Lacus Doloris

TIMELINE: AUGUST 17, 2017. FOUR DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

The sun is hot.

Kelpie knew the sun was hot, honest she did. She knows the alchemical properties of the sun: it's used as a cleansing agent and is vital component in many complex workings, and of course, it's a giant ball of plasma that hangs high in the sky above the fragile world. It couldn't possibly be anything but hot. Still, knowing the sun is hot and knowing the sun is hot are two different things, and before just now, she only had the first one.

The sun is hot and the sun is bright, and the air smells like so many things she doesn't recognize, and some of them she wants to know more about and some of them she doesn't, but they're all fascinating. The door from the lab let her out in a brick courtyard surrounded by buildings two stories tall and hugged by walkways enclosed in wrought-iron rails, rows upon rows of doors facing the spot where she stands. Most of the rails are decked with hanging plants, giving the whole place a lush, green appearance that reminds her of the private offices below, but the ceiling is so high, and so blue, and so disorienting.

It's the sky, she knows it's the sky, but as with the sun, knowing and knowing aren't the same thing. This is the first time she can remember seeing the sky, meaning she's either been underground since her accident or—increasingly likely—she's never been outside at all, and this is the first time she's seen the sky.

It's vast and beautiful and terrifying. How do people go around with that sky hanging over them all the time, like a sword getting ready to fall? There are no wires up there. Anything in the sky could drop out of the sky at any moment, and there'd be no way to know it was coming down.

She's been working on a project about the moon for the last year, but she's never seen the moon. Somehow she always pictured it as the size it appears in pictures, as big as a quarter, something she could slip into her pocket if she needed to, small and manageable. Now, seeing how small the sun looks from here, while she can't help feeling its immensity, the thought of trying to do anything that affects the moon is barely shy of ridiculous.

The moon is huge and celestial and untouchably far away. The alchemists she works with act like it's a concept and a physical object at the same time, which made sense a few hours ago: change a concept, change the thing it conceptualizes. Simple, right? Sure, when you're talking about something the size of a quarter. Not when you're talking about something made on a scale that lets it radiate heat or light from a million miles away. No one should try to mess with the sun, or the moon. They should leave the moon alone.

At least the bright spots the sunlight left dancing in front of her eyes have started to fade; she can almost see normally at this point. She glances around, realizing just how exposed she is. She no longer knows how much of what she's been told she can actually trust—maybe she's a perfectly normal-looking person, outside the lab. Maybe hooves and tails and sunrise-orange skin are common things, and she's allowed herself to feel like something's wrong with her for no reason at all. She doesn't think so, though. Margaret was very blunt with her about her anatomical deviations from the human norm, and even after everything, she's inclined to believe Margaret.

They were trying to make a body that could appeal to Artemis's Hind, and in the legends, the Hind wasn't a human person. It was an actual deer. So maybe she should just feel lucky she has thumbs, and not fret too much about everything else she's got.

But if Margaret was telling the truth about how not-normal she is, then the first person who sees her is going to know that something's wrong with her, at least when they're comparing her to a human baseline. She doesn't so much care what strangers think about her. She cares that if they make enough of a ruckus, they could attract the attention of any Congressional representatives in the area, or even other researchers from the lab who weren't present for the liquidation. The alkahest won't have left any traces of what happened to Margaret. They could be na?ve enough to believe Margaret is gone because she's been reassigned, and Kelpie should be collected and taken back below.

She was there for Margaret's dismissal. She should have died. That she didn't—that she's a successful, intentionally concealed construct, a cuckoo—is an affront to everything the Congress stands for. Their cleaners don't leave evidence behind. She won't survive an encounter with her former peers.

She looks around, half-frantic with the need to get out of the open. The buildings around her are adorned with dozens of doors, each accompanied by a large window. Thankfully, all the curtains she can see are drawn. She fishes deep in her memory for some idea of what these might be, and finds the word "apartments" to describe private living spaces larger than her own room on the dorm level (where is she going to sleep tonight? That's a question she hasn't dared ask before now, and one she probably should at some point). She pictures Margaret's office replicated again and again behind those windows, each iteration occupied by its own version of her friend. Her incipient panic draws closer. All it takes is for one of those doors to open and she'll be in more trouble than she's ever seen in her life.

There are green things around the edges of the courtyard, including a tall, rough-barked tree and several unfamiliar bushes. She hurries to the tree, stepping behind it, hopefully hiding herself from the people who live in these apartments—and more, from the window next to the door she came out of. She hadn't considered, as she'd been standing there gaping at the sky, that someone else could climb the same stairs she had, could emerge into the same sunlight.

But where is she supposed to go from here?

