Mare Ingenii

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

As a newly transferred student, Anna is in on-campus housing, sharing her room with three other girls, none of whom have ever heard the moon speaking through their bedroom windows, none of whom have any idea who they're living with. They look at Judy with the flat, disinterested eyes of junior predators who've already been fed well enough not to care when she enters the room on Anna's heels, feeling awkward and out of place and hating it.

She's used to being the second most powerful Lunar in Berkeley, coming directly after Diana in what passes for the local hierarchy. Not that it matters who's more powerful than who, unless it comes down to an outright brawl, and this isn't a comic book: they don't fight each other for access to the everything. That would be ridiculous. Still, it makes her a little uncomfortable to know that there's a new Lunar in town, one who's been embodied long enough to understand her powers and what they allow her to achieve. Chang'e probably has more active worshippers in the modern world, but Artemis has stories. Artemis has Percy Jackson. There's no denying the fact that those things feed into her manifestations, granting them a level of strength any Lunar would envy.

So yeah, she accompanied Anna when the other woman said she needed to grab something from her dorm, and now she's standing uncomfortably in the center of the room, watching the junior predators assess her potential as a future meal. She's unable to quash the relief when Anna returns, now carrying a backpack, and says, "Okay, Judy, let's go."

Judy doesn't need to be told twice. She falls into step alongside the taller girl, and together they exit the dorm, Anna taking every turn in the labyrinthine building with easy confidence. "How long did you say you'd been here?"

"Not that long. The place looks confusing, but it's really straightforward once you get the lay of the land. This used to be one of those houses too big for anyone sensible to maintain on their own. I don't mean like the bitchin' Victorians downtown, I mean like hello, Mr. Mansion. At some point, ownership passed to the university and they carved it up like a Christmas turkey, turned it into something they could stuff a couple hundred students into. That didn't leave the refurbishing architects a lot of internal wiggle room, and so if you keep going left, you always come to an elevator—assuming your building has one."

Judy last lived in student housing when she was getting her undergrad degree, and that was in a different state, in what sometimes felt like a different world. Berkeley's bewildering dorms aside, she understands the scarcity of elevators in supposedly accessible housing. "Is it legal for them to not have an elevator? In California?"

"Legalities and the speed with which they get applied are two different things," says Anna, as they step out of the dorm lobby and into the late morning air. The day is maturing beautifully, with clear skies and the sort of crisp, sharp chill that only flirts with the idea of becoming actually cold.

California won't be like this forever. It's gotten warmer even since Judy moved here, the crisp falls fading in a matter of weeks when they used to linger for months, the summers going from unpleasant to sweltering. But here and now, it's very close to perfect.

Anna glances at her as they start across the lawn. "Any idea where to start?"

"You're the hunter, not me," says Judy. "If I were a hunter, I think I'd want to start with someone who'd actually seen where the killing took place, though. I'd want to talk to Máni."

Anna looks at her again, eyes flashing green as she focuses on Judy. It's uncomfortably like having the full attention of some massive predator, and Chang'e stirs beneath the surface, very nearly stepping up to defend her avatar before Judy can nudge her back down.

"Do you know where to find him?"

The question is soft, mild, even, with nothing behind it to indicate that it might be a threat. Judy still feels her heart sink, pulse quickening at the harmonics in Anna's tone. The other woman hasn't stepped up, she knows that, but she feels as if maybe, when hunting, Artemis never really steps all the way down.

Anna is someone who would always bleed silver, if anyone could ever make her bleed.

"He's on the football team," says Judy. "I'd start with the locker rooms, if I really wanted to catch him. His daylight name is David."

"David," says Anna, rolling the name in her mouth like she can taste it. Maybe she can, somehow: maybe this is how she gets the scent of him. "Take me there."

"Sure," says Judy. "Not like I have classes to teach today or anything. Not like I was doing something with my time." But she's protesting out of habit as much as anything else. She's normally so reliable that an absence is unlikely to inspire anything but concern that something's happened; she has copious notes for the other TAs, who will cover all her classes for the day. She can always plead food poisoning, if she has to.

In fact, better to do that ahead of time. Pulling out her phone, she sends a quick message to her advisor, copying the department admin. She's not feeling well, she says; she needs to go back to bed and sleep it off. There's some risk there, since she's still going to be on campus, but the chances of either of them going out among the student body voluntarily are very slim, and a little risk is unavoidable.

She turns back to Anna, who's watched all this without comment. "You ready?" she asks.

Anna nods, and the pair strike off across campus.

"You're going to have to talk to Diana eventually," she comments, once they're safely alone on a bike trail, with no one close enough to overhear their conversation.

"Am I?" asks Anna.

"She's the senior Lunar in the area. It's polite, if nothing else."

