Chapter 27 #5
“So we have two choices.” Lilianne drops her hand. “Because I see openings in both spots I just pointed to. Either the lab really wants us to go the second way, or it wants me to go the first way alone.”
“I don’t like either one of those.”
“Neither do I. I want to try something.”
Lilianne turns and walks briskly toward the door Smita can’t see. When she gets there she reaches for the crash bar, stopping before she can make contact, and looks back over her shoulder at Smita. “Anything?” she asks. “Any little threads or ripples?”
“No,” says Smita. “What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.” Lilianne takes a breath to bolster herself, then presses the crash bar, waiting for a stinging pain that never comes.
She pushes hard, and the door swings open without any resistance, and when she takes her hand away, there’s no resistance.
Again, she looks to Smita. “What does this look like to you?”
“Like a cut just opened in the wall,” says Smita, horrified. “I can see things dripping and pulsing inside. Fat and … and veins and … I think it’s alive. How can it be alive?”
“I don’t know,” says Lilianne, grimly. “But I think this is the way we ought to go.”
Smita nods, looking miserably anxious as she crosses the room (at once sterile and dripping in flesh) to follow Lilianne into the gaping maw of the open hallway.
Neither of them was present to see the skin grow back over the doorway, sealing them away.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Artemis walks a few steps ahead of Kelpie, bow drawn and arrow notched, ready to fire at the first signs of trouble.
Her shoulders are locked, and her knees are slightly bent, lending a floating, dance-like quality to her motions.
She’s a huntress in the field, and whatever prey she finds to focus her anger on will surely regret attracting her ire.
“I’m fine,” says Kelpie. She’s following a few feet behind, stepping gingerly so that the echoes of her hooves won’t alert anything that might be down here to their approach. She has her arms wrapped around herself, radiating discomfort even as she follows the faintly luminescent Lunar.
“You don’t sound fine.”
“Probably because I’m lying,” says Kelpie. “But if I lie hard enough, I might start to believe myself, and if I can believe myself, maybe you can believe me too. Can you just pretend you believe me? At least until we’re out of here?”
“I always want to believe you,” says Artemis.
“I want to believe you above everyone and everything else, even myself. I love you like I’ve never loved anyone in this world, and you’re important to me.
But that’s why I can’t believe you if I think you’re hurting yourself, and the way you sound right now, it sounds like you’re hurting yourself to make me happy.
Again. Some of us weren’t made to run naked through the midnight forests. ”
Kelpie grimaces. “I know, and you were really nice about telling me that I don’t have to do that anymore. I was made to be your hind. I should be able to run beside you.”
“Bipeds with hooves don’t run as well as actual deer do.
Who knew?” Artemis shakes her head, attention still focused in front of her.
“I mean, besides everyone who’s ever really looked at an ungulate.
I don’t need you to run through the woods with me.
I’m happy with you just the way you are. That’s what loving you means.”
“I’m okay, really. I may not be fine, but I will be, once I know this place is well and truly dead forever, and we’re not going to get dragged down here again.
” Kelpie slows to study a desk as she walks through the lab, exhaling when she sees the small framed photographs are still there.
The computer being present means one thing; the personal effects of the alchemist who used it mean something else entirely.
Something heartbreaking and sad. The people who worked here were alchemists, yes, and since her escape from their custody and discovery of her strange, off-kilter little family, she’s learned a lot about alchemists that she never knew before.
She’s learned they can’t be trusted, that they lie and cheat and steal and even kill in the pursuit of their “Great Art.” The American alchemists like to pretend they aren’t the inheritors of Asphodel Baker, that they’re more than her loves and hates and petty grudges all made incarnate in modern flesh, but her dreams and ideals and obsessions and cruelties have saturated the texts they study from: they are hers as much as the cuckoos are.
She was built as one of Asphodel’s children and trained as one of her heirs, and now that she runs with the moon, she rejects everything she was intended to be.
But these people were her friends before she had anyone else.
They were her world when she thought the world was small and safe and contained within concrete walls.
