Sinus Amoris

TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017.

THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

They have two possible directions at this point: Diana, or the alchemists. Judy is much more in favor of going to talk to Diana. She knows Diana. She's comfortable with Diana, or as comfortable as she can be with a powerful moon goddess who's been manifest for decades longer than she has. Best of all, she's reasonably confident that Diana isn't going to decide she's crossed some indefinable line and try to have her taken apart.

She's not sure she's ever spoken to an actual alchemist. But what she knows from stories and rumor doesn't exactly make her want to. Alchemists are the selfish, petty, terrifying monsters in every Lunar's closet, and she doesn't need to pull them into the open to understand that when you know where the monster is, you leave it there.

David's in favor of starting with Diana too… from a distance. He thinks that if she's involved with this, the best thing for them to do is leave school and go home, all of them, returning to their families and taking a leave of absence from their studies while all this works itself out.

Of the three of them, only Anna wants to start with the alchemists. Only Anna thinks hunting down and confronting the people who are most likely to be killing Lunars is a good idea. During the day, no less, when stepping up is more difficult and the Moon is slower to respond. Not that they have great cosmic powers at the best of times, but Judy feels a little sturdier at night, feels a little more equipped to deal with danger.

But Anna says the alchemists will be expecting them at night, and somehow this has become her show, even though David still thinks her other half is Losna, still believes she's a minor moon goddess with no real parlor tricks to speak of. Judy's trying not to be offended at that. She knows Artemis has always been charismatic; she's a hunt leader, and that means she needs to be able to convince people to listen when she wants them to take wild risks on her behalf. Chang'e does paperwork and gardens.

Maybe it's reductive, but watching David nod as Anna describes a plan that seems to center on them magically tripping over an alchemist in downtown Berkeley, it's how she feels. Judy produces a peach pit from her pocket to center herself, spinning it between her fingers. She doesn't want to be in charge. She's never wanted to be in charge, wouldn't have been so happy to let Diana continue playing the figurehead role while ignoring the duties she should have been performing as senior Lunar if Judy had wanted to be in charge. In charge is where the blame lies. In charge is where the responsibility is.

But someone's hunting Lunars, and someone knew enough to go into the everything and leave Aske's body there to rot, and someone knew how to find where Máni lives and leave the key for him without closing the gate to the everything. Were they trying to taunt or frighten the other Lunars? "Look, you're not safe even here, when you're outside the rules of normal reality"? Or was whoever left the key trying to send a warning? "They're hunting you, be cautious"? There are so many possibilities! None of them good.

Judy clears her throat. Anna and David turn to look at her. She sighs.

"This seems to rely a lot on things just happening to go the way we need them to go," she says. "Anna, you didn't answer before. Do you know another Aske we can call?"

Anna shakes her head. "Sadly, no. The last one I knew was years ago, in Chicago. Aske's not the most common manifestation, because not many people remember her. I think the universe spits us out less because the City needs us—the City could get by with a perfectly generic Moon, and that's what the Man is for, really. Just make a few dozen Men in the Moon and let him handle the transit every night, none of these personalities or preferences or immortality-granting peaches—and more because the City somehow remembers that humans used to believe in us."

"We all know belief powers the manifestations," says Judy. "That's not news."

"No, but it explains why there are so damn many Dianas," says Anna.

"We should talk to the one we have," says Judy. "We should at the very least see what she has to say about the key situation."

"I'd really rather go looking for alchemists," says Anna.

They both turn to David, expressions questioning. He grimaces.

"Do I have to be the tie-breaker?" he asks.

"That's the nice thing about having three people," says Judy. "We can actually vote on things when it's a choice between two terrible options. Because let's be honest here, both of them really suck."

"Yeah, they do," he says wearily. "I don't like Diana. She makes me nervous. But both of you make me nervous too, and I have class in an hour. I'd rather go see the lady who makes me nervous already than some stranger who makes me nervous and might want to murder me. I'm with Judy. We go see Diana."

Judy resists the urge to punch the air, and instead turns to smile at Anna, choosing to be a gracious winner. "Come on," she says. "I know her schedule."

