Page 12 of Tidal Creatures

If she stays here long enough, the sun will go down. She knows that, knows days don’t last forever, knows they measure time the same way above and below the surface. Once the sun sets, her skin won’t be as noticeable, and the rest of her little oddities might be dismissible as tricks of light and shadow. She shrinks deeper into the shade under the tree, trying to think of other things that might help her situation.

All right. Accept that Margaret was telling the truth. Horrible as it is to think, she’s a cuckoo, not a natural-born human at all. She’s an empty vessel, created through alchemical means to embody a concept that may or may not have any real interest in occupying a physical form. Or maybe it does want a physical form but not hers—she has thumbs, after all, and hands, and lips. She’s more human than cervine, and it’s possible the deer she was created to embody won’t want anything to do with her. Either way, right now she’s herself.

And “herself” is a construct, meaning she’s almost purely alchemical in nature. That’s good. Alchemy doesn’t exist in the eyes of most people, not anymore. People outside the alchemical world often look right past the signs of it, unable to understand or accept what they’re seeing. If she was what she’d always believed herself to be, she’d look horribly twisted away from what a person is supposed to be. If she is what Margaret says she is, she may not look like anything at all. The people who don’t already know about the alchemical just … won’t see her.

Either way, she’s not going to risk anything more until the sun goes down. She leans against the tree, wrapping her arms around herself. It’s a warm day, but she’s shivering. Why is she shivering? Shivering is a response to cold.

Or to shock.

Her supervisor and friend is dead. She isn’t what she thought she was, and she’s going to have to live with that; even if the Congress catches her and takes her back without slaughtering her on the spot, she’s going to have to live with the fact that she was made, not born, and everything she knows about her past was a fabrication. She wonders if Margaret was the one who wrote her supposed “history,” who named her parents and her cousins and told her they were waiting for her in Florida, in a house overlooking the swamp. It’s weird to mourn people who never existed, but she does. They were always abstract concepts to her, people she might never see again, depending on whether they were able to repair the damage done by the accident, but she’d been told she loved them, and so she has loved them for her entire life. Finding out they were never there to love her back feels like losing them.

She’s in shock. She’s been through a lot today. She needs a glass of water, or a hug, or somewhere she can sit and breathe and not be afraid. She doesn’t have any of those things, and so she sinks slowly to the ground, letting the back of her head rest against the tree as she closes her eyes. She can’t imagine falling asleep in this strange place, surrounded by these strange new scents and sounds, with no idea whether or not the man from the Congress is going to come up and find her at any moment. She’s not worried about it, because there’s no chance it’s going to happen. No chance at all.

Silent and still trembling, Kelpie slides into sleep, and the hours pass around her, one into the next, handing down the chain of the day one link at a time.

It’s not one specific thing that wakes her. It’s everything put together—the change in the light, which has grown dim yet not truly dark, thanks to municipal and residential lights; the change in the air, which has cooled, dropping to a less-balmy temperature, although it’s not quite cool enough to have become uncomfortable; the change in the ambient noise. Doors are starting to open and close nearby as people return to the apartments they left behind that morning. Her eyes are fluttering open when something cold jams into her half-curled hand, and she sits bolt upright with a squeak and a gasp.

A large, black-furred creature with a waving tail is sniffing her hand with curious intensity. Kelpie starts to pull away, and the creature licks her fingers, tongue soft and warm and painless. She squeaks again, and a gangly pre-teen boy rushes over.

“I’m sorry, miss!” he says, grabbing for the creature’s neck. It’s wearing a brown leather collar, she sees, almost invisible against its fur. “I didn’t expect anyone to be sleeping here. You shouldn’t be, you know. Apartment manager will be pissed if he catches you, and he enjoys calling the cops on people he thinks are loitering.”

“I’m sorry,” says Kelpie. She pushes herself to her feet. Her rump is numb from the position she fell asleep in, and there’s a crick in her neck. She’s fallen asleep at her desk before, but mostly she sleeps in a specially designed bed, one that accounts for the fact that she’s a biped with a tail that doesn’t like to be compressed against things for long periods of time. Oh, it’s going to hurt when the blood flow to her ass returns to normal.

