Sinus Honoris

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

Isabella's husband is a large man named Juan who looks startlingly like his son—startling because Kelpie would have sworn Luis was a tiny short-haired clone of Isabella until faced with his father. The boy is the best of both his parents, an alchemical marvel in his own strange right.

Juan came home as Kelpie was helping Isabella clean and disinfect the kitchen. Isabella had been pleasantly surprised by how skilled Kelpie was at cleaning up after herself, not apparently understanding what was involved in serving as an assistant in a large alchemical research lab. Still, he'd come in, and they'd been wiping up the last of the mess, and to his credit, he hadn't batted an eye when Isabella introduced Kelpie as "my cousin Marie's ex-husband's little sister's cousin, Kelly." Apparently, claiming a clear but distant relation instantly made her family and entirely welcome in Juan's home. He'd laughed at Isabella's skill at picking up strays and dished himself a plate, taking it to the living room while the ladies finished cleaning the kitchen.

"He's a sweet man," Isabella had confessed, somewhat conspiratorially. "Very straightforward. He says what he means, and he means what he says, and you never have to guess at anything. It would be awful if we didn't have friends, but we do. This isn't one of those households where we got married and decided we'd never need anyone else, ever again. Can you imagine?"

Kelpie, who has almost no frame of reference for a normal relationship, or a normal anything else, only blinked, and went back to wiping vomit off the floor. "No," she'd said, bluntly. "What happens now?"

"Now? It's late, and Luis has school in the morning. You'll sleep on the couch, of course." There didn't seem to be any question for Isabella: Kelpie was here, Kelpie didn't have anyplace else to go, Kelpie was staying. "Tomorrow, we'll start trying to figure out what to do with you. Maybe I can introduce you to the rest of my coven. Smita should be there, and she has more experience with alchemical constructs than the rest of us, even though she tries to pretend she doesn't. We're pretty sure she's dating one of them."

"What?"

"Smita never shows up on her own; she's always walked into our meetings by this high-strung blonde with the kind of eyes you don't get in real people, only engineered ones."

Kelpie had almost objected at that. She was a real person. Maybe she wasn't the kind of person she'd always thought she was, being built instead of born, but she was real. If she wasn't real, she wouldn't be so lost and scared, now, would she? But Isabella had been on a roll, and Kelpie had been so relieved to have a place to stay that she hadn't wanted to make too much of a fuss. Fusses could come tomorrow, when the sun was up and she could see more of this strange world she'd been released into.

"Blondie never stays for the coven meetings, and she's always waiting outside exactly when we adjourn for the day, even if we don't know when that's going to be," said Isabella. "It's like she's got a sixth sense for it. I'd bet you anything she's some alchemist's science project. Smita doesn't like to talk about her. I think she'll like to talk about you."

"Thank you? I think?" Kelpie had replied, and now, on the far side of midnight, she's lying awake on a surprisingly lump-free couch, under a hand-crocheted blanket in a whole rainbow of colors, wearing borrowed pajamas and staring at the ceiling.

Her eyes are burning. They have been for quite some time, tears pooling in the corners and refusing to fall. She doesn't want to cry. She doesn't. Margaret was her friend and now she's dead and that's good enough reason for tears, except Margaret wasn't her friend, because alchemists aren't friends with experiments. That's one of the first rules of working in that kind of lab, right after "wear protective eye gear" and "proper ventilation is essential." Alchemists don't befriend experiments, and they especially don't befriend experimental embodiments. Embodiments are either involuntary extrusions of a disorganized universe or intentional science projects, and either way, spending time with them on a social level would be weird and sort of gross.

She's the same person now that she was last night, when she was sleeping in her own bed, in her own room, secure in the idea that she was wearing her own skin, oddly colored but her own, and one day to be replaced by the skin she'd been born with, when Margaret finished unsnarling the complicated web of accident damage and chemical reactions that transformed her from a normal lab assistant to something bright and strange and all but impossible.

Kelpie rolls over as much as her anatomy allows and sniffles. She was made. She was made in a lab by someone who wanted to embody a celestial deer and didn't care who got hurt in the process. What is she even made of? Did someone die to give her a skeleton, a heart, her eyes? Is she cobbled together from a dozen corpses, each specially selected for the sympathies running through their veins, making her a perfect tuning rod for an energy that very sensibly chose to stop incarnating a long time ago?