She starts walking and the others follow, a small, unremarkable cluster of students walking back across the tangled outline of the campus toward the art classes. No one gives them a second look, and why should they? The most noticeable thing about them is that they're all graying prematurely, and this is higher education: going gray before your time is nothing new. It would almost stand out more if they weren't showing signs of aging most often associated with stress.

They make it down Piedmont to the main campus without incident, and are almost to the building where Professor Williams teaches when disaster strikes. Judy walks straight into a tall brown-haired man in a tweed jacket—or maybe he walks into her, so distracted by the book he's reading that he doesn't see her until it's too late. It doesn't matter who's responsible for the impact; papers go flying everywhere as he loses his balance. Judy is knocked backward into David, who grabs her shoulders and steadies her before she can fall.

The man was walking by himself, and isn't quite as lucky. No one catches him. He staggers back, then falls as his knees buckle, dropping him onto his backside in the middle of the walkway. Judy gasps, clapping her hands over her mouth, and leans back against David, a show of fear and familiarity that clearly startles him, as he keeps hold of her shoulders, providing a steady backdrop.

Anna looks at the two of them, perplexed. "What? You knocked a guy down. It happens." She moves toward the man on the ground, already offering him her hand. "Sorry, sir. You probably shouldn't be reading and walking at the same time."

His hand closes on hers as he lifts his face to focus in her direction, and Anna gasps, trying to pull away. He doesn't let go.

"No," he says instead, and his voice is warm and kind, and filled with strange harmonics that scrape and itch against Judy's brain, all her linguistic training telling her that some of those sounds aren't possible, the human larynx can't make those sounds, and if it could, it would need more than two letters. She's hearing the words around the word, the unspoken shadows of the words that could have been, and she hates it as she has never hated anything in her life.

"I probably shouldn't," he continues, and pulls himself to his feet, still holding Anna's hand. He's shorter than David, taller than Judy; just tall enough to be unremarkable in the local population. Combine that with his hair, which is a brown so ordinary that it doesn't seem to want to catch the mind's eye, save for a pure white streak running from the crown to the front, which hangs slightly askew next to his face, and his generic "college professor from a romantic comedy" attire, and he's a man who could disappear in an instant if they look away.

Judy wishes, desperately, that he would do exactly that. Just disappear, fading away into the chaos of the campus and leaving them free of this ill-timed interruption.

Sadly, she's never gotten anything by wishing for it. He turns to look at her and David, and his eyebrows lift. Behind the wire frames of his glasses, his eyes are a pale, foggy gray, like the sky above campus in the morning, after the sun has risen but before its rays have burned the clouds away.

His eyes were made to hide the moon.

"I know you," he says, sounding just a little perplexed. The words around the words ask for explanation, for clarification, for detail piled upon detail. They want her life story, they demand everything she is, and Judy swallows bile and babble at the same time, forcing the words down her throat like stones to weigh her belly down. She meets those foggy eyes and steps up, just enough to feel her own eyes flash peach before she steps back down. If this were a normal man, she would never dare. If this were a normal man, she wouldn't feel like meeting his eyes risked dragging parts of her into the light that were never intended to be seen.

He smiles as if he's had something confirmed, and finally lets go of Anna's hand. "Thank you," he says. "I wondered why you always ran out of the room at department meetings when I came in, but I've never been able to get close enough to ask. Miss… Kong-Jones, isn't it?"

"Yes, Professor Middleton," says Judy, miserably.

"Are you going to introduce me to your friends?" he asks, and the words around the words whisper how easily that could be a command rather than a mild suggestion with the intonation of a request, so Judy takes a deep breath and begins.

"Anna, David, this is Professor Middleton, the chair of—"

He cuts her off before she can finish. "No, I mean introduce me to your friends."

It takes everything she has to swallow her words a second time, tilt her head, and say, "Not here. Not in public. There are too many people around."

He blinks, apparently taken aback by her refusal. "I… All right."

"Good. Thank you." Judy finally steps away from David, her attention staying fixed on Professor Middleton. It's like she's afraid that if she looks away he'll strike, and on some level, maybe she is; on some level, he's the biggest predator she's ever seen, and he could wipe her from existence if he wanted to. It's always been a risk, staying on this campus with him around, but she's done her best to stay off his radar, and as long as she's here, one of the Lunars knows the threat he represents.

