Chapter 16 #2
Smita looks around the abandoned kitchen, no longer making any effort to disguise her curiosity, and shudders.
Lilianne may or may not know the secret to the Roman concrete, but Smita does.
She’s known it since Artemis and Kelpie came for dinner a month or so after the eclipse, when the two Lunars were still adjusting to their freedom and their new partnership, the ancient goddess of the hunt in the stolen body of a rich man’s daughter—no partnership theirs, despite the way it usually works for Lunars, thanks to the actions of her host’s father and one Mr. James Reed—and an orange-skinned lab experiment still getting used to the way the world worked.
They’re an odd pair, but they’re never more than a shout away from one another, keeping close even when they don’t realize what they’re doing.
It was Kelpie who told her, in a slow, shaking voice, that the alchemists had rediscovered Roman concrete, and that the miracle substance was made possible by infusing it with the blood of minor Lunars, picked off from around the edges of their respective pantheons.
Artemis had made a terrible choking noise when Kelpie said that, and actually left the table for several minutes to calm herself, pacing along the fence line with her head hanging low and her hands clenched into fists.
Artemis herself never voluntarily worked for the alchemists.
But it was her careless interaction with her host that had seen them both delivered into the hands of James Reed, giving him the opportunity to learn and document more than he had any business knowing about the Lunar psyche, the ways the embodied divine interacted with their mortal dwelling places.
With that knowledge, he’d been able to write the studies all the alchemists after him had used to exploit the Lunars.
Without her, they would never have figured out that godsblood was the missing component of the fabled concrete.
They would never have started forcing their own Lunar incarnations.
Dozens of minor Moon gods had died because Artemis was careless with her incarnation.
She had received her Hind, the other half of her personification, missing for centuries, for the same reason.
It was a hard contradiction for anyone to live with.
They’re walking in the halls of the dead.
It’s not quite a haunted house, not quite a tomb, but something worse, something that belongs in one of the horror movies that Kim and Tim sometimes watch in the living room, two bodies huddled under one blanket, screaming and jumping when the monsters show their faces.
Smita doesn’t like those movies, doesn’t need those movies; if she wants to be terrified, all she needs to do is close her eyes and remember the dozens of times she’s died at Erin’s hand, the knife sliding between her ribs, the flames from the Hand of Glory licking at her flesh.
It’s hard to be a normal person surrounded by the fruits of misapplied alchemy.
Maybe that’s why she followed Lilianne, why she’s here now, in wet clothes with no cellphone service, what feels like miles below the surface of the city; she’s the only normal human in her usual social circle, the only person not built in a lab, and sometimes she wants to step away and pretend, for even a few minutes, that normalcy is still possible.
Not that this is normal. But Lilianne is an aspiring alchemist, and that means keeping an eye on her is the normal thing to do.
Smita craves normalcy. Some days she mourns the life she thought she was going to live, the one with a solid job and a good marriage and two or three adopted, beloved children running around the big yard of her suburban house, filled with genetically modified grasses that don’t grow above a certain height and thus never need to be mowed down.
It’s a fairy-tale postcard of a possible future that would never have come to pass even if her life hadn’t been so thoroughly derailed.
She shivers and finally moves toward the door, passing through it to the empty halls beyond.
Lilianne has managed to find the lights here as well: the hallway, which is plain, undecorated concrete, the walls not even painted, the floor not softened by even the most industrial of carpets, is lit by a soft white light from above, unflickering and static.
It adds an odd unreality to the place, which is unreal enough to begin with.
Doors lead off the corridor on both sides, spaced about fifteen feet apart, as far as Smita can see.
She doesn’t know where Lilianne has gone.
She has no way of following. She looks back over her shoulder at the kitchen.
She could go back to the swamp, try to wade her way back to the ladder—their journey here was direct, if long, and there are no turns to take or miss.
But the water was almost cold enough to kill her the first time, and she’s already half-frozen.
