Tidal Creatures

Lacus Spei

TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017. THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

Chang’e is still staring at the doorway when two women appear, one strawberry blonde with a peaches-and-cream complexion that looks like it would be personally offended by the suggestion that it might either freckle or tan, the other black-haired and brown-skinned, expression implying that she would rather be walking into a dentist’s office in Hell than this simple residential kitchen. Behind them, Chang’e hears the door swing shut and then open again, more sedately this time. Footsteps ascend the stairs, the two women in the doorway blocking whoever they belong to from view.

The blonde folds her arms as she looks at the group, slowly taking their measure. The black-haired woman looks less self-assured. She’s trying not to seem concerned, but she’s clearly worried about being in the house, surrounded by people she has to know aren’t entirely human. All three Lunars are stepped up, and the air around them sparkles like it’s been filled with floating glitter. Roger and Dodger are less visibly inhuman, but their calm acceptance of the shimmer in the air has to mark them in some way as outside the norm.

Roger lifts his chin toward the new arrival. “Erin. ’S’up?”

“I feel like I should be the one asking you that, since you’re apparently hosting a kitchen party without having warned your housemates.” The blonde continues to eye the group, somewhat dubiously. “They’re sparkly. Elementals or Lunars?”

“Lunars,” says Roger. “Erin, meet Chang’e, Artemis, and I’m sorry, I forgot your name.”

“Máni.”

“Right, Máni. Two of the big three, and one of the Scandinavians, if I’m not mistaken.” Roger phrases that like he could be mistaken, when everyone in the room knows he physically can’t be.

Or at least Chang’e assumes he can’t be mistaken. She doesn’t actually know what the Doctrine is capable of, especially not now that she knows it’s been divided between two bodies, Math distinct from Language and possessed of its own motivations and desires. This is all far more complicated than she was expecting, and she doesn’t like it. Judy was right to do her best to stay away from the incarnate Doctrine, and all Chang’e can do now is wish her mortal aspect had been a little better at playing keep-away.

“Moon gods, fascinating,” says Erin. She gestures to the woman next to her. “This is Isabella.”

“Oh, the head of Smita’s little coven,” says Dodger. “She’s told us about you.”

Isabella lifts her chin, expression composed and stubborn. “I’m an hechicera,” she says, almost like a challenge.

“I’m a mathematician,” says Dodger. Roger rolls his eyes and drinks more coffee. She slants him a sideways look. “What? I thought we were making declarative statements. She’s an hechicera, I’m a mathematician, we’ve presumably both trained and studied for our positions, why shouldn’t they be on the same level?”

“Because she just confessed to being a sorceress, and you’re being flippant.”

“I’m not being flippant!”

Isabella frowns, deeper with every second that passes. She looks to Erin. “These are the housemates you wanted me to meet?” she asks.

“Some of them, yeah,” says Erin. She puts her index fingers in her mouth and whistles shrilly, the sound incredibly loud in the enclosed space. Chang’e winces as she, along with the others, turns to focus fully on Erin, who drops her hands.

“Great, thank you,” she says, sharply. “Isabella, these are Roger and Dodger, my housemates, who own the place. They’re shitty roommates, decent landlords, and the incarnate Doctrine of Ethos.”

“Hello,” says Roger, lifting his coffee in greeting.

“Your names rhyme,” says Isabella, sounding awe-struck.

“Alchemists have taken the concept of ‘sympathetic magic’ and twisted it until it started to scream for mercy,” says Dodger. “The people who made us should never have been allowed near children. I sometimes think the universe decided we were the ones who were going to manifest because we had to grow up with the worst names. You want mean, drop a girl named ‘Dodger’ on an elementary school playground with an endless supply of dodgeball courts and a whole bunch of pre-teen assholes who believe in nominative determinism.”

“You’re an hechicera?” asks Roger. “How is that?”

“Like any other magical profession in the modern day: doesn’t bring in much money, but I get to set my own hours and the people who come looking for my services really, really need me to help them,” says Isabella, sounding a little less awed, a little more matter-of-fact. “I can’t do as much as I’d like. Being an hechicera doesn’t automatically give me a deep connection to the universe. I can nudge it along, but I can’t work large-scale change.”

“No earthquakes for her,” says Dodger, and sips her coffee.

“No earthquakes for anyone,” says Chang’e sternly. “Shaking the world to pieces does no one any good.”

“Sometimes it makes things clearer,” says Roger. “All right, Erin, I know why the kitchen’s full of moon gods, but why did you bring us a sorceress? Is she hiding from the alchemists?”

