Lacus Mortis

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

The everything flashes and dazzles exactly as it has always done, an unending rainbowed corridor into eternity. Chang'e and Artemis walk in companionable silence, new-met and old allies at the same time. It's strange sometimes, being a new incarnation of something so very old. The gods bring their own baggage to each manifestation, pieces of who they are layered over the humans they become, but they're forever starting over from the beginning. Chang'e has never met this Artemis before. Maybe they've been dear companions at some point in the past; that isn't enough to make them anything other than relative strangers now.

Which explains the disquiet with which Artemis looks at her and says, "I've seen the everything before, you know. You don't need to show me this."

"I know." Chang'e keeps walking, and finally, ahead of them, the window appears. It looks the way it always does, stolen from Judy's childhood bedroom, white frame with the single missing strip of paint on the lefthand side. She gestures toward it. "What do you see?"

"A window. Your window, I presume."

"Yours doesn't look like this?"

Artemis shakes her head. "My window is more Grecian. It changed about fifty years into this incarnation. Yours will change too, if you stick it out long enough. Does this conclude the show-and-tell?"

"Has another Lunar ever shown you their window?"

"No, you can't go near another Lunar's window, or it tries to change to suit you, and it can get confused."

"I don't know whether that's the truth," says Chang'e. She stops walking and gestures again, this time urging Artemis to continue forward without her. "I'm starting to think we don't share the everything like that. Why would the universe need to conserve space? It has all the space that's ever been. This is the everything. It can keep space open for both of us at once."

Artemis looks at her dubiously but keeps walking toward the window.

It doesn't change.

It's still a white frame from a suburban house when she reaches it, and when she reaches out to touch the latch, it still sticks just a little, the way that it's supposed to. She turns to look at Chang'e. "What is this supposed to prove?"

"I think that because I opened the everything and haven't left it yet, right now, it's catering to me," says Chang'e. "This is my window because the everything thinks I'm the one who's supposed to be here, and it's viewing you as my guest."

Artemis looks nonplussed. "No conflict?"

"Not unless we both tried to come in at the exact same time, and even then, I'm sure it would find a way to split the atom that tells it which one of us is ascendant at the moment of entry." Chang'e gestures Artemis back. "There's one more thing I want to try; come on."

"I do track and field because I like running. Running, not walking endlessly back and forth doing little science experiments."

"Uh-huh. Why did you come to Berkeley?"

Artemis blinks. "Excuse me?"

"You said it was because you wanted to join the track team, but you also said you were Losna. Then you said it was because you wanted to know why the alchemists were pissed off, but the alchemists are always pissed off about something. So clearly you had some other reason to want to be here, and to not want anyone to know who you were when you arrived. Why are you here?"

"You're the goddess of immortality, not simple detective work," says Artemis, tone gone mild and soft.

Chang'e pauses. The thought that this could be dangerous hasn't really occurred to her before just now: she's in the everything, baiting one of the big two moon gods, and betting on the fact that whatever brought Artemis out this way, she wasn't the one who killed Aske. If she's wrong about that…

A Lunar who passes themselves off as less powerful than they really are is a Lunar who's potentially up to no good. Aske is dead. Chang'e would prefer not to join her. Judy, who doesn't have the questionable immortality of another manifestation to come, would very much prefer not to join her. She's kicking and screaming at the back of Chang'e's mind, trying to claw her way back to the surface. They're so deep in the everything right now that Chang'e is pretty sure that would be ironically fatal, and probably a terrible way to die.

"You live forever, you start to pick up a few things," says Chang'e, voice carefully neutral.

And Artemis laughs.

"Right, right. We're allowed to have hobbies." She shakes her head. "I really did come to Berkeley to find out why the alchemists are so worked up, because you're right, they're always up their own asses about something, but they're not normally this kicked-hornet's-nest about their shit. And the whole ‘time has been resetting' thing is a little disconcerting. I don't care for it. I only know because time doesn't reset inside the City, and I started to notice that things were happening out of synch with what I expected."

Chang'e blinks. "You started to notice?"

"Once you've been doing this for long enough, you'll be able to stay aware while you're crossing the sky. You'll remember things you see in the City. It's not always fun. I know one manifestation of Selene who fell in love with a resident of the City. They could never meet or touch; she just watched her from the sky every time she got to make the crossing. She said the woman she loved would always go out of her way to be outside while the moon was high, and they were happy together. Her love never married, and when she vanished from the City, Selene mourned until her mortal manifestation died from the grief. Observing lives you can't be a part of is hard on the heart." Artemis shrugs. "But yes, I started to notice. It's not right. Time is supposed to happen here and there at the same rate. Which, by the way, time is happening right now, and we need to get the gate closed before the sun comes up."

