Page 90 of Tidal Creatures

That thought isn’t too far off. There’s a glazed, absent look in Kelpie’s eyes, like wherever she is mentally, it’s very far away. She looks at Artemis’s hand on her elbow, then back up to her face, her own eyes very wide and guileless.

“We have to go down,” she says. “The gate is down.”

“Why would the gate anchor here?” asks Chang’e.

“Because maybe the Moon is tired of something picking you off one by one, and wants you to finish this?” suggests Erin. “I mean, that, or it’s trying to get you all slaughtered so it can start over with smarter moon gods. I don’t know. I’m not the folklore expert here.”

“We don’t have one of those,” says Roger. He steps into the stairwell, nose wrinkling. “It smells like alkahest.”

Dodger follows, slow and unhappy. “I don’t like labs.”

“I know,” he says, reassuringly.

“They can’t keep us here. If they try—”

“They’ll regret it.”

He speaks with such absolute authority that Dodger calms, and the rest of them follow her lead. Artemis lets Kelpie go. The orange-skinned woman shakes her head, rolls her shoulders, and begins to descend into the light, tail twitching and hooves making little ringing sounds on the metal steps.

They follow. There’s not much else to do at this point, not when she’s supposedly leading them to the gate, not when the gate is so far below. Down and down they go, so far beneath the Earth that it shouldn’t be possible, not in earthquake-prone California. Erin winces several times, picking up on the instabilities in the walls around them, but calms incredibly quickly; none of those faults are severe enough to set off her chaos radar for long. That seems to make her tenser rather than soothing her, and by the time they reach the third flight down, she’s tight-shouldered and scowling, glancing around like she expects to be attacked at any moment.

The Lunars stay clustered together as they walk, and halfway down that third flight, something changes in the air around them, like a camera filter has been removed, a layer of soft-focus glitter stripped away. Chang’e makes a small, soft sound of dismay, glancing over her shoulder at Roger, and the way he meets her eyes somehow makes it clear that he’s looking at Judy. The gods have gone. Only their human hosts remain.

Anna stumbles, nearly falling, only to catch herself on the stair rail at the last possible moment. Blinking rapidly, she turns to the others, searching their faces in desperation. There’s no recognition in her expression. “Where are we?” she asks, and her voice has changed, dry, almost generic tones replaced by something closer to the American Mid-Atlantic accent, which sounds at once completely wrong and completely right coming out of her mouth. She’s too young to sound like that.

But she’s not as young as she seems; she’s made that more than clear. Judy hesitates, remembering Artemis saying that she never steps all the way down when there’s a hunt happening, and wonders how long it’s been since Anna—actually Anna, not a pretense of her put on to make people feel more comfortable with the situation—has seen the surface.

“We’re in a stairwell, beneath the city of Berkeley,” says Judy gingerly. “We’re heading down into an alchemist’s stronghold, to find the gate that hopefully lets us access the Impossible City.”

“Children’s stories and nonsense,” says Anna. “I don’t know what I expected from a dancehall girl. Why are we here?” She looks to Roger, apparently flagging him as the leader of their little group, and waits for a reply.

“Was that racist?” asks David. “I feel like that was racist.”

“Almost certainly,” says Dodger. She’s looking at the air above Anna’s head, eyes unfocused, visibly working her way through some sort of incomprehensible equation. “I’d say she’s standing roughly a hundred years ago right now. Nineteen twenty-something. Of course, that’s just a guess. Keep her talking and I’ll be able to narrow the field considerably.”

David looks at her blankly. “I thought your brother was the linguist.”

“He is. He speaks all the languages that are, or ever have been, spoken upon the Earth.”

“So how can you narrow down a time period from her accent?”

“I’m not going by her accent,” says Dodger. “I speak English and just enough Spanish to order lunch at the taquerias downtown without being a total asshole. This isn’t about language.”

“Then what…?”

“Roger speaks languages, but Dodger speaks time,” says Erin, eyeing Anna with distaste. “This isn’t a form of time travel I’m familiar with, and I’m not going to pretend I like it very much. This one came the slow way, in a box at the bottom of a deep well, where no one would mess with her or try to draw her out. Artemis put her there, whether she intended to or not. I thought you people practiced coexistence.”

“We do,” says Judy, sounding disturbed. “The gods can’t suppress us like that.”

But maybe the rules are different for Artemis when she’s on the hunt. Maybe she can do things the rest of them can’t, or wouldn’t, do.

Anna looks alarmed, taking a step backward and down the stairs, her hands held out in front of her in a useless warding gesture. She’s outnumbered, even before you account for the fact that with or without the moon, half of them are more than purely human.

“You’re with them,” she accuses. “The voices from the moon! You’re part of that great delusion! Well, I’ll not have any part of it, do you hear me? I refuse the idea that I’m to share my inner space with someone I never asked for and never invited in!”

“So she wasn’t a willing host, then,” says Erin quietly. “That’s an interesting variation.”

“Calm down,” says Roger, with the force of a direct command. His eyes are on Anna, and his words are clearly meant for her; she catches her breath as if she’s going to object, then sags, objection dying in the force of an order she can’t refuse. Her shoulders relax, her hands lower, and her face goes slack.