Page 56 of Tidal Creatures

“Don’t worry. People who don’t see the orange girl aren’t going to pay attention to a totally innocuous statement that only becomes ominous in context.”

“Um. If you’re sure.”

“I am,” says Erin, almost serenely.

“—than just light a Hand of Glory, but that went a long way,” says Smita, as if a whole conversation hadn’t just occurred in the middle of her sentence. “When that happens to you, you start believing in the alchemical world in a hurry. And also, you latch on to the person who was ordered to kill you and refused to do it, and you hang on to them for dear life, because no one else is ever going to take care of you the way that they will. Erin didn’t kill me. That means I’m her problem now. Everyone else is just sort of collateral damage.”

Erin seems to find this funny. She laughs, long and bright and absolutely delighted, the sound ringing off the buildings to either side.

They’ve been working their way deeper and deeper into the residential part of Berkeley as they walked, moving away from the part of the city where Isabella lives with her family, and even away from the overpriced modernity of Catrina’s neighborhood, into something older and more settled. The houses here are as old as the city itself, and judging by the paint jobs and signs of renovation, many of their occupants are generational homeowners, people who could never afford a house in the modern market but who inherited one from a parent or grandparent and are holding on for dear life, refusing to be shaken off the moving back of the great beast that is the Bay Area real estate market.

All four women watch this change in their own way, and if they thought to share those ways with one another, they would understand so much that is currently unknown to them, but like most people, they aren’t in the habit of sharing every thought that crosses their minds without filtration or consideration.

To Isabella, the houses around them now are a triumph and a tragedy. A triumph because she sees how many of them have the kind of herb garden that takes decades to establish, the kind of paint that hasn’t been touched up in twice that long, because there’s been no need; a little faded is more than good enough when you’re never looking to sell. She sees the people who got in early and never let go, burrowing as deep as they could while the burrowing was still possible. And she sees the number of houses with freshly landscaped yards, newly repainted façades, and understands how quickly those legacy houses will be gone, how soon the inevitable march of progress will wear these small communities down, until only the lucky remain.

Erin sees much the same thing but tempered by the patterns that move through the neighborhoods, the little ways the established neighbors support each other and shun the newcomers, even when those new arrivals had nothing to do with the displacement of the previous residents. She sees the way this will foster resentment, how that resentment will fester and grow, until community collapses, broken past the point of any lasting repair. She sees the cracks through which not only light gets through but the twisting roots of weeds that will tear the whole edifice down. Erin, as always, sees the end of all things. In her view, no one is lucky.

Kelpie sees a whole new world of possibilities and potential, filled with things she’s never seen before, things she never even dreamed. She sees marvels everywhere she looks, a world woven out of miracles, and she sees nothing but hope and glory. The world is beautiful. She sees none of the history, none of the chaos, none of the cracks in the foundation. For her, this is a perfect moment which may well last forever, and that’s enough.

For Smita, the only one of them who still sees things mostly as a normal human would, who still walks through a mostly ordinary world, she sees a neighborhood. A little shabby compared to the ones a few blocks over, but still well outside the reach of most families. She’d feel bad about the fact that she lives very close to here, if not for the fact that she lives in someone else’s house, and lives there in part because she’s been legally dead for years, ever since Erin convinced her to fake her own murder for the sake of fooling the American Alchemical Congress. Dodger has run the numbers a hundred times, trying to find a way to narrow the gap between her first true synchronization with Roger and their inevitable ascension to claim the Doctrine. There isn’t one. For them to have the time they need to settle and mature, Smita must spend a period among the lands of the dead, unable to reveal herself for fear of alchemical intervention.

Smita hasn’t existed for slightly over a decade. She uses a dead woman’s social security number; she works in a position well beneath her capabilities, using an assumed name and a fraudulent diploma. She never graduated college. Her original career path is outside her grasp, as is the comfort of her family, who mourned her long ago. But she has a supposedly rented room in a comfortable middle-class household, and that has to be enough, because she’s not getting anything more. (“Supposedly” because Roger and Dodger own the house, and they sometimes forget to collect rent from her even when she’s standing in front of them trying to press money into their hands.) She lives the closest thing a walking dead woman can to a charmed life, and so she sees a neighborhood, full of people living freely, living loudly, living. And she envies them, and she never sees how soon it all might end.

On they walk until the rainbow house with its wild glass windows comes into view. Isabella laughs. “We’re going to the clown house?” she asks. “Oh, you never told me you lived in the clown house.”

“Is that what people call it?” asks Smita, with real interest.

“Most call it the circus house, but my son Luis always calls it the clown house, and I like his name for it better,” says Isabella. “You live there?”

“We do,” says Erin.

“It’s a little more … busy than I assumed your home would be,” says Isabella, with a vain attempt at diplomacy.

“You mean ‘chaotic,’ don’t you?” asks Erin.

“Is this going to be a thing?” asks Smita. “Because I will squirt you both with a spray bottle and put you in opposite corners like naughty cats, I swear. Yes, it’s chaotic, but it’s a purposeful chaos, and Erin does just fine. Yes, we both live there. Some friends of ours own the place.”

“That’s the nicest way I’ve ever heard you describe the wonder twins,” says Erin dryly.

“They were my friends before you were,” says Smita.

“Doesn’t mean they’re anybody’s friends now,” says Erin. “Remember the food chain.”

Kelpie looks perplexed. Isabella goes past that, all the way to concern.

“Excuse me?” she says. “The food chain? What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means the same people who made me made them, and they’re not as easily defined as I am.” Erin looks to Kelpie. “Care to explain for your friend?”

Kelpie looks down at the ground, which only brings her hooves into view. She lifts her head again, tilting it back until she’s looking at nothing but the seemingly endless sky overhead. In a monotone, she says, “James Reed was the heir, creation, and adopted son of Asphodel Baker, the greatest North American alchemist ever denied entry into the Alchemical Congress. He continued her work after she died, trying to achieve the one thing that had eluded her for her entire life: he believed, as she had, that if he could force the Doctrine of Ethos to personify and embody as other natural forces had already done he would be able to use it to seize control of the Impossible City.”

“We’ve all read the Up-and-Under books,” says Isabella, impatient. “Why are you explaining them to me?”

“I’m not,” she says. “Asphodel Baker wrote those books to encode her theories into the public consciousness so they wouldn’t die when she did. She wanted her ideas to live on forever. But everything I just said is real, from before she wrote the books. She made Reed, and no one knows how—if she kept notes, he burned them, because he wasn’t as interested in sharing information as his creator had been. She made Reed, and she told him to seek the City, capture the Doctrine, and continue her work, and so for more than a century, that’s what he did.”

“That’s not all he did,” says Erin. “He knew whoever took the City would take the world, and he wanted to have as much of the universe under his control as possible when that happened. He obtained a more traditionally made construct, named Leigh Barrow, who had somehow managed to become an alchemist in her own right after killing her creator. With his aid, she was able to personify some of the minor forces—minor only in contrast to the Doctrine, which is major beyond all logic. My brother, Darren, and I were two of those forces. Darren died. I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry about your brother,” says Isabella.