Palus Putredinis

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

The dark-skinned woman is Smita. She takes a seat at the front of the ring, where she can see everyone, resting her hands on her knees and leaning her bag against her ankles.

Erin—the unnerving Erin—doesn't take a seat at all. She finds a spot against the wall and leans there, still watching Kelpie.

"Erin?" asks Isabella. "Will you be staying for today's meeting?"

Erin jerks her chin upward instead of nodding, an almost-challenging gesture. "If that's not a problem, I will," she says. "You've invited me to stay before. I assumed the invitation was still open."

"Your new apprentice is good luck!" burbles Catrina. "We've been trying to entice the mysterious Erin to join us since Smita first started coming around."

"I'm not one of your little witches," says Erin. "Smita can do what she wants, and she knows I'll support her in whatever that is, even when it's coming here." She smiles at Smita, heart-meltingly gentle, and Smita smiles back, a little more reserved. "But that doesn't mean I'm in a hurry to sign up for your club. I'm just going to watch today's meeting, then have a chat with your ‘cousin' when it's finished."

"All right then, I suppose we begin," says Isabella, with a clap of her hands. "Everyone, this is my cousin, Kelly. Kelly, this is everyone. She's going to be training under me as an hechicera, but as we all know, the hechicera's art is not incompatible with witchcraft, and so it seemed wise to bring her to today's meeting. Her mother sent her to stay with me because as she gets older, her potential gets stronger, and untrained, she could do serious damage."

Kelpie smiles hesitantly and waves to the room. It seems like the right thing to do. This accomplished, she flees to sit next to Isabella, who pats her on the shoulder and leans in close.

"You did well," she says, voice low. "Now try to look like I've just said something terribly important and wise."

Kelpie widens her eyes, turning her chin just a little, so that her head is tilted more toward Isabella.

"Very good. I'm going to start the meeting now, and afterward, you can chat with Erin and Smita. All right?"

Kelpie nods. Isabella begins.

The coven meeting opens with something they call "calling the quarters," which involves invoking four out of the five basic alchemical principles and asking them to become embodied in the room. Kelpie watches intently as this goes on, but none of the elements appear. These women, whatever they are or aren't doing, aren't somehow summoning manifestations out of nothing.

Which is probably for the best, since if they were, the alchemists would hound them to the ends of the earth for being able to accomplish such a vast and terrible working.

Each quarter is called by a different member of the group, with Isabella assigning the elements according to her "inner eye," which Kelpie assumes means "her whim." She closes her eyes and turns in a slow circle with one hand held out, then stops and points. When she opens her eyes, whoever she was pointing at is the one who calls that quarter.

Unsurprisingly, Catrina calls water. Smita calls fire. Angeline—the one whose cousin was tapped to serve the seasons—calls air, and a fourth woman calls earth, and Isabella declares the circle open. With her last word, candles around the edges of the room burst into flame, bright and dancing, filling the air with shadows. None of the coven members seem surprised, although Catrina slants a small, mean look over at Kelpie, clearly waiting to see surprise in her expression, and she appears disappointed when it isn't there. As if she needs to be part of such a marvelous thing that it inspires shock and awe in the unprepared.

She might have done better to watch Erin. The blonde's eyes widen when the candles start to burn, eyebrows raising toward her hairline, and while the moment of surprise doesn't last long, the calm that follows seems almost inhuman, more something suited to a praying mantis watching an insect's approach.

Each of the women of Isabella's coven has brought questions or concerns, workings they'd like to see performed. Workings for luck, or for money, or for love. Catrina's working is for power, which is a little bit surprising; she doesn't seem like the sort of person who'd be searching for power. Then Kelpie looks at the way she watches Isabella, the envy in her eyes, and she understands.