Diana knows too, of course. Diana has to know. Professor Middleton's manifestation had been the quiet talk of the undercampus as soon as it happened, everyone who had ever even brushed against the incarnate world making sure the news got around. But Judy's not sure the gossip has continued in the days since then. Anna and David don't look nearly worried enough about what they're standing in front of. David looks confused, and Anna seems wary, as if she got something when he touched her hand, but neither of them has reacted as much as they should.

"My office?" he suggests—and it is a suggestion. Nothing in the words around the words tries to say that it's an order, or even that it's a good idea.

"Too small," says Judy. "And I'm pretty well known in our department for avoiding your company. Someone would talk."

"Right," he says, and tilts his head back to look at the sky, smacking his lips thoughtfully for a moment before he looks back to her, and offers, almost offhandedly, "We could go to my house? My sister's probably there, so it's not like you'd be alone with me, and it's far enough off campus that no one's going to see."

Somehow, going with this man to an undisclosed second location seems like a safer plan than walking with him across campus. Judy doesn't know whether that's her own concern for her reputation speaking, or the strange harmonics that accompany his every word, but her mouth opens before she has a chance to think about it, and her answer is given:

"That works."

Anna scowls at her, less aware of the danger, more aware of the strangeness of refusing a public office for a private home. Judy can't understand how Anna can listen to him speak and not hear the strange harmonics wrapping around every single word, how she can look at him and not see the way space tries to distort around him, unable to make up its mind whether he should be more real than the rest of them or rejected entirely. He's more solid than they are, like something dropped in from another reality, one that makes this one look like tissue paper.

Anna is the huntress here.

She should recognize the greater predator.

Judy scrapes up an uneasy smile, flashing it first at Anna and then at David. "Professor Middleton is the chair of my department," she says.

"He's your advisor?" asks David.

"No," she says. "I've gone out of my way to stay out of his classes." She can stop herself from sharing information that shouldn't be thrown about in public, but she can't lie in his presence. She can tell, in an abstract sort of way, that he wouldn't like that, and part of her is more concerned about upsetting him than anything else.

"Why?"

"Because I terrify her," says Professor Middleton easily. "Come along, students. It looks like we're going to have an unscheduled class session at my place today." He gestures for them to accompany him as he begins walking, heading for the edge of campus. Judy wants to run. Judy wants to turn and bolt as fast as she can. She follows anyway. Running won't save her now, not when he knows her name, not when he's been wondering about her already. Not when she's caught his attention.

Maybe if she'd been more careful, if she'd watched where she was going, she might have been able to finish out her time at Berkeley without this happening, but she wasn't and she didn't, and now she'll have to pay the price for her mistakes on top of everything else.

Anna and David follow her, both perplexed by her seemingly meek obedience, neither of them saying anything or stepping up. They stay almost entirely themselves, as close to human as they ever get, and maybe that's part of why they can't tell how much danger they're in. David is still new to his divinity. Anna is less so, and she said before that when she's on a hunt, she's always partially stepped up, Artemis riding actively along with her human host. Her inability to sense the presence of a larger predator is confusing.

Maybe they'll find out why it's like this before they die. And if they don't… well. Hopefully someone else will start asking questions about Aske. She deserves some answers, and some peace, even if Eliza's family will never know what happened.

"You don't have to look like you're marching off to your own execution," says Professor Middleton, looking at Judy as he walks. "We're just going to my place to talk, because you didn't want to do it on campus."

"How far away do you live?"

"Not far," he says, turning down Bancroft and heading for Telegraph. That's the main street for the university's social scene: if you want cheap pizza or used books, you go to Telegraph. Judy's heard rumors of a happening nightlife that thrives there in upstairs and underground clubs after the sun goes down, but her evenings have been taken up by homework and Lunar duties for so long that the rumors have remained just that—rumors, things to eventually be proven by someone else, someone with more time to kill than she has.

Professor Middleton looks out of place here, weaving between the teenagers playing hooky and playing at being whatever version of alternative is currently speaking to their souls, brightly colored hair and denim jackets, patches of chainmail hung decoratively off recycled fashions from the Buffalo Exchange. Several of the street vendors smile as he passes, some pausing in their work or negotiations to raise their hands in greeting, and he smiles back, entirely at ease.

