Palus Nebularum

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

Artemis takes a step toward Kelpie, looking like she's been punched in the stomach hard enough to knock the air out of her and leave her reeling, no longer fully steady on her feet. Her hands have come up at some point, not reaching, not trying to grasp or grab, but just… hanging there, held in front of her like she no longer knows what to do with them.

Kelpie shies back, against Smita's side. She doesn't look afraid, exactly; she seems more resigned, as if this were something she knew would need to be dealt with eventually, but still held out hope it could be delayed a little longer, or possibly forever.

"Artemis," says Chang'e.

"I would have known if they'd managed—but I started watching Berkeley without a good reason, and that's how I saw how upset the alchemists here were. I only noticed because I was already looking. Did I start looking because of… Are you really?" There's a plea in her last word that defies all description. It's the sound of someone finding a lost lover or a pet they'd long since resigned themselves to never seeing again.

"I don't know," says Kelpie, voice peaking into a wail. "I don't know what I am! I was supposed to be a person, an alchemist, and Margaret was fixing me, she promised what she was doing was going to fix me, so I could be just like everybody else. I have… I have a family in Florida, and maybe they were always ever only lies, but she told me all about them, and they sent me letters sometimes, and so they feel real to me, no matter what the truth is. I don't want to be a cuckoo. I don't want to be a science project or a piece of the universe that stopped pretending it was a person because not enough people wanted it to be. I want to just be me, and I want being me to be totally normal, and not something that makes people look at me the way you're looking at me now. I want to go home."

"You can't go back to the people who made you," says Isabella. "Even if they weren't dead, they weren't treating you right. Whether you were supposed to be a person or not, you're a person now, and that means you deserve the chance to figure out what that means without people telling you lies."

"She's right," says Dodger, somewhat surprisingly; she hasn't exactly been the most generous or encouraging voice in this conversation. As she pushes herself away from the counter and steps up even with her brother, her eyes are on Kelpie. "You're a person now. You're as real as anybody else, because it doesn't matter how we're made, just that we exist. Those people lied to you, and they were planning to keep lying to you, and they didn't do you a favor by forcing you to manifest when you didn't want to. But then, no one asks to be born. Now you get to figure out who and what you want to be, and you get to go for it, no matter what. If you're a celestial hind, that's fine. Doesn't mean you belong to Artemis here, any more than you belong to the alchemists. I think we need to be focusing a little more on why Lunars are dying, and why the alchemists are in such a god-awful snit right now."

"The eclipse," says Chang'e.

Everyone else in the kitchen turns to look at her. Roger speaks first. "The which?"

"There's a total lunar eclipse coming in three days," she says. "The moon is going to be blocked out all the way across the contiguous United States. It's going to be obscured across an unusually large geographic area."

"Do they have eclipses in the Impossible City?" asks Smita.

Chang'e nods, very slowly. "They do," she says. "They mirror the mortal moon as closely as they can, and that means that on the nights when we see no moon here, they see no moon in the City sky. But since the moon is always visible somewhere in the world, there will still be Lunars going into the everything even when the ones here are staying home."

"Not nearly as many," says Máni. "If someone has access to the everything—enough access to have gotten in there and assaulted Aske while she was trying to complete her duties—they could presumably open a gate and get in without needing to worry about running into anyone else."

"But we determined that we each have our own path through the everything," argues Artemis. "Why would anyone need to worry about that?"

"We didn't really determine that," says Chang'e, slowly. "We determined that every Lunar has our own path through the everything, and they always lead us to the same place—to the windows in the sky above the City. We don't know whether another Artemis would use your path, or have their own."

"What do those windows look like to the residents, I wonder?" muses Roger.

"Stars," says Erin, in a tone that implies the answer is patently obvious to anyone who takes a moment to consider it.

The word spreads through the group, and then it is patently obvious. What else could the windows be, if not stars scattered across the glorious blackness above the City? Chang'e catches her breath as Judy stirs within her, glancing to Máni. "So the paths we take through the everything, they don't actually close when we shut the gate, do they. They stay where they are, so the light from the Moon can bounce off all the closed windows and turn them into stars."

"Yes," says Erin.

"I know how we can find Aske's body," she says, and turns the whole of her attention on Dodger, who blinks in brief surprise, and then in irritation. She's not used to being surprised anymore. She clearly doesn't like it.

