Page 6 of Tidal Creatures

The question is earnestly asked, and Margaret only sighs a little as she looks back at her. “I’ve told you this half a dozen times.”

“My memory isn’t what it used to be,” says Kelpie. “That’s why I’m not allowed to mix anything potentially explosive.”

“Right. Right. Okay, do you remember the Impossible City?”

“I’d have to be a lot more scrambled than I am to forget that,” says Kelpie. The Impossible City is Olympus, Avalon, Atlantis—the goal at the end of the long, winding, improbable alchemical road. Everything they do is in service of the City, of finding the way to get there before someone else can beat them to the gates. Before Reed’s escaped, feral cuckoos can seize it as their own and refuse it to the decent, hard-working, real people who deserve to hold it.

“Just making sure,” says Margaret. “Most people can’t enter the City under normal circumstances. The Seasonals can, during a coronation, and we have reason to believe they become permanent residents after they finish serving their seasons. Some Elements can pass the borders, depending on their situations, and of course, Reed’s cuckoos have the authority to claim the Tower if they so choose.”

“They can’t do that,” protests Kelpie. “The Tower belongs to the Queen of Wands!”

“And the Queen of Wands has been dead since before the turn of the century,” says Margaret. “She made Reed, she set him to publishing her manuscripts and establishing her dogma, and she died. If she’s going to come back, she needs to do it sooner than later, because those cuckoos could get tired of waiting any day now.”

Kelpie looks at her sullenly. “I don’t like that.”

“None of us do. The Lunars are a special case. They go to the City nightly, to shine on the streets from above. They have some sort of system, one that lets them keep being ordinary people while they’re also serving as the Moon over the Impossible City; when we’ve managed to get one under surveillance, we’ve never seen them go twice in a row. We don’t know how they set their schedule. Just capturing one isn’t going to be good enough, because what if this is something they do collectively, something they agree on and organize? Put a Lunar in a cage and maybe they never manifest again, or maybe they turn into moonlight and fade away. Either way, we don’t get into the City, and they know we’re hunting them, which puts us at a disadvantage.”

“Which is why we’re trying to force sub-incarnations to become manifest,” says Kelpie, proud that she remembers this part. “If we can fully manifest a sub-incarnation, it should attract its primary, like a baby bird crying for its mother. And then we can use the sub-incarnation to convince the Lunar to do what we want.”

“Which is let us into the Impossible City,” says Margaret. She looks at Kelpie with uncharacteristic solemnity. “We need to access the City. Humans are so important that half the universe has rewritten itself to have the chance to experience humanity firsthand. Doesn’t that mean we should be the ones in charge?”

“Sure,” says Kelpie.

“Because, see, one thing we didn’t consider when we started trying to do this is that even a sub-incarnation was likely to be a person in their own right. We thought since we were calling animals, at least according to the stories, we’d get animals. And maybe we would have, if we’d had any recipes that weren’t based on Baker and Reed’s work.” Margaret refuses to refer to Asphodel by her first name, says it’s not right that Reed always gets his surname when his creator was unquestionably the greater alchemist. She calls it a demonstration of casual misogyny, the way powerful men become surnames and powerful women never do.

Kelpie thinks she probably agrees with her, but she also thinks of the woman who crafted the first cuckoo as Asphodel, like she’s a beloved family member or mentor. The name suits her better than either “Baker” or “Deborah,” those being the other names she went by. Sometimes the shape of a name matters as much as the intent behind it.

She’s sure she had a different name before the accident. It would be too on the nose for someone named after a shapeshifting water horse to have her shapeshifted against her will, much less wind up with hooves of her own. She’s sure. She just can’t imagine what it might have been, and none of the other names she’s tried to wear have fit her.

“You mixed human into the vessels?” asks Kelpie, trying to make sure she understands what Margaret is trying to say. She’s never been this forthcoming about the project before; every time Kelpie’s tried to ask, Margaret has waved her off, saying she has better things to worry about than a bunch of silly science that she’s never going to be asked to replicate.

Margaret nods. “Human, and material Reed harvested from a Lunar that somehow wound up in his keeping.”

Kelpie has no idea what that means, but she doesn’t want to interrupt again and ask, not when Margaret feels like talking. So she only nods, and listens.

“I think that’s where we went wrong with our first batch. We wound up with people when we manifested the sub-incarnate aspects of the Moon. Yes, we made a Rabbit, and he had long ears and strong legs and looked like something out of a cartoon, but he was also a person who liked to read and argue about sustainable farming techniques, and one of the other research teams snagged him to work in their agricultural development lab, and we didn’t have the heart to tell them no, not when other approaches might still be successful. If we handed him over to the people who funded us, he’d be used as bait to lure in Chang’e, assuming she’s got an incarnation on this continent, and then he’d be slaughtered like an animal. As if that were all he was.”

Margaret looks at Kelpie, very seriously, her face drawn.

“Essentially, we succeeded, and then we had to start over from the beginning if we didn’t want to become monsters in the process,” she says. “The City is essential. No sacrifice is too great to achieve it. But there’s a difference between a sacrifice you make and a sacrifice that’s made. If the sub-incarnations are people, they need to understand what they’re dying for, or the sympathies will be all wrong. They need time to be people, and to live as people, and to not think of themselves as anything but people. Do you understand?”

Kelpie is terribly afraid that she does. So she shakes her head and says, “No. I don’t.”

That’s not what Margaret was expecting. She blinks, mouth forming a round O of surprise for just a moment before she says, “You’re not that naïve, Kelp. You must have figured it out by now.”

“There’s nothing to figure out,” says Kelpie. “I’m a researcher in this lab. I came here after my alchemical studies reached a point where I needed a group environment to progress any farther, and I was in a bad accident a year ago that left me changed and missing large pieces of my memory.”

“Kelpie…”

“That’s all I am,” says Kelpie firmly. “For me to be anything else would mean you’d been lying, and more, that you’d been lying for my entire life, because I would never have known anything outside this lab. And you wouldn’t do that, because you’re my friend. You told me you were my friend. Friends don’t tell lies like that, so I’m a researcher who had an accident.”

“All right,” says Margaret, in a soothing tone. “That’s what you are. But if the people who come to shut us down tell you you’re something else, you need to be ready to run. You need to realize they’re not going to see you the same way I do. Are you ready to die to reach the City?”

Kelpie recoils. She can’t help it.

Margaret nods. “That’s what I thought. You’re going to have to run. I’m sorry we didn’t have more time.”

The alarm is going off again. Kelpie’s really starting to hate that thing. She can’t imagine what could have set it off this time, not when she and Margaret are alone in the lab. But the alarm is blaring, loud enough to make her head ring in sympathy. She claps her hands over her ears, looking around for some indication of what’s wrong.