Sinus Fidei

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

Isabella's enchiladas are like nothing Kelpie has ever tasted, and she wants to keep eating until there's no room left inside of her for anything but enchilada. They're sharp and spicy and sweet and savory all at the same time, striking flavors on her tongue she never imagined possible. She wants to wallow in them. She has to fight not to grab the serving platters and empty them onto her own plate, glutting herself in a way that would be entirely inappropriate for a guest.

She's never been a guest before, but Margaret was very insistent that she relearn proper manners after her accident, which Kelpie now supposes was Margaret making sure she was halfway civilized before risking her in the larger, if still limited, lab environment.

All her meals before this one were eaten in her room or the lab cafeteria, made in the same kitchen, nutritionally balanced and designed to flatter the humors of the researchers, keeping them in harmony with themselves. Maybe she never realized how limited the flavors of those "ideal" meals really were, but this is like discovering color after a lifetime of drawing in graphite alone. Graphite is a wonderful medium, and she's always going to have a deep-seated fondness for soy noodles and faux meat, but this…

This is cuisine as poetry.

She cleans her plate and, when Isabella asks if she wants seconds, barely remembers to ask if it's allowed before she accepts. Isabella laughs, and refills her glass of milk. She comments on how advanced Kelpie's spice tolerance is in light of her unfamiliarity with the food, and it's not until Luis leaves the table to take the dog out that her expression sharpens and she focuses on Kelpie's face.

"You come from that lab they think we don't know about?"

Kelpie blinks. "I— What?"

"The alchemists. They think because they're the ones who wrote a rule book, they're the only ones who understand the way things work. Arrogant fucks. You one of their projects?" Her eyes, which were so soft and kind a moment ago, are sharp, shuttered; she's ready to defend her child and her home if she needs to, and Kelpie is the threat she's defending against.

Kelpie shrinks back in her seat. "I don't understand what you mean."

"But you do. That's the first lie you've told me. How about we do it this way: you don't tell me a second lie, and I might let you leave here still breathing."

Isabella is terrifying. Kelpie would never have expected Isabella to be terrifying. She seemed so sweet until the threats started, and to be fair, she still isn't reaching for a weapon—but that makes her more frightening, not less. All the people Kelpie knows, if they're reaching for weapons, it's because they feel like you're worth fighting. Isabella doesn't think she's enough of a threat to warrant a fight. That stings, a little.

"It's not a lie, because I really don't understand," says Kelpie. "I don't think I'm a project, even if they built me. I'm pretty sure I'm a person, and that means I can't be a project, not in the way you mean. I came through a door at the top of a very long series of stairs, and at the bottom of the stairs there's a lab, or there was, anyway. I ran because a man came and said he was going to shut us down. He killed…" Her breath catches. Saying it makes it real. That isn't even sympathetic magic: that's just common sense. Once you speak something into the world, it's true, in some way, even if it's a bald-faced lie. Once she speaks the truth of Margaret's death, it becomes true, and true things are real, and she doesn't want to say it.

Isabella is still watching her with hard, suspicious eyes, so Kelpie keeps talking, even though she doesn't want to. "He killed my supervisor because she worked on a failed project, and they don't reassign people who failed. He killed her right in front of me, and she told him lies that should have meant he was killing me, too."

"What lies?"

"She told him…" Another pause, another breath caught in her throat, like a stone she has to try to talk around. This one refuses to be dislodged, even when she forces herself to continue: "She told him I was a natural person who'd been in a bad accident, which is why I don't look altogether like a natural person to folks who know how to look at me. I guess she convinced him, because what he did to her would have killed me, too, if I'd been natural, and men from the Congress don't usually like to leave witnesses when they don't want to."

"Maybe he wanted to."

"What?"

"Maybe he knew she was lying, and didn't know whether you knew. Maybe he wanted to leave a witness, so he could see what you would do. Maybe he wasn't sure whether you knew."

"I didn't," says Kelpie, and it's so ridiculous that it sounds like a lie, even though it isn't. "I didn't," she repeats, more softly.

"Are you trying to convince me, or to convince yourself?" asks Isabella.

Kelpie looks sharply up, meets her eyes, and manages not to flinch away. Isabella sighs.

