Lacus Odii

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

Mopping Margaret's remains off the floor of the lab had been the work of almost an hour. Not that Tristan had done it himself, oh, no; he'd taken great pleasure in instructing Margaret's former second-in-command to handle the unpleasant task, watching as the woman retched and gagged and tried, desperately, not to either drop her mop or add to the mess on the floor. The poor thing had been somewhat concerned that he would react badly if she made the mess worse, and possibly decide that she could be added to the mess, liquidated as her supervisor had been.

She hadn't been wrong about that, and even now he somewhat resents the fact that she was able to swallow her gorge before she gave him the excuse.

There had been no concealing the fact that the mess had begun its existence as a human being, assuming you could call a failed researcher that: even if any alchemist worth the name hadn't been well practiced in recognizing the various fluids the body could be rendered into, there had been the matter of her skeleton, polished white and glossy, with an opalescent sheen that could almost be attractive, if not for the fact that it had been lying in the midst of all the other awful, unspeakable things Margaret had been reduced to.

Tristan had reopened the lab two hours after the release of his improved alkahest, ordering the staff to get to cleaning preparatory to decommissioning the facility, even as he removed himself to Margaret's desk to begin going through her files. He had reason to suspect that she'd been more successful than she'd claimed, but if that was so, she'd been given the opportunity to repent: she could have told them at any time that she'd done what she set out to do but chosen to conceal it for some unknowable reason, hiding her light under a bushel while others pursued their own dead-end routes into the City. She could have told him, not stood there in front of that orange abomination, telling bald-faced lies about failure and lab accidents.

If she'd just been willing to be honest and admit that the girl was a construct, he might have allowed Margaret to live. The thought is a ridiculous one, and he pauses in his scanning of her files to look up and smile to himself, very slightly. One of the assistants currently occupied in wiping the last of Margaret off the floor catches that expression and pales, redoubling his efforts. He wants out of this house of horrors, which is so sterile, so clean, except for the horrifying mess still being scraped up off the floor.

(Every atom of Margaret will be preserved and repurposed. She may not have led a successful project during her time with the lab, but she'll be part of several, if her superiors have anything to say about it. And they have quite a lot to say.)

No, she was never going to survive the review of her work. She'd been too headstrong, too determined to do things her own way and in her own time. It was a weakness shared by a troubling number of James Reed's former students, most of whom had believed that because they'd once studied at the knee of a man foolish enough to allow Leigh Barrow unfettered access to his person, they were somehow touched by greatness. That James Reed's century-long reign of unfettered self-indulgence was their birthright, and all they had to do was continue pushing forward in his name.

Amateurs, every single one of them. Building Moreau-esque mockeries of humanity down here when they were meant to be finding a way to harness the minor aspects of the Moon. How was the Congress supposed to lure a major Lunar aspect if they didn't have a minor one under their control? Really, it was a miracle anything ever got accomplished. Tristan sighs, looks up again, and pauses as his eyes fall on the skeleton.

Skeleton, singular. Meaning the girl, the "lab accident," really was a construct, despite his explicit instructions about naturals only during his inspection. He snaps his fingers. One of the junior researchers appears almost instantly, scurrying to his side so quickly that he's amazed she doesn't leave tire marks on the clean linoleum.

He hates an ass-kisser. The only thing worse than an overly fawning lackey is one who doesn't know their place. Finding the balance between those two states is the best way to stay alive in his presence over the long term, and it's not his fault these people haven't had the time to study up on their own survival protocols yet.

He'll ask her to come see him after the review is finished. Yes. Removing her internal organs through her navel will be a pleasant way to relax after this frustratingly stressful day. He'd known before arriving that Margaret's project was a failure, of course—her status reports had made that perfectly clear—but he had never imagined she would be foolish enough to look him in the eye and lie to him.

"Yes, sir?" asks the junior researcher.

"When I came for the inspection earlier, Miss Margaret had a lab assistant with her," he says. "Orange skin. Hooves. Margaret claimed the girl was a natural result of a lab experiment when I reminded her that she'd promised me no constructs, but she must have been… mistaken, because if the girl had been natural, she'd have been downsized by the alkahest. There's only one skeleton on the floor."