"But there's no rule."

"Well… no, there's not a rule," admits Judy. "But it's how things have always been done. You introduce yourself to the senior Lunar in the area."

"I did. I sent her an email."

Arguing further won't do any good; Judy can tell that already. So she sighs and shakes her head, asking, "Why are you so against meeting her?"

"Did she tell you to look into Aske's death?"

Did she? Of course she did. Judy tries to recall the specifics of her conversation with Diana, allowing Chang'e to rise just far enough to supply the fragments Judy wasn't present for, and realizes that technically, no, she didn't. She told Judy to find out who escorted Aske to the gate, but that was all. And she'd been oddly calm about the thought of needing to hide a body, hadn't she? Maybe it was already knowing about the other deaths, but it feels like more than that, suddenly.

It feels like a riddle. Unlike many lunar gods, Chang'e has never been particularly fond of riddles. They waste time, and while she's immortal, that doesn't mean time isn't precious, isn't worthy of being saved and savored whenever possible. Her avatars aren't immortal, after all. Take their peaches away, hurt them badly enough, and they die like anyone else does.

Chang'e isn't mortal. Judy is, and Judy very, very much doesn't want to die.

"She asked me to find out who escorted her to the gate before she died, but that was all," says Judy. "She also wanted me to warn Abuk when she came for the handoff—which, where's Abuk, by the way? I was so worried about finding a corpse hanging out in the everything that I didn't realize you weren't supposed to be my escort."

"Oh, I ran into Abuk yesterday morning and told her she didn't need to come," says Anna.

Judy eyes her dubiously. No Lunar passes up the chance to shine above the City, especially not in a field as crowded as this one. Their turns don't come up often enough to give one away. "How did you do that?"

"I told her I really, really needed to meet the peach lady before my next track meet, and she could have my next two shifts if she'd trade with me just this once," says Anna.

That's believable, at least. A new Lunar wanting to meet Chang'e made enough sense that Abuk wouldn't necessarily have questioned it—and she's an English major; she doesn't question anything that isn't written down—and two trips across the City for the price of one was a pretty good enticement.

"You really think you're sticking around for two full shifts?"

Anna shrugs. "If that's what I have to do in order to keep my word, that's what I'll do," she says. "Let's get back to Diana. She's your senior, but she didn't notice the substitution, she didn't notice when Aske went into the everything and didn't come back, and she didn't ask you to look into the death of one of her own. What did she do?"

"She told me there had been other deaths, and where some of them were," says Judy. "She wasn't surprised." That was probably the part that should have stood out from the beginning. Diana had been many things during their discussion. What she hadn't been was surprised. "Oh, and she wouldn't notice you trading shifts with Abuk. She doesn't pay attention to that sort of thing."

"So who does? Things function too smoothly around here for them to be decided by committee, no matter how into community management bullshit you people are."

"I do," says Judy, a little smugly.

Anna stops walking. Judy does the same, turning to face her.

"What?"

"You handle the admin?"

"Yes."

"Like some sort of glorified secretary?"

"Yes."

"You're a top three goddess! If Diana wants to be senior, she should be handling her own paperwork. Or she should be passing the position over to you, not leaving you to handle the City rota and grad school at the same time!" Anna sounds genuinely pissed off, which is a surprise and oddly gratifying all at once.

"I don't mind," says Judy. "I'm good at it. The Celestial Bureaucracy—"

"Belongs in the Chinese Heavens, and even if you're a Chinese moon goddess, you're not there right now! We're all supposed to pull our weight. It's part of why the City keeps us around. The senior for the area makes sure things are happening when they're meant to happen. We're creatures of the calendar, Judy! You really think the calendar isn't meant to be a responsibility? Being senior isn't just a title and a bunch of bowing. It's keeping the rest of us safe and moving." Anna sounds almost disgusted. She shakes her head, hard. "What the hell does your Diana even do?"

"I—" Judy pauses. When asked that bluntly, she doesn't know. It's not a matter of being unable to think of an answer; it's that the answer isn't there. There is no answer. "She teaches classes? She's good with the new gods, I guess…" When she takes notice of them at all, which mostly only happens when they cross her radar directly. Judy didn't meet her until she'd already been on campus for most of a semester and woke up one morning exhausted by the amount of time she'd spent away from the City. She'd gone looking for Diana then, and been put on the roster with a lot of smiling and platitudes about wanting it enough to work for it.

That wasn't how things had worked anywhere else she's ever been, even New Jersey, when she'd been newly divine and coping with the death of her parents. Even then, she'd had the local senior at her door in a matter of days, to tell her what was happening to her and what she was now going to be expected to do.

Maybe Diana isn't supporting the Lunars of Berkeley the way she's supposed to. Judy frowns.

