Mare Serenitatis

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

The ones waiting in the hall have not, in fact, been captured by alchemists or attacked by additional constructs, auf or otherwise. Roger is leaning against the wall, eyes on the ceiling, listening to the hum of the concrete around them and trying to figure out why it makes him think of the moon. There's something about this place that Erin isn't explaining to them just yet. Whatever it is, she's figured it out, he's sure of that; she looks like she's standing in a graveyard, arms wrapped around herself in a defensive posture.

He'd feel bad about making her wait here with the rest of them if not for the fact that Artemis and Kelpie are near the gate, talking in hushed voices. Kelpie doesn't move her hands much, and her facial expression doesn't give very much away, but her tail—maybe it's the lack of people with tails to have modeled herself after, or maybe it's just her natural body language. Either way, her tail is endlessly expressive. It lashes side to side as she and Artemis speak, and he finds himself staring at it, trying to decode the meanings of the individual motions. It's almost hypnotic.

Then, with a burst of sound and thought as loud and sudden as a shotgun blast, Dodger is back. She brings color with her, the hall and its occupants going from grayscale to full Technicolor like Dorothy stepping into Oz, and he wonders whether she even realized her depth perception was gone on the other side of that strange appearing, disappearing doorway. It's been so long since they were distinct from one another. He doesn't want to admit that he depends on the soft hum of her thoughts to go to sleep at night, but he does. The silence of her absence was nearly deafening.

As before, she flings herself across the space between them and into his arms, clutching tight and clinging for dear life. It's like she thinks she can burrow into his skin, like she's the hermit crab and he's the shell, and while he might normally try to remind her that he enjoys not having her nails digging into his skin, right now he only folds his arms around her and holds her in return. If the silence was as loud for her as it was for him, she probably needs the reassurance.

I hated that so much,she thinks, and it's the first coherent thought he's had from her since she emerged. Roger throws back his head and laughs, utterly delighted.

Dodger pulls back and frowns at him, clearly perplexed.

"You are so weird," she says, letting go. She rubs her arms as she does, shuddering. "Let's never do that again. If I'm stepping outside the boundaries of normal reality, you need to come with me, or I won't go."

Roger nods. "I'd feel better if you didn't. And Dodge? We aren't going for another reset, there's only so much I'm willing to risk, but…"

"But we have to find a way to fix things for Kim and Tim," she says, finishing his thought. She sounds oddly relieved, and when he looks at her quizzically, she shrugs. "I was thinking that while I was inside the everything with the Lunars, and how is that a sentence that makes sense? It shouldn't be. Anyway, if having all that silence in my head was that upsetting when I knew you'd come back, what is it doing to them? To have all that silence there all the time? They were in each other's heads from birth onward, and now they're just… they're alone, Roger. We have to find a way to make this better."

"We will," he assures her. "Now that we understand what they're going through, we'll find a way to fix it."

While they've been talking, the Lunars have closed and reopened the gate once again, this time with Artemis making the first strike. She steps into the everything, and Kelpie follows her as Chang'e turns to face the others.

"It's time to go, if you're all ready," she says. "Erin, I can help you through."

"I've got Roger and Dodger," says Máni.

"You're sure you can handle them both?"

"I think if he holds her hand, she'll pull him through as soon as she's on the other side."

Chang'e can't argue with that, and so she simply holds out her hand, waiting for Erin to accept it. Erin looks at her with suspicion, but slips her cool fingers into Chang'e's own, even as Máni is taking hold of Dodger's hand, both of them pulling their passengers toward the reopened gate. Dodger grabs Roger's sleeve, pulling him with her. It's clear from how easily he comes that he would have followed anyway, but this way, they aren't breaking contact.

Erin looks back, sees him grimace as Dodger passes through the gate ahead of him, sees his face relax as he passes into the everything for the first time and their impossible connection is restored. They just need to be on the same side of the door.

(The gate, as opened by Artemis, is less Chang'e's glitter and calligraphed organic curves, less Máni's spiking mercury swirls of frost and rime; her gate is a silvery cascade of branches twisting together into knots that can't be broken, spirals without end. There are so many moon gods. Every one of them is different.)

Roger pulls his arm from his sister's grasp as he passes into the everything, straightening and turning a slow circle, eyes wide and mouth hanging slightly open in his awe. Chang'e watches him and smirks, just a little.

"Welcome to our version of reality," she says.

"The lights…" His voice lacks the strange harmonics it has in the outside world. It's still pleasant, still compelling in the way a charismatic person can be compelling, but it's not supported by an intangible need to do anything he says, all for the sake of keeping him happy. He seems to realize it even as he speaks, because he grins, a narrow tension slipping out of his posture and leaving him standing even straighter than before. "Can you read them?"