The junior researcher is silent. He's glad he had already decided to kill her. If he'd still been thinking in terms of mercy, he would be very disappointed just now.

"Well?" he prompts, when the silence has grown long enough to be genuinely frustrating. He doesn't like waiting.

"I… erm, I think you mean Kelpie, sir. She was a private project of Margaret's. Never worked with anyone else."

"And why is that?" he asks. He looks at her, making no effort to hide his irritation. "Margaret should not have been wasting Congressional resources on private projects. She had a task to perform, and it sounds like you're telling me that she was never doing it properly. If you know something that might contradict that, now would be the proper time to tell me. Lives might be saved."

Not including her own, but she doesn't need to know that.

The woman swallows hard, throat working as she ponders his words. Finally, turning her face away, she says, "Because she was a success."

"A success at what?"

"Kelpie was our second successful minor manifestation." The woman looks back. Apparently, betrayal gets easier the longer it keeps going on. "We got the Rabbit first. Not the actual god, the one who hangs out with the peach farmer. We're still working on the two dogs, the Man's and Diana's, but they seem to be closely enough entangled with each other that getting just one of them to embody is difficult."

She doesn't mention the dangers of dual embodiments. After Reed's failure, no one who serves the Congress in even the least capacity needs the reminder.

Tristan makes a noncommittal noise.

This appears to spur the woman to deeper, more desperate levels of betrayal. "Kelpie was made using Congressional supplies, and we told Margaret it made her property of the Congress, we told her—"

"Even if your former supervisor had used only her own hand-gathered ingredients and materials, the girl would still have been created using knowledge which the Congress had supplied. She would have belonged to us no matter what." Tristan looks at her along the length of his nose, careful not to let her see his slow-building excitement. "She was always ours. Where is she now?"

"I… I don't know, sir."

He was already going to kill her. Now he's going to make it hurt. "You don't know?"

"I didn't know she was here when you did the inspection until you told me! If she was here, she was probably doing some menial task for Margaret, something too basic for the rest of us! We mostly used her for scut work. She had no alchemical talents at all, she didn't understand half of what we were doing, and even if she had, her own orientation would have skewed anything she tried to blend or brew! I have no idea where she would have gone! Are you certain she was here when you released the alkahest?"

She realizes her mistake a beat too late, breath catching as his pupils dilate and his gaze turns a little sharper than is strictly natural. He can hear her heart rate accelerate as he watches her fight not to back away. She's terrified.

Good.

"Did you genuinely just ask an accredited senior alchemist whether I was certain of my own actions?" he asks, and his voice is buttery smooth and velvety, pitched to soothe. "Was that a clever choice you made?"

"Sir. No, sir, it wasn't. I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to—"

"I should certainly hope you didn't mean to. Yes, the girl was here. I closed the doors and left them in this lab alone while the alkahest worked its way through the air. It would have cleared in ten or so minutes, but that doesn't explain where she would have gone. Is there anyone else who would have concealed her? You mentioned that she was the second. Could she have run to the first?"

"No, sir. They've never met."

"You're certain of that?"

"As certain as if my life depended on it," she says, and then winces, seeming to catch the inherent danger of her own working. "I mean, sir, Margaret kept her fairly strictly isolated. It was just this team that really knew she existed. Constructs, even odd-looking ones, aren't that unusual within a static research facility, and we've been able to push the boundaries more since Reed died."

Reed died and his cuckoos settled in Berkeley, the city where they'd come together after years of coming apart, the city where they'd determined who their adult selves were going to be. They had a little house together, according to the last reports, a little house no one could find or see unless the cuckoos allowed it, and they lived there with an assortment of people as strange as they were, people whose names were mysteriously missing from Congressional records.