Isabella can see her for what she truly is, and she isn't surprised by Catrina's request for power. Whatever an hechicera is, it's something powerful enough to touch the scraps of wild magic that still linger in the world, free of alchemical control. Catrina doesn't have that. She knows it exists, she sees it in some of the women she invites into her home, and while Kelpie isn't any great student of human nature, she doesn't need to be if she's going to understand that some people will always want what they don't have. For someone like Catrina, who gets the biggest house and the most comfortable chair, knowing that magic is real when she's unable to touch it must be deeply frustrating.

Kelpie wonders, as the meeting and the castings continue, whether Isabella welcomes Catrina in her coven because the woman would be an easy recruit for the local alchemists, who aren't shy about offering power for nothing more than devotion, dedication, and money. She's spoken to the other lab assistants, the ones who view their time in Margaret's lab as training before they move on to their glorious and inevitable futures. Many of them have told essentially that same story. They brushed against something once that made them realize there was more to reality than they knew; they went chasing it; they found the alchemists, and it wasn't until they were in too deep to walk away that they realized any power they acquired would be on the other end of a long and arduous journey.

Not everyone who yearned for power could be recruited by the alchemists, or there would be a lot more of them, and probably a lot less of everyone else, given their tendency to dismantle what they didn't need.

Only the day before, she'd considered herself one of them, and had been able to justify all these things as necessary and even good. Kelpie frowns. How did she change her mind so quickly? She sinks into her own thoughts, trying to follow the thread of logic, trying to understand herself before she has to explain it to anyone else, and she finds an answer. Whether it's the right one or not doesn't matter as much as the fact that she has one.

In the lab, she had one source of input, and it came from the alchemists who trained and took care of her. It was always flat, always one-sided and absolutely sure of its moral convictions. There were no shades of gray, no complex questions. The only thing she's ever been asked to see in two lights at once was Asphodel Baker, and even that had been an accident.

Asphodel was the one who created the cuckoos, the one who pushed the bounds of alchemical knowledge in ways that have yet to be surpassed, even by her own student and creation.

True constructs, like Leigh Barrow, could become alchemists, could learn party tricks and simple rituals, but they could never truly innovate, could never become fully human, could never surpass their creators. Cuckoos, though… Asphodel Baker had been able to tap into the Promethean fire at the heart of all things, using it to shape a recipe that crafted life itself, true humanity, capable of innovation and exploration, even embodiment. All the world's alchemists working for all the world's centuries had never been able to tap into and capture natural forces, not before Asphodel came along and changed the game for everyone.

And the Congress reviles her. They hate her for being smarter than they were, for being a woman in a time when women weren't meant to be allowed anywhere near a lab, for refusing to let the second fact of her existence eclipse the first and send her discreetly and demurely into darkness. They use what she created, gladly and without hesitation, but they're more likely to credit it to Reed than to Asphodel, even though he was her creation to begin with. They make her out to be the villain, all because she refused to go away.

Kelpie first learned about her from some of the apprentices when they were talking in the cafeteria, casually trading theories and bits of their own work. Information was currency in the lab, and she didn't have any, so she'd always been reduced to eavesdropping, trying to understand the world without being able to barter her way into true enlightenment. The apprentices talked about Asphodel like she was a miracle, the woman who single-handedly dragged American alchemy into the modern age. Her death had been a tragedy; her life, a transcendence of all norms and standards.

So she asked Margaret about this Asphodel person, who sounded absolutely amazing, and had been baffled when Margaret replied with the official Congressional position on Asphodel: it was fine to use her research, because it had all been performed with stolen Congressional resources anyway, and she should have known her place. It was fine to claim her accomplishments. It was not fine to think well of her in any way.

That was Kelpie's first conflict, and it's one she still carries with her now, in this sun-soaked room, surrounded by women she barely knows. She wonders if any of them have heard of the Up-and-Under, or Asphodel, or anything else. She doesn't know how to ask.

It's easy to think the alchemists who were her sole companions until now may have lied to her, because she knows they lied to her.

They told her she was human.

Once she makes space in her mind for that lie, all the others become easy to believe.

