Page 16 of Tidal Creatures

She can feel it, a hum under her skin, a thrilling frisson that calls her to walk faster, to hurry toward the moment when she can look out upon the glory of forever. It always seems to want her in this moment, to need her to answer it—her and only her. No other divinity will do. Even her mortal passenger is barely a distraction from the singing of the City.

But Judy is a distraction and the reason that, out of all the gods still standing, the Lunars are the ones who get this glorious duty as their own. There are Solar gods as well, she knows; she’s encountered them across the centuries, big, bold, brave heroes, ready to fight the sky itself for the opportunity to shine above the City. The sun crosses the sky even as the moon does, and so the incarnate Sun is allowed a certain measure of access, even as the incarnate Moon must be. But they’ve never seemed the most pleasant or harmonious of people, these bright, shining scions of the sun, and she doesn’t know what sort of systems they have in place, beyond the same cycle of manifestation and incarnation as the Lunars, every god combined with a mortal, someone who keeps them from surrendering entirely to the City’s song.

Gods who can’t anchor themselves to the material world can’t come this close to the City, or they’d be lost to it. They wouldn’t be able to resist. So she clings to Judy, her little distraction, her beloved other half, and walks farther and farther from the gate, closer and closer to the City, not rushing the moment, not hurrying toward her duty. She watches for signs of blood as she walks. She finds nothing of the sort.

Then, ahead of her in the everything, the window appears. It is a simple thing, a double window in a plain white frame, with a little latch meant to be opened by a single swipe of the thumb and a strong lip to make it easier to open. The first time this iteration of Chang’e walked along the corridor to the window, she lost her manifestation and fell back down as Judy came surging forth and started to cry, hands over her face, tears on her cheeks and snot running from her nose.

This window no longer exists outside the everything. It was the window of Judy’s childhood room, the one that opened so easily when the fire started and she had to find a way outside. She’d woken up to the smell of smoke and fled before she could ask herself whether anyone else was awake, and even the firemen telling her later that it had been too late for them by the time she woke up had never been enough to ease her guilt over being the only one to make it out, the only one to have the time to run.

She wouldn’t have had that if she’d been any younger. But she’d been sixteen, and the moon had been whispering to her for the better part of six months, transforming her into a light sleeper. A year before, Judy had slept like the dead, and she would have joined them, suffocating alongside the rest of her family. Instead, she’d woken up and made herself an orphan, and would never fully forgive herself for grabbing her notebooks and her laptop before she slipped outside, rather than screaming for her parents.

(It really wouldn’t have done any good. Chang’e has spoken to other Lunars, has asked those who were nearby what they’d seen by moonlight; Judy’s parents were dead before she woke up, suffocated in their beds by the absence of the air. Judy couldn’t have saved them. She could only have lost herself. But such cruel logic is the province of the divine.)

The window was destroyed in the fire, and the window is here, and its appearance is part of why every Lunar makes this journey alone, aside from their eternal passenger. If one of the others were here with her, the window would try to conform to both of them at the same time, becoming the best-beloved window either of them had known during their current mortal incarnation. Some of those hybrid windows can’t be opened. Some of them have no latches, or too many latches, or warped frames. It’s better to come alone, even though none of them are ever truly alone, and to walk in their inherent contradiction to the point of connection.

Chang’e stops, catches her breath, and tries to sink deeper into the moment, to absorb it all the way to her core. There is nothing to show that Aske died here, no stain on the ground or blood spray on the window frame; the air smells as sweet and purified as ever, the atmospheric equivalent of those untouched mountain springs that have existed for millennia in secret, only to be found and pumped dry by some corporation eager to monetize the basic building blocks of life. No one’s ever going to bottle this air. No one gets to breathe it unless they make it this far.

And even this is nothing compared to what waits on the other side of the window. Chang’e approaches, reverent, even as Judy finally releases her anxious hold and sinks down to where she belongs. It’s dangerous for the human side of a god to be too ascendant when the window opens. The air in the everything is sweet and pure, but it’s not addictive. The City air, on the other hand …

The City air is everything. Persephone’s pomegranate seeds and the sweet allure of the fruit from the Goblin Market are pale imitations of the smallest whiff of City air. Chang’e can’t imagine what it would be like to descend to the level of the streets, to eat the food or drink the water. Some nights it’s so hard to stop shining that she thinks it would become impossible after a sip of City water. The heart only mourns what it knows to be true.

