Chapter 33
Courage
“Judy, can you hear me?” Artemis rushes to the other Lunar, dropping her bow on the fleshy floor.
Judy makes a terrible, guttural sound deep in her throat, and Artemis knows the screaming will come next: if she’s recovered enough to react, she must be in pain.
“Drop down. Descend, and let Chang’e come forth. ”
Judy can’t blink, but her eyes roll back in her head as a peach-colored glitter begins to consume the air around her, filling it with a divine brightness.
She sags, then straightens, turning her face to Artemis.
Her eyes, now peachy-gold, roll back into their normal position, and she looks at Artemis, gaze clear and steady.
“Can you finish your peach tree?”
“Why?” croaks Chang’e, the word rendered odd by her lack of lips.
“The peaches heal. They restore. They grant us immortality, for a time. Judy needs one now, or she’s going to die of the shock as soon as you let her come back to the surface.
This version of you will die, and every other version of you will have to contend with the Doctrine of Ethos realizing that you couldn’t save the woman he loved. Please.”
Chang’e nods. “Good enough,” she says, and lays a skinless palm flat against the trunk of the half-grown tree. It shudders and straightens, growing rapidly toward maturity. Its limbs put out branches, which put out flowers that swell and ripen into fruit.
Chang’e plucks the ripest peach within reach and brings it to her mouth, biting delicately down. With each nibble, a bit more of Judy’s skin regrows, thin as rice paper and equally as fragile, and Chang’e continues to bite and swallow, consuming the peach a fragment at a time.
Artemis grabs another of the peaches and whirls, dropping to her knees beside Kelpie.
She presses the peach to Kelpie’s mouth with one hand and recovers her knife with the other, cutting the flesh, which is no longer actively growing, away.
Kelpie takes a bite of the peach, automatically, and chews, swallowing before she opens her eyes.
When she does, she squeaks and scrambles to her hooves, unsteady as she rarely is. “Asphodel!” she gasps. “She’s going to— She can— Where is she?”
“Gone,” says Artemis grimly. “Are you all right?”
“My head hurts, and it feels like there’s a hollow where something’s meant to be, but I think I’m okay,” says Kelpie. “Where did she go?”
“The Impossible City, I assume,” says Artemis. She moves back to Chang’e and the two human women, kneeling to begin cutting their feet free of the floor. Smita and Lilianne remain sprawled insensate on the floor. “It’s a big place. I don’t know how much damage she can do there.”
“So let’s not find out,” says Kelpie.
Chang’e’s skin is mostly back where it belongs, if still thin and half-translucent.
It looks less like rice paper and more like she’s stitched an entire human skin out of peach-blossom petals, impossibly delicate, impossibly easy to destroy.
She takes another dainty bite of peach, then exhales, slowly.
“They were walking deeper into this mess of a maze when the walls attacked. They threw out strands of flesh and nothing could be done about it. Roger commanded them to stop; they disobeyed. Erin tried to weave between the ropes, and they continued to reach for her. In very little time, they were all caught, and then the floor split open and Asphodel emerged.” She sighs.
“What an unpleasant woman. We were better served when she was dead.”
“None of us authorized her coming back,” says Artemis.
“But she did.” Chang’e looks at her. “I am not safe here. Neither are you.” The glitter fades out of the air around her, and Judy staggers. The transition is rarely so clear.
“We need to get the others down,” says Artemis, and turns away from her. This isn’t the time for hysterics, and Judy just had her skin stolen and regrown. She’s earned a few.
If Judy wants to break down as badly as Artemis suspects she does, she doesn’t allow herself the pleasure.
Instead, she brushes past Artemis, heading for the wall, where she leans up and begins yanking on the sheets of skin holding Roger in place.
Her own skin splits with every yank, too fragile for this sort of treatment.
Artemis is there a moment later, cutting him free, and Judy catches him before he can fall.
He sags against her, but there’s tension in him: he’s awake, just oddly limp, wrung-out and weakened.
“Judy?” he asks. “Where are we? Where’s my sister?”