"All right. Follow me. There's something I still want to test." Chang'e starts walking quickly back toward the gate, and Artemis follows.

When they reach the exit from the everything—not the same as the end, because the everything never ends—Chang'e stops and pulls the peach pit out of her pocket, spinning it between her fingers. Then she turns, bends, and places it carefully on the ground. Artemis watches this, faintly perplexed. Her perplexity only deepens when Chang'e straightens and steps out of the gate, back onto the campus.

She steps down at the same time, sparkle in the air extinguishing like a blown-out candle, and Judy returns to her own body, her own life, with the burning desire to find a way to shake her divine copilot. Baiting more powerful gods is not a good way to live long enough to become a more powerful god.

But she understands what Chang'e was trying to do, and so she holds her hands out, gesturing for Artemis to stop.

"Is the peach pit still there?"

Artemis jerks to a halt, blinking at her. "What?"

"The peach pit I put on the ground. Is it still there?"

"Yeah. Where would it have gone?"

"Come out now."

Artemis steps out, the air around her bright with moonglow for the handful of seconds before she, too, steps down, and Anna—if that's her real name—is left, frowning at Judy.

The gate shivers, the tunnel on the other side shaking as it always does, and then it is gone, closed until the next time it's needed. Judy glances up at the still-dark sky. The sun has yet to make an appearance. They'll have to be quick, but there's time, if it's needed. She pulls the key out of her pocket and, as Anna watches, taps it against the stone, once to close the gate, and a second time, to open it again.

The gate spirals into being, exactly as it always does, appearing on the blank wall. Judy takes a breath and drops down, hard and silent as a stone. Chang'e turns to Anna. "Wait here," she instructs, and steps into the everything, looking down.

The peach pit is still there. First theory, proven. She emerges again, feeling heady with success, heart beating a little bit too hard. The gate closes with a tap, and remains closed as she offers the key to Anna.

"I need you to open the everything and go through," she says. "Find the peach pit."

"What?"

"Find the peach pit." She keeps holding out the key until Anna finally takes it.

Muttering, "Immortality gods are so weird," Anna drops down, and Artemis surges up. There's no pretense of being Losna this time; she just comes in silver moonlight, with eyes like the forest at night, looking at Judy like the woman is something unspeakable and inferior.

"Why am I doing this?" she asks.

"Because Aske died last night," says Judy, bluntly.

Artemis freezes. "What?"

"Or the night before last; it's hard to say. Anyway. Aske died, and we left her body in the everything, because she was still bleeding silver, but when I opened the gate to go through, she wasn't there. So either something took her body away, or every one of us opens our own channel through the everything."

"That can't be right," says Artemis. "We walk the same path."

"Then open the gate, and find the peach pit."

Artemis turns to the wall, uncertain for the first time, and taps the stone with the key. Once again, the gate appears, growing fainter as the dawn approaches, and Judy watches Artemis step through. The goddess stops just inside, distorted by the carnival glass-effect of the portal between them, and looks at the ground.

And keeps looking. Judy glances at the sky. The edge is getting lighter; they're running out of time.

"Artemis!" she calls. "Anna! Come back through!"

She won't step through the gate without an invitation. Even though they were just in her iteration of the everything together without coming to any harm, she doesn't trust it to support an uninvited visitor that easily.

Artemis glances up. "It's not here," she says. "It should be right…"

Her eyes widen as she notices how light the sky is getting, and she lunges through the gate, which is getting fainter all the time. For a moment, Judy thinks she's not going to make it out. What would that do, spending a whole day stranded inside the everything, without even the City to serve as a distraction? Can someone survive in there for that long?

Artemis emerges just as the outline of the gate becomes completely invisible, barely escaping the solidifying stone, and it seems almost like a formality as she taps the key against it to tell it that it can close for another day. If she hadn't, would it have closed on its own in the face of the unrelenting sun, or would the channel to the everything still have been "hers" when night fell again, set to whatever standards the everything has been using all along?

Judy suddenly feels very, very over her head, and only the fact that Chang'e is equally confused keeps her from going screaming for Diana.

"How did you know—?" asks Artemis.

Judy shakes her head as she turns to face the other Lunar, holding out the key for Artemis to take. "I didn't. I guessed."

"Explain." Artemis slips the key into her pocket.

"Aske was on duty two nights ago. She's new, so we were a little concerned when she didn't come back and stand down, but Máni had the key, and everything seemed fine. I don't think he killed her. He's a sweet guy, for a football player, and that's not the sort of thing I'd expect from him."

