Lacus Lenitatis

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

Smita is surprisingly chatty once they're away from Catrina's place, although she stays at the back of the group, watching as much as participating. Isabella allows herself to slow, drifting back until she paces Smita, matching her step for step.

"You've been with the coven for a while now," she says. "But you've never mentioned anything about living with the incarnate force of Order. I think I would have noticed if you had."

"Funny, I was just thinking I would have noticed if you'd ever said something about having an electric-orange cousin with hooves, but here we are," says Smita. "Looks like we've both been keeping some of our cards close to our chests, hmmm?"

"She's not actually my cousin," says Isabella.

"You don't say."

"She—" Isabella pauses, looking wearily at Smita. "You're not going to let this one go, are you?"

"Nope."

Erin looks back from where she's walking alongside Kelpie, pale eyebrows lifted high. "Everything all right back there?"

"We're great," says Smita sunnily. "Just working through a few things."

Erin looks dubious but faces front once more. Smita looks to Isabella and shrugs.

"I can forgive you for the little lie about your cousin, especially since it upset Catrina, if you can forgive me for not telling you I lived with an incarnate force of the universe. Also, how do you drop that one casually into conversation? ‘Hi, I saw your signup sheet at the co-op, I've been trying to wrap my head around the idea that there's this whole magical world running in parallel to the one I've always known, and your nondenominational female-first coven seems like a decent way to ease myself into things, anyway, I'm not a witch or a Wiccan, I'm going to be primed for someone to say something bigoted or indicative of toxic views and might leave permanently at any time, and one of my roommates is the living embodiment of Order, but I try not to hold that against her'? Doesn't exactly flow, now, does it?"

"It does not," agrees Isabella. "Still, after you decided to stick around, it might have been nice to get a heads-up."

"I didn't even know if you knew magic was real and not just a way to fleece a rich white lady out of candles and coffee and a nice lunch once a week," says Smita. "It honestly could have gone either way, until today."

"You've been doing ritual work with us for two years, and you didn't know whether I knew magic was real? I think I'm offended."

"Doesn't change anything if you are."

They walk in silence for a few seconds before Isabella nods toward Erin and says, "I knew she was a construct."

"What?"

"That's why I wanted to bring the kid to a coven meeting. You have more experience than any of us with alchemical constructs, and I thought you might be able to help her. But then, I thought you were dating Erin, and that was why she always brought you to the meetings and picked you up after they were finished. I also thought she was a minor personification the alchemists had managed to force to manifest but didn't care enough about to keep track of—one of the Horae, maybe, or something even more intangible than the personification of a singular hour."

"You had that partially right," says Smita. "She's an alchemical construct, and when you compare her to what the alchemists who made her were actually fishing for, I guess you could call her a minor one. But they didn't lose track of her because they didn't care."

"They lost track of me because I broke confinement and went rogue," says Erin, turning to walk backward, facing them. She still manages to miss every crack and break in the sidewalk, her stride never varying. "I bet they say I went feral, since that's what you say about an animal, and they don't want to credit us with full humanity if they don't have to. Am I right?"

She glances at Kelpie, who flushes a deep red-orange and nods, looking almost ashamed of herself. "Yeah," she says, after a momentary pause. "All the c-cuckoos who escaped from Reed's lab are described as having gone feral and turned on their creators."

"Because we're not fully human to them, and that means we're not really people, either, not the way everyone else thinks of people." Erin elbows Kelpie, amiably. "At least Barrow was invested in making sure my brother and I could go to Disney World without causing some sort of a riot, huh? I don't have to deal with being Technicolor or wonder whether the people I meet will see something weird about me. Plenty of people see weird things about me without my needing to have hooves."

"Don't you find her existence a little, well, chaotic?" asks Smita carefully, gesturing to Kelpie.

Erin snorts. "Chaotic? Please. Not compared to you two. She's designed for a purpose, every gene exactly where it's supposed to be, every chromosome expressing itself just so. They made her this way because this was the way they needed her to be if they were going to catch the concept they were trying for. There's not a chaotic cell in her body. Now, you naturals…" She shudders. "All willy-nilly, genes combining on a whim, DNA sourced from two unvetted origins, all the mutations and recessive traits a body can hope for—nope. No, thank you. I'll take the orange girl any day of the week. She may be weird-looking, but it's a logical, linear weird-looking." She turns again, so that her back is to the pair. "Don't try to play the chaos card with me."

