Page 94 of Tidal Creatures

Erin gives him a blankly unhappy look, expression going flat. “I wish that didn’t make sense.”

“I know.”

Erin sighs, then turns toward the door. She blinks, once, and the world changes focus, going from a series of solid forms and sharp edges to what looks almost like a series of values. She’s not seeing the physical world anymore. She’s seeing the chaos all around her, the energy that’s always there, running along the edge of her awareness whether she wants it to be or not. She’s seeing the entropy and the decay that the alchemists fight so hard to control, even at the expense of the natural integrity of the world they inhabit.

She knows now, why they can dig so deep, why the walls don’t crumble inward at the slightest shake. The knowledge comes as easy as catching her breath, bringing with it a hundred unwanted connections. She manages, barely, not to look at any of the Lunars. They might see the understanding in her eyes, and know that they walk through a necropolis, a foundation built upon the bodies of their own dead.

The alchemists may or may not be responsible for all the dead or missing Lunars, but they’re certainly responsible for some of them. She can’t tell, from this surface glance at the situation, how many people were bled out to make this much concrete, how many gods and goddesses of the moon gave everything they had for someone else’s dream. She isn’t sure she’d want to know.

But with all the chaos of the world firmly in her mind’s eye, she moves toward the door, Roger close behind her. If she can spot the traps without triggering them, or even if she does trigger them, if she can do it without putting herself in direct danger, he’ll be able to tell the traps why they aren’t real and thus can’t hurt any of them. It’s an oddly efficient way of clearing space, as long as they go in the right order.

(It’s also remarkably inefficient if looked at with a critical eye. The Lunars are living incarnations of moon gods, but Roger and Dodger are living gods, literally. They can negotiate with reality to a degree that no one else has been able to accomplish, ever, the peak of natural manifestation combined with alchemical personification. They could snap their fingers and bring this all to an end, opening the paths ahead of them without making any real effort. But that’s why they make an effort, why they’re so exquisitely careful in everything they do. They could easily shatter reality without intending to, making everyone else’s needs secondary to their own. That they don’t is a testament to how much care they take every single day. But sometimes that determination to be careful translates into moments like this one, where there’s an easier way, rendered unavailable by their own standards.)

She tries the knob. It’s locked, of course, and so she glances over her shoulder to Roger, nodding once. He looks at the doorknob.

“It’s a real pity, these modern latch mechanisms, the way they never hold up against even the slightest amount of pressure,” he says. “You’d think that by now, we’d be better at making locks you can’t knock loose with a hit in the right place.”

“You’d think,” agrees Erin, and smacks the heel of her hand into the door just above the lock plate.

There’s a click from somewhere deep inside the mechanism, and when she tries the knob again, the door swings open, revealing a narrow hall.

It looks like a continuation of the lab, white and chrome and sterile. The signs of shabbiness are creeping in here as well, the blank patches on the bulletin boards, the scuffs on the floor, but for now, it’s almost as pristine as it was the day that it was made. The seven of them ease through, Erin at the lead, Roger and Kelpie close behind, Dodger following them, looking unhappy to be separated from her brother even by such a short distance. The three moon gods bring up the rear, Judy and David keeping a close eye on Artemis, who moves a little jerkily, like she’s still not sure what happened back there.

She may not know, even now, what Reed did to Anna, and Erin hates that this is just one more life—or pair of lives, more properly—that the man managed to destroy. He’s dead and gone and still ruining things, and sometimes it feels like he’s going to be ruining things forever. He’s never going to go away and leave them alone.

Or maybe it’s not right to blame Reed. Maybe they should be blaming Asphodel, who started this whole obsession in the first place, and left them walking her improbable road whether they wanted to be or not. Erin walks down the hall, steps slow and measured, neither hurrying nor creeping along, but content to travel at the speed her body sets and let it bring her to her destination. Nothing explodes or triggers or comes bursting out to harm them. That’s not as reassuring as it could be.

Alchemists are, by and large, reasonably smart people. This doesn’t make them tactical geniuses, or equip them for a siege; they’re as likely to let death in through the front door as anyone else is. But they think about their own safety, about their legacies, all but constantly, and for the man who appears to have killed everyone in this facility to just let them walk in the way he has says one of two things: either he’s so bone-confident in his alkahest that he can’t imagine any of them are still alive, which is hubris bordering on foolishness, or he’s got another way out, and has already fled the lab complex for the world above.

Even surrounded by divinely infused, self-repairing concrete, Erin can see a hundred ways to bring the apartment that houses the laboratory entrance crashing down, blocking off the door. Sure, Roger could whisper the stones into vapor, or Dodger could find the equation that lets them dig their way out in no time flat with nothing harmed but their schedule, but both those things would strain the limits the cuckoos place on themselves. Others could be hurt, civilian lives lost, and all because they let him get away.

It’s a distressing-enough thought that she doesn’t hear Kelpie call for her to stop at first, but keeps walking, trying to reach the end of the hall. Once they reach the end of the hall, they’ll find their answers. She’s sure of that. She really is.

And then Kelpie’s voice breaks through her fugue, and she stops, looking up at the ceiling as she tries to organize her thoughts. There, worked into the pattern of perforations in the ceiling tiles, she finds a series of sigils designed to encourage focus and single-mindedness among lab technicians. They’re tuned highly enough that they’re effectively weaponized. Anyone who walks down this hall will find themselves unable to deviate from their assigned course, which means she wants to keep going, no matter how important it is for her to stop.

There are many downsides to being a living chaos detector. One of the more pressing, which never seems to occur to anyone unprompted, is that while she can spot things like tripwires and explosive devices designed to cause chaos, she won’t see orderly dangers until it’s too late. She’s missing a full half of the threats, because they’re orderly and thus don’t register.

Erin sighs and looks down again, then turns and backtracks to where Kelpie and the others are gathered, their attention on a particular section of wall.

“You’re sure?” asks Roger dubiously.

“It’s here,” says Kelpie.

“She’s right,” says Judy, moving to the front of the group and reaching out with one hand, brushing her fingertips against the wall. “I don’t know how it can be down this deep. The gates are only meant to appear where there’s moonlight. But it’s here.”

“There’s moonlight everywhere around us,” says Artemis. “It’s been severed from the moon itself, but it’s still moonlight. It comes out of the walls. It’s so strong I bet the place glows in the dark.”

“It does,” says Kelpie, sounding almost serene.

“Can you open it?” asks Roger.

That is the important question, after all; they’ve found the gate, but can they open it? Erin watches, holding her breath, as Judy dips her hand into her pocket and produces the key, which she taps against the wall like she’s trying to ring a bell. Then she scowls.

“Nothing,” she says.

“Let me try,” says Artemis. She reaches into her own pocket, producing a second key. It’s not quite identical to the first, and neither has the mass-manufactured sheen of a key from Home Depot or some other big-box hardware store; they’re hand-worked, these keys, antique and gleaming. They’ve never been given time to tarnish, for all that Erin’s fairly sure they’re the oldest things in this hallway.

Artemis taps her key against the wall, parallel to Judy’s, and the gate appears.