Chapter 17 #4
The gashes are as deep as they seemed from a distance, slicing through muscle and fat like they offered no resistance.
Somehow, the creature managed to miss the brachial artery, although it’s entirely possible that was on purpose: this is an alchemical creation, after all.
It may know enough about human anatomy to play with its food, keeping Lilianne alive as long as possible for the sake of having more time to enjoy toying with her.
Smita peels off her sopping-wet lab coat, then looks to the eti?inen.
Almost primly, she grabs the cuff of one sleeve and stretches it out as far as it will go.
“Can you cut this off at the shoulder?” she asks. “I don’t have any scissors with me.”
The eti?inen blinks at her. “You want me to help you?”
“If she dies while I’m on this desk with her, I’ll do everything in my power to keep her from falling into the water where you can get her, and if you could take her away from me, you would have done it already,” says Smita calmly.
“If you cut the sleeve off like I’m asking, I can bandage her shoulder, and she’ll stay alive.
That means you get another chance at hunting her down. ”
“You think like an alchemist,” says the eti?inen, and there’s a note of delight in its voice that wasn’t there before. It extends its hand, wiggling its fingers with their surplus of joints, then slashes its claws down and through the sleeve.
The sleeve comes off in Smita’s hand. She looks at it, nods, and says, “Thank you. This will do nicely.”
She turns her attention back to Lilianne, wrapping the cut-off sleeve around her shoulder and tying it tight.
Lilianne screams as soon as the fabric tightens, grinding against the damage that’s been done to her shoulder. Her eyes snap open, and she struggles to sit upright, Smita pushing enough to help her, then grabbing her arm to keep her from toppling off the edge.
“Hey, Lily,” she says, trying to sound soothing. “Hey, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re—well, you’re not okay, you’ve been ripped open and you’ve lost a whole lot of blood, but you’re as close to okay as you’re going to get until someone comes down here to get us out.”
“No one’s coming,” moans Lilianne. “No one can find this place.”
“We have at least two people who don’t need to find it, because they’ve been here before, plenty,” says Smita.
“I’m pretty sure my roommates have been here before.
I wasn’t with them, because they try not to lead me into life-threatening situations if there’s any other choice.
They still think of me as being innocent and easily frightened.
I don’t blame them much. That’s exactly what I was, for the longest time you can imagine.
They’ll be here. They’ll come. Whenever I’m in danger, they come. ”
Lilianne blinks at her, then slumps against her, not making any real effort to stay upright.
“I screwed it all up,” she says, dolefully.
“I didn’t find the lost lab. I found the people who’d already found the lost lab, and I let you think I was stupid, just babbling on at you about things you already knew. ”
“I never thought you were stupid, Lily. And I wasn’t being fair.
I was letting you think all this was new to me, because, well.
We’ve had some issues with alchemists in my household.
They’re not always very nice people.” She gestures to the eti?inen, the one in the water and the one out of the water.
“They make things that aren’t very nice either.
It can be a little terrifying sometimes, and we don’t enjoy it.
So I didn’t let on that I knew most of what you were saying.
And I did learn new things. I learned about you. ”
“Me?”
“You. All the alchemy in the world couldn’t have prepared me for you.
It’s just words and recipes. You’re a person, and you’re lovely.
Fun and funny and so passionate about the things you care about!
Even if those things are alchemical. And you weren’t wrong about this place. There’s a lot you can learn here.”
“If I die here, I guess I’ll learn what it’s like to be eaten by an eti?inen,” says Lilianne.
“Don’t even think like that,” says Smita firmly. “You’re not going to die here.”
“That’s what you think.”
Footsteps in the distance, hard soles against tile floors. Not the sound of someone who’s removed waterlogged shoes after a slog through the sewer; not the sound of another eti?inen, either. Smita brightens, sitting up straighter.
“You’re not going to die here,” she repeats, more firmly. Then she raises her voice and calls, “This way. I’m over here, this way!”
The sound of footsteps becomes the sound of running, and a moment later, two figures swing around the corner of the hall. Erin, strawberry hair skinned back into a ponytail, and Artemis, holding a moon-dark bow with an arrow already notched, the whole thing glittering faintly in her hands.
Smita smiles. “Took you long enough,” she says.
The two eti?inen hiss, and the one on the dry side of the lab whirls, lunging for the pair.
Artemis releases her arrow, which flies straight and clean to embed itself in the eti?inen’s throat, sticking out like an exclamation point.
The eti?inen makes a choked gurgling sound, then falls sideways, landing in the water with a splash.
A dark cloud begins to spread out from the point of impact, staining the water black as pitch.
Smita turns to the remaining eti?inen. “Run,” she suggests politely. “Run, and don’t look back. You helped me, so I can try to keep them from chasing, but you have to run, or they’ll kill you where you stand.”
The eti?inen blinks at her. Its eyelids move side to side, not up and down, and Smita spares half a second’s thought for the reasons behind that: what could have encouraged the alchemists to design their creation in such a way? Then it shakes its head.