"Love you too," says Smita warmly. She glances at Isabella, watching the other woman fight to control her expression. "When someone grabs you, pulls you into the magical zone of invisibility cast by a severed hand, and says you have to pretend you're dead long enough for them to convince the people they work for that they're a killer, you listen. Erin did a lot more than that to convince me—"

"Because I'd had several trial runs before I found the argument you were willing to listen to," calls Erin, pitching her voice so it will carry, not turning a third time.

Kelpie looks nervous. Erin pats her reassuringly on the shoulder.

"Don't worry. People who don't see the orange girl aren't going to pay attention to a totally innocuous statement that only becomes ominous in context."

"Um. If you're sure."

"I am," says Erin, almost serenely.

"—than just light a Hand of Glory, but that went a long way," says Smita, as if a whole conversation hadn't just occurred in the middle of her sentence. "When that happens to you, you start believing in the alchemical world in a hurry. And also, you latch on to the person who was ordered to kill you and refused to do it, and you hang on to them for dear life, because no one else is ever going to take care of you the way that they will. Erin didn't kill me. That means I'm her problem now. Everyone else is just sort of collateral damage."

Erin seems to find this funny. She laughs, long and bright and absolutely delighted, the sound ringing off the buildings to either side.

They've been working their way deeper and deeper into the residential part of Berkeley as they walked, moving away from the part of the city where Isabella lives with her family, and even away from the overpriced modernity of Catrina's neighborhood, into something older and more settled. The houses here are as old as the city itself, and judging by the paint jobs and signs of renovation, many of their occupants are generational homeowners, people who could never afford a house in the modern market but who inherited one from a parent or grandparent and are holding on for dear life, refusing to be shaken off the moving back of the great beast that is the Bay Area real estate market.

All four women watch this change in their own way, and if they thought to share those ways with one another, they would understand so much that is currently unknown to them, but like most people, they aren't in the habit of sharing every thought that crosses their minds without filtration or consideration.

To Isabella, the houses around them now are a triumph and a tragedy. A triumph because she sees how many of them have the kind of herb garden that takes decades to establish, the kind of paint that hasn't been touched up in twice that long, because there's been no need; a little faded is more than good enough when you're never looking to sell. She sees the people who got in early and never let go, burrowing as deep as they could while the burrowing was still possible. And she sees the number of houses with freshly landscaped yards, newly repainted fa?ades, and understands how quickly those legacy houses will be gone, how soon the inevitable march of progress will wear these small communities down, until only the lucky remain.

Erin sees much the same thing but tempered by the patterns that move through the neighborhoods, the little ways the established neighbors support each other and shun the newcomers, even when those new arrivals had nothing to do with the displacement of the previous residents. She sees the way this will foster resentment, how that resentment will fester and grow, until community collapses, broken past the point of any lasting repair. She sees the cracks through which not only light gets through but the twisting roots of weeds that will tear the whole edifice down. Erin, as always, sees the end of all things. In her view, no one is lucky.

Kelpie sees a whole new world of possibilities and potential, filled with things she's never seen before, things she never even dreamed. She sees marvels everywhere she looks, a world woven out of miracles, and she sees nothing but hope and glory. The world is beautiful. She sees none of the history, none of the chaos, none of the cracks in the foundation. For her, this is a perfect moment which may well last forever, and that's enough.

For Smita, the only one of them who still sees things mostly as a normal human would, who still walks through a mostly ordinary world, she sees a neighborhood. A little shabby compared to the ones a few blocks over, but still well outside the reach of most families. She'd feel bad about the fact that she lives very close to here, if not for the fact that she lives in someone else's house, and lives there in part because she's been legally dead for years, ever since Erin convinced her to fake her own murder for the sake of fooling the American Alchemical Congress. Dodger has run the numbers a hundred times, trying to find a way to narrow the gap between her first true synchronization with Roger and their inevitable ascension to claim the Doctrine. There isn't one. For them to have the time they need to settle and mature, Smita must spend a period among the lands of the dead, unable to reveal herself for fear of alchemical intervention.