"You're cowering like a whipped dog, and I don't like that," she says. "Makes me feel mean. I fed you, girl, and that means right now you have a certain amount of leeway here; can't break bread with someone and then slaughter them in cold blood. Maybe that's a rule we got from the colonizers, but it doesn't matter when it's the sympathetic law of the land, and it's burrowed deep enough that it is now. I could have poisoned you when we sat down, if I'd wanted you dead and been willing to deal with the aftermath of Luis witnessing it. He's a young, impressionable boy; he doesn't need to see his beloved mother start killing people for what looks like no reason. His daddy's about as magical as a rock—and sure, some rocks are plenty magic, but way more aren't magic at all, and he falls into the second category. Luis hasn't shown us yet who he's going to take after."

"You're an alchemist?" asks Kelpie, mild fear flaring up into sudden terror.

Isabella looks offended beyond all words. "Please. Do I look like an old white man with a god complex? And if the answer to that would be yes, you have permission to tell a second lie after all, because I do not want to hear that."

"You don't," says Kelpie quickly. "You don't look like any of the alchemists I've ever met."

"Yeah, they talk a good talk about wanting to equalize the forces of the universe by giving humanity access to the power that should have belonged to us all along, but if you look closely, you see that their version of ‘humanity' is always very, very pale."

Kelpie blinks at her.

"Now I know you're a construct."

"I don't…"

"You look a little freaked out by the idea."

"The lie my supervisor told the man who… who killed her, she told me that lie, too." Kelpie hunches her shoulders, looks down at the table. There are still a few smears of sauce on the plate in front of her, but her appetite has gone. She wouldn't have thought that was possible before this conversation started. "Until today, I really thought I was a natural person. That I was born, and grew up, and had a family waiting for me to come back when I finished working at the lab."

"No offense, honey, but have you seen you?"

"I didn't realize you could see me."

"That's fair, I suppose. Luis comes in from the yard with an orange girl, I'm not going to shout ‘put her back, she has hooves' where he can hear me. Good to know I still have the best poker face in the neighborhood. But yes, girl, I can see you properly. You shouldn't be walking around with your face hanging out like that. Pull it back."

"I can't." Kelpie looks at her, pleadingly. "I used to beg Margaret to show me how, when she'd play the training videos about the natural manifestations. A manifest Winter can look more or less frozen, depending on how far forward their season is. And a manifest Lunar looks like a normal person unless they decide they want to look like their specific face of the moon. But she said it wasn't possible for me to look normal, because I wasn't representing anything but myself, and I wasn't embodying anything but me, and this was how I look."

She thinks, now, that Margaret was lying, or at least not telling the full truth. She's representing Artemis's Hind, a Lunar companion, and while she's not a divinity in her own right, she stands for something that was never meant to exist in this world. If she can't pull back on the parts of her that mark her as other than human, it's because the people who made her didn't want her to be able to. Someone made the conscious decision that she was going to be this way, all the time and always. They didn't ask her what she thought about it.

(The idea that someone designed her, made her, makes her wish she hadn't eaten quite so many enchiladas at dinner. How much of her did they design? Did they decide she was going to be curious and credulous, fond of asking questions and generally willing to accept the answers she was given? Did they make her like peanut butter and not honey? Is anything about her real?)

Isabella frowns. "They weren't ever going to let you out, were they?"

Miserable, Kelpie shakes her head.

"But you're out now. Why?"

"Margaret said when they made me, they realized I was a person, not just a vessel for them to fill with the concept they were trying to embody, and they couldn't go through with it, so they made me a lab assistant instead of telling the people who were in charge that they'd succeeded. They wanted to keep working." For the first time, Kelpie realizes that continuing to work meant Margaret's team had been hoping to embody the Hind again as something they felt less attached to. That would probably have killed her. Forced aspects don't like to be manifest more than once at a time. True Lunes can manifest in multiplicity, but the companions haven't been seen in so long that trying to make the universe support more than one of them really wouldn't be a good idea.

They had her working every day on her own demise, and they didn't see anything wrong with it. They were letting her live before she died, after all. Wasn't that good enough for her?

Up until today, up until she'd seen the sun, it had been. Now, though… now she doesn't think she could go back below even if Margaret were somehow miraculously returned to life. Below was fine when she didn't know any better. She knows better now.