Oh, the cuckoos hated the alchemists who'd made them, called them monsters, blamed them all for Reed's actions and the actions of his students; they didn't care that alchemy was a tool like any other, blameless without someone to hold it. They hated the alchemists and chose no sides, and that was part of why the Congress was willing to delay the inevitable call to open warfare. As long as the cuckoos were content to play house with each other and spurn all alchemy, they weren't supporting a challenger to the power of the Congress.

And having them stationary, so much of the guiding power of the universe, was making it easier to convince reality that it should allow alchemical innovation. As long as the cuckoos didn't fly away, labs like this one would be able to make incredible, world-changing discoveries with half the staff and a third of the funding that they would have needed anywhere else in the world. Of course they had been able to manifest two of the minor forces. Those facets of the Lunars had been manifest before, time and again, even if they'd been missing for centuries. If any lab was going to bring them back, it was this one.

Tristan rises, slow and deliberate, watching the researcher for signs that she's about to bolt. It would be the clever thing for her to do, even if it would be the last thing she ever did. Those two truths aren't mutually exclusive: both can exist at the same time.

She isn't clever, which he already knew, or maybe she's too clever, and still thinks she can somehow worm her way into survival, find a loophole to wiggle through while his guard is down. He's willing to let hope linger, at least for a moment.

"Show me where she was kept," he says. It's not a request.

The woman doesn't read it as one. She nods, sharp and obedient, and turns to walk out of the lab, away from the remaining mess that was Margaret, her heels clicking sharp and staccato against the floor. He follows, and neither of them looks back.

Slightly over half the lab assistants and junior researchers live in the building. It was necessary, if they were going to conceal the place in an urban area, that they minimize the number of people who were going to be seen coming and going on a regular basis. The Congress owns the apartment building at the top of the stairs, devotes several of the apartments to their staff, and still they have to be careful who goes up to the surface. In order to keep people from getting resentful of those who were allowed to see the sun, go to a movie, and generally live semi-normal lives during their time away from the lab, all junior staff and assistants were assigned residences down below, no exceptions.

That meant Kelpie never questioned the location of her room, which is down a hallway lined with identical doors, each painted white and marked with a small nameplate identifying the occupant and their position. One of those doors cracks briefly open at the sound of footsteps, then swiftly shuts again as the person inside sees who's walking down the hall. The air is still and a little stagnant, tasting of dust and silence.

"Here," says the researcher, indicating the appropriate door.

K. Hindereads the nameplate, and Tristan actually snorts in suppressed amusement, earning himself a glance from the woman, who relaxes slightly, taking his show of humor as a good sign for her survival.

"So much of alchemy relies on the simplest of sympathies," he says, folding his hands behind his back.

"Sir?"

"Of all the fictional quadrupeds, how many have names suitable for a person to use on a daily basis?" he asks. "And that last name—old German for ‘hind.' Really, your Margaret labeled the girl as clearly as she could without setting off alarms, and no doubt deepened her sympathy with her incarnation every day in the process."

The woman doesn't move.

He lifts an eyebrow. "Well?" he says. "The door?"

She moves then, sharp and uneasy, like a frightened child at the cusp of a horror movie. It's a delightful thing, to be able to inspire so much terror so easily. When he was an apprentice, he used to watch the senior alchemists and wonder how they could take such joy in frightening people less powerful than they were, how they could play at being monsters without seeming to care what it could cost them. He swore, then, that he would be different, and he is. He is.

He's so much better at it than they were. He doesn't need weapons or harsh words to put everyone around him into a state of delicious fear: he can do it with a look or an entirely innocuous question. Reputation does the rest.

As to why they did it, he got that answer quite some time ago, and has held to it ever since. They did it then, and he does it now, because it's wonderful. Alchemy is about transformation and power. Transforming the moods of everyone around him to suit his own is a form of both those things, and one he is gleeful in commanding.

The door opens smoothly, unlocked, and swings open on well-oiled hinges, revealing a small room all but free of personal touches. There are a few pieces of clothing discarded on the floor, a dresser cluttered with the small objects that accumulate, even in an underground lab, a narrow bed strewn with tangled bedding, a potted plant putting up cautious green leaves with spiky edges.