"People can surprise you," says Artemis grimly, the silver glow beginning to fade from the air around her as she steps back down toward Anna.

"Tell me about it, Losna," says Judy. "But no, I don't think he hurt her. It just doesn't make sense. She was on duty, she opened the gate, she went through, she didn't come back. The next night, Máni opened the gate and went through, and when he came back, he had her body. We had to leave it in the everything."

"What? Why?"

"Because she was bleeding moonlight," says Judy grimly. "She was still stepped up into the divine when she died. And she stayed that way. Even if David had been willing to carry a dead white girl across campus, we couldn't have explained the way she was leaking divinity."

"I see."

"I expected to find her when I went through last night, or signs of what had happened to her, at least. Instead, there was no trace of anything. I think what happened is Aske did come back, and someone was waiting for her on this side of the gate. They attacked her as she was coming through, and she ran back inside without closing the gate. Her attacker followed, and they killed her in the everything, but it was her everything, not theirs. The gate never fully closed, just disappeared when the sun came up. That's not the same thing. When Máni opened it the other night to go through, he wasn't unlocking the door; he was… pushing open a door that had already been propped in that position."

"That's a pretty big jump to make from me not changing your window."

"Maybe. It was still an accurate one, though." Judy shrugs as she turns to start down the stairs.

Anna, as expected, follows. "What do you think this means?"

"I think I wish there was a way to test whether my everything is the same as the everything every other Chang'e gets," says Judy. "I'm sure we have different windows, because why would a girl from Beijing or Montreal have a window from a suburban house in New Jersey? But do we get the same tunnel to take us there? If we do, then we could find another Aske and ask her to take us to the place where our Aske died. If we don't, then as soon as we let the gate close with her on the other side, we lost her forever."

"If she wasn't stepping down after death, we already had," says Anna. "There's no way we could have told her family what happened without them seeing the divinity leaking out of her."

"I guess that's true," says Judy, somewhat glumly. She doesn't have a family. She's never considered that being what she is could mean she doesn't get a grave, either. "So when you were answering my questions back there, you never told me why you were pretending to be Losna."

"Ah." Anna shrugs. "I heard this region had a Diana running the place, pretty competently. Artemis got syncretized with Diana to such a degree that some people can't even remember which one of us came first."

"You're… grumpy because other people might assume another moon goddess came first?"

"No. I don't much care, and at this point, I've seen so many manifestations come and go that I realize it doesn't matter that much. We all shine in the same sky, we all do the same job, we all come to versions of you when we need peaches or else we all get old and die like anybody else. I'm pretty sanguine about it all. But when I was looking over the records for the area, trying to decide how I wanted to approach things, I found something that was really interesting, at least to me."

"What's that?"

"We're the big three." The statement is made bluntly, and without any real hint of ego. In a deadpan tone, she continues, "Go team Greek exceptionalism and Roman expansionism, I guess. And Chinese population growth. Colonialism wiped out too many followers of the North American Lunars for them to get the numbers they'd need to rival us; we ate most of the other Europeans. Hell, your Japanese counterpart barely even gets a footnote most of the time. Chandra and Khonsu try, and they probably have better traction in the places where people still worship them, but it's not belief that anchors us—it's awareness. How many people are aware we exist."

"Not explaining," says Judy. "Talking a lot about how cool you are, but not explaining."

"Ah. A region run by a Chang'e will usually have a Diana and an Artemis, and they'll get along, because no one wants to piss off the peach purveyor. A region run by an Artemis may have a Diana—we try to play nicely with the other incarnations, even when it's difficult, and we know we came first. The ego, she is soothed. But a region run by a Diana will very rarely have an Artemis. They tend to view us as unnecessarily repetitive, they don't want to deal with comparisons, and we remind them that they're not the oldest game in town. Technically I think Chang'e predates us both, but since there was never any real syncretization there, we can all get along with you."

"Thank you? I think?"

Anna shrugs. "Anyway. I came here to spy on the alchemists, and I came as a minor goddess that I know hasn't manifested in the region any time recently because the Losna in Denver said she was fine with it. Thought it was funny, even. And by telling people I was her, I could avoid attracting too much attention from your Diana, or making her all territorial before I knew what was going on."

"Timing sucks," says Judy. "Could have shown up being all undercover weirdo before people started getting murdered."

"I'll take that under advisement," says Anna dryly. "But your Aske isn't the first death I've heard about recently."