The feeling that he's out of his natural environment fades with the second. He's still too drab and too ordinary-looking for the color and chaos around him, but his posture seems to shift, adapting to his environment like an octopus changing color to blend into the bottom of a fishing boat. By the time they've gone a full block, he's entirely unremarkable once more, and their mismatched little student group is more likely to attract attention than he is.

It's a neat trick. Judy frowns, trying to figure out how he's been able to accomplish it. Professor Middleton smiles in answer.

"They call it body language for a reason," he says. "If you speak it fluently enough, you'll never stick out. I've heard good things about your work. You have a real gift for languages. I'm surprised you haven't spent more time studying this one."

"Kinesthetic linguistics is such a large field that I've never really had time to focus on it," says Judy, distracted into answering without a veil of terror between her thoughts and her voice. "Culture and environment play such a huge role, and it's always struck me as being almost on the border between linguistics and behavioral science. Maybe if I was planning to go into mental health care or social work. Being able to read the way people change their posture depending on threat assessment of their surroundings could be a huge help."

"Or if you just wanted to go anywhere in the world without attracting attention. One of my housemates is almost as good at it as I am, which is saying something, given that she doesn't really have a gift for languages. She's real good at physical stuff, though, so I guess she just came at it from the other side."

The thought of a professor having housemates—plural, apparently, and a sister who either lives with him or comes and goes at will—is a little jarring, a reminder that there's no benchmark in adulthood where capitalism ceases to apply. Judy frowns as she walks, glancing back at Anna and David. They don't appear to have noticed Professor Middleton's odd postural mimicry. Then again, they both move like college students, meaning they're still in their natural habitat this close to campus.

They reach the corner of Haste Street, and Professor Middleton turns. For a moment, just a moment, he can't see them, and once again, Judy sees the chance to run. Once again, she doesn't. If she runs, she'll have to keep running, maybe for the rest of her life, and as a goddess of immortality, that life could be very, very long. She doesn't know if the professor is the sort of man—or manifestation—who holds a grudge. She's gone out of her way not to know.

Haste is quieter than Telegraph, lined with private homes, gated apartment complexes, and the smaller, calmer sorts of business that a city center needs but the hectic social pyramid of Telegraph can't sustain—dentists and daycares and accountancy firms. They keep walking, and Judy watches carefully as Professor Middleton's posture shifts again, abandoning the veil of collegiate ease, becoming what she assumes is his natural stance. He walks like he's not afraid of anything, like he's seen the worst the world has to offer, shrugged, and decided to keep on going, unperturbed.

It's a terrifying walk, all the more because it offers no threats. As she watches him, she realizes she doesn't really know much about the man; she's read his published papers, which are meticulously researched, and precisely as petty as any other academic work, but she's worked so hard to avoid him that she's never risked attracting his attention by digging too much into who he is. She didn't even know he had a sister.

She knows he's an artificial person, built in a secret lab by alchemists who wanted to control the world, so the question of how he has a sister seems like a reasonable one. Either he was cloned from a naturally occurring person and they decided to adopt each other after he became the living force of universal control or—probably more likely, and way more frighteningly—his sister is an artificial person too. Judy can't fathom what she'd be the force of. Professor Middleton is the Doctrine of Ethos. There's only one of those. Right?

Her questions are all-consuming enough to keep her quiet as Haste turns into Shattuck—a main artery, yes, but more domesticated than Telegraph, farther from campus and commensurately more commercialized—and Shattuck turns into the warren of small residential streets. The houses here are old Victorians, imposing, meticulously maintained, and beautifully painted, some with that sort of decorative trim that people call "gingerbread" picked out in tastefully contrasting colors.

They're the kind of houses Judy dreams of owning one day, large enough to contain libraries and home offices and—

She stops dead. David and Anna do the same, all of them staring at a house so out of place that it might as well be a slap across the face of the neighborhood. Judy's supposed to be the one who's good with words, but she can't even convince her mouth to move for the first several stunned seconds—long enough for Anna to demand, loudly, "Okay, what the actual fuck is wrong with the people who live there? Did they lose a bet, or do they hate their neighbors?"

