Page 69 of Tidal Creatures

Kelpie shies back, against Smita’s side. She doesn’t look afraid, exactly; she seems more resigned, as if this were something she knew would need to be dealt with eventually, but still held out hope it could be delayed a little longer, or possibly forever.

“Artemis,” says Chang’e.

“I would have known if they’d managed—but I started watching Berkeley without a good reason, and that’s how I saw how upset the alchemists here were. I only noticed because I was already looking. Did I start looking because of … Are you really?” There’s a plea in her last word that defies all description. It’s the sound of someone finding a lost lover or a pet they’d long since resigned themselves to never seeing again.

“I don’t know,” says Kelpie, voice peaking into a wail. “I don’t know what I am! I was supposed to be a person, an alchemist, and Margaret was fixing me, she promised what she was doing was going to fix me, so I could be just like everybody else. I have … I have a family in Florida, and maybe they were always ever only lies, but she told me all about them, and they sent me letters sometimes, and so they feel real to me, no matter what the truth is. I don’t want to be a cuckoo. I don’t want to be a science project or a piece of the universe that stopped pretending it was a person because not enough people wanted it to be. I want to just be me, and I want being me to be totally normal, and not something that makes people look at me the way you’re looking at me now. I want to go home.”

“You can’t go back to the people who made you,” says Isabella. “Even if they weren’t dead, they weren’t treating you right. Whether you were supposed to be a person or not, you’re a person now, and that means you deserve the chance to figure out what that means without people telling you lies.”

“She’s right,” says Dodger, somewhat surprisingly; she hasn’t exactly been the most generous or encouraging voice in this conversation. As she pushes herself away from the counter and steps up even with her brother, her eyes are on Kelpie. “You’re a person now. You’re as real as anybody else, because it doesn’t matter how we’re made, just that we exist. Those people lied to you, and they were planning to keep lying to you, and they didn’t do you a favor by forcing you to manifest when you didn’t want to. But then, no one asks to be born. Now you get to figure out who and what you want to be, and you get to go for it, no matter what. If you’re a celestial hind, that’s fine. Doesn’t mean you belong to Artemis here, any more than you belong to the alchemists. I think we need to be focusing a little more on why Lunars are dying, and why the alchemists are in such a god-awful snit right now.”

“The eclipse,” says Chang’e.

Everyone else in the kitchen turns to look at her. Roger speaks first. “The which?”

“There’s a total lunar eclipse coming in three days,” she says. “The moon is going to be blocked out all the way across the contiguous United States. It’s going to be obscured across an unusually large geographic area.”

“Do they have eclipses in the Impossible City?” asks Smita.

Chang’e nods, very slowly. “They do,” she says. “They mirror the mortal moon as closely as they can, and that means that on the nights when we see no moon here, they see no moon in the City sky. But since the moon is always visible somewhere in the world, there will still be Lunars going into the everything even when the ones here are staying home.”

“Not nearly as many,” says Máni. “If someone has access to the everything—enough access to have gotten in there and assaulted Aske while she was trying to complete her duties—they could presumably open a gate and get in without needing to worry about running into anyone else.”

“But we determined that we each have our own path through the everything,” argues Artemis. “Why would anyone need to worry about that?”

“We didn’t really determine that,” says Chang’e, slowly. “We determined that every Lunar has our own path through the everything, and they always lead us to the same place—to the windows in the sky above the City. We don’t know whether another Artemis would use your path, or have their own.”

“What do those windows look like to the residents, I wonder?” muses Roger.

“Stars,” says Erin, in a tone that implies the answer is patently obvious to anyone who takes a moment to consider it.

The word spreads through the group, and then it is patently obvious. What else could the windows be, if not stars scattered across the glorious blackness above the City? Chang’e catches her breath as Judy stirs within her, glancing to Máni. “So the paths we take through the everything, they don’t actually close when we shut the gate, do they. They stay where they are, so the light from the Moon can bounce off all the closed windows and turn them into stars.”

“Yes,” says Erin.

“I know how we can find Aske’s body,” she says, and turns the whole of her attention on Dodger, who blinks in brief surprise, and then in irritation. She’s not used to being surprised anymore. She clearly doesn’t like it.

“What do I have to do with this?” she asks.

“It’s Artemis’s night to cross the sky above the City,” says Máni. He hasn’t contributed much up until now, but it’s obvious he’s excited by this new way of approaching the problem. “You could go into the everything with her, and while she’s crossing, you could go from her window to Aske’s.”

“There are about eighty million problems with that idea, but the first one—the big one—is that I don’t know which window you’re talking about,” says Dodger. “I’m not the most athletic person in the world—Roger, I swear if you laugh at me, I am going to tell the laws of thermodynamics, and your coffee will be cold for the next month—and I’m not super into the idea of climbing out a window and trying to jump across a void to something I don’t know.”

“You’re Math, right?” asks Artemis. “If you went to Máni and Chang’e’s windows with them before you came with me, couldn’t you extrapolate where the next relevant window would be?”

“That’s not math, that’s divination,” says Dodger. “Pseudoscience. There’s also the question of whether the stars above the City move. Are you clustered together because you’re here, or do your windows stay wherever it is they were when you became manifest? Or when you were incarnated?”

“You keep using all these different words like they’re interchangeable, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing, and I think I’ve earned a footnote,” says Isabella. “What the hell is the difference between manifest and incarnated?”

“Sorry,” says Roger. He doesn’t sound sorry. “Sometimes we forget we’re using the words the alchemists came up with for all these things, and not everyone knows what those words mean. Language is a shared consensus of concepts as much as it’s anything else, and if we don’t share the local definitions, we might as well be speaking a language you don’t know.”

Isabella blinks, then, and looks faintly mollified as she says, “Well, if you’ll just explain yourselves now, we can get back to throwing people out of windows.”

“Hey,” says Dodger, dryly.

“A personification is a universal force that has been compelled to take on physical form,” says Roger. “Normally human, or so human-adjacent as to make no difference, normally—despite the evidence of this kitchen—naturally occurring, brought about by patterns of myth and belief. People say the summer is a person enough times, they eventually get Summer, born into a human body and walking around doing things like a human might. Gods are just another form of personification. Most of them don’t have any sort of cosmic powers or anything like that: they have what the stories gave them, and what we believe they’re going to have.”

Isabella looks, momentarily, horrified. “Wait, wait … if it’s not just moon gods, are you saying that the God is wandering around all the time, wearing pants and eating sandwiches and looking like a normal human?”