"David first, then Diana," says Anna, apparently satisfied that she's going to get her way. "I'll leave the room while you tell her to start doing her own damn admin work."

"Yeah…" says Judy as she starts walking again, heading toward Piedmont Avenue.

While all of UC Berkeley is technically and legally a single campus, the school covers enough topics and requires enough specialized facilities that, when combined with the encroaching urban area, the need for student housing, and sporting events, there are large portions of campus that aren't remotely contiguous. Reaching them involves leaving the campus for surface streets or private land, which always feels a little unreal. Walking across the school to get somewhere shouldn't mean leaving the school, but it does, surprisingly often.

Judy and Anna walk quickly along Piedmont, students passing them in both directions, heading for other pieces of the school. Anna glances at Judy.

"Does this feel odd to you?" she asks.

"It does," admits Judy. "Like stepping up in a bathroom, or stepping down in the everything. Something that shouldn't be where it is."

"Getting naked in a movie theater."

"Walking your zebra to the grocery store."

They continue on, trading things that don't feel right back and forth, getting more outlandish with every exchange, until Anna breaks down laughing and claps Judy on the shoulder with one surprisingly strong hand.

"You're all right, peach lady," she says. "Most of you are sort of stodgy, but you're all right. I bet you aren't a snitch, either. You're not going to run to Diana as soon as I turn my back on you."

It's a warning wrapped in a compliment, and Judy understands the laws of language well enough to see it in an instant. She decides that in this case, she'd rather be warned. "She's been acting weird about this whole thing, and Aske deserves better," she says. "I'm not running to Diana. Although you are going to have to tell her that you're here."

"Before I leave, I promise." They're almost to the athletic building. The practice field is empty, and voices drift from inside, loud and jubilant in the way that usually signals too much testosterone shoved into too small of a space. Judy exhales, then takes a very deep breath, preparing herself to breathe through her mouth for as long as they're inside. Locker rooms always have a funk that she can't stand, body odor and a plethora of fluids barely contained by the smell of bleach and cheap imitation lemon.

They head inside, Judy slightly in the lead, and move toward the sound of voices. It's coming from the locker room, not the showers, which is a relief. Walking in on half-naked football players is rude at best, and sexual harassment at worst, but walking in on them in the shower is definitely grounds for some sort of disciplinary action.

She stops outside the locker-room door, looking to Anna. "I can go see which of the coaches is in the office," she says. "I know about half of them from around campus, and I'm sure they'll find David for me if I tell them it's an emergency. You wait—"

Anna is already walking into the locker room, ignoring her utterly. Judy stares at her back, wondering briefly whether it's worth the risk of following, then groans and pursues the other woman, only a few steps behind by the time Anna rounds the first bank of lockers and confronts the practice team.

"Hey, guys," she says, voice bright and airy, like a whole group of burly men aren't staring at her, half of them trying to step behind each other. She's keeping her eyes up, which is possibly the only reason Judy isn't trying to drag her physically out of the room. This is beyond inappropriate.

At least they all seem to be wearing pants, or at least underwear. That makes her feel a little better. They still shouldn't be here. It's rude and it's inappropriate and it feels like something out of a mid-eighties comedy, one where nudity is treated as a funny joke that's never harassment or cruel.

Anna is still beaming at them, seeming to share none of Judy's discomfort. She puts her hands on her hips, looking around at the team. "David here?" she asks.

The men shuffle around, none of them demanding to know what she thinks she's doing, although several of them clearly want to. Finally, two men are pushed to the front, one wearing sweatpants and a UC Berkeley hoodie, the other wearing nothing but jeans and the dark tattoos that circle his upper arms and spread across his chest in harsh, tangled shapes. Both men look at Anna, apparently waiting for her to narrow the field further than a fairly common masculine name.

Anna, for her part, turns to Judy, raising her eyebrows. "Well?" she asks. "Either one of these our boy?"

"Hey, David," says Judy to the shirtless man, keeping her eyes as firmly above shoulder level as she can. The temptation to look lower is as strong as it is inappropriate. "You done with practice?"

"What the living fuck are you doing here?"

"Looking for you, dude," says the other David, elbowing him lightly in the side, grinning like he, too, thinks he's fallen into one of those mid-eighties films, and feels much better about it than Judy does. "Didn't you hear her?"

"I heard her," admits David. He hunches his shoulders. "Yeah, we're done. Let me get my shirt on and I'll meet you outside?"

He doesn't directly tell them to leave, but then, he doesn't need to. The rest of the team is glaring and shuffling, viewing their presence as the intrusion that it is, and their patience is running out.

