Mare Spumans

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

Normally, when a Lunar slides out of a window in the sky above the City, they find themselves caught in the magnetic pull of the aggregate Moon. They drift gently upward, merging with the collective consciousness of every other Lunar who has come to share the sky, and they stay there until the moon sets in the location they started from. No one knows how the City sky can keep such perfect time, but it does. Age upon age, it does.

Tonight, however, Chang'e has entered the sky not to shine, but to fall, and fall she does, straight down, body held rigidly straight, stomach swooping to fill her mouth as the dizziness of descent kicks in. She has the presence of mind to reach out as she nears Aske's window, and she grabs hold of the open frame with both hands, jerking herself to a bone-shaking stop.

As Judy, she is always a physical being, a woman walking in the world. As Chang'e, a state she normally enters purely only in the everything, she is a divine creature, a combination of the heavens and the earth, immortal and untouchable. As she stops her fall, for the first time, she feels as if she were something temporary, capable of coming to an end. And in that moment, she understands a truth of the Impossible City: if she let go, if she actually fell all the way to the ground below, she would die. Not Judy, Chang'e. This manifestation of the goddess would wink away and be forgotten, lost to her believers, wiped from the collective consciousness of the world.

Is that what happened to all the forgotten gods, the ones who were but are no longer? Did they fall from their own windows into their own Impossible Cities, dropping down too fast to stop or save themselves?

Heart suddenly pounding and the copper-penny taste of adrenaline filling her mouth, Chang'e pulls herself up and over the window ledge, falling, limbs akimbo, into the everything on the other side.

The space is black as always, infinite, solidified void. But the rainbow flashes here are slow, sluggish, almost creeping along before they fizzle and die. This is what the everything looks like when it's cutting off a piece of itself, declaring a once-vital artery extraneous to needs. Chang'e straightens, pushes her hair out of her face, looks around…

… and screams.

There is a pool of silver-bright blood on the floor, not clotted or congealed in the slightest, as fresh and liquid as the moment when it was shed. There is no red, only silver, like mercury, and still she knows it for blood, because there's nothing else it could possibly be. She catches her breath, swallowing it to sit like a stone in her still-unsettled stomach, then moves closer, trying to understand the scene in front of her.

There's a lot of blood at first, a pool of silver that seems like it must be all the blood a body can contain. Drips and smears travel from it toward the window, and she turns to look. The mark of a grasping hand is on the ledge, desperately clutching at what must have seemed like a chance at salvation. Then it smears and drops away, grip lost, hope abandoned.

Aske was hit over there, and managed to crawl to here. She turns again, back toward the main pool, and begins following the drops in the other direction.

The primary wound wasn't dealt here. No. There are drag marks on the floor of the everything, which has never seemed so solid, or so unwelcoming; this is dead space. It doesn't want her here. It doesn't want anyone here. The everything that was once Aske's is mourning, no longer needed with her gone, not sure how it's meant to let her go.

The drag marks lead to a second pool, almost as large as the first, which must have been where the killing blow was dealt. Something hard and heavy was used to strike Aske, probably in the head, and she began to bleed out almost instantly. A footprint in bright silver stands out at the edge of the pool: Máni was here.

Drops of blood trail off into the distance, a gruesome reminder of the way she saw him approaching the gate, Aske in his arms. They mingle silver with mortal red, Aske's divinity bleeding out of her one drop at a time. Chang'e follows them, and at the end of the trail, she finds the terrible prize they've been seeking. Aske's body is still curled on the ground where Máni left her, eyes closed, limbs bent into the shape of a comma. It's almost obscene, how much it looks like she's just sleeping. Chang'e feels for her pulse, feeling a sudden flare of hope.

There's nothing. Aske is gone. Aske has been gone for quite some time. Chang'e turns her head to the side, revealing the smashed-in back of her skull, and grimaces. At least she knows now how the other Lunar died.

At least it wasn't an arrow.

She straightens, shaking her hands like she can shake away the feeling of tacky, undried blood and dead Lunar flesh. Then she turns and heads back toward the window, letting the blood trail guide her through the unfamiliar everything.