Smita hasn't existed for slightly over a decade. She uses a dead woman's social security number; she works in a position well beneath her capabilities, using an assumed name and a fraudulent diploma. She never graduated college. Her original career path is outside her grasp, as is the comfort of her family, who mourned her long ago. But she has a supposedly rented room in a comfortable middle-class household, and that has to be enough, because she's not getting anything more. ("Supposedly" because Roger and Dodger own the house, and they sometimes forget to collect rent from her even when she's standing in front of them trying to press money into their hands.) She lives the closest thing a walking dead woman can to a charmed life, and so she sees a neighborhood, full of people living freely, living loudly, living. And she envies them, and she never sees how soon it all might end.

On they walk until the rainbow house with its wild glass windows comes into view. Isabella laughs. "We're going to the clown house?" she asks. "Oh, you never told me you lived in the clown house."

"Is that what people call it?" asks Smita, with real interest.

"Most call it the circus house, but my son Luis always calls it the clown house, and I like his name for it better," says Isabella. "You live there?"

"We do," says Erin.

"It's a little more… busy than I assumed your home would be," says Isabella, with a vain attempt at diplomacy.

"You mean ‘chaotic,' don't you?" asks Erin.

"Is this going to be a thing?" asks Smita. "Because I will squirt you both with a spray bottle and put you in opposite corners like naughty cats, I swear. Yes, it's chaotic, but it's a purposeful chaos, and Erin does just fine. Yes, we both live there. Some friends of ours own the place."

"That's the nicest way I've ever heard you describe the wonder twins," says Erin dryly.

"They were my friends before you were," says Smita.

"Doesn't mean they're anybody's friends now," says Erin. "Remember the food chain."

Kelpie looks perplexed. Isabella goes past that, all the way to concern.

"Excuse me?" she says. "The food chain? What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means the same people who made me made them, and they're not as easily defined as I am." Erin looks to Kelpie. "Care to explain for your friend?"

Kelpie looks down at the ground, which only brings her hooves into view. She lifts her head again, tilting it back until she's looking at nothing but the seemingly endless sky overhead. In a monotone, she says, "James Reed was the heir, creation, and adopted son of Asphodel Baker, the greatest North American alchemist ever denied entry into the Alchemical Congress. He continued her work after she died, trying to achieve the one thing that had eluded her for her entire life: he believed, as she had, that if he could force the Doctrine of Ethos to personify and embody as other natural forces had already done he would be able to use it to seize control of the Impossible City."

"We've all read the Up-and-Under books," says Isabella, impatient. "Why are you explaining them to me?"

"I'm not," she says. "Asphodel Baker wrote those books to encode her theories into the public consciousness so they wouldn't die when she did. She wanted her ideas to live on forever. But everything I just said is real, from before she wrote the books. She made Reed, and no one knows how—if she kept notes, he burned them, because he wasn't as interested in sharing information as his creator had been. She made Reed, and she told him to seek the City, capture the Doctrine, and continue her work, and so for more than a century, that's what he did."

"That's not all he did," says Erin. "He knew whoever took the City would take the world, and he wanted to have as much of the universe under his control as possible when that happened. He obtained a more traditionally made construct, named Leigh Barrow, who had somehow managed to become an alchemist in her own right after killing her creator. With his aid, she was able to personify some of the minor forces—minor only in contrast to the Doctrine, which is major beyond all logic. My brother, Darren, and I were two of those forces. Darren died. I didn't."

"I'm sorry about your brother," says Isabella.

"So am I," says Erin. "No matter how many times we've gone back over things, we've never been able to find a way to save him. Not without losing everything else. Darren stays dead, or the timeline collapses."

"Which would be bad," interjects Smita.

"So this Reed fellow, he tried to embody some force so big it makes Order seem small, and he failed?" asks Isabella, and pales when Erin shakes her head and gestures for the others to follow her toward the house.

"No," she says. "That would be the easy way to have done this. He tried to embody some force that makes Order seem small, and he succeeded. Twice over, since it turns out the Doctrine is so big you can't stuff it into a single body and have room for that body to know how to be human."

Isabella doesn't say anything, and doesn't pale further, but does stumble as they approach the garden gate, tripping over a little irregularity in the sidewalk.

Erin is polite enough not to comment, just opens the gate and holds it for the rest of them.

"They're not that bad, really," says Smita. "The way Reed's protocol had them grow up means they thought they were normal people for a lot longer than most personifications do, and so they still have a lot of little normal-people habits and quirks that you don't necessarily see from the ones who grew up in a lab."

