Page 97 of Tidal Creatures

Kelpie blinks. “Why are you asking me?”

“Because they were your friends. They’re going to reach us in a minute, and then they’re not going to give us a choice, but it might be easier on you if you actually saw them attack us before we start cutting them down.”

Kelpie looks at her for a moment, wide-eyed. “You care that much about whether you upset me?”

Artemis shrugs. “Well, yeah. I’ve been looking for you for a long, long time. I don’t want you to hate me. But if I have to make you hate me to keep you safe, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Fine. I just can’t watch.” Kelpie turns her face resolutely to the gate, and doesn’t look, not even when she hears the bowstring snap back into place, when she hears the dull thud of the first arrow striking home. There’s a second thud as the auf Artemis shot collapses to the hallway floor, all without making a single sound.

“Efficient,” says Erin approvingly.

“Can you do better?” asks Artemis.

“Watch.”

Roger sighs. “Please don’t show off.”

“Someone has to.” The sound of running follows, footsteps light, ending in the scuff and tap of a leap. Flesh tears a moment later, strangely dry, like someone is slicing through a dinner roast and not a moving person. There’s not a single thud after whatever Erin has done. There’s a series of them, sharper than the first had been, like whatever she’s dropped has the momentum to bounce.

“Okay, that’s impressive,” says Artemis. “Nice technique.”

“I learned from the best.”

“I thought you learned from Leigh Barrow.”

“She was a monster and a horrible person and I hate her, I genuinely do, but she was also my maker and my mother, and she was genuinely good at what she did. I’m sorry she made me. I’m sorry she hurt so many people. I’m not going to pretend she wasn’t a master of her craft, or that I never loved her. It’s tempting to behave that way. I want to. But it would be a lie, and that kind of lie absolves me of a lot of terrible things, so I’m holding on to what she was to me, and who I was to her, and who I am now.”

“Look!” Kelpie’s exclamation is tinged with bright relief. The others turn, following her gaze to the gate. There, on the other side, their companions are returning through the everything. Dodger looks annoyed and a little wan, but otherwise normal; she’s taken no damage from her current situation. Chang’e and Máni walk to either side of her, an escort through eternity, and neither of them looks like their mortal selves at all. They’re stepped so far forward that they may as well be truly divine, with nothing of humanity remaining.

They reach the gate and step out, Dodger first. She stumbles as she transitions back into the hall, then flings herself across the distance between her and Roger, wrapping her arms around him and holding on like they’ve been apart for a hundred years instead of fifteen minutes. Roger wraps his arms around her in turn, clasping her like he thinks he’s unlocked the secret to undoing what the alchemists have done to them, of rendering them a single body once more.

“Dodge,” he says, not letting go or loosening his grip in the slightest. “Slow down. You’re going too fast, you need to slow down.”

“She’s not saying anything,” says Kelpie blankly.

“Not so the rest of us can hear it, maybe,” says Erin.

Chang’e and Máni step down as they emerge from the everything, letting Judy and David take their places. Judy’s breathing hard, like she just hiked up a very steep hill. David gives her an almost-fond look, smirking to himself.

“This is why even English majors should take a general fitness course,” he says.

Judy smacks him on the arm. “Never call me an English major again, you Western centrist.”

He laughs, and the sound is somehow profane in this chamber below the earth, surrounded by walls of stone and cut off from natural moonlight. Artemis looks at him.

“Aren’t you going to ask about the bodies?” she asks.

“I’ll be honest. I was hoping if I just ignored them long enough, they’d be one more thing that goes away as soon as I stop looking.” He does look, though, frowning as he turns to study the corpses on the floor. “What’s wrong with their skins?”

“They were auf made from the alchemists who worked here,” says Artemis. “The guy Kelpie says killed her maker is definitely not playing by Congressional rules.”

“You would know, since it looks like you’re a double agent,” says Judy. She sounds less angry than exhausted, like she already can’t stand to think about it.

“Yeah,” says Artemis, with a sigh. “Does it help if I say I really didn’t know? My host never steps forward, but I thought it was because she just didn’t want to. I wasn’t intentionally keeping her pushed down or refusing to let her rise. And after a while, it was just easier if I didn’t try to force the issue. I had my own life. The years were passing, so she was further and further out of synch, and it’s not like I’ve been keeping her a prisoner in her own mind or anything! This Reed fellow put a chain around her ankle and locked her to the bottom of our mind, and she couldn’t come up until I was removed entirely.”

“There’s moonlight here, but it’s different somehow,” says Judy. “I can feel it better now that I’ve been inside the everything. Which reminds me.” She turns, tapping her key against the wall. The gate vanishes, extinguished by her actions. “We found my window. That was my gate, I think because I tried my key first. Who’s next?”

“I’ll go,” says David. “I think that when we try Artemis’s gate, that’s when we all go into the everything together. So we do hers last.”