Page 7 of Tidal Creatures

Something is coming out of the overhead vents. Something thick and gaseous and silvery gray. It sparkles in a way smoke should never sparkle, moves as thickly and viscously as a gel, but the way it hangs suspended in the air tells her it’s not. Kelpie makes a wordless sound of displeasure and points.

Margaret follows her shaking finger and sighs. “That’s about what I expected,” she says.

“What is it?”

“Do you remember the way the inspector reacted when he saw you? How unhappy he was at the thought that there might be someone on this level who wasn’t purely natural? This is the Alchemical Congress. Anyone who proposes a project to them understands that failure comes with consequences. You don’t get the chance to fail twice, but there are always other ways someone can contribute to the pursuit of knowledge. You’re not ready to die for the City, and that’s fair and good and right. I knew when I was put in charge of this lab that I had to be ready, and I’ve been ready for a long, long time.” Margaret sighs again, shrugs, and begins removing her lab coat, folding it neatly over her arm. “You might not want to stay for this next part, unless you need to see what happens in order to believe it.”

“I don’t … I don’t understand.”

“Lead really does block virtually everything,” says Margaret, sounding oddly serene. Whatever it was she took before she decided to get unusually candid with Kelpie is working, taking the edges off what should have been a terrifying situation. “As long as we kept you down here, no one noticed your presence. Once you make it aboveground, she’ll notice you soon enough.”

“Who?”

“Artemis. She’s probably been looking for you since you came manifest, even if she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Oh, she’s going to be happy to see you. I promise, she’s going to love you.”

The smoke has almost reached them. Kelpie grabs Margaret’s arm, trying to pull her out of its path.

“You said they’d reassign the researchers,” she says, frantically. “You’re a researcher.”

“I’m not,” corrects Margaret. “I’m the project lead. I don’t get reassigned. I get recycled. I get to be part of someone else’s project, as raw materials, not as a contributor. Run, Kelpie. You don’t want to watch.”

Kelpie pulls on her arm one more time, but Margaret is heavier than she is, Margaret doesn’t budge. Finally, Kelpie lets go and dances back, out of the path of the smoke. It continues to drop, finally reaching Margaret, who turns her face upward and closes her eyes, smiling like a child greeting the sun.

That pill must have been an incredibly potent painkiller, because the first thick tears that run out from beneath Margaret’s eyelids are tinted the color of her eyes, and the ones that follow are red with blood. Margaret sighs, a shuddering sound that turns thick toward the end, burbling, like she’s exhaling through mud. She’s still smiling; she hasn’t fallen. She tries to sigh again, and the sound turns into a cough, leaving her lips stained with a thin layer of blood. She raises her hand to catch the cough. Her skin is already beginning to bubble and drip, fizzing like it’s been carbonated.

Kelpie can’t watch any more of this. She turns and sprints away, scrambling for balance on the slick floor, and she doesn’t stop running until she hits the stairwell. The stairs extend in two directions: down to the safe familiarity of the lower labs, the hydroponics and the bio storage rooms, the kitchens and the residential quarters. There will be people down there, people who know her, who treat her like a junior alchemist who survived a terrible lab accident and had to relearn everything from scratch—people who have, if Margaret was telling the truth, been lying to her every single day, telling her one thing when they really mean another.

She believes Margaret. Margaret has always been good to her. Margaret has apparently been lying to her like everyone else, but there’s no reason for her to have kept lying when she knew she was about to die. People tend to tell the truth when they can see death coming toward them. She doesn’t want to believe Margaret. Believing Margaret means accepting everything she’s ever known was a lie, and that comes with implications she won’t be able to wrap her head around for quite a while, if ever. But she does believe Margaret. She can’t go down.

Up leads to the higher levels of the lab, places she’s never been, the personnel offices and classrooms, and eventually, at the very top of the stairs, the outside world. She’s always wondered why she doesn’t miss it more, the blue sky and fresh air and other things she’s seen in pictures and always assumed were in the missing parts of her mind. Now she has her answer: she hasn’t been grieving for the world beyond the lab because she’s never been there. She doesn’t know how she’s going to survive out there, all things considered, but that’s where she has to go, or the man with the skeleton smile is going to come back and find her, and what he does to her won’t be nearly as merciful as what he did to Margaret.

