Mare Vaporum

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

They walk in a silent line along the sidewalks between the house and campus, a mismatched group that has no business moving in concert but moves in concert all the same. Roger and Dodger take the lead, the professor and the disappearing genius, cutting through the late-afternoon crowds like an arrow through air. Chang'e and Kelpie come after them, the Lunar and the cuckoo walking in uneasy time. They are followed by Máni and Erin, and at the back walks Artemis, a few feet behind the rest of them, giving Kelpie her space as best as she can without putting too much space between herself and the group.

The sky is still bright, the sun riding high, even as the moon shows her face through the clouds, a pale disk hanging in the afternoon sky. Chang'e hesitates as they reach the campus, grimacing.

"There are going to be so many people around this time of day," she says. "There's no way we can open a gate without being seen."

"Will people even notice us walking into a wall?" asks Erin. "They generally ignore that sort of thing unless you go out of your way to draw attention to it."

"Yes, and I generally help that happen by not drawing attention to it," says Chang'e. "Walking into a wall in broad daylight is the definition of drawing attention."

"If you give the actual definition, I will stab you," says Erin pleasantly to Roger, who sulks exaggeratedly.

"It doesn't matter," says Artemis.

"We're not killing people just because they see something they shouldn't," says Chang'e.

"We don't have to," says Artemis. "The gate's not here. Can't you feel that? There's no gate on campus right now."

Chang'e hesitates. "Maybe it just hasn't appeared yet."

"No. It's not anchored here right now."

"So where is it anchored?"

"I don't have magic-gate-detecting powers!"

"Can't you make it a hunt? I thought you said you could hunt anything."

Artemis shoots her a wounded look. "That's not what I meant, and you know it. I can't just find things. And hunting for a door isn't the same as hunting prey, or hunting an enemy. Unless the door was my enemy somehow, but that's just silly."

"I can find it," says Kelpie.

The rest of them stop and turn to look at her. Artemis speaks first.

"You can what?"

"That key you have feels fizzy, like the way some things feel when they get too close to me. I think because I was made to be attuned to unclaimed Lunar energy, I can feel things that are connected to the Moon but aren't preoccupied with being people. I don't know how it works. I don't know how anything works, really. But I feel like if you want me to find the gate, I can find it."

"Why didn't you say something before?"

Kelpie shrugs. "You knew where it was. You were so sure of it. I didn't think I could say anything that would help if you already knew where it was."

"Can't hurt," says Roger. "Which way?"

Kelpie turns a slow circle, face screwing up with concentration. Then she stops and points away from campus, back the way they'd come. "There," she says.

"You heard the woman," says Roger. "This way."

They start to walk again, initially backtracking, then quickly passing the house, heading down Telegraph Avenue until they reach Bancroft, then turning and walking onward to Shattuck Avenue. Kelpie doesn't speak, all her attention focused on the journey, and the rest are quiet as well, letting her set the pace and lead the way. She continues until they're approaching a neighborhood only Artemis seems to recognize. She hesitates.

"Kelpie?"

Kelpie keeps walking.

"Kelpie, are we going back to Isabella's apartment?"

"Is that a problem?" asks Erin.

"Gates don't normally anchor in private homes," says Artemis. "It would make it too difficult for us to be sure of getting the access we need. Can't exactly knock on someone's door and ask to come inside to make the journey to the moon, now, can you?"

Kelpie turns in to the apartment complex, and the others follow, having no better options immediately at hand. On she goes, passing the broken-down door to Isabella's apartment. It's sealed with police tape, garishly yellow and glaring. Juan's body is gone. Groups of neighbors litter the walkway, talking in quiet voices, clearly gossiping about the day's events. The police have been and gone, taking their notes and, one presumes, taking the victims.

It's hard not to wonder what conclusions they'll be able to draw, or how hard they'll even try. Crimes committed on the fringe of the alchemical world have a way of slipping through the cracks, investigations forgotten or dismissed, evidence misplaced. As long as Isabella doesn't push too hard for answers—unlikely, since she already has more answers than she could ever ask for—the authorities will forget this happened within the week. The neighbors, even more quickly. There already aren't as many of them out here as there should be, given the lurid nature of the situation.

It's a blessing, in its own way. It'll be easier for Isabella and Luis to start over without the fear of being charged with Catrina and Juan's murders hanging over their heads. It's also an abomination. Justice will never be served.

Kelpie seems to notice none of this. She's almost in a trance now, walking without seeing, without varying her pace at all. She approaches a door that looks like all the others.

"The gate won't be inside a private home," Artemis says again, a little louder this time.

Kelpie opens the door. It isn't locked. That's odd. Unlocked doors aren't safe. No matter how much you trust your neighbors, unlocked doors are a bad idea.

Inside, the room is square and empty, the walls painted white, the floor lacking any sort of carpet or padding. Kelpie walks straight to the door on the far wall, opening it in turn.

This door reveals a stairwell, descending down into the dark. Motion-sensitive lights come on as she steps onto the landing, illuminating the space in artificial brightness. Artemis surges forward, catching Kelpie by the elbow before she can step onto the stairs.

"This is the lab," she hisses, in case Kelpie somehow doesn't know, in case she's led them here with no real idea where she was going.

That thought isn't too far off. There's a glazed, absent look in Kelpie's eyes, like wherever she is mentally, it's very far away. She looks at Artemis's hand on her elbow, then back up to her face, her own eyes very wide and guileless.

"We have to go down," she says. "The gate is down."

"Why would the gate anchor here?" asks Chang'e.

"Because maybe the Moon is tired of something picking you off one by one, and wants you to finish this?" suggests Erin. "I mean, that, or it's trying to get you all slaughtered so it can start over with smarter moon gods. I don't know. I'm not the folklore expert here."

"We don't have one of those," says Roger. He steps into the stairwell, nose wrinkling. "It smells like alkahest."