"Okay," she says, and is soothed by the sound of her own voice, which hasn't changed; that, at least, has managed to remain the same as she transitioned from the safe, sane, familiar world of the lab where she's spent her entire life into this open-aired wilderness of strange windows and unknown rules. "Okay," she says again, and relaxes, just a little.

"I need to go somewhere," she says. "Where can I go?"

If she stays here long enough, the sun will go down. She knows that, knows days don't last forever, knows they measure time the same way above and below the surface. Once the sun sets, her skin won't be as noticeable, and the rest of her little oddities might be dismissible as tricks of light and shadow. She shrinks deeper into the shade under the tree, trying to think of other things that might help her situation.

All right. Accept that Margaret was telling the truth. Horrible as it is to think, she's a cuckoo, not a natural-born human at all. She's an empty vessel, created through alchemical means to embody a concept that may or may not have any real interest in occupying a physical form. Or maybe it does want a physical form but not hers—she has thumbs, after all, and hands, and lips. She's more human than cervine, and it's possible the deer she was created to embody won't want anything to do with her. Either way, right now she's herself.

And "herself" is a construct, meaning she's almost purely alchemical in nature. That's good. Alchemy doesn't exist in the eyes of most people, not anymore. People outside the alchemical world often look right past the signs of it, unable to understand or accept what they're seeing. If she was what she'd always believed herself to be, she'd look horribly twisted away from what a person is supposed to be. If she is what Margaret says she is, she may not look like anything at all. The people who don't already know about the alchemical just… won't see her.

Either way, she's not going to risk anything more until the sun goes down. She leans against the tree, wrapping her arms around herself. It's a warm day, but she's shivering. Why is she shivering? Shivering is a response to cold.

Or to shock.

Her supervisor and friend is dead. She isn't what she thought she was, and she's going to have to live with that; even if the Congress catches her and takes her back without slaughtering her on the spot, she's going to have to live with the fact that she was made, not born, and everything she knows about her past was a fabrication. She wonders if Margaret was the one who wrote her supposed "history," who named her parents and her cousins and told her they were waiting for her in Florida, in a house overlooking the swamp. It's weird to mourn people who never existed, but she does. They were always abstract concepts to her, people she might never see again, depending on whether they were able to repair the damage done by the accident, but she'd been told she loved them, and so she has loved them for her entire life. Finding out they were never there to love her back feels like losing them.

She's in shock. She's been through a lot today. She needs a glass of water, or a hug, or somewhere she can sit and breathe and not be afraid. She doesn't have any of those things, and so she sinks slowly to the ground, letting the back of her head rest against the tree as she closes her eyes. She can't imagine falling asleep in this strange place, surrounded by these strange new scents and sounds, with no idea whether or not the man from the Congress is going to come up and find her at any moment. She's not worried about it, because there's no chance it's going to happen. No chance at all.

Silent and still trembling, Kelpie slides into sleep, and the hours pass around her, one into the next, handing down the chain of the day one link at a time.

It's not one specific thing that wakes her. It's everything put together—the change in the light, which has grown dim yet not truly dark, thanks to municipal and residential lights; the change in the air, which has cooled, dropping to a less-balmy temperature, although it's not quite cool enough to have become uncomfortable; the change in the ambient noise. Doors are starting to open and close nearby as people return to the apartments they left behind that morning. Her eyes are fluttering open when something cold jams into her half-curled hand, and she sits bolt upright with a squeak and a gasp.

A large, black-furred creature with a waving tail is sniffing her hand with curious intensity. Kelpie starts to pull away, and the creature licks her fingers, tongue soft and warm and painless. She squeaks again, and a gangly pre-teen boy rushes over.

"I'm sorry, miss!" he says, grabbing for the creature's neck. It's wearing a brown leather collar, she sees, almost invisible against its fur. "I didn't expect anyone to be sleeping here. You shouldn't be, you know. Apartment manager will be pissed if he catches you, and he enjoys calling the cops on people he thinks are loitering."

"I'm sorry," says Kelpie. She pushes herself to her feet. Her rump is numb from the position she fell asleep in, and there's a crick in her neck. She's fallen asleep at her desk before, but mostly she sleeps in a specially designed bed, one that accounts for the fact that she's a biped with a tail that doesn't like to be compressed against things for long periods of time. Oh, it's going to hurt when the blood flow to her ass returns to normal.

Not that it's going to matter if she's been fed to the creature that's currently straining to get to her. She presses her back against the tree, unable to retreat any farther, not sure where she would go if she could.

The boy smiles, genial and unafraid. "I don't mind so much. I used to fall asleep out here when I was a kid, 'til Dad said it wasn't safe to sleep so near the street."

