Page 115 of Tidal Creatures

“One missing Moon does nothing to harm the City,” says Diana. “It might have once, when each of us was unique in the night. Now, there are a hundred Chang’es scattered around the world like stars in the sky, a thousand Dianas, and one of us missing changes nothing. We just need to show up so that one missing doesn’t turn into a dozen missing, or any other number that might dim the light that shines upon the City. We’re less essential on our own than you would make us out to be.”

“Tell yourself that if it makes you feel less like a traitor,” says Artemis. She reaches into the air like she’s grabbing at a flying insect, and for a moment, she’s holding the shadowy outline of a hunting bow. Then her fingers pass through it and ball into a fist, and the bow is gone. She looks, bewildered, at the place where it briefly was.

Diana laughs.

“You can’t draw your weapons during the day, little huntress, or did no one teach you the rules of your position before they sent you to challenge me? You’re powerless here, while I, on the other hand, am in my own domain.”

“You’re as tied to the moon as the rest of us,” snaps Chang’e.

“True. But I’m a tenured professor in my own office, and you’re a bunch of students threatening me for no reason.” Diana’s smile is thin and cold and does not reach her eyes. “I would run, if I were you.”

Chang’e shakes her head. “I respected you,” she says. “I thought you must be the best of us, to have held your position for so long.”

“The best, or the most trapped,” says Diana. “There’s no promotion from ‘goddess of the moon’, Chang’e, no way to move up in the department. You get chosen, and that’s your tenure, and then you’re stuck doing the same thing over and over again until you die. I was going to be a great artist, once. I was going to change the world with my brilliance. And what am I now? A middle-aged art teacher trying to make people understand that I’m more than just an easy A in a discipline that matters so much more than they want to believe it does. The Moon isn’t our friend. It’s our abuser. It lures us in when we’re young and innocent, and it uses us up, and it never knows our names. The City doesn’t need us. The City just needs something to shine. We’re an affectation at best, an infection at worst. It’s long past time something changed the system. You can’t blame me for seeking a better way, can you?”

“I can blame you for Aske,” says Máni, voice cold and thick with fury. Chang’e hears David in his voice, god and man united in their anger. “She had nothing to do with anything you think you’ve been burdened with. She was young and kind and eager to see what kind of life she was going to have, and you took that away from her!”

“I did nothing of the sort,” says Diana.

Artemis looks at her coldly. “We were in her everything. We saw what you did. We know you’re working with the alchemists, and we know you killed her.”

Her voice is steady, her words clear. She may be exaggerating how absolute their evidence is, but she’s doing it well.

Diana doesn’t recoil. She does, however, sink deeper in her chair. “Do you have any idea what you’re risking?” she asks. “How dangerous this is?”

“Not unless you tell us,” says Chang’e.

“I was supposed to be a famous artist,” says Diana. “I was supposed to reimagine the world. When I was called to serve the City, I thought, well, this might slow me down for a little while, but it’ll be something new for me to bring to my art—something innovative. I went willingly and with joy, and when it became clear that I wouldn’t dream anymore, wouldn’t find the inspiration I needed to be truly great—and you can’t sell paintings of the City, people just assume you’re trying to be a children’s-book illustrator, they don’t take you seriously. Well, then, I thought I might as well make the best of it. I had technique if I didn’t have inspiration, and so I started teaching, and I suppose I liked it well enough, at first. I met a man who taught history, and we were happy, he and I, for a very long time. I told him, eventually, what I was, why my clock never changed while his rolled around the wheel of hours, and once he believed me, I started bringing him peaches, so he could stay with me.”

Chang’e recoils. “That’s … You know that isn’t…”

“You’re young, you have a lifetime of mistakes ahead of you, you have no idea how malleable the rules become when following them would mean sitting back and watching the people you care about suffer. You say we serve the City. Well, when has the City ever served us in return? We cross its sky nightly, but it gives us nothing. We wouldn’t even have immortality if not for your damn peach trees, and when there’s no Chang’e to be found, we sicken and age like anyone else. It’s an unfair system. You can’t blame me for wanting out of it.”

“And that justifies bludgeoning a student to death where her parents will never be able to know what happened to her?” demands Máni. “Lying to us, working with alchemists?”

“Oh, you think you know everything, don’t you?” asks Diana, her own tone mild. “Well, then I suppose there’s not much left for me to say. You could call campus security, but there’s no way you can prove I did anything, since it didn’t happen in this reality. Or you could call the police—oh, same issue. What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to stop your friends,” says Artemis.

“Good luck with that,” says Diana, and reaches for a notebook on her desk, apparently dismissing them. Chang’e frowns, then turns to the door, which closed behind Máni when he came into the office. She gestures for him and Artemis to follow her, moving to exit.

When she opens the door, the man from the lab is right outside, an unnervingly calm smile on his face. She stumbles back, knocking into Artemis, who steadies her before she can fall.

“You really should have listened when I told you to run,” says Diana.

Lacus Bonitatis

TIMELINE: AUGUST 19, 2017. TWO DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

Kelpie isn’t tired.

She ought to be—she didn’t sleep while they were waiting for Artemis to take her trip across the City sky, and even if she had, they’d been running around for a while before that. Adrenaline is exhausting under normal circumstances. She should be tired—but she’s not. She feels fine.

That’s a problem, because everyone else is asleep, even Erin. The amount of time she and the siblings spent dozing in the everything doesn’t seem to have been enough to prepare them for the day, and all three went to their rooms to collapse after the Lunars left. Except for an ancient orange cat that strolled into the kitchen, creaked at her several times in apparent expectation of breakfast, and then left in disgust when Kelpie failed to feed it, she’s the only thing awake in the whole house.

She’s not sure she’s ever been this bored in her life.

Boredom is a relatively new discovery. She never had much time for it in the lab, where she was continually needed for one task or another. Margaret had likely been trying to run her too hard for her to realize how many holes there were in the story of her situation. And after leaving the lab, of course, everything had been new and terrifying, overwhelming in ways she didn’t have the experience to understand and easily deal with. So this is the first opportunity she’s had for boredom, really, and while it hasn’t been that long, she’s already pretty sure she doesn’t like it.