And why didn't she ask these questions yesterday? She's always known the lab's ultimate goals. She never had a problem with it. She worked with pieces of people—people like Juan and Isabella, people who'd been alive and then weren't alive anymore, people who didn't always donate their bodies of their own free will—and she tried to convince them to harmonize with each other so they could be restored to life through alchemical means, transformed and transmuted into something that would serve.

She doesn't want to serve. So why was it all right that she was building other creatures to serve, that she was supporting a system she'd never realized was inevitably going to hurt her too?

She should have been asking these questions ages ago, even if she's only a year old, even if she's barely had time to figure out what the correct questions are. She should have known what she was doing was wrong.

She's still trying to figure out the ethics of her actions as her eyes drift closed, bathed in the moonlight through the window, which warms and soothes her as nothing else possibly could.

When she wakes up, it's to the sound of Luis talking loudly and excitedly about the upcoming school day while Bobby barks, claws scrabbling against the kitchen linoleum. Someone is frying eggs. She sniffs the air, not opening her eyes, and realizes the room is lighter; even through her eyelids, she can tell that much. The sun has risen. The sun has risen and the moon has gone, and that shouldn't feel like such a loss, but it does.

Slowly, she opens her eyes and sits up on the couch, the blanket falling to puddle in her lap as she tries to get her bearings back. On some level, she'd gone to sleep hoping that when she woke up, it would all have been a dream. She'd be safe in her bed, in her room deep below the ground, with Margaret waiting for her to get up and start on her tasks for the day. Nothing would have changed. Everything would still make sense.

Just to check, she pinches herself on the arm, swift and vicious, hard enough to hurt. She bites her lip to stop herself from squeaking, then sighs and pushes herself off the couch, rising with relative ease. New techs used to marvel at how good she was at standing on her hooves, like any creature won't learn how to use the appendages it has instead of yearning for the appendages it doesn't. Birds learn to fly just fine, even though they don't have thumbs.

Sure, she's occasionally looked with envy at the way people with proper feet can make themselves taller by leaning onto their tiptoes, or express uncertainty by rocking back on their heels, but that was when she thought her own hooves were temporary things. Now that she knows they're not, she's not going to waste any time wishing for something she's never going to have.

She finds Isabella and her family in the kitchen. Isabella's frying eggs and some sort of sausage on the stove. Luis is dressed for school, while Bobby sits beside him at attention, clearly eager for the scraps he's sure will soon be tumbling his way. Juan has a large ceramic mug in one hand; he gestures at Kelpie with it before taking a noisy slurp.

"There's the sleeping beauty," he says, blithely, and Kelpie wonders what he sees when he looks at her. Not what she actually is, that's absolutely certain. "Hope we didn't wake you."

"Oh, I needed to be up anyway," she demurs, smiling and hoping her anxiety doesn't show. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"You're a guest, and guests don't make breakfast; guests get fed breakfast," says Isabella, waving her spatula. "One egg or two? Sausage? I know you're not a vegetarian; I saw you eating last night."

Kelpie has never considered whether she'd prefer to be a vegetarian, and the thought stops her for a moment. In the lab, they ate what the cafeteria provided, and while it varied from day to day, it was always bland, nutritionally balanced, and made of a supposedly ideal balance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. She doesn't think she's ever gone a full day without eating chicken.

"Sausage would be lovely, thank you," she says, with her very best manners, as she takes the open seat at the table.

Luis grins at her, sausage in his teeth and something suspiciously sticky pushing up the front of his hair. "Mom says you're a cousin now, sort of, and you're going to stay a while. Are you really?"

"I… guess so."

"That's good. Bobby likes you! I like you, too. It's nice to have company. Are you going to stay sleeping in the living room the whole time? I get up real early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. Do you care if I watch cartoons?"

Kelpie, who doesn't know what a cartoon is, can only blink at the unending torrent of words, trying to understand what's being asked of her. She's saved from the need to reply by Isabella setting a plate on the table in front of her, rumpling Luis's hair with one hand as she does, only to recoil.

"Ugh! Mijo, how are you sticky? We didn't even have waffles today! Did you forget that jam goes on toast, not in hair?"

Luis giggles, unrepentant. Isabella huffs, then points to the door.