“You have no reason to be kind or trust me,” it says. “I’ve had a taste of your companion. I’ll take another, if I can. This is a promise.”
“You won’t have the opportunity,” says Smita. Erin and Artemis are moving toward the edge of the water, Erin pausing to kick the fallen eti?inen’s hip and confirm to her satisfaction that it’s dead.
“Go,” says Smita. The eti?inen looks unsure.
“You can attack Lilianne later, if you have the chance, and we’ll stop you, and you’ll die.
Or you can run, and live peacefully here in this lab for as long as you’re able.
You won’t leave, I’m sure of that. The world outside won’t be able to sustain you. ”
“Yes, run,” calls Artemis, drawing her bow again.
The eti?inen hisses, then ducks under the water, vanishing without a ripple. Smita sags.
“Shouldn’t have done that,” says Lilianne. She’s almost slurring her words, exhaustion and blood loss catching up with her and stealing the hard edges from her already-sugared diction. “Can’t trust them. Not the life we make in labs.”
Erin laughs, a hard, bitter little laugh, and steps into the water. “You should listen to your new friend, Smita. She’s saying all the right things.”
“Quiet, you,” says Smita. “What took you so long?”
“It took me a while to realize that you were actually gone-gone, not just hung up at the store. After that, I had to follow you all the way to the storm drain, find the tetractys, and realize where you must have gone. That’s when I called Artemis.
The people who built this lab were sneaky assholes, and I didn’t trust them not to have activated some sort of security precautions before they left. I wanted backup.”
The thought of Erin, terrifying Erin, feeling the need for backup is almost as frightening as the situation. Smita shudders, watching Erin wade toward them. If the eti?inen is just lurking for another attack, this is when it will come.
But nothing happens. Erin reaches the desk and holds her hands out for Smita to take, easing her down into the water.
“That was really stupid of you, just so you know,” she says.
“You shouldn’t go running off with strange alchemists, no matter what the circumstances.
You could have been seriously hurt!” She pauses. “You weren’t seriously hurt, were you?”
“I’m not hurt, just really, really cold,” says Smita. “I think I may have the beginnings of hypothermia.”
“Dumbass,” says Erin fondly. She looks past Smita to Lilianne, expression hardening. “I remember her from campus earlier. She was awfully interested in you before. Is it just because she was trying to lure you off somewhere alone?”
“No. We ran into each other when I was going out to get milk after dinner. She’s hurt, Erin. Can you be chill until we know she’s not going to bleed to death?”
Artemis is still pacing at the top of the stairs, arrow notched and aimed at the water. If anything moves, she’s ready to shoot it. Erin glances back over her shoulder at the Lunar.
“Afraid to get your feet wet?” she asks, snidely.
“Afraid of whatever nightmares the alchemists may have decided to pour into the pool,” says Artemis.
“You’re a goddess of healing, aren’t you?”
“A patron,” Artemis corrects. She stops pacing. “I can’t actually heal people by laying on hands, but I can understand what’s wrong with somebody if I get close enough to have a good look. I am not close enough, and I’m not getting in the water if I have any way to avoid it.”
“Wimp.” Erin sounds almost fond. She turns back to Lilianne, huddled on the desk. “Hey. Alchemist. Come over here.”
“No,” mumbles Lilianne. “You’re a scary lady.”
The blood loss is clearly getting to her. She’s barely holding herself upright without Smita there to lean on. Smita shoots Erin a half-panicked look. Erin, for her part, only sighs.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m definitely a scary lady.
I’ve worked hard to cultivate my reputation as absolutely terrifying, and I don’t like you.
You lured my friend into a dangerous place, underground, and I found her huddling in a situation straight out of a horror movie.
So I very much want to be scary at you. But Smita wants us to help you, and that means I need you to come down from that desk.
She’s already cold. I want to get her out of this water as fast as I can, before something happens and she goes down. I can’t carry you both out of here.”
“Please, Lily,” pleads Smita.
Lilianne slowly uncurls from her huddle, scooting down the desk until her feet are dangling in the water.
Some of the blood that’s managed to soak into her jeans spreads out around her ankles in an expanding ring of red, and Smita tenses, waiting for the surviving eti?inen to appear and yank her under.
Nothing happens. Erin reaches out, grasping the sides of Lilianne’s chest, and lifts her down into the water as gently as she can.
Lilianne grunts, the motion probably putting pressure on her injured shoulder, but she doesn’t struggle or try to pull away, and under the circumstances, that’s the best Smita can hope for.
Together, the three of them wade to the stairs, where Artemis is waiting to help them back up onto dry land.
She looks at Lilianne’s injured shoulder and wrinkles her nose in clear disgust, then looks around the lab.
“They must have a first aid kit in here somewhere,” she says, and it’s so ordinary, so predictable a reaction to the situation around them that all Smita can do is laugh until she cries.
She keeps crying when the laughter stops. In the moment, it feels like the right thing to do.