Page 19 of Inkpot Gods

David has a major apart from football, but he’s not a grad student yet, and so she can’t be bothered to remember it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which is probably shitty of her, but hey, she gets a few less-than-perfect personality traits. Everyone does. If she wants to be a little arrogant, she’s allowed.

And then there’s Raven. Unlike Snake, who begged them all not to look when he filled out his rental paperwork, her parents actually gave her that name, actually looked at their red-faced little potential of a person and thought, “She looks like someone who’s going to need a manifest connection to a trickster god.” She was born in one of the nearby suburbs, and has lived in or around Berkeley for her entire life, which is somewhere nebulously between twenty-five and forty: young enough to still have a sense of adventure that drives her to take more risks than is probably good for her, old enough that she’s no longer willing to sit or sleep on the floor. It’s because of Raven that their shared living room is dominated by large, soft couches, three of them crammed in at odd angles, all rescued from curbs and sidewalks.

But the apartment has four bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. It’s almost embarrassingly large when compared to the student housing. Raven was the one who found it and posted flyers looking for people to share it with her. The rules are simple: no smoking, no sex in public spaces, no pets, although there’s no guarantee the house will be pet-hair-free: several of Raven’s friends have service dogs of one type or another, and Rachel’s seizure-alert dog sheds like that’s his actual job.

Snake’s insects aren’t pets. The landlord doesn’t consider anything with an exoskeleton a “pet,” and as long as they don’t tell him about the roaches, he doesn’t care much about the rest of them. Not telling him about the roaches is one of the household rules. He’s a pretty calm guy, but there are limits.

David quirks an eyebrow and takes a bite of his Hostess pie, and Lilianne realizes she’s been standing silently in the doorway too long for normal social behavior. She winces, just a little, and starts across the living room with the forced nonchalance of someone trying desperately to seem normal.

“How was your day?” she asks.

“First day of classes, so no practice,” he says easily, dropping back onto the couch with the grace he brings to everything he does. Sometimes Lilianne considers hating him for that. He moves like a predator, like someone who understands every inch of his body and what it can do. And then she dismisses the idea of hatred as illogical, because he earned that awareness. He’s at the gym more often than he’s anywhere else, even the football field, and his weird friends and bizarre diet don’t seem to hamper his goal of being the most well-conditioned man in Berkeley.

“I had classes,” she says. None of which had involved actual learning, for her: she’s acting as a TA for the head of her department, and her day has been spent showing undergrads around, helping them understand the concepts behind the syllabuses they were supposed to read week ago, and directing them to the student store for the books they just forgot to buy. It’s been a lot, and even though it brought her nothing new, she feels like her brain is so full that it might explode at any moment.

Academia will do that to you.

“Good for you.” David yawns, teeth flashing white against the dark of his skin. “Oh, wanted to let you know: I’ll be out late tonight. Don’t wait up.”

“Don’t wake me,” she counters.

“No promises,” he says, and smirks.

David has a small flock of rotating girlfriends, women he disappears with for entire nights, coming back in the morning shockingly refreshed and ready to face the day. She’s never seen him miss a workout due to a date, and she’s seen him go on plenty of dates. So whatever’s keeping him away, it won’t be a problem.

Lilianne rolls her eyes, more because she knows it’s the expected reaction than out of any actual distaste. “Whatever,” she says, and keeps walking.

“Don’t you have a doctor’s appointment tonight?”

She stops. “What?”

“You wrote it on the house calendar.”

“Ah. Yes. It’s virtual. I’ll be in my room. Please keep Snake and Raven from bothering me, at least if they get home before you leave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Goodnight, David.” And on she goes, heading for the hall, heading for her room, heading for the point where she’ll be safe from questions and expectations and everything else the world has got to offer. She’ll call her endocrinologist in a few hours. For right now, she just wants to lie on her bed and disassociate so hard she feels like she’s dissolving, breaking down into motes of dust and floating away with the languid movement of the indoor air.