“Only in the sense that everyone with sense is hiding from the alchemists, but that’s not why she’s here. She found a runaway cuckoo. The most minor one I’ve seen so far—they’re apparently using Asphodel’s remaining material for anything these days. And I figured if she’s going to be dragging alchemical constructs to her coven meetings, it was probably time we sat down and had a serious talk with her about those little chaos pits she’s been digging with her coven.”

“Chaos pits?” asks Artemis blankly.

“She’s an hechicera steering a coven of people with about as much magical skill as they have sense, which is to say, most of them don’t have much to speak of, but they have enough to chant in tandem and try to force their will on the world,” says Erin. “They’ve been using brute-force elementalism to gouge holes in the surface of reality, and they don’t always remember to scoop all the elements they’ve called back out of the hole when they’re finished. Which means it crusts over and curdles, and becomes a nasty little chaos pit, just waiting for someone to trip and fall into it. They’re not big enough to do a lot of damage, but they can really ruin someone’s day.”

Isabella looks horrified. “I thought you were kidding before! None of our workings were intended to do anything like that,” she says.

“When you grow a carrot, you’ve grown something delicious and nourishing, and that’s great, but then when you pull it up to eat it, you leave a hole,” says Erin. “Did you intend to grow a hole? No, you intended to grow a carrot. The hole was a natural consequence of the carrot. Does that make you a bad person for making a hole? No. Does it fill your lawn with burrowing crayfish taking advantage of the situation if you don’t make sure to put dirt back in your holes when you’re done harvesting your carrots? Possibly. Very, very possibly.”

“That metaphor was a little tortured,” says Roger.

Erin shrugs. “Never said I was good with words, now, did I.”

Dodger cranes her neck, looking past Erin and Isabella. “So where’s the cuckoo?”

“She went upstairs with Smita,” says Erin. “Probably bothering one of the trouble teens to try and calm her down. She was raised by the alchemists who made her, and apparently she somehow thought she was a real girl until a day or so ago, when there was some sort of incident in their lab. Now she’s here, she’s all stressed out and spun up, she doesn’t really understand anything that’s going on, and she knows who the two of you are. They’ve told her stories about you. So I’m pretty sure the idea of actually meeting you has her terrified, and Smita wants to get her to chill out before she does the scary thing.”

“We’re not scary,” says Roger. Dodger gives him a complicated look, some wordless exchange passing between them, and he sighs. “Okay. I guess if you were raised by alchemists who wanted you to think of us as the bogeymen under your bed, we’d be sort of scary. Or if you don’t like being around people who’re in active negotiations with the universe most of the time. Or— Dammit, Dodge, stop making sense.”

“Or if you don’t like telepaths,” says Erin, dryly. Catching the bewildered looks from Isabella and the various Lunars, she explains, “Because of the way they were made, these two don’t need to talk. They do it because they like the sound of their own voices, and because they’re the kind of asshole that thinks it’s funny to make the rest of us listen to them. They can’t read your mind, thankfully, or I’d have to kill them while they slept, but they can read each other’s minds. And that is just one of the many, many reasons Roger and I are no longer sleeping together.”

“The main one being that you were only sleeping with me in the first place because Barrow ordered you to, and you needed a reason to stay close enough to keep an eye on me,” says Roger without rancor.

Erin shrugs broadly. “We all do fucked-up shit when the alchemists get involved.”

“Which is why I’m here,” says Artemis, in the sort of tone used by kindergarten teachers trying to yank their class back onto the topic. “I’m not originally from this area. I transferred to Berkeley a month ago, because the alchemists around here have been all up in arms, enough so that people have noticed.”

“Before you say you didn’t notice,” says Dodger peevishly to Roger, “please remember that you once didn’t notice the kitchen was on fire for almost ten minutes, even though we were all yelling and trying to put it out. And then once you did, you just told it not to be on fire and it wasn’t.”

“Oh, yeah. I do remember that,” says Roger.

Dodger sighs, looking to Artemis. “Please, continue.”

“I…” Artemis glances to Isabella, clearly uncomfortable. Talking about Lunar matters in front of rogue alchemical constructs is one thing. Talking about them in front of an ordinary human woman is something else altogether. It’s clear that she doesn’t like it, but she pushes on, forcing herself to continue. “We know they figured out how many of us there were a few years ago, and started picking at our fringes. Minor Lunars began disappearing, especially the ones in areas where they didn’t have a large pantheon to turn to for protection. The moon doesn’t know whether you’re urban or rural when it speaks to you. The moon knows whether or not you’re in a position to listen. So some of us wind up pretty isolated, with no idea what’s going on anywhere else. They orbit solo, and the moon tells them what to do, and either they break or they find a pantheon to belong to. Things began getting bad a little while after most of the alchemists’ leadership died. We figure that cleared the board for some of the younger alchemists, the ones with big ideas who hadn’t been able to put them into play before.”