“Are you ready?” she asks aloud, and deep within her heart, she feels Judy give her answer, feels her assent. Aske is gone, and her dying left no trace; now is the time for them to shine. Chang’e steps forward, opening the window. Cool night air rushes through, clean and clear and intoxicating and

And

And

And everything is silver-bright and mercury burn, the color of moonlight on the water, the color of the City lights, the color of everything. The color of nothing.

Chang’e blinks and she’s in the everything once again, her fingers resting on the window latch, ready to flip it closed. There are silver smudges on the heels of her hands, moondust etched upon her skin, and the inside of her mouth tastes like peaches. She reaches into herself until she brushes against Judy, who stirs and stretches, rising from a deep and dreamless sleep. She doesn’t have a watch, and Judy’s phone doesn’t get reception in the everything, not even to keep the time, but she can tell it’s been hours, and not only by the aching in her legs, which burn pleasantly with the aftermath of a long walk. She’s been traveling that whole missing time, pushing back against the treacle-thick air of the high lunar roads, making her way across the sky above the City.

Now the moon is setting, and the Moon is allowed to rest. She shakes, reminding herself what it is to wear a skin, to have a body, to be a single concrete form and not an abstract idea projected onto something that will never truly know or care what people think of it. Judy rises up, not all the way but enough that she becomes they once again, plural and peaceful.

She begins to walk down the corridor, idly sucking the moondust from her fingers as she goes. It tastes, as it always does, of peaches. She’s wondered, on occasion, what the other Lunars taste, the ones whose personal versions of the Moon surge with seas or grow green with grass, not a peach orchard in sight. She’s never asked. Some things are too personal to speak aloud.

There is no blood on the ground, no sign that someone died here. Chang’e stops. Maybe because no one did. The Lunars walk the everything alone to avoid confusing the window, which would try to conform to more than one of them at the same time. Who’s to say the whole of the everything isn’t so malleable, or that they walk the same everything at all? Perhaps it’s like an anthill, hundreds of routes to the City, all slightly different. She’s always assumed there was only one window, that it changes shapes each night. What if that’s not the case?

What if they each have their own window, their own path?

The thought is simple but staggering. If there are multiple paths through the everything, this isn’t where Aske died. This is another route entirely. It explains why there’s no sign of what happened, and why her body is missing. But it doesn’t explain how Máni was able to find her, or even how he was able to be on the same path through the everything.

She frowns and starts walking again, trying to work her way through the impossible logic of it all. If they each have their own path, then she’ll never see any signs of the murder. But that could mean Diana’s right and Máni knows more than he’s letting on.

The journey back is always faster than the journey out, the City glad to see them gone once they no longer have a task to perform. It isn’t long before Chang’e sees the gate ahead of her, an opening onto another, more concrete world, one where symbols and ideas need flesh if they’re going to walk among the mortal men. One where a woman can also be the Moon but the Moon can’t also be a woman. She slows, thoughtful.

The view through the gate is still indistinct and cloudy, like she’s looking through a thick pane of distorting glass. Lights flicker on the other side as cars pass in the dark beyond the campus, and there’s a blurred shape she assumes is Losna. She starts moving again, and the shape becomes a little easier to see, although still indistinct. Yes. Losna. The other goddess is stepped down, attention on something in her hands, ignoring the actively flickering gate.

Chang’e stops, clearing her throat. Losna looks up, and a moment later, becomes suddenly crystal clear and crisp, the air around her glittering silver-blue as she steps up into divinity, leaving whatever had her distracted behind. She stuffs the object she was holding—her phone—into her pocket, and steps toward the gate.

“Have a good night?” she asks.

“I did,” says Chang’e, distracted by Judy murmuring at the back of her head. She frowns, trying to understand, then says, “I’m sorry, forgive me a moment,” and does the unthinkable.

She steps down inside the everything.

Not all the way down. Even if she could do that—even if she could step down so completely that she pulled herself from her host, dug herself out by the roots and left Judy alone in the rainbow corridor to eternity—she wouldn’t, because no one knows what would happen to a normal human left in the everything. It’s never happened. Not in all Chang’e’s long, long memory. But she can pull back to such a point that Judy is essentially alone, mortal and breakable, abandoned in the everything.

Judy catches her breath, looking at the dying rainbows around her with wide eyes. They seem brighter than they did just a moment ago, like living things. They were warm before, gentle and welcoming, and now they’re aggressively vivid, lights that never meant to shine for her. Sharing her body with a goddess is something she’s had plenty of time to get used to, and most of the time, she can fool herself into thinking it doesn’t matter which one of them is at the front; they’re the same person, after all. Looking around at the vivid entropy of the everything disabuses her of that notion so completely that she may never get it back.