Page 21 of Tidal Creatures

Kelpie squirms. She doesn’t like this line of questioning, doesn’t like the way Isabella is looking at her now, like she’s suddenly interesting for a whole different reason. Still, she’s been truthful so far, and so she says, “Some of the stories have Artemis accompanied by a golden hind. I’m supposed to be the Hind.”

“And you’re intended to attract Artemis?”

Kelpie bites the inside of her mouth as she nods, watching Isabella. If the other woman moves toward a knife or anything else that could be used as a weapon, she’s going to run. There isn’t anything else she could possibly do at this point.

“Interesting. Why do they want her? If I was going to mess with the Lunars, she’s not where I’d start.”

“I don’t think they want her. They just want one of the strong ones; I think they’re just pretty confident they’d be able to handle any Lunar they could catch.”

“Why do they want a strong one?”

Kelpie looks at her and exhales, slowly. Up until this point, everything she’s admitted to being involved with has been innocent, in its own way. Nothing wrong with being a lab assistant, and it’s not like she had a choice about being built in the same lab. This is where she admits to doing something that could probably be considered “bad.”

“Lunars have access to the Impossible City,” she says. “If we—if they—could catch a strong-enough Lunar, they’d be able to use it to get inside.”

“And there it is,” says Isabella, throwing up her hands. “It always comes back to that damn City. Has since Baker went and wrote her bizarre fantasies down and started shilling them to children, like the more kids she could get to dress up as Avery and Zib on Halloween, the easier it would be for her specific branch of alchemists to seize control of absolutely everything. Why did it have to be a city?”

Kelpie blinks. “What?”

“The center of everything, the summit of creation, the place where, if you have absolute domain, you can control the rest of the universe—why did it have to be a city? Why not a hidden grotto or an endless forest or, if you demand human control, a farm? Why would the universe be centered in something that had to be built?”

Kelpie has never heard anyone question the City itself before. It feels faintly blasphemous, like it shouldn’t be allowed. “I— Every brick is a milestone in human accomplishment, every pane of glass is an achievement in enlightenment—”

“I believe that’s what they told you, but that doesn’t make it true. The City is. I can’t object it into non-existence. But the City shouldn’t be, and if it’s going to be, we should stop trying to take it over. It exists just fine without anyone running the place. But okay, whatever. The Lunars have access, and the alchemists have decided that means they need a pet Lunar. Why now? Why the kind of urgency that puts a deer-woman in my kitchen, eating my enchiladas?”

“Um. Do you know who James Reed is?”

To Kelpie’s surprise, Isabella clearly does. Some of the words she says are familiar, things Kelpie’s heard when another of the techs cut themselves or hit their hands. Others are entirely new to her but said with the same intonation, making their position as profanity more than clear. Kelpie listens, wide-eyed, until Isabella winds down, panting slightly as she glares.

“That bastard,” she says. “I hope he rots.”

“That’ll be easy, since he’s dead,” says Kelpie.

That takes Isabella aback, at least for a moment. She stares at Kelpie, then gets up and crosses to the counter, leaning up to open a cupboard and take down a bottle full of clear liquid. She returns to the table, removes the cap, and takes a long drink directly from the bottle before offering it to Kelpie.

“It’s good luck to drink when a bastard dies,” she says, by way of explanation.

Kelpie blinks. “I … Is that hygienic?”

“Of course. The alcohol kills the germs. Go ahead, have a bit.” Isabella keeps offering the bottle, vehemently.

Kelpie isn’t sure what this means, but she takes the bottle, hesitant and anxious, yet still afraid to offend this woman who can see her for what she is, and knows things about the alchemical world that Margaret never tried to explain. Watching Isabella warily, she raises it to her lips and sniffs.

The liquid smells astringent and herbal, sharp with something green and unfamiliar beneath a wash of a scent that is almost the absence of scent, so empty that it becomes a perfume entirely its own. She doesn’t want to put that in her mouth. But it isn’t poison, unless Isabella is one of those hedge witches who swallows a bezoar in order to pass tests from rivals, and she really, really doesn’t want to get thrown out into the dark, complicated night.

Kelpie drinks.

The liquid burns like fire, but when she swallows, there is no pain; either the fire did no damage, or it did so much that the wound is already cauterized and she’ll fall down dead as soon as her body realizes what just happened. She sets the bottle down with a surprisingly steady hand, looking across the table at Isabella.

“Good luck,” she says.

“It’s not a suggestion,” says Isabella, reclaiming the bottle. “It’s a fact. When a bastard dies, you drink in celebration, and the universe sees that you’re not the same flavor of bastard, and it doesn’t punish you for whatever the bastard did.”

“But doesn’t celebrating because someone’s dead make you a bad person?”

“Not when the dead guy’s James Reed. What happened to him?”

“He and his team managed to embody a universal concept called the Doctrine of Ethos. I don’t all the way understand what that means, just that everyone thought it was very impressive that they could do that, and it might mean they could take control of the Impossible City. They used a lot of things to build a suitable vessel. All the things that usually go into crafting a vessel, and some more things, too—materials Reed had been saving for a long time.”