Page 28 of Tidal Creatures

TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017. THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

Mopping Margaret’s remains off the floor of the lab had been the work of almost an hour. Not that Tristan had done it himself, oh, no; he’d taken great pleasure in instructing Margaret’s former second-in-command to handle the unpleasant task, watching as the woman retched and gagged and tried, desperately, not to either drop her mop or add to the mess on the floor. The poor thing had been somewhat concerned that he would react badly if she made the mess worse, and possibly decide that she could be added to the mess, liquidated as her supervisor had been.

She hadn’t been wrong about that, and even now he somewhat resents the fact that she was able to swallow her gorge before she gave him the excuse.

There had been no concealing the fact that the mess had begun its existence as a human being, assuming you could call a failed researcher that: even if any alchemist worth the name hadn’t been well practiced in recognizing the various fluids the body could be rendered into, there had been the matter of her skeleton, polished white and glossy, with an opalescent sheen that could almost be attractive, if not for the fact that it had been lying in the midst of all the other awful, unspeakable things Margaret had been reduced to.

Tristan had reopened the lab two hours after the release of his improved alkahest, ordering the staff to get to cleaning preparatory to decommissioning the facility, even as he removed himself to Margaret’s desk to begin going through her files. He had reason to suspect that she’d been more successful than she’d claimed, but if that was so, she’d been given the opportunity to repent: she could have told them at any time that she’d done what she set out to do but chosen to conceal it for some unknowable reason, hiding her light under a bushel while others pursued their own dead-end routes into the City. She could have told him, not stood there in front of that orange abomination, telling bald-faced lies about failure and lab accidents.

If she’d just been willing to be honest and admit that the girl was a construct, he might have allowed Margaret to live. The thought is a ridiculous one, and he pauses in his scanning of her files to look up and smile to himself, very slightly. One of the assistants currently occupied in wiping the last of Margaret off the floor catches that expression and pales, redoubling his efforts. He wants out of this house of horrors, which is so sterile, so clean, except for the horrifying mess still being scraped up off the floor.

(Every atom of Margaret will be preserved and repurposed. She may not have led a successful project during her time with the lab, but she’ll be part of several, if her superiors have anything to say about it. And they have quite a lot to say.)

No, she was never going to survive the review of her work. She’d been too headstrong, too determined to do things her own way and in her own time. It was a weakness shared by a troubling number of James Reed’s former students, most of whom had believed that because they’d once studied at the knee of a man foolish enough to allow Leigh Barrow unfettered access to his person, they were somehow touched by greatness. That James Reed’s century-long reign of unfettered self-indulgence was their birthright, and all they had to do was continue pushing forward in his name.

Amateurs, every single one of them. Building Moreau-esque mockeries of humanity down here when they were meant to be finding a way to harness the minor aspects of the Moon. How was the Congress supposed to lure a major Lunar aspect if they didn’t have a minor one under their control? Really, it was a miracle anything ever got accomplished. Tristan sighs, looks up again, and pauses as his eyes fall on the skeleton.

Skeleton, singular. Meaning the girl, the “lab accident,” really was a construct, despite his explicit instructions about naturals only during his inspection. He snaps his fingers. One of the junior researchers appears almost instantly, scurrying to his side so quickly that he’s amazed she doesn’t leave tire marks on the clean linoleum.

He hates an ass-kisser. The only thing worse than an overly fawning lackey is one who doesn’t know their place. Finding the balance between those two states is the best way to stay alive in his presence over the long term, and it’s not his fault these people haven’t had the time to study up on their own survival protocols yet.

He’ll ask her to come see him after the review is finished. Yes. Removing her internal organs through her navel will be a pleasant way to relax after this frustratingly stressful day. He’d known before arriving that Margaret’s project was a failure, of course—her status reports had made that perfectly clear—but he had never imagined she would be foolish enough to look him in the eye and lie to him.

“Yes, sir?” asks the junior researcher.

“When I came for the inspection earlier, Miss Margaret had a lab assistant with her,” he says. “Orange skin. Hooves. Margaret claimed the girl was a natural result of a lab experiment when I reminded her that she’d promised me no constructs, but she must have been … mistaken, because if the girl had been natural, she’d have been downsized by the alkahest. There’s only one skeleton on the floor.”

The junior researcher is silent. He’s glad he had already decided to kill her. If he’d still been thinking in terms of mercy, he would be very disappointed just now.

“Well?” he prompts, when the silence has grown long enough to be genuinely frustrating. He doesn’t like waiting.

“I … erm, I think you mean Kelpie, sir. She was a private project of Margaret’s. Never worked with anyone else.”

“And why is that?” he asks. He looks at her, making no effort to hide his irritation. “Margaret should not have been wasting Congressional resources on private projects. She had a task to perform, and it sounds like you’re telling me that she was never doing it properly. If you know something that might contradict that, now would be the proper time to tell me. Lives might be saved.”

Not including her own, but she doesn’t need to know that.

The woman swallows hard, throat working as she ponders his words. Finally, turning her face away, she says, “Because she was a success.”

“A success at what?”

“Kelpie was our second successful minor manifestation.” The woman looks back. Apparently, betrayal gets easier the longer it keeps going on. “We got the Rabbit first. Not the actual god, the one who hangs out with the peach farmer. We’re still working on the two dogs, the Man’s and Diana’s, but they seem to be closely enough entangled with each other that getting just one of them to embody is difficult.”

She doesn’t mention the dangers of dual embodiments. After Reed’s failure, no one who serves the Congress in even the least capacity needs the reminder.

Tristan makes a noncommittal noise.

This appears to spur the woman to deeper, more desperate levels of betrayal. “Kelpie was made using Congressional supplies, and we told Margaret it made her property of the Congress, we told her—”

“Even if your former supervisor had used only her own hand-gathered ingredients and materials, the girl would still have been created using knowledge which the Congress had supplied. She would have belonged to us no matter what.” Tristan looks at her along the length of his nose, careful not to let her see his slow-building excitement. “She was always ours. Where is she now?”

“I … I don’t know, sir.”

He was already going to kill her. Now he’s going to make it hurt. “You don’t know?”

“I didn’t know she was here when you did the inspection until you told me! If she was here, she was probably doing some menial task for Margaret, something too basic for the rest of us! We mostly used her for scut work. She had no alchemical talents at all, she didn’t understand half of what we were doing, and even if she had, her own orientation would have skewed anything she tried to blend or brew! I have no idea where she would have gone! Are you certain she was here when you released the alkahest?”

She realizes her mistake a beat too late, breath catching as his pupils dilate and his gaze turns a little sharper than is strictly natural. He can hear her heart rate accelerate as he watches her fight not to back away. She’s terrified.