Page 43 of Tidal Creatures

“They think everything has a use and can be broken down for its component sympathies,” says Artemis. Chang’e assumes the other goddess must have more experience with alchemists than she does, and stays silent. “To them, because you’re connected to the Moon, you can be used to create a sympathetic link to the rest of us, or to the divine, or maybe to the Moon directly—they cut off your pinkie toe, they can convince the whole Lunar machinery to tilt into something that’s more favorable to whatever horrifying alchemical thing they’re trying to do this week. For them, having a student or an apprentice suddenly pop up as affiliated with a natural force has got to be like finding out that a box of generic mac and cheese is secretly filled with black truffles. You go from person to resource, like that.” She snaps her fingers.

The sound is sharp and clean and somehow terrible, like a bone breaking, or ice giving way at the middle of a pond. Artemis, expression grim, shakes her head.

“It’s not murder to throw an alchemist into the everything, whether or not they can survive it. It’s pest control. Most people, normal people, they wouldn’t notice if we never stepped down. We could stay manifest all the time, forever, and not have to worry. It’s the alchemists who make us hide like prey animals in the underbrush.”

And your hosts! shouts Judy, in the silence at the back of Chang’e’s mind. She sounds truly furious, incandescent with rage over the very suggestion, and Chang’e really can’t blame her. She turns to Artemis, frowning.

“This is getting off topic a bit, but if we never stepped down, would we be any better than they are? Right now, we have a partnership with the people who carry us. They lend us their skills and strengths, and we grant them ours. If we never stepped aside, we’d be stealing their lives. We’d be effectively killing them.”

The ethics of the Lunar system were something she and Judy had debated many times, in the small hours of the morning, when there wasn’t much else to do. People couldn’t volunteer to become incarnate gods: it either happened or it didn’t. And once the god was there, they couldn’t be made to leave by any means that Chang’e knew of. What made them any better than parasites?

Artemis shrugs. “That’s more philosophical than I like to get. And it doesn’t matter if that would be wrong of us, because that’s not the world we live in. We have this one. If we really want to test whether a pure human can survive in the everything, we need to find an alchemist.”

Chang’e eyes her, uncomfortable with her casual dismissal of the issue, but unwilling to push it any further when Máni already looks like he’s on the verge of bolting. “Aske never closed the gate; you received the key anonymously. When you went to the gate to step through, it was already open, and so you didn’t open it a second time.”

“I told you all of that!”

“Yes, and I’m making sure I didn’t misunderstand at any point. It’s easy to get things wrong when you only hear them once, especially in times of stress. I don’t want to get anything wrong.”

“You showed up after I went in, so you know what happened,” he says, a little sullenly, like he’s just been scolded. “And then I left her there.”

“Because you didn’t have a choice,” says Chang’e, and touches his arm, very lightly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was your friend.”

“She was sweet, for a girl who’d never been outside Minnesota before,” he says. “She didn’t know much about much when it comes to living away from home, or dealing with campus politics, but she wasn’t afraid to ask for help, and she knew she could lean on me when she had to.”

Which made it all the more terrible that he’d been the one to find her body. Chang’e shudders. “Thank you, Máni,” she says. She glances at Artemis, keenly aware that the other goddess is a predator and she might be putting herself at risk with what she’s about to do. Then, she steps back and down, and allows Judy to come back to the surface.

Máni sees the change instantly, and matches it with his own, letting David resume control as he steps back. Mortal, the presence of Artemis is terrifying. Judy feels like she’s standing inside a tiger enclosure, or in one of those fantasy movies where the trees are full of predatory dinosaurs, ready to leap at any moment. She doesn’t allow it to faze her, though, merely holds on to the feeling as she turns to Artemis.

“So now we know as much as we’re going to know without finding a way into Aske’s everything,” Judy says. “Got any of her other incarnations in your contacts list?”

“Whoa, whoa,” says Artemis. The air shifts as she steps back, becoming lighter, less oppressive. “You don’t have to sound so angry about me trying to solve a murder.”

“We’re sure it was murder now?” asks David. “There’s no way she … I don’t know, slipped and fell and hit her head on the windowpane?”

“You were the one who found her,” says Anna. “Did it look like an accident to you?”

David is quiet long enough to really think about it. Finally, in a soft voice, he says, “I didn’t want to look too closely, and there was so much blood, but there were no injuries on her forehead. I guess she could have hit her temple if she fell, but there would probably have been a split in the skin, if nothing else. The back of her head was so bloody, I’d be comfortable saying that was where she was hit. I don’t think she could have hit herself in the back of the head, even if she’d been trying to.”

“Not an accident,” says Anna, sounding satisfied. “Which makes it a murder, which means someone else was in the everything with her. Someone who knew how to get in and out again, who knew enough to bring the key out so we wouldn’t have to find a new one. Someone did this.”

“Is someone with that much information hunting Lunars?” asks Judy, horrified. Diana had been so casual about the deaths that it hadn’t really occurred to her that this could be some sort of targeted hunt. At best, it had seemed like a series of bad coincidences. At worst, it could have been a few rogue alchemists, taking advantage of moments of distraction to harvest the sympathy they so desired.

That was before she’d thought through the implications of the everything. That, and a healthy spoonful of denial; she doesn’t want this to be targeted. She’s already juggling goddess-hood and graduate school. Adding “evading a killer” to the list is more than she’s up for dealing with.

Not that she has a choice.

“I think so,” says Anna. “I think that’s exactly what’s happening here. Aske is the latest, and your local alchemists are riled up. Time for me to hunt the hunters.”

Palus Putredinis

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

The dark-skinned woman is Smita. She takes a seat at the front of the ring, where she can see everyone, resting her hands on her knees and leaning her bag against her ankles.

Erin—the unnerving Erin—doesn’t take a seat at all. She finds a spot against the wall and leans there, still watching Kelpie.

“Erin?” asks Isabella. “Will you be staying for today’s meeting?”