Palus Persici

TIMELINE: AUGUST 19, 2017. TWO DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

Everyone has drifted off by the time Artemis comes through the window. They're not all necessarily asleep, but they're dozing, disassociating, nicely removed from the situation. She slides off the ledge, getting her feet firmly planted as she takes in the scene; the bodies either sitting or sprawling on the unseen ground, the litter of leaves and bruised peaches that remain, even in the absence of the tree. After a long pause to see if anyone will notice her arrival, she plants her hands on her hips, and demands, in a carrying voice: "What the actual fuck is going on here? I thought this was a murder investigation, not a slumber party!"

Chang'e jerks awake. She dozed off with her head on Roger's shoulder, dreaming a complicated, confusing mixture of Judy's dreams and her own, and it is surprising and pleasant to realize how many of those dreams were the same. She turns to the window, eyes wide and still bleary from sleep, then scrambles to her feet as she realizes who's there.

"Artemis!" she exclaims.

Kelpie rubs her eyes as she wakes, and rises with startling grace, offering her hand to Máni as she does. Both of them face the goddess of the hunt and the moon, who looks refreshed and invigorated by her evening's activities, full of light and vigor.

"I'm so glad you're all right," says Kelpie.

Artemis's expression softens, like she wasn't expecting that and doesn't quite know what to do with it, but is happy to accept it all the same. "Why wouldn't I be?" she asks. "I've been doing this for a long time." Her attention flicks to Chang'e. "I see you didn't die."

"No, I made it through Aske's window," she says. "I grew a peach tree from there to here, so everyone else could come down and join me."

"Oh? And how did that work out?"

"I'd need to wake Dodger to explain, and the Doctrine may not be quite human, but it's not Lunar; they still need to sleep. I'd rather not upset her. Basically, we each generate our own individual branches of the everything, but they're all connected. Dodger understands them sort of instinctively, and when Aske's started collapsing, she got us out before we could fall into the void."

She's leaving out so much. She doesn't feel like this is the right time to explain.

"Was Aske still there?"

Chang'e sighs. "She was. Blunt-force trauma to the head. She died quickly, but she made it back to her window before she did. I think she was trying to reach the City. That, or whoever attacked her dragged her there, and was trying to open the window, but it wouldn't open without Aske."

"She was definitely attacked inside the everything?"

"It looked like it. And since her window is gone, we can't go back for another look. But the way the blood was splattered made it pretty clear. Can I see the bottom of your shoe?"

Three sets of footprints. Aske's, Máni's, and a third set which left smaller tracks. Looking bewildered, Artemis lifts her foot and shows Chang'e the sole of her shoe.

The shoe's too big. It's too big, and it looks like it fits, and she can't imagine anyone would put on shoes that were too small in order to commit a murder. Chang'e untenses, shoulders slumping.

"Thank you," she says.

"No problem," says Artemis, sounding bewildered. She puts her foot back down. "Did you learn anything else?"

"Dodger understands the everything better than anyone else I've ever met, I think because it's linear and mathematical in a way that doesn't make sense to most of us; she says it wouldn't be possible for someone who's not a Lunar or accompanied by one to get into the everything. Because of the way we work the buddy system, someone would know if Aske had pulled somebody into the everything with her; she went in alone."

"Which means we're looking for a homicidal Lunar?"

"Yes, and it wasn't you."

Artemis blinks, slowly. "I would like you to please explain, in very carefully selected words, why you feel like you need to specify that I didn't kill one of our own."

"Anna," says Máni. Artemis turns to him. "She's not you, but you share a body. Chang'e told me Judy was able to enter the everything when she was first trying to figure out what was happening. If Judy can get into the everything, Anna could do it too, if she managed to surface long enough to seize control. We know she was working with the alchemists when they suppressed her and let you take over solo. If they wanted Aske dead for some reason, they could have pulled Anna to the surface, set her loose, and let you come back as soon as the deed was done. You'd have no idea what had happened, and could honestly say you weren't there."

"But it wasn't the alchemists who killed Aske, and I don't think they're the ones who ordered her dead," says Kelpie fiercely. The rest of the Lunars turn to her, frowning. "Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm not defending them. I know they're bad people, even Margaret, no matter how nice she was to me. But they're alchemists. If they were the ones who'd had Aske killed, we would never have found her body."

"They would have broken it down for raw materials and put her to work, because that's what alchemists do," says Erin, opening her eyes and pushing herself to her feet. "They don't leave good components laying around for other people to make use of."

