Page 11 of Tidal Creatures

“I don’t keep their memberships memorized. Go find him. Tell him I want to see him.”

Something in her tone makes Chang’e shiver. But she nods, and says, “Yes, ma’am.”

And then, to her surprise, Diana steps down, and it’s Professor Williams looking at her wearily, not glowing at all. Just a woman like any other woman, soft and defenseless. She can move between states with incredible speed, and Chang’e knows that if she moved against Diana’s mortal vessel, she’d be struck down before she could do any real damage. Still, it’s a show of trust large enough to be confusing, and so she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything, barely even dares to breathe.

“I appreciate you bringing this to me,” says Professor Williams. “I know the girl was a friend of yours. I’m sorry for your loss.”

She wasn’t, rages Judy. She was a junior goddess from Minnesota who barely had time to figure out how to shine before she died, and now her family is going to think all those stories about how dangerous California is are true. I don’t even remember her name!

In some ways, that’s the worst of it. There’s no point in mourning for Aske: gods are hermit crabs, and humans are the shells they wear. Even if Aske is too minor a goddess to have more than one mortal manifestation at a time, she’ll be fine. She’s already back in her personal pantheon’s version of paradise, catching her breath before she finds a new mortal shell to nestle herself inside. She’s lost a few decades of human existence, at the most. But the girl she wore on her back, the girl with the wheat-gold hair and the mild echolalia that made every conversation with her like conversing with a deeply genial parrot, that girl is gone, and Judy never bothered to learn her name.

Chang’e simply bows her head, a moment of private grief for what’s been lost.

“You can step down now,” says Professor Williams, a sharp note in her voice. Chang’e looks up again, startled. It’s not standard for them to order one another between states like this, and even Diana, who is largely accepted as the last authority among the local Lunars, isn’t normally this blunt.

Still, she pulls back and drops down, and Judy is there once again, allowing her frown free rein as she eyes the older woman. “I suppose you want me to fetch Máni before tonight’s trip to the City?”

“Not necessarily,” says Professor Williams. Judy blinks. Her confusion fades as the professor continues: “It’s your turn to see the City, isn’t it? You can check the supposed crime scene, and tell me whether you think anything’s been disturbed, before I confront him. We’re in this together, after all.” She smiles, the small, conspiratorial smile of someone who knows they’re going to get their way.

Judy didn’t survive this long in academia without learning to recognize the signs of someone preparing to take advantage of her. So she smiles conspiratorially back and says, “That sounds good to me,” and she doesn’t mean a word of it, and she’s just glad that Diana, for all her qualities, was never a goddess of the truth. She’d be in real trouble if she were.

Something’s wrong. And before she brings anyone to talk to the professor, she’s going to find out what it is.

Lacus Doloris

TIMELINE: AUGUST 17, 2017. FOUR DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

The sun is hot.

Kelpie knew the sun was hot, honest she did. She knows the alchemical properties of the sun: it’s used as a cleansing agent and is vital component in many complex workings, and of course, it’s a giant ball of plasma that hangs high in the sky above the fragile world. It couldn’t possibly be anything but hot. Still, knowing the sun is hot and knowing the sun is hot are two different things, and before just now, she only had the first one.

The sun is hot and the sun is bright, and the air smells like so many things she doesn’t recognize, and some of them she wants to know more about and some of them she doesn’t, but they’re all fascinating. The door from the lab let her out in a brick courtyard surrounded by buildings two stories tall and hugged by walkways enclosed in wrought-iron rails, rows upon rows of doors facing the spot where she stands. Most of the rails are decked with hanging plants, giving the whole place a lush, green appearance that reminds her of the private offices below, but the ceiling is so high, and so blue, and so disorienting.

It’s the sky, she knows it’s the sky, but as with the sun, knowing and knowing aren’t the same thing. This is the first time she can remember seeing the sky, meaning she’s either been underground since her accident or—increasingly likely—she’s never been outside at all, and this is the first time she’s seen the sky.

