Page 61 of Tidal Creatures

“Oh, the head of Smita’s little coven,” says Dodger. “She’s told us about you.”

Isabella lifts her chin, expression composed and stubborn. “I’m an hechicera,” she says, almost like a challenge.

“I’m a mathematician,” says Dodger. Roger rolls his eyes and drinks more coffee. She slants him a sideways look. “What? I thought we were making declarative statements. She’s an hechicera, I’m a mathematician, we’ve presumably both trained and studied for our positions, why shouldn’t they be on the same level?”

“Because she just confessed to being a sorceress, and you’re being flippant.”

“I’m not being flippant!”

Isabella frowns, deeper with every second that passes. She looks to Erin. “These are the housemates you wanted me to meet?” she asks.

“Some of them, yeah,” says Erin. She puts her index fingers in her mouth and whistles shrilly, the sound incredibly loud in the enclosed space. Chang’e winces as she, along with the others, turns to focus fully on Erin, who drops her hands.

“Great, thank you,” she says, sharply. “Isabella, these are Roger and Dodger, my housemates, who own the place. They’re shitty roommates, decent landlords, and the incarnate Doctrine of Ethos.”

“Hello,” says Roger, lifting his coffee in greeting.

“Your names rhyme,” says Isabella, sounding awe-struck.

“Alchemists have taken the concept of ‘sympathetic magic’ and twisted it until it started to scream for mercy,” says Dodger. “The people who made us should never have been allowed near children. I sometimes think the universe decided we were the ones who were going to manifest because we had to grow up with the worst names. You want mean, drop a girl named ‘Dodger’ on an elementary school playground with an endless supply of dodgeball courts and a whole bunch of pre-teen assholes who believe in nominative determinism.”

“You’re an hechicera?” asks Roger. “How is that?”

“Like any other magical profession in the modern day: doesn’t bring in much money, but I get to set my own hours and the people who come looking for my services really, really need me to help them,” says Isabella, sounding a little less awed, a little more matter-of-fact. “I can’t do as much as I’d like. Being an hechicera doesn’t automatically give me a deep connection to the universe. I can nudge it along, but I can’t work large-scale change.”

“No earthquakes for her,” says Dodger, and sips her coffee.

“No earthquakes for anyone,” says Chang’e sternly. “Shaking the world to pieces does no one any good.”

“Sometimes it makes things clearer,” says Roger. “All right, Erin, I know why the kitchen’s full of moon gods, but why did you bring us a sorceress? Is she hiding from the alchemists?”

“Only in the sense that everyone with sense is hiding from the alchemists, but that’s not why she’s here. She found a runaway cuckoo. The most minor one I’ve seen so far—they’re apparently using Asphodel’s remaining material for anything these days. And I figured if she’s going to be dragging alchemical constructs to her coven meetings, it was probably time we sat down and had a serious talk with her about those little chaos pits she’s been digging with her coven.”

“Chaos pits?” asks Artemis blankly.

“She’s an hechicera steering a coven of people with about as much magical skill as they have sense, which is to say, most of them don’t have much to speak of, but they have enough to chant in tandem and try to force their will on the world,” says Erin. “They’ve been using brute-force elementalism to gouge holes in the surface of reality, and they don’t always remember to scoop all the elements they’ve called back out of the hole when they’re finished. Which means it crusts over and curdles, and becomes a nasty little chaos pit, just waiting for someone to trip and fall into it. They’re not big enough to do a lot of damage, but they can really ruin someone’s day.”

Isabella looks horrified. “I thought you were kidding before! None of our workings were intended to do anything like that,” she says.

“When you grow a carrot, you’ve grown something delicious and nourishing, and that’s great, but then when you pull it up to eat it, you leave a hole,” says Erin. “Did you intend to grow a hole? No, you intended to grow a carrot. The hole was a natural consequence of the carrot. Does that make you a bad person for making a hole? No. Does it fill your lawn with burrowing crayfish taking advantage of the situation if you don’t make sure to put dirt back in your holes when you’re done harvesting your carrots? Possibly. Very, very possibly.”

“That metaphor was a little tortured,” says Roger.

Erin shrugs. “Never said I was good with words, now, did I.”

Dodger cranes her neck, looking past Erin and Isabella. “So where’s the cuckoo?”

“She went upstairs with Smita,” says Erin. “Probably bothering one of the trouble teens to try and calm her down. She was raised by the alchemists who made her, and apparently she somehow thought she was a real girl until a day or so ago, when there was some sort of incident in their lab. Now she’s here, she’s all stressed out and spun up, she doesn’t really understand anything that’s going on, and she knows who the two of you are. They’ve told her stories about you. So I’m pretty sure the idea of actually meeting you has her terrified, and Smita wants to get her to chill out before she does the scary thing.”

“We’re not scary,” says Roger. Dodger gives him a complicated look, some wordless exchange passing between them, and he sighs. “Okay. I guess if you were raised by alchemists who wanted you to think of us as the bogeymen under your bed, we’d be sort of scary. Or if you don’t like being around people who’re in active negotiations with the universe most of the time. Or— Dammit, Dodge, stop making sense.”

“Or if you don’t like telepaths,” says Erin, dryly. Catching the bewildered looks from Isabella and the various Lunars, she explains, “Because of the way they were made, these two don’t need to talk. They do it because they like the sound of their own voices, and because they’re the kind of asshole that thinks it’s funny to make the rest of us listen to them. They can’t read your mind, thankfully, or I’d have to kill them while they slept, but they can read each other’s minds. And that is just one of the many, many reasons Roger and I are no longer sleeping together.”

“The main one being that you were only sleeping with me in the first place because Barrow ordered you to, and you needed a reason to stay close enough to keep an eye on me,” says Roger without rancor.

Erin shrugs broadly. “We all do fucked-up shit when the alchemists get involved.”

“Which is why I’m here,” says Artemis, in the sort of tone used by kindergarten teachers trying to yank their class back onto the topic. “I’m not originally from this area. I transferred to Berkeley a month ago, because the alchemists around here have been all up in arms, enough so that people have noticed.”