The workings are drawing to a close, the air thick with herbs and dried flowers, some crushed and sprinkled, some added to small bowls of purified water, some burnt. Bowls of small, precious stones have appeared at some point, and more of the crushed-up flowers have been mixed in, meaning that all four of the invoked elements have been involved. Kelpie wonders if they know how close they tread to alchemy in the design of their workings. The four static elements, and then flowers to stand in for living things, which walk the ways of aether. Add a few more controls and some good warding seals, and this could have been a rite to purify glassware, or to return life to a dead beetle.

Maybe all magic is the same at the heart, and alchemical superiority is just another lie the alchemists told when they were afraid they might be losing control over the world as a whole. Kelpie has so much to unlearn.

Isabella stands. "Our time is done, our close is come; we bore our banners, and we won," she says. It's bad poetry, false rhymes and no internal structure, and yet the last of the candles burning around the edges of the room gutter and go out, somehow extinguished by her declaration. She smiles warmly at the women around her, then bows to them, deep and serious. When she straightens, she says, "I thank you, sisters, for your time in this circle. Go in peace, and know that you are powerful."

And then, perplexingly, the women begin to rise and leave, murmuring their own farewells as they turn to exit. Smita doesn't move. Catrina rises but lingers, watching the others, and then begins inching toward Isabella. "Isa, I was wondering—"

Isabella turns toward Catrina. "Go in peace," she repeats, but not the remainder of the phrase.

Catrina stops, jerking sharply into a tensely upright position. It's like watching a doll get lifted by its hair. She looks unsurprised but somehow affronted by Isabella's response, like she's not the one who gets dismissed. She's supposed to be the one who does the dismissal.

"We'll talk after," she says, voice clipped, and turns to follow the others out.

Isabella turns, not toward Smita but toward Erin, the woman who remained outside the circle the whole time. "The circle is open," she says. "It poses no dangers to the unaffiliated."

"I am the dangers, witchy lady," says Erin, pushing away from the wall. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Good, for I am not your enemy."

"Oh, you could be. You could be, really easily. These little circles of yours are basically chaos pits. You dig holes in the surface of the world and you fill them up with elemental energy. You know what happens when you dig a hole?"

"Erin, please," says Smita.

"Things fall into it," says Erin, unflagging. "If you scoop out all the elementalism by the time you're done, then maybe it heals, but if you don't, when it crusts over, you've made yourself a nice, ripe zit right on reality's chin. You're giving the universe acne."

"That's nice of you to say," says Isabella. "I suppose you've brought the acne treatment?"

"Me? Nah. That was my brother's gig. I just want you to know how much you hurt my eyes. You're doing things you shouldn't be doing. But you're not as bad as the people who made me, so I guess you're right, and you're not my enemy. Yet."

Smita sighs, leaning back in her chair. Kelpie sits up a bit straighter.

"Made you?" she asks.

Erin's gaze swivels around to Kelpie, and it's unnervingly heavy and direct, like a smothering sheet of cotton laid directly across her shoulders. "Yup. Made me. In a lab, deep underground. In Ohio, of all places, flatland at the center of the country. Oz territory. I think it amused Reed to know that he was pissing on Baum's grave with his work, after everything Baum had done to Baker, both before and after she was gone."

She leans forward, still watching Kelpie, measuring her reactions. "He didn't put me together himself. That was accomplished by Leigh Barrow, his right-hand woman and favorite monster. But he approved and adjusted the recipe that made me and my brother possible. He knew me completely, both inside and out, every bone, every organ. He wasn't my father. He was my doting uncle, and he killed my brother, and he owned me until the day he died. Got any more questions?"

Kelpie's heart is beating so hard it hurts, and she feels like she can barely breathe. Still, she manages to squeak out a faint "What are you?"