"Sounds good," says Judy, grabbing Anna's arm and dragging her away. Anna is taller and sturdier, arms ropy with muscle that Judy, as a linguist, has never needed to work on developing, but she's also not resisting, and Judy is able to pull her out of the locker room, back into the hall.

"What?" asks Anna, sounding baffled.

Judy stares at her. "You cannot be that oblivious," she says.

"We needed to find David, we found David," says Anna. "He was our target, and our hunt was successful."

Judy eyes her for a moment. Anna blinks.

"What?"

"I'm just trying to figure out how serious you are, because that's going to inform how annoyed I am," she says. "He was our target, yes. He's also a person, and ask yourself how you'd like it if he'd barged into the track-team locker room while you were all changing."

Anna frowns. "Oh."

"Yeah. Oh. If swapping the genders on something makes it creepy, then it was always creepy, and you just didn't want to admit it." She takes Anna's arm again. "Come on. We're going to wait outside, like he asked us to."

"He didn't ask."

"He said he'd meet us outside when he was trying to defuse an uncomfortable situation and keep it from getting even worse," says Judy. "He asked. Some forms of question aren't as direct as we might like them to be, much as there are forms of both consent and refusal that aren't always completely clear. Haven't you ever signaled yes or no at someone without saying the word? He asked. We're going outside."

Anna is quieter as they exit the building, more subdued, and Judy can't shake the feeling that the odd sensation of the other woman still being partially stepped up into Artemis has faded without going entirely away. With the immediate hunt concluded, the goddess is more willing to rest.

"I'm sorry," says Anna, once they're outside. "When I have an active hunt, if I can see what I'm trying to find… it can be overwhelming. I don't always have full control of myself."

"Are you stepped up right now?" asks Judy. "You need to tell me if you are."

Anna blinks, eyes flashing momentarily green again. "You can tell, huh?"

"I can tell." It's tempting to add some sort of boast, like "I can always tell," but she doesn't know yet whether that's true, and if she claims a skill she doesn't have, she's sure it'll come back to bite them in the ass. That's how lying usually works.

"I can't fully step down when I'm actively hunting," says Anna. "Artemis is always with me. And I don't sleep."

"I don't sleep much," says Judy. "I don't think any of us do."

"You don't understand: I don't sleep. At all. If I try to go to bed, if I close my eyes for too long, I can get stepped on. Artemis will just take over and push Anna all the way out of the equation. Artemis doesn't see anything wrong with busting into a room full of half-naked men; if they didn't want to be seen like that, they should have kept their clothes on, and besides, it's an honor to be beheld so by a goddess." Anna looks briefly haggard. "She isn't always a nice person, Judy. She doesn't have a problem killing people, as long as she thinks they deserve it, and so when she's this restless, when there's a hunt on, I have to stay awake. I have to keep myself as close to the surface as I can."

Judy stares at her, horrified. She hasn't always agreed with Chang'e; the goddess is old and set in her ways, and sometimes she likes to do things in ways Judy thinks are slow or inefficient or just plain wrong. But she's never been afraid her passenger was going to hijack her body and use her divine sense of justice to commit very real, very human crimes.

A Lunar imprisoned away from a Chang'e and her peaches will only have to suffer through a mortal lifespan, growing old and eventually dying of age, if nothing else comes to claim them. She has no idea what might happen to a Lunar with no way to reach the City.

"You need to stay close, because that was not okay, and that also wasn't quite a crime," says Judy. "It was inappropriate and rude, but it can be chalked up to enthusiasm, or to not knowing the social rules. You might get called in front of a disciplinary committee if someone makes an official complaint, but that's about as far as this goes. Artemis uses your body to steal something or stab somebody, that's a lot harder to get out from under."

"I know that," says Anna miserably. "I've known that since the first time she took over. She's hunting something, and I don't know what it is."

Judy pauses. "You didn't just come here because the alchemists are in a tizzy, did you?"

"Good word. ‘Tizzy.' Gets the point across."

"Good attempt at deflection, but I will not be deflected this time."

Anna sighs. "The reason I know is the alchemists. The reason I don't know is something deeper. Artemis is carrying it so far down that she won't even share it with me, and I have no idea what it might be, only that it was vital we get here before any other Artemis could find the way."

Judy stares at her. "Are you telling me we're about to have an Artemis convention on our hands?"

"Not if we find what I'm hunting for fast enough," says Anna.

David emerges from the building. He's clothed now, sunlight lending a rich warmth to his dark brown skin, and catching silvered highlights off his still mostly black hair. He'll go gray soon enough, like all the rest of them, and Judy doesn't think it'll age him before his time; he's going to be one of those men who looks distinguished with silver hair. She has no idea if he's gay or straight or neither, but assuming he eventually goes looking for a partner, he's going to make somebody very happy.