"Go. Wash up, now. Jam out of hair, off face, off hands, and change your shirt if there's a speck of jam on it, anywhere. I won't have your teachers thinking I roll you in pectin before I ship you off to their care."

"Aw, Mom," he protests.

"Go!" she repeats, and giggling, he goes.

A beat later, Juan rises, taking his mug with him, and crosses the kitchen to kiss the crown of Isabella's head before he nods to Kelpie, says, "Have a lovely day, and I hope things at home improve for you soon. I'll see you both at dinner." Then he's gone, heading out of the kitchen with Bobby at his heels, the dog's tail waving wildly, as if he can't control his excitement over the moment and the chance that he might get to go outside again.

He doesn't. The door opens and closes, and the dog trots back to sit next to Kelpie's chair, silently begging for scraps of her breakfast. She laughs and moves her plate a bit away from him, shielding it with her arm. After last night, she didn't think she was ever going to be hungry again, but now she's ravenous, her stomach demanding satisfaction in loud and uncomfortable growls.

She watches Isabella carefully as she reaches for knife and fork, hoping the other woman will signal in some way if she's doing it wrong, but Isabella is busy studying her hair.

"How did you sleep?"

Kelpie shrugs. "Better than I expected to, since I've never slept in a room with a window before." Her eyes widen. "I don't have my toothbrush! Or my hairbrush. I left them in the lab, and I can't go back down to get them—"

"No, you can't," says Isabella firmly. "Last time Luis went to the dentist, they sent him home with a little goodie bag full of floss samples and flavored toothpastes, and a new brush we still haven't opened. With what we pay to have his teeth cleaned, they should have sent him home with a new bike."

As if summoned by the word "bike," Luis reappears in the doorway, the front of his hair now wetted down against his forehead. He holds out his hands for inspection, beaming at Kelpie and his mother.

Isabella crosses the kitchen to take his hands, turning them over for a cursory inspection. "Mmm… that will do," she says, finally. "Go get your things. You need to take Bobby out before you head for school."

"Dad already left?"

"If you wanted a ride, you shouldn't have let yourself get all sticky," she says, in a tone which makes it very clear she's teasing; this is a conversation they've had many times, in many settings, and while he may be playing it up a bit for the sake of his audience, there's no resentment here. This is just the way the morning goes.

Luis shrugs, still grinning. "I'll take Bobby out and then I'll go."

"Okay. You do that." Isabella watches as he scurries away, then finally picks up her own breakfast and sits down across from Kelpie. "Don't get the wrong idea. He's a good kid, but he likes to press the rules as much as any child does. If I gave him an inch, he'd take a mile. Fortunately, we only have one car, and Juan needs it for work."

"What does he do?"

"He's a mechanic. Works at a shop over in Oakland, comes home every night smelling like grease, with new calluses on his hands. It's wonderful. He enjoys his work, I enjoy not needing to worry about him, and his income is unpredictable enough that the government doesn't notice the money I bring in under the table."

Most of this makes no sense to Kelpie, so she just nods, hoping she looks like she understands, and cuts into her eggs with a quick swipe of her butter knife. The yolks rupture in a river of gold that seems oddly alchemical in nature, reminding her far too much of Margaret's eyes running down her cheeks, impossibly still pigmented in their original color. She pushes her chair back and drops her fork, abruptly no longer hungry.

"I'm sorry. I should have asked how you liked your eggs."

"It's not…" There's a lump in Kelpie's throat. She doesn't know how it got there, but it hurts. She swallows as hard as she can, forcing herself to speak around it, even as she wraps her tail around her leg and draws it tight, cutting off the circulation below the knee. "I guess I'm just not hungry. Sorry to waste food."

"I can put it in the fridge for later, but the eggs will congeal if I do that," says Isabella.

Congealed eggs won't run like liquefied human eyes. Kelpie nods immediately. "Yes please could you do that?" she asks.

Looking confused, Isabella rises, takes Kelpie's plate, and carries it to the counter, where she wraps a piece of tinfoil over it before putting it in the fridge. "This is here whenever you're ready," she says.

"Thank you," says Kelpie, meekly.

"But if you're going to be staying longer than a day, we need to talk about how much you actually eat when you're not traumatized."

Kelpie unwraps her tail before anything can go numb, flicking it out of the way, and blinks at Isabella. "Why?"

