Page 66 of Tidal Creatures

“What do you mean?” asks Artemis stiffly.

“Oh, an alchemist whose master died when the Congress fell started pursuing some new avenues of research, looking for better ways to shield against the alkahest and keep the other alchemists safe, and she found a use for Lunars. I think that’s what put Margaret and her team on to the idea of catching one to get into the City. They’d mostly ignored the moon gods before that—I’ve seen the records, and there’s a lot of mention of the overall uselessness of them. ‘What good is a personification of the universe that does naught but smile and shine and fade away?’ Plenty of really lousy poetry masquerading as research. But then she found a way for them to be useful.”

“What would that be?” asks Artemis. She’s getting stiffer by the second. Chang’e wonders if Kelpie can tell how much danger she’s in, whether she’s plunging merrily forward out of ignorance or out of foolhardy courage. Either way, it doesn’t seem like a good idea.

“I’m not entirely sure. It had something to do with concrete. But whatever it was, it made the alchemists really notice the Lunars for the first time in a long time. They started picking off the minor ones, using them for what they needed and disposing of whatever was left at the end. I might be made partially from one of those minor gods.” For the first time, she looks like she understands that she’s saying something upsetting, like she knows this is wrong. It’s a brief transition, but it’s there. “But then Margaret—she was so smart, and so kind to me, and I’m going to miss her—Margaret thought hey, if the minor Lunars can be useful, maybe the major Lunars can be really useful. And she drew up the research plan for forcing one of their companions to manifest, because it seemed like the best way to lure them in. We’d make a perfect rabbit, or hind, or dog, and then we’d get a powerful Lunar who was willing to work with us, who didn’t have to die to help us. Who could get an alchemist to the door they use to reach the City, and let them inside.”

“But it didn’t work,” says Erin.

“Oh, no, it did,” says Kelpie. “Margaret told me. They made the rabbit first, and he was everything he needed to be, and he should have attracted a Chang’e to us almost immediately.”

Chang’e feels sick. She remembers Judy poring over the lists of colleges with good graduate programs in linguistics, looking for the perfect place to apply. She remembers nudging her host toward Berkeley, not knowing why she wanted to go there, only that it felt right. Had she been trying to move toward her Rabbit, unaware of his existence and drawn to him all the same?

“Then they made the hind, and she was perfect, too, she was properly manifest, but by then, Margaret had figured out something that alchemists aren’t supposed to think about, and so she put the rabbit in the botanical research division, and she kept the hind for herself, and she kept working, trying to find a way to force a second manifestation without using the material from Reed’s files.”

“Wait—why?” asks Smita, sounding suddenly baffled.

“Because ‘the material from Reed’s files’ is a nicely, needlessly euphemistic way of saying ‘the remains of Asphodel Baker,’” says Dodger. “You use it when you’re making cuckoos, like us. Even if they were trying to manifest animals, I bet they kept getting people because of the sympathies they were starting out with.”

“I bet that’s how they got you,” says Roger, and sips his coffee, watching Kelpie closely. Watching the way she flinches, confirming his not-quite-guess: she’s an escaped experiment with distinctly cervine features, talking about how the alchemists were trying to force a celestial deer to manifest for the first time in years. There was really nothing else she could have been.

He does glance away after her flinch, measuring the response from Artemis, who gave her name before Kelpie entered the kitchen, and hasn’t repeated it since. She’s staring at Kelpie now, eyes very wide and face very pale.

In a voice that shakes like a leaf in a stiff wind trying not to blow off its tree, she asks, “Hind? Are you—? Did they—?”

Kelpie says nothing, and for a moment, silence reigns.

Palus Somni

TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017. THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

The door to the decoy apartment which connects to the stairway down to the lab opens, and a man steps out. He’s thin, almost skeletally so, and he adjusts his tie with one hand as he turns his face up toward the afternoon sun, tightening the knot. Something must have gone terribly wrong for it to have been loosened in the first place; everything about him is pressed and proper, suit crisply ironed, creases arrayed just so, like a model of a man. A single splattered drop of something mars the toe of one perfectly shining shoe. No Avery here to sell the shine from his shoes for safety, no, sir!

Luis, who has returned home from school to find the apartment empty and a note on the counter reminding him to walk the dog before he watches cartoons, suddenly decides he would rather spend some time doing his homework before he walks the dog, delaying TV time even further (for he would never think to go against his mother when the welfare of his best friend is concerned; in other ways, certainly, but not this one). He grips Bobby’s leash tighter as the dog whines, and stumbles backward through the still-open door, into the safety of the apartment.