"I am something that should never have been, and will probably be forever now, because that's how the universe works, isn't it? It can go forever not incarnating a piece of itself, and then it trips and drops a concept into a human shell, and it's all over after that. It gets addicted, hooked to the possibilities inherent in mortal flesh, and it wants more, more, more all the time. Reality is greedy. It contains everything because it wants everything, and the greatest constraint on its hunger is the fact that in its natural state, it can't interact with half of what it has, any more than Smita here can interact with her own liver. Not directly, anyway. She can drink and bathe it in toxins, and interact with it that way, but she can't kiss and caress it, can't tell it everything's going to be all right after all. She's limited by the confines of her flesh, and the universe is limited by the confines of itself. Very sad, isn't it?"

"That's a lot of pretty words to not give an actual answer," says Isabella.

"Oh, I know you, hechicera," says Erin. "You've been sniffing around me for months."

Isabella shrugs. "I know a construct when I see one. You'll forgive me for being curious, I hope?"

"Ah, but you see, that's where you're wrong," says Erin. "I'm not a construct; I'm a cuckoo. The difference is the blood and body of Asphodel Baker, who has more descendants than she ever dreamed she might, thanks to the tireless efforts of her only son. He died childless, by the way. Every single one of us repudiated him, bigtime. Over and over again, until it finally stuck and we decided we liked the timeline we were in well enough to let it continue."

"What?" asks Isabella.

Smita just sighs. She's clearly heard all this before, and while Erin might take pleasure from playing with people the way a cat plays with a bird, she doesn't. "Can we hurry this up?" she asks.

"Anything for you," says Erin. She focuses on Isabella again. "I am the living force of Order, forced to incarnate by Leigh Barrow as part of the run-up to James Reed's incarnation of the Doctrine of Ethos. They were experimenting with capturing what they saw as ‘lesser forces' before they tackled the big one. My brother, Darren, was the living force of Chaos. They killed him when he ceased to be useful to them. So now here I am, alone in the madhouse, with no way to close my eyes to just how fucked everything around me really is."

Isabella blinks, eyebrows lifting. "I… see," she says. "That must be very hard. Does Smita help to center you in the chaos?"

"Nah. Smita's a friend from school."

Smita eyes Erin for a moment, looking faintly amused. "That is absolutely the most reductive description of our relationship that I have ever heard, Erin. You want to try again?"

"How open are we being?"

"Look at Isabella's ‘cousin,'" says Smita. "I think it's more likely that she's a cousin of yours, and we're going to wind up taking her home with us, one way or another. So I'd say we're being pretty open, whether we came here intending to be or not."

"Are you a c-construct?" asks Kelpie, looking at Smita. She can feel a commonality with Erin, a certain recognition, even though they've never seen each other before. Cuckoos can, apparently, detect other cuckoos. Whether that extends to constructs isn't something she knows. Margaret never kept them around the labs. There was the one rabbity technician in the agricultural research department, but he was on a different team, and Kelpie had only ever glimpsed him at a distance.

And even if he was the Rabbit Margaret talked about before she died, that would make him a cuckoo, and being able to recognize him as like her wouldn't have told her whether she could spot constructs. Without the context of knowing that what she was spotting was another cuckoo, she might just have assumed he was like her: a normal person who'd been in a terrible lab accident.

Although now she wonders if that's something that actually happens, or just one more thing Margaret lied about. Maybe the story she's always believed belonged to her was impossible from the start.

Smita looks briefly taken aback. Then she laughs, bright and open and earnestly amused. "No, no, I'm not a construct," she says. "I'm naturally occurring. I'm a geneticist. I work at one of the biotech firms downtown, near the Vivarium. So I'm good for the cuckoos to have around, but I'm not one of them."

"You're also the only one other than me who ever remembers to buy toilet paper," says Erin. "We live in a house full of geniuses who wouldn't be able to wipe their own asses if they lost us, and you need to remember that whenever you start to question your worth."

"I wasn't!" says Smita.

"You were. You get this tone when you're appending the word ‘only' to ‘naturally,' like you should have been built in a lab, just so you'd fit in with the rest of the house. Trust me, it's not that much fun."