She can't control her relief when she sees the window floating serenely in the blackness. It's almost overwhelming, how glad she is to have the confirmation that she'll be able to get out of here. She almost runs the last twenty feet to the window, clutching the frame in both hands to reassure herself that it's real, she's not trapped, it's really real.

People are shouting above her, and she realizes how much she must have frightened them. She sticks her head out the window and looks up.

"I'm okay!" she yells. Saying it makes it true, or true enough that she breathes a little easier, stands up a little straighter, and repeats herself: "I'm okay."

"How are you planning to get back up here?" demands Máni. "What the hell made you go down there alone?"

Chang'e almost laughs. How can she say that it was out of the fear that if she took Artemis with her, she'd find Aske had been killed by an arrow through the heart, that she still doesn't trust the other Lunar, that she's tired of feeling like she's at the back of the line when it comes to handing out answers? How can she say any of that? She swallows her painful merriment, shakes her head, and says, "I have a plan. Step away from the window."

Máni vanishes, back into Artemis's everything, and Kelpie sticks her head out. "Artemis is crossing the sky," she calls. "She left right after you jumped. She said she was sorry, but she couldn't wait any longer."

"I need you to step back, too," says Chang'e. "I'll be right up."

Kelpie withdraws. Chang'e reaches into her pocket, closing her hand around the small, hard object nestled there. She pulls it out and opens her fingers, revealing a peach pit nestled in the hollow of her hand.

This is her main trick. She doesn't have a disappearing bow or control over the tides; she can't call a hunt or compel the truth. But she can grow an orchard out of nothing, if she wants one, if she has the seeds. She's never done it in the everything before, but how hard can it be?

Raising the peach pit to her lips, she kisses its rough, ridged surface gently, a tap of her lips against the shell, then bends to place it on the floor. It gleams silver, brought one step closer to divinity.

"If it pleases you, grow," she says, in a dialect of Cantonese so old that its proper name has been forgotten; it is a cousin to ancient Chinese, the oldest recorded form of the language, which also has no proper name, for when it thrived, it didn't need one, and when it died, its corpse was scavenged by its children and their cousins. "If it pleases you not, grow, for it pleases me."

The seed bursts as the peach tree it has always had the potential to become wakes and begins to grow with unnatural speed and vigor, becoming a sprout becoming a seedling becoming a healthy young tree which, at the softest brush of her fingers, bends and grows out the window, reaching ever upward as it becomes a monster of its kind. Its branches fork and spread, vaster than they have any proper business being, their boughs growing lush with flowers that bloom and drop away, a rain of petals for the City far below.

There are no pollinators here, but Chang'e's trees have never needed pollinators; she is their only symbiont, the only companion they require, and as the fruit begins to swell and ripen, impossible but solid, she smiles.

Above her, she hears shouts of surprise and delight. She sticks her head out the window, plucking the nearest ripe peach at the same time. The fruit is heavy in her hand, familiar and soft, and it makes her feel better as she calls up, "You can climb down. It'll hold you. And then we can all climb back up, but I want you to see the body."

"She's still there?" asks Máni, sounding utterly horrified.

"She is," says Chang'e. She steps back from the window. "It's clear."

One by one, the others descend, coming down the tree with peaches in their hands and leaves in their hair and, in Erin's case, an utterly ridiculous grin on her face.

"We should be able to solve everything by climbing trees," she says. "Roger, write that down for when you control the universe. Everything should be solvable by climbing a tree."

"I'll get right on that," he says, frowning at Chang'e. "What the hell possessed you to fling yourself out of a window?"

"Someone had to," she says, with a shrug. "Artemis needed to start her crossing. Máni had already seen the body—letting him see her again wasn't going to tell us anything new. If we had to leave whoever went down behind, better me than you, your sister, or Erin."

"Don't think about yourself like that," snaps Kelpie, who made her own descent with surprising ease, given her hooves. She brandishes a peach at Chang'e. "You're as essential as anyone."

"I'm one more facet of a very common god," says Chang'e. "Lose me, you'll have another within the week."

"And how does Judy feel about that?" asks Roger.

Chang'e doesn't answer.

"Seems like maybe Artemis and Anna aren't the only ones who aren't completely comfortable with the way you people have things set up," he says, and his voice is mild, but the inherent critique is not. "Nice trick with the peach tree, by the way. You do that often?"

