Page 42 of Inkpot Gods

Blessedly, when she turns the taps, the water works as well and heats up as quickly as she could have hoped, cascading down over her in a glorious, cleansing tide. She just stands there for several minutes, letting it warm her from the outside in. First the shivering stops. Then she begins to feel like she could actually survive the trek back to the surface. Then, as the last of the ice in her belly lets go, she begins to truly appreciate the enormity of what they’ve discovered.

Roger and Dodger told her about the secret alchemical lab hidden in the very heart of Berkeley. They don’t keep secrets in their household. They used to keep secrets, too many of them to truly count, and all that got them was separated, murdered, and put through endlessly repeating loops of the same short years, preventing them from moving forward into a better or brighter future. No. Secrets are too dangerous to allow past the front door.

They told her about it, and of course she listened, of course she nodded and asked all the right questions, learned as much as she could about their discovery … and then forgot virtually all of it, because it didn’t matter, did it? The alchemists were gone, and after the way they’d been driven out, the Congress wasn’t going to send anyone else to take their place. Berkeley was free, and the lab was just an artifact of a worse time, one that wasn’t coming back.

But all their stories hadn’t been able to convey the enormity of the place, the fact that it had hallways long enough to echo, or an internal support structure that seemed designed to care for dozens of people all at the same time.

And none of what they’d done or explained to her had been enough to keep independent alchemists out of the city, which was the truly dangerous part of the whole situation. She couldn’t explain the people she lived with to Lilianne—secrets were dangerous, but some secrets weren’t hers to share. She couldn’t change the other woman’s mind about alchemy, couldn’t convince her to leave it alone and live a normal life, one beyond the reach of the Alchemical Congress.

Why does she care so much, anyway? She lathers shampoo into her hair, scrubs with frustrated ferocity, and rinses the suds away before reaching for the conditioner. She only met Lilianne today: she’s basically a stranger. The number of things Smita can say with conviction that she knows about Lilianne can be counted on her fingers. She’s from Alabama; she’s studying American history, and cares enough about American children’s literature to have made it her focus—although the fact that she’s an alchemist means she’s probably only doing that so she can study the Up-and-Under books in an endless loop, searching every period and paragraph for Asphodel Baker’s secrets. She’s an aspiring alchemist, advanced enough in her studies to have made a dowsing pendulum and be able to learn certain secrets from her peers, not so advanced that she can pass up the call to adventure. She’s tall, and has thick, dark brown hair that needs to be styled better, but is still beautiful.

There’s not much else. When someone she knows that shallowly wants to risk her life exploring an abandoned alchemist’s lab, why shouldn’t she just let them? Why did she have to invite herself along?

The sound of a door opening and closing again makes her tense, goosebumps breaking out on her arms and the back of her neck despite the heat of the water. “Hello?” she calls, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard over the shower. “I’m still in here.”

The door closes a second time, which means it must have been opened a second time … but no one answers her. Lilianne, if that was her, must have realized her mistake and left as quietly as she could.

Despite the knowledge that she’s alone again, Smita finishes her shower as quickly as she can, and when she turns off the water she freezes for several seconds, listening for any signs that someone else might be in the room. There aren’t any. Finally, cautiously, she pulls the curtain open to reach for the towel.

A pair of sweatpants is folded on the nearest bench, along with a soft-looking long-sleeved shirt of some kind and a loose white coat that would be better suited to a researcher of some sort. Smita blinks, several times, before beginning to dry herself off.

She’ll get dressed in a moment.

Lilianne feels like a child somehow magically granted access to Santa’s workshop. The real one, at the North Pole that only exists in movies, where elves make the toys and it’s basically Christmas all year long. The place where miracles can happen.

This lab is a miracle. A terrible one if she stops to think about it for too long: the Lunars are a class of incarnate, just like her parents, and just like her parents, they didn’t have any choice in what they manifested. Someone died to make this place. Maybe more than one someone. And since the minor manifestations the alchemists are able to catch are almost always young, they may have been teenagers or even children. It’s a horrible thought.

But their deaths are in the past. They can’t be unmade or undone, no matter how much she may wish they could be. And this place, this glorious, wonderful, impossible place … well, it’s still here, and that makes it the most important thing in the world.