"Oh, for—because, hon, food isn't free when it's not being provided by the evil underground alchemy lab. I'm happy to feed you. You're a victim of those bastards as much as anyone else I've ever known, but if you eat like the age you look, we're going to need extra money, and there's no way you legally exist. Even if you could afford to take the risk of being behind the counter at 7-Eleven when an alchemist came in looking for bottled water and MM's, they'd never hire you to begin with, because their computers will all say you're not real."

Kelpie's head is starting to spin. This is a lot, and she's been loose in the world for less than a day, and she doesn't know how she's going to handle any of it. Of course she exists! If she didn't exist, this would all be so much easier. But she's been called into being by alchemists whose educations outstripped their ethics by such a wide margin that they never stopped to ask themselves whether this, any of this, was acceptable. She is. How can a computer decide she's not?

"I don't know how much I eat," she says, in a small voice. "A normal amount."

"Was last night normal?"

"No. I was hungry and I'd been so scared and sometimes adrenaline can convert into hunger signals when the body comes down from the peak of panic, and the food was so good. I never had anything like that before."

"Sounds about white," says Isabella, and eyes her. "That stuff about adrenaline—why do you know that?"

"I helped with the animals in the bio lab sometimes," says Kelpie. "You'd have a rat so scared it was forgetting to breathe, and then five minutes later, it'd be trying to eat a chunk of bread bigger than its body. I know a lot about biology."

"And nothing about the cost of food. What a fun education you've had." Isabella sighs, but she's smiling; she's not mad. "Well, you can't get a job, and you can't go back to the alchemists, so that means you're going to have to learn how to do what an hechicera does, just a little. Maybe you're going to be amazing at talking the universe into things, since technically you're an incarnate piece of it walking around on two hooves—and don't think they were doing you any favors when they built you so far off the human norm, kiddo. Maybe most people won't see you for what you are, but enough will, and that's going to make you a target any time you go out in public."

Kelpie blinks. "Margaret always said I was a lab accident," she says, not fully aware that she's omitted the word "in" from that sentence; she's adjusting to the reality of what she is and how she came to be. "I don't know if they did it on purpose, or whether they could have made me any other way."

"You look kinda like a deer; maybe it's the Hind coming out in you. But by that logic, every Winter would look like Jack Frost, and every Summer would look like a harvest icon, so maybe it's just because they were working with something that didn't want to manifest. Who knows why alchemists do anything? They're like kids with a chemistry set way above their age level. Half the time, I don't think they know why they do the things they do."

"But I can go out?"

"Yes. As long as we stay out of crowds and avoid places where alchemists tend to congregate, you can go out. Which is good. You're coming to my coven meeting today, and then you and I are going to figure out what of my services you can help for. I do things for the local community. Luck charms, water-purification stones—with the plumbing around here, sometimes you don't have a choice—all the little forms of magic that the alchemists can't monitor or admit exist without showing their whole hand. If you can help me do my job faster, I can take more clients, and we'll be able to pay whatever increase you cause in the food bill. And we can start setting you up with funds for when you inevitably get tired of haunting my living room."

"Do you think that's going to happen?"

"Stranger things happen every day," says Isabella.

She's finished her breakfast while they were talking, and after a brief pause to rinse the dishes and load them into the dishwasher (which Isabella dismisses merrily as "a piece of crap" while still using it), she leads Kelpie to the bathroom and presents her with the available sanitary products: toothpaste and a fresh toothbrush, a hairbrush that looks like it might be up to the challenge of her hair, a washcloth, and a towel. She stays long enough to establish that they did have showers in the lab, then excuses herself, telling Kelpie to come out when she's ready, and leaves her alone.

The bathroom is small, square, and very, very white. It's the most familiar thing she's seen since leaving the lab. Kelpie looks at the brush and tube of paste in her hands, and decides to start with what she knows hasn't changed: oral hygiene doesn't care whether you're real or lab-grown. It's a constant. Her hair is more of a challenge. It's not curly so much as it's wavy and stubborn, with a tendency to tie itself into knots if she looks at it funny. Sleeping under a tree and then on a couch definitely qualifies as looking at it funny, and it takes the brush away from her several times before she feels like she can safely step into the shower.