"What do I have to do with this?" she asks.

"It's Artemis's night to cross the sky above the City," says Máni. He hasn't contributed much up until now, but it's obvious he's excited by this new way of approaching the problem. "You could go into the everything with her, and while she's crossing, you could go from her window to Aske's."

"There are about eighty million problems with that idea, but the first one—the big one—is that I don't know which window you're talking about," says Dodger. "I'm not the most athletic person in the world—Roger, I swear if you laugh at me, I am going to tell the laws of thermodynamics, and your coffee will be cold for the next month—and I'm not super into the idea of climbing out a window and trying to jump across a void to something I don't know."

"You're Math, right?" asks Artemis. "If you went to Máni and Chang'e's windows with them before you came with me, couldn't you extrapolate where the next relevant window would be?"

"That's not math, that's divination," says Dodger. "Pseudoscience. There's also the question of whether the stars above the City move. Are you clustered together because you're here, or do your windows stay wherever it is they were when you became manifest? Or when you were incarnated?"

"You keep using all these different words like they're interchangeable, but they don't mean exactly the same thing, and I think I've earned a footnote," says Isabella. "What the hell is the difference between manifest and incarnated?"

"Sorry," says Roger. He doesn't sound sorry. "Sometimes we forget we're using the words the alchemists came up with for all these things, and not everyone knows what those words mean. Language is a shared consensus of concepts as much as it's anything else, and if we don't share the local definitions, we might as well be speaking a language you don't know."

Isabella blinks, then, and looks faintly mollified as she says, "Well, if you'll just explain yourselves now, we can get back to throwing people out of windows."

"Hey," says Dodger, dryly.

"A personification is a universal force that has been compelled to take on physical form," says Roger. "Normally human, or so human-adjacent as to make no difference, normally—despite the evidence of this kitchen—naturally occurring, brought about by patterns of myth and belief. People say the summer is a person enough times, they eventually get Summer, born into a human body and walking around doing things like a human might. Gods are just another form of personification. Most of them don't have any sort of cosmic powers or anything like that: they have what the stories gave them, and what we believe they're going to have."

Isabella looks, momentarily, horrified. "Wait, wait… if it's not just moon gods, are you saying that the God is wandering around all the time, wearing pants and eating sandwiches and looking like a normal human?"

"Erin, you want to field this one?"

"He's not," says Erin. "Any god more powerful than the strongest Lunars would take more belief than we have on the whole planet, and they'd be inherently limited by the shape they took. If you want omnipotence, you need the City. If any of the big-G gods currently has a physical form, that's where they'll be. Sitting in the control room of reality, keeping everything vaguely operational."

"Oh. Good."

"But little gods, like our Lunars here, gods that are closely tied to specific natural phenomenon or things, they personified a long time ago. And the universe is a creature of habit, just as much as the people who live inside of it are. Once it starts doing something, it needs a good reason to stop. So they keep incarnating, over and over again, probably forever. I would be willing to wager actual money that the gods we don't see anymore, the ones people have forgotten about, who don't have any believers to remind the universe about them, still incarnate. They just don't manifest."

"Because that's the difference," says Roger, stepping in and smoothly taking over. "An incarnation is someone who's been born who might manifest one day, who might become a living personification of a universal concept. Dodger and I were incarnate from the moment we were born. It took us a long time to realize we needed to become something more, and manifest. That was when we fully claimed the Doctrine of Ethos and became it, for all intents and purposes. As long as we're alive, we'll be the living manifestations of the personification of the Doctrine. Nothing gets to change that now."

"I met a girl upstairs," says Kelpie. "She had green hair, and she said she and her brother were almost the Doctrine. What is she?"

"Kim," says Dodger, with a flicker of regret. "She's an incarnation, like we were. She was made by the same alchemists, using the same material, and I guess on a purely merit-based level, she and her brother would have been better candidates for manifestation. We just got there first, and while a lot of incarnations can choose not to manifest if they don't want to, you can't really de-manifest. We couldn't give the Doctrine back if we wanted to."

"And we don't want to," says Roger. "We fought and bled and sacrificed a lot to be standing here, two manifest halves of a force without which the universe would collapse, watching you look at us like we're zoo exhibits. I'm sorry Kim didn't get what she was made to want. I'm not sorry my sister did."