It’s vast and beautiful and terrifying. How do people go around with that sky hanging over them all the time, like a sword getting ready to fall? There are no wires up there. Anything in the sky could drop out of the sky at any moment, and there’d be no way to know it was coming down.

She’s been working on a project about the moon for the last year, but she’s never seen the moon. Somehow she always pictured it as the size it appears in pictures, as big as a quarter, something she could slip into her pocket if she needed to, small and manageable. Now, seeing how small the sun looks from here, while she can’t help feeling its immensity, the thought of trying to do anything that affects the moon is barely shy of ridiculous.

The moon is huge and celestial and untouchably far away. The alchemists she works with act like it’s a concept and a physical object at the same time, which made sense a few hours ago: change a concept, change the thing it conceptualizes. Simple, right? Sure, when you’re talking about something the size of a quarter. Not when you’re talking about something made on a scale that lets it radiate heat or light from a million miles away. No one should try to mess with the sun, or the moon. They should leave the moon alone.

At least the bright spots the sunlight left dancing in front of her eyes have started to fade; she can almost see normally at this point. She glances around, realizing just how exposed she is. She no longer knows how much of what she’s been told she can actually trust—maybe she’s a perfectly normal-looking person, outside the lab. Maybe hooves and tails and sunrise-orange skin are common things, and she’s allowed herself to feel like something’s wrong with her for no reason at all. She doesn’t think so, though. Margaret was very blunt with her about her anatomical deviations from the human norm, and even after everything, she’s inclined to believe Margaret.

They were trying to make a body that could appeal to Artemis’s Hind, and in the legends, the Hind wasn’t a human person. It was an actual deer. So maybe she should just feel lucky she has thumbs, and not fret too much about everything else she’s got.

But if Margaret was telling the truth about how not-normal she is, then the first person who sees her is going to know that something’s wrong with her, at least when they’re comparing her to a human baseline. She doesn’t so much care what strangers think about her. She cares that if they make enough of a ruckus, they could attract the attention of any Congressional representatives in the area, or even other researchers from the lab who weren’t present for the liquidation. The alkahest won’t have left any traces of what happened to Margaret. They could be naïve enough to believe Margaret is gone because she’s been reassigned, and Kelpie should be collected and taken back below.

She was there for Margaret’s dismissal. She should have died. That she didn’t—that she’s a successful, intentionally concealed construct, a cuckoo—is an affront to everything the Congress stands for. Their cleaners don’t leave evidence behind. She won’t survive an encounter with her former peers.

She looks around, half-frantic with the need to get out of the open. The buildings around her are adorned with dozens of doors, each accompanied by a large window. Thankfully, all the curtains she can see are drawn. She fishes deep in her memory for some idea of what these might be, and finds the word “apartments” to describe private living spaces larger than her own room on the dorm level (where is she going to sleep tonight? That’s a question she hasn’t dared ask before now, and one she probably should at some point). She pictures Margaret’s office replicated again and again behind those windows, each iteration occupied by its own version of her friend. Her incipient panic draws closer. All it takes is for one of those doors to open and she’ll be in more trouble than she’s ever seen in her life.

There are green things around the edges of the courtyard, including a tall, rough-barked tree and several unfamiliar bushes. She hurries to the tree, stepping behind it, hopefully hiding herself from the people who live in these apartments—and more, from the window next to the door she came out of. She hadn’t considered, as she’d been standing there gaping at the sky, that someone else could climb the same stairs she had, could emerge into the same sunlight.

But where is she supposed to go from here?

“Okay,” she says, and is soothed by the sound of her own voice, which hasn’t changed; that, at least, has managed to remain the same as she transitioned from the safe, sane, familiar world of the lab where she’s spent her entire life into this open-aired wilderness of strange windows and unknown rules. “Okay,” she says again, and relaxes, just a little.

“I need to go somewhere,” she says. “Where can I go?”