"You know, natural incarnations are more common than the artificial ones," says Isabella, finally sounding like she feels comfortable contributing to the discussion. Kelpie looks at her. "Summer, Winter, the various faces of the Moon, all of them personify without alchemical intervention."

"Maybe so, but that hasn't been my experience," says Smita. "People tell me natural incarnations are a thing, but they never seem to show up when I'm around. I met a very unpleasant lab-grown potential Winter once, if you can call ‘refusing to let her into the garden while she practically frothed at the mouth' meeting someone. She went away when Erin came out and was terrifying at her." She gives the other woman a look of such adoring fondness that it seems hard to believe they're not together, or that Smita doesn't want them to be.

"Your experience is a unique one," says Isabella.

"Really? How many personifications have you met?" Smita sounds genuinely interested, and Kelpie looks to Isabella, eager to hear her answer.

It's Isabella's turn to redden faintly, blush appearing high on the arch of her cheekbones. "Before this week, two."

"I live with five," says Smita. "So even when we account for the people you've met, we're still leading with the artificial."

"We're losing the thread," says Erin. "Kelpie? Finish my story."

Kelpie ducks her head. "Reed continued Baker's work, striving for the Doctrine of Ethos and, by extension, for control of the Impossible City. He was successful in 1986, when twin children were born to one of his incubators—"

"Incubators?" squeaks Isabella, sounding appalled.

"—and verified as potential vessels for the Doctrine. They were separated and placed in the mundane world to mature, one under the care of alchemists Reed had personally selected, one in the custody of a neutral family. As they grew, their connection became apparent and, after a certain point, unbreakable. Attempts were made to separate them, to no avail. They would re-entangle despite all efforts, making it impossible to isolate them, even though they hadn't physically met since birth."

Erin gestures for her to stop before digging her house keys out of her pocket and picking up the thread. "In 2008, shortly after the murder of Smita Mehta, the pair fully connected on the alchemical plane, manifesting their full potential in the physical world for the first time. The Berkeley Earthquake was the result, and it scared them back into separation. Eight years later, they would reunite and defeat their creator, finally ascending to their place as the incarnate Doctrine of Ethos. Long may they get on my fucking nerves, forget to buy milk, and generally drive me to distraction." She unlocks the door and shoves it open, so hard it slams against the opposing wall.

"I want to talk more about that ‘incubators' comment," says Isabella, preparing to follow her inside.

"We use the language we're given," says Erin, and steps in, Isabella close behind. Smita moves to follow, then looks back at Kelpie, who hasn't moved. She seems to have become rooted to the porch, staring at the door like she's afraid it might snap shut and swallow her whole.

"You coming?" asks Smita.

"I should," says Kelpie. "Isabella says it's not safe for me to be alone."

And she doesn't move.

"Okay, so come on."

"I… can't."

Smita takes a step back, letting the door swing shut, and moves back toward Kelpie. "Why can't you?"

"I'm… I'm what they were talking about. I'm a fake person. I didn't know I was a fake person until just a few days ago, and I know how that sounds now that I'm out in the world where lab accidents don't turn people into monsters, and the shape you have is always basically the shape you were born with, but that was what they told me and I believed them, because I didn't know any better."

"That's all right," says Smita soothingly. "We don't use words like ‘real' or ‘fake' here—they're the kind of abstracts we don't need in this house—but even if we did, you wouldn't be the only one. Erin was made in a lab. So were Roger and Dodger, and the kids. I'm the only one who lives here who wasn't."

"But what if they're mad because I was helping the alchemists they ran away from try to find them? What if they look at me and go ‘no, you aren't any tangible concept, the universe doesn't need to personify you, go away' and they make me be not? I know what Reed's cuckoos can do! I've seen the research!"

"They really did treat you like you were one of them, didn't they?" Smita sighs. "We don't do things the way the alchemists you're used to do them. We don't want to. If they look at you and think you're not supposed to exist, Erin and I will make sure they don't do anything unpleasant. And who cares if you're not a tangible concept? What do you embody, if that's not a rude question? Living with this lot hasn't really taught me much about dealing with other embodiments, or how they handle things among themselves."

"Not like I know, either," says Kelpie. "We were working on a project that was supposed to embody the adjuncts of the Lunars. Chang'e's Rabbit, the Old Man's Dog, that sort of thing. They used to appear on their own, but a few centuries ago, they stopped. If we could get one of them to manifest, we'd be able to summon and maybe even control the Lunar they belong with. And since the best-known companions go with some of the most powerful Lunars, that was a good goal to be working toward if…"

She stops then, looking guilty. Smita smiles, just a little.