"Sure, Pinocchio," says Smita. "You know I think of you as a real girl. I don't need to be a cuckoo to understand the score. But—and I'm not trying to be rude; I know it's inappropriate to comment on aspects of someone's appearance that they didn't necessarily choose—but why is Kelly orange?"

"It's ‘Kelpie,' actually," says Kelpie. "And I always thought I was orange because I'd been in a bad lab accident, but it seems I'm orange because the alchemists who made me made me this way. I don't know why."

"Visibility," says Erin.

The other three turn to look at her. She shrugs. "Reed made most of his projects in human skin tones. Usually white ones, because he liked to convince wealthy assholes to invest in his empty promises, and most of his investors were white. So when they looked at his science projects and saw their own children reflected back at them, they believed those children could be powerful."

"But not, it seems, as powerful as racism," interjects Smita.

"Yeah, well, what is?" asks Erin.

"You were explaining why I'm orange," says Kelpie.

"Ah, right. Thing is, when you're building a person from scratch, alchemically, you're not doing it according to the normal rules of biology and how things evolve in the real world. So you're not limited, as it were, to the things that reality has actually decided to put in a vote for. You can make anything if that's what you want to do, and you can make some gene expressions conditional on things that have nothing to do with genetics. With the Doctrine, for example, we couldn't decide ahead of time which half would be born first—and every incarnation of the Doctrine after the first was gestated as a set of twins. But the one who was born first always claimed dominion over Language, and the one born second would claim Math and have flashier, brighter coloring. Red hair, or white hair that didn't look quite natural, things people would be drawn to look at."

"To pull focus away from the elder twin," says Kelpie. "The Math children were supposed to draw fire?"

"Exactly. So tell me, how do you explain the second-born always having so much more dramatic coloring, if not for a gene expression that didn't happen until it reacted to the presence of the older child outside the womb?"

"Alchemists have no morals," says Isabella. "That's like building a time bomb into a child."

"Why, because maybe there's some unique medical situation where they're both born at once and the Math kid literally explodes? Or because you don't like the idea? Sometimes we don't like things," says Erin. "When alchemists are making fake people that they never intend to release into the general population, they get… creative. They make them with chromophores, or wings, or feathers for hair. They make them in every color of the rainbow. Sometimes they have the equivalent of dog shows with them, all these smug little alchemical innovators showing off their most impressive collections for the other monsters to ooh and aah over until one of them takes home Best in Show, and the rest get butchered. They made your girl here orange so she'd be visible, stand out in a crowd—can't run away. What are you?" Her focus shifts fully to Kelpie with the final question.

"I—I was a lab assistant until yesterday," says Kelpie. "Then a man from the Congress came and melted my supervisor, and I ran away. I don't think I can go back, even if I wanted to… and I don't think I want to. They were lying to me. They told me I was a normal human who'd been in a bad lab accident, and that was why I didn't remember anything before a year ago."

"And you believed them?" asks Smita.

"Maybe we should continue this elsewhere," says Isabella. She rises from her chair, beginning to gather the dishes left over from their ritual workings. The small stones and salt are tipped into plastic baggies, which vanish into the depths of her purse; the dishes are stacked, carefully, one atop the other. "Kelpie, can you get the ones with the water in them? We need to pour that onto the grass outside."

"Wouldn't the sink be closer?" asks Erin.

Isabella looks at her calmly. "Pouring it onto the grass lets it rejoin the natural world, and carries our intent into the universe. There's a reason for everything we're doing here."

"Including leaving?"

"This is Catrina's house, and while she's willing to respect that sometimes coven members want to hang back and speak with me after ritual is finished, she can get a little… needy if she's made to wait too long," says Isabella. "If we're here much longer, she'll join us."

"But why?" asks Kelpie. "She couldn't see my hooves, or anything else about me."

