Chapter 15
Growth
It’s not until the clock strikes midnight, a gentle chiming from her phone as the alarm goes off to notify her, that Lilianne rolls out of bed, smoothing her hair back with one hand, and reaches for her shoes.
She didn’t entirely mean to nap for as long as she has, sinking in and out of a variable doze like a glass orb floating in the ocean, now on the surface, now four feet below, but still buoyant the entire time.
Most nights are like that for her. No matter how tired she is, her brain never slows down enough for her to truly sleep.
Other people talk about long hours of unconsciousness, about deep dreams that seem to entirely replace the waking world, lives lived in the stillness of slumber.
She’s never experienced that. Even as a child, she would be partially aware of herself as she spent her mandated hours with her eyes closed, letting them rest in a way her mind never did.
Sleep is a companion, not a friend. Never once have they truly embraced each other.
The apartment is silent as she creeps to the door, hesitating long enough to listen.
Raven is primarily nocturnal, but she’ll usually be out between the hours of ten and three; Snake sleeps nights so he can make his morning classes without endangering himself.
The animals he works with aren’t malicious, but they can’t be handled safely unless the handlers are fully aware and alert.
One slip on his part and someone’s getting bitten or stung—or worse, one of his precious specimens is getting stomped to death.
She doesn’t know where David is. Some nights, he’s in bed by nine, like the good little athlete he is.
Others, he’s gone until the sun comes up, and him coming in is what wakes her.
She’s sure she’ll spot the pattern in his schedule eventually, but until then, she needs to move quietly.
He could be passed out on the couch again, or he could be somewhere else entirely. There’s just no way to know.
Letting herself out of the room, she creeps down the hall to the living room, where she’s relieved to see no David by the dim city glow coming through the windows.
She really is alone for now, and she holds that solitude like a cloak as she creeps onward to the front door, unlocking it and slipping out onto the landing.
She doesn’t exhale until the door is shut and locked again behind her.
Her roommates aren’t her keepers; they probably wouldn’t have said anything if they’d been there to see her go, just waved and dismissed her nocturnal activities as her own damn business.
And yet, the fear of discovery has never needed to be rational.
It’s enough that it exists, coiled at the bottom of her belly like a snake prepared to strike.
The food court is silent when she reaches the bottom of the stairs, the individual storefronts closed, the oil cooled for the night.
They’ll wake up in the morning, some earlier than others, putting out breakfast offerings of hot donuts and fried-egg sandwiches.
A few of the local homeless sleep on the tables and benches of the central eating area, and Lilianne looks at them with sympathy as she passes, careful not to disturb them.
California is an expensive place to live.
According to Raven, it gets more expensive every year.
Add that to the remarkably forgiving weather and it isn’t such a surprise that when people lose their homes, they often choose to stay in the places they know, where they’re not dealing with readjustment to their environments on top of everything else.
Better to suffer where the rain tastes right, that’s what her mother always said, and she’s not one to argue with her mother.
She clutches her satchel close as she steps out of the food court and onto the street beyond.
Someday the rain here will taste right, she knows.
Someday this place will be her home. But not yet. Not tonight.
The night is far from silent, despite the stillness of the street around her.
No bars this close to campus, although they thrive only a few blocks away: they’re still open, music blasting and neon flashing as they offer their temporary escape to the people who come seeking it.
The bouncers are large enough to make even David seem small, and the air around them always smells of a mix of stale beer, sweat, and soft desperation, running down the walls like sap running down the side of a maple tree. No, those are not her destination.
Instead, she turns away from the downtown nightlife, fixing her eyes on the secret, half-hidden part of Berkeley, where normal people live normal lives, and abnormal people hide themselves in plain sight.
Every city she’s ever seen has been like this, dividing itself into separate chambers, like they’re unknowingly seeking the seashell heart of their existence, pursuing the Golden Mean above all else.