"I was colorblind until my sister and I killed our father and merged sufficiently to overcome our engineered shortcomings—and I mean true colorblindness, not the kind that normally occurs in the human population. There's nothing wrong with red-green colorblindness, or a lack of sensitivity to shades. I lived in a grayscale world, and it's a miracle I didn't pancake myself across a highway or something before I figured out what colors were. Now I have them all, and they're still novel." Professor Middleton shrugs broadly. "I like 'em. We have all these colors, and all these words for colors. We should use them more."

Anna turns to stare at him. "There's using them more, and then there's painting your house to look like a prism fucked a rainbow."

"I didn't paint it," he says serenely, and starts walking again. Judy catches David's elbow before he can follow.

Leaning close and dropping her voice, she says, "Probably because he just asked the house to look like that and it couldn't figure out a reason not to."

He turns and blinks at her. "What are you talking about?"

"You need to be careful around him," she says. "He's dangerous."

"What?" David actually snickers at that. "He's built like a beanstalk. He's wearing tweed. I don't think he's dangerous, Judy. I think you're all freaked out by everything that's been happening, and you're jumping at nothing."

"You just dismissed Aske being murdered as ‘everything that's been happening.' Doesn't that seem strange to you?"

Maybe David can't hear the words around every word Professor Middleton says, but he can react to them. The little subliminal eddies in the air telling them this is safe, this is fine, this is a good idea, they've been burrowing their way deeper and deeper into his thoughts, and now he can't see any reason why he shouldn't be happily following a strange professor into a house stolen from a children's television show.

Judy lets go of his arm. She can't fight this. Chang'e might be able to resist it better than she can, but for her to let the goddess take over is for her to admit that Judy's human life is coming to an end. If she runs, if she tries to break the other Lunars loose and take them with her, she'll make an enemy of the Doctrine. There's no coming back from that. Even if she abandons her hopes of linguistic success, she'll be on the run forever from the concept of language itself. As he so accurately pointed out, even movement is a language. She'll never escape.

None of them will.

Professor Middleton has reached the house, and is holding the gate in the fence open as he watches her talk to David. Anna is beside him, already too far away to reach. Shoulders slumped, Judy follows, and David trails along behind.

The garden is as much a marvel as the house is a monstrosity, unseasonable fruits and flowers warring for dominion. Like the house, it's a riot of chaotic color; unlike the house, it somehow manages to form something coherent and even beautiful. It's like a contrasting argument, like the house is in conversation with itself and its surroundings, and thinking about it too hard makes Judy's head hurt.

There's a peach tree near the fence line, branches heavy with flawlessly ripe fruit, and the sight of it makes Chang'e want to step up, to taste their sweetness and judge how close it is to her own. Judy has to fight her back down, to silently remind her that they don't want to make this situation any worse than it already is. If the professor takes her stepping up as a threat… No. The risk is too great.

He smiles as she approaches. "I was concerned you might have remembered another appointment," he says, like they're old friends and she's not here under unspoken duress.

"I think we need to talk this through," she says, and he nods, gray eyes grave.

"We do," he agrees. He waves them into the garden with a sweep of his free hand.

The porch steps are painted as garishly as the rest of the house, each board a different color, and as if that weren't enough, the windows are made of mismatched panes of leaded carnival glass, giving the whole edifice a funhouse air that simultaneously ties it all together and adds the final horrifying touch. Judy's surprised the neighbors haven't torched the place yet, their suburban sensibilities overwhelming the normal distaste for arson.

As for Professor Middleton, he heads up the stairs and opens the unlocked front door, revealing an ordinary hallway beyond, plain wood with doors to either side and a stairway about eight feet deeper in. He leans into the house, yelling an enthusiastic "Hey, Dodge, I brought home a bunch of stray moon gods, and if you don't get down here, I'm going to keep them!"

The house makes no reply. He turns back to the group, smiling more broadly this time. "All right, now that you know I know and we're not on campus anymore, come on in and you can explain who the hell you are and what you're doing at my school."

In he goes, and they follow, ducklings in a line with no other obvious options. Anna is the last one in, the huntress finally appearing to realize she's walking into a trap. The door swings shut behind her. She stops, turns, and tries to open it again. The knob won't budge, and there's no visible way to unlock it. Swallowing hard, she follows Judy and David, who are walking together through the narrow space.

