Page 29 of Tidal Creatures

Good.

“Did you genuinely just ask an accredited senior alchemist whether I was certain of my own actions?” he asks, and his voice is buttery smooth and velvety, pitched to soothe. “Was that a clever choice you made?”

“Sir. No, sir, it wasn’t. I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to—”

“I should certainly hope you didn’t mean to. Yes, the girl was here. I closed the doors and left them in this lab alone while the alkahest worked its way through the air. It would have cleared in ten or so minutes, but that doesn’t explain where she would have gone. Is there anyone else who would have concealed her? You mentioned that she was the second. Could she have run to the first?”

“No, sir. They’ve never met.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“As certain as if my life depended on it,” she says, and then winces, seeming to catch the inherent danger of her own working. “I mean, sir, Margaret kept her fairly strictly isolated. It was just this team that really knew she existed. Constructs, even odd-looking ones, aren’t that unusual within a static research facility, and we’ve been able to push the boundaries more since Reed died.”

Reed died and his cuckoos settled in Berkeley, the city where they’d come together after years of coming apart, the city where they’d determined who their adult selves were going to be. They had a little house together, according to the last reports, a little house no one could find or see unless the cuckoos allowed it, and they lived there with an assortment of people as strange as they were, people whose names were mysteriously missing from Congressional records.

Oh, the cuckoos hated the alchemists who’d made them, called them monsters, blamed them all for Reed’s actions and the actions of his students; they didn’t care that alchemy was a tool like any other, blameless without someone to hold it. They hated the alchemists and chose no sides, and that was part of why the Congress was willing to delay the inevitable call to open warfare. As long as the cuckoos were content to play house with each other and spurn all alchemy, they weren’t supporting a challenger to the power of the Congress.

And having them stationary, so much of the guiding power of the universe, was making it easier to convince reality that it should allow alchemical innovation. As long as the cuckoos didn’t fly away, labs like this one would be able to make incredible, world-changing discoveries with half the staff and a third of the funding that they would have needed anywhere else in the world. Of course they had been able to manifest two of the minor forces. Those facets of the Lunars had been manifest before, time and again, even if they’d been missing for centuries. If any lab was going to bring them back, it was this one.

Tristan rises, slow and deliberate, watching the researcher for signs that she’s about to bolt. It would be the clever thing for her to do, even if it would be the last thing she ever did. Those two truths aren’t mutually exclusive: both can exist at the same time.

She isn’t clever, which he already knew, or maybe she’s too clever, and still thinks she can somehow worm her way into survival, find a loophole to wiggle through while his guard is down. He’s willing to let hope linger, at least for a moment.

“Show me where she was kept,” he says. It’s not a request.

The woman doesn’t read it as one. She nods, sharp and obedient, and turns to walk out of the lab, away from the remaining mess that was Margaret, her heels clicking sharp and staccato against the floor. He follows, and neither of them looks back.

Slightly over half the lab assistants and junior researchers live in the building. It was necessary, if they were going to conceal the place in an urban area, that they minimize the number of people who were going to be seen coming and going on a regular basis. The Congress owns the apartment building at the top of the stairs, devotes several of the apartments to their staff, and still they have to be careful who goes up to the surface. In order to keep people from getting resentful of those who were allowed to see the sun, go to a movie, and generally live semi-normal lives during their time away from the lab, all junior staff and assistants were assigned residences down below, no exceptions.

That meant Kelpie never questioned the location of her room, which is down a hallway lined with identical doors, each painted white and marked with a small nameplate identifying the occupant and their position. One of those doors cracks briefly open at the sound of footsteps, then swiftly shuts again as the person inside sees who’s walking down the hall. The air is still and a little stagnant, tasting of dust and silence.

“Here,” says the researcher, indicating the appropriate door.

K. Hinde reads the nameplate, and Tristan actually snorts in suppressed amusement, earning himself a glance from the woman, who relaxes slightly, taking his show of humor as a good sign for her survival.

“So much of alchemy relies on the simplest of sympathies,” he says, folding his hands behind his back.

“Sir?”

“Of all the fictional quadrupeds, how many have names suitable for a person to use on a daily basis?” he asks. “And that last name—old German for ‘hind.’ Really, your Margaret labeled the girl as clearly as she could without setting off alarms, and no doubt deepened her sympathy with her incarnation every day in the process.”

The woman doesn’t move.

He lifts an eyebrow. “Well?” he says. “The door?”

She moves then, sharp and uneasy, like a frightened child at the cusp of a horror movie. It’s a delightful thing, to be able to inspire so much terror so easily. When he was an apprentice, he used to watch the senior alchemists and wonder how they could take such joy in frightening people less powerful than they were, how they could play at being monsters without seeming to care what it could cost them. He swore, then, that he would be different, and he is. He is.

He’s so much better at it than they were. He doesn’t need weapons or harsh words to put everyone around him into a state of delicious fear: he can do it with a look or an entirely innocuous question. Reputation does the rest.

As to why they did it, he got that answer quite some time ago, and has held to it ever since. They did it then, and he does it now, because it’s wonderful. Alchemy is about transformation and power. Transforming the moods of everyone around him to suit his own is a form of both those things, and one he is gleeful in commanding.

The door opens smoothly, unlocked, and swings open on well-oiled hinges, revealing a small room all but free of personal touches. There are a few pieces of clothing discarded on the floor, a dresser cluttered with the small objects that accumulate, even in an underground lab, a narrow bed strewn with tangled bedding, a potted plant putting up cautious green leaves with spiky edges.

The air here is even cooler and more stationary than the air in the hall. He looks back to the researcher. He supposes she must have a name—people generally do—but as she won’t be making use of it for much longer, he doesn’t see much point in bothering to learn it now.

“She hasn’t been here,” he says. “Where else does she go?”

“As I said, sir, Margaret mostly kept her close. None of the rest of us were encouraged to get to know her very well.”