"Not to full maturity, but peach trees are sort of my thing," she says. "I can grow an orchard in an afternoon. I only need the seeds."

"The body?" asks Erin, less patient and less comfortable with the situation than some of her companions.

Chang'e nods. "This way," she says, and turns to lead them deeper into Aske's everything. The rainbow flashes are continuing to slow, and the ground is taking on a mushy quality, like ice on the verge of breaking. It makes her nervous. She's fairly sure that's the right response to walking on something that feels like it's considering the virtues of ceasing to exist.

Dodger watches the walls as they walk, less rapt than fixated, intent. She still manages to avoid the blood, even without looking down. Chang'e isn't sure how that's possible when there's so much of it. She doesn't want to ask.

"Roger," says Dodger, voice gone soft. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"

"I am," he replies. "You have any ideas about how we're supposed to get out of here?"

"Can't we just go back up the tree?" asks Kelpie. "It's a good tree. It seemed really solid."

"That's assuming the tree is still there when we're done," says Dodger. "This place is breaking down."

"The everything can't break down," protests Máni. "It's always here, or we wouldn't be able to access the City, and without the City, I don't think anything else gets to exist."

"How much do you know about mushrooms?" asks Dodger.

Máni blinks before turning to Chang'e. "Is that a weird question?" he asks. "Because that seems like a weird question, but I no longer feel like I really have a benchmark for where ‘normal' stops and ‘weird' begins."

"Says the moon god to the moon goddess who just grew an adult peach tree in under a minute, while they walk through a channel of nothingness to look at a corpse," says Erin, almost singsong.

Máni flushes a deep red but keeps his eyes on Chang'e, waiting for her response.

She nods, not quite smiling. "Yeah, that's a weird question. What do mushrooms have to do with anything, Dodger?"

"I think that's basically what we are, all of us, except for maybe Smita, since she's still a human and not an anthropomorphic force of the universe. We pop up because the mycorrhizal network says the right conditions for our growth and survival have been met, and if those conditions persist, we survive. If they don't, or if there are more predators present than expected—meaning the alchemists—then we die."

"That's grim and a little terrifying as an outlook on life," says Chang'e. "What the hell's a ‘mycorrhizal network'?"

"In forests, fungi tangle their mycelia with plant roots to form an organic internet. They communicate that way, full conversations via chemical signal. It's basically math as instinctive language, and it's gorgeous, and it lets the whole biome talk to itself. That combination of mycelium and root is the mycorrhizal network."

"And we're mushrooms?"

"Exactly," says Dodger, sounding pleased to have been understood. "We're mushrooms. Well, I think this—your everything—is the mycorrhizal network. We're walking through the channels the universe uses to communicate with itself."

"The universe being our version of the forest in this metaphor."

"Yup." Dodger shoots an oddly heated glance at Roger. "Stop gloating, asshole."

"I told you I'd get you to start using metaphors one day," he says. "My victory was inevitable."

"So is my fist."

He snickers and keeps snickering as Chang'e frowns, brows knotting together in dismay. "Okay, I mostly follow, I think, but why do you think my tree isn't going to be there when we go back?"

They're approaching the body, small, crumpled, and sad in its pool of red and silver. Roger speeds up, just a little, as does Erin; the two of them are the first to reach the fallen Aske, crouching down so that their bodies partially block hers from view. Kelpie looks relieved. She stops walking, and studies the peach in her hands, turning it over and over like it contains all the wonders of the universe. And maybe it does. Given the unsoil on which its parent fed its roots, this peach may contain the answer to all the questions ever asked.

"The mycorrhizal network tells the forest where mushrooms should grow, and when they sprout, they grow their own mycelia to add to the collective," says Dodger. "They put down roots, essentially, even though they started from a single spore. And then, if those mushrooms get plucked, some of their mycelia get absorbed back into the forest, but some of them just die. This slice of the everything was Aske's mycelium. And it's dying, because she's done. The everything as a whole will endure—that's why it matters that each of you has your own—but this piece of it is going to atrophy and be absorbed back into the soil. The universe, I mean, in this case. There's no more need for it."

"But… Aske…"

"Roger tells me she bled silver. That stuff we saw by the window, that was her blood. Is that correct?"