"No. But she saw that I took you as an apprentice, when I've been refusing to do the same for her since before the coven started officially meeting at her house. And she saw that Erin, who we've been inviting to stay for months now with no look at all, was willing to stay for the chance to talk with you after. She's going to be curious. We should join the others, briefly, and then get out."

"Join the others?" asks Kelpie, blankly. "They left."

"They left the circle," says Isabella. "Cleaning up the ritual supplies is my job, because I bring most of them to be sure they've been purified and treated correctly. Everyone's all still in the house."

"Oh." Kelpie had truly believed that once the other women left, they were gone, rejoining their own lives outside the influence of the coven.

"I have to deal with the granola brigade in a social setting?" asks Erin, sounding genuinely horrified.

Smita elbows her as she rises, lightly and with affection. "It won't hurt you. Come on, you might enjoy it."

"There are usually sandwiches," says Isabella, as if that changes things. She gathers a few more dishes, then gestures for Kelpie to get the ones filled with water. "You remember where the front door is?"

"Yes," says Kelpie uncertainly, picking up the dishes.

The group exits the room roughly together. Isabella smiles reassuringly at Kelpie. "Just follow the voices once you're done. We'll be waiting for you."

Indeed, the faint sound of unintelligible conversation drifts from the back of the house once they're in the hall, marking the location of the rest of the coven. Kelpie turns away from Isabella and the others, carrying the dishes of water to the door, careful not to spill any on the polished floor. Her hooves leave little scuffs as she walks; Catrina will be able to see those, even if she didn't see the hooves themselves. Kelpie wonders what the woman will blame for the marks. Will she decide someone must have kept their shoes on inside? Or will she find a way to justify it away?

It's a small thing to be concerned with, scuffs on a floor. But as she lets herself gingerly outside, dishes balanced on her arm to keep from spilling, it seems like the most important thing in the world. If she can just make sense of the small things, the big ones will unsnarl themselves.

One by one, she tips the dishes out onto the lawn, watching the water cascade onto the uniformly cut green strands. She's never seen a lawn by daylight before, and the smell of it is indescribable, bright and vibrant and living. Given her obvious cervine traits, she's briefly concerned that the smell will trigger some biological need and have her down on hands and knees, chewing on the landscaping.

To her great relief, that doesn't happen, and she straightens after tipping out the last of the water, taking a quick look around before she turns and flees for the front door, back into the safety of the house.

Once inside, she follows the sound of voices until she comes to the kitchen, which is nothing like Isabella's. It's as large as Isabella's whole apartment, or close to it, for one thing; the ceiling is higher than any other she's seen in this house, and one whole wall is windows, looking out onto a lush green backyard that's clearly been landscaped to within an inch of its life to look like a wild and carefree garden. One half of the space is taken up by appliances and cabinetry, while the other half is occupied by an oval table, a large hutch full of very fancy dishes, and a dark wood sideboard.

Kelpie lacks frame of reference for this room, but she can tell it must have been expensive. Everything is gleaming, wood, metal, and tile, all of it polished with the same intensity as the backyard landscaping. The appearance of perfection is the only thing that matters here. The reality is less compelling.

The women from the coven are mostly seated at the table, while Catrina holds court against the counter, next to a tall stainless steel urn which the other women visit, one by one, like supplicants coming to an altar. The smell of coffee fills the air. A tray of pastries has been set out on the table, next to a tray of tiny crustless sandwiches.

Catrina waves the mug in her hand when Kelpie enters the room. "Our guest!" she proclaims jubilantly, as if she'd been the one to invite the stranger into their midst. It's clear from the way the kitchen is laid out, the way people have positioned themselves, that she needs this moment to seem like the most important person in the room. This is where Catrina finds the power she was requesting during their circle, whether or not it's real.

Isabella is one of the women at the table, seated at the end along with Smita and Erin. Kelpie pauses long enough to flash Catrina an uncertain smile, then hurries over to the safe familiarity of the woman she came in with and the dangerous newness of the only other cuckoo she's ever knowingly met.