The air here is even cooler and more stationary than the air in the hall. He looks back to the researcher. He supposes she must have a name—people generally do—but as she won't be making use of it for much longer, he doesn't see much point in bothering to learn it now.

"She hasn't been here," he says. "Where else does she go?"

"As I said, sir, Margaret mostly kept her close. None of the rest of us were encouraged to get to know her very well."

"I didn't ask you who might be braiding her hair and singing her happy little campfire songs. I asked you where she went. Surely you're not incompetent enough that you don't know that much about the girl who, as you have so casually informed me, represents the greatest alchemical breakthrough this provincial little lab has managed to unlock." He takes a step toward her, standing straighter as he does, until he looms in a towering collection of angles and bones. "If you've lost her, you'll yearn for the death your superior was granted. I have much less pleasant tools at my disposal."

The woman swallows hard, all color draining from her face. She makes a pretty picture, rigid and barely breathing.

"Well?"

"The cafeteria and the biology lab," she blurts. "We let her feed the frogs. It kept her out of the way, and they seemed to like her—they responded well to her, at least, and who knows what a frog likes?"

"Another frog, I suppose." He stops looming quite so intentionally. "Was any amphibian material used in her construction?"

"No more than the amount needed to stabilize the genetic matrix. Margaret thought it might confuse the sympathies if we crossed clades too much while she was being put together. I'll take you to the cafeteria, sir."

"You do that."

Again, he follows her. She moves more quickly this time, clearly no longer entertaining childish fantasies of rescue and redemption. No one's coming to save her. It's time and past time that she admitted that, and he's faintly impressed that she's managed to reach that conclusion without any active threats. Too many people in her position think that as long as he's not twirling the mustache he doesn't have and cackling, they can still work their way out of the abyss. It's tiresome. People who get themselves into the position of being listed as "expendable" should have the good grace to understand that it's an irrevocable designation.

Of course, she might feel the reminder of how efficient alkahest is as a killer to have been an active threat rather than an alchemical fact. He'll have to ask her while she's still capable of speech.

He doesn't pay much attention to where they're going as she leads him down another set of halls, focusing instead on the architecture of the lab itself. They have subterranean fortifications like this one all over North America, the majority built since James Reed murdered much of the last American Alchemical Congress. Losing so many masters in one blow had been very nearly incapacitating for the continent's alchemical interests. But their apprentices had survived, in many cases, alongside the independent alchemists, the up-and-coming, the ones whose ways of thinking had been too innovative or iconoclastic for the hidebound structures of the old Congress. Out of destruction could blossom new growth… at least for a while.

The old Congressional holdings had been cleaned out, the bodies removed, the traps disarmed, and the research fairly distributed among the surviving students of the lost masters. Then it had been distributed again, among the survivors of the argument over that ownership, until the strong and the clever had been the true survivors, and the time of rebuilding could begin.

Most of the old lab facilities had been too small, too cramped, and too designed for use by people who had been extending their own lives since the American Revolution, reluctant to consider other ways of doing business. Half the demolished labs hadn't been connected to the phone system, much less equipped with modern internet, although a surprising number had been accidental Faraday cages, capable of blocking cellular signals with ease. Really, it was a miracle that some of those old masters had been convinced to wire their labs for electricity. Privately, Tristan suspected they wouldn't have been willing to be convinced, if not for the increasing difficulty in finding apprentices who were willing to work by candlelight, or who inherently understood the safety protocols of carrying an oil lamp in enclosed spaces or around flammable materials. Modernization had come in fits and starts, resisted with every step.

In a way, Reed had done the Congress a massive favor by clearing out the old masters. Oh, knowledge had been lost, but not as much as had been originally feared; even the most paranoid among them had kept reasonably detailed notes, which had proven incredibly helpful once decoded and translated into instructions others could apply to their own efforts. But removing them had opened holes in the power structure, in which new powers had been able to arise, and new work had been able to begin.