“Why hunt Lunars?” asks Roger. “No offense, but you’re pretty minor as manifestations go. You’ve always seemed more like a habit of reality than a necessity in the modern world. Most of you can’t even affect the world through your manifestations.”

“Most?” asks Chang’e.

“There are exceptions, but I’ve never heard of a Lunar strong enough to shift the tides or build a bridge of birds between the Earth and the Moon.” He slips so easily into stressing the words as the proper names they sometimes are. It would be impressive coming from almost anyone else.

Chang’e hears the echoes of all the things he isn’t saying around every word he speaks, and she’s not impressed.

“I don’t know why,” says Artemis.

“I think our guest upstairs gave us a large part of it,” says Erin. “The alchemists are trying to take the City before you two assholes get around to it.”

Dodger blinks.

Roger does the same.

For just a moment, the familial relationship between them is so obvious, it’s almost glaring. Chang’e glances away.

“What the hell do we want with the Impossible City?” asks Dodger. “That place is getting by just fine without us. It probably has some sort of civic government that doesn’t need a pair of untrained weirdoes bumbling in and trying to take over.”

“The alchemists want the City so badly, they probably can’t even conceive of someone who doesn’t,” says Erin.

Footsteps on the stairs herald the return of the people missing from this conversation. Erin steps to the side. Isabella does the same, and a moment later, Smita and an impossible girl appear in the doorway.

Smita is a familiar sight in this house, as comfortable and understood as the walls, if a stranger to the three newcomers. The girl beside her is not. The girl, whose skin is the color of the sky at sunrise, a bright and cheerful orange that has never appeared on anything mammalian, and was never meant to, is so clearly artificial that she barely needs her over-vivid complexion to tell them of her origins. She has the eyes of a prey animal, with horizontal pupils, their deep orange barely visible against the brighter orange of her irises. Instead of feet, she has hooves, and Chang’e shudders to think of how many small skeletal adjustments must have been needed to make that possible. Bipeds aren’t made to be redesigned casually or on the fly. The human body is enough of a ridiculous miracle without starting to screw around with the way it fits together.

Something sways behind the orange girl, and looking more carefully, Chang’e realizes it’s a tail, tufted at the end like a lion or a qilin. That’s what this girl looks like—Chang’e can’t quite think of her as a woman, not with her impossible anatomy and the wide-eyed expression on her face—she looks like an alchemist’s attempt to make a qilin in the material world. She’s close enough to human that she’ll be visible to non-alchemists, but they’ll see her as a normal person, someone who belongs in a normal setting. They won’t see her as she is.

She’s not the furthest thing from natural that Chang’e’s ever seen, even in this specific incarnation. But she’s pushing the limits in a way that bends the world around her, ever so slightly, making it seem thinner than it ought to be. Closer to the edges of the everything.

“This is Kelpie,” says Erin, in a very slightly protective tone. She even shifts her position, putting herself slightly between the newcomer and the rest of the room. Interesting, that she’d be that protective so quickly. Chang’e wonders if that’s normal for her, if she goes around finding lost puppies to adopt.

This is an odd puppy, if so.

“Hello, Kelpie,” says Roger. “That’s an interesting name. It comes from a Celtic water horse, a shapeshifter. Are you a shapeshifter?”

“If I’m supposed to be, I never figured out exactly how,” says Kelpie. Her voice is soft and sweet, a little high, with no discernable accent. The hardest accent to hear is always the one rooted where you’re standing, and so Chang’e supposes she grew up very near here. If she grew up at all. Maybe the alchemists made her at the age she is right now, setting her loose in an early, ill-defined adulthood. “I always wanted to be a shapeshifter, though. Just think hard and you won’t be a color that’s visible from space anymore.”

“Kelpies also killed people,” says Dodger. “Are you a killer?”

“I was a lab technician until yesterday,” says Kelpie. “I never killed anybody, but I guess the things I prepared for other people to work with probably included bits of dead people. Alchemy does, a lot. Are you the missing cuckoos?”

“We are,” says Roger.

“Oh. There are some people who really, really want to find you.”

“That’s not much of a surprise,” says Roger. “Fortunately, we’re not easy to find when we don’t want to be found.”

Chang’e snorts.

Roger looks toward her, eyebrows rising in mild curiosity. “Yes?” he asks.

“Sorry, it’s just that I—that Judy—ran right into you. You weren’t difficult to find at all.”

“Ah,” he says. “Well, most people wouldn’t have recognized me for anything out of the ordinary. Not even most alchemists, if they didn’t know me already—and I don’t know whether any of the alchemists who would actually recognize me are still alive.”

“Reed had pictures,” says Erin. “Reed had so many pictures. And class transcripts, medical records, basically all the bullshit an absent but arrogant parent might want to collect. He had that stuff on both of you, even. I doubt it was all destroyed when you burned his lab down.”