Chang'e nods silently.

"Then you have to know we were never going to be able to take her out of here and back into the material world," says Dodger. "She'd be the biggest prize we had ever dangled in front of the alchemists. A dead goddess, still leaking divinity? That's like rubbing catnip in your hair before you walk into a lion's den."

"Lions don't care about catnip," says Roger.

"Bite me," says Dodger mildly. She keeps her focus on Chang'e. "We have to leave Aske here, in her branch of the network, in her version of the everything. It's going to continue to degrade, and when it collapses, it'll take her body with it. If we can't return her to her family, I can't think of a better place for a Lunar to rest than here, in their everything."

"Oh," says Chang'e, very softly. "What does that have to do with my tree?"

"See how the flashes in the walls are slowing down? Like they're getting stuck?"

Chang'e nods.

"The possibilities that involve this place are narrowing to a single point, and when that finishes, away it goes."

"How do you know?"

"Because I can translate the equations the light traces out. This is the universe singing to itself, and the song it's singing here is a dirge. As soon as the light dies, this piece of everything is gone, and we need to not be here when that happens. We really need to not be halfway up a peach tree hanging over the void."

Chang'e blanches. "Okay. So how are we getting out of here?"

"Remember I said this was essentially the mycorrhizal network on a universal scale? The key word is network."

Chang'e shakes her head. "We only ever get a tunnel through the everything. A channel between the gate and our window. We didn't even know that we all had different iterations until Aske died and we couldn't figure out where her body had gone."

"You only ever follow a tunnel, because it's dark in here—which doesn't make any sense, by the way, I can see that it's dark, and yet I can see every person here perfectly well; it's like it manages to be light and dark at the same time—and you can't see the openings in the walls." Dodger shrugs. "I can. We can exit this everything and head into the next one over, and from there, we should hopefully be able to find our way back to Artemis's. Before she comes looking, or decides to climb down the peach tree herself."

"That reminds me; you probably shouldn't eat that peach."

Dodger lifts an eyebrow. "Oh? Why not?"

"These are the peaches of immortality," says Chang'e. "Just one won't make you immortal, but it'll probably stop your aging for a while. In a god, a single peach lasts for about a decade. In an anthropomorphic personification? I have no idea."

"It's cute that you don't think I stopped our aging a while ago," says Dodger. "There's nothing wrong with getting older, but Smita makes incredible curry, and I don't want to deal with that thing where every white person I know who's physically over forty gets horrific heartburn any time they eat something with a decent level of spice. Time and I are good buddies. I negotiated a ceasefire as soon as we finished looping through our lives, and it's holding pretty solid for right now."

Chang'e blinks. "That's… You're… How can you be so casual about that?"

"You just informed me that eating one of your special magic peaches from the tree that didn't exist an hour ago would make me stop aging for a whole-ass decade. I don't think you have the high ground when it comes to ‘things we should be less casual about.'" Dodger raises her voice, calling, "Hey, Erin, you two about done over there? Because I want to get us heading for the next room over before this one starts eating people."

"She died of a blow to the back of the head, hard enough to fracture her skull," says Erin, straightening. There's not a drop of blood on her, which should be impossible, given the way she was touching the body. "One good thing about that as cause of death: she wouldn't have had much time to suffer."

"That's not as comforting as I think you want it to be," says Máni.

"Was it the alchemists?" asks Chang'e.

"Not unless they have a way of getting through that gate without another Lunar to help them," says Roger. "There are three sets of footprints in here, from where the person walking couldn't avoid the blood. One of them is yours, and one of them is Máni's. The third is someone I can't recognize. Small feet, though. Definitely not the man we saw before."

"Is there anything else we can learn by staying here?" asks Dodger. "Because if not, I don't think we should be. The window of safety is closing fast."

The rainbow flashes in the walls have slowed so much, they're only coming every few seconds, in contrast to the constant flow in Artemis's everything. The others turn to look at them, registering the unhappiness in Dodger's tone. Roger glances at her.

"You're sure?"

"Am I ever wrong about this sort of thing?" asks Dodger, with evident disgust.

He shakes his head. "Not normally."

"Good. Now, is there anything else to learn from the body?"