Dodger follows, slow and unhappy. "I don't like labs."

"I know," he says, reassuringly.

"They can't keep us here. If they try—"

"They'll regret it."

He speaks with such absolute authority that Dodger calms, and the rest of them follow her lead. Artemis lets Kelpie go. The orange-skinned woman shakes her head, rolls her shoulders, and begins to descend into the light, tail twitching and hooves making little ringing sounds on the metal steps.

They follow. There's not much else to do at this point, not when she's supposedly leading them to the gate, not when the gate is so far below. Down and down they go, so far beneath the Earth that it shouldn't be possible, not in earthquake-prone California. Erin winces several times, picking up on the instabilities in the walls around them, but calms incredibly quickly; none of those faults are severe enough to set off her chaos radar for long. That seems to make her tenser rather than soothing her, and by the time they reach the third flight down, she's tight-shouldered and scowling, glancing around like she expects to be attacked at any moment.

The Lunars stay clustered together as they walk, and halfway down that third flight, something changes in the air around them, like a camera filter has been removed, a layer of soft-focus glitter stripped away. Chang'e makes a small, soft sound of dismay, glancing over her shoulder at Roger, and the way he meets her eyes somehow makes it clear that he's looking at Judy. The gods have gone. Only their human hosts remain.

Anna stumbles, nearly falling, only to catch herself on the stair rail at the last possible moment. Blinking rapidly, she turns to the others, searching their faces in desperation. There's no recognition in her expression. "Where are we?" she asks, and her voice has changed, dry, almost generic tones replaced by something closer to the American Mid-Atlantic accent, which sounds at once completely wrong and completely right coming out of her mouth. She's too young to sound like that.

But she's not as young as she seems; she's made that more than clear. Judy hesitates, remembering Artemis saying that she never steps all the way down when there's a hunt happening, and wonders how long it's been since Anna—actually Anna, not a pretense of her put on to make people feel more comfortable with the situation—has seen the surface.

"We're in a stairwell, beneath the city of Berkeley," says Judy gingerly. "We're heading down into an alchemist's stronghold, to find the gate that hopefully lets us access the Impossible City."

"Children's stories and nonsense," says Anna. "I don't know what I expected from a dancehall girl. Why are we here?" She looks to Roger, apparently flagging him as the leader of their little group, and waits for a reply.

"Was that racist?" asks David. "I feel like that was racist."

"Almost certainly," says Dodger. She's looking at the air above Anna's head, eyes unfocused, visibly working her way through some sort of incomprehensible equation. "I'd say she's standing roughly a hundred years ago right now. Nineteen twenty-something. Of course, that's just a guess. Keep her talking and I'll be able to narrow the field considerably."

David looks at her blankly. "I thought your brother was the linguist."

"He is. He speaks all the languages that are, or ever have been, spoken upon the Earth."

"So how can you narrow down a time period from her accent?"

"I'm not going by her accent," says Dodger. "I speak English and just enough Spanish to order lunch at the taquerias downtown without being a total asshole. This isn't about language."

"Then what…?"

"Roger speaks languages, but Dodger speaks time," says Erin, eyeing Anna with distaste. "This isn't a form of time travel I'm familiar with, and I'm not going to pretend I like it very much. This one came the slow way, in a box at the bottom of a deep well, where no one would mess with her or try to draw her out. Artemis put her there, whether she intended to or not. I thought you people practiced coexistence."

"We do," says Judy, sounding disturbed. "The gods can't suppress us like that."

But maybe the rules are different for Artemis when she's on the hunt. Maybe she can do things the rest of them can't, or wouldn't, do.

Anna looks alarmed, taking a step backward and down the stairs, her hands held out in front of her in a useless warding gesture. She's outnumbered, even before you account for the fact that with or without the moon, half of them are more than purely human.

"You're with them," she accuses. "The voices from the moon! You're part of that great delusion! Well, I'll not have any part of it, do you hear me? I refuse the idea that I'm to share my inner space with someone I never asked for and never invited in!"

"So she wasn't a willing host, then," says Erin quietly. "That's an interesting variation."

"Calm down," says Roger, with the force of a direct command. His eyes are on Anna, and his words are clearly meant for her; she catches her breath as if she's going to object, then sags, objection dying in the force of an order she can't refuse. Her shoulders relax, her hands lower, and her face goes slack.

"Now, tell us who you are and what you know."

Judy frowns, reviewing the conversations she's had with Roger. He doesn't give orders. He asks for things. He makes his wishes clear. But for a man with all of language at his fingertips, he speaks with remarkable care, never quite demanding when there's any other choice. She wonders how he figured out he had to be so careful with the world, and how difficult it is for him to navigate when the slightest misspoken word can render everyone around him incapable of saying "no."

His weirdly codependent relationship with his sister makes more sense all the time, and the wisdom of voluntarily entangling herself with this man fades a little deeper into the mists of confusion, but she can already tell she's going to do it anyway. He's charming, in his own eccentric way, and he can skip language to language in the middle of a sentence in a way that appeals endlessly, and is so difficult to find out in the real world. She's a part-time goddess of the moon. She was never that infatuated with the real world anyway.

Anna sighs, shoulders sagging in what looks almost like relief. "My name is Annabelle Austin, and I'm the daughter of Charles Austin, who owns the Austin Continental Rail Company. My father's a very important man, which is why he was very alarmed when his oldest daughter started hearing voices. I was meant to be making my debut into society, and instead I was arguing with the moonlight. I had to be seen to."

"Seen to?" asks Roger.

Anna nods. "Seen to. He found a lovely man who promised he could heal my instabilities and set me back on the path to becoming a functional member of society. Dr. Reed was quite skilled with the art of the mind. He took me into his care, and under his tutelage, the voices stopped. I no longer heard a woman calling to me from the moon, as was only right and proper; there are no women in the moon, and if there were, they wouldn't use the moonlight as radio waves, beaming themselves into my dreams."