“We’re still in the lab. And she’s right behind you. Artemis is helping her down,” says Judy. “It’s all right, Roger. We’re all here.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t think we are.”
Artemis cuts the others down. Erin falls without a sound. Artemis is able to catch Dodger, if only barely, and lets go of the gawky redhead when she pushes her away, allowing Dodger to huddle against the wall.
All of them look terribly traumatized, like they’ve just been subjected to something beyond imagining. Lilianne and Smita are still unconscious. Erin lifts Smita, while Judy and Artemis together hoist Lilianne, holding her under the arms.
“We have to get out of here,” says Erin, looking around them. The flesh on the walls is starting to sag, softening and dripping down like candle wax. “I don’t like the way this looks.”
“Neither do I,” says Artemis. “Come on.”
She leads them back the way they came, moving as fast as she can while not outpacing the others.
Kelpie is still walking unsteadily, like she doesn’t quite understand her own legs, while Erin is burdened with Smita.
Judy is doing an admirable job of keeping up with Artemis despite her strained and splitting skin, although part of that may be being pulled along by their shared custody of Lilianne.
Nothing rises up to stop them as they flee the fleshy chambers for the stairwell. There, they’re faced with a new horror: cracks are forming in the walls, spreading rapidly.
“Do we go up?” demands Judy.
“We’ll never make it,” says Kelpie.
“We go down,” says Artemis, and tries to sound like she means it. Dodger still hasn’t spoken; Roger is moving with quick efficiency, but he seems closed down, sucked into himself like he’s barely aware of his surroundings. No one argues with her, and so, together, they descend.
The cracks get wider as they go deeper, and Kelpie almost falls several times, barely catching herself on the rail.
Artemis is so busy focusing on her that she almost drops Lilianne.
Then they’re on the lowest floor, and she turns to Kelpie.
“We need to get out of here,” she says. “Take us to the back door.”
“What back door?”
“The one Smita and Lilianne used to get in here in the first place.”
“The little Lunar doesn’t know the way,” says a sibilant voice from the shadows.
Artemis jerks around, and watches as the eti?inen slips out of the shadows.
It’s wearing Dodger’s face, red-and-white hair a shock against the gray walls of the lab.
“I remember her from when she served here. She was never meant to go outside. They didn’t tell her how. ”
“We have to get out of here,” says Artemis.
“Yes,” says the eti?inen, unblinking as a snake as it stares at their little cluster. “You have to go, or else you’ll die here.”
“Which way?” demands Artemis.
“Why do I care if you die here?” counters the eti?inen.
“I can’t leave this lab or I’d already be free.
I’m going to die. No matter what becomes of you, I’m going to die.
But her…” It turns slowly to look at Smita, hanging limp in Erin’s arms. “She helped me before. She had no cause to, but she helped me all the same. For her, I’ll show you the way out. ”
“Thank y—” begins Artemis.
“But you, bow-woman, Lunar who gives orders, you will stay behind, and you will fight me.” The eti?inen looks perfectly content with this declaration. “The others may go, but you will have to earn your survival. That is my price for the way out.”
“We don’t have time to bargain,” says Artemis. “Fine. Show us the way, and I’ll fight you.”
“Fool,” says the eti?inen smugly, and moves to the front of their group. It moves quickly after that, forcing them to follow as fast as they can. In not much time, it leads them to the cafeteria, gesturing toward the door that they’ve been looking for. “Your exit,” it says.
“Thank you,” says Artemis. She waves the others through, releasing her half of Lilianne’s weight to Judy, and remains at the rear until they’re all through.
She sees Kelpie turn like she’s going to rush back to the door on her unsteady legs, then moves as if she’s going to follow them, grasping the edge of the door.
The eti?inen’s clawed hand closes around her bicep. “Your exit, my price,” it says, mouth suddenly very full of teeth.
Artemis turns back to face it. “Very well,” she says, and slams the door shut as she turns to face her bargained battle.
The sewer is dark as midnight, and the water is so cold it’s like a slap.
Smita and Lilianne both jerk upright as they’re pulled into it.
Behind them, Roger and Judy are pulling Kelpie away from the closed door in the wall.