"So what could they have wanted?" demands Chang'e.

"They wanted the everything," says Dodger.

The Lunars—and Erin—turn to look at her. She's still on the ground, eyes still closed; if not for the fact that she's talking, it would be easy to assume she was sound asleep. "What do you mean?" asks Artemis.

"Her branch of the everything collapsed as fast as it did because there was too much weight on it. It was falling apart before we got there, but it was stable, mostly because she was still in there—I'm not sure it could tell the difference between living and dead without something to compare it to. It could have endured that way for weeks, or even months, just empty and floating mired in the sky above the City. When we made it realize Aske was dead, that it was dead, it gave up and dropped away." She sighs, finally opening her eyes. "Don't you see?"

"See what?" asks Chang'e.

"Get a Lunar to kill another Lunar on your behalf. Leave her where she falls. Create an empty everything that still has a window but doesn't have an owner. Make yourself a synthetic Lunar who doesn't have a window of their own," she nods toward Kelpie, "and send them into the abyss. Zib was able to take the graveyard path into the City and open the doors from the inside, and it was made very clear that anyone who opens the doors can let people in. So you send your synthetic in, and they let you in. Then you have access to a stable window, with no one to stop you."

"And how is that Lunar supposed to even get into the everything, if they don't have a key?" demands Artemis. "If they did have a key, how would they open the door to someone else's everything?"

"Blood," says Dodger. She shrugs. "That's how alchemists do everything. Get enough of Aske's blood, and even if they can't fool the universe into accepting someone natural as a Lunar, they can fool it into accepting a synthetic Lunar as Aske. There's a lot of blood in an adult human body. Approximately one and a half gallons, for most people. Well, I only saw a little under a gallon while we were in there. Was Aske a blood donor?"

"She never mentioned it to me if she was," says Máni.

"So she would presumably have had the normal human amount of blood," says Dodger.

"Because knowing how much blood that is, and being able to estimate how much blood someone has lost with a glance, that's a normal human thing," grumbles Máni, sotto voce.

Chang'e elbows him. He grimaces, unrepentant.

"Let me see if I'm following you here," she says. "You're saying the alchemists had Aske killed because they had Kelpie and thought she would be able to access the City via Aske's window, as long as Aske's iteration of the everything remained accessible. And that by using blood collected by the Lunar who did the actual killing, they'd be able to convince one of our keys to open Aske's gate into the everything, meaning they'd have an unprotected point of access, without any Lunar actually taking the step of betraying the City itself." Chang'e isn't sure it's possible for a Lunar to betray the City. She has the feeling, vague and unformed, that the City would stop them if they tried.

Dodger stands as she nods. "Yup. It's convoluted, but alchemists like convoluted. They think a simple plan is destined to fail, because the universe abhors a straight line. Give them a labyrinth with a finish line at the end, and hoo, boy, they are your new best friends."

"There's just one problem."

"What's that?"

"How were they planning to access the everything without a key? There are only three in the city, and before Aske died, I would have told you there were only two. I'm certainly not handing mine to a stranger."

"I'm not either," says Artemis.

"Who has the third key?"

"Right now, I do," says Máni. "I was supposed to hand it to Artemis—clearly unnecessary—and then she'll give it to whoever comes next in the rotation."

"Diana," says Chang'e, slowly and with dawning horror.

Máni frowns at her. "But Diana doesn't cross the sky very often."

"She said she wanted to go the night before the eclipse, to remind herself why it was so important," she says. "Diana put herself down for the next crossing."

"Meaning I, in my guise as Losna—a minor moon goddess with no allies and no real protection—would be meeting her alone with a key in my hand and no witnesses." Artemis gives a small, hard shake of her head. "Nope. That's a trap. I know how to recognize a trap when I see it, and that's a trap right there. I was supposed to walk into it without hesitation."

"Diana gets the key from ‘Losna,' douses it in Aske's blood, and gives it to the alchemists." Chang'e frowns at Kelpie. "But you're not quite right."

"I'm orange and I have hooves," says Kelpie. "How am I even remotely right?"

"No, I mean you're not a synthetic Lunar in the sense they'd need. You're imprinted with Artemis's Hind. They'd want to use something completely empty."

"Margaret had a project in a locked room," says Kelpie slowly. "She was building the ideal human body, she said, and if we couldn't figure out how to fix the damage my accident had done, she'd see about transferring me into it. At the time, that sounded like the nicest thing anyone had ever offered to do for me. Now I'm wondering what parts of me would have been left out."

