Page 101 of Tidal Creatures

“Wouldn’t it be better if we all stayed inside the everything until you get back?” asks Dodger.

Artemis shifts her attention to the redhead. “I’ll be crossing the sky for hours. It’s almost time for moonrise and sunset to meet, and that’s when my journey begins. You won’t have food, or water, or bathrooms. You’ll be bored stiff.”

“And you want that for me?” asks Kelpie.

“You’re a Lunar, or close enough that it doesn’t really make any difference,” says Artemis. “We don’t experience any of those things in here.”

“Neither do we, if I decide we don’t,” says Dodger, and it’s such a calmly off-handed statement that it’s terrifying in its implications.

Artemis considers a snappy comeback or a question, then dismisses both as bad ideas and gestures for the group to follow as she starts deeper into the everything. She walks the same way Chang’e and Máni did, following the same path. Dodger takes note of her steps, of the places where she deviates from the earlier journeys, the places where they stay the same. By the time the window appears ahead of them, she knows what’s going on.

“The windows move,” she says. “When you move in the physical world, they follow you in the everything. Chang’e and Máni manifested in two very different geographic areas. Their windows being close together could have been a coincidence. Yours being this close to both of theirs means it wasn’t, and the windows move. We know there are windows on the other side of the sky. They shift with geography. Presumably they open when a new Lunar manifests, and close when a Lunar is lost.”

Artemis’s face falls. “So Aske’s window might already be gone?”

“Depends on how fast things move around. How long have you all been in the area?”

“Since start of term,” says Máni.

“Four years,” says Chang’e.

“Three months,” says Artemis.

“All right, and your window, while quite close, is still on the edge of the zone the other two are occupying.”

“How do you know that? You haven’t looked outside yet.”

Dodger blinks at her, unable to figure out how she’s meant to express the delicate, ongoing conversation between the flashes of light and the everything itself, which is not (contrary to appearances) the prismatic pathway glistening around them. It is, and it will be even when there are no more possibilities for it to contain, when it bridges the darkness as more of the same, alone and eternal. The everything and the potential for specific things are in endless dialog with each other, and that dialog is mathematical as much as linguistic: Roger can follow it as easily as she can, as easily as breathing. That conversation is what tells her Artemis’s window is close to the other two. She doesn’t need to look outside.

Still, she follows Artemis to the window, because she also doesn’t need to argue. They’re all tired and they’re all stressed and they’re all aware, to one degree or another, of the open gate behind them, beyond which is a nightmare maze of alchemical science and potential enemies. None of them were able to enter without the aid of a Lunar, but who’s to say the alchemists will have the same constraints? Maybe they have a way of tricking the entrance into letting them through, something related to the moonlight held captive in the walls (and oh, Dodger is sure she’ll be horrified when she finds out how they did that; horrified and maybe impressed, to a small, shameful degree. It’s only natural that alchemists would do things in ways she instinctively understands—as their creation, she was designed to follow those same paths. That doesn’t mean she likes it, or wants it to keep happening).

Maybe the alchemists lured the gate into their territory because they were hoping for this exact moment, when the window was open and its defenders were distracted.

She doesn’t know, and speaking her concerns into the world won’t make them any less real. Artemis opens the window. Dodger nudges her lightly to the side and leans out, into the bright City air.

Some of the other nearby windows—but not too near—are standing open, their owners already joining the slow journey from horizon to horizon. Dodger estimates their anchors as a hundred miles or more from their location, linked to Lunars who have no idea that any of this is happening, and would probably be rightly alarmed if they did. She really doesn’t understand this system, or how it works for the Lunars who follow it, but she’s not here to criticize; she’s here to calculate.

Leaning out the window, she looks around until she spots the windows she knows belong to Chang’e and Máni. They’re closer to each other than they are to Artemis’s window, although they’re still a good way apart. If she focuses, she can see the calculations in the air around them, the ones that tell her where they started and where they’re going. They’re seeking their permanent places in this section of the sky.

And she’s just slowing things down by continuing to insist on seeing this scene the way a person would see it. I’m sorry, she thinks, enunciating the thought clearly enough for Roger to receive the words, and then she steps away from herself, deeper into the grasp of her domain.

(People who aren’t like them—which is basically everyone except for Kim and Tim, and self-absorbed as they are, even Roger and Dodger realize how cosmically cruel it would be to try to have this discussion with their involuntary wards—assume constant telepathic communication must mean they get every thought the other has, fully formed and articulated. Instead, they receive every impulse and emotion, every feeling, and the words that are articulated internally with the same level of precision as they would be spoken. It’s not a stream; it’s a river. She feels Roger pull back to the limit of his ability to disengage, even as she descends into pure mathematics.)

The equations she’s seen teased in the walls since their arrival snap into sudden clarity, and so do the equations in the sky, the calculated arcs of angle and ascent. She leans in to the numbers, finding comfort in what has always seemed to her to be the true proof of the divine, and she understands the way this sky works, the movement and placement of the windows, the reason everything fits together.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, or hopes she says—when she’s this deep, she sometimes thinks she’s saying something, but says something else entirely, some string of sums or formulae that, to her, express the same sentiment. She leans a little farther out, no longer concerned about falling, and scans the sky around her.

Based on the displacement and acceleration she sees written around her, Aske’s window should be … She looks down. Not quite straight down, but close enough to be a short fall.

There, hanging in the air like all the others, is an open window, curtains rustling slightly in the breeze rising off the City far below, glass lightless. It doesn’t gleam like the windows around it.

It is, in many ways, no longer a star.

Math and time are both Dodger’s domain, and when she blinks, she sees the future of the window as clearly as any other equation: it will continue to dim, losing what little remains of its inherent shine, until it loses its grasp on the firmament and plummets. They’re too close to the ground for atmospheric friction to cause combustive ablation, but still, it will flare and burn up.

She wonders if the inhabitants of the Impossible City understand that every time they point in delight at a falling star, they’re marking the death of a Lunar. She rather hopes they don’t. These are the people she will one day, inevitably, live among. She really doesn’t want them to be cruel. If there’s anything she can choose about her future, it’s that she doesn’t want the people she’ll inevitably have to go and live among to be cruel.

So Aske’s window is no longer a star the way the others are, but it’s still here. Dodger pulls herself physically back, not only from her position out the window but from the mental state that allows her to see the world as pure numbers, no complications, no constraints.