Page 103 of Tidal Creatures

Drops of blood trail off into the distance, a gruesome reminder of the way she saw him approaching the gate, Aske in his arms. They mingle silver with mortal red, Aske’s divinity bleeding out of her one drop at a time. Chang’e follows them, and at the end of the trail, she finds the terrible prize they’ve been seeking. Aske’s body is still curled on the ground where Máni left her, eyes closed, limbs bent into the shape of a comma. It’s almost obscene, how much it looks like she’s just sleeping. Chang’e feels for her pulse, feeling a sudden flare of hope.

There’s nothing. Aske is gone. Aske has been gone for quite some time. Chang’e turns her head to the side, revealing the smashed-in back of her skull, and grimaces. At least she knows now how the other Lunar died.

At least it wasn’t an arrow.

She straightens, shaking her hands like she can shake away the feeling of tacky, undried blood and dead Lunar flesh. Then she turns and heads back toward the window, letting the blood trail guide her through the unfamiliar everything.

She can’t control her relief when she sees the window floating serenely in the blackness. It’s almost overwhelming, how glad she is to have the confirmation that she’ll be able to get out of here. She almost runs the last twenty feet to the window, clutching the frame in both hands to reassure herself that it’s real, she’s not trapped, it’s really real.

People are shouting above her, and she realizes how much she must have frightened them. She sticks her head out the window and looks up.

“I’m okay!” she yells. Saying it makes it true, or true enough that she breathes a little easier, stands up a little straighter, and repeats herself: “I’m okay.”

“How are you planning to get back up here?” demands Máni. “What the hell made you go down there alone?”

Chang’e almost laughs. How can she say that it was out of the fear that if she took Artemis with her, she’d find Aske had been killed by an arrow through the heart, that she still doesn’t trust the other Lunar, that she’s tired of feeling like she’s at the back of the line when it comes to handing out answers? How can she say any of that? She swallows her painful merriment, shakes her head, and says, “I have a plan. Step away from the window.”

Máni vanishes, back into Artemis’s everything, and Kelpie sticks her head out. “Artemis is crossing the sky,” she calls. “She left right after you jumped. She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t wait any longer.”

“I need you to step back, too,” says Chang’e. “I’ll be right up.”

Kelpie withdraws. Chang’e reaches into her pocket, closing her hand around the small, hard object nestled there. She pulls it out and opens her fingers, revealing a peach pit nestled in the hollow of her hand.

This is her main trick. She doesn’t have a disappearing bow or control over the tides; she can’t call a hunt or compel the truth. But she can grow an orchard out of nothing, if she wants one, if she has the seeds. She’s never done it in the everything before, but how hard can it be?

Raising the peach pit to her lips, she kisses its rough, ridged surface gently, a tap of her lips against the shell, then bends to place it on the floor. It gleams silver, brought one step closer to divinity.

“If it pleases you, grow,” she says, in a dialect of Cantonese so old that its proper name has been forgotten; it is a cousin to ancient Chinese, the oldest recorded form of the language, which also has no proper name, for when it thrived, it didn’t need one, and when it died, its corpse was scavenged by its children and their cousins. “If it pleases you not, grow, for it pleases me.”

The seed bursts as the peach tree it has always had the potential to become wakes and begins to grow with unnatural speed and vigor, becoming a sprout becoming a seedling becoming a healthy young tree which, at the softest brush of her fingers, bends and grows out the window, reaching ever upward as it becomes a monster of its kind. Its branches fork and spread, vaster than they have any proper business being, their boughs growing lush with flowers that bloom and drop away, a rain of petals for the City far below.

There are no pollinators here, but Chang’e’s trees have never needed pollinators; she is their only symbiont, the only companion they require, and as the fruit begins to swell and ripen, impossible but solid, she smiles.

Above her, she hears shouts of surprise and delight. She sticks her head out the window, plucking the nearest ripe peach at the same time. The fruit is heavy in her hand, familiar and soft, and it makes her feel better as she calls up, “You can climb down. It’ll hold you. And then we can all climb back up, but I want you to see the body.”

“She’s still there?” asks Máni, sounding utterly horrified.

“She is,” says Chang’e. She steps back from the window. “It’s clear.”

One by one, the others descend, coming down the tree with peaches in their hands and leaves in their hair and, in Erin’s case, an utterly ridiculous grin on her face.

“We should be able to solve everything by climbing trees,” she says. “Roger, write that down for when you control the universe. Everything should be solvable by climbing a tree.”

“I’ll get right on that,” he says, frowning at Chang’e. “What the hell possessed you to fling yourself out of a window?”

“Someone had to,” she says, with a shrug. “Artemis needed to start her crossing. Máni had already seen the body—letting him see her again wasn’t going to tell us anything new. If we had to leave whoever went down behind, better me than you, your sister, or Erin.”

“Don’t think about yourself like that,” snaps Kelpie, who made her own descent with surprising ease, given her hooves. She brandishes a peach at Chang’e. “You’re as essential as anyone.”

“I’m one more facet of a very common god,” says Chang’e. “Lose me, you’ll have another within the week.”

“And how does Judy feel about that?” asks Roger.

Chang’e doesn’t answer.

“Seems like maybe Artemis and Anna aren’t the only ones who aren’t completely comfortable with the way you people have things set up,” he says, and his voice is mild, but the inherent critique is not. “Nice trick with the peach tree, by the way. You do that often?”

“Not to full maturity, but peach trees are sort of my thing,” she says. “I can grow an orchard in an afternoon. I only need the seeds.”