Dodger wrinkles her nose, looks down into her coffee cup, and says nothing. Chang’e is sure Roger is getting an earful none of the rest of them can hear. Telepathy is a two-edged sword.

“I learned all about the project that made you,” says Kelpie. “A lot of people worked for a long time to get Baker’s research to the point of having real-world applications. Even more people said it would never work, which is why Reed was considered sort of on the fringe right up until he succeeded.”

“Fringe alchemy; I never thought I’d see the day,” mutters Isabella.

Kelpie doesn’t respond to her. She’s still focused on Roger, trying to answer both the question he asked and the ones he hasn’t fully voiced. She’s responding to the harmonics. Chang’e wonders whether Roger even realizes he does that to people. He clearly knows he can give them direct commands. Does he also know he can push them toward the behaviors he wants with the things he doesn’t say? It must be exhausting, either way, never knowing whether people are responding to him or to the Doctrine.

No wonder he lives in a carnival-colored house with a handful of other personified concepts. They may be the only people he stands half a chance of having a normal conversation with, ever.

“When Reed succeeded, I hadn’t had my accident yet, which I guess means I didn’t exist yet, since I was made, and that’s going to take some time to work all the way into my thinking, but. When Reed succeeded, a lot of people got their minds really, really changed really fast. I guess it wasn’t his success that did it, because that happened a while ago. It was when he and Barrow started taking out the people they saw as competition, and then when most of the Alchemical Congress got blown up and no one knows how that happened, but everybody knows it was somehow Reed. He got a bomb into the Congress, and he killed almost all the masters on the continent. It shouldn’t have been possible, even for him.”

“James Reed always did like to achieve the impossible,” says Roger, quietly.

“Are you going running back to the alchemists who made you?” asks Erin.

Kelpie recoils. “The alchemist who made me—I think—was a woman named Margaret, and she’s dead now, because it seems that’s just what happens to alchemists. They die. They kill each other, and then they use the pieces for their rituals and experiments, and it’s awful. If Margaret were still alive, I might be willing to go back even knowing I’m not who I always thought I was. With her being dead, I’m not going anywhere near those people. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“None of us did,” says Artemis. “Natural manifestation or constructed, we didn’t ask for it. It just happened.”

“Yeah,” says Kelpie, sounding subdued.

“If you’re not going back, I can confirm that yes, James Reed and Leigh Barrow were responsible for the alkahest-and-azoth bomb that destroyed the bulk of the North American Alchemical Congress,” says Erin. “The old masters opposed Reed’s theories, and had stated their intent to fight him for ownership of the City, even after he’d done the work to incarnate the Doctrine, see it to maturity, and guide it to the borders. A preemptive strike seemed cleaner than taking war to the Impossible City.”

“Can you even take a war to the Impossible City?” asks Dodger, frowning sharply.

“You can take a war anywhere, if you’re willing to do the work,” says Erin. “They were going to fight him, he didn’t want them to, he stopped them before they got the chance. That was what Reed did. He never considered himself the villain of the piece. He was a hero in his own mind, Asphodel’s hero, and he was doing what he had to in order to achieve what he had been created to achieve. That was all. Everything he did was in her honor, all the way to the end.”

“He was a horrible man who did horrible things, even to other horrible people, and I’m glad he’s dead,” says Dodger primly.

Kelpie, meanwhile, is nodding gravely. “I guess it’s good to know he really did kill the old Congress. I wish someone would tell the alchemists, though. They spend a lot of time arguing over whether it was Reed or not, and I feel like some of them really, really want it not to have been, because they’re trying so hard to pretend they were always on his side, they always thought he had the right idea about things, they were his disciples. And not knowing for sure that he did it makes it easier for them to say he was a great man who only ever did great things.”

“People who want that badly to believe in his greatness are going to find a way to do it anyway,” says Erin.

“I guess. So, um. After the Congress was wiped out, while the new Congress was being called, a bunch of new projects launched, people scrambling for space and people and resources. And several projects got approved using the remains of Reed’s root stock, the material he used to make his cuckoos.”

“Meaning the preserved bits and pieces of Asphodel he used to tote around with him,” says Erin. “Because nothing says ‘love’ like keeping your dead mother in jars and using her genetic material to make new people.”

“I love how you can always put things in the most disgusting way possible,” says Dodger. “It makes me feel all warm and tingly inside, and not like an asshole’s favorite toy.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Dodger. You were never his favorite,” says Erin, and laughs, as high and bright as a mockingbird, while Dodger glares at her.

“Do you want me to finish or not?” asks Kelpie, somewhat peevishly, and Erin stops laughing.

“Sorry,” she says. “Please, tell us about the people who made you.”