"Do Lunars have some sort of access to the City?"

Kelpie nods, silent.

"Thought so. Come on. We need to join the others." Smita reopens the door.

This time, Kelpie follows her inside.

The house is smaller and warmer than Catrina's, and while it isn't particularly cluttered or unkempt, it seems dirtier, in a vital, living sense, like dirt is allowed here, while it has been so thoroughly forbidden at Catrina's house that it would never dare enter. The walls have the well-scrubbed appearance of something that has been scrubbed, not merely wiped down, because at one point it needed to be.

Kelpie, who spent most of her life in sterile lab conditions, immediately decides she likes this much better. This house looks like people live in it, like it's happy to have people living in it, and that makes more of a difference than she could possibly have realized before it was placed in front of her. This is a good house.

This is a good house, but people are arguing very nearby, a multitude of overlapping voices. It sounds like a budget meeting in the lab, except that none of them are talking about resource allocation. Smita looks toward the noise, frowns, and takes Kelpie by the elbow.

"Come on," she says. "I have a few people you ought to meet while they take care of whatever all that's about."

Kelpie blinks but lets herself be pulled away from the sound of voices and up the stairs to the landing on the second floor.

Even more than the entry hall, the second-floor hall is filled with light, more than the windows can adequately explain, although the sun pours through them in honeyed sheets, illuminating the little motes of dust dancing in the air, turning them into a pale, phantom aura of gold around the pair as they move through. There are no artificial lights. The sun just seems to refract off of itself somehow, growing bigger and stronger within the enclosed space.

Tall bookshelves have been pushed up against the walls, and braided rugs in a wide variety of contrasting colors pepper the floor, almost like someone has been trying to replicate the experience of standing outside, looking at the house. One of the windows has a set of prisms hanging from it, adding tiny, glimmering rainbows to the scene.

The shouting is quieter here. Kelpie relaxes marginally, realizing how much tension she was carrying after their walk and conversation. Being out in the open is still new to her, and no matter how aware she is that most people won't see anything strange about her, it's difficult not to be afraid.

Smita watches, smiling a little as she sees Kelpie straighten.

"That's better," she says. "Did you know you wrap your tail around your leg when you're worried about something? You shouldn't do that. You'll cut off the circulation, and I don't know if even the most mundane doctor in the world could treat you without noticing you don't have feet."

"What do feet have to do with anything?"

"Normally, when people lose circulation to their leg, we worry about them possibly losing toes."

"Well, I already lost all of mine, so I guess I'm ahead of the game," says Kelpie, and giggles.

Smita's smile widens. "Good. I was afraid we'd traumatized you, and we still have so many opportunities to do that." She moves toward a closed door. Someone has placed a small whiteboard in the middle of it, and a complicated mathematical equation has been written there, the numbers surrounded by surprisingly well-drawn wildflowers in dry-erase marker. Smita knocks, lightly.

A feminine voice shouts, "Go away."

"It's Smita," says Smita. "Dodger is downstairs making someone else's life more difficult than it technically needs to be, if the yelling is anything to judge by. I have a guest."

"You never have guests." There's the rattling sound of a chain being undone, and then the door is cracked open, and a face appears in the gap.

Kelpie blinks. So does the girl, whose eyes widen briefly at the sight of the orange woman in the hallway, before she opens the door wider.

"You can both come in," she says, in a tone that implies she's granting some impossible favor.

"Thank you," says Smita. "Kelpie, this is Kim. Kim, this is Kelpie."

"Nice to, um, meet you," says Kelpie, as she follows Smita into the room. She has to fight the urge to stare.

Kim isn't being nearly so careful. She closes the door behind the pair, turning to watch them.

"Your friend's orange," she says.

"Yes," says Smita.

"Your friend has a tail," she says.

Kelpie feels like she should contribute something at this point, so she says, "Your hair is green."

"No, it's not," says Kim.

"I mean, it looks white, mostly, but when the light hits it at the right angle, it's green," says Kelpie. "I didn't know human hair could look like that. It's really pretty, but if we're saying obvious things, it's the most obvious thing about you."

Kim starts to protest, then stops, and frowns at her. "It won't dye. I've tried, even though it makes me sick to my stomach to even think about dyeing it, but then the dye rolls right off as soon as it's dry. That's chemically impossible."

