Page 72 of Tidal Creatures

“I get that,” says Artemis. “I really do. I don’t control where I incarnate, but when I introduced myself to Anna, she thought she was going to be a teacher. She grew up in a really strict family, and they had all these rules about what she could wear and who she could talk to and what careers she was allowed to even think about. ‘Teacher’ was one of the only ones that they said was suitable for a woman. And then I moved in, and told her it was okay to want to be happy, and she started pushing their limits.” She pauses for a moment, expression turning somber.

“I think…” Artemis says finally. “I think it might be easier if we did things the way the alchemists do, when they make their perfect vessels. If we weren’t sharing space. I’m Artemis, I know I’m Artemis, but I don’t remember any of those things that people say about Olympus. I could hit a target dead-on from the moment I first picked up a bow, and anything that can be a projectile weapon is deadly in my hands, but I never trained. And sometimes the things I want and the things Anna wants aren’t the same. I have to negotiate with myself all the time, forever, in order to stay on level ground. When I meet another Artemis, she’s me, but she isn’t, like a photograph that’s been left out in the rain and gotten all distorted. But neither of us is a clearer picture than the other; we’re just starting from someplace different. I’ve never seen a Hind before. They stopped incarnating a long time before this incarnation of me was born.”

“Why?” asks Kelpie. “If the City needs the Lunars to satisfy its populace, and enough people believe in you that you keep getting born over and over again, why did the companions go away?”

“I think because the City didn’t need you, and so it never pressed against the part of the universe that spends resources putting pieces of itself in living bodies,” says Artemis. She finally moves to open the back door, gesturing toward it with an open hand, inviting. “You want to go outside?”

“Okay,” says Kelpie, and crosses to exit, careful to keep as much distance between herself and Artemis as possible. It’s like she fears something will change if they touch, and maybe something will; she was built to be a perfect companion to this woman, after all, and now that they’re in the same place, the same time, she has no idea what that might actually mean for her. Right now, she still feels like she can walk away.

Or could, if she had anywhere to go. She’s trying her hardest not to think about that. She can’t go back to the lab, even if part of her wants to, yearns for the safety of familiar surroundings and routines. The man who killed Margaret would do the same to her without hesitation. She isn’t even human. She’s a failed project. There’s no reason for him to let her roam free.

She can’t go back to Isabella’s apartment. What Roger said about the wards matches what she understands of such boundaries, which even the strongest alchemist can’t render unbreakable without a lot more time and resources than Isabella has. Her presence puts that family in danger. She isn’t sure if she’s a danger to these people as well, but she feels like they would have said something if she were, like they would have pushed her out the door and told her to solve her own problems. More importantly, these people are as unnatural as she is. They understand in a way that Isabella can’t.

But they haven’t asked her to stay, and she can’t invite herself. Out on the streets, on her own, she’ll be a beacon for any alchemist who’s looking to score points with the Congress by bringing the runaway back; she can’t evade them forever. And from what she knows, having been on the companion incarnation project for as much of her life as she can remember, being Artemis’s Hind isn’t going to give her any of the strange abilities that some personifications get after they become manifest.

Is she even manifest? What if this is all the stage before that happens, and she’s going to wind up like the Lunars, with someone else inside her head, telling her what to do and occasionally taking control of her body? They all seem comfortable with what they are and the way it works, but she’s never considered needing to share the only thing that’s really hers. She doesn’t want to.

The existence of the steps up to the front porch should have made her realize how elevated the house is from the ground, but she’s not familiar enough with standard architecture, and she didn’t realize before. She steps onto the back porch and stops, hooves thudding dully against the weathered redwood surface. Another set of steps leads down to the backyard, which is a riot of color. Green dominates, of course, in the form of lush grass and surprisingly well-behaved blackberry vines, which have twisted and wrapped themselves around one another to form tidy mounds, turning the back half of the yard into a labyrinth of channels and paths. Their branches hang heavy with fruit. Much of the rest of the space is filled with vegetable beds, all as ripe and perfect as the ones out front, none seeming to care about the season or the weather.

This is a tiny slice of paradise, called into being behind a house in Berkeley. It’s thriving, but Kelpie knows without asking that it’s fragile; remove any of the pieces from this exact configuration, and the whole thing will come crashing down.

The door shuts as Artemis exits the house to stand behind her, still not closing the distance between them, still not touching her. Artemis may not share her specific concerns about what will happen when they inevitably make contact, but she’s respecting Kelpie’s clear concerns as best she can, even as she continues to lean toward the other woman like a flower leans toward the sun.

“I don’t know why the City needs a Moon, or whether it’s going to stop someday,” she says. “I don’t even know whether the people we see there are actually people, or if they’re ideas, or ideals, or something else altogether. Maybe they’re concepts that haven’t personified yet, or maybe they’re former manifestations that have gone to their reward for putting up with all this bullshit while they were alive. I think you’d have to go down into the City to find out for sure, and that’s not allowed. We can’t leave the sky while we’re overhead.”