"Take an empty vessel, infuse it with just enough bottled moonlight and symbolic folklore to attract the universe's attention, and pump it full of stolen Lunar blood," says Dodger grimly. "Or hell, if the body didn't make it out of the lab for some reason, do it with an auf. All you'd need to do is empty it out a bit more than they normally do before they wake the nasty little fuckers up."

"So Kelpie's a Plan B, not a component of Plan A?" asks Artemis.

Dodger nods. Artemis does as well, looking fiercely grateful.

"Good," she says. "I don't want her back in the line of fire unless she insists—and if she insists, I'm still going to argue. Someone deserves to get through all of this unharmed. Even if it's not necessarily going to be one of us."

"Artemis…" says Kelpie.

"You may not be mine. I know you don't want to feel like you belong to anyone. But you were made for me, and everything I am tells me to protect you, even from your makers."

"You really think this Diana lady's crooked?" asks Erin.

Artemis nods. "I've had my suspicions for a long time. I wasn't kidding when I said that Artemises don't come around Berkeley, because your Diana is territorial. And we talk. Just like every other flavor of Lunar, we talk."

"Do we confront her?" asks Chang'e. "Or do we wait for tonight, and then see who shows up at the gate?"

"If they open a channel into Aske's everything, they're going to die," says Dodger. "It's not there anymore, and now that the universe knows it's gone, it won't take kindly to someone trying to play that kind of trick on it."

"Right, so we don't let them go through."

"Or maybe we do, and this becomes a self-solving problem."

Chang'e stares at Dodger for a moment. "That's horrible."

"That's practical. I'd rather be a little horrible and alive than untarnished and dead. But hey. You do you, I guess."

"All right," says Artemis. "Let's not fight. Here's what I say we do: we get out of here."

"At last someone's talking sense," says Dodger.

"We all go home, and we go about our normal business, we don't let on that anything's out of the ordinary—we don't spy on Diana, or avoid her if we would normally see her around campus, or anything ridiculous like that. And then, come moonrise, I go to the clocktower, assuming the gate is back where it belongs, and I wait to see who shows up. If it's Diana alone, we're good. If it's Diana and the alchemists—which sounds like a rival band from Scooby-Doo—then she and I settle this like alpha goddesses."

"Meaning?"

"I pull her hair, kick her in the tits, and run like fuck," says Artemis. "I'm in pretty good shape; she's an art professor. I can outrun her."

"And I'll be there, which gives you a power boost," says Kelpie.

Artemis looks at her, mouth opening like she's about to object, and stops as she sees the look on Kelpie's face, which is sternly determined, a deep line between her eyebrows as she scowls.

"You'll be there," she agrees. "I'll be happier with backup."

"We'll be there too," says Chang'e. "Aske was our friend, not yours. She deserves to have people show up to avenge her."

"Do you want me to just take out an ad in the newspaper?" asks Artemis.

"That would be an excellent idea," says Erin. "We can include the address where the alchemists can come to collect your corpse, and save ourselves a lot of trouble. Are all moon gods as bound and determined to get killed as you lot?"

Máni shrugs. "We know we're actually immortal. Why not be a little inclined to taking risks while we're here on Earth?"

"Because the human halves of you aren't immortal," says Erin. "What do they have to say about this?"

"Judy's fine with it," says Chang'e. "She feels like we failed Aske."

"David was planning to ask Eliza out after the end of the semester, when he was sure she had her feet under her and didn't need a friend more than she needed a partner," says Máni. "He's furious with himself for not doing it sooner, and if this was Diana, he wants a chance to explain to her that Aske was never meant to be collateral damage."

"Anna doesn't get a vote," says Artemis.

"Plan is to just go home, then? And those of us who live together get to deal with the traumatized widow and her son—and their dog—that we've suddenly acquired? Great," says Dodger. "Erin, go wake my brother up, if you would be so kind. Kelpie, are you staying at our place tonight?"

"If you don't mind," says Kelpie.

"If you're not careful, Smita's going to decide that you live there, and then what I do and don't mind is going to be entirely irrelevant," says Dodger. "Artemis, this is your everything. Can you get us out of here?"

"I can," says Artemis.