Keeping her word to Smita has proven more difficult than she expected it to be. True, two rooms in each direction, including across the hall, leaves her with eight new places to explore, but there’s so much to see, and she just wants to run along the halls, cackling with delight at her own cleverness and incredible good fortune. Cleverness because she was able to craft a pendulum accurate enough to get her here in the first place; good fortune because no one else has been here at all. There would be signs if they had been, things out of place on the lab tables, the more valuable tinctures and components missing from the shelves. But no, no. It’s all here.

Everything she could ever want or need, from mercury and purified copper all the way to vials of godsblood and a few precious flasks of alkahest, and it’s all hers for the taking. She’ll be able to push her studies forward by years—and that doesn’t even take the books into account.

The room to the right of the locker room is storage, napkins and extra towels and refills for the soap dispensers, flasks and vials and spare stoppers. It’s like a glorious cross between a janitor’s closet and the cabinets at the back of her high school chemistry class, and she could spend hours in there alone.

Next to it, however, is the first of the actual labs. It’s small, and was clearly being used for botany at one point: some of the bonsai trees are still alive, their roots dry as dust but their branches straining toward the grow lights on the ceiling, which were already on when she stepped into the room. The younger plants are dead, all of them, wilted and collapsed in their pots, and without some sort of guide to the experiments that were being performed here, Lilianne knows she’ll never be able to understand them. No one can study every discipline, and even within alchemy, there is specialization.

Going in the other direction from the locker room brings Lilianne to a second lab, almost identical to the first, but with empty cages in place of dead plants, a dissection table, and several texts on anatomy. The tools are stainless steel, clean and beautiful, and Lilianne can’t bring herself to touch them. These were working alchemists from the Congress, and they were willing to build their foundations on the blood of a non-consenting Lunar. There’s no telling what those tools may have been used against.

She’s always known that alchemy is built on a bed of bones. She would have known it from the first time her parents recoiled from the word, looking at her with a horror and revulsion that she hasn’t seen on their faces since, and had never seen before. But until this moment, she’s never really had to face the full reality of it. What alchemy costs, what it demands … that price is built into the very stone around her, and for a moment she can feel the weight of it pressing down, too heavy to be borne.

The room beyond that is a library, large enough to be enthralling, small enough to make her think that similar rooms must be strewn throughout the structure, tucked away behind unassuming doors and filled with books relevant to the work going on in the closest labs. She picks up a book on incarnate animals and is almost instantly lost, sinking into the pages detailing all the ways in which the standard incarnations can occasionally manifest in horses, or dogs, or other creatures close enough to humanity to have picked up some of their simpler attributes. Skimming through it raises questions about domestication, and whether humans might not be considered domesticated by the divine.

It’s an unsettling thought. She puts the book back down, reluctantly turning toward the door. She has more rooms to explore, and Smita won’t be in the shower forever. She’s managed to stay within the range she promised, and she feels like she should get some sort of reward for that.

The feeling is ridiculous enough to stop her in her tracks for a moment. She has this whole lab to pillage at her leisure, with no one to stop or slow her. She already has all the reward she’ll ever need.

Pleased with her own revelation, she leaves the library and turns back toward the locker room. Once Smita is clean and dry, they can find another way out of here, some elevator or hidden stairwell that doesn’t require wading through a sewer to access. She’ll get Smita to street level without endangering her again, and then maybe they can exchange numbers, give her a way to contact the most beautiful woman in the world when she’s done looting the abandoned toys the Congress left behind.

Maybe they can be friends. She’s fine with that, as an outcome; she doesn’t need Smita to return any interest she might have, miraculous as that would be. Friendship is in some ways a greater reward than romance, which never seems to last as long. Given a choice between having Smita in her life for a long time or a good time, she’ll take the length.

The locker room door is still closed. She raps her knuckles against the wood, echoes rolling down the hall, and leans closer as she calls, “You all right in there? Sorry, but I didn’t find any sweatpants in the rooms right next door. I’m sure there’s a laundry room somewhere, but you may be in that robe for a little while.”

“What are you talking about?”

The question comes from behind her, not behind the door. Lilianne turns. Smita is standing in the hall, dressed in sweatpants, a soft sweatshirt, and a lab coat that stands out crisp as new-fallen snow against her deep brown skin. Lilianne decides in an instant that Smita should always wear white. It somehow makes her even lovelier, which shouldn’t be possible.

Smita is looking at her with confusion, brows furrowed and lips drawn down in a small, bewildered frown.