Page 69 of Inkpot Gods

“What if I promised to come straight back? I know you promised to find me some clean clothes, but I also need my medication. I need my hormones. They’re not something I can just skip for a day and be okay about. They’re important.”

“I’m sure if you ask Dodger, she can mix up some of whatever it is you need,” says Smita. “Chemistry and compounding are both math, when you boil them far enough down to their essentials. And if she can convince the universe that something is math, she can recreate it.”

“I shouldn’t need to recreate my medication. It’s all prepared and paid for and waiting for me in my room.”

“You’re the alchemist. She’s alchemy made flesh. Shouldn’t you be more excited about that, since she’s sort of your life’s work?”

“But she’s terrifying!”

“And that’s also your life’s work.” Smita pauses, looking at her critically. “What was the appeal, anyway?”

“What?”

“Of alchemy. You had your parents right there, you had to know how they felt about alchemists—how alchemists interacted with incarnates, all the reasons they had to be afraid of them. What made you decide that you wanted to become something you knew your parents wouldn’t be able to support?”

“I got really interested in alchemy right about when I was figuring out that I felt weird about being a boy because I wasn’t one,” says Lilianne uncomfortably. “Part of it was the idea that we could control our world so well that we could remake it if we wanted to—that we could remake ourselves. Transformation and transmutation and purification all seemed like pretty good ideas to a terrified teenage trans girl in Alabama. My father’s a pediatrician, but he couldn’t be my pediatrician, and I’d heard him complain about how hard it was to get some of his colleagues to understand gender-affirming care as life-saving and essential. I was scared that I’d get bad treatment or no treatment, and the idea of trying to live as a boy was … it was impossible. I wasn’t going to do it. Either I was going to be a girl, or I wasn’t going to be anything anymore. Alchemy felt like a way to survive if medicine failed me. It felt like a rope out of the hole that I was standing at the bottom of, and I didn’t climb down there on purpose, but I needed help if I was going to get out.”

“But it didn’t do what you were hoping for…?”

“It didn’t need to.” Lilianne shrugs. “My dad called around until he found another doctor who worked with trans teens, who was willing to listen to me and understand that until I turned eighteen, he wasn’t going to be asked to do anything that couldn’t be undone later, if I changed my mind. I already knew I wasn’t changing my mind, and so did my parents, but he needed to hear that from somebody else before he could let himself listen.”

“Sort of like my doctor keeps refusing to give me a hysterectomy, but would allow it if I had a husband to sign off on the procedure,” says Smita. “Because I’m a girl, I don’t get to know my own mind.”

“Exactly!” says Lilianne. “I was sixteen. I knew who I was and what I wanted, and no one stopped one of the girls in my class from getting gastric bypass, or got mad when one of the boys started doing the kind of weight training that shreds your knees and leaves your muscles all weird. It was like they got to know what they wanted, because what they wanted fit with the majority, while I had to be wrong, because most people didn’t want the same things I did.”

“That must have been really hard.”

“So hard.” Lilianne shakes her head. “It still is.”

“I didn’t go through anything like that. I just got to explain to my fairly strict and traditional parents that there was never going to be a husband in the picture for them to approve of or reject, because if I got married, I was going to have a wife. I wanted kids—I still do want kids, even if Kim and Tim make me wonder why sometimes—but I was planning to adopt, probably by doing long-term foster-care placements first, not get pregnant. I had it all worked out.”

“So what happened?”

“Alchemy.”

Lilianne frowns. “I … What do you mean?”

“Dodger and I were in the same graduate class. We’re not in the same discipline, at all, but we wound up sharing an orientation group, and somehow, we became friends.” She pauses to chuckle. “That feels like dialog out of a bad Star Wars movie. ‘Somehow, Palpatine returned.’ Somehow, Dodger Cheswick, the most antisocial woman in the world, managed to make a friend when she wasn’t being graded on it. She and Roger were just reconnecting after a long estrangement, and they still believed they were ordinary humans. Just people, you know? Nothing special.”

“Have they seen their own eyes? How did they not figure out that something was going on?”

“Most people don’t have the context to go ‘Oh wow my eyes are a sort of weird color guess that means I was built in a lab.’ Also, they had more pigment back then. Not a lot more pigment, but they were closer to gray than white. Anyway, when Dodger first introduced me to Roger, she wasn’t even sure he was her brother. The first thing they asked me to do was perform a blood test to figure out whether they were related.” Smita’s expression takes on a dreamy, far-off cast. “The first time I looked at their results, I thought I’d cross-contaminated the samples. But the deeper I dug, the more obvious it was that nothing like that had happened. They were just two people, phenotypically distinct, genetically almost identical. They’re identical twins who just happen to be different sexes. That doesn’t happen. It goes against everything we know about twin development, and it’s not possible, no matter how you want to look at things.”

“Huh,” says Lilianne. “That sounds … complicated.”

“So I called them back to the lab to give them the good news: they were related, they were really related, and I needed them to give me a lot more blood so I could make some impressive discoveries about the human genome and secure my place at the top of my field.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”

“Gosh, you’re a quick one, aren’t you?” asks Smita, lightly. “No, that didn’t happen. Instead, Erin, who had been watching them, notified the American Congress that someone was on the verge of discovering how absolutely impossible their genetics were, and they sent her to take care of the problem. Which meant killing me and burning all the evidence.”

“But she didn’t, and that’s why you’re such close friends now?”

“Oh, no, she did,” says Smita. “Picked up a Hand of Glory and used it to get into my lab without being seen. The first time, she stabbed me and burned the place to the ground after she was done. The second time, she slit my throat. The third … well, I could keep doing this for quite a while, and she tells me not to dwell, because it never really happened. The Doctrine reset the timeline over and over again until they found a way to thread the needle of developing the relationship they needed to have without me needing to die in the process. It took them a long time, but fortunately, they had all the time in the world.”

“If those timelines didn’t happen, how can you know about them?”

“Erin is the incarnate force of Order. Disorderly things hurt her, and scarring in the timeline is disorderly, by definition. She started seeing the scars a long time ago. She carries information between resets, and without her, Roger and Dodger would never have been able to figure out how to navigate manifestation. She led them every step along the way. She was the one to insist they find a path that allowed her to save me—killing me over and over again was really bad for her, mentally speaking. But saving me required the Doctrine to focus so much energy and attention on that narrow little span that it scarred over to the point where I could remember it, too. That’s why I can perceive the alchemical world without looking away or pretending I don’t see anything strange. It killed me and then it saved me, and now part of me belongs to it, so I can perceive it just like anybody who was born to it. I’ve never studied alchemy. Alchemy has sure as hell studied me.”