Page 43 of Inkpot Gods

Lilianne blinks, looking back to the locker room, then to Smita again. “You found clothes,” she says, awkwardly.

“You brought me clothes,” corrects Smita. “I wish you hadn’t come inside without asking, but at least I’m dry now. Let’s go.”

She turns and starts down the hall, not pausing to see whether Lilianne is following her.

Uneasy, Lilianne does.

Smita towels herself dry, moving as quickly as she can manage before hanging the towel on a nearby rack. Her limbs are weary, exhausted beyond what makes sense for how much exercise she’s had tonight. Cold will do that, she supposes. It has a way of sapping the strength from everything.

Thinking about the cold reminds her of the pale woman who’d collapsed in their front garden last year, dropping like a stone as soon as she crossed the border into Dodger’s captive artificial summer. Melanie, her name had been, and she was the living soul of Winter, the season and the concept in one. Her traveling companion and boyfriend, Harry, had been beside himself after seeing Melanie go down, and getting the two of them awake and on their way had been most of the work of an afternoon.

She hasn’t seen either of them since, but she’s heard Melanie laughing from Dodger’s phone when it was set to speaker, and she knows they won their race to claim the crowns of their seasons, becoming something more than human, something less than gods. It’s all so complicated, and some days she feels like she’s the only real human left in the entire world, the only person not somehow tied into a universal concept instead of ordinary human days. The cold never sapped Melanie’s strength away, because the cold was her burden and her birthright.

Smita’s only birthright is a clever mind and dexterous hands, and some days she thinks she has more in common with the alchemists her friends revile so much than she does with her friends themselves. One day they’ll realize that she’s too human to belong, and then she’ll find herself cast out, alone in a world that no longer entirely makes sense after everything she’s seen.

The clothes Lilianne found for her are surprisingly well-fitting. She pulls them on, feeling safer and more secure with a layer of fabric between her and the rest of the lab. This shower room could fit into any luxury spa in San Francisco, but she’s still punishingly aware of the weight of the city high above her, the tons of earth just waiting to come plummeting down and make this place her tomb.

The white coat that was stacked with her new clothes is definitely a lab coat, the sort of thing alchemists wear when they’re doing their experiments. The sort of thing Smita herself used to wear when she worked in active genetics labs. She looks at it for a moment, expression grave, before shrugging it on and rolling her shoulders to make it hang correctly down the line of her body. Like everything else, it fits precisely.

“If she doesn’t make it as an alchemist, Lily has a career as a personal shopper ahead of her,” she says, as much to hear the sound of her own voice as to break the silence. She gathers her wet clothes from the floor, wrapping them in the towel, and turns to the door.

The hall is empty, and she doesn’t hear Lilianne moving around anywhere nearby, which is odd, since she’d seemed utterly sincere about not going more than two doors in any direction. Feeling suddenly uneasy, Smita hurries to check the rooms that would fall under Lilianne’s promise. She doesn’t find her, not in any of them. She’s truly alone.

Panic gripping her heart like a dead man’s frozen fingers, Smita whirls and runs back to the kitchen where they initially entered. At least if she can see the door back to the sewer, she’ll know she has a way out of here, should she need it. She hasn’t put her wet shoes back on yet. She can’t quite bear the thought of shoving her dry feet back into the cold confines of dripping nylon and rubber. But she could, if she needed to, and if she moves fast, she might be able to make it out of the sewer before she freezes—

And it’s a moot point anyway, because when she opens the door that should lead to the kitchen, she finds an office on the other side, complete with hefty oak desk and wall lined in matching shelves, each one heavy with books. She freezes in the doorway, hand still on the knob, before pulling the door shut again and backing away, looking up and down the hall. This was the right door, she knows it was. And yet …

Rooms don’t just rearrange themselves like that, not in the real word, not outside the sometimes-unreal confines of her own home. She must have just counted wrong. She turns toward the next door, trying again.

A supply closet.

The next two doors are a small lab and a shockingly sterile sitting room. There’s no sign of the kitchen, or of Lilianne. She’s been abandoned, deserted in a place that no one else knows how to find. She’s trapped.

Smita has been through more than any woman in her position should be asked to endure. She’s died, dozens of times, due to the orders of alchemists, at the hands of an alchemical creation. (She doesn’t always think of Erin in terms of her origins, anymore, but she still knows what the person who’s become her best friend really is. Has known long enough that she no longer thinks of her as anything else, no matter what happens around them.) The panic grasping her heart is no longer icy cold: it’s a burning plume of terror, igniting her from the inside out.

There must be a way out of here. There has to be. Smita turns and runs, fleeing down the hall. The sound of her bare feet slapping against the tile is the only thing she leaves behind.

Lilianne walks down the hall at a measured pace, Smita beside her, moving with an eerie silence. She glances down at Smita’s feet. They’re bare, and she would expect to hear at least a little sound when they strike the ground. But there’s nothing, only the sound of her own steps echoing along the empty hall.

Something is very wrong. With the entire situation—and, terribly, with Smita. She looks precisely as she did when they first met on the quad, save for her clothing, but didn’t her hair seem like it would be softer, before? Less like the polished carapace of some infinitely complex insect? And weren’t her eyes kinder?

The light is harsh here in the lab, endlessly bright and unvarying. Maybe that’s what saps the kindness from Smita’s eyes, what squares the corners of her mouth. Maybe it’s all the situation, and there’s nothing wrong at all.

Lilianne turns a corner, and there before her is a lab with an indented floor, easily three feet below the level of the hall from what she can tell. The angles are warped by the water that has filled the space, dripping from a crack in the ceiling. Cracks shouldn’t be possible, not here, in this shell of godsblood and alchemy, but this one has opened wide enough to let a leak break through, water falling inexorably to drown the lab.

The light casts strange ripples across the near-motionless surface. Lilianne takes a moment to stop and gape at the scene in front of her, one more impossibility added to a day filled with them, one more obstacle to overcome.

Her first thought when she feels Smita’s hands press against her back is joy, like she’s become a source of comfort for this woman she’s only just met, like her seedling crush may have the chance to bloom.

Then Smita is shoving her, hard, and she’s tumbling into the freezing water that fills the lab, mixed with who-knows-what chemicals from the desks and workstations it covers. She gasps, flailing frantically to get her head above the surface, then turns, straightening, to stare at Smita.

But it isn’t Smita anymore. It was never Smita to begin with. The figure standing at the water’s edge is easily seven feet tall, neck elongated and swan-like, hands dangling by digitigrade ankles. The clothes that fit so well a moment ago are now almost a mockery of human attire, clinging to a body that’s more insectile than mammalian.

Not-Smita grins, showing jagged, needlelike teeth that would look more at home in the mouth of a viperfish than a … whatever this is.

Then, with an inhuman ease, the creature is sliding into the water, disappearing immediately below the surface, and Lilianne doesn’t know where it is, and she doesn’t know what it’s going to do, and this—all of this, this entire journey into the unknown—has been a mistake.

Aggression