Page 102 of Tidal Creatures

“I found it,” she says. “But we have a problem.”

“When is there not a problem?” asks Erin. “What’s the problem this time?”

“It’s beneath us.” She points, angling her finger so that even as she’s pointing down, she’s pointing with precision. “It’s open, and I should be able to get there if I just lean out and let go.”

“Why you?” asks Artemis. “Why not me, or Máni, or someone who belongs here?”

“Because of the other half of what I was about to say,” says Dodger. “I can get there. I don’t really see how anybody is going to get back. Even with a rope, we’d be asking someone to freeclimb about ten feet, when slipping would mean a potentially fatal fall. Unless you’re signing up to splash, I don’t really see anyone else doing it.”

“You’re leaving something out, Dodge,” says Roger.

“I’m … Oh, right. I can find my way out of here if I need to. So unless you’re sure, and I mean sure, that your little key trick will let you open a gate from inside the everything, if there’s a chance our explorer gets stranded, it needs to be me.”

Chang’e is drifting toward the window, moving slow and careful, conserving her steps to make it look as if she’s not doing anything of the sort. Erin watches her go, and wonders, a bit, whether she should tell someone this is happening; whether anyone would care enough to stop it. She supposes Roger might. Chang’e’s host is in his department, and he seems to like the girl. He probably wouldn’t want her to splash across the City.

“Hey,” she says, voice mild.

Chang’e doesn’t stop or turn, only continues to drift toward the window, expression politely blank.

Dodger and Artemis are still arguing about who’s going to go down to Aske’s window, Roger and Kelpie looking on with near-matching expressions of indulgence on their faces. Máni is looking upward, into the rainbow dark. Out of all of them, he’s the one who most seems to remember that Aske was a person before she died, and they’re here because they need to know who killed her.

“Hey,” she says again, more sharply, as Chang’e puts her hand on the windowsill.

Chang’e looks back at her, smiling politely.

“I’m the senior Lunar present,” she says. “Any risks we’re taking should be mine. Judy agrees.”

She boosts herself up onto the ledge, looking back and down, and her smile broadens.

“I see the open window,” she says, and pushes herself away, and falls.

Mare Spumans

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

Normally, when a Lunar slides out of a window in the sky above the City, they find themselves caught in the magnetic pull of the aggregate Moon. They drift gently upward, merging with the collective consciousness of every other Lunar who has come to share the sky, and they stay there until the moon sets in the location they started from. No one knows how the City sky can keep such perfect time, but it does. Age upon age, it does.

Tonight, however, Chang’e has entered the sky not to shine, but to fall, and fall she does, straight down, body held rigidly straight, stomach swooping to fill her mouth as the dizziness of descent kicks in. She has the presence of mind to reach out as she nears Aske’s window, and she grabs hold of the open frame with both hands, jerking herself to a bone-shaking stop.

As Judy, she is always a physical being, a woman walking in the world. As Chang’e, a state she normally enters purely only in the everything, she is a divine creature, a combination of the heavens and the earth, immortal and untouchable. As she stops her fall, for the first time, she feels as if she were something temporary, capable of coming to an end. And in that moment, she understands a truth of the Impossible City: if she let go, if she actually fell all the way to the ground below, she would die. Not Judy, Chang’e. This manifestation of the goddess would wink away and be forgotten, lost to her believers, wiped from the collective consciousness of the world.

Is that what happened to all the forgotten gods, the ones who were but are no longer? Did they fall from their own windows into their own Impossible Cities, dropping down too fast to stop or save themselves?

Heart suddenly pounding and the copper-penny taste of adrenaline filling her mouth, Chang’e pulls herself up and over the window ledge, falling, limbs akimbo, into the everything on the other side.

The space is black as always, infinite, solidified void. But the rainbow flashes here are slow, sluggish, almost creeping along before they fizzle and die. This is what the everything looks like when it’s cutting off a piece of itself, declaring a once-vital artery extraneous to needs. Chang’e straightens, pushes her hair out of her face, looks around …

… and screams.

There is a pool of silver-bright blood on the floor, not clotted or congealed in the slightest, as fresh and liquid as the moment when it was shed. There is no red, only silver, like mercury, and still she knows it for blood, because there’s nothing else it could possibly be. She catches her breath, swallowing it to sit like a stone in her still-unsettled stomach, then moves closer, trying to understand the scene in front of her.

There’s a lot of blood at first, a pool of silver that seems like it must be all the blood a body can contain. Drips and smears travel from it toward the window, and she turns to look. The mark of a grasping hand is on the ledge, desperately clutching at what must have seemed like a chance at salvation. Then it smears and drops away, grip lost, hope abandoned.

Aske was hit over there, and managed to crawl to here. She turns again, back toward the main pool, and begins following the drops in the other direction.

The primary wound wasn’t dealt here. No. There are drag marks on the floor of the everything, which has never seemed so solid, or so unwelcoming; this is dead space. It doesn’t want her here. It doesn’t want anyone here. The everything that was once Aske’s is mourning, no longer needed with her gone, not sure how it’s meant to let her go.

The drag marks lead to a second pool, almost as large as the first, which must have been where the killing blow was dealt. Something hard and heavy was used to strike Aske, probably in the head, and she began to bleed out almost instantly. A footprint in bright silver stands out at the edge of the pool: Máni was here.