Page 99 of Tidal Creatures

The Impossible City may be her destiny and inevitable destination. That doesn’t make it her master. She moves to take Máni’s place at the window, leaning out and scanning the nearby sky.

Stars gleam everywhere, little diamonds against the dark. She takes another deep breath of City air, and the diamonds become tetragons, some square, some rectangular, some with arched or domed tops, but all with four sides, perfect geometric shapes. Windows. Some are open, their owners already on their passage across the sky, and she wonders how the Lunars manage that, how they reconcile time zones and shifting sunsets to form a singular moon. She dismisses the question quickly. It’s not her business, not her problem; she’s here for the sake of the math, and she doesn’t need to worry about the way the Lunars handle their own affairs.

She keeps looking, taking in the exact angles and designs of the windows, until she spots something familiar. She has to lean out much too far to see it, a white wooden frame about six feet to her left.

“There,” she says, dropping back to the flats of her feet and stepping back before she can give in to the urge to steal another look at the City below. She indicates the direction in question. “Chang’e’s window is over that way. Close enough that I’m pretty sure we could swing there if we anchored the rope right.”

“So I can come see you when you’re at work,” jokes Máni, looking at Chang’e.

Chang’e smiles. “Assuming you feel like playing acrobat with a possible long, long drop, sure,” she says. “Dodger, do you think you can estimate the location of Aske’s window?”

“Not without the third data point, and it’s Artemis’s night anyway,” says Dodger. “Let’s go back to the others.”

She’s a little afraid to be in the everything with Roger. The two of them together, in this impossibly possible space, feels like it’s something that ought to be forbidden. The feedback they set up between themselves may well cross the line into what they feared when they were children, when they hadn’t wanted to meet because a single touch could have locked them into one another’s heads forever.

But they need to be here. Both of them. She knows that, deep down, in the place where she keeps the equations that modify reality, the ones that somehow steal time from itself and bend causality like a strip of paper.

Máni shuts the window, and the three of them walk back to the gate, Dodger refusing to let herself look at the gaps in the walls that neither of her companions can see, Chang’e walking a little faster than the other two, like she’s eager to get back to the underground lab where their friends—if they can be called friends—are waiting.

As they approach the gate, Máni makes a soft sound of protest, signaling a stop. Chang’e turns to look at him, curiosity taking ownership of her face.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Artemis,” he says.

“What about her?”

“She lied to us when she got here, and I didn’t meet her until after Aske was dead. Did you? Is there a chance that maybe this wasn’t the first time Anna’s managed to come back up to the surface? Because if Aske wasn’t expecting another Lunar to attack her, she wouldn’t have been prepared to fight back. Artemis tried so hard to make us not trust Diana…”

“I still don’t trust Diana,” says Chang’e. “Even if we can’t trust Artemis completely, she’s right when she says Diana doesn’t do nearly as much of the administrative side of managing the local pantheon as she should. Judy’s still a student, but Diana is happy to put all the maintenance and busywork on us, and she knows we’ll do it—me because I don’t want to see the pantheon fall into chaos, Judy because she understands my concerns. This shouldn’t ever have been our job.” She stops, silence taking a moment to grow heavy in the air between them before she finally says. “I don’t trust Diana. I want to—this would be so much easier if we had someone powerful and trustworthy on our side—but I can’t. Artemis has had plenty of opportunities to betray us. I think there’s a good chance she is what Anna said she is. She’s just someone who wound up in the path of the alchemists before she knew how to evade them.”

“Sounds about right,” says Dodger. “We’ll see what we can do for her when this is all over.”

“Artemis, or Anna?” asks Máni.

“Artemis,” says Dodger. “I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done for Anna at this point. Even if we could somehow pull off a miracle and get her a body she didn’t have to share with someone she clearly hates, she’d be a hundred years out of the only time period she knows.”

“Aren’t you in charge of—” begins Máni.

Dodger fixes him with a glare before he can complete his sentence. “Don’t even suggest it,” she says, in a voice like ice.

“But you said you could control time,” he protests.

She stops walking and sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose with her right hand and closing her eyes. “I can reset time,” she says. “I can sidestep time, to a degree, just wrap myself up in the seconds dying all around me and disappear, or I can rewind us to any point within my own lifetime and let things restart from there. How much I remember when I do this is … well, it’s not the most reliable thing ever. We did it a lot of times to get to this timeline. A lot of times. This is the best of all possible worlds, at least by the standards we have to work from, and I’m not going to risk all of that because you don’t understand how the system works.”

“We can’t understand if you won’t tell us,” says Chang’e.

“All right, look at it this way.” Dodger drops her hand. “You’re always the same goddess, right? You have personal continuity, or continuity of personality at the absolute minimum. But you don’t carry experiences and memories from manifestation to manifestation. If Judy dies, you’ll find a new host, and you’ll start clean, with only the things Chang’e knows, and none of the things Judy knew.”

Chang’e nods, slowly.

“Seems inefficient to me. You should have a way of storing memories, so people can’t just go around slaughtering Lunars the way they have been. Die here, manifest elsewhere with your saved game intact, immediately alert the rest of your pantheon. If I were in charge, that’s how we’d do things.”

“But then any god who’d incarnated more than once would overwhelm and swamp out their host,” protests Máni. “We’d crush them as soon as we woke up.”

“So maybe if I were in charge I wouldn’t change anything,” says Dodger. “Well, the way I manipulate time is sort of like what you’re describing. I take us back to a preset time, and the version of me who did the taking ceases to exist. Then, if I do things right in the new timeline, she never gets the chance to exist, because I’ve bent things in a way that makes her impossible. Say I could go back to when Anna was an innocent little lamb who hadn’t fallen into Reed’s clutches or fully accepted Artemis yet. Say I could keep either or both of those things from happening. What happens then? Does Reed stay on the alchemical path that leads to my brother and I being created? Is there an Artemis here in Berkeley when we need a moon god who can actually fight? Do any of us exist? All of time is the butterfly effect writ large, and to be honest, I probably can do more than I think I can, but when there’s a chance—any chance at all—that pushing my limits could wipe my brother out of reality, I’m sorry. There are risks I don’t take.”

“I didn’t consider any of that,” says Chang’e.