Erin wakes Roger, who rises groggily and with many small sounds of protest, then falls into line with the rest of them. Even half-awake, he's learned to watch his words, not saying anything that could be viewed as either a request or a demand. It must be a hard way to live. Chang'e watches him, and understands both why her human half finds him so fascinating and why he cleaves so closely to his sister, who doesn't seem to be as affected by his voice as the rest of them.

They fall into a line, Artemis at the front, Chang'e and Máni close behind, Kelpie after them. Roger and Dodger come after her, and Erin brings up the rear, a final defense that will hopefully go unneeded. They make their way back to the gate, Dodger watching the rainbow flashes in the walls with rapt fascination. As they're nearing the wavering square of light that will lead them back to the alchemists' lab, she clears her throat, then calls, "I want to try something. Can we hold up for a moment?"

Artemis stops, and the others stop in turn. Dodger, meanwhile, breaks away from the line and walks a few steps deeper into the blackness, then reaches out and begins to play her fingers over the air like she's tracing patterns on a screen. The rainbow flashes follow her fingertips, increasing in brilliance and frequency, until they coalesce into a sheet of vivid brightness, scintillating through every color and no colors at the same time. It hurts to look at. She presses her palm against the center and it shatters back into a cascade of rainbow streaks, racing off to join their fellows in the walls.

Dodger turns, a satisfied expression on her face, back to Artemis. "I think that worked," she says. "Let's try the gate."

Artemis gives her the sort of patient look normally reserved for very small children and for pets that have done a clever trick. "All right," she says. "We'll try it."

She resumes her passage toward the gate, looking through its distorting transparent membrane, and blinks, recoiling slightly. "That's not the lab," she says.

"Nope," agrees Dodger.

The gate is looking out onto the blackberry snarl behind the carnival house, briars and even boughs bending inward under the weight of their fruit visible through the distortion.

"How—?"

"I moved it," says Dodger, with an easy shrug. "Now that I know where both ends are, it wasn't hard."

Roger looks at her fondly. "Please stop terrifying our new friends for fifteen minutes, if you would."

"Fuck you," says Dodger, in an amiable tone. She gestures to the gate. "After you, moon people. I promise I won't stay in here and reprogram the universe while you're not looking."

Oddly, this doesn't seem to be as reassuring as she wants it to be. Artemis frowns as she looks back to the gate, not moving until Kelpie pushes past her and steps out. Then she follows, and the others follow her, leaving Roger and Dodger alone in the everything.

She looks at the gate and doesn't move, agony in her eyes.

"Dodge," he says.

"I don't want to go back," she says. "I know we've always said we wanted some time to be normal before we went ahead with doing what we were made for, but I don't want to go back. Everything here, on this side, feels… unlimited. In a way I can't really describe yet, but want to spend more time figuring out."

"We don't know if they have farmer's markets in the Impossible City. Or potatoes, even. Baker was an American author, so I'd assume potatoes, but she was writing in a very European tradition. Maybe we get there and we don't have access to anything they didn't have in pre-Colonial London. Are you ready to go without internet? Without your journals? Because I don't think I am, and this is one of those things we do together or we don't do it at all."

"I know." Dodger shrugs. "I'm still allowed to want to stay."

"You are. You just can't do it yet." He offers her his hand. "At least now we know we'll have company."

"Yeah, maybe you can ask your new girlfriend to drop care packages every time she's the one up in the sky."

"She's not my girlfriend," he demurs.

Dodger laughs and prods him with her elbow. "She's going to be. I know the signs, and I know you've been lonely. She can't keep up with you, but no one can, not even me, and she's about as close as it's going to get. Preternaturally empowered linguist who also happens to be a part-time god? That's your type. Even if you didn't know it two days ago, that's your type. You nerd."

"I nerd, you also nerd," he says, reaching out to take her hand and pull her with him out of the everything. She doesn't protest, although she glances back at the lines of rainbow light with longing in her eyes, watching them until she's on the other side of the gate and they vanish, lost in the blackness and the blur.

Roger lets go of her hand. She turns with a sigh to the gathered Lunars and Erin, who are watching her with varying degrees of wariness.

The whole night has slipped away while they were in the everything, leaving them standing in the last vestiges of darkness before the sunrise. Dodger wasn't kidding about time moving differently in there; what felt like three or four hours has proven to be at least eight, maybe more, and the lights in the house are still on. Smita and the teens must have stayed awake, waiting for them to come home, unable to sleep when they didn't.

"How did you do that?" asks Artemis, and then: "Can you do it again?"

