Page 46 of Tidal Creatures

“How open are we being?”

“Look at Isabella’s ‘cousin,’” says Smita. “I think it’s more likely that she’s a cousin of yours, and we’re going to wind up taking her home with us, one way or another. So I’d say we’re being pretty open, whether we came here intending to be or not.”

“Are you a c-construct?” asks Kelpie, looking at Smita. She can feel a commonality with Erin, a certain recognition, even though they’ve never seen each other before. Cuckoos can, apparently, detect other cuckoos. Whether that extends to constructs isn’t something she knows. Margaret never kept them around the labs. There was the one rabbity technician in the agricultural research department, but he was on a different team, and Kelpie had only ever glimpsed him at a distance.

And even if he was the Rabbit Margaret talked about before she died, that would make him a cuckoo, and being able to recognize him as like her wouldn’t have told her whether she could spot constructs. Without the context of knowing that what she was spotting was another cuckoo, she might just have assumed he was like her: a normal person who’d been in a terrible lab accident.

Although now she wonders if that’s something that actually happens, or just one more thing Margaret lied about. Maybe the story she’s always believed belonged to her was impossible from the start.

Smita looks briefly taken aback. Then she laughs, bright and open and earnestly amused. “No, no, I’m not a construct,” she says. “I’m naturally occurring. I’m a geneticist. I work at one of the biotech firms downtown, near the Vivarium. So I’m good for the cuckoos to have around, but I’m not one of them.”

“You’re also the only one other than me who ever remembers to buy toilet paper,” says Erin. “We live in a house full of geniuses who wouldn’t be able to wipe their own asses if they lost us, and you need to remember that whenever you start to question your worth.”

“I wasn’t!” says Smita.

“You were. You get this tone when you’re appending the word ‘only’ to ‘naturally,’ like you should have been built in a lab, just so you’d fit in with the rest of the house. Trust me, it’s not that much fun.”

“Sure, Pinocchio,” says Smita. “You know I think of you as a real girl. I don’t need to be a cuckoo to understand the score. But—and I’m not trying to be rude; I know it’s inappropriate to comment on aspects of someone’s appearance that they didn’t necessarily choose—but why is Kelly orange?”

“It’s ‘Kelpie,’ actually,” says Kelpie. “And I always thought I was orange because I’d been in a bad lab accident, but it seems I’m orange because the alchemists who made me made me this way. I don’t know why.”

“Visibility,” says Erin.

The other three turn to look at her. She shrugs. “Reed made most of his projects in human skin tones. Usually white ones, because he liked to convince wealthy assholes to invest in his empty promises, and most of his investors were white. So when they looked at his science projects and saw their own children reflected back at them, they believed those children could be powerful.”

“But not, it seems, as powerful as racism,” interjects Smita.

“Yeah, well, what is?” asks Erin.

“You were explaining why I’m orange,” says Kelpie.

“Ah, right. Thing is, when you’re building a person from scratch, alchemically, you’re not doing it according to the normal rules of biology and how things evolve in the real world. So you’re not limited, as it were, to the things that reality has actually decided to put in a vote for. You can make anything if that’s what you want to do, and you can make some gene expressions conditional on things that have nothing to do with genetics. With the Doctrine, for example, we couldn’t decide ahead of time which half would be born first—and every incarnation of the Doctrine after the first was gestated as a set of twins. But the one who was born first always claimed dominion over Language, and the one born second would claim Math and have flashier, brighter coloring. Red hair, or white hair that didn’t look quite natural, things people would be drawn to look at.”

“To pull focus away from the elder twin,” says Kelpie. “The Math children were supposed to draw fire?”

“Exactly. So tell me, how do you explain the second-born always having so much more dramatic coloring, if not for a gene expression that didn’t happen until it reacted to the presence of the older child outside the womb?”

“Alchemists have no morals,” says Isabella. “That’s like building a time bomb into a child.”

“Why, because maybe there’s some unique medical situation where they’re both born at once and the Math kid literally explodes? Or because you don’t like the idea? Sometimes we don’t like things,” says Erin. “When alchemists are making fake people that they never intend to release into the general population, they get … creative. They make them with chromophores, or wings, or feathers for hair. They make them in every color of the rainbow. Sometimes they have the equivalent of dog shows with them, all these smug little alchemical innovators showing off their most impressive collections for the other monsters to ooh and aah over until one of them takes home Best in Show, and the rest get butchered. They made your girl here orange so she’d be visible, stand out in a crowd—can’t run away. What are you?” Her focus shifts fully to Kelpie with the final question.

“I—I was a lab assistant until yesterday,” says Kelpie. “Then a man from the Congress came and melted my supervisor, and I ran away. I don’t think I can go back, even if I wanted to … and I don’t think I want to. They were lying to me. They told me I was a normal human who’d been in a bad lab accident, and that was why I didn’t remember anything before a year ago.”

“And you believed them?” asks Smita.

“Maybe we should continue this elsewhere,” says Isabella. She rises from her chair, beginning to gather the dishes left over from their ritual workings. The small stones and salt are tipped into plastic baggies, which vanish into the depths of her purse; the dishes are stacked, carefully, one atop the other. “Kelpie, can you get the ones with the water in them? We need to pour that onto the grass outside.”

“Wouldn’t the sink be closer?” asks Erin.

Isabella looks at her calmly. “Pouring it onto the grass lets it rejoin the natural world, and carries our intent into the universe. There’s a reason for everything we’re doing here.”

“Including leaving?”

“This is Catrina’s house, and while she’s willing to respect that sometimes coven members want to hang back and speak with me after ritual is finished, she can get a little … needy if she’s made to wait too long,” says Isabella. “If we’re here much longer, she’ll join us.”

“But why?” asks Kelpie. “She couldn’t see my hooves, or anything else about me.”

“No. But she saw that I took you as an apprentice, when I’ve been refusing to do the same for her since before the coven started officially meeting at her house. And she saw that Erin, who we’ve been inviting to stay for months now with no look at all, was willing to stay for the chance to talk with you after. She’s going to be curious. We should join the others, briefly, and then get out.”