The City is still the goal. The City is the goal across the globe, and every Alchemical Congress knows there can only be one winner in the race for metaphysical dominance over the universe. But finally, America is free to pursue other routes toward breaching those hallowed walls, while the other continents and regions continue to labor under the weight of centuries. They aren't as nimble.

Facilities of the size a modern alchemical organization needed couldn't be constructed in the open. Not without attracting the sort of attention that rendered the idea of a "secret society" somewhat moot. It was one of the survivors of the old Congress who proposed their current structure, a senior apprentice of a man who'd been trying to recreate true Roman concrete for the better part of fifty years. His theory was that modern material engineers failed in what should have been a reasonably achievable undertaking because they were missing some intangible portion of the process, some magical imbuement that would make it possible again.

His apprentices had been fond of that lost alchemist, making him a rare beast among the dead seniors, many of whom had been unpleasant verging on abusive, and they had continued his work in his absence, with the apprentice who now led the lab-construction efforts making the final breakthrough after she was given access to a dead Lunar for her own studies. She'd extracted a sample of the creature's blood, taking it back to her own lab for further analysis, and upon spilling it into a batch of concrete in process had discovered the key:

Divinity. The Romans had bled their gods into their construction and been rewarded with a substance that could endure for millennia, that actively repaired itself when it was damaged, that would even grow back if it was chipped away. It was closer to living bone than to stone when looked at under the proper conditions, and all it had taken to mix enough to grow underground laboratories around the continent was ensnaring a few minor gods and trapping them in their ascended condition before bleeding them dry.

Lunar gods have the ability to move in and out of manifestation, much like the moon can wax and wane: one of them might seem perfectly normal and human, then turn around and begin to glow as they took on the aspect of their divine self. Still, there are ways of finding them even when they hide below the surface of their own mortality, and so many of them that it's child's play to pick off a few weaker members of the pack from around the edges. Best of all, they aren't like the Seasons: killing a Lunar won't cause an immediate search for their replacement. It's like even the universe understands that they're an archaic affectation, an oil lamp in a modern laboratory setting, but keeps making them out of habit.

To create a subterranean lab in a matter of days, all the alchemists need now is a dilute form of alkahest to chew tunnels into the earth, a suitable amount of concrete, a Lunar to bleed into their construction materials, and the bones of a dozen murdered innocents. Much like the Hand of Glory's use as a thief's best friend, the bones can be infused with slow-burning phosphorus and used to cloak the lab from all but the closest examination.

Alchemical labs have been seeded around North America like anthills or mushrooms after a rain, their entrances concealed beneath buildings secured by the Congress through one of a dozen shell companies, their utilities provided by local grids unaware that they've been parasitized, their foundations rendered safe and stable by the blood of the moon itself.

It's an elegant solution to a problem that's been looming larger and larger across the years: how are they supposed to transform the world when the world insists on leaving no place for them? Their art has been dismissed by the "proper" sciences, relegated to the sidelines and viewed as little more than another form of witchcraft, powerless and suitable only for sale at Hot Topic. They need space in which to work, shared labs in which to conduct their research, and the freedom to do these things away from prying eyes. Now, with the proper infrastructure finally in place and thriving in a modern setting, they can truly get down to the business of changing the world.

Best of the construction project's dividends is the wealth of knowledge it's forced them to acquire about the Lunars. Catching a reliable supply of the weak, often ineffectual creatures meant learning how they operated, where to find them and how to lure them away from their fellows. Some of them protested when they were grabbed, saying they couldn't be abducted, they couldn't be held prisoner, because they had an essential job to do.

That was how the alchemists came to learn something new and wonderful about the Impossible City. Tristan would have said there was nothing new for them to learn, not after centuries of studying the place, decades spent trying to break through the walls and take their birthright at the head of the universal powers. But it seemed the City still held her surprises and her secrets, and from the Lunars, they have learned that each night, all over the world, windows appear and incarnate moon gods slip through, becoming that which they embody as they make the slow trek across the sky. They shine on the Impossible City. These small, useless slices of divinity come closer to eternity than most creatures will ever even dream.