"I negotiated with the possibilities until they agreed it was possible they might have placed the gate on the back fence," she says. "Not the easiest conversation I've ever had, but not the hardest, either. It was easier because someone else had already done it. The gate was supposed to be on campus last night."

All of them turn then, looking at the fence where the gate is anchored, standing open and barely visible in the watery pre-dawn light. It will vanish soon enough, whether or not it's formally closed. Artemis pushes past the rest of the group, remarkably careful not to knock any of them into the thorns, and taps her key against the frame.

The gate spirals inward on itself and is gone, leaving only the fence behind. She looks over her shoulder at Dodger. "What do you mean, someone had already done it?"

"I mean, someone convinced the gate to show up in the lab, underground, rather than where it wanted to be. It'll be back on campus tonight."

"Who could have done that?"

"Is Hecate in town?" asks Artemis.

"Not unless she snuck in the same way you did," says Chang'e. The glitter in the air around all three of the properly divine Lunars is more apparent in the small, dark hours of morning, haloing their heads in sparkling light.

"Hecate isn't a sneaker," says Artemis. "You'd know."

"Who else does doors?" asks Máni.

"Diana is also the goddess of crossroads and passage to the underworld," says Erin, in an aggravated tone. "With the way you go on about people using their other aspects, could the Diana you've all been worried about have done it somehow?"

"If we call the bottom of a ladder into a secret alchemical laboratory ‘the underworld,' I suppose we could, sure," says Artemis. "She would have needed to know where the gate was intended to be."

Chang'e shrugs. "I do the divinations at the start of the moon cycle every month, and then I make a shared calendar. Diana has access."

"A shared calendar," says Artemis.

Chang'e nods.

"The modern world has brought us nothing worth preserving," says Artemis.

Kelpie snorts as she laughs.

"I need coffee," announces Roger, starting for the house. The others follow, since none of them has a better idea. Dodger, who seems to want coffee even more than her brother, trots ahead of him. She's the first one up the stairs, the first into the kitchen, where Smita has fallen asleep at the dining room table, where she stops and turns to motion the others to be quiet as they follow her inside.

"Smita," says Erin. "We're home."

"Oh, thank fuck," says Smita, sitting up without opening her eyes. She stands, motion jerky and stiff from hours spent dozing in a hard wooden chair. "I'm going to bed," she announces, and stumps out of the room, finding her way by muscle memory alone.

Roger smiles as he shakes his head. "They worry about us."

"Of course they do," says Dodger. "If we die and the Doctrine doesn't immediately pass to Kim and Tim, they're homeless. This house mostly exists because I've convinced it that it doesn't have a choice in the matter. If we go poof and the Doctrine isn't right at hand to maintain my equations, the house as it currently is goes poof with us."

"Leaving…?" asks Kelpie.

"A one-bedroom with mold stains on the ceiling that hadn't been given basic maintenance in roughly fifty years," says Dodger. "Really, it's best if we don't die."

"Back to Diana, please," says Chang'e. "Do we honestly think she could have moved the gate?"

"We do," says Artemis. "Before we had the tools to chart where the gates would appear, and in the absence of anyone as damned useful as my Hind apparently is, the gates were set by Diana. She'd tell them where to open, and they'd anchor there, so that whoever was going to make the passage could open them at their leisure. She would need an old rite to move a gate, the sort of thing most people don't know about or use anymore, but she could do it."

"The sort of thing an alchemist might have in their files?" asks Erin. The others look at her. "We know the alchemists are behind this, because the evidence says so, and their history confirms it. The alchemists are behind basically everything when you dig deep enough. Say they needed to get a Diana on their side, and figured out what would get around her defenses. They come in with proof that she would have been a lot more powerful once, and they've got her. I guess." She pauses, then, frowning deeply. "What the hell does this Diana of yours even want, anyway?"

"That's what we're about to go find out," says Chang'e, looking toward Máni and Artemis. "Kelpie, you might want to stay here for now. If she's working with the alchemists, we don't want to let her know you've found us."

"I don't like you going off without me, but you're right," says Kelpie. "I'll stay here and make sure Isabella and Luis are okay when they get up. Be careful."

"Careful is for people less awesome than we are," says Artemis. "We'll be fine."

As she and the other Lunars leave Kelpie and the other alchemical constructs behind, Kelpie wonders if Artemis even knows how boldly she was lying just there.

They may not, in fact, be fine.