She’s been in this apartment for almost two months, and yet her room is still a wonderland of cardboard boxes piled high not only against the walls, but in freestanding towers throughout the rest of her carefully apportioned space. When she packed and took her things away from Alabama, she’d been so sure that she was limiting herself to the essentials, that she was keeping herself lean and light and ready to pivot on a moment’s notice. Now, crammed in with absolutely everything she owns, it feels like she’s on the verge of becoming a hoarder.

(How do her parents handle having an entire house to fill with the leftovers of their lives? It seems irrational to stay in one place for that long, to put down roots so deep and strong that pulling them up becomes virtually unthinkable. But it is, for them. She’s tried to bring up the idea of moving out to the coast, of leaving Alabama behind. They’ll certainly see her more if they move to California. The political climate is shifting. Some of her classmates want to say that transphobia is over, that the world is changing, but she can see the writing on the walls. History likes to repeat itself. She’d rather not be standing in the refrain, and she wants to see her parents again before she dies.)

Lilianne drops onto the bed, books still clutched to her chest, eyes on the spiderweb network of cracks in the ceiling. There was a massive earthquake in Berkeley a few years back, and it’s harder to find a building that hasn’t sustained some light structural damage than one that has. She’s the newest arrival to this city; all three of her roommates wave off the possibility of a collapse like it’s nothing, like only a fool would be concerned about the ceiling coming down in the middle of the night. They’re not worried, and so she shouldn’t be, either.

She’s not worried. She knows why the earth shook here in Berkeley, and what that motion signified. It’s the reason she’s here. It always has been. The UC Berkeley History department is good enough, but it’s not world-famous; there were better places she could have gone to study if all she wanted was an impressive name on her resume.

No. Berkeley matters for other reasons.

With a sigh, she rolls onto her side and stacks the books on the floor next to her bed, then rolls back into her original position. She’ll meet them soon enough, Reed’s cuckoos. They’re both in Berkeley, according to the information she’s been able to find, the son of Ethos and the daughter of Kairos, the two halves of the Doctrine of Ethos made manifest and walking the world like the people they’re pretending to be. Their existence is the proof of all Asphodel Baker’s theories, the ones too wild and too ambitious for the American Alchemical Congress. The ones that left Baker effectively ostracized for the latter part of her life, that drove her to create James Reed to continue her work.

The theories that, in a very real, causally traceable way, killed her are alive and well and making their lives here in Berkeley, and Lilianne hates them for that, even as she yearns to know them, to position herself close enough to see into their nest and understand what fuels them, first and finally. She has more experience with incarnations than most young alchemists, self-trained or no: her mother and father have been serving the autumn and spring since much longer than she’s been alive.

It’s their service to the seasons that has allowed her to live her own life at the asynchronous tempo she prefers, skipping over the bad parts, stretching out the good ones like a tape played in slow motion. Time has a generous relationship with its most loyal servants. But she wasn’t tapped for that same service. There’s nothing of the summer or winter in her, no seeds of spring or acorns of the fall. She is as human as they come—blood and bone from side to side—and any mysterious transformations she undergoes must come from the outside. She can do part of it on her own. If she can catch Asphodel’s cuckoos, learn the last secrets of their creation, and apply them inward, she can achieve the rest. The cuckoos were vessels made to contain the uncontained, to hold what the universe hadn’t seen fit to embody on its own.

If she modifies her own vessel in the right directions, she may be able to catch her own embodiment.

They’re somewhere in this city. She doesn’t know their faces and she doesn’t know their names, but she knows the Alchemical Congress abandoned this place after their losses reached a certain unforgivable volume, after they had to decommission and desert a hard-won urban lab location. She’ll find the lab first, locate the door, and work her way down to where the Congress spun their secrets like spiders crouching in a darkened corner. They must have left something behind in their rush to flee the city. They must have given her something.