"This doesn't make any sense," says Isabella. She eyes Kelpie. "You feel loyalty to those alchemists? You going to keep their secrets, go running back to them as soon as you have the chance?"

She remembers the face of the man from the Congress as he'd sentenced Margaret to death, the way he'd looked at her when he thought she was collateral damage. Kelpie shakes her head, reluctantly. "I want to, but I can't."

"Good. You mentioned Margaret. That the little goth girl?"

"Yeah. She liked the clubs around here. She said blowing off steam after hours helped keep her head straight, so she could manage the project during the day."

"Mmm-hmm. She was nice, for an alchemist. Used to come up the stairs sometimes, always had a friendly word and a smile for Luis. It's too bad they killed her. Alchemists would be less unbearable if they had more like that one. What was she doing for them?"

"They want to catch a Lunar."

"That's the second time you've used that word. You know about the Lunars?"

Kelpie nods, silently.

Isabella snorts. "It figures. They've been busy little bees lately. So the alchemists want to catch one. Haven't they done enough damage in the last few years?"

"I don't know about any damage, and I don't think my lab did it if there was damage," says Kelpie. "I know there was a coronation recently…"

"Mmm-hmmm. Last Summer Queen threw herself in front of a taxiing plane in order to take out her counterpart. Killed the bastard stone-cold dead. Wish I could've been there to see it. If there's anyone who deserved a nasty, ignoble death from someone else's suicide, it was William Monroe."

"How do you know that?"

"One of my cousins worked at the airfield where the accident happened. Said it was the damnedest thing. This lady in a white sheet came out of nowhere and just walked in front of the plane like it was nothing, and they couldn't turn in time. Flight never took off, of course, and by the time the authorities got there, Monroe was dead. Massive heart attack. They chalked it up to stress and being a general asshole, and no charges were levied against anyone. It's the funniest thing, though."

"What is?" Kelpie isn't actually sure she wants to know the answer, but the question is virtually unbidden, unavoidable.

Isabella shrugs. "Neither of the bodies made it to the county morgue. The woman was a Jane Doe, but Monroe, he was wealthy. He had connections, friends, patrons. Someone should have kicked up a fuss, but nobody did. Both of them just vanished en route, and not a trace of them has surfaced, not even in the night markets."

There's a ruckus then, and Luis comes surging back into the kitchen, Bobby beside him, the dog's tail waving wildly. "Can we go back outside? Bobby needs to use the bathroom again."

"Does Bobby really need to use the bathroom after you just took him out, or are you just tired of me monopolizing your friend's attention and looking for something to do?"

Luis grins a gamin grin, utterly unrepentant, and shrugs. "You don't normally steal my friends," he says. "I want her back when you're done."

"You'll have her, my prince of porchlights, I promise," says Isabella. She licks her thumb and leans over to wipe a smudge from his forehead. "Go out, but don't leave the courtyard, understand me? And take the potty bags! Maybe if Mr. Mendoza sees you carrying them, he won't blame us for the cat shit in his bushes. Not likely, though." She turns back to Kelpie, saying in an undertone, "Man can't tell the difference between cat shit and what comes out of a full-grown silver lab."

"Bobby isn't silver," says Kelpie, uncertainly.

"And American pit bull terriers aren't bad dogs, but until the people who make the rental rules get their heads out of their asses and stop trying to enforce unreasonable breed bans, Bobby gets to be a silver lab, and he still doesn't shit like a cat."

"Oh," says Kelpie. The world up here is much more complicated than she ever imagined it might be. She's studied in preparation for her supposed "return" to the world, and she thought she understood the complexities she was walking into, but she didn't know anything, not really. She doesn't even know what she shouldn't ask.

Isabella takes some pity. She leans across the table to pat Kelpie's hand. "It's all right. If you're not an alchemist, I can help you."

"I… used to work as a lab assistant," says Kelpie.

"You ever strip the fat off a baby, or break a crow down to its component parts?"

Kelpie stares at her, horrified.