For her part, Erin seems to have noticed her the moment she stepped into the room. The other woman watches her every step, as silent as a snake. Kelpie stops next to Isabella, who looks up and smiles, reassuringly.

"Here, sit down, have a sandwich," she says. "You look like you must be hungry, and this is a part of the coven meeting. The cooldown afterward. We can go soon, and you and Erin can talk more."

"Or at all," says Erin. "I don't feel like we've even started scratching the surface."

"Oh that's so intriguing!" says Catrina, appearing at Kelpie's side as if by magic, mug in her hand and a curious expression on her face as she focuses in on Erin. "Do I hear the chirp of lovebirds in the air? Oh, dear, Smita, I'm so sorry it looks as if your love may have a wandering eye!"

If she was trying to cause trouble, she missed the mark fairly widely. Smita blinks, twice, then turns to Erin as she starts to giggle. Erin isn't that subtle. She begins to outright guffaw, laughing so hard all conversation in the kitchen stops, the other coven members turning to stare at her with suddenly focused fascination.

"You thought we were—" she manages to gasp, between peals of laughter.

Smita shakes her head, still more subdued in her amusement, and elbows Erin. "It's not that funny; I'm not that unfortunate to look at! I make good money, I'm clever, and I knit, which means I'm useful around the house. You'd be lucky to have me."

"I would," admits Erin, slowly getting herself back under control. "But it would be like dating my sister, and I'm not that kinky." She looks at Catrina, the last of the laughter slipping away, leaving her as reptile-calm as before. "Why does my wanting to talk to Isabella's cousin mean I must be romantically interested in her? She's at least ten years too young for me."

Catrina sputters, then focuses on Isabella, apparently not wanting to risk Erin's clear willingness to verbally draw blood. "We have a rule about guests at circle because you said we needed one. You said it could disrupt the energy in the room."

"Yes," says Isabella. "That's correct."

"Yet you brought two guests today."

"We all agreed months ago that Erin was welcome if she ever wanted to stay and enjoy our company," says Isabella. "And apprentices or initiates have never been considered guests. The rules allow them explicitly."

"But don't grant them membership."

"No, not at all. Kelly isn't a member, she's not an initiate, and she won't be attending every circle with me. But as my new apprentice, it was important for her to see what we do here, so she can understand it for herself. She may be running things for me one of these days, after all."

Catrina sputters, and the whole story comes clear in that reaction. She wants power; she's said as much. She expects to be able to control the world and people around her without too much difficulty. She offered up her home for the coven meetings; she supplies these pleasant refreshments, which Kelpie is sure are expensive or otherwise special in some way. She's their hostess. She's important. And here's Isabella, telling her without coming out and saying it, that she won't be the next coven leader, that she's going to be passed over for a quiet girl she just met, all because that girl has a familial relationship to Isabella.

Kelpie watches the way Catrina's eyes change, and wonders if Isabella is so used to her environment that she's no longer sensitive to its dangers. The lab didn't prepare her for a lot of things aboveground. It prepared her for egos, though, the way they could bruise, the way they could fester; the way they could get so large they pulled the air out of a room, leaving no space for anything but admiration of the ego's owner. Catrina isn't quite that bad, but she needs some fawning over or she's going to become dangerous.

"Did you make these sandwiches yourself? They look delicious," she says, trying to break the growing tension.

Catrina turns to blink at her, and the hostility that has been building in her expression falls away, replaced by a patronizing softness that Kelpie's seen before. It's the look the techs get when she asks them to explain something they consider blatantly obvious, and it means she's not seen as a threat in this moment—she's part of the furniture, almost an excuse to show off cleverness and very little more.

"Oh, no, dear, I don't do my own cooking," says Catrina. "That would be beneath me. I have a lady who makes these things on my behalf. I do set the menu, however, so everything you taste is a demonstration of my attention to detail."

Kelpie doesn't see how you can tell someone else to mix every step of your experiment and still claim the experiment shows your attention to detail, but she's trying to placate Catrina, not argue with her, so she only smiles and nods. "Well, she did an excellent job, and you have fabulous taste—and a beautiful home!"