Alkahest, when used in a gaseous mixture, is not a painless way to die, but it’s a fast one, and Margaret had warning enough to take a painkiller before the alkahest began eating away at her nerves. As methods of execution go, this one came surprisingly close to kindness.

Kelpie’s not very experienced. She’s naïve but not unintelligent: she knows there’s no possible way she was that close to Margaret when the alkahest reached her without also being exposed. The fact that she’s not melting yet means Margaret was telling the truth. She’s not natural. She’s constructed. And if she was constructed using Baker and Reed’s recipes, she’s part of the subclass of constructs they call “cuckoos,” and that means the man with the skeleton smile isn’t going to be kind when he catches her. He’s going to kill her, too, but he’s going to take his time about it.

Cuckoos are dangerous. Cuckoos go feral and turn on their creators. Cuckoos seize the forces they were intended to embody and hoard them away from the alchemists who really deserve them. If she’s a cuckoo, as long as she’s alive, she’s going to muddy the question of who owns her manifestation, whatever it’s supposed to be.

Artemis’s Hind, she supposes. It would explain the hooves, and the tail, and the other parts of her anatomy that never made much sense as the consequences of a simple lab accident. She’s seen stranger—it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility—but it was odd enough to make her wonder.

The Congress wants the Lunars. Margaret swore the companion aspects were the key to catching them, and Artemis is one of the ones whose name is still spoken with reasonable frequency; she’s one of the more powerful Lunars walking the world, and that makes her desirable. Kelpie doesn’t want to spend the rest of her probably short life as bait.

Up is the only possible direction.

So she climbs the steps, wincing every time her hoof hits the metal and sends the sound ringing through the stairwell, and she doesn’t stop until she reaches the door at the top. She pushes it open and light floods in, so much light, light like she’s never seen before. It’s blinding. It’s beautiful.

Kelpie steps out into the sun.

Lacus Timoris

TIMELINE: AUGUST 17, 2017. FOUR DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

Judy’s advisor is a smart man. He’d have to be, to hold his position for more than an afternoon; people who aren’t clever tend to fail once they hit a certain level of academia. That’s not a judgment—Judy’s own parents couldn’t understand half of what she said before they died, even when she was speaking one of their shared languages, and they were both brilliant. Their brilliance was just focused on other things, leaving matters like accreditation, thesis defense, and class planning to people with the mental room to care.

Judy cares. Judy cares a lot. The current record for most languages spoken fluently by a single person is forty-two, and she plans on beating that. Professor Middleton, who probably speaks languages numbered in the hundreds, doesn’t count. He’s never going to sit down with the people who maintain the Guinness Book and let them put him through his paces, because if he did, he’d be revealed as something more than human. Which means, given the way the scraps of magic still left in the world protect themselves, that he’d go through the whole process, only for the examiners to forget, if he was lucky. If he wasn’t lucky, they’d turn out to be alchemists, or they’d be in a terrible accident before they could report their findings, and he’d have to carry the guilt over their deaths forever. Either way, he won’t be appearing on any official lists.

Judy isn’t like him, isn’t the living incarnation of the concepts behind spoken and written language. She has a natural talent for languages, but she has to work at it, has to study and make an effort for every new sentence structure and scrap of syntax. Chang’e isn’t a goddess of language, never has been so far as Judy can tell, and she’s gone digging for every obscure myth and retelling she can find. Being able to read them in their original dialects helps a lot, and yet she’s never found a mention of the goddess who maintains the peach orchards on the moon having a gift for Scrabble, much less the foundational blocks of language itself. That means she’s not cheating when she goes for the record, and that means she needs to do things according to the rules. Which means degrees and advisors and so much homework that sometimes she wants to scream and start throwing things.

Dictionaries are heavy. They make surprisingly effective projectiles.