The soap doesn't smell like anything she recognizes, and the bottle doesn't help as much as she'd like it to. Is "Summer Berry Medley Dream" a kind of fruit? It's probably delicious, with a name like that, which explains why someone would want to smell that way. She lathers herself up and rinses twice, the way she always did down in the lab, and wishes she'd thought to go by her quarters for her nail kit. Normally, she files her nails every morning, and oils her hooves and horns to keep them from cracking. It's a tedious routine, and she never thought she could miss it.

"You drown in there?" calls Isabella from the hall, and she knows she's been in the bathroom long enough; the day here may not follow the ebb and flow of the days in the lab, but she still has duties to perform and marks to meet. That's almost comforting.

"I'll be right there!" she calls, and she means it. She has somewhere to be, with someone who wants her there, and she's not completely adrift in a world she doesn't understand, she's not. She's a part of something. Maybe it's not the something she always thought she was a part of, but it's something all the same, and that can be good enough for her.

That has to be.

She leaves the bathroom in a cloud of Summer Berry Medley Dream–scented fog, and Isabella wrinkles her nose at the sight of her. "I should have realized," she says. "Of course you don't have anything else to wear."

"I thought my clothes were better than your pajamas," says Kelpie apologetically. "I can't borrow any pants that button or zip. They don't have space for my tail."

"No, and it isn't the right weather for dresses." Isabella looks Kelpie frankly up and down. "Well, at least you don't look too abnormal."

Kelpie, who has worn a button-down white shirt and khaki pants every day of her life so far, is baffled by that examination but doesn't say anything about it. Some things are beyond all understanding. "Most people can't see my tail, you said."

"That's right."

"So what will they see if they look at me from behind? Will my pants just have a hole in them for no reason?"

That gives Isabella a momentary pause before she shakes her head and says, "When the coronation was on, we had potential monarchs slaughtering each other all across the continent, and it mostly didn't make the papers. People would remark on how strange it was, the way Miss Kinsey's boy died, and then they'd just move on, tragedy dismissed. No gossip, no evidence, no footprint on memory. The magical world knows how to conceal itself from people who don't want to see it. Will a hole in your pants count if it's there to allow for something most people won't realize or admit exists? I don't know. I suppose we're going to find out together." Isabella picks up a purse from the table at the end of the hall, brown leather in a shell of knotted beige twine, and slings the strap over her shoulder. "Isn't this going to be fun?"

"Yeah," says Kelpie, unenthusiastically. "Fun."

She follows Isabella out of the apartment, noting the way the woman stays between her and the decoy apartment, making it harder to see her from the windows. She doesn't think anyone's looking. If they were trying to find her, surely they would have done so already; surely there's something baked into the foundations of her that would lead them right to her location.

The thought is unexpected, and sends her stomach swooping toward her ankles, dropping hard and fast and brutal. She slept in Isabella's living room last night, only a closed door away from Luis and Bobby, and they could have come for her at any moment. She almost stops walking, but manages not to. Stopping here would leave her visible from the window. Stopping here would leave Isabella in danger.

She manages to hold her tongue until they've exited the apartment complex and made it down to the sidewalk, where true to Isabella's word, no one seems to notice her: the people continue to walk, the cars roll down the street, and no one stops to stare, no one runs into anyone else. Only then does she stop, grabbing the strap of Isabella's purse to make her stop as well. She turns to look at Kelpie, expression somewhere between irritated and amused.

"Penny dropped, eh?"

"They could have come in the middle of the night! You could all be dead right now! I know you're an hechicera, but that's not bigger than a master alchemist like the one who killed Margaret! You let me put you in danger!"

"All right, first off, keep your voice down, all right? Yes, most people can't see the magical world, but they can hear just fine, and if you go hurling certain words around, you might attract attention. Yeah, nine out of ten will think you're some college kid LARPing or whatever, but that tenth will tell a funny story about a yelling blonde woman, and that could reach the wrong ears before you know it. Part of why I'm happy to be an hechicera instead of a bruja is that almost no one in this country knows what that is, while ‘bruja' is a word that makes them stop and take notice."

Kelpie blinks, then nods, looking down at the sidewalk. "I'm sorry," she says, voice much softer.