There’s always overlap—her own apartment is proof of that, a little oasis of residence in the middle of a sea of commerce.
In the other direction, there’s the home daycare, the living-room salon, or the corner bodega.
Nothing is ever entirely one thing or another.
Alchemy pursues purification, but humanity thrives in the blended spaces.
That’s how it’s always been, and how it will always be, and the reason not every human is an alchemist, which is for the best.
One day—one day very soon—they’ll be able to enter the Impossible City, and whoever claims it first will be as untouchable as the sun itself.
On that day, for the chosen, the purification can begin, and whatever form it takes will be the right and righteous one.
All of humanity can be as god-touched and glorious as the Lunars, as the Doctrine, as her parents. And all she has to do is get there.
The thought carries her through the silence of the streets, onto labyrinthine lanes lined in grass-fronted houses, the smell of dew and slightly metallic recycled water hanging heavy in the air.
Their gardens are California impossibilities of bright flowers and ripening fruit.
Many of them have lemon or orange trees, adding their citrus-sharp smells to the air.
It’s so far from Alabama that it aches, serving only to remind her that she’s left home behind.
It was a surprise to her parents when she abruptly changed her aim from her lifelong dreams of Boston to far-off Berkeley, but she couldn’t explain to them exactly why, couldn’t tell them that the most exciting developments in modern alchemy are happening in Berkeley—a city, paradoxically, that no longer hosts any alchemists of its own.
They’re all gone, scattered to other places after the rise of Reed’s cuckoos and the destruction of their main lab.
But everyone she’s spoken to has confirmed that reality is thin here, malleable in a way it wouldn’t be without the weight of the various greater incarnations distorting it.
A tincture that can heal scars somewhere else might be able to regrow an entire skin here.
Pastes to cure baldness that wouldn’t work anywhere else might grow whole new heads of hair, provided they were made in Berkeley.
Hormones brewed and blended to change endocrine systems can potentially rewire them to a level otherwise seen only in utero, making mass physical changes to soft tissue and reproductive systems. She didn’t become an alchemist for the sake of easing her transition, but if she can make use of the natural properties of the space, why shouldn’t she?
Once the sounds of campus have fully fallen behind her, she reaches into her coat and withdraws a rhyolite pendulum.
It’s nothing special to look at, light gray and faintly speckled, knapped down to a point with obsidian tools.
She bought it from a metaphysical shop downtown, surrounded by the scent of incense and patchouli.
(The owners lack the powers they advertise so freely.
They’re just normal humans with a decent grasp of what it takes to run a business.
In this case, that’s a good thing: the pendulum wouldn’t work as well for her if it was already imbued with someone else’s essence.)
Holding the pendulum out at arm’s length, Lilianne focuses on it, slightly narrowing her eyes as it begins to sway gently back and forth.
She holds her hand as steady as she can, watching as the pendulum’s steady rocking gradually evolves into a slow spiral, moving independently of anything else.
(It’s not truly independent, keyed into the motion of the universe unfolding all around it, but for someone standing on the surface of the Earth, it might as well be.)
The spiral grows larger and larger, winding out and then winding back in, until the pendulum develops a strong list to one side. Lilianne nods and turns to face in that direction, letting the swinging stone guide her wanderings. Onward she goes.
Through the night, down populated streets, past darkened windows like eyes into the worlds and lives beyond, the sleeping people she will never know.
Step by step she extends the distance between herself and her room, all her possessions, the person she pretends to be.
Here, in the dark, she isn’t Lilianne the student, Lilianne the transplant, Lilianne the trans woman.
She’s only Lilianne the alchemist, and she’s going to remake the world.
There is a vacant lot up ahead, incongruous among the rows and rows of tidy houses, and she barely notices the woman stepping out of it onto the sidewalk, barely sees her in the haze of searching and discovery.
The woman pauses to pull something out of her purse, and for the second time in a single day, Lilianne collides with a stranger, knocking her to the ground.