“They were trying to modify and adapt Reed’s work, to make it less universally massive and prone to turning on its creators. They wanted controllable cuckoos. They’ve been trying all sorts of controls, including…” Kelpie pauses then, before she begins to laugh, borderline hysterically. Looking concerned, Smita moves to put a hand on her shoulder. Kelpie turns to look at her. “Controls like telling them they weren’t cuckoos at all! Like telling them they were lab assistants who’d been in accidents!” She keeps laughing, harder and harder, until the “borderline” wears off the “hysterically” and she starts to sob, slumping forward until her face is pressed against Smita’s chest, and she’s just crying.

Smita strokes her hair with one hand, comfort offered on instinct more than anything else, and looks at Roger, Dodger, and the Lunars with her jaw set in a hard line. “Are we quite done torturing this poor girl?” she asks, voice as hard as her expression. “Because I think what she needs is to go and lay down for a little while, not to stand here and keep answering questions about where she came from. And don’t try telling me it doesn’t count when she volunteers the information. I know what it’s like to have the pair of you looking at me, wanting answers. Even if you don’t ask the question, sometimes telling you what you need to know is the only thing a person can do.”

Roger looks faintly abashed. Dodger, however, only rolls her eyes.

“My kitchen,” she says, “is full of moon gods, at least one of whom has come to town hunting alchemists, because the alchemists have gotten so worked up about something that a bunch of cosmic space cases who mostly check out on what life on Earth is doing have noticed. We now know, for sure, that those same alchemists have continued working with Reed’s research and Asphodel’s genetic material, which, believe me, is not making me feel any less like some asshole’s science project. We’re not harassing the kid. We’re trying to figure out how bad the situation is.”

“And how close they are to claiming the City,” says Roger, rather more direly. “We don’t want the Impossible City. I don’t know much about the place, because I’m not supposed to. No one who exists in this world is supposed to know too much about that one. No one travels between them.”

“No one but the Moon,” says Erin, looking to Chang’e.

Feeling obscurely as if she’s just been pulled from audience to actor after a welcome chance to catch her breath, Chang’e nods. “Every night,” she says. “That’s why there are so many of us. Every night, we go into the everything—the passage between this world and the outskirts of the Impossible City—and we take one more step up from our normal manifestation. We step into the sky, and we shine down on the City as we cross from one side to the other.”

“That shouldn’t need more than, what, thirty of you?” asks Roger.

“There are dozens of us shining at any given time,” says Chang’e. “Moon gods from all around the world, coming together until we have the mass and power to form a proper Moon.”

“A composite moon,” says Dodger. “Fascinating.”

“So you have nightly access to the City?” asks Roger, looking at the Lunars. When they nod, in ragged disharmony, he sips his coffee again. “All right. Could I access this ‘everything’?”

“You? Probably,” says Artemis. “Once you knew what it was and how to find it, I doubt it would be able to keep you out. If you’re asking whether an alchemist could pull the same trick, I don’t think they could.”

“What if they were wearing one of us like a coat?” asks Máni. “Some real Silence of the Lambs bullshit.”

“First person to say Thomas Harris is an alchemist is getting slapped,” says Dodger, almost singsong.

“That’s disgusting,” says Artemis, to Máni. She pauses, then, considering. “But it just might work. If you could find the gate when you had managed to trick the universe into seeing you as a Lunar, you could probably enter the everything, and we’ve never had any indication that the windows would know the difference between a Lunar and a person playing pretend. Wrapping yourself in the skin of a wolf when you want to fool the deer into leaving you alone is an old hunter’s trick. I think we have narrative weight behind it working here.”

“Don’t talk about us like we’re stories,” says Erin, and Artemis looks at her flatly. They stay that way for several seconds, two hunters sizing each other up and staring each other down. One born of science, one born of the human need to fictionalize the world around them. They aren’t the same. They are exactly the same. In that contradiction waits their conflict, and their collaboration.

Erin looks away first. Artemis returns her attention to Dodger. “If you could fool the gate and get access to the everything, once you’re in that deep, I don’t think there are any defenses that would keep you from entering the sky above the City.”

“And if there are multiple Moons up there every night, what’s going to stop one from playing shooting star and dropping down into the streets?” Dodger looks to Smita. “In the books, didn’t the returning Queen of Wands get access to the City by sneaking Zib in through an unguarded path and having her unlock the doors from the inside? We keep saying the Up-and-Under books were meant to be a roadmap for the alchemists to follow. What if that was the part where Asphodel told them how to get in?”

“They sent Zib along the graveyard path in one of the early books, but they didn’t use the road of moonlight until what, book twelve? By that point, it didn’t feel as much like Asphodel was teaching big lessons as like she was writing errata,” says Smita.

