Page 41 of Tidal Creatures

“She wasn’t there,” he says, slowly. “The sun came up and the gate disappeared, and I went home to steal an hour or so of sleep before I had class. When I got up, there was an envelope under the doormat with my name on it, and the key was inside. Why? Am I in trouble?”

If Aske hadn’t come out of the gate, then someone must have gone in to get the key. But why drop it at Máni’s doorstep rather than going inside and telling him Aske was dead? Why leave her body there? If Judy was right about the way the everything worked, whoever it was must have left the gate open, knowing Máni would step into Aske’s passage when he went through again, unless …

“When you got to the gate, was it already open?” asks Chang’e, forcing her voice to stay gentle. Artemis is watching her as intently as a hawk. Any slip now could set the huntress on them both, and while she doesn’t have the experience in this incarnation to know exactly how that would be a bad thing, still she knows all the way to the base of Judy’s bones that it would be very, very bad.

“Yes,” admits Máni. “I thought … You weren’t there, and so I thought you’d come ahead and opened it for some reason.”

“Even though you had the key?”

“I know you don’t like me,” he blurts. “You always look at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about, and this is the most words you’ve ever said to me without snapping. You don’t like that I play football, or that I like to have a drink every now and then, or that I hang out with pretty girls. But you don’t have to talk to me like I’m stupid. Okay?”

“Okay,” says Chang’e, startled into taking a half-step back. “I’m sorry, Máni. I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

“You mean you didn’t realize I was smart enough to know you felt that way.”

It’s true, and so she doesn’t argue, just rolls her shoulders in a shrug and says, “It doesn’t matter whether I like you or not, right now. What matters is finding out what happened to Aske.”

“Do you even know her name?”

“I—”

“I didn’t,” says Artemis, coming to her rescue by reminding Máni that she’s there, he’s not alone with Chang’e. He’s being hunted, and he needs to stay aware of the predator in his vicinity, or the chase will end very badly for him.

“I— Who are you?”

“Now who doesn’t know names, hmm?” Artemis smiles, thinly. “To you, I’m Losna. We’ll see if that changes. You’re Máni, known as David.”

“Yeah,” he says, clearly cowed, and looks back to Chang’e. “Her name was Eliza. She was majoring in early childhood education, and she liked strawberry ice cream and rare roast beef sandwiches and those little Beanie Baby knock-offs you get at the drug store. She was a real person. You only ever saw her as a face of the moon. You aren’t even sad that she’s gone.”

“I…” Chang’e pauses. “You’re right. I only saw her as a face of the Moon, as someone else I had to shove into the schedule and share the City passage with. She wasn’t real to me the way she apparently was to you, and I’m sorry for your loss. And for Eliza. We should have been a better community to her.”

“Yeah, you should have.” Máni pauses, taking a deep breath. “I knew I had the key when I got there, and logically, that means you couldn’t have opened the gate. But I was still confused by finding it the way I did, and I was running late, so I didn’t dwell. I just threw myself into the everything and made for the window. Only when I got there, it was … wrong.”

“Wrong how?” asks Artemis.

“It wasn’t my window. It was a window, a perfectly good one, but I’d never seen it before. And Aske was on the ground in front of it. You know, I’d never thought of the everything as having a ground before? I mean, I had to be walking on something, but it looks so much like something out of a bad science fiction movie that I never really saw it as having a floor and a ceiling. But there was Aske, on the ground, bleeding red and silver. And when I looked around, there was more silver, making the ground more and more obvious, until I couldn’t not see the ground. I had to stop seeing it. It was making the everything into something, and that hurt to see. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was something that wasn’t supposed to happen, a definition of a space that’s supposed to remain undefined, and it hurt. I think if I’d looked at it for too long, it could have really hurt me. Maybe even killed me.”

He shudders, glancing to the side. Chang’e finds nothing to indicate that he’s lying; he seems entirely sincere, and genuine in his fear.

“I had to stop looking, but Aske was just there, and I could see she wasn’t breathing, so I…” He stops, sighs, and looks at Chang’e, clearly regretful. “I went through the window. I went to the City. It wasn’t the everything, and it meant I wasn’t standing there watching the floor get harder and harder to ignore. I’m sorry. Maybe she wasn’t dead! Maybe I could have helped her, but instead I just … I just ran away.”

Chang’e steps closer, putting a hand on his arm. He shoots her a startled look.

“She was gone before you went into the everything, Máni,” she says. “You only found her because no one had closed the gate between her transit and your arrival. You went into her everything, not your own. It wasn’t your fault.”

He blinks, several times, before he bursts noisily into tears.

Chang’e leaves her hand resting on his arm. He seems to need it, and she’s failed the younger Lunars enough this week. As long as he needs her, she’ll be here. She has a duty that she’s been neglecting for far too long.

Máni keeps crying but wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, focusing on Chang’e. “I needed to hear that so much more than I realized I did. Thank you. Thank you so, so much.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What do you mean, I went into her everything?”

“Chang’e has a theory, and so far, it’s a good one,” says Artemis. “Chang’e, you wanna explain?”

So they’re continuing to put this on her? It makes sense, but it still annoys her a little, as she glances from Máni to Artemis and back again. “I don’t think we enter the same everything,” she says. “I think the reason we’re told not to enter together isn’t to avoid confusing the window; it’s because each of us gets our own window, and if we entered together, we might get both, or neither, or something else entirely. When Aske died, she died in her everything, and that gate was never closed. You entered her channel through the everything that night, not your own, and that’s why you found her body.”