The alchemists have also learned—or, rather, confirmed—that Lunars are universally arrogant and self-important creatures, believing themselves somehow special just because they're touched by an archaic sort of divinity. Efforts have been made to use them to access the City, but even Lunars who know themselves to be on the verge of dying have refused to allow the alchemists access. No amount of cajoling or threatening breaks through their pompous dedication to their duty.

Margaret's project began as an attempt to get around that dedication. Many Lunars had been represented across the centuries with animal partners of one sort or another, beloved companions who might provide a lever to get that final, essential degree of cooperation. Those animals stopped embodying some centuries before, the universe deeming them unnecessary as people stopped believing in them. That didn't mean they'd never existed, or that the potential for their manifestation might not still be floating somewhere out there in the ether.

Alchemists could catch Lunars, easily. What they couldn't do was control them, and control was what they needed. It helped that most of the Lunars with animals worth chasing were on the stronger side—Diana, Artemis, Chang'e. The big gods of their pathetic pantheon. Get one of them to join the cause, and it would be child's play to either convince or remove the rest of the Lunars, and then? An open door into the City, and a guide to get them there.

The Lunars moved back and forth between states, now mortal, now divine. The recreated embodiments wouldn't need to do that. If they could be shaped successfully, they wouldn't be anything other than themselves, with no shifting between states. They couldn't retreat into themselves to become less of a lever against their primary. They could always be leaned upon.

Margaret's proposal was sound, and her early results were promising enough that this lab was planted and grown to her specification, hidden in the city with the largest growing concentration of Lunars, right under the nose of Reed's cuckoos. She was young, clever, and ambitious, and Tristan was honest enough to admit to himself that he'd been expecting the order to kill her because of her success, not because of her failure. The new rulers of the Alchemical Congress liked their positions, and they'd been young and hungry recently enough to not nurture their own replacements longer than they had to.

The long hall from the residential quarters to the cafeteria is carefully devoid of character, with blank white walls and concrete-gray floor and ceiling. When there was always a chance that any sort of accident would require sterilizing the place with an alkahest wash, there was no point in customizing it. Anything apart from the living concrete would dissolve.

Roman concrete, prepared with gods' blood, survives even alkahest. It's a fascinating contradiction, a substance the supposedly universal solvent can't destroy, but the stuff is too useful not to keep making, and if anything, its existence will motivate them to improve the alkahest, to make it what it was truly meant to be.

Like the rest of the lab, the cafeteria is empty, the air holding the faint aroma of scrambled egg and French-bread pizza. Somehow, every cafeteria winds up smelling like those things, even before they turn on the stove burners for the first time. Some quirk of universal sympathy too minor for anyone to look into too deeply, at least so far. Maybe after they understand all the other mysteries of the universe, that will be a question to set for the apprentices—why do group kitchen spaces always smell like eggs? Discuss.

"I'd expect to find her here, if she's not in the lab or her quarters," says the junior who's been escorting him around the lab. She continues a few feet deeper into the cafeteria, like her presence will somehow force the missing girl to appear.

As if they could miss her. Tristan didn't exactly take the time to study her when he'd seen her in the lab before, but his memory insists that she was rather extremely and distinctly bright orange. People don't normally come in that color. She should stand out like a flashlight in a graveyard, but there's nothing here, not a hint of color.

Slowly, he turns to the junior, expression blank. The blood drains from her cheeks and the muscles around her eyes tighten as she fully grasps both her situation and the fact that he's between her and the exit.

"She's not here," he says.

"There are other places we can—"

"Tell me the truth. I'll know if you lie." He hesitates just long enough to give her time to formulate that lie, then says, "Is the woman we are pursuing a successful embodiment of Artemis's Hind?"

She licks her lips, pupils dilating. "Yes," she says. "Yes, she is."

"That will be all. Your services are no longer needed." He waves a hand lazily.

She bolts.

Not for the door—that would be the easy way, and he gets the feeling this woman has never taken the easy way in her life. She runs for the kitchen. Smiling to himself, he languidly follows.

Perhaps this day will be interesting after all.