Page 59 of Inkpot Gods

Lilianne is struck silent by the ease with which Smita reveals things that she herself hadn’t been able to discover until she’d been studying alchemy in secret for more than a decade. What has she stumbled into?

Falling into immediate giddy infatuation with beautiful women shouldn’t be this complicated. She makes a silent vow to never do it again.

(She’ll keep that vow, but only because she’ll never see another woman as instantly beautiful to her idea of the world as Smita. Smita is perfectly suited to her desires, and she’s stuck.)

Smita tugs her again. “Come on,” she says. “I’m forgiven for bringing an alchemist home, given the state you were in when I got you here, but that degree of forgiveness isn’t going to extend to you being openly rude to my housemates.”

Lilianne’s feet feel like lead. But she’s an alchemist; purifying lead is one of the first tricks she learned. She wills them back to flesh and bone, and once again allows herself to be pulled onward, whether or not she wants to go—and she doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t, there just isn’t any way this can be avoided, not in truth, not for long—to the kitchen door, which Smita pushes open like it’s nothing remotely important. Like this is just another day.

The kitchen is large and comfortable, if built in an architectural style more common to parts of the Midwest than it is to California; they could be stepping into an Indiana farmhouse, into the sort of space that’s been used for generations of Thanksgiving dinners and hundreds of family birthday parties. The floor is scuffed blue linoleum, the walls are white, and the appliances are a dizzying array of colors, some of which Lilianne is fairly sure haven’t been manufactured since the seventies.

It’s a good thing the kitchen is so large; if it weren’t, it would never be able to hold this many people. There’s the human candy cane Lilianne saw in the library when she first woke up, and there’s a tall brunet man with a matching white streak in his hair. It looks even sillier on him than it does on her, which increases her quiet conviction that it must be natural: no one would look that goofy on purpose, not even in Berkeley, which sometimes seems to be trying harder than is healthy to stand out from the crowd. The pair of them are leaning against one of the counters, the man cupping a large mug in his long-fingered hands, the woman with her arms folded over her chest.

The woman from the lab is seated in the breakfast nook, next to another woman, this one with bright orange skin, horns, and sideways-slit pupils, like a goat’s. Lilianne has never seen a person so blatantly artificial. She’s crammed in next to Artemis, their shoulders touching, and it’s shocking seeing a cuckoo—because she has to be a cuckoo, she has to be, everything about her is engineered and deliberate—that close to a Lunar with neither of them seeming alarmed by the proximity.

A dark-haired woman who looks like she’s half-Chinese perches on the counter to the other side of the brunet man, sipping from a bottle of orange-pink liquid. Her shirt is covered in dense writing, and from what Lilianne can see, it doesn’t stay the same language for more than two words, telling some complicated, incomprehensible joke.

Erin is near the stove, stirring something that smells sweet and bland at the same time. Probably oatmeal.

And then there is David. Her housemate David, standing a few feet away from the Chinese woman, arms folded and face set into a scowl. Lilianne jumps a little when she sees him, feeling an odd mix of relief and panic, like she ought to turn and run before he notices her. Which is silly, because there’s no way he doesn’t know she’s here. Not if he’s been here the whole time.

Before she can even finish asking herself why he’s here, he meets her eyes and says, curtly, “Lilianne.”

“David.” Her mouth isn’t as dry as it was when she woke up, but it still hurts to talk, and so she doesn’t try for more than that single-word acknowledgment that she recognizes him, that she’s not going to try pretending that she doesn’t.

“I was on my way home after dinner and a lot of therapeutic video games when Erin here”—he hooks a finger toward the woman in question, who looks up from her pot and nods, once—“came running in and told us all that Smita had gone and cracked open some rotten egg of an alchemist’s lab, and needed help. Artemis is the best of us for actual physical dangers, but they still didn’t want anyone else leaving before they got Smita back. You were an unexpected bonus.”

There’s something in his eyes that tells her he’s not necessarily her ally here. They share an apartment, but they aren’t friends. She’s not the person he thinks of when he has news to share, whether good or bad or deeply strange.

He’s not going to defend her against these people if things go badly.

“Do you need to sit down?” asks the brunet man, looking directly at her. His eyes are the same pale gray as Dodger’s; that, and the similarity in their facial features, makes her think they’re some of the extremely related people Smita mentioned before. Still, his voice is warm and kind, and the question seems entirely sincere. “We can get you a chair if you need to sit down.”

“Do we really want to make the alchemist more comfortable?” asks the Chinese woman, setting her bottle aside. She produces a peach pit from a pocket and begins flipping it between her fingers like a streetcorner magician with a trick coin. “I’m all for a little discomfort.”

“She’s a guest here, just like you are,” says Erin. “That means we follow the rules of hospitality, even if we don’t necessarily want to. Even if we’re not completely happy having certain people in our home. The rules are what keep us from collapsing into chaos. You don’t want us collapsing into chaos, do you, Judith?”

“Full name, you’re in trouble now,” says Artemis, almost snickering.

“That’s not my full name, just my full American first name,” snaps Judith. “You couldn’t pronounce my full name.”

The brunet man puts a hand on her arm. “Let’s try not to fight until we’re done figuring out what’s actually going on, okay?” he says.

Lilianne feels suddenly much more inclined to try to get along with these strange people. This man should be an inspirational speaker or something. One of those folks who get paid to stand up in front of crowds and tell them how they’re supposed to live their lives to maximize their synergies and experience their experiences. He just has one of those voices.

Smita nudges her with an elbow. “Hey,” she says. “Don’t drift off into some pretty fantasy about world peace, okay? It can be hard to focus your thoughts the first time Roger talks to you. But don’t worry, you’ll get better. As long as he’s not actually trying, you can generally shrug him off.”

Lilianne blinks at her, then at the brunet man—Roger.

His name rhymes with his sister’s. That’s funny. Most parents of twins try to avoid that sort of symmetry. It’s too cutesy, and it denies their children the right to forge their own identities, outside of the sometimes-confining structure of twinship. Rhyming names are a form of sympathetic connection; some alchemists, like the late James Reed, have been known to use that sort of thing to forge bonds between—

Between—

Lilianne’s eyes widen. Washed-out eyes, paler than anything she’s ever seen in nature. Matching white streaks, like they both somehow experienced the same injury, bleaching the hair follicles in a specific stretch of the scalp. Even the languidly predatory way they both move, like neither one of them can imagine a world where they’re not the most dangerous things in the room. There’s at least one Lunar and a girl who looks like some sort of weird sexy demon Oompa Loompa, and yet they still think of themselves as the apex predators of this space.

“You’re Reed’s cuckoos,” she blurts, everything she knows snapping together to make a single, indisputable picture.

“Told you she’d get it on her own,” says Dodger. She turns to face her brother. “Pay up.”