads to complicated fears. But no. I am not compromised because my mortal half-loves a man.”
Roger jerks like he’s been stuck with a pin, abandoning all pretense that he’s not listening to their conversation as he slowly turns to stare at Chang’e. There is a clatter from somewhere far below, drifting through the half-real material of the house.
Chang’e looks unbothered by all of this, her eyes remaining fixed on Máni, her skin remaining bright with beaming divinity.
“Everything I do, I do for the betterment of our community. Judy’s feelings are her own.
I haven’t caused or shaped them in any way.
But I have, perhaps, encouraged her to act on those feelings when her natural inclination might be to suppress them in favor of focusing on her position. ”
“Why?”
“Because there is no virtue in self-denial, whatever the world may try to say to us, and because you speak of benefiting the Lunars as if we should have no other purpose in this world. Well, tell me, Máni, which benefits the Lunar community more: an intimate relationship with the embodied Doctrine, or a suppressed attraction leading to frustration and tension between us? Judy has influence that she would not otherwise have.”
“Hey, now,” says Roger, sounding mildly affronted.
Chang’e barely glances in his direction.
“I say again, I have done nothing to force or direct Judy’s affections.
She loves you because you speak more languages than she does, and because she finds you funny and sweet and protective in a very attractive way.
You could release the Doctrine tomorrow and I believe she would still love you, and I would still allow it. I don’t control her heart.”
Roger frowns. “She’s never said she loves me. This feels like a conversation I should be having with her.”
“Oops,” says Chang’e blandly, with no real hint of apology. “Now, Máni. I said I wanted to talk to David. I have answered your concerns, and hopefully alleviated them. Let him come forward.”
“Yes,” he says, and sinks back, dropping down into the dark that waits when he is not ascendant. David responds by rising, and for one dizzying moment they have equal control of their shared body. Then Máni releases the reins, and David is in command once more, leaving Máni to only observe.
He immediately whirls on Roger, hands raised in supplication. “I’m so sorry, man,” he says. “I had no idea he was going to do that, we didn’t discuss it, he didn’t warn me. That was fundamentally uncool, and he was way, way out of line.”
“Yeah, kinda,” says Roger. He rakes one hand backward through his hair, momentarily looking like a disheveled cockatoo. “I don’t show up at your place and start interrogating the women you’re dating.”
“Not currently dating anyone.”
“That’s not the point. Please tell Máni that Judy’s friends will always be welcome in my home, but if he talks to her like that again, I won’t consider him a friend.”
David grimaces. “He can hear you, and he understands.”
“You people and your sublinguistics,” mutters Roger. “I will never understand how you don’t all lose your minds.”
“Divinity carves new channels for our thoughts to follow, even as ascension makes it possible for you to hold your singular self and all the words of the world in the same mind at the same time,” says Chang’e, surprisingly serene.
“We are all as we were made to be, and we do what we must to survive.”
Roger meets her eyes, seemingly untroubled by the glow. “I need to talk to Judy when you’re done interrogating David,” he says.
“I understand,” says Chang’e. “I would expect nothing less.”
“Great. Now I’m going to go and make sure my sister doesn’t come charging up the stairs to break some noses. If you’ll excuse me?”
Roger turns and leaves the library, which doesn’t collapse into a haze of improbability as soon as he walks through the door, but for a moment feels like it might. David tenses, waiting for the moment when the floor pops beneath him like a soap bubble. Chang’e sees, and sighs.
“The equations that expand the space inside the house are completely stable, and not dependent on human presence beyond the fact that they need the embodied Doctrine to be alive to maintain them,” she says.
“They hinge on Dodger more than Roger, at his request. He didn’t want to get so deeply sunk in a book that he forgot to keep bending space around himself. We’re safe here.”
“If you say so,” he grumbles, still uneasy.
“I do. Now. You wanted tell me about a possible alchemist? Why do you think there’s an alchemist?”
“Máni told you about the alkahest—”
“Alkahest is just a form of acid. He could have been smelling something else.”
“I smelled it too, and it wasn’t just any acid. Alkahest is acid mixed with ozone and mercury. It smells like atoms coming apart. It smells like dying. This was something that shouldn’t have been in my apartment, and I know it didn’t come from Raven or Snake. It was Lilianne.”
“I see.”
“You don’t, or you wouldn’t be sounding so calm about the whole situation,” he half-snaps.
“She’s furtive. She slinks around corners, and she approaches socialization like she’s following a script.
I know she has a thesis to finish, an advisor to answer to, but her classes are less coherent than mine are.
She’s not here for an education. I’ve seen the books she brings back to the apartment, and they’re … eclectic to say the least.”
“Wouldn’t an alchemist be better about concealing themselves?” asks Chang’e.
“Not necessarily. A lot of them are self-taught. The Congress has taken serious losses in the last few decades, and they were very focused before that on undoing Baker’s alchemical mapping of North America, trying to prevent Reed’s creations from claiming the Impossible City.”
“All they needed to do to keep those two out of the Impossible City was make sure they had access to the internet and too many hobbies to let them go and take over the control room of the universe,” says Chang’e.
“The alchemists never stopped to ask themselves what kind of person the Doctrine was likely to become.”
Privately, David isn’t sure anyone could have predicted Roger and Dodger, least of all the twins themselves.
They are the product of the world and their endless looping journeys through it as much as they are of Reed’s lab and Asphodel’s original research.
Nurture and nature both were involved, and in the final battle between the two, neither came out definitively the winner.
“No, and even if they had, I don’t think they could have changed anything,” says David.
“Still. She’s showing all the indicators that we’re supposed to look for in alchemists, and even more than that, there’s just this feeling that I get when she’s nearby, like there’s something she’s not telling me.
” Belatedly, he realizes how that might sound and hastens to add, “It’s not that she’s trans.
She told us all when she moved in, and it’s not a big deal.
This has nothing to do with that. Máni has been embodied as a woman before, he understands what it is to have a divide between your body and your mind.
He was a little surprised when he woke up in me and realized we were Black.
It’s not who she is, it’s how she is that makes me feel like she’s an alchemist.”
“Watch her for proof,” says Chang’e, serenely. “When you know for sure, come to us, and we’ll listen. We’ll find a way to stop whatever it is she’s intending to do to the people of this city, and we’ll keep our pantheon from harm.”
“Thank you,” says David, shoulders drooping slightly.