Page 31 of Tidal Creatures

Like the rest of the lab, the cafeteria is empty, the air holding the faint aroma of scrambled egg and French-bread pizza. Somehow, every cafeteria winds up smelling like those things, even before they turn on the stove burners for the first time. Some quirk of universal sympathy too minor for anyone to look into too deeply, at least so far. Maybe after they understand all the other mysteries of the universe, that will be a question to set for the apprentices—why do group kitchen spaces always smell like eggs? Discuss.

“I’d expect to find her here, if she’s not in the lab or her quarters,” says the junior who’s been escorting him around the lab. She continues a few feet deeper into the cafeteria, like her presence will somehow force the missing girl to appear.

As if they could miss her. Tristan didn’t exactly take the time to study her when he’d seen her in the lab before, but his memory insists that she was rather extremely and distinctly bright orange. People don’t normally come in that color. She should stand out like a flashlight in a graveyard, but there’s nothing here, not a hint of color.

Slowly, he turns to the junior, expression blank. The blood drains from her cheeks and the muscles around her eyes tighten as she fully grasps both her situation and the fact that he’s between her and the exit.

“She’s not here,” he says.

“There are other places we can—”

“Tell me the truth. I’ll know if you lie.” He hesitates just long enough to give her time to formulate that lie, then says, “Is the woman we are pursuing a successful embodiment of Artemis’s Hind?”

She licks her lips, pupils dilating. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, she is.”

“That will be all. Your services are no longer needed.” He waves a hand lazily.

She bolts.

Not for the door—that would be the easy way, and he gets the feeling this woman has never taken the easy way in her life. She runs for the kitchen. Smiling to himself, he languidly follows.

Perhaps this day will be interesting after all.

Sinus Honoris

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

Isabella’s husband is a large man named Juan who looks startlingly like his son—startling because Kelpie would have sworn Luis was a tiny short-haired clone of Isabella until faced with his father. The boy is the best of both his parents, an alchemical marvel in his own strange right.

Juan came home as Kelpie was helping Isabella clean and disinfect the kitchen. Isabella had been pleasantly surprised by how skilled Kelpie was at cleaning up after herself, not apparently understanding what was involved in serving as an assistant in a large alchemical research lab. Still, he’d come in, and they’d been wiping up the last of the mess, and to his credit, he hadn’t batted an eye when Isabella introduced Kelpie as “my cousin Marie’s ex-husband’s little sister’s cousin, Kelly.” Apparently, claiming a clear but distant relation instantly made her family and entirely welcome in Juan’s home. He’d laughed at Isabella’s skill at picking up strays and dished himself a plate, taking it to the living room while the ladies finished cleaning the kitchen.

“He’s a sweet man,” Isabella had confessed, somewhat conspiratorially. “Very straightforward. He says what he means, and he means what he says, and you never have to guess at anything. It would be awful if we didn’t have friends, but we do. This isn’t one of those households where we got married and decided we’d never need anyone else, ever again. Can you imagine?”

Kelpie, who has almost no frame of reference for a normal relationship, or a normal anything else, only blinked, and went back to wiping vomit off the floor. “No,” she’d said, bluntly. “What happens now?”

“Now? It’s late, and Luis has school in the morning. You’ll sleep on the couch, of course.” There didn’t seem to be any question for Isabella: Kelpie was here, Kelpie didn’t have anyplace else to go, Kelpie was staying. “Tomorrow, we’ll start trying to figure out what to do with you. Maybe I can introduce you to the rest of my coven. Smita should be there, and she has more experience with alchemical constructs than the rest of us, even though she tries to pretend she doesn’t. We’re pretty sure she’s dating one of them.”

“What?”

“Smita never shows up on her own; she’s always walked into our meetings by this high-strung blonde with the kind of eyes you don’t get in real people, only engineered ones.”

Kelpie had almost objected at that. She was a real person. Maybe she wasn’t the kind of person she’d always thought she was, being built instead of born, but she was real. If she wasn’t real, she wouldn’t be so lost and scared, now, would she? But Isabella had been on a roll, and Kelpie had been so relieved to have a place to stay that she hadn’t wanted to make too much of a fuss. Fusses could come tomorrow, when the sun was up and she could see more of this strange world she’d been released into.

“Blondie never stays for the coven meetings, and she’s always waiting outside exactly when we adjourn for the day, even if we don’t know when that’s going to be,” said Isabella. “It’s like she’s got a sixth sense for it. I’d bet you anything she’s some alchemist’s science project. Smita doesn’t like to talk about her. I think she’ll like to talk about you.”

“Thank you? I think?” Kelpie had replied, and now, on the far side of midnight, she’s lying awake on a surprisingly lump-free couch, under a hand-crocheted blanket in a whole rainbow of colors, wearing borrowed pajamas and staring at the ceiling.

Her eyes are burning. They have been for quite some time, tears pooling in the corners and refusing to fall. She doesn’t want to cry. She doesn’t. Margaret was her friend and now she’s dead and that’s good enough reason for tears, except Margaret wasn’t her friend, because alchemists aren’t friends with experiments. That’s one of the first rules of working in that kind of lab, right after “wear protective eye gear” and “proper ventilation is essential.” Alchemists don’t befriend experiments, and they especially don’t befriend experimental embodiments. Embodiments are either involuntary extrusions of a disorganized universe or intentional science projects, and either way, spending time with them on a social level would be weird and sort of gross.

She’s the same person now that she was last night, when she was sleeping in her own bed, in her own room, secure in the idea that she was wearing her own skin, oddly colored but her own, and one day to be replaced by the skin she’d been born with, when Margaret finished unsnarling the complicated web of accident damage and chemical reactions that transformed her from a normal lab assistant to something bright and strange and all but impossible.

Kelpie rolls over as much as her anatomy allows and sniffles. She was made. She was made in a lab by someone who wanted to embody a celestial deer and didn’t care who got hurt in the process. What is she even made of? Did someone die to give her a skeleton, a heart, her eyes? Is she cobbled together from a dozen corpses, each specially selected for the sympathies running through their veins, making her a perfect tuning rod for an energy that very sensibly chose to stop incarnating a long time ago?

And why didn’t she ask these questions yesterday? She’s always known the lab’s ultimate goals. She never had a problem with it. She worked with pieces of people—people like Juan and Isabella, people who’d been alive and then weren’t alive anymore, people who didn’t always donate their bodies of their own free will—and she tried to convince them to harmonize with each other so they could be restored to life through alchemical means, transformed and transmuted into something that would serve.

She doesn’t want to serve. So why was it all right that she was building other creatures to serve, that she was supporting a system she’d never realized was inevitably going to hurt her too?

She should have been asking these questions ages ago, even if she’s only a year old, even if she’s barely had time to figure out what the correct questions are. She should have known what she was doing was wrong.