Kelpie glances at her and nods, listening without interjecting.

“I think Lunars work the way we do because we have to be used to the idea of sharing space inside ourselves. When we go into the sky above the City, we’re never alone. Every other Lunar who’s come to shine that night emerges and shines with us, and when we come together, we make a Moon. But what I know about companions tells me they never do that. They don’t combine to form one bigger than themselves. They stay in the everything, and they watch us pass, and then when we come back to the everything, they … help.”

“Help how?”

“That’s less clear. I think they’re supposed to help us snap back into being ourselves, and not stay muddled up with all the other people we’ve been combined with for the whole night. Sort of like using a ground wire when you’re working with electricity. They bleed off the extra energy. And that makes sense, when you consider that only the most powerful Lunars ever manifest companions.”

“Máni,” says Kelpie, dubiously.

“He used to be a lot more powerful than he is now,” says Artemis. “Chang’e still has a lot of active worshippers, and the way the Holy Roman Empire fucked with European culture when they started expanding means that even though Diana and I don’t have nearly as many worshippers as she does, just as many people know who we are, because they’ve read the books of Greek and Roman mythology. They know our names, and so we hold on to the power we should probably have lost centuries ago. Why us and not Máni, or Losna, or any of the others? It’s all down to who managed to spread their stories farther and faster than anyone else, like dandelions going to seed and blanketing a whole meadow.”

“Oh,” says Kelpie, voice softer.

“So if you’re worried that you’re going to get swallowed up by something you never asked for, I don’t think you need to be worried. Not the way a new Lunar does.”

“What do you mean? You swallow them?”

Artemis looks momentarily guilty. “No. I mean, yes, but also no. We don’t swallow our hosts; we share with them, and we make them stronger than they would have been without us. But at the end of the day, when we’re manifesting our divinity, they’re pushed way, way down. They become passengers in their own bodies, in their own lives. I have Anna’s face and Anna’s body, always. I can make a lot of trouble for her. If I break the law, her ID is the one they’ll flag in the system. If I drop out of school or decide it would be fun to try some sort of really addictive drugs, she’s eventually going to have to deal with that. And of course, when I have control, she doesn’t. That’s time that should have been hers, getting spent on being me. She can’t get that time back. Not ever. And being Artemis means I’m naturally manifest a lot of the time. I can’t step all the way down when I’m on a hunt, even if I want to.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning right now, Anna is always sharing space with me in a way that means she doesn’t have full control over her life—but she’s still here. You have to remember that. She was here before I started speaking to her, and when she dies—because all mortal flesh will die, no matter how many peaches she steals from Chang’e’s garden—Artemis will endure. This speck of the greater goddess will gutter out and fade away, forgotten like any other tiny variation on a familiar story, and somewhere in the world, someone else will wake up with the voice of a goddess ringing in their ears.” Artemis sighs. “Gods die all the time. Especially tiny gods like us.”

“Why do the gods have to be tiny?” asks Kelpie. “That’s the part I don’t quite get. If the universe has to use energy to make you manifest, wouldn’t it be better to just make one of each of you at a time, and not spend all that extra energy?”

“The universe wants its personifications to be human,” says Artemis. “That’s the whole point of making us the way it does. It likes being able to experience things through a human lens, and so it casts some of its functions into human roles. But if all of me incarnated in one person…” She pauses, shivers. “I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason the universe splits us up this way. Because we’re small enough to share space with people, we don’t completely destroy them. When a Summer or Winter becomes manifest, they’re still the people they were before they were seasons, just with a sort of … overlay that never quite goes away. When a Lunar becomes manifest, they’re still completely the person they were, just with a voice in their head nudging them along and occasionally asking for a turn at the wheel. But when an Element becomes manifest, when someone is Fire, or is Water, or whatever, the person they were before they manifested is gone. They’re burnt out, drowned, blown away, buried. There’s no going back. The Elements can’t step down, because there’s nothing left for them to step down to. If you put a whole god into a human body, you’d get a situation like those three inside. There is no Professor Middleton. It’s nice that he’s pretending he’s a person, and I guess he’s not faking it entirely, because he grew up already connected to the Doctrine through his sister—breaking it into two bodies and tying them together means they had to be a little bit manifest from birth—but really, there’s nothing there but Language. It’s just Language with a name and a coffee order at Starbucks.”

Kelpie glances over her shoulder at the house. “I don’t want that.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” says Artemis, sounding frustrated. “I don’t think you’re going to have that. The companions don’t aggregate the way the gods do—and not even all the gods do it, just the Lunars, although every kind of divinity I know of that still incarnates does it the way we do, in little pieces. Everything I know about the companions says they incarnate, and they incarnate intact. And then, if circumstances are right, eventually, they manifest.”

“I’m afraid I’ll manifest if I touch you.”