Page 35 of Inkpot Gods

One day—one day very soon—they’ll be able to enter the Impossible City, and whoever claims it first will be as untouchable as the sun itself. On that day, for the chosen, the purification can begin, and whatever form it takes will be the right and righteous one. All of humanity can be as god-touched and glorious as the Lunars, as the Doctrine, as her parents. And all she has to do is get there.

The thought carries her through the silence of the streets, onto labyrinthine lanes lined in grass-fronted houses, the smell of dew and slightly metallic recycled water hanging heavy in the air. Their gardens are California impossibilities of bright flowers and ripening fruit. Many of them have lemon or orange trees, adding their citrus-sharp smells to the air. It’s so far from Alabama that it aches, serving only to remind her that she’s left home behind.

It was a surprise to her parents when she abruptly changed her aim from her lifelong dreams of Boston to far-off Berkeley, but she couldn’t explain to them exactly why, couldn’t tell them that the most exciting developments in modern alchemy are happening in Berkeley—a city, paradoxically, that no longer hosts any alchemists of its own. They’re all gone, scattered to other places after the rise of Reed’s cuckoos and the destruction of their main lab. But everyone she’s spoken to has confirmed that reality is thin here, malleable in a way it wouldn’t be without the weight of the various greater incarnations distorting it. A tincture that can heal scars somewhere else might be able to regrow an entire skin here. Pastes to cure baldness that wouldn’t work anywhere else might grow whole new heads of hair, provided they were made in Berkeley.

Hormones brewed and blended to change endocrine systems can potentially rewire them to a level otherwise seen only in utero, making mass physical changes to soft tissue and reproductive systems. She didn’t become an alchemist for the sake of easing her transition, but if she can make use of the natural properties of the space, why shouldn’t she?

Once the sounds of campus have fully fallen behind her, she reaches into her coat and withdraws a rhyolite pendulum. It’s nothing special to look at, light gray and faintly speckled, knapped down to a point with obsidian tools. She bought it from a metaphysical shop downtown, surrounded by the scent of incense and patchouli. (The owners lack the powers they advertise so freely. They’re just normal humans with a decent grasp of what it takes to run a business. In this case, that’s a good thing: the pendulum wouldn’t work as well for her if it was already imbued with someone else’s essence.)

Holding the pendulum out at arm’s length, Lilianne focuses on it, slightly narrowing her eyes as it begins to sway gently back and forth. She holds her hand as steady as she can, watching as the pendulum’s steady rocking gradually evolves into a slow spiral, moving independently of anything else. (It’s not truly independent, keyed into the motion of the universe unfolding all around it, but for someone standing on the surface of the Earth, it might as well be.)

The spiral grows larger and larger, winding out and then winding back in, until the pendulum develops a strong list to one side. Lilianne nods and turns to face in that direction, letting the swinging stone guide her wanderings. Onward she goes.

Through the night, down populated streets, past darkened windows like eyes into the worlds and lives beyond, the sleeping people she will never know. Step by step she extends the distance between herself and her room, all her possessions, the person she pretends to be. Here, in the dark, she isn’t Lilianne the student, Lilianne the transplant, Lilianne the trans woman. She’s only Lilianne the alchemist, and she’s going to remake the world.

There is a vacant lot up ahead, incongruous among the rows and rows of tidy houses, and she barely notices the woman stepping out of it onto the sidewalk, barely sees her in the haze of searching and discovery. The woman pauses to pull something out of her purse, and for the second time in a single day, Lilianne collides with a stranger, knocking her to the ground.

Wait: no. Not a stranger. As she automatically grabs for the falling woman’s arm, Lilianne realizes she knows her. She knows very few people in Berkeley so far, but she knows this one, with her beautiful face and her thick black hair. She can no more stop knowing her than she can unring the crystal bell of her own heart, and so she just freezes, pendulum still spinning in her unoccupied hand, to stare at Smita.

Smita recovers her composure before Lilianne does, using the firm anchor of the taller woman’s grasp to pull herself to her feet, shaking her head until her hair falls in a black ink river down her back. She’s wearing a tan jacket, something like a short, stylish trench coat, and carrying a large leather purse. And she’s still the most beautiful woman Lilianne has ever seen, so beautiful that it almost hurts to look directly at her. It’s like staring into the sun.