Dodger bumps him with her shoulder, focusing on Isabella. "That's your answer, in the broadest terms possible. A personification is something that shouldn't be a person, but is. An incarnation is a person with the potential to represent that something, and a manifestation is someone who does represent it."

"Do we really need three separate words for that?" asks Isabella.

"Yes," says every incarnation currently in the kitchen, which is almost every other person there. Roger follows up with "We need thirty, for the gradations and subtle differences, and so people don't waste time asking what you meant. We need more words, not fewer of them, and these three are the ones that have managed to hang on for centuries, which means they're the best words available, even if they're still more limited than I would like them to be."

"So the moment we became incarnate is when this body"—Chang'e gestures to herself—"was born, and the moment we became manifest is when we agreed that we were willing to be gods. For me, there was a sixteen-year gap between those two events. If my window is still where it was when I was born, it's nowhere near here. But I've always walked the same distance through the everything, and I can't say for sure, but I feel like there are so many stars above the City that they could absolutely move around if they wanted to. Lunars who shine from the same spot in the sky should have windows near each other."

"So it's settled," says Artemis. "She follows each of us into the everything so she can start charting out the location of our windows, and then either she swings over to the right window, or I do it. I'm probably a lot more athletic than she is. No offense."

"None taken. I'm a math nerd who manages to avoid spending eight hours at the gym every week solely because I'm also an immutable force of the universe."

"Not to point out the elephant in the room, but what are we going to do about the alchemists who lost her?" Erin hooks her thumb at Kelpie. "Alchemists aren't great about letting other people take their toys, and they're likely to be looking for this one."

"My apartment is warded," says Isabella. "My family is safe."

Roger starts shaking his head, and she blinks at him, bewildered. "No, that won't do," he says. "Dodge, how far are we going in adopting these people?"

"Erin likes them; I think we're keeping them."

"How do you know she likes us?" asks Kelpie.

"She hasn't murdered either one of you," says Smita, and Erin sticks her tongue out at her. Smita snickers.

"Okay, great. Dodge, start watching the listings."

"On it."

Isabella frowns. "I'm sorry, what's going on?"

"The kind of wards you can manage on an apartment are good, but they're going to erode fast as people come and go," explains Roger. "They'll collapse, and if you're not already in the process of setting whatever comes next, they'll leave your family exposed. Maybe only for a few seconds, but a few seconds is all these assholes need. You need a border that's entirely yours."

"So we're going to find you a house," says Dodger, like that's a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to say to somebody they've just met.

Isabella gapes at the two of them. "What?"

"House," says Roger. "That's what you need. Hey, moon people. When can we access this everything you keep talking about?"

"I feel like you can probably access it any time you want to," says Chang'e. "But more realistically, as soon as the moon shows up in the sky, we can open up the gate. It moves around every night, but the local version's been circling the clocktower, so we should probably check there first."

"Of course it is," says Dodger. "Guess we're going to campus at moonrise. Now if you'll all excuse me, this is about as much togetherness as I can handle before midnight, and I'm not going to get that much alone time. I'll be in my room when you're ready to go. Roger? Call me."

And she's gone, striding out of the kitchen like she's just remembered some incredibly vital appointment she needs to attend to right now.

"Huh," says Smita. "She lasted a lot longer than I expected her to."

"Not the most social person in the house," says Erin. "And given that we have two teenagers who mostly hide in their rooms, and also me, that's saying something pretty impressive. But if she says she'll help, she'll help, and that means she's with us for charting out your windows and hopefully figuring out which one you want. Why are we doing this?"

"One of our friends was murdered while she was in a place no one should be able to access without a Lunar," says Artemis. "We said we were looking for her body."

"That can have a lot of meanings," says Erin. "Sorry about your friend. And I'm sure you'll find the answers you're looking for now that you've got a little outside help. I'm going to go check on the kids, but I'll come along with you all when it's actually time to go out where the alchemists are." She gestures for Smita to follow her out of the kitchen, and the two of them make their exit, heading quickly up the stairs.

"I should get home," says Isabella, seeing the dissolution of their temporary gathering as an opportunity for escape. "My son will be home from school by now, and if there's any chance the wards might go down, I need to be there before it happens."