Professor Middleton leads them to the kitchen, which is as oddly normal as the rest of the house, marble countertops and white walls and windows which, seen from this side, appear to be made of perfectly clear glass. If not for the bookshelves lining the walls of the breakfast nook, there would be nothing to distinguish it from any other middle class suburban kitchen. A round cat bed rests against the base of the central island, and the oldest orange cat Judy has ever seen is curled there, tail over its nose, sleeping soundly.

The bookshelves aren't a surprise. Their contents are. There isn't a single book on linguistics, not even one of Middleton's own, but there are several books on higher mathematics, some with titles so long and convoluted that Judy's not sure she could understand the credits page, much less the books themselves. The round wooden table in front of them is covered in papers and Post-It flags, again, exactly like similar tables in academic households around the world.

Anna doesn't seem to notice. Neither she nor David is really looking around, having just figured out how much trouble they might be in: they're watching Professor Middleton, Anna with predatory tenseness, David with something much closer to territorial irritation. Judy hangs back. She might know more about the situation than they do, but she doesn't know enough.

Professor Middleton heads for the coffee machine on one counter, picking up the half-full pot and decanting a cup. "Talk," he says.

It's a command. None of them are prepared to resist it, and they all begin talking at once, words tumbling over themselves as if they're trying to recreate the complex harmonics of the professor's own speech. Unlike his words, where the unspoken ones fade politely into the background and become harmonics, these words smother each other, becoming unintelligible.

He puts the pot down and pinches the bridge of his nose. "All right, stop talking," he says. They do, all of them. Judy's not sure she's ever going to be able to speak again, no matter how much she wants to. Awkward, for a linguist.

"I need you to go one at a time," he says, and indicates Judy with his coffee mug. "You, girl in my department who knows enough to avoid me. Who the hell are you, and who are your friends?"

"I'm Judith Kong-Jones, and I'm a linguistics grad student who was hoping to keep avoiding you until I graduated," says Judy. "Fucked that one up but good, since now I'm in your house. These are Anna and David. They're… I suppose ‘work acquaintances' is the best way to explain our relationship."

"Mm-hmm. And what is it that you all do for work that has you acquainted?" he asks, sounding halfway amused by her attempt to dodge the undodgeable question.

"We're incarnate moon gods," she says, immediately, then claps her hands over her mouth, horrified by what just came out. "I didn't mean to… I'm so sorry, I didn't…"

"Calm down; you didn't have a choice," he says, and takes a sip of his coffee. "Just so we're all equally exposed: Hi. I'm Roger, and I'm the living manifestation of the linguistic half of a universal concept normally referred to as the Doctrine of Ethos, when people remember that it's something they can refer to, which isn't very often outside of philosophy and music theory cl— Oh, thank God, Dodge!" The last appears to be a name, as it's accompanied by his eyes focusing on the kitchen doorway and him raising his mug in what appears to be a toast. "Get in here and save me from the student body."

"Which one? The one who looks like she's about to go for your throat, the tall guy, or the one who looks like a whole lot of missed alarms?"

"All three?"

"Sure, sure." The woman walks into the room, following the professor's path to the coffee machine. They have a certain facial similarity, but Judy wouldn't have pegged her for Professor Middleton's sister if she'd seen her on the street: her hair, for one thing. It's a shockingly bright shade of red, cut short and slightly feathered, like she's been hunting her whole life for the lowest-maintenance style possible, and has finally hit on this as the comfortable middle ground between "something I have to brush" and "something I have to take care of." Like the professor, there's a white streak at the front, running from the crown of her head down. It doesn't look like an affectation.

Unlike his traditionally professorial attire, she's wearing jeans and a Berkeley T-shirt, with a highlighter tucked behind one ear. She's also surrounded by a thin rainbow film of broken time. Not dead time—broken time, the kind that flashes in the walls of the everything, intangible and ever-shifting, dying even as it fully appears. Judy blinks, blinks again, and finally scrubs at her eyes, trying to make the afterimages disappear.

They don't oblige. "Who are you people, and why am I saving my brother from you?" the woman asks.

Her voice is genial and lacks the echoing subliminal commands of Professor Middleton's. That would be comforting, if not for those rainbows. Judy begins to open her mouth.