Not Judy. She likes boys, but she doesn't like them nearly a foot taller than her, or occupied by other moon gods. When she hooks up with somebody, she wants them to be wholly human, or else aligned with another pantheon entirely, one where she won't have to compete with her partner for access to the City. Above all else, the City.

He scowls as he marches toward them, ire focused mostly on Anna, the stranger. Judy tries not to be pleased by that; some of the anger is for her too, she's sure.

"What the hell was that?" he asks.

Anna looks at him coolly. "Hello, Máni," she says, and stands straighter, eyes flashing green. She doesn't step up fully, but she moves far enough toward the divine to remind Judy that she's currently very mortal and thus very fragile.

She doesn't like the feeling, and steps up almost reflexively in answer. The sunlight is diffuse enough that the faint sparkle in the air will seem like a trick of the light; she's unable to cause herself any issues, uncomfortable as it is to be stepped up in full daylight.

David blinks, and then blinks again as Máni comes surging to the surface in answer to the obvious threat presented by the two goddesses in front of him. "Do I know you?" he asks.

Anna—Artemis—shakes her head. "Not this version of you. I've met many versions of you."

"Don't screw with his head," snaps Chang'e. "Máni, this is Losna. She wanted to ask you some questions about what happened with Aske."

Máni glances around, suddenly and clearly nervous in a way he wasn't even when presented with the goddesses. His shoulders hunch as he leans forward and asks, in a small voice, "Did you find her body?"

"No. It wasn't there when I went into the everything last night. Máni, I have a very important question for you. You're not in trouble, no matter what you say. All right?"

Judy waits until he nods understanding before she continues:

"Every morning, the next person to travel through the City meets the person who came before them at the gate, to get the key and make sure nothing happened during the transit. You were supposed to meet Aske. Did you?"

Máni jerks like she's stuck him with a pin. Chang'e sighs.

"You're not in trouble, no matter what you answer. We just need to know what happened. Did you see her before you went through the gate?"

"No. She never came out."

"So how did you get the key?" Because that's one of the major reasons they needed to talk to him: without the key, unless the gate remained open for a full day, he shouldn't have been able to get back into the everything. He certainly wouldn't have been able to pass the key along to Judy. So much hinges on a little piece of moonsilver metal, which looks, on its own, no more remarkable than any other key. A little old-fashioned, maybe, but not unique.

The keys are the reason they form communities, the reason they can keep a schedule, rather than giving in to their addicted urges to spend every night sailing across the City. Any one of them would give up a human life in an instant for another breath of that intoxicating air. Chang'e knows it, even as she knows Judy's human existence is important. Part of what keeps them anchored enough to the world that they can keep manifesting after so many others have faded and failed is their closeness to humanity.

Since the beginning of the world, humans have never stopped looking up at the midnight sky and dreaming of the moon. So long as there are keys, and gates, and reasons to linger in human form, not exhausting their incarnations in their eagerness to get back to the Impossible City, the moon is looking back on the world, and dreaming of it, too.

"She wasn't there," he says, slowly. "The sun came up and the gate disappeared, and I went home to steal an hour or so of sleep before I had class. When I got up, there was an envelope under the doormat with my name on it, and the key was inside. Why? Am I in trouble?"

If Aske hadn't come out of the gate, then someone must have gone in to get the key. But why drop it at Máni's doorstep rather than going inside and telling him Aske was dead? Why leave her body there? If Judy was right about the way the everything worked, whoever it was must have left the gate open, knowing Máni would step into Aske's passage when he went through again, unless…

"When you got to the gate, was it already open?" asks Chang'e, forcing her voice to stay gentle. Artemis is watching her as intently as a hawk. Any slip now could set the huntress on them both, and while she doesn't have the experience in this incarnation to know exactly how that would be a bad thing, still she knows all the way to the base of Judy's bones that it would be very, very bad.

"Yes," admits Máni. "I thought… You weren't there, and so I thought you'd come ahead and opened it for some reason."

"Even though you had the key?"

"I know you don't like me," he blurts. "You always look at me like I don't know what I'm talking about, and this is the most words you've ever said to me without snapping. You don't like that I play football, or that I like to have a drink every now and then, or that I hang out with pretty girls. But you don't have to talk to me like I'm stupid. Okay?"

"Okay," says Chang'e, startled into taking a half-step back. "I'm sorry, Máni. I didn't realize you felt that way."

"You mean you didn't realize I was smart enough to know you felt that way."

It's true, and so she doesn't argue, just rolls her shoulders in a shrug and says, "It doesn't matter whether I like you or not, right now. What matters is finding out what happened to Aske."

"Do you even know her name?"

