Page 27 of Tidal Creatures

“That has to be confusing,” says Judy. She’s thought before about how nice it would be to have another Chang’e around, someone else who can tend the peaches, someone who understands her when she talks about the wind blowing through the orchards of immortality. She’s never been to the moon herself, knows it’s a lifeless chunk of rock floating in the void, but when she does sleep, she dreams Chang’e’s Moon, which is lush and green and inviting, and home in a way no place in this world has been since the house in New Jersey burned down. She touches that Moon on her nights above the City, and she thinks she’d be willing to give up on her dreams of linguistic and academic success if it somehow meant she could stay there permanently.

What would it be like to be around someone else who knows that Moon? Someone who is, effectively, the same person as half of her but a stranger to the other half? It would be like a human centipede of the soul, and she’s not sure that’s something she wants to deal with, much less experience.

Anna shrugs. “Not as confusing as you might think. They always get along, anyway. Hard to really fight with someone who has a piece of you inside their head. Anyway, we have two Tsukuyomis in Denver right now, and they’re both fine, even though another one of them just died in Austin three weeks ago. Bike accident. He was on his way to the gate to take his turn at crossing the sky. I heard about it because their Artemis was complaining afterward. She had to scramble to find someone who could fill in for him—she’d done the night before, and so she couldn’t do it.”

“Oh.”

“I was already on my way here by then, which is why I was around to meet you on the last full moon, even if you were too distracted to pay attention to me.”

“I’m sorry, I still don’t remember you.”

“Which is a genuine tragedy, or would be if we weren’t in the sort of situation that makes flirting a little bit inappropriate.” Anna sobers. “Look, it’s like this. Every time one of us dies, the alchemists get all hyper for a few days, like they’re working on something. I’m afraid they’re involved with whatever’s going on.”

“So you came here undercover, pretending to be a minor Lunar who fits the profile for the victims, without telling our Diana who you were in case she got territorial, in hopes that what, you’ll get murdered next?” Judy snorts. “Not a great plan there, sport.”

“You have a better one?”

“Yeah. You just said you have two Tsukuyomis in Denver. We call and ask them to conduct our little test with the everything tomorrow morning, and then we’ll know whether another Aske would let us retrieve our poor dead goddess. If we can get to her body, maybe we can learn more about what killed her.” Judy spins her peach pit between her fingers, thoughtfully. “If someone’s out there hunting Lunars, we should know about it. And what good would that do? Are we even useful to alchemists?”

“They have whole recipes built around harvesting ‘materials’ from the people they’ve had killed,” says Anna, with exaggerated finger quotes to make her message excruciatingly clear. “They can get different metaphysical qualities out of corpses, depending on how they died. A really gruesome murder can give them all sorts of lovely toys.”

Judy pauses, then scoots a little bit away from Anna, putting more of the damp table between them. Anna raises her eyebrows, questioning wordlessly.

“Sorry,” says Judy. “It’s just that you’re a stranger who started out by lying to me, and who knows way too much about alchemical graverobbing to be a comfortable conversation partner.”

“Ah, yeah. I can see where this might look bad,” says Anna. “If you know any Lunars in the Denver area, they can vouch for me? Or I can give you the number for our Chang’e, and you can call her directly. I’m not sure she can lie to you. I’ve never seen a manifestation try to lie to another aspect of themselves. I feel like heads might explode if the effort were sincerely made.”

“I don’t really feel like exploding any heads,” says Judy, and slides off the table. “Diana’s going to find out eventually, you know. Especially if your Tsukuyomis can help us recover Aske’s body.” She’s starting to feel bad, consistently referring to the dead woman by the name of the divinity that inhabited her. She needs to find out what her mortal name was, what the name of the grieving family was. They may never know their daughter died, may mark her down as one of the missing and spend the next twenty years hoping she’ll come home, but at least Judy will know. At least Judy will be able to mourn her properly.

“For right now, let me be a Losna,” says Anna. Her eyes flash green for a moment. “I don’t want to show my hand until I have to.”

“But you’ve been upfront with me.”

“You showed me something new, and like I said before, I’d be flirting if it weren’t currently inappropriate.” Anna shrugs. “I like new things, and I like pretty girls.”

Judy isn’t quite sure how she’s supposed to respond to that, and so she looks at the peach pit she’s still spinning between her fingers. “How do you do that eye thing?” she asks.

“What eye thing?”

“When you were pretending to be Losna, they were blue, and when you’re actually Artemis, they go green,” says Judy. “I’ve never seen a Lunar who could do that before.”

“Your eyes are always that funny hazel color,” says Anna. “You can’t tell me that’s the color you were born with. I won’t believe you.”

“It’s not,” says Judy. “My dad was Chinese, and my mother was Scottish.” She takes after her father’s side of the family, almost entirely, except for a slightly more rounded figure and slightly sharper cheekbones. Her eyes were dark brown when she was born, just like his. It wasn’t until the moon started talking in her dreams that they’d started to get lighter, until now, when they were clearly hazel—at least until she stepped up into divinity. Then, and only then, they turned the pink-yellow color of ripe peaches, something inhuman and startling.

She’s never had any control over it. Certainly not the control Artemis has demonstrated, or the ability to choose between colors, like some sort of ocular mood ring.

“So you do it too.”

“No. This is just the color my eyes are now, the same way my hair keeps turning silver,” says Judy, defensively. “I can’t make them change just because I want them to look like something else.”

(She broke up with her last high school boyfriend over her eyes. He’d refused to believe that she wasn’t wearing contacts, and accused her of trying to “look like a white girl,” as if that would ever have been possible, as if the only barrier between her and white privilege was the color of her eyes, and not the shape of them, the shape of her face, the shape of her. She’d thrown her soda in his face and walked away, leaving him furious and dripping, while she stormed out of the movie theater where they’d been meant to be having a romantic outing. While she’d seen him at school after that, they had never spoken again, a fact that now seems melodramatic and disproportionate but at the time felt exactly right.)

“Ah.” Anna leans closer, dropping her voice just a little, and smiles. “I can only change them right now because I’m hunting. As long as I’m hunting, I can disappear into the silence, and nothing will stop me from blending into my surroundings. I’m going to bring down my prey, one way or another.”

Judy doesn’t know what to say to that.

Lacus Odii