Page 39 of Inkpot Gods

“Protective?”

“I think they defined the word so they’d be able to describe her someday. It’s not her fault. Her brother died when she was young, and she wasn’t able to save him. So she tries her best to save everybody else. She’s never forgiven herself for not being there when he needed her.”

This feels too personal for Lilianne to know about someone she’s only met once, and then essentially in passing. She frowns into the darkness, feeling her stomach twist like she’s swallowed something bad.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“It is what it is. But we all try to forgive Erin when she gets a little overly intense, because she doesn’t know any other way to be. She didn’t have the upbringing for it.”

The water is getting shallower, or else Lilianne is getting so cold that she can’t feel it anymore. She reaches down with her free hand, and while her thighs are still wet, the denim clinging to them like it’s never going to come off again, the water level is considerably below where she expects it to be. Hope sparks through the sourness of her stomach, chasing it away.

They might survive this.

Onward they walk, following the pendulum ever deeper into the dark.

Protection

TIMELINE: AUGUST 23, 2018.

The water keeps getting shallower until they’re not wading at all, they’re stepping up onto a concrete platform. The tunnel is otherwise unchanged, but just being out of direct contact with the water makes it feel warmer … for now. Lilianne knows that won’t last for long. Their bodies will realize that they’re still wrapped in wet cocoons, still buffeted by cold air, and the freezing will resume, if it ever actually stopped to begin with.

But Smita isn’t shivering as hard, and the motion of the pendulum is getting more and more focused, not swinging at all any longer, only pointing toward whatever lies ahead. She shakes it, trying to see if she can change the direction of its focus, and nothing she does will make it shift or swing: it only points.

They’re almost there.

It’s almost anticlimactic when the light hits a rough concrete wall, free of waterlines or graffiti. In the center is a door, plain wood painted white, like something you might find in the back halls of a hospital. It’s unimpressive enough to loop back around to becoming impressive in a unique, half-terrible way.

“Is it locked?” asks Smita.

“I don’t know, but my pendulum wants us to go there,” says Lilianne. She steps forward, Smita’s reassuring light at her back, and reaches for the knob.

“The light will guide me home,” she murmurs just before her fingers close around it, mantra and plea and prayer all at the same time, so jumbled up together that they can’t be picked apart.

She grasps the knob. She turns it.

The door swings inward under her hand.

She pushes it about a foot open, revealing a narrow strip of darkness that manages to be even deeper than the darkness in the tunnel. A faint smell escapes, like formaldehyde and some kind of cleaning fluid, lemon-bright and utterly impossible.

“Is this it?” asks Smita.

Lilianne almost wants to snap at her, to remind her that they’re both here for the first time, that she has no more way of knowing what’s going on than Smita does. But even more than that, she wants to squeal and throw her arms around the other woman, dancing with delight over the fact that it’s here, it’s really here, they found it.

The lost lab is hers. All she has to do is step inside and claim her destiny.

“I think so,” she says. “I hope so. And I hope that it has a working dryer, whether it is or not.” She grasps what little bravery she has left and steps forward, pushing the door the rest of the way inward. Smita follows her, phone raised to cast as much light as possible.

They’re in a kitchen, large and industrial, with chrome shelving and countertops. It looks like the sort of thing you’d expect to find at a summer camp or school, someplace where the staff is expected to feed enormous numbers of people very quickly and out of industrial vats. It’s hard to imagine so many alchemists in one place that this sort of setup would be necessary, but here it is, and it’s even harder to imagine another situation that would put this many people in a windowless underground kitchen and force them to eat whatever the cafeteria could produce.

The walls are concrete. The floor is tile. The ceiling is high, and yet the room doesn’t echo as they step inside, or as the door swings shut behind them. Lilianne shifts to stand closer to Smita, like she thinks the warmth off her body could help the smaller woman without the need to touch her.

“There must still be power down here,” says Smita.

“Why would you say that?”

“We can still breathe.”

It’s a simple statement, and yet. There are no windows: the door, when closed, forms an almost perfect seal. There’s no way air is getting down this deep without some sort of ventilation system, and there’s no way it would be this fresh if the vents weren’t actively doing their jobs. Lilianne blinks, then turns to start scanning the nearby walls.