She’s scrabbling at it, frantic, trying to pry it open even as they pull her toward the water.
“Kelpie, no,” says Judy. “She made her bargain. She’s Artemis. She’ll be fine.”
She doesn’t sound like she believes it, but under the circumstances, it’s not like she could say anything else.
Kelpie, crying, allows herself to be tugged into the water, and they begin to wade through the sewers, letting Lilianne lead the way. Smita moves to walk beside her, and they all stay close together, not talking as they wade toward safety. After everything that’s just happened, silence feels safer.
They’re halfway to the ladder when a wave of water rushes up from behind them, driving them briefly forward.
Judy loses her footing, going under with a splash, and flails until hands find her arms. She opens her eyes to find Roger and Dodger holding her out of the water, and blinks as she realizes she can see them.
The wave has been followed by light, thin and pale, but light. She looks up.
The ceiling above them—the ceiling that is also the street—is riddled with cracks, some wide enough to let considerable shafts of light through. She gasps, then says the only word she can think of: “Run!”
For good measure, she repeats it in Italian, Mandarin, and German—all languages she’s heard Roger and Erin use, if not the others—before she turns and starts running as fast as the thigh-high water will allow.
Two more waves follow, but all of them hurry toward the ladder as fast as they can go, and they manage to reach it before the street begins to fall inward, collapsing in slow motion.
A wave of water catches them when they’re halfway up the ladder, and Kelpie is swept loose, carried down the length of the sewer by the rush.
Judy watches helplessly, but there’s nothing she can do; all she’d do by following the other Lunar into the water is drown with her.
In the end, they all climb out of the sewer, two less than they were when they descended, and into chaos.
The nearby street has collapsed in on itself, creating a giant broken hole where a large square of downtown Berkeley should be.
Emergency vehicles are already swarming, authorities securing the edge of the hall.
Somehow, no one takes notice of them climbing free, and why should they?
They can’t have caused this disaster, which is too big and too dramatic to have been anything but a massive infrastructure failure.
Shivering and soaked, they limp back to the spot where they left the van, no one saying a word as they pile inside. There’s nothing to be said. Even the linguists have been struck silent, a silence which grows thicker and heavier as Erin drives them toward home.
When they finally turn down the correct street, for a moment none of them can make sense of what they’re seeing—or what they aren’t seeing.
The house is gone. Where it should be is a much smaller structure, painted a peeling eggshell color.
David, Tim, and Kim are sitting on the porch, the twins huddled together, David looking deeply perplexed—and a little uneasy, as he’s suddenly a visibly Black man with two white teens, in a very predominantly white neighborhood where some of the neighbors have no idea how to mind their own business.
It’s never been a concern here before, not with the house effectively invisible to anyone uninvited. But now, he has to be aware.
Erin parks and gets out of the van, eyes wide as she approaches the gate. The others follow, more slowly, Roger and Dodger seeming to hold each other up while Judy trails along behind them, blood dripping from her many wounds, remaining equidistant between the pair and Smita and Lilianne.
“What happened?” asks Erin.
“Can’t you tell?” asks Dodger, speaking for the first time since Asphodel. She steps away from Roger, who staggers but stays standing. “She took back what she gave us. Every bit of it. She drained us dry, like a vampire or something, and she left us to deal with what she didn’t need.”
“I don’t understand,” says Judy.
“Of course you don’t,” says Dodger. “You’re a natural Lunar, and I’m just a woman alone in her own head for the first time in her damn life.”
“Asphodel wrote the formula every alchemist has used to construct their cuckoos,” says Roger, voice gone dull and dead. “She didn’t make us, but she told other people how to do it. She laid the groundwork. And when she finally woke up, she took it all away. She’s won. It’s over.”
Silence falls then, all of them looking at one another, none of them quite certain what to do.
Asphodel walks along the rainbow-ringed corridor of Kelpie’s slice of the everything, moving toward the window into what she’s wanted ever since she knew it was a thing that could be desired.
“Ah,” she says, and swings the window open wide. “The Impossible City.”