"Didn't think so. You're not an alchemist. I'm not sure you could be, not when you're not a natural. Seems like that would be crossing the streams in a bad, bad way, if you could take the people who are more than just human and make them stronger. My coven, we don't have anyone with us who's not a straight-up human, no extra bits, no surprises at the bottom of the cereal box. Angeline says one of her cousins was tapped for the coronation, but they were never close, she and that cousin. She didn't even go to his funeral. I think being too close to a manifestation, even if you're not one yourself, can mess up your sympathy with the universe. So most likely, you would never have been good for anything beyond washing dishes and mixing chemicals together, even if you'd wanted to be."

"I don't think I want to be," mutters Kelpie.

"Good choice, really. And you say ‘what damage,' and I say ‘what damage haven't they done?' There used to be hundreds of different magical systems, all sorts of people doing things according to all different sets of rules. None of this ‘my way is the right way and if you don't like it, you're not going to accomplish anything.' People could take a lot of paths to the same outcome."

"What happened?"

"The alchemists happened," says Isabella, darkly. "They started making rules, big rules, and when people didn't want to follow them, they started finding ways to enforce those rules. It got to where almost no one else could do anything, because the universe thought they were doing it wrong when they didn't follow the alchemists' rules. That's the problem with living in a world that wants to be a person. People tend to like rules. Even the ones who think they don't like rules, they like them. We enjoy having the same atmosphere every day, and knowing we're allergic to one thing but not another, and that we should drink water instead of hydrofluoric acid. We like gravity and thermodynamics, and even though we complain about it, we like time. We like the way it passes at a consistent rate for everyone and everything. We like rules. And when you turn the basic building blocks of reality into people, what you wind up with is a reality that likes rules just as much as people do. So they follow along. Even the rule-breakers acknowledge the rules, because if they didn't, they couldn't break them. You see?"

"Yes… no. Not really."

"The first horrible thing the alchemists did was convince the universe it needed rules to run smoothly. Their rules. They took a lot of chaos and they tamed it as much as they could. They weren't alone in those days—most people who had any pull with the universe wanted at least a few rules, to make things easier on themselves—but as time went on, more and more of the rules the alchemists made said ‘and we're on top and everyone else is on the bottom, and that's the way things are meant to be.' The alchemists built the boxes, and shoved the rest of us inside, and then they got mad when we didn't want to stay where we'd been put."

"You're not an alchemist, then?"

Isabella laughs, loud and bright and genuinely amused. "If I were an alchemist, would I be so happy to talk shit about them? No, kid, I'm an hechicera. Unless you ask the ladies in my coven, then I'm a witch, although we have a couple of dabblers who keep trying to call me a bruja."

"What's the difference?" Kelpie's head is spinning. This is all so much, so fast and so out of order.

"An hechicera, that's like a sorcerer. We do big, deep magic—kind of like your alchemists do. We talk the universe into things. A witch, they stay shallow. They talk people into things. A bruja is a kind of witch, and there's nothing wrong with being one, unless you're Puerto Rican and a white lady keeps insisting that has to be what you are."

"Oh."

"So no, I'm not an alchemist. They might have been willing to have me when I was younger, if I'd been whiter or more male, but at this point I know so many rules they don't approve of that they wouldn't have me even if I was willing to have them. Which I'm not." Isabella leans forward, serious again. "Now. You were saying they wanted one of the Lunars. How does that drop a girl with hooves in my kitchen?"

"Oh. Um. Margaret was the head of a team that thought they could attract certain Lunars if they could force their traditional companions to incarnate. Like a dog, for the Man in the Moon? But most of those companions haven't been manifest in a long, long time, so they had to build the vessels themselves. I thought we were only working on animals, but I found out today that actually, they'd been using some material created for use in compelling nonstandard forces to manifest, and since it's human at its roots, they were getting humans with animalistic features."

"And you're one of those manifest companions?"

"I was supposed to be."

"Which one?"

Kelpie squirms. She doesn't like this line of questioning, doesn't like the way Isabella is looking at her now, like she's suddenly interesting for a whole different reason. Still, she's been truthful so far, and so she says, "Some of the stories have Artemis accompanied by a golden hind. I'm supposed to be the Hind."

"And you're intended to attract Artemis?"

Kelpie bites the inside of her mouth as she nods, watching Isabella. If the other woman moves toward a knife or anything else that could be used as a weapon, she's going to run. There isn't anything else she could possibly do at this point.

