Page 85 of Tidal Creatures

She pales, even as she shoves her handful of blackberries into her mouth and bends to pat the dog almost robotically on the head. Swallowing her mouth of half-chewed fruit, she manages to squeak, “Dead?”

“The alchemists who made you somehow tracked Isabella’s footsteps back to the apartment,” says Artemis. “They made an auf, and set it to catch her.”

“She told me she’d warded the apartment. She swore!”

“I think she was telling the truth.” Artemis pauses briefly, expression sorrowful. “The boy and dog were both inside when she got there, or they’d be dead too. There must have been something preventing the auf from just ripping its way inside.”

“What’s an auf?” asks Máni.

Kelpie has a more pressing question: “Who … who was it?” she asks.

“A woman. Blonde. Isabella knew her. She didn’t tell me what her name had been, but … she knew her before this happened.”

Kelpie wobbles, looking momentarily like she’s going to throw up. “Catrina,” she says. “Her name was Catrina. The coven met at her house. Isabella took me there. Oh, they were looking for me, and they found Catrina.”

“Which gave them a destination they could backtrack from,” says Artemis. “Smart. Primitive, as hunting techniques go, but … smart, all the same.”

“You’re praising them?” asks Kelpie.

“Not in the sense of admiring what they’ve done, but refusing to acknowledge the skills of your enemies doesn’t take those skills away. It just leaves you more vulnerable to having those skills used against you.” Artemis shrugs. “It wasn’t a stroke of tactical brilliance. Like I said, it was primitive. But if they wanted to find Kelpie and Isabella had wards keeping them from perceiving the apartment, hollowing out someone Isabella knew and using them as a hunting dog was clever, especially for alchemists. It’s so simple and so gruesome that modern alchemists don’t usually think of that sort of thing.”

“But you recognized it right away,” says Máni, eyeing her warily.

“I’m a hunter. I know hunting techniques,” says Artemis. To her relief, he lets it go with that.

She focuses on Kelpie, who’s still bent over, petting the dog. Bobby, for his part, is in ecstasy at all the attention. “How are you feeling?”

“The same as I’ve felt all afternoon. Lost. A little confused. But still like myself, if that’s what you’re really asking.”

“You’re the one who was worried,” says Artemis. “I drew my bow. At the apartment. It’s the reason Isabella and the boy are alive. I shouldn’t have been able to draw my bow before the moon was out, but I needed it, and when I reached, it was there. I saved them because I could do something that shouldn’t have been possible. I saved them because you were here.”

“They were in danger because I was here,” says Kelpie, and Artemis can’t argue. She sighs as Kelpie straightens and storms back into the house, Bobby following. He stops halfway, looking uncertainly back at Artemis. “Go with her,” she says, and he goes, bounding after Kelpie, vanishing.

Artemis turns to Máni. “I don’t know how to help.”

“I don’t know if you can help. She’s trying to cope with the idea that she was made, not born, and it’s tearing her up inside. I think she’s more embarrassed and frightened than anything else.”

“Fear I get, but embarrassment?”

“Look at her.” He shrugs. “It doesn’t seem quite realistic that she would have thought she was anything other than constructed, does it? Especially in a lab where everyone else was a natural human. If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have looked at them, looked at herself, and known the truth without anyone needing to tell her. But she couldn’t think clearly, because she didn’t have all the information. She did the best she could under the circumstances. And now she’s in the real world, where all those pretty lies are falling down, and she can’t fool herself anymore. She feels bad about that. She’s afraid spending too much time with you will wipe out who she is as a person, and she’s also afraid that might not be the worst thing ever, because who she is as a person let herself be lied to for so long.”

“Ah,” says Artemis, softly.

Máni shrugs again, smiling. “I just want us to finish this, and figure out what the hell is going on. Blackberry?” He holds out a hand filled with fruit, and Artemis takes one delicately, popping it into her mouth.

It explodes on her tongue in a perfect cascade of sweet and sour. It tastes like the height of summer, like the harvest in its most platonic form, and she swallows almost eagerly. “Fuck, that’s good.”

“Guess when the Doctrine of Ethos orders a garden to grow, it listens.”

“Guess so.”

They’re quiet for a moment after that before Máni asks, slowly, “Were you telling the truth before? About why you’re here in Berkeley?”

“I was.” Artemis looks at him. “That’s not really what you want to ask, is it?”

“Why were you pretending to be Losna?”

“Because I knew there wasn’t a Losna here to contradict me, and if your Diana heard an Artemis had come into the area, she’d start trying to make me leave.” Artemis looks at him calmly, trying to make her point without forcing him to see things her way. “She doesn’t like other Lunars who might rival her for power. She only puts up with Chang’e because she needs the peaches, and every Chang’e I’ve met who’s been around more than a few decades knows better than to go near Berkeley. This Diana likes her territory to be hers, and she doesn’t like to share.”