"‘Impossible' is a thing people say when they want something not to have happened and don't have a good reason why it wouldn't," says Kelpie.

Kim stands up straighter, color leaving her cheeks. "Get out," she says, voice gone cold.

"What?" asks Kelpie.

"What?" echoes Smita.

"That's what Leigh used to say when—that's what the alchemist who raised me used to say, and I hated her, and I'm not going to sit here and listen to whatever one of her students has to say, even if you are orange."

"I wasn't one of Leigh Barrow's students," protests Kelpie. "I never even met her! The lab where I worked didn't open until after she was already dead! I'm pretty sure that's where I was made, since waking up there is the first thing I can remember. They told me it was because I'd been in a really bad accident that scrambled up my head, and since I already knew how to talk and do a lot of simple things, like dressing myself or running the autoclave, I never had a reason to think they were lying to me. But Leigh Barrow didn't teach me or create me or anything, and I can't know what of the things I've learned are bad to say if people chase me away as soon as I say one of them!"

Kim pauses. "You're artificial?"

"You didn't pick up on that just by looking at her?" asks Smita dryly.

Kim shoots her a sharp look. "She could have been a modified human. They came through the lab sometimes, people who'd decided two hands weren't enough, and given themselves prehensile tails, or feet like monkeys. The other alchemists scoffed at them behind their backs, called them ‘Moreaus' and acted like they were fools for making themselves less than human. I always thought they were braver than the other alchemists."

"Braver? How?"

"A normal alchemist is so dangerous because they look just like everybody else. At least the ones who push themselves outside the bounds of what can be considered ‘normal' give people a fighting chance to know they're in danger. And no, most people don't believe in magic anymore, so they wouldn't necessarily see those modifications before the alchemist attacked, but alchemists aren't wizards wandering around with nasty wands they can point at people and shoot spells out of. They need to get close enough to open a vial or throw something in your direction, or have the time to set runes and triggers for you to stumble over. But if an alchemist who'd modified themselves attacked somebody, and the person lived, they'd be able to find who hurt them. They'd be able to see it. Can't not believe in what hurts you."

"Meaning they lost deniability," says Smita, slowly.

Kim nods. "Yeah. So I thought she'd just been messing around with her own composition for fun, or because it was useful, or hell, because she thought orange skin made her tits look great! Who knows why an alchemist does anything?"

"I'm not an alchemist," says Kelpie, voice tight.

"Then what are you?"

"I'm…" She pauses. There are so many possible answers. None of them are good, or easy. Part of her hates the man who came to examine the lab, because he killed Margaret, but he didn't do it fast enough to stop Margaret from telling her the truth. The truth is complicated. The truth is oozing all over everything like alkahest, melting it away, turning it into something new. She was happy with the lies. She was happy believing she had a family missing her in faraway Florida, that one day she'd go back to them, that one day she'd be a normal human woman, and not have to worry all the time about someone seeing her on the street and knowing her for something made, not born. She knew who she was, and where she belonged, and she was happy.

And now she doesn't know any of that. Is she a lab technician? Is she Artemis's Hind? Is she a person who got hurt in an accident, or is she someone's science project? Even that question isn't as simple as it seems on the surface. Construct or cuckoo, manikin or monster, there are so many options for a made thing. She worked on the projects that apparently created her, she knows they used Baker's seed material at their root: she's a cuckoo, and the longer she stands near this girl with the cornsilk hair and the golden-brown eyes, the more she recognizes her as kin. They're vessels filled from the same well, not sisters, but… cousins, maybe. Distant relations spun on the same wheel and fired in the same kiln.

"I'm Kelpie," she says finally, and the words are flat on her tongue, like water that's been sitting out in the open air for too long, allowed to turn stagnant and stale. "That's all. They made me in the lab. I used to think I was one of them, and now I think I may be something they invented. The only thing I'm completely sure of is my name, because at this point, it's mine, and I'm not giving it back."

"She's a cuckoo, like you," says Smita.

Kim blinks several times, and then, to Kelpie's surprise and dismay, fat tears start rolling down her cheeks. They're not like Margaret's final tears: they're just water, not her eyes melting out of her head. Wiping them away, Kim turns to face the desk, no longer looking at Kelpie or Smita.