“We keep running into each other,” Smita quips, half-dryly, and it’s such a dad joke that it breaks through her beauty for just a moment, allows Lilianne to recover her composure and risk a dry, shallow laugh.

Smita gives her an assessing look. “What brings you this far from campus?” she asks. “Forgive me if I’m making assumptions here, but when we met earlier, you didn’t strike me as a local. I don’t normally find out-of-state students wandering around the residential neighborhoods, especially not after midnight.”

Because it is after midnight now, well after midnight, sliding into the deep slow hours of the morning. These are the best hours for alchemy, which is a form of debate as much as it’s a science, even if half the alchemists Lilianne has known would never admit it; through alchemy, they can negotiate with the universe, argue with the rules it chooses to follow on a daily basis, and sometimes win in ridiculous ways, rewriting everything to suit themselves. The fewer waking minds there are nearby, the easier it becomes to win those arguments, because there’s no one available to offer contradiction.

“I, uh…” she says. “I just wanted to go for a walk, you know? And I guess I moved away from all the noise and fuss coming off the campus just sort of automatically. I didn’t want to run into anybody.”

“I can go,” says Smita.

“No, that’s all right,” says Lilianne hurriedly. Maybe too hurriedly: Smita looks momentarily amused, as Lilianne’s cheeks burn. Still, she soldiers on: “I don’t mind a little company. You’re not a stinking drunk frat boy telling me how tall I am like he thinks I somehow never noticed, or a sorority girlie looking at me like I’m some sort of a threat.”

“Well, you know, they might be right about the threat.” Lilianne’s heart sinks, only to rebound back into her throat as Smita continues: “You do keep walking into people.”

Lilianne smiles. “Only you.”

“Oh, so I’m special? Well, I’m flattered. Every girl wants to be special. I just feel like I could be special without hitting the ground quite so many times, you know?”

“Picky, picky. And what are you doing out here? Is there something interesting in that vacant lot? How is there a vacant lot in the middle of the block? I thought the local real estate market was so tight that any open ground would have been snapped up and overbuilt by now.” She takes a step toward the point where the sidewalk ends and the rough, rocky ground of the lot begins. For some reason, for just a moment, she smells peaches.

Then Smita is in front of her, hands raised and a disarming smile on her face. It’s like she can’t decide whether she’s distressed or not. “Remember the earthquake we had a few years back? The house that used to be here had a bad-enough gas leak that the whole thing burned to the ground. It was a nasty piece of work. Anyway, the owners still own the plot, and they’re planning to rebuild eventually, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“And the something interesting?”

“I was visiting a friend who lives over there.” Smita gestures vaguely. It’s hard to tell which of the neighboring houses she’s trying to indicate; it could be any of the three on the far side of the lot. “Cutting through is faster than trying to find my way through the maze of little streets between here and there. I don’t know what I’ll do when they rebuild the house that’s supposed to be here. Learn to go the long way around, I guess.”

“Huh,” says Lilianne, and takes another step toward the lot. She keeps smelling peaches, and she can’t figure out why …

But Smita doesn’t move, and if Lilianne keeps going, she’s going to knock the other woman down again. She stops where she is, bewildered.

Smita smiles. “I’m out on the street because my friend needed to go to bed,” she says. “You met her earlier—Erin? And anyway, if we’re not going to visit her, there’s really nothing there but a bunch of rocks and old, broken glass. You can get hurt wandering around in the dirt if you don’t know where it’s safe to step. You want some company?”

Lilianne can keep arguing, keep trying to get into the vacant lot, but why? There’s nothing there, and the strange smell of peaches could be coming from almost anywhere. A nearby tree or Smita’s shampoo. The world is filled with tiny mysteries that were never intended to be solved. She can leave this one safely alone.

So instead she turns her body halfway back toward the pendulum she’s been ignoring for these last few minutes. It isn’t swinging anymore. Instead it’s spinning in small, tight spirals, each one pulling toward the same unseen destination.

“What’s that?”