Bobby’s whining doesn’t stop until the door is closed between them and the man in the pressed suit. He plasters himself against Luis’s legs then, shaking hard, but determined to keep his body between his boy and the door. Luis can feel the growl radiating through the big dog’s ribs, deep and almost inaudible, but strong enough to shake his bones.

He crouches, wrapping his arms around Bobby, and in doing so, he saves his own life, because crouching means he isn’t visible through the window when the man turns his face toward the apartment. Isabella’s wards are holding. The man did notice the boy and the dog, for an instant, but they dropped out of his mind as soon as they went inside, and he doesn’t remember them as he turns a slow circle, assessing his surroundings for threats.

The man finds none, and so he lowers his face, straightens his spine, and pulls a piece of forked wood out of his pocket. Like all good dowsing rods, it grew in this shape, was whittled down but not truly carved, only refined. Unlike its naturally occurring kin, it was cultivated, trained into this shape while still on the branch. It grew on an impossible hybrid of willow and peach, fruiting and shade trees combined in a botanical lab whose research didn’t quite follow the laws of nature. It is, by any measure, perfect, the points tipped in hardened ash where they were burned, the base capped with silver that rests cool against his palm as he turns a slow and easy circle, holding the rod at roughly waist-level.

When he is facing west, the rod twitches, ever so slightly, a small rise followed by a sharp fall, and he frowns in thought before he begins to walk, letting it guide him away from the apartment, out of the courtyard, onto the street. A brief, self-satisfied smile creases his lips as he leaves the apartments behind him.

Tristan Rapp has never been a patient man. Oh, he’s capable of waiting—all alchemists are, and they have to be in order to succeed at their profession. Impatience does not help a solvent mature or bring a project more quickly to fruition. But waiting and patience are not the same thing. When he waits, he does so on a set timeline, knowing that in the end, the results will fit a very narrow band of possibilities. Patience involves trusting the universe, which is not something he has ever been inclined to do.

This lack of tolerance for wasting and wasted time has made him an excellent weapon in the arsenal of the new Alchemical Congress. He served under the prior masters, of course, has served for many years with distinction and with excellent results, but the prior Congress was more conservative in many ways than these new, upstart children of the modern age. He takes orders from scholars eighty years his junior, and he smiles with all his teeth as he agrees to their inane demands, reminding himself in the silence that follows that he has seen better men than them hung by the chains of their own hubris.

He is an alchemist but not one of the serious researchers, the ones so invested in the Great Work of chasing and claiming the City that they lose track of life here in the world where all flesh begins and much of it will end. He makes his own philters and draughts, but he creates nothing new, pursues no innovations, crafts no cuckoos. There are those who think less of him for these choices, and others who think more, and he values both schools of thought precisely the same. None of them matter.

What he enjoys most is the sensation of a job properly and efficiently done, the sight of a body coming apart into its component elements, ready to be repurposed and put to better uses, the sound of an apprentice begging for the life they don’t realize they’ve already lost. He knew Leigh Barrow, called her a colleague when others called her a monster, and respected her methods, even as he occasionally questioned the fervor with which she employed them. Barrow could never be truly great, for she allowed herself to be too easily distracted by vengeance and desire. He has no such issues.

Also unlike Barrow, he is a naturally occurring form of monster, born of flesh, and destined to die the same way if the City is not taken in his lifetime. He drinks his elixir of life, which tastes ever more of apples, and he endures, for his lifetime is a malleable thing, while the taking of the City is an inevitability.

The girl may have fled the lab while he was waiting for the filters to cleanse the alkahest from the air, but she didn’t sanitize her quarters on her way out the door, and after the small matter of Margaret’s assistant had been resolved—quite pleasantly so, at least for him—he had returned to the girl’s room to locate her hairbrush, which had several strands tangled in the tines. One of them even still had the root ball attached.

Affixing them to the fork of his dowsing rod with a loop of ice-washed cobweb had been a matter of seconds, and now he will find her. Wherever she’s hiding, unless it’s behind protections she couldn’t even imagine, he will find her.

The dowsing rod continues to twitch and tug as he makes his way along the sidewalk, ignoring the people who pass to either side. They are nothing more than mist and vapor to him, as inconsequential as a thought, and he pays them no mind. They go on their way, unaware of how lucky they are to be ignored, and he goes on his, passing storefronts and houses, attention reserved for the wooden rod in his hands.