"I—"

"I didn't," says Artemis, coming to her rescue by reminding Máni that she's there, he's not alone with Chang'e. He's being hunted, and he needs to stay aware of the predator in his vicinity, or the chase will end very badly for him.

"I— Who are you?"

"Now who doesn't know names, hmm?" Artemis smiles, thinly. "To you, I'm Losna. We'll see if that changes. You're Máni, known as David."

"Yeah," he says, clearly cowed, and looks back to Chang'e. "Her name was Eliza. She was majoring in early childhood education, and she liked strawberry ice cream and rare roast beef sandwiches and those little Beanie Baby knock-offs you get at the drug store. She was a real person. You only ever saw her as a face of the moon. You aren't even sad that she's gone."

"I…" Chang'e pauses. "You're right. I only saw her as a face of the Moon, as someone else I had to shove into the schedule and share the City passage with. She wasn't real to me the way she apparently was to you, and I'm sorry for your loss. And for Eliza. We should have been a better community to her."

"Yeah, you should have." Máni pauses, taking a deep breath. "I knew I had the key when I got there, and logically, that means you couldn't have opened the gate. But I was still confused by finding it the way I did, and I was running late, so I didn't dwell. I just threw myself into the everything and made for the window. Only when I got there, it was… wrong."

"Wrong how?" asks Artemis.

"It wasn't my window. It was a window, a perfectly good one, but I'd never seen it before. And Aske was on the ground in front of it. You know, I'd never thought of the everything as having a ground before? I mean, I had to be walking on something, but it looks so much like something out of a bad science fiction movie that I never really saw it as having a floor and a ceiling. But there was Aske, on the ground, bleeding red and silver. And when I looked around, there was more silver, making the ground more and more obvious, until I couldn't not see the ground. I had to stop seeing it. It was making the everything into something, and that hurt to see. I don't even know how to describe it. It was something that wasn't supposed to happen, a definition of a space that's supposed to remain undefined, and it hurt. I think if I'd looked at it for too long, it could have really hurt me. Maybe even killed me."

He shudders, glancing to the side. Chang'e finds nothing to indicate that he's lying; he seems entirely sincere, and genuine in his fear.

"I had to stop looking, but Aske was just there, and I could see she wasn't breathing, so I…" He stops, sighs, and looks at Chang'e, clearly regretful. "I went through the window. I went to the City. It wasn't the everything, and it meant I wasn't standing there watching the floor get harder and harder to ignore. I'm sorry. Maybe she wasn't dead! Maybe I could have helped her, but instead I just… I just ran away."

Chang'e steps closer, putting a hand on his arm. He shoots her a startled look.

"She was gone before you went into the everything, Máni," she says. "You only found her because no one had closed the gate between her transit and your arrival. You went into her everything, not your own. It wasn't your fault."

He blinks, several times, before he bursts noisily into tears.

Chang'e leaves her hand resting on his arm. He seems to need it, and she's failed the younger Lunars enough this week. As long as he needs her, she'll be here. She has a duty that she's been neglecting for far too long.

Máni keeps crying but wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, focusing on Chang'e. "I needed to hear that so much more than I realized I did. Thank you. Thank you so, so much."

"Don't worry about it."

"What do you mean, I went into her everything?"

"Chang'e has a theory, and so far, it's a good one," says Artemis. "Chang'e, you wanna explain?"

So they're continuing to put this on her? It makes sense, but it still annoys her a little, as she glances from Máni to Artemis and back again. "I don't think we enter the same everything," she says. "I think the reason we're told not to enter together isn't to avoid confusing the window; it's because each of us gets our own window, and if we entered together, we might get both, or neither, or something else entirely. When Aske died, she died in her everything, and that gate was never closed. You entered her channel through the everything that night, not your own, and that's why you found her body."

"But I left it there," says Máni, sounding horrified. "I left her there. Does that mean she's just going to… what, rot inside the everything forever?"

"Maybe if we found another Aske, we could get them to open the gate to her everything, somehow," says Artemis. "We're just now figuring out that the everything is divided, which seems like something we should probably have known before now, and I don't think we have any duplicated incarnations in Berkeley. So we can't test whether two iterations of Máni can open the gate to each other's versions of the everything, or whether they're locked into their own."

"If we can find a way to get her body, we will," says Chang'e, trying to sound soothing. "And if she's still bleeding divinity, we'll worry about it then. Right now, though, just to be perfectly clear: you went to the gate, Aske never came out to give you the key. You went home, and later found the key in an envelope with your name on it. David, or Máni?"

"David," he says, with certainty.

Chang'e nods. "All right. Did you save the envelope? Maybe we could identify the handwriting."

"You can do that?"

"Judy's a linguist," Chang'e says. "That doesn't make her a forensic handwriting analyst, but she's taken some courses. The way people write tells us a lot about how they interact with language, so she dabbles."