Erin steps forward, expression going sharp. "Ask her what Reed ordered her to do. There must have been something, or she wouldn't have let Artemis in. The Lunars have to be allowed to take root and grow inside their hosts. For some reason, she allowed it."

Judy frowns. Artemis's avoidance of Diana makes more sense now, as does her insistence that the other woman had to be doing something wrong. Diana is more hands-off than she should be as a senior Lunar, more distracted by the human side of her existence, but she's never shown any signs of being an alchemical puppet.

"What did Reed ask of you?" asks Roger, obediently. "You have to answer truly. I need to know."

Anna's face screws up with momentary discomfort before she says, in a sharper tone, "He was embarking on a great project, one he had started with his mother's assistance, before her passing. He was going to have children of his own, a boy and a girl, and he was going to raise them to be the most perfect people who ever existed."

Dodger scoffs. Roger glances at her, expression sharp.

"He may have intended to do things that way in the beginning," he says. "She's not lying if that's what he told her he was doing. One of the dangers of asking someone to tell the truth is that they can only tell you the truth as they understand it, and not necessarily the truth as it actually is."

Anna nods. "He was very determined to be a parent. He called them his cuckoos, and said one day they would fly. And he might not be there to see it, but I would be. He was quite sure of it. He said I was a fascinating subject, useful and useless at the same time. I don't care to be called useless. It seems impolite at best, and insufferably rude at worst. But he told me I had access to a place he dearly wished to enter and feared he might be banned from. He prepared me to serve as needed."

"And Artemis?"

Anna's face screws up in sudden disdain, so pure and absolute that Judy winces. She can't imagine sharing her life with someone she dislikes as much as it seems Anna dislikes Artemis. She and Chang'e may not always be in perfect agreement, but they're always friends, and they navigate the complexities of their shared life with relative grace.

"He said I had to let her in. He said he needed to talk to her. So I let her in. So he talked to her. And then… I don't remember much after that. The taste of peaches, frequently. Flashes of my father's funeral, my mother saying I had some nerve showing my face there after the way I'd broken his heart. And then it was all a dark room, with a window that let in the moonlight."

"Quiet now," says Roger. "Go to sleep."

Anna closes her eyes and bows her head, swaying as she appears to fall asleep on her feet. Erin moves to steady her, keeping her from falling down.

"Great," she says. "So Reed was fishing for Lunars before any of the rest of us were born. What was he planning to do with them?"

"I think he must have been afraid we'd do exactly what we did, and break away after we claimed the Doctrine," says Roger. "So he creates his cuckoos and then they don't hand him the City—what then?"

"Then he'd start planning another way to get inside, since us existing makes the City more concrete than it was before," says Dodger. "Us being here, on Earth, as material creatures that need things like air and gravity, means the City has to appear the same way. It has to be solid so we can enter it. In a way, forcing us to manifest forces the City to manifest. Cause and effect don't have to go in that order, not for this equation."

"So Reed incarnates the Doctrine, and that lures the City close enough to become solid, and then, what, it echoes backward?"

"Maybe." Dodger shrugs. "Causality is squishy where we're concerned. You know that. Baker made the City a place when she wrote the Up-and-Under—except it was already a place, because we already had stories about Olympus, and Avalon. Even the Christian Bible says, in so many words, that Heaven is a city. Baker redefined it to fit what she wanted it to be, to fit us, or the idea that was eventually going to become us. Do you think the Lunar system worked the same way before that happened, or do you think it adapted after she changed the way reality works?"

"This is giving me a headache," mutters David.

"Welcome to my world," says Erin. "Much as I hate to break up philosophy club, we're standing in the stairwell leading to an alchemical research center owned and operated by people who don't like us much and have already demonstrated that they're more than happy to commit murder to get what they want."

"And, um, what they want is at least partially me, but I bet they'd be happy to take us all," says Kelpie, sounding anxious. She sounds anxious perpetually enough that it's not setting off alarm bells yet, but Judy can see where they might eventually learn the flavors of her anxiety, come to understand them as individual and distinct things, and be able to calibrate their panic accordingly.

Of course, first, they have to live that long.

"Anna," says Roger. "You can wake up now, and take a breath, and then you'll go back to sleep, and let Artemis come forth again. I know the moon isn't shining this far underground, but the gate is here, and we need Artemis right now."

Anna opens her eyes, giving him a spiteful look. "You want to put me away again," she accuses. "You're just like Dr. Reed. When he'd had enough of me, he sent me away, and for you to do the same, sir, proves only that you are no gentleman at all, only a pale mockery of same."

"That's fair enough, and you're not wrong. But now you need to go."

"You're just like your father," spits Anna. Roger reels back as if he's been struck, and maybe he has been, maybe some forms of assault have nothing to do with the physical. Then Anna's eyes glaze over, and between one blink and the next she's gone. Artemis is back.

Artemis stands differently than Anna does. She has a greater tension in her limbs, a certain assurance that she knows precisely where she belongs and will have no trouble getting there. At the same time, an arrogance is missing, one that Kelpie recognizes only because she's seen it in so many alchemists, and in Catrina as well: the belief that the universe has been arranged for your benefit, even if it harms everyone else around you. Artemis has a different flavor of arrogance to her, the kind that says she knows exactly what she's capable of, and has no question of her worth. She's proven it, time and time again.

She has nothing left to prove.

She also, for the moment, looks totally baffled. "What just happened?" she asks.

"We'll explain in a few minutes," says Erin. "For right now, we move."

Suddenly concerned, Judy reaches for Chang'e as they resume their descent toward the bottom of the stairs, and is relieved to find the goddess, reduced and somewhat pushed aside, but present at the bottom of her psyche, lurking.

What?asks Chang'e.

Just wanted to know that you were here,replies Judy, feeling a little foolish. Did you see what happened to Artemis?

