Page 68 of Inkpot Gods

“That isn’t what—”

“Alchemists aren’t better than everybody else. They’re just in a different graduate program. Roger and Dodger aren’t hurting anyone, and creating a cuckoo seems to me like it’s very similar to creating a child. You don’t own them once they’re ready to leave the lab, or even before that. They don’t owe you anything.”

Lilianne looks up at her, visibly trying to understand. “If you’re not prepared to have a queer kid, you shouldn’t have children,” she says, with exquisite carefulness. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“Yes, it is,” agrees Smita. “If you’re not ready to have an antisocial Doctrine that just wants to take a few years to figure itself out before it tries doing anything else, don’t force essential attributes of the universe to become manifest. Manifest forces are people too.”

“I know that!” protests Lilianne.

Smita pauses to frown at her. “I’m not actually sure you do.”

“I do, because my parents are both incarnates,” says Lilianne. Normally she wouldn’t tell people about them: normally saying “my father is the living spring” gets people to look at her like there’s something wrong with her. “My mother is a Stingy Jack, and my father is a Jack in the Green. They met, they fell in love, they got married, and they had me. And they weren’t disappointed when they learned that I wasn’t an incarnate anything, even if I think my childhood included more than the standard number of weird field trips to see whether I might resonate with something they hadn’t thought of yet.” They hadn’t been disappointed to learn that she was a girl, either, something that she was eternally grateful for: it would have been so easy for them to make her transition a terrible thing, and instead they’d looked at it as just another turn of the seasons, one thing melting into the next, as natural as sunrise.

Smita blinks at her. “So you’re … incarnate-adjacent?”

“I guess, if you need something to call it that’s more precise than just ‘their kid.’ But I think it’s why my eyes have always been open to the alchemical world. I didn’t need to be traumatized or eased into it. I grew up there.”

“It’s interesting,” says Smita. “Even the Lunars call it ‘the alchemical world.’ All the incarnates I’ve met do. But why should they do that? Alchemists didn’t invent the world. They didn’t make the rules. So why do we name it after them?”

“I think because the majority of people aren’t manifest anything. They aren’t incarnate anything. But they have the potential to become alchemists. It’s the alchemical world because the alchemists have the numbers.”

“That makes sense,” says Smita, voice turning thoughtful. “Are you comfortable with the idea of going back down to the lab? Because I know my housemates, and they’re absolutely going to be heading back down to make sure everything is taken care of. They’re probably going to want you to go with them.”

“I wouldn’t want to be left behind.”

“It’s not going to be safe. You could get seriously hurt. We don’t know how this is going to play out.”

“No one ever does.” Lilianne gestures to the room around herself, hands spread wide. “This is all … this is so amazing for me. I’m in a house that’s basically built from living probability. This isn’t an alchemical creation, except that it is, because alchemy created the Doctrine. This whole place is the culmination of Asphodel’s life’s work.”

“You’re really fond of her, aren’t you?” says Smita carefully.

“I’ve idolized her since I learned who she really was,” says Lilianne. “Everything she did, everything she overcame, the way the Congress treated her … she’s inspirational. She achieved so much despite all the obstacles they put in her way, and she paved the path that hundreds of female alchemists have followed since. She recreated herself in her own image. I’ve been trying to do the same thing for as long as I can remember. The Asphodel your friends described isn’t the one I knew.”

“You know her as the Queen of Wands,” says Smita. “We know her as the Queen of Swords. And she was both, mother and monster-maker, benevolent guardian and cruel destroyer. We’re just standing on opposite sides of her divide.”

“I know people are complicated,” says Lilianne. “But I chose my name because I wanted to be a flower, like her. It’s not so easy to accept this version of my hero who’s somehow worse than all the human monsters who have ever lived.”

“You may not have a choice,” says Smita. “If you’re going to be around here, you’re going to be around people who have very good, very real reasons for disliking Asphodel. Hating her, even.”

“But they wouldn’t exist without her!”

“And even they would admit that that might be better,” says Smita. “Their existence is unnatural. They were made. This isn’t IVF or fertility treatments: this is someone sitting down with a workstation and putting together a person from the cellular level on up. I love my friends. They’re basically a second family to me, and I’d do almost anything for them. But I know how hard things have been for them, and I understand why they feel the way they do about Asphodel. I’m not going to ask you to change the way you think about her. I’m just going to ask that you be understanding of their feelings. They’ve earned them.”

Lilianne squirms. She looks down at the floor, then says, “I just met you yesterday.”

“I know.”

“I thought you were really pretty, and maybe, if I got to know you, and you seemed like you might be okay with it, I’d ask you out for coffee or ice cream or something one of these days.” Those suggestions feel unbelievably juvenile after everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours.

“Really?” Smita sounds surprised.

“Really.” Lilianne squints up at her. “You have to know that you’re beautiful. I mean, you have a mirror, you see yourself every day, this can’t be a shock to you.”

“It’s not, but—I mean. I didn’t even know you were—” Her cheeks redden, visible even against the rich brown of her complexion. “How could I have known that you were into girls? I just met you!”

“Which is my point. We just met. We’re supposed to be in that sort of awkward, just getting to know each other, everything is new and surprising and strange stage. Not moving straight to arguing about childhood heroes and the ethical applications of alchemy.” Lilianne shakes her head. “This is all moving really fast, and not in any of the directions I had wanted it to go. Am I allowed to leave? If I wanted to go back to my apartment, could I?”

Smita looks uncomfortable. “I told you you’d need to come back to the lab with us.”