"Interesting. Why do they want her? If I was going to mess with the Lunars, she's not where I'd start."

"I don't think they want her. They just want one of the strong ones; I think they're just pretty confident they'd be able to handle any Lunar they could catch."

"Why do they want a strong one?"

Kelpie looks at her and exhales, slowly. Up until this point, everything she's admitted to being involved with has been innocent, in its own way. Nothing wrong with being a lab assistant, and it's not like she had a choice about being built in the same lab. This is where she admits to doing something that could probably be considered "bad."

"Lunars have access to the Impossible City," she says. "If we—if they—could catch a strong-enough Lunar, they'd be able to use it to get inside."

"And there it is," says Isabella, throwing up her hands. "It always comes back to that damn City. Has since Baker went and wrote her bizarre fantasies down and started shilling them to children, like the more kids she could get to dress up as Avery and Zib on Halloween, the easier it would be for her specific branch of alchemists to seize control of absolutely everything. Why did it have to be a city?"

Kelpie blinks. "What?"

"The center of everything, the summit of creation, the place where, if you have absolute domain, you can control the rest of the universe—why did it have to be a city? Why not a hidden grotto or an endless forest or, if you demand human control, a farm? Why would the universe be centered in something that had to be built?"

Kelpie has never heard anyone question the City itself before. It feels faintly blasphemous, like it shouldn't be allowed. "I— Every brick is a milestone in human accomplishment, every pane of glass is an achievement in enlightenment—"

"I believe that's what they told you, but that doesn't make it true. The City is. I can't object it into non-existence. But the City shouldn't be, and if it's going to be, we should stop trying to take it over. It exists just fine without anyone running the place. But okay, whatever. The Lunars have access, and the alchemists have decided that means they need a pet Lunar. Why now? Why the kind of urgency that puts a deer-woman in my kitchen, eating my enchiladas?"

"Um. Do you know who James Reed is?"

To Kelpie's surprise, Isabella clearly does. Some of the words she says are familiar, things Kelpie's heard when another of the techs cut themselves or hit their hands. Others are entirely new to her but said with the same intonation, making their position as profanity more than clear. Kelpie listens, wide-eyed, until Isabella winds down, panting slightly as she glares.

"That bastard," she says. "I hope he rots."

"That'll be easy, since he's dead," says Kelpie.

That takes Isabella aback, at least for a moment. She stares at Kelpie, then gets up and crosses to the counter, leaning up to open a cupboard and take down a bottle full of clear liquid. She returns to the table, removes the cap, and takes a long drink directly from the bottle before offering it to Kelpie.

"It's good luck to drink when a bastard dies," she says, by way of explanation.

Kelpie blinks. "I… Is that hygienic?"

"Of course. The alcohol kills the germs. Go ahead, have a bit." Isabella keeps offering the bottle, vehemently.

Kelpie isn't sure what this means, but she takes the bottle, hesitant and anxious, yet still afraid to offend this woman who can see her for what she is, and knows things about the alchemical world that Margaret never tried to explain. Watching Isabella warily, she raises it to her lips and sniffs.

The liquid smells astringent and herbal, sharp with something green and unfamiliar beneath a wash of a scent that is almost the absence of scent, so empty that it becomes a perfume entirely its own. She doesn't want to put that in her mouth. But it isn't poison, unless Isabella is one of those hedge witches who swallows a bezoar in order to pass tests from rivals, and she really, really doesn't want to get thrown out into the dark, complicated night.

Kelpie drinks.

The liquid burns like fire, but when she swallows, there is no pain; either the fire did no damage, or it did so much that the wound is already cauterized and she'll fall down dead as soon as her body realizes what just happened. She sets the bottle down with a surprisingly steady hand, looking across the table at Isabella.

"Good luck," she says.

"It's not a suggestion," says Isabella, reclaiming the bottle. "It's a fact. When a bastard dies, you drink in celebration, and the universe sees that you're not the same flavor of bastard, and it doesn't punish you for whatever the bastard did."

"But doesn't celebrating because someone's dead make you a bad person?"

"Not when the dead guy's James Reed. What happened to him?"