I did.Chang'e sounds regretful, almost ashamed. There's a reason we coexist rather than taking over entirely. That sort of behavior is shameful and unkind. We must never push our hosts from the chambers of their own hearts. We owe you coexistence.

Anna and Artemis haven't been coexisting.

No. Not for a long time.

Kelpie pulls them up short as they come to the bottom of the stairs, sticking one arm out to prevent them from going any farther. She gestures to the door. "That's the way to the main lab," she says. "That's where I was when… That's where I was. In there."

"So that's where we'll find the alchemists?" asks Dodger. "Great. I have a few things I'd like to say to those assholes." She pushes Kelpie's arm aside and makes for the door, wrenching it open without further hesitation.

On the other side is a lab, gleaming chrome, glass, and glaring white light… and an utter absence of people. Half the equipment has been covered in plain cotton sheets; the exposed half is as clean and shining as the rest, but clearly only because it's been maintained, not because it's new and top of the line. This is a lab in the process of being decommissioned.

Kelpie blinks, then steps forward, almost knocking into Dodger. Roger thinks, only half-rationally, that her hooves make more sense now; for a science project that can walk and talk and think for itself, living in a facility where all the floors are linoleum or tile is the equivalent of belling the cat. She's never been able to sneak up on anyone in her life.

"Where are they?" she asks, breathless, voice tight with sudden concern. She can't stop herself from looking at the drain in the center of the floor, as polished as the rest of the metal in the room, a channel through which mortal remains can pour and be collected. "He can't have killed them all."

"I think you'll find I can," says a voice, mild, cultured, and calm. The whole group looks around.

A door has opened on the far wall, partially obscured by a rack of jars and vessels, most of which look too old-fashioned for the lab around them, all of which are spotless. A man is in the process of stepping through. He is tall and almost skeletally thin, with the air of unreality about him that Roger has noticed most alchemists seem to possess, as if he's looked at the laws governing the rest of the world and decided that no, he doesn't need to abide by those after all. Those are the restrictions of something lesser than himself.

His eyes are dead. If not for the fact that he's standing, moving toward them, speaking, Roger would be perfectly willing to call the man a corpse.

"They were a failed research team that wasted Congressional time and resources on a doomed project," he continues, studying the fingernails of his left hand like he thinks there might be something fascinating beneath them. "Contributing their personal resources to our stores is a kinder outcome than many would have offered them, and those who understood their place were properly grateful for the opportunity."

"I don't believe that," says Kelpie, voice wavering.

He looks away from his nails, finally focusing on her. "It was kind of you to return here of your own volition," he says, lowering his hand. "You, yourself, are a Congressional resource, and you had no right to remove yourself from the premises."

"I am not a Congressional resource, I'm a person," she counters.

"You're a construct, a cuckoo, and the purpose you were built for is almost upon us," he says. "You'll pry open the gates of the City if it kills you." From the tone of his voice, he'd be perfectly happy with that outcome. One more loose end tied off, one more aberration removed from the world.

"No, I don't think she will," says Artemis, stepping between Kelpie and the man with the graveyard eyes. She glares, her own eyes flashing olive green and dangerous.

The man smirks. "Reed's little double agent. I knew they'd signaled you when the project seemed to be nearing completion; Margaret's notes were sloppy and quite unprofessional, but they were thorough. I did hope we'd have the opportunity to meet, Miss Austin. You've long been one of my favorite examples of the lack of inevitability even in predestination."

Artemis glares at him. "I don't work for you."

"Don't you?" He snaps his fingers, then hums the first six notes of an orchestral fugue.

Artemis stiffens. Dodger inhales sharply.

"That was the theme for the 1907 stage musical of Over the Woodward Wall," says Dodger. "The sheet music was supposedly lost after the theater burned down. How…?"

"How can you?" counters the man. Artemis's expression, meanwhile, has gone slack, all animation draining away. The man frowns. "Miss Austin," he says. "You should be here now."

"She can't," says Roger. "I gave her strict instructions to sleep, and you don't have the authority to overrule me."

"As to how I can, music is sort of like math, and time is absolutely a form of math, and music that time took is one hundred percent in my wheelhouse," says Dodger. "You're not going to get control of her."

Kelpie turns to Artemis, losing interest in the man, at least for the moment, and grabs hold of the other woman's shoulders. "We don't need Anna," she says firmly. "We need Artemis. We need to get to the gate."

Artemis blinks, then shakes her head, clearing away the fog. "Hey," she says, focusing on Kelpie. "Where is it?"

"Behind him."

"Of course it is," says Erin, sounding disgusted. She steps forward. "Hello. Judging by the fact that you look like you've been embalmed, I'm going to guess you're the local Congressional representative. Am I warm?"

"I serve the Congress; I don't belong to the Congress," he says, sounding almost amused. "But yes, you're quite close to the reality of the situation. Can I help you in some fashion?"

"You can let us pass."

He taps his chin with one finger, expression turning thoughtful. "Mmm… no, I don't think I'll be doing that."

"Then you can make your peace with whatever divinity you serve."

"I don't think I'll be doing that, either," he says, producing a flask from inside his pocket. Kelpie, who recognizes it all too well, makes a wordless sound of dismay and recoils. He holds it up for Erin's inspection. "You seem too well educated to be a part of this little mob. Who did you study under?"

"Barrow, primarily," says Erin.

For the first time, his composure flickers. Only for a moment, but long enough for the whole group to see it happen. "You're one of…"

"One of Reed's, yes," she says. "I'm the one who handled his cleanup when he didn't want to do it himself. You can drop that flask, but you'll have to ask yourself which is faster: airborne alkahest or an angry construct with nothing left to lose."

"I'll bet on the alkahest," he says, and tosses the flask, a bare moment before he retreats through the door, slamming it closed behind him.

The glass shatters when it hits the floor, a thick, silver-gray gas beginning to billow forth. It's too much to have been contained in that flask at any point; even the most generous of reagents would have overflowed the available space.

