Page 55 of Tidal Creatures

The front door slams open, all but punctuating her sentence, and Chang’e turns, eyes very wide, to see who dares intrude upon the Doctrine of Ethos.

Lacus Lenitatis

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

Smita is surprisingly chatty once they’re away from Catrina’s place, although she stays at the back of the group, watching as much as participating. Isabella allows herself to slow, drifting back until she paces Smita, matching her step for step.

“You’ve been with the coven for a while now,” she says. “But you’ve never mentioned anything about living with the incarnate force of Order. I think I would have noticed if you had.”

“Funny, I was just thinking I would have noticed if you’d ever said something about having an electric-orange cousin with hooves, but here we are,” says Smita. “Looks like we’ve both been keeping some of our cards close to our chests, hmmm?”

“She’s not actually my cousin,” says Isabella.

“You don’t say.”

“She—” Isabella pauses, looking wearily at Smita. “You’re not going to let this one go, are you?”

“Nope.”

Erin looks back from where she’s walking alongside Kelpie, pale eyebrows lifted high. “Everything all right back there?”

“We’re great,” says Smita sunnily. “Just working through a few things.”

Erin looks dubious but faces front once more. Smita looks to Isabella and shrugs.

“I can forgive you for the little lie about your cousin, especially since it upset Catrina, if you can forgive me for not telling you I lived with an incarnate force of the universe. Also, how do you drop that one casually into conversation? ‘Hi, I saw your signup sheet at the co-op, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the idea that there’s this whole magical world running in parallel to the one I’ve always known, and your nondenominational female-first coven seems like a decent way to ease myself into things, anyway, I’m not a witch or a Wiccan, I’m going to be primed for someone to say something bigoted or indicative of toxic views and might leave permanently at any time, and one of my roommates is the living embodiment of Order, but I try not to hold that against her’? Doesn’t exactly flow, now, does it?”

“It does not,” agrees Isabella. “Still, after you decided to stick around, it might have been nice to get a heads-up.”

“I didn’t even know if you knew magic was real and not just a way to fleece a rich white lady out of candles and coffee and a nice lunch once a week,” says Smita. “It honestly could have gone either way, until today.”

“You’ve been doing ritual work with us for two years, and you didn’t know whether I knew magic was real? I think I’m offended.”

“Doesn’t change anything if you are.”

They walk in silence for a few seconds before Isabella nods toward Erin and says, “I knew she was a construct.”

“What?”

“That’s why I wanted to bring the kid to a coven meeting. You have more experience than any of us with alchemical constructs, and I thought you might be able to help her. But then, I thought you were dating Erin, and that was why she always brought you to the meetings and picked you up after they were finished. I also thought she was a minor personification the alchemists had managed to force to manifest but didn’t care enough about to keep track of—one of the Horae, maybe, or something even more intangible than the personification of a singular hour.”

“You had that partially right,” says Smita. “She’s an alchemical construct, and when you compare her to what the alchemists who made her were actually fishing for, I guess you could call her a minor one. But they didn’t lose track of her because they didn’t care.”

“They lost track of me because I broke confinement and went rogue,” says Erin, turning to walk backward, facing them. She still manages to miss every crack and break in the sidewalk, her stride never varying. “I bet they say I went feral, since that’s what you say about an animal, and they don’t want to credit us with full humanity if they don’t have to. Am I right?”

She glances at Kelpie, who flushes a deep red-orange and nods, looking almost ashamed of herself. “Yeah,” she says, after a momentary pause. “All the c-cuckoos who escaped from Reed’s lab are described as having gone feral and turned on their creators.”

“Because we’re not fully human to them, and that means we’re not really people, either, not the way everyone else thinks of people.” Erin elbows Kelpie, amiably. “At least Barrow was invested in making sure my brother and I could go to Disney World without causing some sort of a riot, huh? I don’t have to deal with being Technicolor or wonder whether the people I meet will see something weird about me. Plenty of people see weird things about me without my needing to have hooves.”

“Don’t you find her existence a little, well, chaotic?” asks Smita carefully, gesturing to Kelpie.

Erin snorts. “Chaotic? Please. Not compared to you two. She’s designed for a purpose, every gene exactly where it’s supposed to be, every chromosome expressing itself just so. They made her this way because this was the way they needed her to be if they were going to catch the concept they were trying for. There’s not a chaotic cell in her body. Now, you naturals…” She shudders. “All willy-nilly, genes combining on a whim, DNA sourced from two unvetted origins, all the mutations and recessive traits a body can hope for—nope. No, thank you. I’ll take the orange girl any day of the week. She may be weird-looking, but it’s a logical, linear weird-looking.” She turns again, so that her back is to the pair. “Don’t try to play the chaos card with me.”

“Love you too,” says Smita warmly. She glances at Isabella, watching the other woman fight to control her expression. “When someone grabs you, pulls you into the magical zone of invisibility cast by a severed hand, and says you have to pretend you’re dead long enough for them to convince the people they work for that they’re a killer, you listen. Erin did a lot more than that to convince me—”

“Because I’d had several trial runs before I found the argument you were willing to listen to,” calls Erin, pitching her voice so it will carry, not turning a third time.

Kelpie looks nervous. Erin pats her reassuringly on the shoulder.