Page 63 of Tidal Creatures

“Sorry, it’s just that I—that Judy—ran right into you. You weren’t difficult to find at all.”

“Ah,” he says. “Well, most people wouldn’t have recognized me for anything out of the ordinary. Not even most alchemists, if they didn’t know me already—and I don’t know whether any of the alchemists who would actually recognize me are still alive.”

“Reed had pictures,” says Erin. “Reed had so many pictures. And class transcripts, medical records, basically all the bullshit an absent but arrogant parent might want to collect. He had that stuff on both of you, even. I doubt it was all destroyed when you burned his lab down.”

Dodger wrinkles her nose, looks down into her coffee cup, and says nothing. Chang’e is sure Roger is getting an earful none of the rest of them can hear. Telepathy is a two-edged sword.

“I learned all about the project that made you,” says Kelpie. “A lot of people worked for a long time to get Baker’s research to the point of having real-world applications. Even more people said it would never work, which is why Reed was considered sort of on the fringe right up until he succeeded.”

“Fringe alchemy; I never thought I’d see the day,” mutters Isabella.

Kelpie doesn’t respond to her. She’s still focused on Roger, trying to answer both the question he asked and the ones he hasn’t fully voiced. She’s responding to the harmonics. Chang’e wonders whether Roger even realizes he does that to people. He clearly knows he can give them direct commands. Does he also know he can push them toward the behaviors he wants with the things he doesn’t say? It must be exhausting, either way, never knowing whether people are responding to him or to the Doctrine.

No wonder he lives in a carnival-colored house with a handful of other personified concepts. They may be the only people he stands half a chance of having a normal conversation with, ever.

“When Reed succeeded, I hadn’t had my accident yet, which I guess means I didn’t exist yet, since I was made, and that’s going to take some time to work all the way into my thinking, but. When Reed succeeded, a lot of people got their minds really, really changed really fast. I guess it wasn’t his success that did it, because that happened a while ago. It was when he and Barrow started taking out the people they saw as competition, and then when most of the Alchemical Congress got blown up and no one knows how that happened, but everybody knows it was somehow Reed. He got a bomb into the Congress, and he killed almost all the masters on the continent. It shouldn’t have been possible, even for him.”

“James Reed always did like to achieve the impossible,” says Roger, quietly.

“Are you going running back to the alchemists who made you?” asks Erin.

Kelpie recoils. “The alchemist who made me—I think—was a woman named Margaret, and she’s dead now, because it seems that’s just what happens to alchemists. They die. They kill each other, and then they use the pieces for their rituals and experiments, and it’s awful. If Margaret were still alive, I might be willing to go back even knowing I’m not who I always thought I was. With her being dead, I’m not going anywhere near those people. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“None of us did,” says Artemis. “Natural manifestation or constructed, we didn’t ask for it. It just happened.”

“Yeah,” says Kelpie, sounding subdued.

“If you’re not going back, I can confirm that yes, James Reed and Leigh Barrow were responsible for the alkahest-and-azoth bomb that destroyed the bulk of the North American Alchemical Congress,” says Erin. “The old masters opposed Reed’s theories, and had stated their intent to fight him for ownership of the City, even after he’d done the work to incarnate the Doctrine, see it to maturity, and guide it to the borders. A preemptive strike seemed cleaner than taking war to the Impossible City.”

“Can you even take a war to the Impossible City?” asks Dodger, frowning sharply.

“You can take a war anywhere, if you’re willing to do the work,” says Erin. “They were going to fight him, he didn’t want them to, he stopped them before they got the chance. That was what Reed did. He never considered himself the villain of the piece. He was a hero in his own mind, Asphodel’s hero, and he was doing what he had to in order to achieve what he had been created to achieve. That was all. Everything he did was in her honor, all the way to the end.”

“He was a horrible man who did horrible things, even to other horrible people, and I’m glad he’s dead,” says Dodger primly.

Kelpie, meanwhile, is nodding gravely. “I guess it’s good to know he really did kill the old Congress. I wish someone would tell the alchemists, though. They spend a lot of time arguing over whether it was Reed or not, and I feel like some of them really, really want it not to have been, because they’re trying so hard to pretend they were always on his side, they always thought he had the right idea about things, they were his disciples. And not knowing for sure that he did it makes it easier for them to say he was a great man who only ever did great things.”

“People who want that badly to believe in his greatness are going to find a way to do it anyway,” says Erin.

“I guess. So, um. After the Congress was wiped out, while the new Congress was being called, a bunch of new projects launched, people scrambling for space and people and resources. And several projects got approved using the remains of Reed’s root stock, the material he used to make his cuckoos.”

“Meaning the preserved bits and pieces of Asphodel he used to tote around with him,” says Erin. “Because nothing says ‘love’ like keeping your dead mother in jars and using her genetic material to make new people.”

“I love how you can always put things in the most disgusting way possible,” says Dodger. “It makes me feel all warm and tingly inside, and not like an asshole’s favorite toy.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Dodger. You were never his favorite,” says Erin, and laughs, as high and bright as a mockingbird, while Dodger glares at her.

“Do you want me to finish or not?” asks Kelpie, somewhat peevishly, and Erin stops laughing.

“Sorry,” she says. “Please, tell us about the people who made you.”

“They were trying to modify and adapt Reed’s work, to make it less universally massive and prone to turning on its creators. They wanted controllable cuckoos. They’ve been trying all sorts of controls, including…” Kelpie pauses then, before she begins to laugh, borderline hysterically. Looking concerned, Smita moves to put a hand on her shoulder. Kelpie turns to look at her. “Controls like telling them they weren’t cuckoos at all! Like telling them they were lab assistants who’d been in accidents!” She keeps laughing, harder and harder, until the “borderline” wears off the “hysterically” and she starts to sob, slumping forward until her face is pressed against Smita’s chest, and she’s just crying.

Smita strokes her hair with one hand, comfort offered on instinct more than anything else, and looks at Roger, Dodger, and the Lunars with her jaw set in a hard line. “Are we quite done torturing this poor girl?” she asks, voice as hard as her expression. “Because I think what she needs is to go and lay down for a little while, not to stand here and keep answering questions about where she came from. And don’t try telling me it doesn’t count when she volunteers the information. I know what it’s like to have the pair of you looking at me, wanting answers. Even if you don’t ask the question, sometimes telling you what you need to know is the only thing a person can do.”

Roger looks faintly abashed. Dodger, however, only rolls her eyes.

“My kitchen,” she says, “is full of moon gods, at least one of whom has come to town hunting alchemists, because the alchemists have gotten so worked up about something that a bunch of cosmic space cases who mostly check out on what life on Earth is doing have noticed. We now know, for sure, that those same alchemists have continued working with Reed’s research and Asphodel’s genetic material, which, believe me, is not making me feel any less like some asshole’s science project. We’re not harassing the kid. We’re trying to figure out how bad the situation is.”