Dodger nods. “Exactly. Reed focused all his attention on those first four books, the big elemental adventures, the ones with the most obvious alchemical applications. At this point, the people who are left are grasping at straws. Anything that gets them past the City walls is going to look like something worth trying.”

“It always comes back to the damn City,” says Roger. “Why do they want it so badly?”

Kelpie straightens, pulling slightly away from Smita as she turns to answer him. “The City is everything,” she says. “The Tower is in the City, and whoever holds the Tower holds everything. The Tower controls the universe. It’s the center of creation. If they can take the City, they can take the Tower. If they can take the Tower, it won’t matter that you went rogue and destroyed your creator, or that I ran away, or anything. They won’t need to follow the rules anymore, because they’ll be making the rules.”

Isabella laughs, a little uneasily. “You make it sound like whoever controls this Impossible City is some kind of God.”

“Oh, no,” says Kelpie. She gestures to the Lunars. “They’re some kind of god.”

“Moon gods, in specific,” says Artemis.

“Whoever controls the Impossible City is just God. They get the whole mess. Mostly it runs on its own, and they don’t have to do anything to keep it going. But they can make changes if they want to.”

The idea of the alchemists who would commit the kind of atrocities they’ve all seen becoming God is horrifying enough that for a moment, the kitchen falls silent. Only Kelpie doesn’t appear to share in the general malaise that has fallen over the rest of them. She looks from face to face, wide-eyed and curious, and pauses when she gets to Artemis, frowning just a little, like she recognizes her but doesn’t understand entirely how. Pulling her gaze away, she looks to Chang’e and cocks her head.

“Your eyes are pink,” she says. “I’ve never seen that before. Red, sure, in some of the mice, but never pink. It’s pretty. More people should have pink eyes.”

“They’re not pink; they’re peach,” says Chang’e. “I’m Chang’e, the Chinese goddess of the moon and immortality. I tend the peach orchards that grow on my version of the moon, and that’s where I go when it’s my turn to shine down on the City.”

“Were they always pink?”

“No. They changed when I took this form, and they change back to hazel when I step down to let my mortal host take care of things.”

“That must be confusing, not always being the one in charge of being you.”

“It can be. If I step too far down, Judy can do things without my being aware of her having done them, and if I step too far forward, I can do the same thing to her. Cruel Lunars can take advantage of the disconnect between our mortal and divine sides to abuse their hosts, shutting them out of their own lives and gradually isolating them from the world. I don’t understand what would motivate someone to do that to something that is, at the end, a part of them, but I don’t need to understand to disapprove. Judy and I are a partnership. We keep each other informed.”

“Oh,” says Kelpie, eyes wide and round. “Is she here now?”

“Judy? Yes. I’m not stepped so far forward that she can’t see what’s going on, and have her opinions about it. She’s just… letting me drive right now, when it’s better for us. Every Lunar has their own relationship with their hosts. Some choose to integrate, until there’s only one person in the body; some choose to separate more than we have, making rules and drawing lines. And some go to war against themselves, as I mentioned before. The mortal hosts almost never win when that happens. They’re not strong enough.”

“That’s awful,” says Kelpie. “So you’re all three the god of the same thing?”

“Sort of,” says Chang’e. “I’m the only one of us who handles immortality. Máni is…”

“Máni is mostly vague, these days,” says Máni. “No one’s ever quite been able to tell me what I’m supposed to be the god of, but then, I haven’t been doing this job for long. Maybe we’ll eventually figure out what I’m supposed to be good for.” He laughs then, large and without any real humor.

“Máni used to have companions,” says Kelpie. “They would manifest and help him do his job. They were minor gods of the phases of the moon, and of harvest and healing. Bil and Hjúki. They were on the list the alchemists had for possible aspects to pursue, but rejected because Máni wasn’t considered powerful enough to be worth catching.”

“Catching?” he asks, with a dangerous note in his voice.

“That’s what I was trying to explain, before everyone kept pulling things in different directions and asking questions,” says Kelpie, a little desperately. “The alchemists who made me, they were trying really, really hard to incarnate the aspects of individual Lunar gods that have dropped away over the centuries, as belief waned. The Man in the Moon’s dog, or Chang’e’s rabbit. Not, um, Tu’er Ye, the rabbit god on the moon, but the rabbit that accompanied her in some earlier versions of her story. We have records that say she was seen on Earth with a celestial rabbit, a very long time ago, when people believed more in this sort of thing. But beliefs shifted, and the Moon stopped incarnating the supplementary aspects. Which means—”

“Which means the universe already has grooves worn into it where those aspects could go, but it stopped having enough belief to smooth the process and since they weren’t strictly necessary, they got downsized,” says Roger. “They still have the potential to manifest; they just need a little push.”