"No. Just that she died fast and brutal, and she managed to drag herself back to the window before she did. Someone was waiting for her near the gate."

"So it was someone who understood the system enough to know when her guard would be down. Great. Come on."

Dodger starts to walk, steps brisk and sharp. The first few are stable. On the third, her foot seems to sink, as if she's stepped into a small divot in the previously smooth floor. She winces, and keeps going.

"You're about to walk into the—" begins Chang'e, just as Dodger makes a hard right turn, and disappears.

"—wall," finishes Chang'e, awkwardly.

A split second later, Dodger wraps her hand around what suddenly looks like the edge of an entryway and sticks her head back into view, asking, "Well? Are the rest of you assholes coming with me?"

"We're coming," says Roger, and gestures for the others to follow as he goes after his sister. Only Chang'e seems to notice how he closes his eyes as soon as he starts to walk, while Dodger fixes her attention on the ground, watching their feet. Oddly, he's the only one of them not to stumble on his way to the turn. They all avoid the divot that caught Dodger, but at one point, Kelpie steps in a hole that goes halfway to her knee, while Chang'e catches her foot in what feels like a pothole, stumbling and falling behind the group.

The ground is mushier with every step, until it feels less like walking on ice about to break than it does like walking on cornstarch mixed with water, like it's becoming something that's only solid under direct pressure, and returns to a liquid state as quickly as it possibly can. It feels like it's eroding around the edges of her foot, slipping away into nothingness. She walks as fast as she dares, unwilling to risk running when the ground is this unstable. Falling, she feels, would be a terrible mistake. Quite possibly the last one she'd ever have the opportunity to make.

Roger reaches the turn before any of the rest of them, and turns, eyes still closed, to offer them his help in clearing the floor. As Chang'e approaches, he leans out, shouting, "Jump!"

It's a direct command. She can no more refuse to obey than she can suddenly figure out how to fly. She digs her feet as deep into the dissolving ground as she can, leaping for him, and feels the moment when it drops out from beneath her. For a moment, she feels like she's flying after all. She always thought the everything was built on blackness. Now, hanging above true darkness, she understands how wrong she was.

In that split second, she's genuinely afraid she's about to die. Immortality doesn't do much good for someone who breaks every bone in their body, and part of being twinned with mortals is dying. Chang'e knows that. She never meant to lead Judy into the abyss.

And then Roger is catching her, swinging her around to safety before settling her feet on solid ground. They're standing in a new corridor, identical to the last, at least to her eyes, although this one still has rapid flashes dancing in its walls. Not as many as she expects there to be; compared to her own iteration of the everything, this is still a lightless, lifeless place. Roger lets her go and steps back, finally opening his own eyes.

"There you are," he says, sounding quietly satisfied with himself.

"How—" she squeaks, voice breaking on that single syllable, denying it the chance to become the question she intended. She pauses, swallowing hard, and tries again: "How did you know?"

"Sometimes what I see isn't as important as what my sister sees," he says.

"And vice versa," Dodger agrees. She leans to the side, looking around the pair of them, and winces. "I really hope no one dropped their keys back there."

Chang'e looks over her shoulder. Aske's body is gone, as are almost all signs of her demise. A few splashes of silver-red blood remain, back in the direction of the window, until the ground drops out from beneath them and they, too, fall into the void.

"No," she says, faintly.

"I think the place was already collapsing, but putting all of us inside it put pressure on it that it wasn't equipped to withstand," says Dodger. "Okay, everyone. This is where you follow me, and you don't argue anymore. Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am," says Kelpie.

"Come on," says Roger, offering Chang'e his hand.

More shaken than she knew was possible, she takes it and holds on firmly, letting him guide her through the dark.

They stay clustered close as they walk, following Dodger's lead. She walks a mostly straight line, but when she steps to the side or takes a larger step than usual, she pauses and looks back, watching them. It's hard to mind that very much. The consequences of her not watching out for them are too dire.

"What if the tree's still there?" asks Kelpie, sounding worried all out of proportion with the question. The reason follows immediately after: "What if Artemis gets back and sees it and climbs down, but doesn't realize the ground's mostly missing?"

"I thought you didn't want to belong to her," says Máni.

