Page 40 of Inkpot Gods

“What are you looking for?” asks Smita.

“The light switch,” says Lilianne, and then: “Ah-ha!” She moves toward the wall, then flicks the switch she spotted there.

The fluorescents overhead sputter and groan as they flicker into life, filling the kitchen with a lambent white light that makes the flashlight immediately unnecessary. Smita grunts approval as she flicks it off, then moves to stuff the phone into her pocket. She freezes before she can finish the gesture.

“Try your bra,” says Lilianne. “That’s what I did. It should still be dry enough to be safe.”

Smita shoots her a grateful look, then tucks the phone into her bra, safely away from her sodden clothing. She turns, looking at everything around them with wide-eyed curiosity.

“The alchemists built all this?” she asks.

“I think so,” says Lilianne. “If I’m right and we are where I hope we are, they definitely did.”

“How? This must be right under at least one major intersection! There’s no way they could build this much without someone catching them!”

“Have you ever heard of Roman concrete?”

“What?” Smita blinks at her, clearly thrown by the sudden change of subject. “Concrete?”

“Yeah. It was this famous Roman discovery. A concrete that could move with its environment, meaning it had incredible tensile strength and didn’t buckle in earthquakes. It could even heal itself under the right conditions, or follow lines drawn by the people who used it, constructing whole rooms without the need for an architect. But then Rome fell, and the secret of the concrete was lost.”

“That sounds a little close to magic for me,” says Smita dubiously.

“Not magic. Alchemy. It was pure human innovation and science being bent toward fulfilling the needs of the alchemists who made it. There was nothing magical about it.”

“And that has what to do with this lab?”

“This whole place was built using Roman concrete, following lines of resonance implanted in the soil.” Lilianne tries to make her answer sound as matter-of-fact as possible, like this is the sort of thing Smita should expect. “Modern alchemists working for the Alchemical Congress rediscovered the secret a few years ago, and they were able to use it to build labs all over the country.”

Oh, she’d been so excited on the day the news of the discovery leaked into the independent alchemists’ community, when the whispered rumors became openly spoken facts. One of the cockier alchemists she knew, a boy from Decatur, Georgia, who had been refining gold out of sand since his eighth birthday, had even managed to acquire a brick-sized sample of the stuff, which had looked entirely unassuming until it was hit by a hammer. Watching it put itself back together with the methodical silence of a healing muscle had been sobering in the extreme.

“It’s the real deal,” she says, more sedately. “It works, and it should stand up for centuries, even in earthquake country. It just recovers from whatever people throw at it.”

“That should be the sort of thing that changes the world,” says Smita.

“It was, and it did, and then the world forgot about it, and now the world doesn’t deserve it anymore,” says Lilianne. “Lost knowledge belongs to the people who rediscover it.”

“But you said it was the Alchemical Congress who rediscovered it. Why are you talking like you should have any say in what happens to the information? You just said that it doesn’t belong to you.”

There’s an unexpected sharpness in that question, and for a moment, Lilianne isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do. The moment passes. “If it belongs to one alchemist, it belongs to all alchemists. We’re equipped to understand it, and that’s the most direct form of ownership there is. This place is Roman concrete. No steel to rust, no wires to corrode. Just solid, self-healing stone shot through with vents and wiring. It’ll still be here long after the city of Berkeley is forgotten. It may even have grown by then, depending on the blueprint they used. If they told the lab how to expand itself over time, then that’s exactly what it’s going to do, year after year, until the entire underground is just rooms and chambers.”

“All empty,” says Smita. “The alchemists are gone.”

“For now.” Lilianne takes another look around. “The place isn’t even dusty. The self-cleaning processes are still working.”

“Is that part of the not-magic magic concrete?”

“No. But there are ways to program air scrubbers, modified fungus and the like. We prefer to work with the natural world whenever possible, because alchemy is the oldest of the natural sciences. It doesn’t require anything falsified.”

“Huh,” says Smita.

Lilianne leads her to the door, testing it to see if it, like the door into the sewer passage, has been left unlocked. When the knob turns, she grins, giddy as a schoolgirl, and says, “I bet we can find some towels in one of the main labs.”

Smita doesn’t have time to object before Lilianne’s through the door and she’s alone in the empty, echoing kitchen. Her soaking-wet clothes are sticking to her body, pressing her core temperature further and further down: she needs those towels or she’s going to freeze.

But she stays where she is, and does not follow, and is finally free to think about what she’s done for the first time since she decided she was going to do it.

Smita looks around the abandoned kitchen, no longer making any effort to disguise her curiosity, and shudders. Lilianne may or may not know the secret to the Roman concrete, but Smita does. She’s known it since Artemis and Kelpie came for dinner a month or so after the eclipse, when the two Lunars were still adjusting to their freedom and their new partnership, the ancient goddess of the hunt in the stolen body of a rich man’s daughter—no partnership theirs, despite the way it usually works for Lunars, thanks to the actions of her host’s father and one Mr. James Reed—and an orange-skinned lab experiment still getting used to the way the world worked. They’re an odd pair, but they’re never more than a shout away from one another, keeping close even when they don’t realize what they’re doing.