There isn't time to dwell on the impossibility of the moment. He knew his targets when he prepared his poisons. This isn't like before, when he thought he only needed to kill a human. If this alkahest touches them, they'll die, divinity and cuckoo alike; flesh is not immune to consumption, no matter how it was created.

Kelpie shies back, pressing herself into Artemis, who puts her arms around her and drags her several feet back, while Judy and David try their best to step behind Roger and Dodger, neither of whom look particularly disturbed.

Dodger rolls her eyes. "Gravity is a mathematical concept, did you know?" she asks.

Roger nods. "You do love reminding me," he says.

"Well, it seems important," she says, and looks at the cloud of foggy gas that's pooling by the door. She begins to recite a string of numbers so complicated it sounds more like a witch's incantation than a math problem, and the gas falls out of the air, splatting on the floor with a wet sound. Dodger nods, apparently satisfied. "Go tell it that it's impossible now, okay?"

"Cleanup crew again," says Roger, and moves to stand at the edge of the puddle of alkahest. "You don't exist," he informs it. "Alchemists struggled for centuries to create you, and failed over and over again, because you don't exist. You're a literal impossibility. For you to exist, a dozen laws of nature would have to be violated or rewritten, and that hasn't happened, so you're not real. You're just fancy colored water."

He crouches and reaches for the pool. Kelpie's eyes widen in terror.

"No!" she yelps, just before he touches the surface of the liquid. It ripples, and nothing else happens.

He pulls back his hand, showing her his wet fingertips, then wipes them against the side of his leg. "All I had to do was make it understand that it's not real," he says. "I could have gone for more of a sledgehammer approach, told it that it wasn't there, but that's rude. I don't figure the universe likes having itself ripped apart just because it's convenient, so if I can do things the subtle way, I generally will."

Kelpie continues to stare at him with wide eyes, clearly waiting for the moment when he starts to melt. It doesn't come. Roger straightens.

"You said the gate's through there?" He gestures to the door the man from the Congress retreated through. "Are we all feeling good about following him?"

"No," says Erin. "These people love to set traps almost as much as a Scooby-Doo villain does. We open that door, we could set off all kinds of nastiness."

"Which is why you go first, since you'll pick up on anything that's not where it's supposed to be."

Erin gives him a blankly unhappy look, expression going flat. "I wish that didn't make sense."

"I know."

Erin sighs, then turns toward the door. She blinks, once, and the world changes focus, going from a series of solid forms and sharp edges to what looks almost like a series of values. She's not seeing the physical world anymore. She's seeing the chaos all around her, the energy that's always there, running along the edge of her awareness whether she wants it to be or not. She's seeing the entropy and the decay that the alchemists fight so hard to control, even at the expense of the natural integrity of the world they inhabit.

She knows now, why they can dig so deep, why the walls don't crumble inward at the slightest shake. The knowledge comes as easy as catching her breath, bringing with it a hundred unwanted connections. She manages, barely, not to look at any of the Lunars. They might see the understanding in her eyes, and know that they walk through a necropolis, a foundation built upon the bodies of their own dead.

The alchemists may or may not be responsible for all the dead or missing Lunars, but they're certainly responsible for some of them. She can't tell, from this surface glance at the situation, how many people were bled out to make this much concrete, how many gods and goddesses of the moon gave everything they had for someone else's dream. She isn't sure she'd want to know.

But with all the chaos of the world firmly in her mind's eye, she moves toward the door, Roger close behind her. If she can spot the traps without triggering them, or even if she does trigger them, if she can do it without putting herself in direct danger, he'll be able to tell the traps why they aren't real and thus can't hurt any of them. It's an oddly efficient way of clearing space, as long as they go in the right order.

(It's also remarkably inefficient if looked at with a critical eye. The Lunars are living incarnations of moon gods, but Roger and Dodger are living gods, literally. They can negotiate with reality to a degree that no one else has been able to accomplish, ever, the peak of natural manifestation combined with alchemical personification. They could snap their fingers and bring this all to an end, opening the paths ahead of them without making any real effort. But that's why they make an effort, why they're so exquisitely careful in everything they do. They could easily shatter reality without intending to, making everyone else's needs secondary to their own. That they don't is a testament to how much care they take every single day. But sometimes that determination to be careful translates into moments like this one, where there's an easier way, rendered unavailable by their own standards.)

She tries the knob. It's locked, of course, and so she glances over her shoulder to Roger, nodding once. He looks at the doorknob.

"It's a real pity, these modern latch mechanisms, the way they never hold up against even the slightest amount of pressure," he says. "You'd think that by now, we'd be better at making locks you can't knock loose with a hit in the right place."

"You'd think," agrees Erin, and smacks the heel of her hand into the door just above the lock plate.

There's a click from somewhere deep inside the mechanism, and when she tries the knob again, the door swings open, revealing a narrow hall.

It looks like a continuation of the lab, white and chrome and sterile. The signs of shabbiness are creeping in here as well, the blank patches on the bulletin boards, the scuffs on the floor, but for now, it's almost as pristine as it was the day that it was made. The seven of them ease through, Erin at the lead, Roger and Kelpie close behind, Dodger following them, looking unhappy to be separated from her brother even by such a short distance. The three moon gods bring up the rear, Judy and David keeping a close eye on Artemis, who moves a little jerkily, like she's still not sure what happened back there.

She may not know, even now, what Reed did to Anna, and Erin hates that this is just one more life—or pair of lives, more properly—that the man managed to destroy. He's dead and gone and still ruining things, and sometimes it feels like he's going to be ruining things forever. He's never going to go away and leave them alone.

Or maybe it's not right to blame Reed. Maybe they should be blaming Asphodel, who started this whole obsession in the first place, and left them walking her improbable road whether they wanted to be or not. Erin walks down the hall, steps slow and measured, neither hurrying nor creeping along, but content to travel at the speed her body sets and let it bring her to her destination. Nothing explodes or triggers or comes bursting out to harm them. That's not as reassuring as it could be.

