Page 63 of Inkpot Gods

“What?”

“It’s a pretty simple question. Do you know why?”

“Of course I don’t know why. How could I possibly know why, when I just found out that you know what an alchemist is? I have no idea what might have happened in your past that would make you hate alchemists.”

“There was a girl who went to school with us,” he says. “Her name was Eliza, and when she wasn’t being a beautiful, sweet, generous girl from Minnesota learning how she was going to become a woman and stay all those things at the same time, she was the Sámi goddess of the moon. I liked her a lot. She was a good friend, and I hoped we’d get to be something more than friends once she’d had a little more time to get comfortable here in California. And I guess we did get to be something more than friends. I got to be the one who found her body.”

Lilianne gasps. She knew it had to have been something that put true loathing in his eyes when he looks at her, now that he knows what she is. Now that he understands.

“The alchemists who built that lab you like so much, they were trying to find a way to use the Lunars—to use us—to get to the Impossible City. Are you enough of an alchemist to know what the Impossible City is?”

“It’s a fairy tale,” says Lilianne. “Asphodel used it to represent the alchemical ideal, the melding of elements and the place where their purified forms could exist in material space. It’s the home of the aether. It’s Olympus. It’s not real.”

“It’s real,” says Judy, moving to stand next to David. She even puts a hand against his arm, golden-pale skin against umber dark. “The Impossible City exists. Didn’t you ever wonder why there are still so many moon gods when most of the pantheons are down to one or two manifest representatives, if they even have that by this point? We should be irrelevant by now, but instead we show up by the dozen. We’re the Walmart clearance sale of gods.”

“Why?” asks Lilianne.

“The Impossible City,” says Judy, like that should be obvious. And maybe, from context, it should be. “It’s a real, solid, tangible place, it’s just not a part of this layer of reality. But it’s the control room of this universe, for lack of a better way of putting it. Without the Impossible City, everything falls apart. No more gods, no more monsters, no more embodiments. No more gravity, either, most likely. Take out the City, you take out everything. And it’s connected to this universe through a place we redundantly call the everything.”

“It’s sort of like the improbable road if it were really a place you could go,” says Smita, her interjection strange and almost out of place after the lecturing Lunars. Both David and Judy turn to give her a look, and she looks boldly back, shifting closer to Lilianne, until her hand is resting on the other woman’s shoulder, protective and unmoving. “But it doesn’t seem to have quite as many opinions, based on everything you’ve said about it.”

“It has some,” says Judy. “The everything connects us to the Impossible City, and every night, Lunars travel through the everything to cross the sky above the City. It keeps the place anchored to our reality. It keeps the City from slipping so far out of phase that our reality starts going with it.”

“And whoever controls the City controls everything,” says David. “Those alchemists you’re so fond of, they were really into the idea that they could be controlling everything. Not ‘the everything,’ literally everything. They came up with a plan. All they had to do was drain a few Lunars—something they were already doing to build their little labs—and they could use the blood and the open passages into the everything to get to the City. I’m not sure what they planned to do from there.”

“There was a plan,” says Kelpie. “It wasn’t a good plan, but it was a plan. They were going to use the blood of the Lunar they’d killed to keep that entrance to the everything open, and lure Artemis in with me, so she could use it to get to the window over the City. Pry it open, and then the alchemists could go through and start breaking stuff. I’m not sure they understood just how real the City really is. It’s real in a way that we don’t so much have here, and all they’d have done by jumping through the window is break their ankles.”

“But they didn’t know that,” says David, glaring at Lilianne like he thinks he can kill her with nothing but his fury. “They thought this would be easy, if they just committed a few unforgivable crimes first. And Aske … she was sweet and gentle and naïve and defenseless. So they smashed her skull in.”

Lilianne knew something like this was coming, has felt it coming since David said he’d found Aske’s body, but the bald truth of it is still enough to take her breath momentarily away.

“She was bleeding silver when I found her,” he says. “All that divinity just leaking out of her like a broken promise. She was bleeding silver, and it wasn’t fading, maybe because she died in the everything, maybe because she died so close to the City. Whatever the reason, it didn’t stop, and we didn’t have a crematorium—”

“Or know what would happen if we put her into one,” adds Judy.

“—so we just had to leave her there. Inside her branch of the everything. It took her with it when it collapsed, and her parents think she just ran away or something, they’ll never know what happened to her, they’ll never know that their daughter was the goddess of the moon, or that she died because some alchemists decided to be assholes, or that she was loved, and we’ll never know how amazing she was going to be. You want to know why I hate alchemists, Lilianne? That’s why. Because they think they’re more human, and thus more important, than all the rest of us. They think they get to matter in a way that we just don’t. I’m sorry you felt so small that you needed alchemy to make you feel bigger. And I’m sorry one of us is going to be moving out by the end of the month.” He swipes his hand roughly across his eyes. “Judy, I’m out. Call if you need anything.”

He storms out of the kitchen then. He doesn’t look back.

Lilianne hunches down in her seat, very aware of Smita’s fingers on her shoulder, very aware of the hostility in the room. “I’m sorry,” she says miserably. “I didn’t know about the—the City or the Lunars or any of—I didn’t know.”

The words aren’t enough. The words could never be enough. But Artemis leans forward, putting one elbow on the table, and says, “It’s all right. You didn’t know, which means you didn’t have a chance to do anything unforgivable. All we need to do is figure out why that lab was important enough to leave that sort of protection in place when they left it, and then we can let you go. You don’t have to be responsible for any of this.”

She sounds so reasonable, so rational, that Lilianne’s heart jumps, hope blooming where only terror was before.

“Or you could be, if you wanted, and we could kill you before you endangered one of us,” Artemis continues. The hope withers on the vine, collapsing into ash and aching. “It’s all up to you.”

“No pressure,” adds Erin.

“What I can’t figure out is why the lab’s defense systems would still be active when it’s been abandoned for this long,” says Kelpie. The orange girl hasn’t spoken much, and hearing her is enough of a novelty that Lilianne focuses on her immediately, almost relaxing.

Kelpie isn’t relaxed. If anything, she’s tenser than Lilianne was a minute ago, her head down and her shoulders up, leaning against Artemis like she’s afraid the other woman is about to disappear and leave her here alone.

“The lab was already being shut down when everything went wrong,” she says. “After the man from the Congress came in and killed Margaret, there wasn’t any reason for the doors to stay open. She’d been the lead on all our biggest projects. She was … she was my creator, I think, but before I knew that, she was my friend. She did her best to protect me. She’s the reason I got away.”

That’s a new name. Lilianne turns to Smita, mouthing curiously, “Margaret?”

Smita shakes her head. Either Margaret isn’t important beyond being a dead alchemist, or Smita will explain later. It doesn’t matter much in the moment. Lilianne returns her attention to Kelpie.