Page 110 of Tidal Creatures

“Diana,” says Chang’e, slowly and with dawning horror.

Máni frowns at her. “But Diana doesn’t cross the sky very often.”

“She said she wanted to go the night before the eclipse, to remind herself why it was so important,” she says. “Diana put herself down for the next crossing.”

“Meaning I, in my guise as Losna—a minor moon goddess with no allies and no real protection—would be meeting her alone with a key in my hand and no witnesses.” Artemis gives a small, hard shake of her head. “Nope. That’s a trap. I know how to recognize a trap when I see it, and that’s a trap right there. I was supposed to walk into it without hesitation.”

“Diana gets the key from ‘Losna,’ douses it in Aske’s blood, and gives it to the alchemists.” Chang’e frowns at Kelpie. “But you’re not quite right.”

“I’m orange and I have hooves,” says Kelpie. “How am I even remotely right?”

“No, I mean you’re not a synthetic Lunar in the sense they’d need. You’re imprinted with Artemis’s Hind. They’d want to use something completely empty.”

“Margaret had a project in a locked room,” says Kelpie slowly. “She was building the ideal human body, she said, and if we couldn’t figure out how to fix the damage my accident had done, she’d see about transferring me into it. At the time, that sounded like the nicest thing anyone had ever offered to do for me. Now I’m wondering what parts of me would have been left out.”

“Take an empty vessel, infuse it with just enough bottled moonlight and symbolic folklore to attract the universe’s attention, and pump it full of stolen Lunar blood,” says Dodger grimly. “Or hell, if the body didn’t make it out of the lab for some reason, do it with an auf. All you’d need to do is empty it out a bit more than they normally do before they wake the nasty little fuckers up.”

“So Kelpie’s a Plan B, not a component of Plan A?” asks Artemis.

Dodger nods. Artemis does as well, looking fiercely grateful.

“Good,” she says. “I don’t want her back in the line of fire unless she insists—and if she insists, I’m still going to argue. Someone deserves to get through all of this unharmed. Even if it’s not necessarily going to be one of us.”

“Artemis…” says Kelpie.

“You may not be mine. I know you don’t want to feel like you belong to anyone. But you were made for me, and everything I am tells me to protect you, even from your makers.”

“You really think this Diana lady’s crooked?” asks Erin.

Artemis nods. “I’ve had my suspicions for a long time. I wasn’t kidding when I said that Artemises don’t come around Berkeley, because your Diana is territorial. And we talk. Just like every other flavor of Lunar, we talk.”

“Do we confront her?” asks Chang’e. “Or do we wait for tonight, and then see who shows up at the gate?”

“If they open a channel into Aske’s everything, they’re going to die,” says Dodger. “It’s not there anymore, and now that the universe knows it’s gone, it won’t take kindly to someone trying to play that kind of trick on it.”

“Right, so we don’t let them go through.”

“Or maybe we do, and this becomes a self-solving problem.”

Chang’e stares at Dodger for a moment. “That’s horrible.”

“That’s practical. I’d rather be a little horrible and alive than untarnished and dead. But hey. You do you, I guess.”

“All right,” says Artemis. “Let’s not fight. Here’s what I say we do: we get out of here.”

“At last someone’s talking sense,” says Dodger.

“We all go home, and we go about our normal business, we don’t let on that anything’s out of the ordinary—we don’t spy on Diana, or avoid her if we would normally see her around campus, or anything ridiculous like that. And then, come moonrise, I go to the clocktower, assuming the gate is back where it belongs, and I wait to see who shows up. If it’s Diana alone, we’re good. If it’s Diana and the alchemists—which sounds like a rival band from Scooby-Doo—then she and I settle this like alpha goddesses.”

“Meaning?”

“I pull her hair, kick her in the tits, and run like fuck,” says Artemis. “I’m in pretty good shape; she’s an art professor. I can outrun her.”

“And I’ll be there, which gives you a power boost,” says Kelpie.

Artemis looks at her, mouth opening like she’s about to object, and stops as she sees the look on Kelpie’s face, which is sternly determined, a deep line between her eyebrows as she scowls.

“You’ll be there,” she agrees. “I’ll be happier with backup.”