"Yes, you should be," says Kelpie solemnly. "The people who made me… they wouldn't think twice about killing him if they thought it would help them get whatever it is they want, and they'd use the pieces against you."

Isabella looks horrified for a moment, then says, briskly, "I'll look up moonrise online, and meet you all at the clocktower. Sir." She turns to Roger. "Can I bring my son and husband here while we're on campus? I can make something up to explain why, but I don't want them left alone."

Roger nods. "Tim and Kim won't be coming with us. If you say you're babysitting, they're highly unlikely to come downstairs and contradict you."

"Thank you," says Isabella. She gives Kelpie a brisk, one-armed hug, then flees for the door.

One by one, they're slipping away. Chang'e looks to Artemis, then to Kelpie. "Is there a place these two could go and talk, maybe? Without being listened to the whole time?"

"They can go out in the backyard," says Roger, and gestures to a door. "No one will bother them there."

"Wonderful," says Chang'e. "I want to go out front and check out that peach tree I saw before Judy shoves me out of the way and starts trying to interrogate you about linguistics."

Roger smiles toothily. "Having a little trouble keeping her suppressed?"

"You have no idea," says Chang'e. "Being at Berkeley with you and feeling like she couldn't talk to you has been wearing on her ever since we found out what you are. Máni, you want to come with me?"

"Going to leave me alone in the yard when she wins and jerks you back inside to yell at him, aren't you?"

"Oh, probably," she says, and he's laughing as they head back toward the front door, leaving Artemis and Kelpie to look at each other awkwardly. Roger sighs and puts his mug down on the counter.

"Door's right there if you ladies want to do this outside, or you can have the kitchen," he says. "I'll be in my office either way. It's the door at the end of the hall with the bronze sign that says ‘Please, no,' in eleven languages. If you can read them all, you may knock. If you can't, unless the house is on fire, please leave me alone."

"Okay…?" says Kelpie, and watches in bemusement as he picks up the coffee pot, refills his mug, and takes it with him out of the kitchen.

At last they are alone. Neither one of them looks particularly happy about it. Kelpie looks like she's going to be sick.

"I didn't—" she begins.

"I wasn't—" says Artemis, at the same time. She stops, catching her breath, and takes a step backward, putting some more distance between her and Kelpie, and at the same time, opening the path to the back door. "They're right, though. We should talk. Do you want to do it inside or out in the garden?"

"Outside is still really new to me," says Kelpie. "It's exciting. I've seen flowers before, but they were always in the hydroponics section, or part of someone's experiment."

Artemis frowns, biting the edge of one lip. "I don't… I don't like that for you."

"I didn't know anything different." Kelpie shrugs. "Margaret told me the accident had messed up my head just as much as my body, and I trusted her, so I thought she was telling the truth. I believed her when she said I could never risk going up to the surface, not until they finished fixing me."

"Fixing you?"

"I guess I was already too human when they made me for them to see me as the kind of tool they wanted me to be? Sometimes when new technicians came to the lab, they'd say I was in the ‘uncanny valley,' and so funny-looking that I was cute. I didn't really understand what that meant, but they didn't seem to say it to be mean, and the ones who felt that way were almost always nice to me, so I figured it had to be a good thing."

"Okay…"

"Oh, um. Fixing me. Right. I looked a lot less… human? I guess? When I first woke up?" Kelpie waves her hands, encompassing the hooves, the tail, the complexion that not even the world's worst spray tan could explain. She doesn't look human. She looks bipedal but like a member of some other species entirely, something that was never intended to stand in this kitchen and talk about human things. "So they were working to change those parts of me so they'd be more normal. And give me back my memory from before the accident."

"Since now we know there was no ‘before the accident,' what does that mean?"

"It means that Margaret would bring me papers she said I wrote, and my application to come and work in the lab, and pictures of my family in Florida. We'd do flash cards, with things on them that I needed to recognize so I'd be safe when I finally left the lab. Cars and buses and sidewalks and money. She worked really hard to get me ready." Kelpie sighs. "I know it's probably wrong, but my whole life, I've thought one day I was going to get to be something else, and even though I don't mind what I am that much—people should have tails, it's hard to tell what they're thinking when they don't, and toes are weird, I'm glad I don't have toes—it's hard to let go of what I thought I was meant to be."