For them all to be gone, most likely victims of the same alkahest that brought her first friend, Margaret, to pieces before her eyes …
it’s a tragedy. So much more than alchemy was lost here.
And there is still so much left to lose.
That’s the worst thing about the world getting bigger. It gets more confusing and less linear with every piece that’s added. But there is also so much more to lose now than there was when she called this place her home.
Artemis turns, making a slow sweep with her bow, then returns her attention to Kelpie. “I don’t see any signs that there’s been movement down here in a long time. But there’s no dust.”
“The filtration system cleans the air,” says Kelpie.
“And when I say ‘cleans the air,’ I mean that there are screens designed to attract and consume dust. They’re technically alive.
Just sheets of active biomaterial at regular intervals inside the vents.
They eat spiders, too. Which is good, because any spiders that managed to make it down here would starve. ”
“Because the vents eat all the other insects.”
“Exactly.” Kelpie nods. “Since there’s no dust, that means the biomaterial is still alive. It’s probably grown since the alchemists left. I bet it completely fills the vents.” She looks up at the ceiling, thoughtfully.
“We are not going into the vents to check,” says Artemis firmly.
“I wasn’t going to,” lies Kelpie. “If you think this room is clear enough for us to move on, I can take you to Margaret’s office. The man the Congress sent to relieve her may have ransacked it, but I doubt he had time to completely clear it out before everything went wrong.”
“Margaret was your project leader?”
“Mmm.” Kelpie nods. They’ve talked about Margaret before, but never in the kind of detail Artemis has tried to encourage.
Margaret is hers, a pearl she carries in the treasure caverns of her heart, not meant to be carelessly spent.
She’ll never have another friend like Margaret was, and while that may be partially down to the fact that Margaret lied to her right up until the end, it’s also true that Margaret died to save her.
Without Margaret’s willingness to stand up to the man from the Congress and keep lying, Kelpie would never have seen the surface.
Had she really been the lab accident Margaret claimed she was, the alkahest would have taken Kelpie apart bit by bit, leaving her to drip away like water.
Alkahest is the universal solvent, and at the most basic level, it exists to dissolve everything it touches.
But most American alchemists—even the Congress, who so despised her when she lived—use Asphodel’s recipe to make the stuff, and Asphodel’s alkahest recoils from the sympathy of her blood.
Constructs and alchemists alike break down at the touch of her alkahest. Cuckoos don’t.
Cuckoos carry the philosopher’s stone of Asphodel’s genetics in their veins, and so her alkahest sees them as siblings, not entirely trustworthy, but undeserving of death.
Kelpie’s feelings about Margaret will never be untangled, and maybe Margaret saw her as an owner sees a pet, but she still saved her life. Kelpie won’t forget that.
“I think we can move deeper,” says Artemis. She doesn’t shoulder her bow, keeps it out and ready to fire at anything that moves.
Kelpie nods, and turns to start down one of the short halls that branch off the main lab like spokes of a wheel. Artemis follows.
They’re almost to the door at the end of the hall when a voice speaks from the shadows, poisonously sweet and slightly lisping, like the speaker is trying to navigate a set of inhuman teeth.
“Little cuckoo, you’ve returned,” it purrs. “I never thought to see you haunt these halls again. Come to join the other ghosts? We’ve saved a space for you in the depths.”
Kelpie stops in her tracks, still looking straight ahead.
Behind her, she knows Artemis has done the same.
They’re both too smart to look behind themselves.
Anything that speaks out of the shadows like this is unlikely to attack as long as it remains unseen.
That might not work with natural animals, but with alchemical creations, refusing to see them directly is often the surest means of survival.
“Did you take the bodies?” she asks. “If you’ve saved a space for me.”
“There were no bodies,” says the voice. “Of the staff of this lab, only the subjects walked as cuckoos do, and only they survived the purification. Of course, a cuckoo’s flesh is flesh still, and they needed to eat if they wanted to survive.
Sad for them, that they were all so well confined.
They couldn’t get out, couldn’t get away, couldn’t do anything but dwell and die where they were.
You were our only loss, little cuckoo, our only survivor.
Now that you’re home, we’ll have the full collection once again. ”