"Don't be sorry for wanting to protect my family, all right? If you need to be sorry, be sorry you didn't trust me to have thought things through. You're right. An hechicera, even a very, very good one, isn't a match for what you call a master alchemist. They cheat. They're not more powerful—they're as human as I am—but they have all the other alchemists in the world to borrow toys from, and they have no shame. They'll burn a whole building to ashes because they feel like one person inside it insulted them, and then they'll brag about how no one saw the fire until they wanted it to be seen. An hechicera doesn't cheat. We work within the world, not against it. That means I started to take precautions as soon as I realized what you were. By the time you went to sleep, that apartment was warded so tight that they could ring the bell and try to sell you cookies without realizing who you were, as long as you didn't go outside."

"So why bring me with you now? Wouldn't it be safer for me to stay in the apartment?"

"Call it a test." Isabella reaches out and gently tugs her purse strap out of Kelpie's hand before she starts walking again, letting Kelpie follow.

"For who?"

"Everyone, I suppose. We're testing whether I'm as good at hiding things as I think I am, and how good a job you can do of dealing with the world outside the lab. You're getting top marks so far, by the way. I thought you were going to see your first car and have a complete meltdown, but you're doing really well." Isabella's smile is wide and sincere. "And it's a way to see how many of the ladies in my coven are exaggerating their own sensitivity to the hidden world, since if they can't see how damn weird you are, they sure as hell can't see the auras they claim to find everywhere. You're my Karen detector."

Kelpie has no idea what that means, but she only shrugs as she keeps walking. "I know what a car is. Margaret showed me videos."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. I didn't think they'd be this big, or this smelly, but the general concept, I get. Oh, do you think we might see a bus? I've always wanted to see a bus."

Isabella laughs. "You're delightful. It's like having a really big puppy that can talk. Yes, Kelpie, we'll probably see a bus. Probably more than one. You can learn to love and resent them the way the rest of us do." She turns sober as they walk on. "It's interesting that she showed you video of cars, though. It means she expected you to leave the lab someday."

"Well, yeah. She was working on a way to reverse the lab accident so I could go topside and rejoin the world. Or that's what she said, anyway. I guess maybe she was just looking for a way to make me look more normal so she could use me as an embodiment without the Alchemical Congress catching on. I don't know why she didn't like them. They gave her a lab, and all the assistants and materials she needed, and room to do her work. She couldn't have made me if not for them."

"People are complicated. I'm sure she had her reasons," says Isabella. "Love and hate are kissing cousins, after all."

Kelpie looks confused, and Isabella laughs again, and they walk on, following the sidewalk as it transitions from somewhat run-down residential neighborhood to a tree-lined street filled with small brick buildings, each one split between two or three stores with big glass windows displaying their wares to the world. True to Isabella's word, no one looks at them twice. Kelpie is bright orange, and they don't seem to see her at all.

It's strange. It's impossible. It's ridiculous.

It's happening all the same.

They reach the end of a block defined by spreading maple trees and turn onto another residential street. This one has large houses instead of apartment buildings, each one with a set of stone steps leading up to its front door, most with small gardens or lawns in front, showing the world how wealthy the residents must be. The grass here is greener, healthier than the grass at the apartment complex, and Kelpie frowns.

Isabella catches her expression, and explains: "Water's expensive. California's experiencing a drought. So only the rich people can afford to water their lawns all the time."

"That's not fair," protests Kelpie. "The grass doesn't decide whether it gets planted by someone rich or poor. All the grass should have water."

"You're on the cusp of figuring something out there," says Isabella, stopping in front of one of the larger houses. "Come on. When they ask you to take your shoes off, mime it. No one's going to ask any questions."

"Why would they ask me to take my shoes off?" asks Kelpie, following her up the stairs.

"Because this house belongs to a very nice, very clueless, very New Age–y white woman who doesn't want us to scuff her bamboo parquet floors," says Isabella, ringing the bell. When Kelpie still looks confused, she sighs. "That means no shoes in the house. A lot of cultures do that for good reasons; she does it because she thinks it's spiritual, which is why I'm not actually being an asshole when I tease her lightly about it."

"But I'm not wearing shoes," says Kelpie, in case Isabella hadn't noticed.

"Their eyes will fill them in along with the feet when they try to see you as something perfectly normal, I promise," says Isabella. She steps back, putting a hand on Kelpie's shoulder. "Now smile."

The door opens.