"I get that," says Artemis. "I really do. I don't control where I incarnate, but when I introduced myself to Anna, she thought she was going to be a teacher. She grew up in a really strict family, and they had all these rules about what she could wear and who she could talk to and what careers she was allowed to even think about. ‘Teacher' was one of the only ones that they said was suitable for a woman. And then I moved in, and told her it was okay to want to be happy, and she started pushing their limits." She pauses for a moment, expression turning somber.

"I think…" Artemis says finally. "I think it might be easier if we did things the way the alchemists do, when they make their perfect vessels. If we weren't sharing space. I'm Artemis, I know I'm Artemis, but I don't remember any of those things that people say about Olympus. I could hit a target dead-on from the moment I first picked up a bow, and anything that can be a projectile weapon is deadly in my hands, but I never trained. And sometimes the things I want and the things Anna wants aren't the same. I have to negotiate with myself all the time, forever, in order to stay on level ground. When I meet another Artemis, she's me, but she isn't, like a photograph that's been left out in the rain and gotten all distorted. But neither of us is a clearer picture than the other; we're just starting from someplace different. I've never seen a Hind before. They stopped incarnating a long time before this incarnation of me was born."

"Why?" asks Kelpie. "If the City needs the Lunars to satisfy its populace, and enough people believe in you that you keep getting born over and over again, why did the companions go away?"

"I think because the City didn't need you, and so it never pressed against the part of the universe that spends resources putting pieces of itself in living bodies," says Artemis. She finally moves to open the back door, gesturing toward it with an open hand, inviting. "You want to go outside?"

"Okay," says Kelpie, and crosses to exit, careful to keep as much distance between herself and Artemis as possible. It's like she fears something will change if they touch, and maybe something will; she was built to be a perfect companion to this woman, after all, and now that they're in the same place, the same time, she has no idea what that might actually mean for her. Right now, she still feels like she can walk away.

Or could, if she had anywhere to go. She's trying her hardest not to think about that. She can't go back to the lab, even if part of her wants to, yearns for the safety of familiar surroundings and routines. The man who killed Margaret would do the same to her without hesitation. She isn't even human. She's a failed project. There's no reason for him to let her roam free.

She can't go back to Isabella's apartment. What Roger said about the wards matches what she understands of such boundaries, which even the strongest alchemist can't render unbreakable without a lot more time and resources than Isabella has. Her presence puts that family in danger. She isn't sure if she's a danger to these people as well, but she feels like they would have said something if she were, like they would have pushed her out the door and told her to solve her own problems. More importantly, these people are as unnatural as she is. They understand in a way that Isabella can't.

But they haven't asked her to stay, and she can't invite herself. Out on the streets, on her own, she'll be a beacon for any alchemist who's looking to score points with the Congress by bringing the runaway back; she can't evade them forever. And from what she knows, having been on the companion incarnation project for as much of her life as she can remember, being Artemis's Hind isn't going to give her any of the strange abilities that some personifications get after they become manifest.

Is she even manifest? What if this is all the stage before that happens, and she's going to wind up like the Lunars, with someone else inside her head, telling her what to do and occasionally taking control of her body? They all seem comfortable with what they are and the way it works, but she's never considered needing to share the only thing that's really hers. She doesn't want to.

The existence of the steps up to the front porch should have made her realize how elevated the house is from the ground, but she's not familiar enough with standard architecture, and she didn't realize before. She steps onto the back porch and stops, hooves thudding dully against the weathered redwood surface. Another set of steps leads down to the backyard, which is a riot of color. Green dominates, of course, in the form of lush grass and surprisingly well-behaved blackberry vines, which have twisted and wrapped themselves around one another to form tidy mounds, turning the back half of the yard into a labyrinth of channels and paths. Their branches hang heavy with fruit. Much of the rest of the space is filled with vegetable beds, all as ripe and perfect as the ones out front, none seeming to care about the season or the weather.

This is a tiny slice of paradise, called into being behind a house in Berkeley. It's thriving, but Kelpie knows without asking that it's fragile; remove any of the pieces from this exact configuration, and the whole thing will come crashing down.

The door shuts as Artemis exits the house to stand behind her, still not closing the distance between them, still not touching her. Artemis may not share her specific concerns about what will happen when they inevitably make contact, but she's respecting Kelpie's clear concerns as best she can, even as she continues to lean toward the other woman like a flower leans toward the sun.

