Page 93 of Tidal Creatures

“How can you?” counters the man. Artemis’s expression, meanwhile, has gone slack, all animation draining away. The man frowns. “Miss Austin,” he says. “You should be here now.”

“She can’t,” says Roger. “I gave her strict instructions to sleep, and you don’t have the authority to overrule me.”

“As to how I can, music is sort of like math, and time is absolutely a form of math, and music that time took is one hundred percent in my wheelhouse,” says Dodger. “You’re not going to get control of her.”

Kelpie turns to Artemis, losing interest in the man, at least for the moment, and grabs hold of the other woman’s shoulders. “We don’t need Anna,” she says firmly. “We need Artemis. We need to get to the gate.”

Artemis blinks, then shakes her head, clearing away the fog. “Hey,” she says, focusing on Kelpie. “Where is it?”

“Behind him.”

“Of course it is,” says Erin, sounding disgusted. She steps forward. “Hello. Judging by the fact that you look like you’ve been embalmed, I’m going to guess you’re the local Congressional representative. Am I warm?”

“I serve the Congress; I don’t belong to the Congress,” he says, sounding almost amused. “But yes, you’re quite close to the reality of the situation. Can I help you in some fashion?”

“You can let us pass.”

He taps his chin with one finger, expression turning thoughtful. “Mmm … no, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.”

“Then you can make your peace with whatever divinity you serve.”

“I don’t think I’ll be doing that, either,” he says, producing a flask from inside his pocket. Kelpie, who recognizes it all too well, makes a wordless sound of dismay and recoils. He holds it up for Erin’s inspection. “You seem too well educated to be a part of this little mob. Who did you study under?”

“Barrow, primarily,” says Erin.

For the first time, his composure flickers. Only for a moment, but long enough for the whole group to see it happen. “You’re one of…”

“One of Reed’s, yes,” she says. “I’m the one who handled his cleanup when he didn’t want to do it himself. You can drop that flask, but you’ll have to ask yourself which is faster: airborne alkahest or an angry construct with nothing left to lose.”

“I’ll bet on the alkahest,” he says, and tosses the flask, a bare moment before he retreats through the door, slamming it closed behind him.

The glass shatters when it hits the floor, a thick, silver-gray gas beginning to billow forth. It’s too much to have been contained in that flask at any point; even the most generous of reagents would have overflowed the available space.

There isn’t time to dwell on the impossibility of the moment. He knew his targets when he prepared his poisons. This isn’t like before, when he thought he only needed to kill a human. If this alkahest touches them, they’ll die, divinity and cuckoo alike; flesh is not immune to consumption, no matter how it was created.

Kelpie shies back, pressing herself into Artemis, who puts her arms around her and drags her several feet back, while Judy and David try their best to step behind Roger and Dodger, neither of whom look particularly disturbed.

Dodger rolls her eyes. “Gravity is a mathematical concept, did you know?” she asks.

Roger nods. “You do love reminding me,” he says.

“Well, it seems important,” she says, and looks at the cloud of foggy gas that’s pooling by the door. She begins to recite a string of numbers so complicated it sounds more like a witch’s incantation than a math problem, and the gas falls out of the air, splatting on the floor with a wet sound. Dodger nods, apparently satisfied. “Go tell it that it’s impossible now, okay?”

“Cleanup crew again,” says Roger, and moves to stand at the edge of the puddle of alkahest. “You don’t exist,” he informs it. “Alchemists struggled for centuries to create you, and failed over and over again, because you don’t exist. You’re a literal impossibility. For you to exist, a dozen laws of nature would have to be violated or rewritten, and that hasn’t happened, so you’re not real. You’re just fancy colored water.”

He crouches and reaches for the pool. Kelpie’s eyes widen in terror.

“No!” she yelps, just before he touches the surface of the liquid. It ripples, and nothing else happens.

He pulls back his hand, showing her his wet fingertips, then wipes them against the side of his leg. “All I had to do was make it understand that it’s not real,” he says. “I could have gone for more of a sledgehammer approach, told it that it wasn’t there, but that’s rude. I don’t figure the universe likes having itself ripped apart just because it’s convenient, so if I can do things the subtle way, I generally will.”

Kelpie continues to stare at him with wide eyes, clearly waiting for the moment when he starts to melt. It doesn’t come. Roger straightens.

“You said the gate’s through there?” He gestures to the door the man from the Congress retreated through. “Are we all feeling good about following him?”

“No,” says Erin. “These people love to set traps almost as much as a Scooby-Doo villain does. We open that door, we could set off all kinds of nastiness.”

“Which is why you go first, since you’ll pick up on anything that’s not where it’s supposed to be.”