Page 19 of Tidal Creatures

Kelpie blinks at her.

“Now I know you’re a construct.”

“I don’t…”

“You look a little freaked out by the idea.”

“The lie my supervisor told the man who … who killed her, she told me that lie, too.” Kelpie hunches her shoulders, looks down at the table. There are still a few smears of sauce on the plate in front of her, but her appetite has gone. She wouldn’t have thought that was possible before this conversation started. “Until today, I really thought I was a natural person. That I was born, and grew up, and had a family waiting for me to come back when I finished working at the lab.”

“No offense, honey, but have you seen you?”

“I didn’t realize you could see me.”

“That’s fair, I suppose. Luis comes in from the yard with an orange girl, I’m not going to shout ‘put her back, she has hooves’ where he can hear me. Good to know I still have the best poker face in the neighborhood. But yes, girl, I can see you properly. You shouldn’t be walking around with your face hanging out like that. Pull it back.”

“I can’t.” Kelpie looks at her, pleadingly. “I used to beg Margaret to show me how, when she’d play the training videos about the natural manifestations. A manifest Winter can look more or less frozen, depending on how far forward their season is. And a manifest Lunar looks like a normal person unless they decide they want to look like their specific face of the moon. But she said it wasn’t possible for me to look normal, because I wasn’t representing anything but myself, and I wasn’t embodying anything but me, and this was how I look.”

She thinks, now, that Margaret was lying, or at least not telling the full truth. She’s representing Artemis’s Hind, a Lunar companion, and while she’s not a divinity in her own right, she stands for something that was never meant to exist in this world. If she can’t pull back on the parts of her that mark her as other than human, it’s because the people who made her didn’t want her to be able to. Someone made the conscious decision that she was going to be this way, all the time and always. They didn’t ask her what she thought about it.

(The idea that someone designed her, made her, makes her wish she hadn’t eaten quite so many enchiladas at dinner. How much of her did they design? Did they decide she was going to be curious and credulous, fond of asking questions and generally willing to accept the answers she was given? Did they make her like peanut butter and not honey? Is anything about her real?)

Isabella frowns. “They weren’t ever going to let you out, were they?”

Miserable, Kelpie shakes her head.

“But you’re out now. Why?”

“Margaret said when they made me, they realized I was a person, not just a vessel for them to fill with the concept they were trying to embody, and they couldn’t go through with it, so they made me a lab assistant instead of telling the people who were in charge that they’d succeeded. They wanted to keep working.” For the first time, Kelpie realizes that continuing to work meant Margaret’s team had been hoping to embody the Hind again as something they felt less attached to. That would probably have killed her. Forced aspects don’t like to be manifest more than once at a time. True Lunes can manifest in multiplicity, but the companions haven’t been seen in so long that trying to make the universe support more than one of them really wouldn’t be a good idea.

They had her working every day on her own demise, and they didn’t see anything wrong with it. They were letting her live before she died, after all. Wasn’t that good enough for her?

Up until today, up until she’d seen the sun, it had been. Now, though … now she doesn’t think she could go back below even if Margaret were somehow miraculously returned to life. Below was fine when she didn’t know any better. She knows better now.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” says Isabella. She eyes Kelpie. “You feel loyalty to those alchemists? You going to keep their secrets, go running back to them as soon as you have the chance?”

She remembers the face of the man from the Congress as he’d sentenced Margaret to death, the way he’d looked at her when he thought she was collateral damage. Kelpie shakes her head, reluctantly. “I want to, but I can’t.”

“Good. You mentioned Margaret. That the little goth girl?”

“Yeah. She liked the clubs around here. She said blowing off steam after hours helped keep her head straight, so she could manage the project during the day.”

“Mmm-hmm. She was nice, for an alchemist. Used to come up the stairs sometimes, always had a friendly word and a smile for Luis. It’s too bad they killed her. Alchemists would be less unbearable if they had more like that one. What was she doing for them?”

“They want to catch a Lunar.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used that word. You know about the Lunars?”

Kelpie nods, silently.

Isabella snorts. “It figures. They’ve been busy little bees lately. So the alchemists want to catch one. Haven’t they done enough damage in the last few years?”

“I don’t know about any damage, and I don’t think my lab did it if there was damage,” says Kelpie. “I know there was a coronation recently…”

“Mmm-hmmm. Last Summer Queen threw herself in front of a taxiing plane in order to take out her counterpart. Killed the bastard stone-cold dead. Wish I could’ve been there to see it. If there’s anyone who deserved a nasty, ignoble death from someone else’s suicide, it was William Monroe.”

“How do you know that?”

“One of my cousins worked at the airfield where the accident happened. Said it was the damnedest thing. This lady in a white sheet came out of nowhere and just walked in front of the plane like it was nothing, and they couldn’t turn in time. Flight never took off, of course, and by the time the authorities got there, Monroe was dead. Massive heart attack. They chalked it up to stress and being a general asshole, and no charges were levied against anyone. It’s the funniest thing, though.”