"Read them?" asks Artemis. "They're lights."

"I was able to spend some time studying with an older incarnation of myself before Judy's studies brought us here," says Chang'e. "She taught me the lights were possibilities the universe considered enacting and was unable to commit to. They come here to flare out and fade away, because they were never meant to be."

"If we'd had access to this place when we were still working on our perfect run…" Roger's voice trails off. He turns a slow circle, staring in open awe at the rainbows flashing around them. Then he stops, shaking it off, and turns his attention to Artemis. "All right. What do we do now?"

"I lead you to my window," she says. "Once we're there, Dodger tells us whether she can do the geometry we came here to ask her for, and then one of two things happens: either we swing over to Aske's window and find out what happened with her before I start my passage across the sky, or I start my passage. Either way, Chang'e and Máni will be able to walk you out."

"What about me?" asks Kelpie.

Artemis looks at her, expression softening into something lost and longing. "I'd like you to stay by my window until I get back, if you don't mind. We'll be coming out way underground, and there might be alchemists, or constructs. I want to walk you out myself."

"Wouldn't it be better if we all stayed inside the everything until you get back?" asks Dodger.

Artemis shifts her attention to the redhead. "I'll be crossing the sky for hours. It's almost time for moonrise and sunset to meet, and that's when my journey begins. You won't have food, or water, or bathrooms. You'll be bored stiff."

"And you want that for me?" asks Kelpie.

"You're a Lunar, or close enough that it doesn't really make any difference," says Artemis. "We don't experience any of those things in here."

"Neither do we, if I decide we don't," says Dodger, and it's such a calmly off-handed statement that it's terrifying in its implications.

Artemis considers a snappy comeback or a question, then dismisses both as bad ideas and gestures for the group to follow as she starts deeper into the everything. She walks the same way Chang'e and Máni did, following the same path. Dodger takes note of her steps, of the places where she deviates from the earlier journeys, the places where they stay the same. By the time the window appears ahead of them, she knows what's going on.

"The windows move," she says. "When you move in the physical world, they follow you in the everything. Chang'e and Máni manifested in two very different geographic areas. Their windows being close together could have been a coincidence. Yours being this close to both of theirs means it wasn't, and the windows move. We know there are windows on the other side of the sky. They shift with geography. Presumably they open when a new Lunar manifests, and close when a Lunar is lost."

Artemis's face falls. "So Aske's window might already be gone?"

"Depends on how fast things move around. How long have you all been in the area?"

"Since start of term," says Máni.

"Four years," says Chang'e.

"Three months," says Artemis.

"All right, and your window, while quite close, is still on the edge of the zone the other two are occupying."

"How do you know that? You haven't looked outside yet."

Dodger blinks at her, unable to figure out how she's meant to express the delicate, ongoing conversation between the flashes of light and the everything itself, which is not (contrary to appearances) the prismatic pathway glistening around them. It is, and it will be even when there are no more possibilities for it to contain, when it bridges the darkness as more of the same, alone and eternal. The everything and the potential for specific things are in endless dialog with each other, and that dialog is mathematical as much as linguistic: Roger can follow it as easily as she can, as easily as breathing. That conversation is what tells her Artemis's window is close to the other two. She doesn't need to look outside.

Still, she follows Artemis to the window, because she also doesn't need to argue. They're all tired and they're all stressed and they're all aware, to one degree or another, of the open gate behind them, beyond which is a nightmare maze of alchemical science and potential enemies. None of them were able to enter without the aid of a Lunar, but who's to say the alchemists will have the same constraints? Maybe they have a way of tricking the entrance into letting them through, something related to the moonlight held captive in the walls (and oh, Dodger is sure she'll be horrified when she finds out how they did that; horrified and maybe impressed, to a small, shameful degree. It's only natural that alchemists would do things in ways she instinctively understands—as their creation, she was designed to follow those same paths. That doesn't mean she likes it, or wants it to keep happening).

Maybe the alchemists lured the gate into their territory because they were hoping for this exact moment, when the window was open and its defenders were distracted.

She doesn't know, and speaking her concerns into the world won't make them any less real. Artemis opens the window. Dodger nudges her lightly to the side and leans out, into the bright City air.

Some of the other nearby windows—but not too near—are standing open, their owners already joining the slow journey from horizon to horizon. Dodger estimates their anchors as a hundred miles or more from their location, linked to Lunars who have no idea that any of this is happening, and would probably be rightly alarmed if they did. She really doesn't understand this system, or how it works for the Lunars who follow it, but she's not here to criticize; she's here to calculate.