"I don't know why the City needs a Moon, or whether it's going to stop someday," she says. "I don't even know whether the people we see there are actually people, or if they're ideas, or ideals, or something else altogether. Maybe they're concepts that haven't personified yet, or maybe they're former manifestations that have gone to their reward for putting up with all this bullshit while they were alive. I think you'd have to go down into the City to find out for sure, and that's not allowed. We can't leave the sky while we're overhead."

Kelpie glances at her and nods, listening without interjecting.

"I think Lunars work the way we do because we have to be used to the idea of sharing space inside ourselves. When we go into the sky above the City, we're never alone. Every other Lunar who's come to shine that night emerges and shines with us, and when we come together, we make a Moon. But what I know about companions tells me they never do that. They don't combine to form one bigger than themselves. They stay in the everything, and they watch us pass, and then when we come back to the everything, they… help."

"Help how?"

"That's less clear. I think they're supposed to help us snap back into being ourselves, and not stay muddled up with all the other people we've been combined with for the whole night. Sort of like using a ground wire when you're working with electricity. They bleed off the extra energy. And that makes sense, when you consider that only the most powerful Lunars ever manifest companions."

"Máni," says Kelpie, dubiously.

"He used to be a lot more powerful than he is now," says Artemis. "Chang'e still has a lot of active worshippers, and the way the Holy Roman Empire fucked with European culture when they started expanding means that even though Diana and I don't have nearly as many worshippers as she does, just as many people know who we are, because they've read the books of Greek and Roman mythology. They know our names, and so we hold on to the power we should probably have lost centuries ago. Why us and not Máni, or Losna, or any of the others? It's all down to who managed to spread their stories farther and faster than anyone else, like dandelions going to seed and blanketing a whole meadow."

"Oh," says Kelpie, voice softer.

"So if you're worried that you're going to get swallowed up by something you never asked for, I don't think you need to be worried. Not the way a new Lunar does."

"What do you mean? You swallow them?"

Artemis looks momentarily guilty. "No. I mean, yes, but also no. We don't swallow our hosts; we share with them, and we make them stronger than they would have been without us. But at the end of the day, when we're manifesting our divinity, they're pushed way, way down. They become passengers in their own bodies, in their own lives. I have Anna's face and Anna's body, always. I can make a lot of trouble for her. If I break the law, her ID is the one they'll flag in the system. If I drop out of school or decide it would be fun to try some sort of really addictive drugs, she's eventually going to have to deal with that. And of course, when I have control, she doesn't. That's time that should have been hers, getting spent on being me. She can't get that time back. Not ever. And being Artemis means I'm naturally manifest a lot of the time. I can't step all the way down when I'm on a hunt, even if I want to."

"Meaning…?"

"Meaning right now, Anna is always sharing space with me in a way that means she doesn't have full control over her life—but she's still here. You have to remember that. She was here before I started speaking to her, and when she dies—because all mortal flesh will die, no matter how many peaches she steals from Chang'e's garden—Artemis will endure. This speck of the greater goddess will gutter out and fade away, forgotten like any other tiny variation on a familiar story, and somewhere in the world, someone else will wake up with the voice of a goddess ringing in their ears." Artemis sighs. "Gods die all the time. Especially tiny gods like us."

"Why do the gods have to be tiny?" asks Kelpie. "That's the part I don't quite get. If the universe has to use energy to make you manifest, wouldn't it be better to just make one of each of you at a time, and not spend all that extra energy?"

"The universe wants its personifications to be human," says Artemis. "That's the whole point of making us the way it does. It likes being able to experience things through a human lens, and so it casts some of its functions into human roles. But if all of me incarnated in one person…" She pauses, shivers. "I'm pretty sure that's the main reason the universe splits us up this way. Because we're small enough to share space with people, we don't completely destroy them. When a Summer or Winter becomes manifest, they're still the people they were before they were seasons, just with a sort of… overlay that never quite goes away. When a Lunar becomes manifest, they're still completely the person they were, just with a voice in their head nudging them along and occasionally asking for a turn at the wheel. But when an Element becomes manifest, when someone is Fire, or is Water, or whatever, the person they were before they manifested is gone. They're burnt out, drowned, blown away, buried. There's no going back. The Elements can't step down, because there's nothing left for them to step down to. If you put a whole god into a human body, you'd get a situation like those three inside. There is no Professor Middleton. It's nice that he's pretending he's a person, and I guess he's not faking it entirely, because he grew up already connected to the Doctrine through his sister—breaking it into two bodies and tying them together means they had to be a little bit manifest from birth—but really, there's nothing there but Language. It's just Language with a name and a coffee order at Starbucks."