"I don't want to belong to anybody," says Kelpie, fiercely. "I'm a person, and that means I'm not property, no matter what the ones who made me were trying to do. But if I'm going to wind up with an Artemis no matter what, I'd rather be with the one I already know, and not have to spend all my time wondering whether some stranger is going to stroll in and try to… to claim me or something. So, what if the tree's still there?"

"This space is part of the universe, but it's outside the universe at the same time," says Dodger. "We're walking on the bottom side of the M?bius strip. Anywhere else, I wouldn't have to run just because the floor was disappearing from underneath me. I'd tell it to cut that shit out, give it the mathematical proof that it already had, and keep on going. Here, I can't do that. I'm limited by the nature of the reality around us."

"And isn't it amazing?" asks Roger.

Chang'e winces a bit at the delight in his voice. He sounds far too happy to be told that he's been placed under some incomprehensible new limitation.

Erin nudges her with an elbow. "Ignore them when they get giddy about things no one reasonable would be happy about," she advises. "They're so used to the world being made of folded paper that they get excited when something refuses to rip just because they're pulling on it."

Dodger makes another turn.

This hallway has more flashes in the walls, more lights in all directions; it's almost as vibrant as the active everythings Chang'e and Máni are accustomed to. There's a distinct upward tilt to the floor. Dodger nods, looking satisfied.

"It's doing that to make us comfortable," she says. "There's no actual ‘up' or ‘down' here—Artemis's window being higher up was just the way the sky arranged itself, not anything to do with where your branches are. But the everything knows we expect certain things from linear space, and it's trying to be linear for us. I don't know what would happen if you brought an actual normal person in here. Whether the everything would collapse or fold in on itself, or just become a compressed plane and smash everyone inside." Her tone turns speculative at the end.

"No using other people's bolt-holes as your science experiments," says Roger.

She sighs. "You never let me have any fun."

"We're walking through the infinite darkness on the other side of reality. I let you have all the fun in the world," says Roger.

Dodger huffs, and they keep on walking.

The journey is mostly uneventful. Every turn takes them to a new level of rainbow flashes, the activity ramping up bit by bit, until they come around a bend and see a window hanging in the air. This one is painted a cheery shade of sunshine yellow, with curtains covered in rainbows and unicorns. Chang'e blinks.

"Our windows take the form of the room our hosts occupied when we first became a part of them," she says. "I hope whoever's room this is still likes rainbows and unicorns."

"Who doesn't?" asks Máni.

"People who got bludgeoned with them as children," says Chang'e. "It's more common than you'd think."

"Damn," says Máni. "Any idea whose window this is?"

"Not Diana's, if she's the senior Lunar in this area. I recognize that fabric. It's based on a show that came out about twenty years ago," says Erin. Roger and Dodger turn to look at her. She shrugs. "They kept me in the lab, but I was still a kid, and sometimes Leigh would reward us for good behavior. Take the cadaver apart in under five minutes, get an hour of screen time, that sort of thing. The main difference between my childhood and a horror movie was that I couldn't turn my childhood off."

"We keep moving," says Dodger. "The window's closed, but we don't know whether it's actually in the same time zone as the one we started with. If it belongs to someone in Hawaii, they could enter the everything at any moment. Even if it doesn't, it's probably rude for us to be here without an invitation. Come on."

She wheels and steps through another hole none of the rest of them can see, and they follow her into another upward-slanting corridor.

They walk along it until Dodger makes another abrupt turn and they find themselves looking at Artemis's window. The tree is gone, leaving a scattering of leaves and a few fallen peaches on the ground. There's no way of knowing whether Artemis came back and climbed down, or hasn't come back yet. But the window is still open, so they know it's one of those two.

Dodger moves to the window and leans out, bracing her hands on the sill and looking down. When she leans back into the main space, she's smiling, clearly smug about something.

"There's no window below us," she says. "We must have gotten out just in the nick of time."

"Why do you look happy about that?" demands Kelpie. "Artemis—"

"Wasn't down there."

Kelpie stops. "What?"