"And don't lie to her," says Professor Middleton sharply.

Judy tries to shut her mouth again. It refuses to oblige. She glares at the professor, then turns to the woman. "We're a group of incarnate moon gods currently attending the college where Professor Middleton teaches, and he picked us up and dragged us home as punishment for running into him on campus."

"Hey!" he protests. "This isn't a punishment. You're the one who didn't want to explain who you people were in public, and wouldn't go to my office with me."

"Poor baby. Are you terrifying the lesser incarnates again?" The woman pats him on the cheek. "Wow, sucks to be you. Anyway, which ones are you people? There are like ninety moon gods or something. You're like rats."

"Don't let her fool you," says the professor, as an aside to Anna. "She knows exactly how many moon gods there are, possible, currently incarnate, and no longer incarnating regularly. That's what she does. She knows the numbers of things."

"Oh fuck me the Doctrine has two halves, doesn't it?" says Judy, horrified.

The woman looks at her, amused. "You picked that up pretty quick, little Lunar. Yes, there are two halves to the Doctrine of Ethos. Most things have two halves, since that's what ‘half' means. There should probably have been more, since it's also a means of describing musical modes, but that gets overly complicated, and then I have a headache, and you don't want me to have a headache. Hello, I'm Dodger Cheswich, call me ‘Dodger,' and I'm basically the living concept of mathematics, which makes me fun at parties. You were going to tell me which moon gods you are."

"Chang'e, ma'am," says Judy.

Dodger nods, satisfied with this, and looks to David.

"Máni," he says.

Too late, Judy remembers that Anna's lie to David is still in effect—he thinks she's Losna, and she's about to tell the truth. Anna appears to remember at the same time. She pales slightly, mouth working like she's chewing on a fresh piece of gum.

She resists the command for a surprisingly long time before she spits out, "Artemis."

"Two of the big three, in our kitchen? My." Dodger sips her own coffee. "We should get out the nice dishes, Roger."

"They're not staying for dinner."

"Your strays always wind up staying for dinner, when they don't drop dead in the garden."

David, meanwhile, is staring at Anna in outright shock. Before Judy can tell him not to, he steps up, Máni shifting to the forefront as his eyes flash silver and the air around him takes on a sparkling, wintery air. Dodger lifts her eyebrows as she observes this, but doesn't comment, while Professor Middleton takes a deep, weary drink from his mug, leaning back against the counter.

"You told me you were Losna," says Máni. "Why would you lie to me?"

"I had my reasons," she says.

"We don't lie to each other."

"I just met you," she protests. "I don't owe you honesty."

Judy winces, and steps up to match Máni, Chang'e moving smoothly to the forefront. "Anna, please," she says. "There's no reason to antagonize your allies when you don't need to. Máni, I understand why you're upset."

"But you're not surprised," he snaps. "You knew, didn't you?"

More lies will only compound the damage already done. "I found out this morning. She was talking about hunting, and Losna's not a hunter. Artemis is."

"Hunters kill things."

That's an angle she hasn't considered yet. She looks to Anna, speculatively. Is it truly a coincidence that a minor Lunar died, and almost immediately after, she met Artemis pretending to be someone harmless? Could she have pulled that same ruse on Aske?

"I didn't kill her," says Anna. She's staying as she is, Artemis present but not dominant, making sure she doesn't look like the biggest threat in the room. It's a smart call on her part, since Máni looks like he's just about ready to start breaking things.

Chang'e doesn't think that would be nearly as much of a smart call, not with the Doctrine of Ethos—both halves, and how did she not know there were two of them? How did she never put it together?—standing right there, watching. If he starts something now, she's pretty sure Roger and Dodger will finish it, and that things they finish don't restart.

"We don't know that."

"Yes, you do, because I'm telling you the truth," says Anna. She glances to Roger. "You told us not to lie to your sister. Is that still in effect?"

"Yup," he says, and drinks more coffee.

"I want to know how you did that. Because I could feel it when it happened, like a net settling over a school of fish, and I knew I was caught, but now I don't feel it at all."

"Eh." He shrugs. "If you were always aware of your underwear, it would start to drive you up the wall before the end of the day."

"Spoken like a man who's been forced to understand why I hate thongs so much," says Dodger.

