Page 62 of Tidal Creatures

“Before you say you didn’t notice,” says Dodger peevishly to Roger, “please remember that you once didn’t notice the kitchen was on fire for almost ten minutes, even though we were all yelling and trying to put it out. And then once you did, you just told it not to be on fire and it wasn’t.”

“Oh, yeah. I do remember that,” says Roger.

Dodger sighs, looking to Artemis. “Please, continue.”

“I…” Artemis glances to Isabella, clearly uncomfortable. Talking about Lunar matters in front of rogue alchemical constructs is one thing. Talking about them in front of an ordinary human woman is something else altogether. It’s clear that she doesn’t like it, but she pushes on, forcing herself to continue. “We know they figured out how many of us there were a few years ago, and started picking at our fringes. Minor Lunars began disappearing, especially the ones in areas where they didn’t have a large pantheon to turn to for protection. The moon doesn’t know whether you’re urban or rural when it speaks to you. The moon knows whether or not you’re in a position to listen. So some of us wind up pretty isolated, with no idea what’s going on anywhere else. They orbit solo, and the moon tells them what to do, and either they break or they find a pantheon to belong to. Things began getting bad a little while after most of the alchemists’ leadership died. We figure that cleared the board for some of the younger alchemists, the ones with big ideas who hadn’t been able to put them into play before.”

“Why hunt Lunars?” asks Roger. “No offense, but you’re pretty minor as manifestations go. You’ve always seemed more like a habit of reality than a necessity in the modern world. Most of you can’t even affect the world through your manifestations.”

“Most?” asks Chang’e.

“There are exceptions, but I’ve never heard of a Lunar strong enough to shift the tides or build a bridge of birds between the Earth and the Moon.” He slips so easily into stressing the words as the proper names they sometimes are. It would be impressive coming from almost anyone else.

Chang’e hears the echoes of all the things he isn’t saying around every word he speaks, and she’s not impressed.

“I don’t know why,” says Artemis.

“I think our guest upstairs gave us a large part of it,” says Erin. “The alchemists are trying to take the City before you two assholes get around to it.”

Dodger blinks.

Roger does the same.

For just a moment, the familial relationship between them is so obvious, it’s almost glaring. Chang’e glances away.

“What the hell do we want with the Impossible City?” asks Dodger. “That place is getting by just fine without us. It probably has some sort of civic government that doesn’t need a pair of untrained weirdoes bumbling in and trying to take over.”

“The alchemists want the City so badly, they probably can’t even conceive of someone who doesn’t,” says Erin.

Footsteps on the stairs herald the return of the people missing from this conversation. Erin steps to the side. Isabella does the same, and a moment later, Smita and an impossible girl appear in the doorway.

Smita is a familiar sight in this house, as comfortable and understood as the walls, if a stranger to the three newcomers. The girl beside her is not. The girl, whose skin is the color of the sky at sunrise, a bright and cheerful orange that has never appeared on anything mammalian, and was never meant to, is so clearly artificial that she barely needs her over-vivid complexion to tell them of her origins. She has the eyes of a prey animal, with horizontal pupils, their deep orange barely visible against the brighter orange of her irises. Instead of feet, she has hooves, and Chang’e shudders to think of how many small skeletal adjustments must have been needed to make that possible. Bipeds aren’t made to be redesigned casually or on the fly. The human body is enough of a ridiculous miracle without starting to screw around with the way it fits together.

Something sways behind the orange girl, and looking more carefully, Chang’e realizes it’s a tail, tufted at the end like a lion or a qilin. That’s what this girl looks like—Chang’e can’t quite think of her as a woman, not with her impossible anatomy and the wide-eyed expression on her face—she looks like an alchemist’s attempt to make a qilin in the material world. She’s close enough to human that she’ll be visible to non-alchemists, but they’ll see her as a normal person, someone who belongs in a normal setting. They won’t see her as she is.

She’s not the furthest thing from natural that Chang’e’s ever seen, even in this specific incarnation. But she’s pushing the limits in a way that bends the world around her, ever so slightly, making it seem thinner than it ought to be. Closer to the edges of the everything.

“This is Kelpie,” says Erin, in a very slightly protective tone. She even shifts her position, putting herself slightly between the newcomer and the rest of the room. Interesting, that she’d be that protective so quickly. Chang’e wonders if that’s normal for her, if she goes around finding lost puppies to adopt.

This is an odd puppy, if so.

“Hello, Kelpie,” says Roger. “That’s an interesting name. It comes from a Celtic water horse, a shapeshifter. Are you a shapeshifter?”

“If I’m supposed to be, I never figured out exactly how,” says Kelpie. Her voice is soft and sweet, a little high, with no discernable accent. The hardest accent to hear is always the one rooted where you’re standing, and so Chang’e supposes she grew up very near here. If she grew up at all. Maybe the alchemists made her at the age she is right now, setting her loose in an early, ill-defined adulthood. “I always wanted to be a shapeshifter, though. Just think hard and you won’t be a color that’s visible from space anymore.”

“Kelpies also killed people,” says Dodger. “Are you a killer?”

“I was a lab technician until yesterday,” says Kelpie. “I never killed anybody, but I guess the things I prepared for other people to work with probably included bits of dead people. Alchemy does, a lot. Are you the missing cuckoos?”

“We are,” says Roger.

“Oh. There are some people who really, really want to find you.”

“That’s not much of a surprise,” says Roger. “Fortunately, we’re not easy to find when we don’t want to be found.”

Chang’e snorts.

Roger looks toward her, eyebrows rising in mild curiosity. “Yes?” he asks.