Page 107 of Tidal Creatures

“No using other people’s bolt-holes as your science experiments,” says Roger.

She sighs. “You never let me have any fun.”

“We’re walking through the infinite darkness on the other side of reality. I let you have all the fun in the world,” says Roger.

Dodger huffs, and they keep on walking.

The journey is mostly uneventful. Every turn takes them to a new level of rainbow flashes, the activity ramping up bit by bit, until they come around a bend and see a window hanging in the air. This one is painted a cheery shade of sunshine yellow, with curtains covered in rainbows and unicorns. Chang’e blinks.

“Our windows take the form of the room our hosts occupied when we first became a part of them,” she says. “I hope whoever’s room this is still likes rainbows and unicorns.”

“Who doesn’t?” asks Máni.

“People who got bludgeoned with them as children,” says Chang’e. “It’s more common than you’d think.”

“Damn,” says Máni. “Any idea whose window this is?”

“Not Diana’s, if she’s the senior Lunar in this area. I recognize that fabric. It’s based on a show that came out about twenty years ago,” says Erin. Roger and Dodger turn to look at her. She shrugs. “They kept me in the lab, but I was still a kid, and sometimes Leigh would reward us for good behavior. Take the cadaver apart in under five minutes, get an hour of screen time, that sort of thing. The main difference between my childhood and a horror movie was that I couldn’t turn my childhood off.”

“We keep moving,” says Dodger. “The window’s closed, but we don’t know whether it’s actually in the same time zone as the one we started with. If it belongs to someone in Hawaii, they could enter the everything at any moment. Even if it doesn’t, it’s probably rude for us to be here without an invitation. Come on.”

She wheels and steps through another hole none of the rest of them can see, and they follow her into another upward-slanting corridor.

They walk along it until Dodger makes another abrupt turn and they find themselves looking at Artemis’s window. The tree is gone, leaving a scattering of leaves and a few fallen peaches on the ground. There’s no way of knowing whether Artemis came back and climbed down, or hasn’t come back yet. But the window is still open, so they know it’s one of those two.

Dodger moves to the window and leans out, bracing her hands on the sill and looking down. When she leans back into the main space, she’s smiling, clearly smug about something.

“There’s no window below us,” she says. “We must have gotten out just in the nick of time.”

“Why do you look happy about that?” demands Kelpie. “Artemis—”

“Wasn’t down there.”

Kelpie stops. “What?”

“Time is moving faster in here than it is in the normal world. I’d say about three to one, or something in that neighborhood. It has to be, for this whole system of moons and Cities to work even as well as it is right now. Still.” Dodger steps back from the window and picks up one of the peaches. It’s barely starting to show a bruise. “This fell off the tree when the tree fell away, and it happened almost at the same time as us losing the floor. Do not ask me how I know this. When the woman who is the living incarnation of time itself tells you something happened at a specific time, you listen to her. You don’t ask her to show her math.”

She tosses the peach gently to Roger, who snatches it out of the air and turns it over in his hand before he nods. “Works for me. Chang’e, Máni, any questions?”

“No,” says Chang’e.

Kelpie gulps a breath, visibly calming herself. “All right. Thank you for getting us out of there.”

“You can thank me after we finish waiting for your boss to get back,” says Dodger. She sits down on the rainbow-streaked ground, leaning back against what appears to be nothing, and stretches her arms up over her head. “Anyone need me for anything, or can I take a little nap?”

“How can you sleep here?” asks Chang’e. “We’re in the void!” She’s been traveling the everything for decades, but she’s never lost sight of the fact that it’s a tunnel through infinite nothingness, and today’s reminder was something she could really have done without.

“You can sleep anywhere if you really try,” says Dodger. “I did a sleepover in the Sutro Baths shortly after we manifested. That place burned down before we were born, but I asked it nicely to exist again for the night, and it did.”

“There was a time when she said we were going to go live there,” says Roger, fond and weary and absolutely accepting in the way that only truly comes to someone whose life has been reshaped to make statements like “I asked it nicely to exist again” make perfect, reasonable sense. “I talked her out of it, thankfully. A little house in Berkeley with a negotiable number of rooms is a much better place for us than a collapsed bathhouse that has to be constantly reminded not to disappear into the ether. I like floors that actually exist whether or not you ask them to.”

Dodger wrinkles her nose at him, then closes her eyes, relaxing into whatever unseen surface she’s leaning against. Roger looks around, then sits down cross-legged, resting his elbows on his knees. Erin flops to the ground not far away, leaning on her hands and looking like she was happier when the floor was dropping out from underneath them. At least then, something was actively going on.

“The way I see it, we have a braid of problems,” he says, without any preamble. “Your friend’s dead, and that sucks, and we need to figure out who or what killed her; we have an asshole alchemist running around making monstrosities and attacking people who haven’t done anything to warrant it; and we have a group of alchemists who seem to have mostly been wiped out by the aforementioned asshole, who were making accessory packs of existing Lunars in a really complicated attempt at a honeypot. Does that sound about right for a summary?”

“What’s a honeypot?” asks Kelpie.

“Usually a woman wearing her underwear as eveningwear being sent to seduce a professional spy,” says Roger dryly.