Page 94 of Inkpot Gods

“Other than private spaces that we can hopefully ignore, what else are we likely to find here?”

“There’s a dissection theater, and there’s the cuckoo room, but it was shut down long before the man from the Congress came to tell us that we were being decommissioned—”

“Wait. Are you telling me that this is the level where they worked with Asphodel Baker’s genetic material?”

“Well, yeah. Some people thought it was disrespectful to keep the samples on the same level as the animals, but Margaret overruled them. She said Asphodel was human and humans are the alchemical children of apes, and apes are animals, so it was only right for Asphodel’s vital humors to be housed with the unevolved, at least until they were used to create cuckoos and could become human again.”

“You know, it unnerves me when you recite the dogma with such ease.”

Kelpie shrugs. “It unnerves me when you say that things I’ve always known are dogma. This is just something I’ve always known. That’s all.”

“How do we get to the cuckoo room?”

“It’s on the other side of the morgue.”

Artemis stares at her. It’s easy to forget that this is the environment that shaped Kelpie’s ways of looking at the world, of assessing the difference between “normal” and not. Even knowing that she’s here with them—a kitten among the wolves, less dangerous and prepared than any of them except for maybe Lilianne and Smita—because this was once her natural environment doesn’t make it any easier to remember that she grew up an alchemist among alchemists. Knowing it and internalizing it enough to keep it reliably in mind are two very different things.

“That’s where we need to go,” she says. “Can you get us there?”

“If the doors aren’t locked.” Kelpie gives the lumpy sphincter that has replaced the doorway a dubious look. “And if they’re still doors.”

“They’re close enough for me. Let’s go.”

They start to move again, crossing the uneven floor to the sphincter that will let them travel deeper into the lab. Kelpie pushes against it and it opens like an iris, showing a glimpse of an even-fleshier space, the skin there red and irritated, crisscrossed with bloody gashes. The air that rushes out, washing over them, is entirely free of decay. That would be a mercy, if not for what it does smell like: it smells like blood, nothing but blood, fresh and hot and terrible.

Kelpie seems to pay it no mind as she steps through the opening, Artemis close behind.

Here, there are signs that their friends, at least some of them, are close enough to find (alive if fortunate, still warm if not): the gashes in the floor still leak blood, unclotted, and someone has taken the time to try to cut a passage into one of the walls. They have clearly failed, and the skin around the room’s other exit is bruised and battered, wounded by the drumming of hard hands and frantic feet.

There is no one here. But the bulky shapes of dissection tables loom out of the floor like fleshy mushrooms, their tops smoothed over with tightly drawn skin, their structures obscured. Kelpie moves to the middle of the room and looks up, at the dangling light structures likewise swallowed by the skin. It’s the belly of the beast, and the final bruised sphincter illustrates that: all of them have looked like orifices inside some terrible, unthinkable creature, but this one is clamped tight, moist and unknowable, and it does not look inclined to yield.

“We have to keep going,” says Kelpie, and it’s half statement, half plea. She’s begging to be told that she’s wrong, and there’s another way. She closes her eyes for a moment, then continues: “It wants us to keep going.”

Artemis jerks in alarm. She hasn’t seen or heard anything to indicate that this place is capable of wanting anything. “Kelpie … what do you mean?”

“I mean that whatever this place used to construct itself is still here, and it hurts, and it can tell it’s almost done being forced to be whatever it is right now. In the stories, the travelers pick up the improbable road on the other side of the mosasaur, once they’re on the shore again. They don’t see another mosasaur until Past the Pluvial Peaks, and even then, it’s not the same one. Once we’re on the road, whatever that means, this whole thing can die.”

“I don’t like the idea that we’re walking through something that can think,” says Artemis.

Kelpie shrugs. “I don’t like the idea that we’re walking through an amalgamation of all my friends and the remains of every animal in this lab, but I’m here anyway,” she says.

She turns and walks for the final sphincter, and Artemis follows, because there is nothing else to do.

In the final chamber, the animal nature of their surroundings is undeniable, painted in the wet moisture of the walls and floor, in the blood vessels as big around as adult human arms that spin their traceries across the ceiling. If they walked through skin and flesh before, now they stand in viscera, in the chambered space within the chest. They stand, no matter how they look at their situation, inside a nightmare.

A nightmare that has already claimed six people, all of them unconscious and seemingly unaware of their surroundings. Roger, Dodger, and Erin are webbed to the far wall by bonds of near-translucent skin, tied tight and held firm. Smita, Lilianne, and Judy are connected to the floor, red muscle tissue grown up around their feet and calves like terrible boots, holding them locked where they are. There is a half-grown peach tree about a foot away from Judy, close enough that she has collapsed halfway onto it, rather than to the ground. It holds her up, immature branches bending beneath the weight of her. Her eyes are closed; she does not move.

There is another figure here, wrought out of the same red, raw material as the walls, damp with mucus and internal fluids, almost invisible until it moves, turning toward the pair of them. It has a human face, flensed raw and bare of skin; when it smiles at Artemis and Kelpie, they can see every muscle and tendon pulling into place.

“My dears,” it says, and it has a woman’s voice, not only in timbre, but in pitch and intonation; it speaks like a kindly schoolteacher, like someone no one wants to disappoint. If Roger sounds like the platonic ideal of a college professor and Dodger sounds like a children’s science educator, this figure sounds like a kindly woman in a patterned dress, the sort who exists mostly in memory and nostalgia-tinted stories for parents to recount around the dinner table. It speaks for a time that never was, an ideal that could never have been.

Artemis swings her bow around, taking aim at the center of the figure’s chest. It continues smiling, lipless and terrible.

“We’re all together now,” it says. “A few of my children are missing, but enough of us are here. We can finally begin.”

Dodger’s eyes remain closed, but they move frantically behind her lids, the motion only obvious because the rest of her is so uncannily still. It’s the first sign Artemis and Kelpie have had that their friends are in any way still aware of their surroundings. A muscle in her jaw twitches under the skin, sharp and staccato.

“Who are you?” asks Artemis, voice cold.