“The alchemists have been trying to give that push by crafting perfect vessels for them, so there won’t be any resistance when they try to manifest,” says Kelpie. “That’s what the project I was working with did.”

“Mmm-hmm. And which one are you?”

Kelpie laughs a little, uncertainly. “I always thought I was working with the team that was trying to incarnate Artemis’s Hind. A hind is another word for a female red deer, and Artemis used to appear with one. I always thought it was a little weird that a huntress appeared with a deer, and not with some of her dogs or something, but I didn’t write the myths.”

Artemis steps slightly forward, around Máni, who gives her a half-amused look. “In the myths, she would transform people into deer when she wanted to punish or protect them, and I guess the symbolism stuck.”

Kelpie nods. “Yeah, that. So they thought if they could get the Hind to manifest, a manifestation of Artemis would be drawn to the lab, and they’d be able to catch and contain it, and force it to grant us access to the City.”

“Why did they want a powerful Lunar?” asks Roger, gesturing Artemis to silence with a wave of one hand. “Wouldn’t someone like Máni be easier for them to control? And wouldn’t Chang’e have been a better choice than Artemis, by the same measure? I know if I were going to try to capture and control a powerful aspect of the incarnate moon, I’d go for the farmer before I tried to catch the huntress. Seems safer.”

“These aren’t people who focus on the safety of their work,” says Erin. “Apprentices are expendable, and you can always get another one if you accidentally break the one you have. ‘Slow down and come in second’ might as well be the alchemist’s creed.”

“Right. So you go for the big gold ring right out the gate, on the theory that if you try for copper, you might catch it, but someone else will have managed to get there first. It makes sense, even if I don’t like it.”

“They tried for Artemis and Chang’e at the same time,” says Kelpie, clearly choosing her words with care. “Chang’e is just as powerful, and she comes with the added bonus of her peaches—immortality is always an attractive offering to an alchemist. Even with access to a philosopher’s stone and the ability to brew the elixir of life, the process is time-consuming and materially expensive. Growing a peach tree and living forever is a temptation no alchemist could ignore.”

“It’s not that simple,” grumbles Chang’e. She wants to be flattered by the acknowledgment of her power, but she’s slightly wounded at the same time. People always want to act as if it’s the peaches themselves that have the divine gift, and not the one who grows them. Without her, all they’d get is fruit. Delicious fruit, to be sure, but fruit all the same. She’s essential to the process of immortality. “You know the first alchemists got the idea for the elixir of life from my orchards? Mine and Ieunn’s, although she grew apples. I haven’t seen her in centuries. I don’t even know if she’s still around…” Her voice trails off, annoyance replaced by grief as she considers that yet another of them might have been lost.

They were friends once. Ieunn was never a Lunar god, but there was a time when more divinities regularly walked the world than happens anymore, and she was a sweet concept who incarnated in sweet hosts, always ready with a smile or a joke or a slice of hot baked apple pastry. The things that woman could do with a twist of dough and a sprinkle of sugar were virtually illegal. The idea that she might just not be considered necessary by the universe anymore is a little heartbreaking, like finding out that Tuesday has been canceled, or the sunrise has been deemed extraneous to needs. Something so constant and predictable that you never even considered it might be taken away.

Kelpie grimaces, sympathetic, and continues. “They want those peach trees, but not as badly as they want the City. The City is everything. We don’t need peach trees if we can tell the Tower that humans live forever now.”

“The right humans, I’m sure,” says Erin. “We’re talking about alchemists here. There’s no way they take the City and bring about utopia.”

“Probably not,” admits Kelpie. “They always said it was good I couldn’t leave the lab after my accident, because the people who weren’t with us were the worst sort of people. They were dull and drab and not magical at all, and they didn’t even know what they were missing. But Margaret would put on pretty clothes and go clubbing three nights a week, and sometimes she’d come back smelling like smoke and other people’s perfume, with her lipstick all smudged, and she looked so happy when that happened, like nothing could ever go wrong again. And then I had to go out of the lab, and I met Isabella and her family, and Isabella’s plenty magical, but her husband’s not, and her son’s not, and they’re lovely people. They were nice to me, and I liked them lots when I met them. I don’t think anyone should get to say who the right or wrong sorts of people are, because everyone’s different.”

“And thus do brand-new lab-grown people figure shit out faster than some of the ones who’ve been doing this the normal way for a hell of a lot longer,” says Dodger, sounding disgusted. She moves to fill her coffee mug again.

“Should you really be having that much caffeine?” asks Artemis, somewhat delicately.

“It soothes my nerves,” says Dodger.

