Page 86 of Inkpot Gods

They hurry out of the lab, and nothing grabs them. The lights go out of their own accord as the two women reach the door. For a moment, the lab is nothing more than a purple-painted horror, and something definitely moves in the darkness, lashing toward the door even as Lilianne slams it shut.

She looks to Smita. “I am starting to have more sympathy for your position on alchemy,” she says.

“I’m not asking you to throw your life’s work away,” says Smita. “Just to consider that maybe people who’ve already been hurt by alchemy won’t be as enthusiastic about it as you are. Alchemy can make wonderful things. It made most of my friends. All you have to do is accept that there are other beautiful things about the world. Things alchemy didn’t do.”

“Like you,” says Lilianne, and bites her tongue, cheeks flaring red. She stares at Smita, who looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “I … That came out wrong.”

“I can see you’re pretty smooth,” says Smita, and starts up the stairs, heading for the level Kelpie identified as the menagerie. “Come on. I’m sure we can catch up with the others.”

Lilianne follows.

Dodger is the first to reach the menagerie door. Roger, following close behind with Judy beside him, doesn’t comment on her apparent eagerness. It’s all about his proximity, he knows, just like he knows that she wouldn’t have been able to move with such confidence if he’d gone looking for some other danger of this strange, enclosed space. The nature of their entanglement is such that even now, when they’re both fully manifest and virtually indestructible, she will always try to be the first into a dangerous situation, to stand where she can draw the fire away from him.

He understands and respects her reasons. Even if they were built into her by their creators, she’s had plenty of time to make them her own, and she’s not changing for anyone.

She opens the door, revealing a dark, narrow antechamber and releasing a gout of sour, musk-scented air at the same time. It smells like a place where animals are kept, like the secret back tunnels of a zoo, hot and vital and alive.

Nothing should be alive down here. Not after the amount of time that’s passed since the place was officially shut down. Dodger hesitates, hand still on the doorknob, blocking him or Judy from getting past her.

“We sure about this?” she asks. “I know the alchemists are gone, there’s no one down here to take aim at us or intend to do us wrong, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have left traps behind them. There could be something in here that we don’t want to deal with.”

This, too, is a part of her construction, and it makes the hairs on the back of Roger’s neck stand on end: if Dodger is trying to make excuses for why they shouldn’t explore the space beyond the door, it’s because her probabilities are picking up a possible danger in the darkness. She doesn’t have any extra senses, but the ones she does have are tightly honed for calculating risks. He’s looked up the biology behind them, curious about how the alchemists were able to build such finely calibrated danger-detection into his sister, and whether that same apparatus might be sleeping within him, ready to be accessed; what he’s found is that every attribute she displays is found in ordinary people, one way or another, just not at this intensity, and not all packed into the same skin.

There’s something in there, and whatever it is, she doesn’t want him facing it. He can respect and appreciate it. He just can’t let her back down to protect him.

Judy has a peach pit in her hand and is flipping it across her fingers like a magician with a trick coin. It’s something she does when she’s nervous, and he knows the repetitive motion soothes her.

“I think we’re sure, Dodge,” he says, gently. She gives him a quick, sharp look, as interrogative as a question. He meets it with a nod, non-verbal reply to non-verbal query. “We need to find out what’s going on with this place.”

“The numbers don’t add up,” she says. “There’s something wrong with this whole thing, and I don’t like it. We should be going home and looking at the things we’ve learned with an eye to analysis.”

“But we haven’t learned anything yet,” objects Judy.

“We’ve learned how big this complex is, and how much more Kelpie knows than she’s been telling us,” says Dodger. “That’s something we should have been taking into account already, and the fact that we didn’t means we’re less prepared than we ought to be.”

Roger looks at her and frowns. It can be hard, with the two of them, to tell when they’re panicking: they don’t tend to get red in the face, and their eyes are pale enough that it isn’t obvious when the whites are showing around their irises. (And it wasn’t always like this, was it? Not for him, anyway. He doesn’t remember people reacting to his eyes as if there was anything strange about them when he was younger. There are no pictures to prove his recollection—artifacts rarely carry between timelines, and never without intent. On the few occasions when he’d needed something to endure, it had never been a picture of himself, never anything so small or petty as confirmation that he used to be something different than he is now.)

(They all used to be something different than they are now. Endlessly looping through time in pursuit of the perfect happy ending will change a person. It can’t possibly do anything else.)

“Dodger,” he says, in a voice pitched low and gentle, like he’s trying to talk down a potentially dangerous animal, “what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and she sounds frustrated enough to give him pause. She turns her face back to the open door and the dark beyond. “I know we’ve always been more inclined to player-versus-environment than player-versus-player, but normally when we’re walking into danger, we’ve at least seen some indication that there might be another player on the board. Right now, it’s just us and a bumbling baby alchemist from Alabama and this lab. It all feels too … too straightforward. We’re moving in a linear line. We never move in a linear line. If we’re doing it now, that means something must be going on that I can’t see, and I don’t like it.”

“We won’t find out what it is by standing around out here,” says Roger. “Go on in.”

Dodger nods, shoulders tightening as the command registers with her forebrain, and then she’s stepping through the door, unable to stop herself any longer.

Roger and Judy are close behind, Judy still flipping the peach pit between her fingers, the small, ceaseless motion seeming to lend her some fragment of comfort. Then the dark closes around them, and the heavy, humid air is everything the world contains.

Slowly, the three of them inch along the antechamber. They’re halfway to the point Dodger has estimated to be the next door when the door behind them swings shut and red runner lights come on along the base of the walls, filling the space with an eerie, horror-movie-adjacent glow. It’s unsettling, and it doesn’t get better when Judy takes a deep breath and begins to glow with a lambent silver-peach light. She seems to get a little taller at the same time, a little more than mortal. Roger turns to look at her, trying not to flinch from the way the mingled red and silver lights cast bloody shadows on her face.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m still mostly me. Chang’e just thought we could use a little extra muscle while we’re walking around in here. She’s close to the surface, but she’s not taking the reins.”

“If she decides she needs to, please try to tell me first,” says Roger. He trusts and adores his girlfriend’s divine alter ego, is aware that her presence is the only reason the two of them can ethically have a relationship like the one they currently enjoy; without Chang’e to elevate Judy slightly above the human baseline, he would feel like he was exploiting her every time he asked for anything, from a kiss to time to get his grading done. Chang’e creates a comfortable buffer between them. The Lunars, with their dual natures, are some of the only people who can actively defy him, by giving his commands to one half of their selves while the other half continues doing whatever it is they had wanted to do in the first place.

He trusts her, but he knows she isn’t Judy, and unlike Judy, she isn’t always willing to go along with preexisting plans. Which is not the same as “She won’t follow orders,” but is a close cousin, and not something he wants to risk when they’re in a dangerous situation.

“I will,” says Judy.