Kelpie smiles.

The woman in the entryway smiles reflexively back before her eyes skitter to Isabella and her smile melts into an expression of petulant upset. "Isabella, there you are!" she says, a whining note in her voice that makes Kelpie's shoulders tighten and draw upward, toward her ears. "I tried to call the apartment this morning, the energy in the house is simply dreadful, I don't know how we're supposed to have a meeting here today!"

"I have salt spires; I can purify it very quickly," says Isabella, soothingly. "May I introduce you to my new apprentice, Kelly? She's a distant cousin of mine, and she has the family gift."

"Hello," says Kelpie.

The woman barely glances at her, too focused on Isabella. "Oh, I'm so glad you're going to have help; you overextend yourself so," she gushes, reaching out as if to pull her bodily inside. At the last moment, she thinks better of it and steps to the side, allowing Isabella and Kelpie to enter. "I was just saying yesterday, I was saying, Isabella burns the candle at both ends and in the middle, and she needs to stop if she wants to keep going! And we need you to keep going, we do, you're our spiritual leader, we would all be lost without you!" She does glance at Kelpie then, smile hardening and voice taking on the lilting quality of someone speaking to a child: "Take off your shoes, dear; this isn't a barn."

Barn comment aside, she doesn't seem to see anything strange when Kelpie lifts her hooves, one by one, and mimes the removal of the shoes she isn't wearing. The woman's only flicker of confusion comes when Kelpie puts her "shoes" down, since it's quite obvious that there's nothing there. Then she shrugs, dismissing it as nothing, and her attention swings back to Isabella.

"While you're looking at the humors of the house, can you check mine as well? I've been feeling faint in the mornings, you see…"

"I've told you before, Catrina, you can't cut salt entirely out of your diet, no matter how much of an internal toxin you've decided it is. Your body needs some salt to regulate itself."

The woman, who is tall and pale and not much older than Isabella herself, with silvery-gold hair pinned up in elaborate curls that look like they must have taken most of the morning, recoils, hands fluttering like she wants to brush Isabella's words out of the room. "Salt is like bug spray," she protests. "It's good for cleansing and purifying a space, but it's not meant to be taken internally! I don't know why you insist on buying into the lies told by Big Sodium the way that you do, Isabella; a smart woman like you ought to know better."

She begins to move deeper in the house, still chattering about the dangers of sodium. Isabella looks at Kelpie, smiling a little. "What did I tell you? She didn't notice anything was wrong about your foot situation, or anything else."

"Salt isn't poisonous to humans," says Kelpie, baffled. "They need it to live."

"I know that, and you know that, and Catrina's doctors know that, and I presume her in-home chef knows that and has been slipping salt into her food, since she hasn't dropped dead yet, but she's prone to crusading against things, and right now, it's salt," says Isabella. "At least she still lets us use it for ritual work. We could find another place to meet if we had to, but I'd very much prefer we didn't. This is a private home, which means we don't worry about rental fees or who might have been using it when we weren't around. We've been able to install and charge a permanent ritual circle, and those make certain things so much easier. Magic is magic as a natural force, while alchemy is magic as a domesticated beast. We're not doing science here."

She follows Catrina then, and Kelpie follows her, not sure what else she's meant to do. Her hooves tap against the bamboo floor with every step, and she can't help wondering whether whatever quirk of the universe keeps people from seeing her strangeness will also keep them from hearing it. No one barefoot sounds like she does when they walk.

The house, which seemed large from the outside, is clearly massive, almost as large as a level of the lab, and she glimpses a staircase winding up to another floor, implying the existence of yet more house beyond what she's already seen. She can't imagine needing this much house. There's no color, either, another thing that reminds her of the lab: the walls are white, only occasionally decorated with a tastefully framed, carefully placed piece of art, none of them in primary colors. It makes her yearn for the bright jewel tones and earth colors of Isabella's apartment. The air, which is almost as cool as the outside, smells of nothing, the sort of nothing that she knows comes only from constant cleaning and air purification. It's almost smothering. She had no idea people aboveground lived like this.

Maybe most of them don't. Based on what she's seen so far, lives like Isabella's are far more common than lives like this one. That's somewhat reassuring. She doesn't want to flee from one sterile environment into another.