"Diana said something similar." Their walking has carried them halfway across the quad, still largely empty at this hour of the morning. Members of the campus homeless population who crept back after the final security sweep sleep under the tables and draped across the benches, their bodies wrapped in tattered blankets and layer upon layer of torn sweater. Some of them are also students. They'll rise when the campus starts to wake for the day, heading off to the gym for hot showers before they start their classes.

Judy hates that people have to choose between housing and tuition. She wishes she were an actual god, something powerful and cosmic enough to make this all go away. (Something like, perhaps, the Doctrine of Ethos, which is by all reports more powerful than a single manifestation of any given god. Maybe if she were Chang'e and not just one more incarnation of a goddess who's scattered herself across the globe in shining fragments, but she's not. She's a timeshare manifestation, and she doesn't have the power to make things better. One more reason to avoid Professor Middleton. It's hard not to resent someone who has that kind of power and mostly chooses not to use it.)

She continues to guide Anna toward the picnic tables outside the drama department. They're mostly shaded by evergreens, constantly a little damp and littered with fallen needles. No one much likes to hang out here except for the drama students, and even they tend not to linger, preferring to take their unrelenting chaos out into the streets where it can get them the attention they so desperately crave. She's never found anyone sleeping in the little picnic area, which means no need to feel bad about waking people who actually need to rest.

(One of the perks of being a manifest Moon: she barely needs to sleep on the nights when she isn't assigned to the sky above the City, and on the nights when she is, she doesn't sleep at all. The toxins sleep would normally flush from her mind and body vanish during her trip across the sky, and being able to get by on an hour a night without long-term psychological harm has been a huge help in her studies. Easy to get an edge over the competition when your day is effectively six hours longer than theirs is.)

She brushes a layer of needles off the nearest damp picnic table and sits atop it, resting her feet on the bench as she produces another peach pit from her pocket and spins it between her fingers like a magician's coin.

"How many of those do you just carry around with you?" asks Anna, looking with mild displeasure at the damp bench before echoing the brush-off-and-sit gesture. She lets Judy keep the table for herself.

Judy shrugs. "I don't know. Half a dozen or so, most days. More, during the high summer. I like to have them on hand. They keep me calm."

And they're the key to her only real magic trick. Without them, it would be far too easy to convince herself that she's just a very confused young linguist and not a god at all.

"There have been at least half a dozen," says Anna. "Your Aske is the first one I've heard of actually dying inside the everything; all the others were out in the real world when they had their accidents."

"Are we sure they were accidents?"

"The first couple, I was," says Anna. "By number four, I was a little more skeptical."

"Diana mentioned two, apart from Aske," says Judy.

"Which brings us up near double digits, and that's if it's only been half a dozen," says Anna, grimly. "I think it's been more than that. I just can't prove it. It's not like there's a directory of currently active moon gods."

"How…?"

"They've all been minors," says Anna. "Not a single Diana, or Chang'e, or Artemis. Only Askes, and Losnas, and other gods who don't have a lot of punch in their pockets. They'd be easier to take than one of the big names. And they've all been the only representative of their Moon in an area. It's not unknown for more than one manifestation of the same god to come together. Makes it easier for them to set the transit schedule."

"That has to be confusing," says Judy. She's thought before about how nice it would be to have another Chang'e around, someone else who can tend the peaches, someone who understands her when she talks about the wind blowing through the orchards of immortality. She's never been to the moon herself, knows it's a lifeless chunk of rock floating in the void, but when she does sleep, she dreams Chang'e's Moon, which is lush and green and inviting, and home in a way no place in this world has been since the house in New Jersey burned down. She touches that Moon on her nights above the City, and she thinks she'd be willing to give up on her dreams of linguistic and academic success if it somehow meant she could stay there permanently.

What would it be like to be around someone else who knows that Moon? Someone who is, effectively, the same person as half of her but a stranger to the other half? It would be like a human centipede of the soul, and she's not sure that's something she wants to deal with, much less experience.

Anna shrugs. "Not as confusing as you might think. They always get along, anyway. Hard to really fight with someone who has a piece of you inside their head. Anyway, we have two Tsukuyomis in Denver right now, and they're both fine, even though another one of them just died in Austin three weeks ago. Bike accident. He was on his way to the gate to take his turn at crossing the sky. I heard about it because their Artemis was complaining afterward. She had to scramble to find someone who could fill in for him—she'd done the night before, and so she couldn't do it."

"Oh."

"I was already on my way here by then, which is why I was around to meet you on the last full moon, even if you were too distracted to pay attention to me."

"I'm sorry, I still don't remember you."