Kelpie hasn't seen a street since she came aboveground—which means she hasn't seen a street probably ever in her life, and that's unnerving to think. How many concepts does she have in her head that are actually entirely new to her? And how many things is she missing? From the way the boy holds the beast, she can tell this is an ordinary creature, something she's expected to recognize and know, something she shouldn't be afraid of. That's good. That both probably means it's not going to eat her, and tells her not to ask what it is. If he hasn't noticed anything strange about her yet, better to wait and see if he does.

Then his expression sharpens, and he looks at her more closely. "I fell asleep here 'cause I live here. My family's lived here most of my whole life. You don't live here. I'd remember a white girl moving into the complex. Why are you sleeping here?"

He's younger than she assumed at first, twelve at most and tall for his age; her eyes were tricked by the shadows and by the fact that she's never actually seen a young person before, just read about them in books, which generally focused more on the reasons it was sometimes important to take a young person apart than the ways to identify them when you meet them. She doesn't want to take anyone apart. Especially not this friendly boy with his strange beast, which is still trying to reach her. Neither of them seems hostile. She probably shouldn't be hostile either.

"I ran away," she says, more bluntly than she intends to. "The people I've been living with, they… aren't very nice people, and the nicest of them warned me that they were probably going to do something really bad to me soon. So I ran away."

The boy blinks, eyes going wide. "Are they your family?"

"No. Not really."

"Where is your family?"

Kelpie pauses. "I don't know." Artemis is probably the closest thing she has to a family now, but she's never met her, and she doesn't know where she is. Where do moon goddesses spend their time? Finally, she just shrugs. "I'm not sure I have one."

"That's awful. I'm Luis. Do you want to come home with me? You can meet my mom. She always knows what to do."

Kelpie hesitates. The boy doesn't seem to see anything strange about her, and that both raises her hopes and breaks her heart. Margaret was telling the truth; people who aren't at least a little bit connected to the alchemical world will look at her and see someone entirely unremarkable. They won't even be able to describe her once she's out of sight. But that means no one's going to miss or mourn her, and she's not a part of the world, not really. She didn't manifest naturally: someone made her, built her like the science project she is. There's no family in Florida wondering if she's all right. There's no one left in the world who'll miss her if she disappears.

"Sure," she says, finally. "Are you sure your mom won't mind?"

"I bring home people for dinner all the time," he says, with the airy ease of someone who knows the world is a dangerous place, but has never actually faced that danger up close and personal, or else has seen that danger from a different angle than she has, one where it takes the form of things other than runaway girls in the flowerbeds. "She's used to it. Dad might mind, but he won't be home for hours. Come on."

He waves for her to follow as he begins dragging his beast toward one of the doors. It's on the opposite side of the courtyard from the door to the lab, and so she follows, unsteady on her hooves in the grass, half-afraid of what she's agreed to, and half-exhilarated at the thought of interacting with real people, in the real world. Every step she takes is one step farther from the lab. Experience is its own alchemical agent, and it transforms the people it touches.

Thank you, Margaret,she thinks, and lets Luis lead her to the door, which looks just like every other door around it. Lush green plants in colorful pots hang from the balcony rail and sit on the air-conditioning unit; there's a red-and-yellow doormat outside.

"We have to wipe our feet before we can go in," he says, doing exactly that. His beast doesn't, too occupied with pulling against its collar, but he doesn't seem to notice.

It seems like a pointless ritual action, wiping their feet if the creature is just going to track whatever covers its paws inside anyway, but Kelpie steps obligingly onto the mat, wiping the dirt and grass shards from her hooves. A surprising amount of mud caked there in the short time she spent wandering around the yard; it comes off in dark streaks, and she looks to Luis for approval.

He's staring at her hooves, a furrow between his brows. "Those are real weird shoes," he says. "Don't they pinch your feet?"

Kelpie, who has caused a few arguments and one borderline brawl in the cafeteria by asking whether she has feet in the classical sense, can only shrug. "Not really," she says.

"Oh." Luis's face relaxes. Now that he's not contending with some undeniable piece of evidence that not everything is as he expects it to be, she's normal to him again. She wonders, on some level, how he's coping with the horns. They're small, barely worth the name, but they're hers, and they're sort of hard to overlook. She's tried.

"Come on," he says, and waves for her to follow as he opens the door, releasing the beast's collar and allowing it to run inside as he does. Kelpie follows, close, and is unsurprised when the beast flips around and comes running back to jump up and put its paws on her shoulder. It makes a noise, sharp and loud and very close to her ear, and she suddenly knows what it is, memory and academic knowledge combining with reality.