If she tries to wade back to the ladder, she’ll die.
She’s died before. But those times, it had been at Erin’s hand, and Roger and Dodger had known to look when they irresponsibly rewound time and tried for a better ending.
While she’s certain Erin will eventually find her body, will notice the disruption created by her absence, she’s not nearly as certain that the twins would be willing to go through the complexity and strain of a new time loop just to bring her back.
(And one thing she’s learned from her repeated deaths, even if they were undone by almost-human hands: dead is still dead.
She’s died every time she was killed, and it never got more pleasant.
This isn’t a video game where there are no consequences for falling off a cliff or missing a button press.
This is real life, and it never lets you go without making you pay for it.)
Smita stops where she is, cups her hands around her mouth, and calls, “Lily? You here?”
There’s a clatter from somewhere up ahead, sudden enough that for a moment it feels like her heart has stopped beating. Smita freezes, not even shivering, and waits to see what she’s just called down on herself.
The door swings open, and Lilianne’s head appears around the edge, the other woman beaming as brightly as a kid on Christmas morning. “There you are!” she virtually chirps. “I figured you’d follow soon enough. Come on, I found one of the locker rooms.”
“They have locker rooms?” asks Smita, and hurries down the hall to slip into the room.
As promised, it’s a locker room, even if it looks more like the sort of thing you’d find at a fancy spa than in a sports complex or gymnasium.
The lockers are made of red cedar slats, all of them polished until splinters become an unthinkable horror for a different age.
Benches of the same wood stand a few feet away, bolted to the floor.
There are even showers, and a long row of sinks with accompanying mirrors and power outlets, perfect for personal grooming.
Lilianne is holding a fluffy white towel in one arm, which she thrusts at Smita.
“You need to get dry,” she says. “You’re short enough that you were a lot more submerged than I was, and I don’t like what that means for your core temperature.
Most of the lockers have robes in them if you want to take a shower. ”
She sounds so earnest that Smita almost laughs in her face, even as she takes the towel and wraps it around herself, shivering again now that warmth has become a possibility rather than a distant dream.
“I don’t really want to be naked and wet in the creepy abandoned underground lab,” she says.
“So you’ll just be wet, then?” Lilianne shrugs.
“Suit yourself. I was going to suggest that you get clean and warm and put a robe on, and then we can go looking for the laundry facilities. I won’t stay in here while you shower.
There’s a lab next door. It’s abandoned for the moment, but I can explore it until you’re ready for me to come back.
I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, but I also don’t want you to get hypothermia. ”
Smita glances over her shoulder at the shower stalls, curtained off and more tempting than words can easily express. “Are you sure the water works?”
“Yes, and the temperature is adjustable. Whatever systems they set up down here, they’re self-contained and still operational.
There’s shampoo and conditioner in the lockers if you need to wash your hair, and soap already in the stalls.
” Lilianne looks at her, earnest and pleading.
“Please just … get warm? And out of those wet clothes? I’ll see if I can find something else for you to wear if the robe isn’t enough to make you comfortable, but anything would be better than running around in wet denim. ”
“You’re running around in wet denim.”
“I’m not shivering the way you are. And I’m going to look for sweatpants whether you shower or not. I just need to explore more than I need to boil myself.”
Smita doesn’t want to be the kind of person who needs to stop for a shower in the middle of a dangerous adventure.
She wants to be the kind of person who barrels merrily onward, a wrecking ball striking the problem with a resounding ferocity.
She takes another look around the locker room, sags, and sighs.
“I’ll shower,” she says.
“Thank you,” responds Lilianne, with a fervor that makes Smita realize her lips must be as blue as a child’s after jumping into a lake. “I won’t go more than two rooms away, and I won’t come back in unless it’s to put dry clothes on the bench, promise.”
“All right,” says Smita. “Thank you. I’ll be right out.”
Lilianne puts the towel down on the nearest bench, flashing her an awkward smile, and moves toward the nearest curtained-off shower stall.