"He and his team managed to embody a universal concept called the Doctrine of Ethos. I don't all the way understand what that means, just that everyone thought it was very impressive that they could do that, and it might mean they could take control of the Impossible City. They used a lot of things to build a suitable vessel. All the things that usually go into crafting a vessel, and some more things, too—materials Reed had been saving for a long time."

Isabella's expression cools, eyes shuttering, like she's stepping back from the conversation without actually stepping away. "And what materials would those be?"

Kelpie feels as if the floor has suddenly fallen out from beneath her, and she needs to scramble to hold on to something or she'll fall too. "There are… recipes, standard components you use when you want to create a human life, and… some of them are human? I guess? Or were, once? They're not working with really… raw materials most of the time, once you get to Reed's level. They don't harvest the way really junior alchemists do."

Isabella makes a noncommittal noise, neither approving nor disapproving, and says, "Meaning they don't usually murder people for their science projects. I don't think that's the free pass you want it to be."

"I don't…" Kelpie stammers and stops, looking at her hands. Her throat doesn't burn anymore, and she can feel herself swallow, so she supposes the nerves weren't really cauterized, no matter what it felt like at the time. But her stomach, so full of those delicious enchiladas, is starting to feel unsettled, its contents roiling in a seasick way that makes her feel less orange than green. "I'm trying to answer your questions, but I don't know what you mean half the time, and if you keep looking at me like I did something wrong, I won't be able to tell you what you want to know."

"Sorry. I'll back off." Isabella sits, finally, and leans back in her chair, trying to look as harmless as possible. It's not working as well as it did before she got up to fetch the bottle, before Luis went away. "Why are the alchemists rushing for the City?"

"James Reed managed to successfully embody the Doctrine of Ethos in two constructed human creations. He called them his cuckoos, because they were placed in the nests of other birds. The early success of the cuckoo project led to multiple other attempted embodiments using the same base materials and rearing standards. The resultant cuckoo-children were raised in normal human families, exposed to conditions beyond those that could be easily synthesized in a laboratory setting. This was all before the Doctrine became manifest, you understand: once they manifested, that technique was abandoned, since it came with certain unanticipated complications."

"Meaning when you raise something to consider itself a person, it's going to act like a person even when that isn't what you want," she says, and laughs. "Oh, his little science project told him to go fuck himself, didn't it?"

"Yes," says Kelpie. "The Doctrine became manifest and came into its strength, and in the ensuing conflict, James Reed and Leigh Barrow were both killed. The cuckoo programs were discontinued, although some of the base materials are still in use."

"You keep saying ‘base materials' like that means it's not human remains. If Reed started this project, you're talking about bits of Asphodel Baker, aren't you?"

Kelpie nods, that sick feeling in her stomach getting even stronger. She knows what she's supposed to think of Asphodel Baker—she may not be an alchemist in her own right, but no one works around alchemy for any length of time without knowing the woman who created James Reed, the one who betrayed the Alchemical Congress by releasing the Up-and-Under into the public consciousness without congressional oversight. When Baum rewrote and replaced as much of her creation as he could, he had worked with full approval and editorial review from the Congress. He had been able to understand that the City was to be taken for all of them, not only for himself.

Still, Asphodel touched the City, more than once, when she was alive. It was natural that her bone and tissues should remember the resonance of those streets, should encourage those they inhabited to strive to return. That was part of what made Reed's cuckoos so dangerous. Their power was immense, something that should never have been allowed to exist outside the proper hands. But their inherent need for the City, their almost-instinctive migration toward those hallowed streets… that was where the true risk came in.

"So the Congress is in disarray because Reed's cuckoos are trying to fly home to roost," says Isabella. "They can't stop something as big as the Doctrine. Those kids are probably unkillable through mortal means at this point. Unless they have a keyed-in weakness."

"If they do, Reed didn't document it where the rest of us could find the information."

"Okay. So you have two unstoppable, unkillable forces of the incarnate universe trying to find their way home to the City that Baker's people spent centuries establishing as, essentially, the control room of creation, and you're trying to catch a Lunar so you can get there before they do?"

"Basically."

"Oh, man." Isabella starts to laugh, clearly delighted. "You people are fucked."

Kelpie tries to smile, even as her stomach, filled by an unfamiliar mixture of spices and alcohol, gives a final lurch and she loses her dinner all over the table.