Roger shudders dramatically. "You are the worst sister. But yes, miss moon god, you are currently forbidden to lie to my sister."

"Cool." Anna turns away from Máni, stepping all the way up at the same time, so it's Artemis who finishes the motion, Artemis who faces the incarnate Doctrine, Artemis who says, in a voice as cool as running water, "Much appreciated. Can we agree that no matter where I'm looking, I'm addressing said sister?"

"Sure," says Dodger, sounding thoroughly amused.

Roger nods.

Artemis turns back to Máni. "I came to Berkeley because Lunars have been dying, and the alchemists have been in a tizzy all over the continent, but it's worse here than it is anywhere else. For some reason, the alchemists here are on the verge of bursting into flame from sheer nervous activity, and I want to know why. They must be doing something that has everyone worked up, and given that they're alchemists, it's not unreasonable to connect it to the deaths. I said I was Losna because you haven't had a Losna recently enough for anyone to know what her incarnations are supposed to be like, and I don't trust your Diana. I can't truthfully say I've never killed anyone—I am a huntress—but I can say that I have not killed a single person since arriving in this city, and the only other Lunar I ever killed was over a decade ago. He attacked me first. Unless you're planning to come at me with a knife, I'm no danger to you."

Máni blinks, taking a small step back, then looks to Chang'e. "You're okay with this?"

"I don't think it's up to me," says Chang'e. "She's telling the truth. She helped me search for Aske's body after I didn't find her inside the everything. She's a huntress, and there's something here to hunt, so she came here to go hunting."

"Is a Diana another kind of moon god?" asks Dodger.

"That is possibly the nicest thing you could have said," says Artemis. "Chang'e and I are as high in the pantheon as she is, but she goes around acting like she's the boss of everyone, even when she doesn't have a leg to stand on. And since she still has so many people who believe in her, you find her in almost every community of Lunars, which gives her a numerical advantage."

"Hold on, hold on." Roger pinches the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up at the same time. "Are you saying you people are composite entities? Some sort of distributed consciousness?"

"Not exactly," says Artemis. She glances to Chang'e. "You know this guy well enough to have been trying to avoid him. You want to explain?"

"Not particularly, but I'll do it," says Chang'e. It's easier if she avoids looking directly at either half of the Doctrine, if she just acts like she's talking to a particularly interesting bit of wall. "Lunar gods manifest on a regular basis all over the world. We grow in people who have enough of an affinity for our specific natures that they might eventually be able to hear us calling to them from the moonlight, and when they accept, we join them. We don't take them over, we don't replace them, we… share the space. We are them, and they are us; it's just that the personality travels with the power, so as we step up and down the ladder of divinity, either the god or the host will be more dominant. That means we all tend to begin our growth in the same sort of soil, and our hosts tend to have similar personalities. Any god you meet will have multiple manifestations at any given time. It's the only way we can be sure there's enough of us."

"Enough for what?" asks Roger. He sounds fascinated, and Chang'e isn't surprised. Judy finds this all fascinating too, even after as long as she's been living with it. Any place where the world of gods intersects with the world of men is likely to be enthralling: that's how myths are born, after all. Mortals like to feel like they're walking along the border of a myth.

Still, she hesitates, unsure how much she should say, how much she's allowed to say. They never discuss matters of divinity in front of people who aren't Lunars; their history is rich with cautionary tales about Lunars who made that exact mistake, who thought they could trust a lover or a friend and found themselves betrayed, committed to psychiatric care or, worse, handed over to the nearest group of alchemists to be "cured." There are reasons so many cultures yoke madness to the moon, and the Lunar tendency to slide into a person's mind and start speaking plays a large part.

She glances to Artemis and Máni, desperate for salvation that isn't coming. Máni refuses to meet her eyes, while Artemis nods, very slowly.

Returning her attention to Roger—or, more precisely, to the cabinets beside his head, which don't watch her with mild gray eyes and occasionally give commands that restructure the way the world is meant to work—Chang'e takes a deep breath.

"We have to be sure there's enough of us to shine above the Impossible City every night."

The front door slams open, all but punctuating her sentence, and Chang'e turns, eyes very wide, to see who dares intrude upon the Doctrine of Ethos.