Alchemists are, by and large, reasonably smart people. This doesn't make them tactical geniuses, or equip them for a siege; they're as likely to let death in through the front door as anyone else is. But they think about their own safety, about their legacies, all but constantly, and for the man who appears to have killed everyone in this facility to just let them walk in the way he has says one of two things: either he's so bone-confident in his alkahest that he can't imagine any of them are still alive, which is hubris bordering on foolishness, or he's got another way out, and has already fled the lab complex for the world above.

Even surrounded by divinely infused, self-repairing concrete, Erin can see a hundred ways to bring the apartment that houses the laboratory entrance crashing down, blocking off the door. Sure, Roger could whisper the stones into vapor, or Dodger could find the equation that lets them dig their way out in no time flat with nothing harmed but their schedule, but both those things would strain the limits the cuckoos place on themselves. Others could be hurt, civilian lives lost, and all because they let him get away.

It's a distressing-enough thought that she doesn't hear Kelpie call for her to stop at first, but keeps walking, trying to reach the end of the hall. Once they reach the end of the hall, they'll find their answers. She's sure of that. She really is.

And then Kelpie's voice breaks through her fugue, and she stops, looking up at the ceiling as she tries to organize her thoughts. There, worked into the pattern of perforations in the ceiling tiles, she finds a series of sigils designed to encourage focus and single-mindedness among lab technicians. They're tuned highly enough that they're effectively weaponized. Anyone who walks down this hall will find themselves unable to deviate from their assigned course, which means she wants to keep going, no matter how important it is for her to stop.

There are many downsides to being a living chaos detector. One of the more pressing, which never seems to occur to anyone unprompted, is that while she can spot things like tripwires and explosive devices designed to cause chaos, she won't see orderly dangers until it's too late. She's missing a full half of the threats, because they're orderly and thus don't register.

Erin sighs and looks down again, then turns and backtracks to where Kelpie and the others are gathered, their attention on a particular section of wall.

"You're sure?" asks Roger dubiously.

"It's here," says Kelpie.

"She's right," says Judy, moving to the front of the group and reaching out with one hand, brushing her fingertips against the wall. "I don't know how it can be down this deep. The gates are only meant to appear where there's moonlight. But it's here."

"There's moonlight everywhere around us," says Artemis. "It's been severed from the moon itself, but it's still moonlight. It comes out of the walls. It's so strong I bet the place glows in the dark."

"It does," says Kelpie, sounding almost serene.

"Can you open it?" asks Roger.

That is the important question, after all; they've found the gate, but can they open it? Erin watches, holding her breath, as Judy dips her hand into her pocket and produces the key, which she taps against the wall like she's trying to ring a bell. Then she scowls.

"Nothing," she says.

"Let me try," says Artemis. She reaches into her own pocket, producing a second key. It's not quite identical to the first, and neither has the mass-manufactured sheen of a key from Home Depot or some other big-box hardware store; they're hand-worked, these keys, antique and gleaming. They've never been given time to tarnish, for all that Erin's fairly sure they're the oldest things in this hallway.

Artemis taps her key against the wall, parallel to Judy's, and the gate appears.

It looks like something a computer generated for a movie about fantasy worlds hidden beyond impossible doors, all curls and gentle arches spiraling out from the two points of contact, braiding themselves together to form the arched structure of the gate itself, which gleams silver and brilliantly white, like someone has covered the wall in a thin layer of embossing glitter.

Judy takes a deep breath and drops away, her eyes changing tones as Chang'e rises to the surface. "We're so far from the moon, but I feel it all around us," she says, glancing to Artemis. "Whose everything is this? Which of us opened the door?"

"I don't know," says Artemis. "I guess go through and see?"

Chang'e nods before walking calmly into what was previously solid white-painted concrete. There's no resistance; she's just through, appearing on the other side of the glittering veil. She looks around, then turns back to the others. "It's solid," she says. "I don't know whether it's mine—I suppose the window will answer that. Dodger, try to come through."

The living force of mathematics steps forward, and scowls as she bumps her nose against the wall. "Ow," she says. Then she looks more closely at the shimmering veil. "I could force it, but I don't think that would be a good idea. The equations that comprise this thing are—woof. They're complicated. And that's putting it really, really lightly. I guess this was a bust. So now we find the asshole alchemist and get the hell out of here."

David steps forward, his own eyes gleaming with an icy sheen for a moment as Máni steps up to the forefront. He takes Dodger's hand in his, ignoring the way she half-recoils, and walks into the wall. Walks through the wall, pulling Dodger with him, into the black-and-rainbow tunnel beyond the gate.

Dodger yelps as they pass through the gate, then yanks her hand from his and glares at him. "Don't touch me," she snaps. "I didn't say you could touch me."

For Kelpie and Artemis, every word is clear as day. For Erin and Roger, her mouth moves, but no sound emerges. She's somewhere else, somewhere beyond their ken.

Roger's eyes abruptly widen, and he lunges for the gate. Erin is quick enough on the uptake to realize what must have just happened; she catches his arm before he can slam into the wall, as incapable of passing through on his own as his sister is.

"The two of you got by just fine for years without playing cranial roommate; you can stand being separated for five minutes," she says, pulling him back, away from the transparent patch on the wall. Artemis looks at her, puzzled.

Erin sighs. "There's only one Doctrine of Ethos," she says. "Fitting it into a single human body was impossible—it's too big, and that's saying something, given some of the concepts they can cram into a human skin—so they had to give the Wonder Twins here two bodies to work with. Doesn't actually make them distinct from each other. They grew up enough apart to develop individuality, and they're separate enough to be considered different people, but as soon as they became manifest, they moved into each other's heads, and they haven't been apart since then. If Dodger's on a different plane of reality, I'm betting they can't hear each other's thoughts. I'd think he'd see this as a good thing, especially if he's planning to get frisky with a moon goddess."

