Page 112 of Tidal Creatures

“You are. You just can’t do it yet.” He offers her his hand. “At least now we know we’ll have company.”

“Yeah, maybe you can ask your new girlfriend to drop care packages every time she’s the one up in the sky.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he demurs.

Dodger laughs and prods him with her elbow. “She’s going to be. I know the signs, and I know you’ve been lonely. She can’t keep up with you, but no one can, not even me, and she’s about as close as it’s going to get. Preternaturally empowered linguist who also happens to be a part-time god? That’s your type. Even if you didn’t know it two days ago, that’s your type. You nerd.”

“I nerd, you also nerd,” he says, reaching out to take her hand and pull her with him out of the everything. She doesn’t protest, although she glances back at the lines of rainbow light with longing in her eyes, watching them until she’s on the other side of the gate and they vanish, lost in the blackness and the blur.

Roger lets go of her hand. She turns with a sigh to the gathered Lunars and Erin, who are watching her with varying degrees of wariness.

The whole night has slipped away while they were in the everything, leaving them standing in the last vestiges of darkness before the sunrise. Dodger wasn’t kidding about time moving differently in there; what felt like three or four hours has proven to be at least eight, maybe more, and the lights in the house are still on. Smita and the teens must have stayed awake, waiting for them to come home, unable to sleep when they didn’t.

“How did you do that?” asks Artemis, and then: “Can you do it again?”

“I negotiated with the possibilities until they agreed it was possible they might have placed the gate on the back fence,” she says. “Not the easiest conversation I’ve ever had, but not the hardest, either. It was easier because someone else had already done it. The gate was supposed to be on campus last night.”

All of them turn then, looking at the fence where the gate is anchored, standing open and barely visible in the watery pre-dawn light. It will vanish soon enough, whether or not it’s formally closed. Artemis pushes past the rest of the group, remarkably careful not to knock any of them into the thorns, and taps her key against the frame.

The gate spirals inward on itself and is gone, leaving only the fence behind. She looks over her shoulder at Dodger. “What do you mean, someone had already done it?”

“I mean, someone convinced the gate to show up in the lab, underground, rather than where it wanted to be. It’ll be back on campus tonight.”

“Who could have done that?”

“Is Hecate in town?” asks Artemis.

“Not unless she snuck in the same way you did,” says Chang’e. The glitter in the air around all three of the properly divine Lunars is more apparent in the small, dark hours of morning, haloing their heads in sparkling light.

“Hecate isn’t a sneaker,” says Artemis. “You’d know.”

“Who else does doors?” asks Máni.

“Diana is also the goddess of crossroads and passage to the underworld,” says Erin, in an aggravated tone. “With the way you go on about people using their other aspects, could the Diana you’ve all been worried about have done it somehow?”

“If we call the bottom of a ladder into a secret alchemical laboratory ‘the underworld,’ I suppose we could, sure,” says Artemis. “She would have needed to know where the gate was intended to be.”

Chang’e shrugs. “I do the divinations at the start of the moon cycle every month, and then I make a shared calendar. Diana has access.”

“A shared calendar,” says Artemis.

Chang’e nods.

“The modern world has brought us nothing worth preserving,” says Artemis.

Kelpie snorts as she laughs.

“I need coffee,” announces Roger, starting for the house. The others follow, since none of them has a better idea. Dodger, who seems to want coffee even more than her brother, trots ahead of him. She’s the first one up the stairs, the first into the kitchen, where Smita has fallen asleep at the dining room table, where she stops and turns to motion the others to be quiet as they follow her inside.

“Smita,” says Erin. “We’re home.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” says Smita, sitting up without opening her eyes. She stands, motion jerky and stiff from hours spent dozing in a hard wooden chair. “I’m going to bed,” she announces, and stumps out of the room, finding her way by muscle memory alone.

Roger smiles as he shakes his head. “They worry about us.”

“Of course they do,” says Dodger. “If we die and the Doctrine doesn’t immediately pass to Kim and Tim, they’re homeless. This house mostly exists because I’ve convinced it that it doesn’t have a choice in the matter. If we go poof and the Doctrine isn’t right at hand to maintain my equations, the house as it currently is goes poof with us.”

“Leaving…?” asks Kelpie.

“A one-bedroom with mold stains on the ceiling that hadn’t been given basic maintenance in roughly fifty years,” says Dodger. “Really, it’s best if we don’t die.”

“Back to Diana, please,” says Chang’e. “Do we honestly think she could have moved the gate?”

“We do,” says Artemis. “Before we had the tools to chart where the gates would appear, and in the absence of anyone as damned useful as my Hind apparently is, the gates were set by Diana. She’d tell them where to open, and they’d anchor there, so that whoever was going to make the passage could open them at their leisure. She would need an old rite to move a gate, the sort of thing most people don’t know about or use anymore, but she could do it.”

“The sort of thing an alchemist might have in their files?” asks Erin. The others look at her. “We know the alchemists are behind this, because the evidence says so, and their history confirms it. The alchemists are behind basically everything when you dig deep enough. Say they needed to get a Diana on their side, and figured out what would get around her defenses. They come in with proof that she would have been a lot more powerful once, and they’ve got her. I guess.” She pauses, then, frowning deeply. “What the hell does this Diana of yours even want, anyway?”

“That’s what we’re about to go find out,” says Chang’e, looking toward Máni and Artemis. “Kelpie, you might want to stay here for now. If she’s working with the alchemists, we don’t want to let her know you’ve found us.”

“I don’t like you going off without me, but you’re right,” says Kelpie. “I’ll stay here and make sure Isabella and Luis are okay when they get up. Be careful.”

“Careful is for people less awesome than we are,” says Artemis. “We’ll be fine.”

As she and the other Lunars leave Kelpie and the other alchemical constructs behind, Kelpie wonders if Artemis even knows how boldly she was lying just there.

They may not, in fact, be fine.