Flattery does indeed appear to be the way into Catrina's good graces. The woman preens, standing a little straighter, gesturing to the kitchen with the mug in her hand. "I chose all the décor myself."

"It's very… harmonious," says Kelpie, who can't think of a better way to say "beige" without it turning into an insult.

Isabella stands, putting a hand on Kelpie's shoulder, and smiles at Catrina. "We're heading out. I have an afternoon appointment that Kelly has promised to accompany me on as an observer."

"Coven business?" asks Catrina, almost hungrily.

"Hechicera business," Isabella corrects. "It's not an exorcism—those are church territory—but it's asking an unquiet spirit to please move on and stop bothering the people who knew it in life. I wouldn't bring anyone at all with me, but Kelly is trained enough to protect herself, and she needs to understand this part of the business if she's going to take it over someday."

Kelpie tries to look brave and wise, although she doesn't really feel like either of those things.

Erin and Smita rise from their own seats and move to join the pair. Catrina's face falls and then falls further, as she sees all the people she was most hoping to make inroads with clearly preparing to leave.

"If you're sure," she says, and her tone manages to imply without stating that Isabella is making a terrible mistake, that taking Kelpie instead of Catrina is akin to attempting to remove a nail with a fork instead of the claw end of a hammer. But because she doesn't say it, Isabella doesn't have to answer it.

That seems to be the way people communicate outside the lab. Tones and looks and implications, things unsaid but inferred. Kelpie doesn't like it. They may have lied to her belowground, but they were blunt about it, not trying to tie her into knots with social signals she didn't have all the background to understand.

Isabella makes a quick circuit of the room, saying her individual goodbyes to all the members of the coven, and then the four of them head for the door, Catrina watching them go. Erin slouches along at Smita's side, hands in her pockets, walking like she's never rushed a day in her life and isn't intending to start now. Kelpie makes sure she stays on the other side of Isabella. She knows an apex predator when she sees one. There's so much she doesn't know, so much she still needs to learn, but she and Erin are both cuckoos, and she knows when she's in danger.

Once they're outside, Erin's affect changes. She stands straighter, moving so as to stand between Smita and Kelpie and the street, as if she can somehow block them both from view. Suddenly uncomfortable, she glances up and down the sidewalk, and mutters, "It's moments like this where I wish I hadn't gotten over my Hand of Glory addiction."

Smita elbows her in the ribs, and this time it's not so gentle. Erin jerks away, putting up her hands.

"Hey, kidding!" she says. "Do I look like I'm trying to find someone I can get away with murdering?"

"Not a funny joke," says Smita.

Kelpie looks between the two of them, baffled. Isabella is less subtle.

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, in another timeline, I"—Erin gestures to herself, then to Smita—"stabbed her to death, chopped her hand off, and turned it into a Hand of Glory that I was going to need later. In this timeline, I chloroformed her, dragged her out of the lab before I torched the place, and let her keep both her hands. I didn't need the second Hand because I hadn't used the first hand completely on the night I was supposed to kill her. It was a whole thing."

"I don't remember this at all, but since all five of the people I live with insist it really happened, I'm inclined to believe them," says Smita.

"Anyway, this is where I tell the two of you that you're coming home with us," says Erin, frowning. "I need you to meet my housemates so we can figure out what we're going to do next. And this isn't something that's up for discussion, so I'm sorry if this isn't how you wanted to spend your afternoon. If you really need to be dealing with an unquiet spirit or whatever, just give me the address and I'll do it."

"That was just to get us out of there," says Isabella. "I don't do spirit removal."

"Pity," says Erin. "Could have been fun. Anyway, come on. We're going this way."

She waves for Isabella and Kelpie to follow, then starts down the street. Smita stays where she is until she can take up the rear of their little group.

None of them sees Catrina watching from the window as they walk away.