Page 13 of Tidal Creatures

He’s staring at her hooves, a furrow between his brows. “Those are real weird shoes,” he says. “Don’t they pinch your feet?”

Kelpie, who has caused a few arguments and one borderline brawl in the cafeteria by asking whether she has feet in the classical sense, can only shrug. “Not really,” she says.

“Oh.” Luis’s face relaxes. Now that he’s not contending with some undeniable piece of evidence that not everything is as he expects it to be, she’s normal to him again. She wonders, on some level, how he’s coping with the horns. They’re small, barely worth the name, but they’re hers, and they’re sort of hard to overlook. She’s tried.

“Come on,” he says, and waves for her to follow as he opens the door, releasing the beast’s collar and allowing it to run inside as he does. Kelpie follows, close, and is unsurprised when the beast flips around and comes running back to jump up and put its paws on her shoulder. It makes a noise, sharp and loud and very close to her ear, and she suddenly knows what it is, memory and academic knowledge combining with reality.

A dog. This is a dog. They’re real. The lab has been trying to incarnate the Man in the Moon’s beloved Dog for as long as she can remember, but unlike the Rabbit—and, apparently, the Hind—they haven’t had much success. Margaret used to say it was because people liked dogs too much, and it was hard for them to think of the creatures as components in an alchemical construct. Their personal desires got in the way of their art.

“Down, Bobby!” says Luis, and the dog stops jumping at her, sitting and staring up at her with large brown eyes, tail thumping an irregular beat across the floor.

Kelpie catches her breath. “I don’t mind,” she says, looking around the apartment.

It’s small, and she supposes it’s shabby—everything she can see has been mended at least once, including the couch, which is a mottled tan that looks like it’s been stained and scrubbed dozens of times. The carpet is several shades darker, still brown. There’s colorful art on the walls, and a blanket in a half dozen primary colors slung over the back of the couch, but everything else she sees is shades of black and brown. Bobby is as black in the light as he was outside in the shadows; Luis’s skin is a shade of brown a little darker than the carpet. His eyes and hair are black. She’s never seen anyone who looks like him. Maybe people come in more colors than she knows.

(One of the younger researchers had been slightly black-haired and black-eyed, with skin darker than the rest of them; her features didn’t align with Luis’s, and according to Margaret, she was from a research team in a place called Tokyo, assigned to their lab in order to help them better incarnate and embody the Asian Lunar divinities. Kelpie had heard her complaining about how white American alchemists tended to be, but since none of the people she could see were actually white, just different shades of peach and tan, she’d assumed it referred to some attribute that hadn’t been included in her reeducation yet, and dismissed it as unimportant.)

If people come in colors, maybe Luis hasn’t commented on her skin tone not because he can’t see it, but because there’s nothing strange about it. Although he did call her a white girl before, and she’s anything but white.

Trying to make sense of things is making her head ache. The air in the apartment smells delicious, peppers she doesn’t recognize, spices, some sort of frying meat, and it’s all she can do not to follow the smells, leaving boy and dog behind in favor of feeding her suddenly aching stomach. When did she last eat?

Lunch, probably, but she doesn’t know how long ago that was.

“Ma!” Luis turns to head deeper into the apartment, toward the source of the smell. Kelpie follows, not sure what else she’s supposed to do, and the carpet under her hooves stops, replaced by linoleum. That’s more familiar, and despite the slipperiness of the material, she immediately feels more stable, which helps as they turn a corner and another person appears.

This one is taller than Luis, with long black hair pulled into a ponytail, standing over a stove and stirring something with a wooden spoon. Luis runs to throw his arms around her waist, not seeming to care about the heat. Maybe human children are fireproof? The woman jerks slightly but doesn’t flinch or yell or pull away, just pats him semi-awkwardly on one shoulder.

“What have I told you about surprising me at the stove?” she asks.

“Don’t,” he says. “That’s why I didn’t. I yelled first.”

She laughs and says something in a language Kelpie doesn’t know, and Luis lets her go, stepping away. “I brought a friend home,” he says. “Can she stay for dinner?”

The woman pauses, turns. She’s even darker than Luis, and her shirt is a bright red that Kelpie can’t help but interpret as meaning “danger.” Kelpie takes a half-step back, forcing herself to smile. Not everyone is going to be her enemy. Margaret wouldn’t have sent her this way if everyone was going to be her enemy.

“Hi,” she says, hesitantly. “I’m Kelpie. Luis found me in the yard. Whatever you’re cooking smells amazing.”

“Dirty rice to go with the enchiladas,” says the woman, still eyeing Kelpie.

“Why is it dirty? Should we eat it if it’s dirty?”

“We just call it dirty because of the color it turns when it’s cooked,” says the woman. “Luis found you in the yard? Really?”

“I, um, fell asleep under one of the trees.”

“So my son brought you home for dinner, yes, that makes total sense, and isn’t ridiculous at all,” says the woman. She turns back to her rice. “Why were you under our trees?”

“I ran away.”

“From home?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

The woman glances back again. Her eyes are very sharp. Kelpie feels like she’s being seen, every inch of her, all her oddities, all her impossibilities. But if that’s somehow the case, this woman doesn’t seem to care about the parts of her that are other than precisely human, because she’s more focused on her rice as she starts talking again.

“Can you go back there?”

The thought conjures the image of Margaret with her eyes closed, tears that aren’t tears rolling down her cheeks, and Kelpie isn’t hungry anymore. Hard to be hungry when she feels this sick to her stomach. “No,” she says. “I don’t think I can.”