"There are no cuckoos like me, except my brother, and he's not enough," she says, voice gone dull.

"I don't understand," says Kelpie.

Kim sniffles—a thick, snotty sound—and turns back to Kelpie, still crying. "They made us to embody the Doctrine of Ethos, and we were supposed to be perfect," she says. "They used everything they learned from every failed pair, and they made us. We were going to manifest. We were going to catch the Doctrine. We were so close. We were going to be perfect, and we were going to be free, because as soon as we manifested, we were going to blow those bastards down. We had a plan." Her expression is pleading, desperate for Kelpie to understand. "All we had to do was survive long enough for them to give us what they made us to carry, and we could walk away, me and my brother, the living Doctrine. But instead, the last round of failures somehow overpowered the man who made us all, and they claimed the Doctrine, and then they wouldn't give it back."

She turns her face to the wall. "They took what we were made to carry, and they carried it away. Tim and I, we'd been entangled since before we could walk. I didn't know where he ended and I began. And suddenly we were two separate people, with two separate bodies, and it was so wrong it hurt, and there was nothing we could do about it. There's still nothing we can do about it. No one knows whether the Doctrine is going to get addicted to being human and stick around the way the other forces have. Maybe when Roger and Dodger die—if they die—it goes back to being nebulous and unconcerned with humanity. Or maybe it sticks around. Either way, it won't choose us. By the time they're dead, we'll be old. It'll want better hosts. Clean hosts. Hosts that didn't already fail."

"I'm sorry," says Kelpie, awkwardly. "I don't know much about the Doctrine, really. All Margaret ever liked to say was that the alchemists working for James Reed had managed to incarnate it, and then the cuckoos who were supposed to carry it went rogue and ran away before they could be properly put to use. They're real scared about it being out there in the wild."

"Why?" asks Kim, her tears finally stopping in the face of her confusion.

"They—the alchemists, I mean—are trying to get to a place called the Impossible City. The way Reed embodied the Doctrine of Ethos means the cuckoos who carry it have the authority to claim the Tower if they want to, and the alchemists want to get there first."

"But the Queen of Wands…" says Kim.

"The Queen of Wands is dead," says Kelpie. "Asphodel Baker claimed the crown before she wrote the Up-and-Under books, and since her death, the Tower has been standing empty, and there's no one in her parlor."

"The way you people treat those books like a religion baffles me sometimes," says Smita. "They're just kiddie books."

"They're a primer on modern alchemical reality," says Kim, somewhat stiffly.

"That's why Baker wrote them," says Kelpie. "She wanted to solidify her concepts about reality and spread them as wide as she could, because the person who got there first would win. Baum tried to unseat her with his Emerald City, but he made it too real. He spent too much time there. The Impossible City isn't real. It can't be. A thing that's real has been defined until it doesn't feel fully flexible the way something a little bit hazy does. The Impossible City is impossible in part because it has to encompass everything that everyone in the world can possibly ask it to be."

"So the alchemists want the Impossible City," says Smita. "We knew that. What does that have to do with Roger and Dodger being out on their own?"

"Baker proposed the idea of embodying the Doctrine because she believed it was the key to universal control, and hence to claiming the City itself," says Kelpie. "The City is the universe. Whoever controls it, controls everything. Reed continued her work because he wanted to control reality."

Kim wrinkles her nose. "Roger and Dodger can't control the universe. They're too weird."

"Alchemical constructs generally are," says Kelpie. She pauses and then, laughing nervously, adds, "Which includes me, I guess."

"I guess."

Kelpie looks to Smita. "Why did you want me to meet her? She's nice, but I don't understand."

"She's not terrifying, is she?" asks Smita. "She's just a teenage girl who was almost the human incarnation of Math, and now she isn't. But even if she never gets to be Math, she'll always be Kim. She'll always be a really real person, who also happens to be a cuckoo. How you're made doesn't matter. It's what you do once you exist that matters."

"Oh," says Kelpie. "I guess that… that makes sense." She looks back to Kim. "It was very nice to meet you. I'm sorry you didn't get to be what they made you to be."

"That makes two of us," says Kim, and smiles, expression at odds with her words. "It was nice to meet you, too. I hope you figure out what you're supposed to be, and that it's something you don't have to be if you don't want to."

"Ready to go downstairs?" asks Smita, almost gently.

Kelpie sighs, then nods.

"Ready as I'll ever be," she says.