Leaning out the window, she looks around until she spots the windows she knows belong to Chang'e and Máni. They're closer to each other than they are to Artemis's window, although they're still a good way apart. If she focuses, she can see the calculations in the air around them, the ones that tell her where they started and where they're going. They're seeking their permanent places in this section of the sky.

And she's just slowing things down by continuing to insist on seeing this scene the way a person would see it. I'm sorry, she thinks, enunciating the thought clearly enough for Roger to receive the words, and then she steps away from herself, deeper into the grasp of her domain.

(People who aren't like them—which is basically everyone except for Kim and Tim, and self-absorbed as they are, even Roger and Dodger realize how cosmically cruel it would be to try to have this discussion with their involuntary wards—assume constant telepathic communication must mean they get every thought the other has, fully formed and articulated. Instead, they receive every impulse and emotion, every feeling, and the words that are articulated internally with the same level of precision as they would be spoken. It's not a stream; it's a river. She feels Roger pull back to the limit of his ability to disengage, even as she descends into pure mathematics.)

The equations she's seen teased in the walls since their arrival snap into sudden clarity, and so do the equations in the sky, the calculated arcs of angle and ascent. She leans in to the numbers, finding comfort in what has always seemed to her to be the true proof of the divine, and she understands the way this sky works, the movement and placement of the windows, the reason everything fits together.

"It's beautiful," she says, or hopes she says—when she's this deep, she sometimes thinks she's saying something, but says something else entirely, some string of sums or formulae that, to her, express the same sentiment. She leans a little farther out, no longer concerned about falling, and scans the sky around her.

Based on the displacement and acceleration she sees written around her, Aske's window should be… She looks down. Not quite straight down, but close enough to be a short fall.

There, hanging in the air like all the others, is an open window, curtains rustling slightly in the breeze rising off the City far below, glass lightless. It doesn't gleam like the windows around it.

It is, in many ways, no longer a star.

Math and time are both Dodger's domain, and when she blinks, she sees the future of the window as clearly as any other equation: it will continue to dim, losing what little remains of its inherent shine, until it loses its grasp on the firmament and plummets. They're too close to the ground for atmospheric friction to cause combustive ablation, but still, it will flare and burn up.

She wonders if the inhabitants of the Impossible City understand that every time they point in delight at a falling star, they're marking the death of a Lunar. She rather hopes they don't. These are the people she will one day, inevitably, live among. She really doesn't want them to be cruel. If there's anything she can choose about her future, it's that she doesn't want the people she'll inevitably have to go and live among to be cruel.

So Aske's window is no longer a star the way the others are, but it's still here. Dodger pulls herself physically back, not only from her position out the window but from the mental state that allows her to see the world as pure numbers, no complications, no constraints.

"I found it," she says. "But we have a problem."

"When is there not a problem?" asks Erin. "What's the problem this time?"

"It's beneath us." She points, angling her finger so that even as she's pointing down, she's pointing with precision. "It's open, and I should be able to get there if I just lean out and let go."

"Why you?" asks Artemis. "Why not me, or Máni, or someone who belongs here?"

"Because of the other half of what I was about to say," says Dodger. "I can get there. I don't really see how anybody is going to get back. Even with a rope, we'd be asking someone to freeclimb about ten feet, when slipping would mean a potentially fatal fall. Unless you're signing up to splash, I don't really see anyone else doing it."

"You're leaving something out, Dodge," says Roger.

"I'm… Oh, right. I can find my way out of here if I need to. So unless you're sure, and I mean sure, that your little key trick will let you open a gate from inside the everything, if there's a chance our explorer gets stranded, it needs to be me."

Chang'e is drifting toward the window, moving slow and careful, conserving her steps to make it look as if she's not doing anything of the sort. Erin watches her go, and wonders, a bit, whether she should tell someone this is happening; whether anyone would care enough to stop it. She supposes Roger might. Chang'e's host is in his department, and he seems to like the girl. He probably wouldn't want her to splash across the City.

"Hey," she says, voice mild.

Chang'e doesn't stop or turn, only continues to drift toward the window, expression politely blank.

Dodger and Artemis are still arguing about who's going to go down to Aske's window, Roger and Kelpie looking on with near-matching expressions of indulgence on their faces. Máni is looking upward, into the rainbow dark. Out of all of them, he's the one who most seems to remember that Aske was a person before she died, and they're here because they need to know who killed her.

"Hey," she says again, more sharply, as Chang'e puts her hand on the windowsill.

Chang'e looks back at her, smiling politely.

"I'm the senior Lunar present," she says. "Any risks we're taking should be mine. Judy agrees."

She boosts herself up onto the ledge, looking back and down, and her smile broadens.

"I see the open window," she says, and pushes herself away, and falls.