"Time is moving faster in here than it is in the normal world. I'd say about three to one, or something in that neighborhood. It has to be, for this whole system of moons and Cities to work even as well as it is right now. Still." Dodger steps back from the window and picks up one of the peaches. It's barely starting to show a bruise. "This fell off the tree when the tree fell away, and it happened almost at the same time as us losing the floor. Do not ask me how I know this. When the woman who is the living incarnation of time itself tells you something happened at a specific time, you listen to her. You don't ask her to show her math."

She tosses the peach gently to Roger, who snatches it out of the air and turns it over in his hand before he nods. "Works for me. Chang'e, Máni, any questions?"

"No," says Chang'e.

Kelpie gulps a breath, visibly calming herself. "All right. Thank you for getting us out of there."

"You can thank me after we finish waiting for your boss to get back," says Dodger. She sits down on the rainbow-streaked ground, leaning back against what appears to be nothing, and stretches her arms up over her head. "Anyone need me for anything, or can I take a little nap?"

"How can you sleep here?" asks Chang'e. "We're in the void!" She's been traveling the everything for decades, but she's never lost sight of the fact that it's a tunnel through infinite nothingness, and today's reminder was something she could really have done without.

"You can sleep anywhere if you really try," says Dodger. "I did a sleepover in the Sutro Baths shortly after we manifested. That place burned down before we were born, but I asked it nicely to exist again for the night, and it did."

"There was a time when she said we were going to go live there," says Roger, fond and weary and absolutely accepting in the way that only truly comes to someone whose life has been reshaped to make statements like "I asked it nicely to exist again" make perfect, reasonable sense. "I talked her out of it, thankfully. A little house in Berkeley with a negotiable number of rooms is a much better place for us than a collapsed bathhouse that has to be constantly reminded not to disappear into the ether. I like floors that actually exist whether or not you ask them to."

Dodger wrinkles her nose at him, then closes her eyes, relaxing into whatever unseen surface she's leaning against. Roger looks around, then sits down cross-legged, resting his elbows on his knees. Erin flops to the ground not far away, leaning on her hands and looking like she was happier when the floor was dropping out from underneath them. At least then, something was actively going on.

"The way I see it, we have a braid of problems," he says, without any preamble. "Your friend's dead, and that sucks, and we need to figure out who or what killed her; we have an asshole alchemist running around making monstrosities and attacking people who haven't done anything to warrant it; and we have a group of alchemists who seem to have mostly been wiped out by the aforementioned asshole, who were making accessory packs of existing Lunars in a really complicated attempt at a honeypot. Does that sound about right for a summary?"

"What's a honeypot?" asks Kelpie.

"Usually a woman wearing her underwear as eveningwear being sent to seduce a professional spy," says Roger dryly.

Kelpie blinks.

"Ignore him," advises Erin. "The rest of us do, and it works pretty well for the most part. That sounds accurate to me, Roger. Missing some nuance, but what summary isn't?"

"Any nuance that matters?"

"They're doing this all ahead of an eclipse, and it's all but guaranteed that it's an attempt at claiming the Impossible City."

"They're not going to give up on the City," says Roger. "If we stop them this time, they're just going to step back and take another run. Is this the rest of our lives? Lurching from alchemical attempt at the City to alchemical attempt at the City, until either we slip and they get in or we admit that there's one way to stop this and move into the City ourselves."

"That sounds about right," says Erin. "But until we have to file change-of-address forms, we have pizza, and we have cable television, and we have time to figure out a better way to do this. For right now, we focus on the murdered girl, the local alchemists, and the Lunars."

"It's what works," says Roger.

Chang'e sits down next to him, letting Judy slip a little closer to the surface than she normally does when they're inside the everything. Judy reaches over to take his hand, tangling their fingers together, and holds on tight.

"I'm sorry you got dragged into all this," she says.

"I'm not." He shrugs. "This is the most fun I've had in weeks, and even if it wasn't, without Dodger playing Minesweeper back there, you would all have plummeted into the abyss, assuming you could find Aske's everything in the first place. I'd rather be a little inconvenienced than never know you because you'd died in the everything."

"That's… oddly sweet."

He grins. "Oddly sweet is my superpower."

The others sit in turn, and comfortable silence falls as they wait in the dark, surrounded by the rainbow light of unfulfilled potential, and hope that they haven't already missed their chance to set things right.