Catrina vanishes through a doorway, and Isabella vanishes after her, and Kelpie pauses in the hall as she hears voices greeting both women, feeling suddenly shy. What if none of them can see her properly, and she has to spend the rest of her life feeling like she's lying to everyone around her by letting them believe she's something that she's not? Or what if one of them does see her properly and starts yelling about how she's some sort of freak?

Both options are almost equally terrifying, and so she stands frozen as she hears Isabella explaining, "I brought my new apprentice for you to all meet. She's a distant cousin of mine, and she's a little shy, but I hope you'll be friendly."

A murmur of agreement from the room.

"All right, if you promise. Kelly! You can come on in; no one's going to bite you."

Slowly, Kelpie steps around the doorframe and into the room, where half a dozen women have already gathered. They smile at the sight of her, with none of them so much as hesitating. She begins, cautiously, to relax.

"Cousin?" asks a woman. "She's blonde."

"Distant," repeats Isabella.

The woman laughs. "When I told you one of my cousins was in the running for Winter, you said that was proof we shouldn't work with family. What possessed you to take one as an apprentice?"

"I… I asked her to," says Kelpie, defensively.

"She know anything?" asks the woman who seems to have decided she's the one who makes the call on whether or not Kelpie is trustworthy. She looks her up and down, and Kelpie has the distinct feeling she's seeing something that's not there, some pale, unremarkable shadow of Kelpie herself. Finally, the stranger shrugs one shoulder and turns back to Isabella. "About the art, or about us?"

"She knows you're my coven, she knows you all practice in one form or another, and she knows I'm an hechicera, or I wouldn't be able to train her."

"You mean bruja, don't you, dear?" asks Catrina, who, for all the group's apparent deference to Isabella, has taken the largest and most comfortable-looking chair in the room as her own. "That's the word for witch."

"As I've told you several times now, I'm not a witch, and it would be dishonest of me to call myself one," says Isabella carefully. "I'm an hechicera, which is a different tradition, and works by different rules. I don't know how else I can explain it."

"We're a coven of witches," says Catrina. "We're women working with the sacred feminine and the divine energy of the goddess. You have to be a witch. You're our high priestess."

"I'm not your high priestess," says Isabella, with clearly fraying patience. "I'm your leader, yes, but that's not the same thing, and it never has been. If you want a Wiccan-style structure, with a high priestess telling you what to do and a deeply appropriative approach to ritual, you're more than welcome to find another coven to work with, or you can ask that I leave and do my workings elsewhere. You can't have me and the structure you're describing at the same time."

"I didn't mean that," objects Catrina. "Just that… we're supposed to be doing things the traditional way."

"There are many traditions," says Isabella staunchly.

There's a clatter from behind them as someone comes rushing down the hall, and a pretty, black-haired, dark-skinned woman in a diamond-patterned sweater containing all the colors the house doesn't appears in the doorway. She's barefoot, carrying a large canvas bag, and she looks like she's on the verge of panic.

"I'm sorry!" she says. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I was at the lab and I lost track of time again, I didn't mean to be late!"

"I showed up five minutes after she was supposed to have left and she was still at her desk, looking at some diagram of acidic interactions that I couldn't explain if you paid me," says the woman who strolls calmly in after her, before she stops and stares at Kelpie.

Kelpie stares back. She feels like she knows this woman already, like she's known her all her life, like they're sisters and enemies and the best and worst of friends, all at the very same time. The stranger is shorter than her companion, more softly built, but the sort of softness that promises steel beneath: despite the layer of fat she carries, Kelpie can tell by the way she moves that she's physically the most powerful person in the room. Her hair is strawberry blonde, like she's been bleeding for years and never figured out how to wash it all out, and her eyes, as Isabella said, are impossible, blue on blue, like a butterfly's wing. They're eyes for a painting, not a person, and they're fixed on Kelpie with a sharpness that says, very clearly, that she can see her.

"Hello," she says. "Who's this?"

"Isabella's taken an apprentice," says Catrina, apparently happy to answer any question she can, even when those questions aren't for her.

"Hello, Erin," says Isabella. "I was hoping you'd swing through today, so I could introduce you. I think you're going to have a lot to talk about."

"Oh, yes," says Erin. "I think so, too."

Silence falls over the room, thick and heavy, smothering them all with its weight, and Kelpie resists the urge to turn and run.