Page 70 of Inkpot Gods

“And that’s why you’re still here?”

“Sadly, yes. See, they were able to find a way to fulfill the timeline’s requirements that didn’t need me to actually die. It just needed me to seem dead. So in the process of misdirecting the American Alchemical Congress, Erin ‘killed’ me and then hid me in a safe house she’d set up, where I stayed until the timeline caught up to the Doctrine becoming manifest. By the time they let me out, my parents had mourned and buried their daughter, and I was legally dead in every government system you can think of. They even canceled my library card. It was pretty grim.”

“Are you legally alive now?”

“Not really.” Smita shrugs. “We’re still trying to figure out how to bring me back without setting off some cascade of paperwork that ends with my parents being informed that I’ve returned from the dead. My dad was already pretty old when I ‘died.’ I don’t think his heart could handle it.”

“That sounds really awful.” Lilianne can’t imagine being cut off from her parents like that, left with no way to go home, no matter how bad things get. She can always go home. She’s so much luckier than a lot of the people she knows, because no matter what, she can go home. Her parents will always be waiting for her, always ready and willing to love her as much as she can stand to be loved. Losing that would be …

Well, it would be a lot like dying.

“So I don’t get my picture-postcard life, and you don’t get to go home until we’ve finished dealing with this lab, and you get to lean on the fact that we were all happy to ignore the place and pretend it wasn’t there,” says Smita. “In our defense, Kelpie was the only one of us who really understood enough to realize what a danger that lab was potentially going to be, and when she didn’t sound the alarm, we were perfectly content to just go about our business. But that’s not enough of a defense. She has trauma about that place like you would not believe, and it’s not really a surprise that she never told us anything about it. She probably just wanted to pretend that it didn’t exist and she was never going to need to go back there again. So if anyone gives you any guff—”

“Guff?” asks Lilianne, amused.

“—about being the one to find the place, just remind them that we wouldn’t have seen the danger coming if it hadn’t been for you,” finishes Smita, before she snorts. “Yes, guff. It’s a real word. I don’t know the exact definition, but Roger would, if you asked him.”

“I am not going to use the Doctrine of Ethos as a reference manual,” says Lilianne.

“Why not? The rest of us do.”

The thought is horrifying in an existential sort of way that would probably have been incredibly tempting when she was a teenager, but is now just distantly upsetting. Primal forces of the universe shouldn’t be used like party games. It’s neither right nor fair.

“Well, I’m not going to.”

“Suit yourself,” says Smita. “I mean it, though. If anyone tries to be too nasty about you opening the seal on the lab, you point out that we knew it existed and just left it there. I think the others sometimes forget they’re still fallible, and start to believe they can’t do anything wrong, can’t make mistakes. You’re an important reminder.”

“Are they going to lock me in the attic forever if I make them mad?”

“No. But they might ask you to babysit.”

Lilianne’s eyes widen in sudden horror. “There are children here?”

“Worse. Teenagers. Designer teenage cuckoos, built to manifest the Doctrine and blocked when their elders did it before they got the chance. So they’re surly and mean about it, and no one who values their sanity agrees to babysit.” Smita smiles. “And on that note, I should go before Erin convinces Roger or Dodger that I should stay back to take care of the teens while the rest of you go into mortal danger. There are clothes in the dresser over there. See if you can’t find something that fits you properly, and I’ll see you when you come back out to the kitchen.”

Then Smita is gone, slipping out of the room with such speed that Lilianne doesn’t have time to fully realize what she’s doing before it’s done. Lilianne blinks, then groans and throws herself backward on the bed, staring up at the unchanging ceiling.

“Well, that sucked,” she says, and the ceiling does not disagree.

Wealth

TIMELINE: AUGUST 3, 1896.

The standard term of an alchemical apprenticeship is seven years, each with its own purpose and position in the wheel that turns to mark a new alchemist’s education. After five full turns of the wheel, Asphodel is exhausted, annoyed, and very ready to graduate. But the last two years are meant to represent Invention and Innovation, two of the most essential skills a new alchemist will need on undertaking their independent career. And that is why she’s once again standing in the basement of her uncle’s house, hands flat against the table where she’s performed so many dissections over the past five and a half years. She has to come up with something. She has to create something entirely new, and more, she has to make it as perfect as she can, while understanding that her last year of apprenticeship will be spent refining it, making it ever more flawless, ever more worthy of the Congress.

She’s not sure the Congress is worthy of any of the things they claim as their right, not anymore. They hoard knowledge like a squirrel hoards nuts, and while she knows other apprentices can request access to the great stores of secrets and solutions, her requests are met with blank stares and closed doors. She’s her uncle’s sworn apprentice, she signed the book before the Congress like any other apprentice, but too many of them still believe she’ll abandon her studies the first time an attractive journeyman smiles at her, that her interests will always come second to the performance of true woman’s alchemy, building a child of her own body and bringing it warmly into the world.

Asphodel has every intention of becoming a mother in her own time, but it won’t be through any union with someone else’s flesh. She’ll craft her children through her art, the way a proper alchemist is meant to do. Her sex has nothing to do with her performance of her discipline. One day they’ll see that. One day they’ll understand.

And until that day, she has to find a way to make them understand.

Looking down her nose at the table, she says, flatly, “Again.”

“Sparrow…” says Miss Cottingsly, catching herself short as Asphodel shoots a sharp look at her through the oily curtain of her dangling hair. “Yes, miss?”

“I need to understand how my uncle made you,” says Asphodel. “Everything I have and everything I know tells me that you’re an auf. Auf aren’t supposed to last as long as you have, or be so damned willful. So how do you exist?”

“Oh, miss,” says Miss Cottingsly. “I am an auf, yes. I was assembled from the bodies of dead humans.”