"Which is a genuine tragedy, or would be if we weren't in the sort of situation that makes flirting a little bit inappropriate." Anna sobers. "Look, it's like this. Every time one of us dies, the alchemists get all hyper for a few days, like they're working on something. I'm afraid they're involved with whatever's going on."

"So you came here undercover, pretending to be a minor Lunar who fits the profile for the victims, without telling our Diana who you were in case she got territorial, in hopes that what, you'll get murdered next?" Judy snorts. "Not a great plan there, sport."

"You have a better one?"

"Yeah. You just said you have two Tsukuyomis in Denver. We call and ask them to conduct our little test with the everything tomorrow morning, and then we'll know whether another Aske would let us retrieve our poor dead goddess. If we can get to her body, maybe we can learn more about what killed her." Judy spins her peach pit between her fingers, thoughtfully. "If someone's out there hunting Lunars, we should know about it. And what good would that do? Are we even useful to alchemists?"

"They have whole recipes built around harvesting ‘materials' from the people they've had killed," says Anna, with exaggerated finger quotes to make her message excruciatingly clear. "They can get different metaphysical qualities out of corpses, depending on how they died. A really gruesome murder can give them all sorts of lovely toys."

Judy pauses, then scoots a little bit away from Anna, putting more of the damp table between them. Anna raises her eyebrows, questioning wordlessly.

"Sorry," says Judy. "It's just that you're a stranger who started out by lying to me, and who knows way too much about alchemical graverobbing to be a comfortable conversation partner."

"Ah, yeah. I can see where this might look bad," says Anna. "If you know any Lunars in the Denver area, they can vouch for me? Or I can give you the number for our Chang'e, and you can call her directly. I'm not sure she can lie to you. I've never seen a manifestation try to lie to another aspect of themselves. I feel like heads might explode if the effort were sincerely made."

"I don't really feel like exploding any heads," says Judy, and slides off the table. "Diana's going to find out eventually, you know. Especially if your Tsukuyomis can help us recover Aske's body." She's starting to feel bad, consistently referring to the dead woman by the name of the divinity that inhabited her. She needs to find out what her mortal name was, what the name of the grieving family was. They may never know their daughter died, may mark her down as one of the missing and spend the next twenty years hoping she'll come home, but at least Judy will know. At least Judy will be able to mourn her properly.

"For right now, let me be a Losna," says Anna. Her eyes flash green for a moment. "I don't want to show my hand until I have to."

"But you've been upfront with me."

"You showed me something new, and like I said before, I'd be flirting if it weren't currently inappropriate." Anna shrugs. "I like new things, and I like pretty girls."

Judy isn't quite sure how she's supposed to respond to that, and so she looks at the peach pit she's still spinning between her fingers. "How do you do that eye thing?" she asks.

"What eye thing?"

"When you were pretending to be Losna, they were blue, and when you're actually Artemis, they go green," says Judy. "I've never seen a Lunar who could do that before."

"Your eyes are always that funny hazel color," says Anna. "You can't tell me that's the color you were born with. I won't believe you."

"It's not," says Judy. "My dad was Chinese, and my mother was Scottish." She takes after her father's side of the family, almost entirely, except for a slightly more rounded figure and slightly sharper cheekbones. Her eyes were dark brown when she was born, just like his. It wasn't until the moon started talking in her dreams that they'd started to get lighter, until now, when they were clearly hazel—at least until she stepped up into divinity. Then, and only then, they turned the pink-yellow color of ripe peaches, something inhuman and startling.

She's never had any control over it. Certainly not the control Artemis has demonstrated, or the ability to choose between colors, like some sort of ocular mood ring.

"So you do it too."

"No. This is just the color my eyes are now, the same way my hair keeps turning silver," says Judy, defensively. "I can't make them change just because I want them to look like something else."

(She broke up with her last high school boyfriend over her eyes. He'd refused to believe that she wasn't wearing contacts, and accused her of trying to "look like a white girl," as if that would ever have been possible, as if the only barrier between her and white privilege was the color of her eyes, and not the shape of them, the shape of her face, the shape of her. She'd thrown her soda in his face and walked away, leaving him furious and dripping, while she stormed out of the movie theater where they'd been meant to be having a romantic outing. While she'd seen him at school after that, they had never spoken again, a fact that now seems melodramatic and disproportionate but at the time felt exactly right.)

"Ah." Anna leans closer, dropping her voice just a little, and smiles. "I can only change them right now because I'm hunting. As long as I'm hunting, I can disappear into the silence, and nothing will stop me from blending into my surroundings. I'm going to bring down my prey, one way or another."

Judy doesn't know what to say to that.