A dog. This is a dog. They're real. The lab has been trying to incarnate the Man in the Moon's beloved Dog for as long as she can remember, but unlike the Rabbit—and, apparently, the Hind—they haven't had much success. Margaret used to say it was because people liked dogs too much, and it was hard for them to think of the creatures as components in an alchemical construct. Their personal desires got in the way of their art.

"Down, Bobby!" says Luis, and the dog stops jumping at her, sitting and staring up at her with large brown eyes, tail thumping an irregular beat across the floor.

Kelpie catches her breath. "I don't mind," she says, looking around the apartment.

It's small, and she supposes it's shabby—everything she can see has been mended at least once, including the couch, which is a mottled tan that looks like it's been stained and scrubbed dozens of times. The carpet is several shades darker, still brown. There's colorful art on the walls, and a blanket in a half dozen primary colors slung over the back of the couch, but everything else she sees is shades of black and brown. Bobby is as black in the light as he was outside in the shadows; Luis's skin is a shade of brown a little darker than the carpet. His eyes and hair are black. She's never seen anyone who looks like him. Maybe people come in more colors than she knows.

(One of the younger researchers had been slightly black-haired and black-eyed, with skin darker than the rest of them; her features didn't align with Luis's, and according to Margaret, she was from a research team in a place called Tokyo, assigned to their lab in order to help them better incarnate and embody the Asian Lunar divinities. Kelpie had heard her complaining about how white American alchemists tended to be, but since none of the people she could see were actually white, just different shades of peach and tan, she'd assumed it referred to some attribute that hadn't been included in her reeducation yet, and dismissed it as unimportant.)

If people come in colors, maybe Luis hasn't commented on her skin tone not because he can't see it, but because there's nothing strange about it. Although he did call her a white girl before, and she's anything but white.

Trying to make sense of things is making her head ache. The air in the apartment smells delicious, peppers she doesn't recognize, spices, some sort of frying meat, and it's all she can do not to follow the smells, leaving boy and dog behind in favor of feeding her suddenly aching stomach. When did she last eat?

Lunch, probably, but she doesn't know how long ago that was.

"Ma!" Luis turns to head deeper into the apartment, toward the source of the smell. Kelpie follows, not sure what else she's supposed to do, and the carpet under her hooves stops, replaced by linoleum. That's more familiar, and despite the slipperiness of the material, she immediately feels more stable, which helps as they turn a corner and another person appears.

This one is taller than Luis, with long black hair pulled into a ponytail, standing over a stove and stirring something with a wooden spoon. Luis runs to throw his arms around her waist, not seeming to care about the heat. Maybe human children are fireproof? The woman jerks slightly but doesn't flinch or yell or pull away, just pats him semi-awkwardly on one shoulder.

"What have I told you about surprising me at the stove?" she asks.

"Don't," he says. "That's why I didn't. I yelled first."

She laughs and says something in a language Kelpie doesn't know, and Luis lets her go, stepping away. "I brought a friend home," he says. "Can she stay for dinner?"

The woman pauses, turns. She's even darker than Luis, and her shirt is a bright red that Kelpie can't help but interpret as meaning "danger." Kelpie takes a half-step back, forcing herself to smile. Not everyone is going to be her enemy. Margaret wouldn't have sent her this way if everyone was going to be her enemy.

"Hi," she says, hesitantly. "I'm Kelpie. Luis found me in the yard. Whatever you're cooking smells amazing."

"Dirty rice to go with the enchiladas," says the woman, still eyeing Kelpie.

"Why is it dirty? Should we eat it if it's dirty?"

"We just call it dirty because of the color it turns when it's cooked," says the woman. "Luis found you in the yard? Really?"

"I, um, fell asleep under one of the trees."

"So my son brought you home for dinner, yes, that makes total sense, and isn't ridiculous at all," says the woman. She turns back to her rice. "Why were you under our trees?"

"I ran away."

"From home?"

"I suppose you could call it that."

The woman glances back again. Her eyes are very sharp. Kelpie feels like she's being seen, every inch of her, all her oddities, all her impossibilities. But if that's somehow the case, this woman doesn't seem to care about the parts of her that are other than precisely human, because she's more focused on her rice as she starts talking again.

"Can you go back there?"

The thought conjures the image of Margaret with her eyes closed, tears that aren't tears rolling down her cheeks, and Kelpie isn't hungry anymore. Hard to be hungry when she feels this sick to her stomach. "No," she says. "I don't think I can."

"All right, then. I guess you're staying for dinner. You like enchiladas?" The woman turns all the way around this time, offering Kelpie her free hand. "I'm Isabella. You're welcome in my home."

"Thank you," says Kelpie, and shakes her hand, and tries to focus on the bright, amazing smells in the kitchen, the light overhead, the people around her who don't see how strange she is, who don't want anything from her. She's enough.

This is enough. This has to be enough.