Page 56 of Inkpot Gods

BOOK IVGold

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

Or who cleft the devil’s foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy’s stinging,

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

—John Donne, “Song”

Truth can take us so far, beyond that we go by trust

Are you as scared as I am at what’s happening to us

It’s hard on you, but sometimes I just have to run and hide

But it’s your arms I’ll run back to, and your face I wear inside.

—Talis Kimberley, “The Face Within”

Authority

TIMELINE: AUGUST 23, 2018.

Lilianne groans as consciousness comes seeping back around the edges of her mind, pulling her out of the deep, healing darkness of sleep. She’s stretched out on something soft, and while her shoulder still aches, it doesn’t throb, doesn’t pound with every beat of her heart. It feels like the blood inside her body is staying there, like she might be a closed system, capable of survival.

She just doesn’t know where she is. The air is cool, and smells faintly of oiled leather and old paper. It’s a library smell, a familiar, comfortable smell. It’s the smell of her father’s office back in Alabama.

It’s not the smell of the underground lab, or of her current off-campus home. The apartment smells like the ghosts of old marijuana cigarettes and the soft, almost-sweet scent of Snake’s cockroach colony, which fills the bathroom like a strange sort of incense. None of those smells are present here. Only books and stillness.

With an effort almost exhausting enough to send her spiraling back down into the silent dark, Lilianne forces her eyes to open. She’s looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling, plain wood stained dark to balance the amount of light coming in from the windows. What she can see of the walls without turning her head is mostly books and shelving, dark oak without a sign of dust. She blinks, several times, trying to find the strength to move and look anywhere else.

A dry voice to her left says, “The alchemist’s awake.”

Lilianne blinks again and tries to ask who the speaker is. Her lips refuse to move. The effort shows her how dry her tongue is, how stuck to the top of her mouth. She’s entirely defenseless.

“Are you sure?” This voice belongs to Smita. There’s an edge of anxiety to the question, terror, concern, and relief all mixed together.

“I think I can tell the difference between someone who’s awake and someone who’s asleep,” says the first voice. It’s female, Californian by accent, with a vague disaffection that Lilianne’s used to hearing in teens who would rather chew their own arms off than spend time with their families. She dealt with a lot of them during her years volunteering as a receptionist at her father’s pediatric practice.

Just the thought of the practice is enough to summon a pleasant hallucination of the old, familiar place, its polished floors, its clean, primary-colored walls. She’s halfway back down the slide into unconsciousness before she realizes what’s happening and tries to catch herself, digging her heels into the waking world and refusing to tumble any further. The stop is jarring, from the soles of her feet all the way to her still-aching shoulder.

Wait. Why does her shoulder only ache, like something she injured weeks ago and is well on the way to recovering from? She remembers the etiäinen shedding the illusion of Smita’s face and lunging for her, the way its claws caught and tore at the meat of her shoulder, the hot feeling of the damage spreading through her body. She remembers the blood running down her arm to feed the water, and the etiäinen lurking just barely out of reach, strangely unwilling to come up onto the desk where she was huddled. She’s sure there was a reason for that. She just needs to figure out what it was, in case this ever comes up again.

Because I’m definitely going to be wandering around a lab originally staffed by high-level alchemists who didn’t have time to defuse their tricks and traps before they fled again in the future, she thinks, words caustic and biting in the silence of her own mind, and the loathing in the thought is enough to snap her eyes open again. It’s the same ceiling as before, which makes it feel more likely to be real.

Whatever’s going on, it’s actually happening, and that means she’s going to have to deal with it.