Artemis lifts her eyebrows. "Oh? Which one?"

"The one whose host loves languages almost as much as he does, if that's even possible," says Erin. "Not you."

"I mean, no, not me," agrees Artemis. She looks at the gate, through which the trio remains visible. Máni is holding Dodger back; she's trying to get to the gate, apparently as distressed by the separation from her brother as he is by his separation from her. "I'm definitely not his type."

"Not linguistic enough?"

"Too gay. Hang on."

She steps through into the familiar rainbow black of the everything, clapping her hands together. "Dodger! Look at me!"

Dodger stops pulling against Máni and looks. Artemis smiles, trying to look reassuring.

"Cool. Glad you can listen. Erin says you probably don't have your brother in your head right now, and that's why you're freaking out. Can you still do the necessary calculations while you're distracted by the quiet?"

"I can," says Dodger, sullenly. "There used to be a little door in the back of my head, and when I closed it, I couldn't hear him. So I know I can work when it's quiet."

"Good. Chang'e?"

"Yes?"

"Take her to the window. I'm going to stay here with the others, make sure I can defend them if that alchemist comes back while we're waiting on you."

She steps out of the everything there, leaving the three of them to start their journey.

Outside, Roger is still staring raptly at the gate. Erin and Kelpie are watching him, both looking profoundly uncomfortable with the situation, with splitting the party. Artemis moves to stand next to the trio, watching as the others move away into the dark.

"That's the everything?" asks Erin.

Artemis nods.

"It hurts my eyes."

"Why?"

"Because there's nothing chaotic about it, and absolutely everything about it is chaotic, at the same time."

"Ah. I guess that makes sense. It's the passage between this world and the City. I always sort of figured the rainbows were a function of entropy, and entropy is chaotic, isn't it?"

"Yes, but it's a perfect manifestation of order at the same time." Erin shrugs broadly. "I'm not the one who made the rules. Sometimes I sort of wish I were, because a lot of them would be very, very different."

"It's so quiet," complains Roger.

"Only because you're too used to having someone in your head all the damn time. I liked it better before that happened." Erin gives Kelpie a sidelong look, then says, in a tone that implies she's imparting a great and profound secret, "Dodger used to talk more. Not in conversations about serious shit, just like, in passing. She'd comment on the weather or ask about dinner. Normal people talking to each other things. Now she can go days without saying a word, and neither of them notice, because they're so busy carrying on a conversation none of the rest of us can hear."

Roger blinks at her. "You didn't tell me it bothered you that much."

"So there's something in the world you don't know? Be still my heart."

"You okay?" Artemis asks, looking at Kelpie.

Kelpie hesitates, then shakes her head. "No," she says. "I don't want to be here. I was never going to be here again. I'm only here because we had to get to the gate. Why is it down here?"

"Maybe we needed to be down here, or maybe that alchemist we saw figured out a way to force the gates to manifest where he wants them to be."

The door at the end of the hall slams open, then, and two figures in white lab coats lurch into the room. There's something wrong with their faces, some indefinable lack of tension, some inaccuracy in the way their skin fits over their bones. Kelpie stiffens.

"You know them?" asks Artemis.

"I did," says Kelpie.

"What does that mean?"

"It means they're dead," says Erin, moving in front of Roger and falling into a fighting stance. She tilts her head, smiling sunnily at the pair. "Hi. I'm the one who's about to ruin your entire day."

"Auf," says Artemis with disgust, stepping to the side, putting herself next to Erin. She reaches behind herself, gripping something that isn't there, and when she brings her hand around, she's holding a bow, long and curved and gleaming like the gate.

"Why is this asshole so enamored with the things?" asks Erin. "They fell out of fashion centuries ago, right around the time you stopped being able to swap somebody's kid out for one of them without getting caught."

"What's an auf?" asks Kelpie.

"Used to be an interchangeable term for ‘changeling,'" says Roger, eyes on the pair. They're slowly advancing down the hall, walking without difficulty, their heads occasionally twitching as if they're not quite sure what's in front of them. "Of course, they're not the same thing."

"Nothing ever is," says Kelpie.

"Alchemists make them out of dead people," says Erin. "They're different from constructs because they're not as durable. An auf will fall apart in a matter of weeks unless you put a lot more care into it than most alchemists do. And you don't want to know why they might take that kind of care. It's almost always a sex thing."

"Ew," says Kelpie.

"Precisely."

The two auf are continuing to head down the hall, not moving with any real urgency. They feel more like an environmental hazard than a real threat, or possibly a psychological attack: Kelpie is getting paler and paler as they approach, clearly recognizing the people they used to be. Artemis pulls her bowstring back. There's no arrow notched. Maybe there doesn't need to be, not when the bow and the arrows are made of the same textured moonlight.

"This isn't a sex thing," says Kelpie. "This is a message."

"What's the message?"

She pauses, swallowing hard. "Everyone I've ever cared about is dead," she says, after a long moment has trickled by, unremarked. "These two worked in hydroponics. That's where Margaret said they put the Rabbit they'd managed to manifest before they got me. So he's probably dead too. The Congress is cleaning house."

"Cleaning house and making it personal," says Erin grimly. "All right, Artemis, you've dealt with aufs before. Anything I need to know?"

"Haven't you?" asks Artemis.

"Yes, but not from the ‘killing them a second time' side of things. It was more that I was around when they were being put together," says Erin. "I even helped with a couple. Leigh called them her little craft projects. She never liked making her monsters out of mud or iron or other inanimate materials, and constructs like us were too much trouble. We got ideas in our heads, we rebelled against our makers. A good auf will never do that. A good auf is a tool, always and forever."