Kelpie glances over her shoulder at the house. "I don't want that."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," says Artemis, sounding frustrated. "I don't think you're going to have that. The companions don't aggregate the way the gods do—and not even all the gods do it, just the Lunars, although every kind of divinity I know of that still incarnates does it the way we do, in little pieces. Everything I know about the companions says they incarnate, and they incarnate intact. And then, if circumstances are right, eventually, they manifest."

"I'm afraid I'll manifest if I touch you."

"So don't touch me."

"I think I have to." The admission is small. "I also think that if I don't manifest, it's easier for the people who made me to catch me and take me back again, and I don't want to be taken back. But I don't want to be someone else, either. I want to be me, whatever that means."

"Only one way to find out, but it's not something you can take back if you don't like what happens."

"Really? There's no way for someone to say ‘I don't like this, I don't want it, I'll let it go'?"

Artemis hesitates. Finally, she says, "Some of the manifestations can do that. I know the big Seasons can voluntarily step aside, and since there's only one crown per season per continent, they sever themselves from their seasons when they do that, and they die. But if they're born with the potential to seize a season—incarnates—and there's not a coronation during their lifetimes, they live their whole lives and die without ever manifesting. They live human. It's only if a coronation is called that they start to manifest, and after that process begins, they can't live without the season that sustains them. If they refuse the crown, they die. If they don't win the crown, they die. There is no other way out."

"And for gods?"

"If I'd said to Anna ‘I'm Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the moon, and I want you to be my mortal vessel and let me walk with you in the world,' and she'd said ‘no, thank you,' I would have stayed a seed. I wouldn't have sprouted, and she would have lived her whole life with the potential to be me, but never become me. Now, she's stuck with me for the rest of her life. I couldn't leave if I wanted to."

"What about me?" There's a challenge in Kelpie's tongue. "I never invited anyone in."

"I don't think you had to."

Kelpie blinks, then turns her face away. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that, in your case, I don't think there was anyone for you to talk to. The alchemists made a perfect, empty vessel, and they made it so perfect that you couldn't stay out. They invited you into something you didn't have the capacity to refuse, and they put all the power into it that the universe wasn't offering. So you went in. You got comfortable. And when you woke up, they gave you a name and told you that you belonged to them. They invented a Kelpie for you to be. Or maybe she was real, once, and they used pieces of her when they made you. I don't know. I don't think anyone can know. But you never invited anyone in because you are the person knocking at the door. You are the seed, and you're already growing, whether or not you become manifest, whatever manifestation means for you. It's not like the stories we have ascribe a lot of powers to the Hind."

"She soothes Artemis when the hunt goes badly; she can enter sacred spaces without frightening the game already there, and allows all the hunt to follow without fear of failure. And she's supposed to be associated in some way with healing waters, but that always seemed a little weird to me, since Artemis isn't a healer."

"No, but you wash the wounds you incur while hunting, and if the Hind washes her wounds, it would make sense for it to gradually develop the ability to make the water more potent, or at least cleaner." Artemis looks at her carefully. "Are you really afraid there'll be a second voice in your head if you take my hand? Or are you afraid there won't be?"

"I want to be real," says Kelpie, a hitch in her voice. "I want to exist like everyone else exists, and to stay. Is it bad, that I want to be a real person?"

"You seem pretty real to me. You can talk, and say confusing things, and come with us tonight to access the everything and find out how Aske died. Does it really matter whether you have a person inside you even when you're not the Hind?"

"I don't know." Kelpie looks at Artemis's hands, hanging relaxed and nonthreatening at the other woman's sides. "I'm scared that I'll find out it matters a lot, and then it'll be too late to take it back."

"Be brave," says Artemis. "You were brave when you ran away from the alchemists, and you were brave when you came into that kitchen, and spoke to me. So be brave now. Be brave enough to find out who you really are."

Kelpie says nothing. Just steps a little closer, hooves thudding dully against the wood, and takes her hand.

Silence follows.