Not that it’s going to matter if she’s been fed to the creature that’s currently straining to get to her. She presses her back against the tree, unable to retreat any farther, not sure where she would go if she could.

The boy smiles, genial and unafraid. “I don’t mind so much. I used to fall asleep out here when I was a kid, ’til Dad said it wasn’t safe to sleep so near the street.”

Kelpie hasn’t seen a street since she came aboveground—which means she hasn’t seen a street probably ever in her life, and that’s unnerving to think. How many concepts does she have in her head that are actually entirely new to her? And how many things is she missing? From the way the boy holds the beast, she can tell this is an ordinary creature, something she’s expected to recognize and know, something she shouldn’t be afraid of. That’s good. That both probably means it’s not going to eat her, and tells her not to ask what it is. If he hasn’t noticed anything strange about her yet, better to wait and see if he does.

Then his expression sharpens, and he looks at her more closely. “I fell asleep here ’cause I live here. My family’s lived here most of my whole life. You don’t live here. I’d remember a white girl moving into the complex. Why are you sleeping here?”

He’s younger than she assumed at first, twelve at most and tall for his age; her eyes were tricked by the shadows and by the fact that she’s never actually seen a young person before, just read about them in books, which generally focused more on the reasons it was sometimes important to take a young person apart than the ways to identify them when you meet them. She doesn’t want to take anyone apart. Especially not this friendly boy with his strange beast, which is still trying to reach her. Neither of them seems hostile. She probably shouldn’t be hostile either.

“I ran away,” she says, more bluntly than she intends to. “The people I’ve been living with, they … aren’t very nice people, and the nicest of them warned me that they were probably going to do something really bad to me soon. So I ran away.”

The boy blinks, eyes going wide. “Are they your family?”

“No. Not really.”

“Where is your family?”

Kelpie pauses. “I don’t know.” Artemis is probably the closest thing she has to a family now, but she’s never met her, and she doesn’t know where she is. Where do moon goddesses spend their time? Finally, she just shrugs. “I’m not sure I have one.”

“That’s awful. I’m Luis. Do you want to come home with me? You can meet my mom. She always knows what to do.”

Kelpie hesitates. The boy doesn’t seem to see anything strange about her, and that both raises her hopes and breaks her heart. Margaret was telling the truth; people who aren’t at least a little bit connected to the alchemical world will look at her and see someone entirely unremarkable. They won’t even be able to describe her once she’s out of sight. But that means no one’s going to miss or mourn her, and she’s not a part of the world, not really. She didn’t manifest naturally: someone made her, built her like the science project she is. There’s no family in Florida wondering if she’s all right. There’s no one left in the world who’ll miss her if she disappears.

“Sure,” she says, finally. “Are you sure your mom won’t mind?”

“I bring home people for dinner all the time,” he says, with the airy ease of someone who knows the world is a dangerous place, but has never actually faced that danger up close and personal, or else has seen that danger from a different angle than she has, one where it takes the form of things other than runaway girls in the flowerbeds. “She’s used to it. Dad might mind, but he won’t be home for hours. Come on.”

He waves for her to follow as he begins dragging his beast toward one of the doors. It’s on the opposite side of the courtyard from the door to the lab, and so she follows, unsteady on her hooves in the grass, half-afraid of what she’s agreed to, and half-exhilarated at the thought of interacting with real people, in the real world. Every step she takes is one step farther from the lab. Experience is its own alchemical agent, and it transforms the people it touches.

Thank you, Margaret, she thinks, and lets Luis lead her to the door, which looks just like every other door around it. Lush green plants in colorful pots hang from the balcony rail and sit on the air-conditioning unit; there’s a red-and-yellow doormat outside.

“We have to wipe our feet before we can go in,” he says, doing exactly that. His beast doesn’t, too occupied with pulling against its collar, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

It seems like a pointless ritual action, wiping their feet if the creature is just going to track whatever covers its paws inside anyway, but Kelpie steps obligingly onto the mat, wiping the dirt and grass shards from her hooves. A surprising amount of mud caked there in the short time she spent wandering around the yard; it comes off in dark streaks, and she looks to Luis for approval.