"I saved it, but it wasn't handwriting. They used a label maker." He sighs. "I guess that should have told me something was wrong, if the person leaving the key didn't want me to be able to figure out who they were."

"This is a college campus," says Chang'e. "Everyone has a label maker." Judy has three. One that prints in English, one that prints Standard Chinese, and one that prints Traditional Chinese. She's considered buying one of the big fancy ones that can print labels in dozens of languages; that's probably going to be a graduation gift to herself, when she finally gets her doctorate.

"I don't," says Artemis.

"You just got here," says Chang'e.

"I don't," says Máni, and Chang'e doesn't say anything at all. If he could tell she didn't like him, he'll probably take anything she says about his lack of a label maker as insulting his intelligence. Not the sort of atmosphere she wants to create.

"It's cool. We can borrow Judy's if we desperately need to label something," says Artemis.

Máni laughs, and the odd tension that had come with the label-maker conversation dissipates.

"Can we see it anyway?" asks Chang'e. "There are different brands of label maker. Maybe Judy will be able to tell which kind printed it, and then we just need to keep our eyes out for that brand."

"It'd be funny if we caught a murderer based on office supplies," says Máni. "But sure, you can see it. I'll bring it to the gate tonight?"

"I won't be there," says Chang'e. "It's not my turn."

"No, but it's mine," says Artemis. "I don't mind a little company, especially not when you're the one who understands the minutiae of label makers. You can come by."

"All right," says Chang'e. "It's not standard, but… all right." They always do the escort and hand-off in pairs. The person who goes next meets the previous night's Lunar at the morning gate to receive the key, then is escorted to the gate in the evening by the next night's Lunar, who will either wait there until morning or come back just as the sun begins to rise. The chain is maintained, the key is passed, and nothing is lost.

Nothing is lost.

"So we have a plan, then," says Máni. "I'll bring the envelope, and Chang'e will take it and figure out who put my name on it?"

"Which will tell us who had the key when it should have been with either you or Aske," says Chang'e. "To get back to the sequence of events, you found the key in the envelope. You didn't go back to the gate to make sure that it was closed, yes?"

"Why would I have done that?" Máni sounds genuinely confused. "The gates don't appear during the day."

"But sometimes you can see the moon during the day," says Chang'e. "Maybe we've just always assumed the gates don't appear during the day, because we were never trying to use them. Maybe the key is less about being able to open the doorway into the everything, and more about being able to close it."

"Can people who aren't divine go into the everything?" asks Máni.

Chang'e looks to Artemis, who shrugs. She looks back to Máni. "I… I don't know," she admits. "I wish I did. It suddenly feels like something I really should know. But the person who taught me the system didn't mention it, and no one else has ever said anything, other than ‘never open a gate where an alchemist can see you,' and they're not divine, so I guess if they're a danger, then it must be possible. I was able to step down inside the everything, and it didn't hurt Judy when I did it, but she's always at least a little divine, because I'm always with her, so I don't know if that proves anything. And it's not like we can test the theory. Either it works and we've just dragged someone normal into the everything, which is going to raise a lot of questions, or it doesn't work, and we've just killed somebody."

Chang'e is a giver of immortality, not a committer of manslaughter. She'd really rather not kill someone by mistake for the sake of testing a theory.

"What if we find ourselves an alchemist?" asks Artemis, as if this were the most reasonable suggestion in the world. "They're not divine. They're mostly not anything. From what I understand, if you're involved in alchemy and you start to display any signs of an affinity, even one of the really minor ones like the shoulder seasons, they kick you out of their little club. Usually in a very permanent manner."

Máni looks confused. Artemis drags her thumb across her throat. His eyes widen, confusion replaced by horror.

"They kill them? But it's not like you can decide to be affiliated with something! David didn't wake up one morning and volunteer to be connected to the moon! He and I get along pretty well, but it's definitely disrupted his life in some ways he couldn't have anticipated. Killing him because of me would have been pointless!"

"They think everything has a use and can be broken down for its component sympathies," says Artemis. Chang'e assumes the other goddess must have more experience with alchemists than she does, and stays silent. "To them, because you're connected to the Moon, you can be used to create a sympathetic link to the rest of us, or to the divine, or maybe to the Moon directly—they cut off your pinkie toe, they can convince the whole Lunar machinery to tilt into something that's more favorable to whatever horrifying alchemical thing they're trying to do this week. For them, having a student or an apprentice suddenly pop up as affiliated with a natural force has got to be like finding out that a box of generic mac and cheese is secretly filled with black truffles. You go from person to resource, like that." She snaps her fingers.