“That isn’t how—”

“I wouldn’t argue with her,” says Roger. “It’s rarely a good idea, and I want Kelpie to finish telling us why the alchemists wanted a powerful Lunar, and not just any Lunar they could grab. There are so many of you, it would be easy to pick off a few around the fringes.”

Chang’e relaxes slightly. These people aren’t responsible for the deaths. She was fairly sure of that already, but now she’s certain. That’s good. She really doesn’t want to deal with predators on all sides, especially not predators she can’t either destroy or outrun. The Doctrine knows her face now—this one, anyway, and she wouldn’t be surprised if that means the Doctrine can deduce all her other faces through some hand-wavy piece of mathematics. She can’t run. She can’t hide. She doesn’t have to, and that’s a relief almost too big to stand up against.

“They’ve already been doing that,” says Kelpie, sounding bemused. “Pretty much since the Congress fell.”

Everyone in the room looks at her with horrified dismay, even Isabella, who may be new to all this discussion of Lunar manifestations and alchemical plots, but can still tell that Kelpie just admitted to murder as casually as she might have mentioned making a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s chilling, in its own way. Sweet as she seems, she was made and raised by people who saw the world as nothing more than an endless assortment of resources for them to harvest and bend to their own ends, and it would be unwise to forget that about her.

“What do you mean?” asks Artemis stiffly.

“Oh, an alchemist whose master died when the Congress fell started pursuing some new avenues of research, looking for better ways to shield against the alkahest and keep the other alchemists safe, and she found a use for Lunars. I think that’s what put Margaret and her team on to the idea of catching one to get into the City. They’d mostly ignored the moon gods before that—I’ve seen the records, and there’s a lot of mention of the overall uselessness of them. ‘What good is a personification of the universe that does naught but smile and shine and fade away?’ Plenty of really lousy poetry masquerading as research. But then she found a way for them to be useful.”

“What would that be?” asks Artemis. She’s getting stiffer by the second. Chang’e wonders if Kelpie can tell how much danger she’s in, whether she’s plunging merrily forward out of ignorance or out of foolhardy courage. Either way, it doesn’t seem like a good idea.

“I’m not entirely sure. It had something to do with concrete. But whatever it was, it made the alchemists really notice the Lunars for the first time in a long time. They started picking off the minor ones, using them for what they needed and disposing of whatever was left at the end. I might be made partially from one of those minor gods.” For the first time, she looks like she understands that she’s saying something upsetting, like she knows this is wrong. It’s a brief transition, but it’s there. “But then Margaret—she was so smart, and so kind to me, and I’m going to miss her—Margaret thought hey, if the minor Lunars can be useful, maybe the major Lunars can be really useful. And she drew up the research plan for forcing one of their companions to manifest, because it seemed like the best way to lure them in. We’d make a perfect rabbit, or hind, or dog, and then we’d get a powerful Lunar who was willing to work with us, who didn’t have to die to help us. Who could get an alchemist to the door they use to reach the City, and let them inside.”

“But it didn’t work,” says Erin.

“Oh, no, it did,” says Kelpie. “Margaret told me. They made the rabbit first, and he was everything he needed to be, and he should have attracted a Chang’e to us almost immediately.”

Chang’e feels sick. She remembers Judy poring over the lists of colleges with good graduate programs in linguistics, looking for the perfect place to apply. She remembers nudging her host toward Berkeley, not knowing why she wanted to go there, only that it felt right. Had she been trying to move toward her Rabbit, unaware of his existence and drawn to him all the same?

“Then they made the hind, and she was perfect, too, she was properly manifest, but by then, Margaret had figured out something that alchemists aren’t supposed to think about, and so she put the rabbit in the botanical research division, and she kept the hind for herself, and she kept working, trying to find a way to force a second manifestation without using the material from Reed’s files.”

“Wait—why?” asks Smita, sounding suddenly baffled.

“Because ‘the material from Reed’s files’ is a nicely, needlessly euphemistic way of saying ‘the remains of Asphodel Baker,’” says Dodger. “You use it when you’re making cuckoos, like us. Even if they were trying to manifest animals, I bet they kept getting people because of the sympathies they were starting out with.”

“I bet that’s how they got you,” says Roger, and sips his coffee, watching Kelpie closely. Watching the way she flinches, confirming his not-quite-guess: she’s an escaped experiment with distinctly cervine features, talking about how the alchemists were trying to force a celestial deer to manifest for the first time in years. There was really nothing else she could have been.

He does glance away after her flinch, measuring the response from Artemis, who gave her name before Kelpie entered the kitchen, and hasn’t repeated it since. She’s staring at Kelpie now, eyes very wide and face very pale.

In a voice that shakes like a leaf in a stiff wind trying not to blow off its tree, she asks, “Hind? Are you—? Did they—?”

Kelpie says nothing, and for a moment, silence reigns.