Page 84 of Inkpot Gods

When he twists the knob, it turns easily enough, and the door swings inward, revealing an empty living room with white-painted walls and an industrial beige carpet. Erin nods to him.

“Respect,” she says, and steps inside, heading for the hallway at the back of the room. One by one the others file after her, with Smita pausing long enough to close the door.

The air in the living room smells of fresh paint, cleaning solvents, and—very faintly, in the distance—alkahest. This place is definitely connected to the lab, no matter how distantly. Lilianne’s mouth is suddenly dry, her heart beating too fast as she follows the others down the hall.

Past the open bathroom door, Erin opens what looks like a closet, revealing instead a flight of stairs descending down into the dark. “I tagged along the last time the management showed this apartment to a potential renter, and when they opened this door, they saw shelves. Or at least they acted like they did. They said it was plenty of room for all their linens, anyway. I sort of wonder what happens if they ever rent this place out, and the new tenants start just shoveling their towels into the abyss.”

“They couldn’t see the stairs?” asks Smita.

“Too much alchemy went into building them,” says Erin. “It’ll be years before anyone outside the alchemical world can see them. Longer if we don’t clean up whatever’s keeping the lab awake and active below us.”

“What fun alchemy is,” says Smita.

“What fun indeed,” says Erin, and steps onto the stairs.

Again, they all follow her, like a little line of self-destructive ducklings willingly descending down into the dark.

The lab is definitely awake, and getting more awake by the minute. Once they’re all on the stairs and the door is closed behind them, lights come on, pale and lambent at first, but rapidly brightening until they fill the entire stairwell with bright, sterile illumination, hurting Lilianne’s eyes.

Kelpie sighs, shoulders slumping slightly. Artemis puts a hand on her back, right between the shoulder blades, and Kelpie flashes her a grateful smile. “Sorry,” she says. “It’s just that for the longest time, I thought this was what light was supposed to be. This was all that I knew until I got away.”

“We can go back,” says Artemis, voice low and urgent. “You just say the word and we’ll go back. You and me. We can get the hell out of Berkeley for a little while, go and see the redwoods or something along the coast, whatever you want—”

“I want to finish this,” says Kelpie firmly. “Whatever that means, that’s what I want. I can’t run away again. We all saw how that worked out the last time I did it.”

Artemis looks pained, but she nods, and she descends the stairs a step behind Kelpie, the two of them staying close together. And the others follow, Erin ceding the lead to the Lunars, who seem to know where they’re going, or at least have an idea of what they’re going to do when they get there. The stairs are wide and relatively shallow, making it easy to descend. Lilianne stays near the wall, ready to brace herself if something happens or rises to attack them. She can’t put it past this place.

This was all she was dreaming of when she came to Berkeley, and now it feels like she’s descending back into a nightmare. They’ve gone at least three full flights down before they see the first real signs that the lab has truly been abandoned: the lights in the walls flicker and fail for a full twenty steps, leaving them to walk through a gray, grimy twilight zone lit only by the light radiating from above them and rising up from below.

Still they keep moving, and the unnatural channel the alchemists have opened in the earth rises up to swallow them all whole.

Lilianne loses count of the steps long before they reach the bottom of the stairs. Each flight is no more than twenty steps, followed by a short landing and a sharp turn to the next descending flight. About half the landings have doors, but Kelpie passes them all up, indicating that their destination is still somewhere farther down. The only thing worse than the thought of how far they’ve already descended is the thought of climbing back up them again.

“I can’t feel my thighs,” she complains to Smita, as they continue moving downward. “I’m starting to think the way through the sewer wasn’t all that bad.”

“Agreed,” says Smita. “But whether we can use it or not is going to depend on what time it is when we’re done here—and how many monsters we’ve encountered. Too many, and I’m not going into a sewer for anything, not even to avoid all these damn stairs.”

“There’s an elevator,” says Kelpie.

Smita stares at her. “Why didn’t you say so before?” she demands.

“Because there’s no way we can use an elevator when we don’t know whether the lab is safe,” says Kelpie, tone reasonable. “If we got in and the cable snapped, I don’t think even Roger could negotiate with the laws of physics fast enough to keep us all from getting splattered across the bottom of the elevator shaft.”

“Or maybe we push a button and the elevator ignores it, takes us to whatever floor it thinks would be more fun to visit, and the doors open on a sea of monsters,” says Erin, turning to look back at the group on the stairs. “This is the worst way to get down, but it’s also the best way we have, because it’s the safest.”

“I still hate it,” says Smita.

“Noted,” says Erin, and keeps on walking.

The lights have continued to vary during their descent, sometimes on, sometimes casting them into temporary darkness. None of the dark patches have been large enough to make them stop and get out phones or flashlights; they’re able to keep going, even when their footing is temporarily unsure. The air is temperate and smells of office building, a little dusty, a little tinged with cleaning products, but otherwise inoffensive, beyond the faint underscore of lingering alkahest. There are no hints of rot or glaring inconsistencies.

They’ve been going down for what feels like an hour when Kelpie abruptly stops, hooves clattering on the concrete landing, and looks toward the door on the wall with wide, unhappy eyes. “My room was through there,” she says. “The place they kept me when I still had to belong to them. It’s got my bed and my hairbrush and all the things that used to be my things but aren’t my things anymore.”

“Do you want to go get them?” asks Artemis.

“I want to burn this whole lab to ashes,” says Kelpie. She looks toward the taller Lunar. “After we’re done here, can we do that?”

“I don’t … Judy?” Artemis looks toward Judy. “Can we burn down the lab?”