The sound is sharp and clean and somehow terrible, like a bone breaking, or ice giving way at the middle of a pond. Artemis, expression grim, shakes her head.

"It's not murder to throw an alchemist into the everything, whether or not they can survive it. It's pest control. Most people, normal people, they wouldn't notice if we never stepped down. We could stay manifest all the time, forever, and not have to worry. It's the alchemists who make us hide like prey animals in the underbrush."

And your hosts!shouts Judy, in the silence at the back of Chang'e's mind. She sounds truly furious, incandescent with rage over the very suggestion, and Chang'e really can't blame her. She turns to Artemis, frowning.

"This is getting off topic a bit, but if we never stepped down, would we be any better than they are? Right now, we have a partnership with the people who carry us. They lend us their skills and strengths, and we grant them ours. If we never stepped aside, we'd be stealing their lives. We'd be effectively killing them."

The ethics of the Lunar system were something she and Judy had debated many times, in the small hours of the morning, when there wasn't much else to do. People couldn't volunteer to become incarnate gods: it either happened or it didn't. And once the god was there, they couldn't be made to leave by any means that Chang'e knew of. What made them any better than parasites?

Artemis shrugs. "That's more philosophical than I like to get. And it doesn't matter if that would be wrong of us, because that's not the world we live in. We have this one. If we really want to test whether a pure human can survive in the everything, we need to find an alchemist."

Chang'e eyes her, uncomfortable with her casual dismissal of the issue, but unwilling to push it any further when Máni already looks like he's on the verge of bolting. "Aske never closed the gate; you received the key anonymously. When you went to the gate to step through, it was already open, and so you didn't open it a second time."

"I told you all of that!"

"Yes, and I'm making sure I didn't misunderstand at any point. It's easy to get things wrong when you only hear them once, especially in times of stress. I don't want to get anything wrong."

"You showed up after I went in, so you know what happened," he says, a little sullenly, like he's just been scolded. "And then I left her there."

"Because you didn't have a choice," says Chang'e, and touches his arm, very lightly. "I'm sorry. I didn't know she was your friend."

"She was sweet, for a girl who'd never been outside Minnesota before," he says. "She didn't know much about much when it comes to living away from home, or dealing with campus politics, but she wasn't afraid to ask for help, and she knew she could lean on me when she had to."

Which made it all the more terrible that he'd been the one to find her body. Chang'e shudders. "Thank you, Máni," she says. She glances at Artemis, keenly aware that the other goddess is a predator and she might be putting herself at risk with what she's about to do. Then, she steps back and down, and allows Judy to come back to the surface.

Máni sees the change instantly, and matches it with his own, letting David resume control as he steps back. Mortal, the presence of Artemis is terrifying. Judy feels like she's standing inside a tiger enclosure, or in one of those fantasy movies where the trees are full of predatory dinosaurs, ready to leap at any moment. She doesn't allow it to faze her, though, merely holds on to the feeling as she turns to Artemis.

"So now we know as much as we're going to know without finding a way into Aske's everything," Judy says. "Got any of her other incarnations in your contacts list?"

"Whoa, whoa," says Artemis. The air shifts as she steps back, becoming lighter, less oppressive. "You don't have to sound so angry about me trying to solve a murder."

"We're sure it was murder now?" asks David. "There's no way she… I don't know, slipped and fell and hit her head on the windowpane?"

"You were the one who found her," says Anna. "Did it look like an accident to you?"

David is quiet long enough to really think about it. Finally, in a soft voice, he says, "I didn't want to look too closely, and there was so much blood, but there were no injuries on her forehead. I guess she could have hit her temple if she fell, but there would probably have been a split in the skin, if nothing else. The back of her head was so bloody, I'd be comfortable saying that was where she was hit. I don't think she could have hit herself in the back of the head, even if she'd been trying to."

"Not an accident," says Anna, sounding satisfied. "Which makes it a murder, which means someone else was in the everything with her. Someone who knew how to get in and out again, who knew enough to bring the key out so we wouldn't have to find a new one. Someone did this."

"Is someone with that much information hunting Lunars?" asks Judy, horrified. Diana had been so casual about the deaths that it hadn't really occurred to her that this could be some sort of targeted hunt. At best, it had seemed like a series of bad coincidences. At worst, it could have been a few rogue alchemists, taking advantage of moments of distraction to harvest the sympathy they so desired.

That was before she'd thought through the implications of the everything. That, and a healthy spoonful of denial; she doesn't want this to be targeted. She's already juggling goddess-hood and graduate school. Adding "evading a killer" to the list is more than she's up for dealing with.

Not that she has a choice.

"I think so," says Anna. "I think that's exactly what's happening here. Aske is the latest, and your local alchemists are riled up. Time for me to hunt the hunters."