"I don't think there's any such thing as a ‘good' auf," says Artemis. She pulls her bowstring back a little farther, and looks to Kelpie. "Can we kill them?"

Kelpie blinks. "Why are you asking me?"

"Because they were your friends. They're going to reach us in a minute, and then they're not going to give us a choice, but it might be easier on you if you actually saw them attack us before we start cutting them down."

Kelpie looks at her for a moment, wide-eyed. "You care that much about whether you upset me?"

Artemis shrugs. "Well, yeah. I've been looking for you for a long, long time. I don't want you to hate me. But if I have to make you hate me to keep you safe, that's what I'll do."

"Fine. I just can't watch." Kelpie turns her face resolutely to the gate, and doesn't look, not even when she hears the bowstring snap back into place, when she hears the dull thud of the first arrow striking home. There's a second thud as the auf Artemis shot collapses to the hallway floor, all without making a single sound.

"Efficient," says Erin approvingly.

"Can you do better?" asks Artemis.

"Watch."

Roger sighs. "Please don't show off."

"Someone has to." The sound of running follows, footsteps light, ending in the scuff and tap of a leap. Flesh tears a moment later, strangely dry, like someone is slicing through a dinner roast and not a moving person. There's not a single thud after whatever Erin has done. There's a series of them, sharper than the first had been, like whatever she's dropped has the momentum to bounce.

"Okay, that's impressive," says Artemis. "Nice technique."

"I learned from the best."

"I thought you learned from Leigh Barrow."

"She was a monster and a horrible person and I hate her, I genuinely do, but she was also my maker and my mother, and she was genuinely good at what she did. I'm sorry she made me. I'm sorry she hurt so many people. I'm not going to pretend she wasn't a master of her craft, or that I never loved her. It's tempting to behave that way. I want to. But it would be a lie, and that kind of lie absolves me of a lot of terrible things, so I'm holding on to what she was to me, and who I was to her, and who I am now."

"Look!" Kelpie's exclamation is tinged with bright relief. The others turn, following her gaze to the gate. There, on the other side, their companions are returning through the everything. Dodger looks annoyed and a little wan, but otherwise normal; she's taken no damage from her current situation. Chang'e and Máni walk to either side of her, an escort through eternity, and neither of them looks like their mortal selves at all. They're stepped so far forward that they may as well be truly divine, with nothing of humanity remaining.

They reach the gate and step out, Dodger first. She stumbles as she transitions back into the hall, then flings herself across the distance between her and Roger, wrapping her arms around him and holding on like they've been apart for a hundred years instead of fifteen minutes. Roger wraps his arms around her in turn, clasping her like he thinks he's unlocked the secret to undoing what the alchemists have done to them, of rendering them a single body once more.

"Dodge," he says, not letting go or loosening his grip in the slightest. "Slow down. You're going too fast, you need to slow down."

"She's not saying anything," says Kelpie blankly.

"Not so the rest of us can hear it, maybe," says Erin.

Chang'e and Máni step down as they emerge from the everything, letting Judy and David take their places. Judy's breathing hard, like she just hiked up a very steep hill. David gives her an almost-fond look, smirking to himself.

"This is why even English majors should take a general fitness course," he says.

Judy smacks him on the arm. "Never call me an English major again, you Western centrist."

He laughs, and the sound is somehow profane in this chamber below the earth, surrounded by walls of stone and cut off from natural moonlight. Artemis looks at him.

"Aren't you going to ask about the bodies?" she asks.

"I'll be honest. I was hoping if I just ignored them long enough, they'd be one more thing that goes away as soon as I stop looking." He does look, though, frowning as he turns to study the corpses on the floor. "What's wrong with their skins?"

"They were auf made from the alchemists who worked here," says Artemis. "The guy Kelpie says killed her maker is definitely not playing by Congressional rules."

"You would know, since it looks like you're a double agent," says Judy. She sounds less angry than exhausted, like she already can't stand to think about it.

"Yeah," says Artemis, with a sigh. "Does it help if I say I really didn't know? My host never steps forward, but I thought it was because she just didn't want to. I wasn't intentionally keeping her pushed down or refusing to let her rise. And after a while, it was just easier if I didn't try to force the issue. I had my own life. The years were passing, so she was further and further out of synch, and it's not like I've been keeping her a prisoner in her own mind or anything! This Reed fellow put a chain around her ankle and locked her to the bottom of our mind, and she couldn't come up until I was removed entirely."

"There's moonlight here, but it's different somehow," says Judy. "I can feel it better now that I've been inside the everything. Which reminds me." She turns, tapping her key against the wall. The gate vanishes, extinguished by her actions. "We found my window. That was my gate, I think because I tried my key first. Who's next?"

"I'll go," says David. "I think that when we try Artemis's gate, that's when we all go into the everything together. So we do hers last."

Judy nods and hands him the key. He takes a deep breath, Máni stepping up to take control of the moment, and as the air around him gleams with moonlight and frost, he taps the wall.

As before, no gate appears. Also as before, Artemis steps forward to repeat the gesture, and the gate blooms into being.

The pattern is different this time, less like calligraphy and more like rime blooming on frozen leaves. There are distinctions in the divinity behind the gods that unlock the gate. They're not normally this clear, because they're not normally opening in such quick succession, and not for the first time, Judy wishes she'd looked more closely at the gate Máni went through when he found Aske dead on the other side. Maybe then she would have known even before he came back that he was walking into someone else's space.

Máni steps through into the everything. Judy turns, and Chang'e offers her hand to Dodger.

"We need you to come with us again," she says.

Dodger reluctantly lets go of Roger, her hand lingering on his wrist, as if she's afraid to even break contact. Roger bumps her side with his elbow.

"It's okay," he says. "You came back, and everything re-entangled immediately. This isn't going to hurt us; it's just going to let us do what we came all the way down here to do."

"All right," she says, and takes Chang'e's hand, letting herself be pulled into the everything.

After that, all they can do is wait.