Page 91 of Tidal Creatures

“Now, tell us who you are and what you know.”

Judy frowns, reviewing the conversations she’s had with Roger. He doesn’t give orders. He asks for things. He makes his wishes clear. But for a man with all of language at his fingertips, he speaks with remarkable care, never quite demanding when there’s any other choice. She wonders how he figured out he had to be so careful with the world, and how difficult it is for him to navigate when the slightest misspoken word can render everyone around him incapable of saying “no.”

His weirdly codependent relationship with his sister makes more sense all the time, and the wisdom of voluntarily entangling herself with this man fades a little deeper into the mists of confusion, but she can already tell she’s going to do it anyway. He’s charming, in his own eccentric way, and he can skip language to language in the middle of a sentence in a way that appeals endlessly, and is so difficult to find out in the real world. She’s a part-time goddess of the moon. She was never that infatuated with the real world anyway.

Anna sighs, shoulders sagging in what looks almost like relief. “My name is Annabelle Austin, and I’m the daughter of Charles Austin, who owns the Austin Continental Rail Company. My father’s a very important man, which is why he was very alarmed when his oldest daughter started hearing voices. I was meant to be making my debut into society, and instead I was arguing with the moonlight. I had to be seen to.”

“Seen to?” asks Roger.

Anna nods. “Seen to. He found a lovely man who promised he could heal my instabilities and set me back on the path to becoming a functional member of society. Dr. Reed was quite skilled with the art of the mind. He took me into his care, and under his tutelage, the voices stopped. I no longer heard a woman calling to me from the moon, as was only right and proper; there are no women in the moon, and if there were, they wouldn’t use the moonlight as radio waves, beaming themselves into my dreams.”

Erin steps forward, expression going sharp. “Ask her what Reed ordered her to do. There must have been something, or she wouldn’t have let Artemis in. The Lunars have to be allowed to take root and grow inside their hosts. For some reason, she allowed it.”

Judy frowns. Artemis’s avoidance of Diana makes more sense now, as does her insistence that the other woman had to be doing something wrong. Diana is more hands-off than she should be as a senior Lunar, more distracted by the human side of her existence, but she’s never shown any signs of being an alchemical puppet.

“What did Reed ask of you?” asks Roger, obediently. “You have to answer truly. I need to know.”

Anna’s face screws up with momentary discomfort before she says, in a sharper tone, “He was embarking on a great project, one he had started with his mother’s assistance, before her passing. He was going to have children of his own, a boy and a girl, and he was going to raise them to be the most perfect people who ever existed.”

Dodger scoffs. Roger glances at her, expression sharp.

“He may have intended to do things that way in the beginning,” he says. “She’s not lying if that’s what he told her he was doing. One of the dangers of asking someone to tell the truth is that they can only tell you the truth as they understand it, and not necessarily the truth as it actually is.”

Anna nods. “He was very determined to be a parent. He called them his cuckoos, and said one day they would fly. And he might not be there to see it, but I would be. He was quite sure of it. He said I was a fascinating subject, useful and useless at the same time. I don’t care to be called useless. It seems impolite at best, and insufferably rude at worst. But he told me I had access to a place he dearly wished to enter and feared he might be banned from. He prepared me to serve as needed.”

“And Artemis?”

Anna’s face screws up in sudden disdain, so pure and absolute that Judy winces. She can’t imagine sharing her life with someone she dislikes as much as it seems Anna dislikes Artemis. She and Chang’e may not always be in perfect agreement, but they’re always friends, and they navigate the complexities of their shared life with relative grace.

“He said I had to let her in. He said he needed to talk to her. So I let her in. So he talked to her. And then … I don’t remember much after that. The taste of peaches, frequently. Flashes of my father’s funeral, my mother saying I had some nerve showing my face there after the way I’d broken his heart. And then it was all a dark room, with a window that let in the moonlight.”

“Quiet now,” says Roger. “Go to sleep.”

Anna closes her eyes and bows her head, swaying as she appears to fall asleep on her feet. Erin moves to steady her, keeping her from falling down.

“Great,” she says. “So Reed was fishing for Lunars before any of the rest of us were born. What was he planning to do with them?”

“I think he must have been afraid we’d do exactly what we did, and break away after we claimed the Doctrine,” says Roger. “So he creates his cuckoos and then they don’t hand him the City—what then?”

“Then he’d start planning another way to get inside, since us existing makes the City more concrete than it was before,” says Dodger. “Us being here, on Earth, as material creatures that need things like air and gravity, means the City has to appear the same way. It has to be solid so we can enter it. In a way, forcing us to manifest forces the City to manifest. Cause and effect don’t have to go in that order, not for this equation.”

“So Reed incarnates the Doctrine, and that lures the City close enough to become solid, and then, what, it echoes backward?”

“Maybe.” Dodger shrugs. “Causality is squishy where we’re concerned. You know that. Baker made the City a place when she wrote the Up-and-Under—except it was already a place, because we already had stories about Olympus, and Avalon. Even the Christian Bible says, in so many words, that Heaven is a city. Baker redefined it to fit what she wanted it to be, to fit us, or the idea that was eventually going to become us. Do you think the Lunar system worked the same way before that happened, or do you think it adapted after she changed the way reality works?”

“This is giving me a headache,” mutters David.

“Welcome to my world,” says Erin. “Much as I hate to break up philosophy club, we’re standing in the stairwell leading to an alchemical research center owned and operated by people who don’t like us much and have already demonstrated that they’re more than happy to commit murder to get what they want.”

“And, um, what they want is at least partially me, but I bet they’d be happy to take us all,” says Kelpie, sounding anxious. She sounds anxious perpetually enough that it’s not setting off alarm bells yet, but Judy can see where they might eventually learn the flavors of her anxiety, come to understand them as individual and distinct things, and be able to calibrate their panic accordingly.

Of course, first, they have to live that long.

“Anna,” says Roger. “You can wake up now, and take a breath, and then you’ll go back to sleep, and let Artemis come forth again. I know the moon isn’t shining this far underground, but the gate is here, and we need Artemis right now.”

Anna opens her eyes, giving him a spiteful look. “You want to put me away again,” she accuses. “You’re just like Dr. Reed. When he’d had enough of me, he sent me away, and for you to do the same, sir, proves only that you are no gentleman at all, only a pale mockery of same.”

“That’s fair enough, and you’re not wrong. But now you need to go.”