“It’s okay,” said Neko. “We’re all monsters here.”
Audrey whipped her head around to stare, then came over and embraced Neko.
“Entirely human monsters, to be precise,” said Caleb. “Trumbull’s the only inhuman monster in the house.”
“Point,” said Audrey. “In the future, I’ll try to be more specific about the crazy cannibalistic branch of my family.”
Neko took her to find fresh sheets, leaving me alone at last with my brother.
“I want to go to the chapel,” I told him. “Walk with me?”
“After a day like this, you want to pray?” he asked.
“Or meditate. Away from Trumbull’s house. You don’t have to stick around; we can talk on the way.”
Outside, there was no sign of the gate guards. Broad wet flakes still drifted through the air. The sidewalks, only partly cleared, were coated in a thin layer of white. I hoped Charlie had made it back without trouble. I scuffed my foot; it didn’t seem too slippery.
The aeon that Trumbull came here from was warm: the atmosphere a different composition, the Earth at a hotter phase of her cycles. It would never snow, except perhaps on the highest mountain peaks. The same was true when they stole the bodies of the eldermost, who carved their polar cities from seething jungle rather than the glaciers that buried them now. And it would be hot once more in the time of the ck’chk’ck. How had I never noticed that in the Litany before? The Yith’s original world, however far back, must have been a sweltering place.
“It was so good to see our elders again,” said Caleb without preamble. “But somehow I’d come to imagine them as— If only I could prove that I’d done something, they’d swoop in and make everything all right. Everything that could be made right.”
“They could still help. Although I’m reluctant to invite them near Miskatonic at the moment.” I thought of the soldiers with their guns and talismans. “I wonder if we should do as Grandfather and the archpriest suggested. If we ought to try and … but I don’t know if I can bear it. Caleb?”
He cocked his head, and my heart ached with the familiarity of his silhouette, with its similarity to mine.
“What are you doing with Dawson?”
He started, which gave me my answer, then tucked his chin and stuck his hands in his pockets. It made him look younger. “I’ve taken her as a lover.”
“Are you trying to get her with child?”
“It’s only been a few days. But I’m not trying to prevent it.” He shuffled. “It’s not like it was in the camps. She could bear and raise healthy offspring. If it takes after us, she’d have a powerful child to look out for her. And it is what Grandfather wants.”
“You didn’t say anything when he asked.”
“I didn’t want him to talk about Deedee the way he was talking about … other possible mates.”
“You have to know,” I said, “how these people treat women who have children out of wedlock. It’s not right to subject her to that. Unless—you’re not thinking of marrying her, are you?”
“Of course I’m not going to marry her. How much mourning do you think I want to do? But Deedee’s not a fool. She’s been made to play mistress to Dean Skinner, because he’s useful to the government—it’s better than what she was doing before, so she puts up with it. But do you think she hasn’t thought about how to get out of it?”
“So you two talked, and she told you to get her pregnant as some … ornate letter of resignation?”
“Don’t mock. You just sat around pitying her; I’m the one who did something. Of course we haven’t talked about it. That would be planning treason, or something like it, on her part. This way she can testify that the inhumanly charismatic Deep One seduced her—she couldn’t possibly have been expected to resist.”
I looked up at my brother. “You’re inhumanly charismatic?”
“They certainly won’t believe she wanted me for my looks.”
A swarm of boys passed, raucous with shouted plans and friendly teasing. All were clean-shaven, pale, small-eyed, handsome by any ordinary standard.
“Tell her,” I said. “It’s far better for her to lie to the state about whether she had a choice in the matter than for you to steal that choice. Even if not for her sake—suppose you want to teach the child our ways, later, and she flees inland? A few children who never knew themselves until they changed, or carried a touch of our blood and never knew at all—that was one thing when the bulk of our people were born and raised in Innsmouth, but is it all we want now?”
“Is it?” he said. “Do we want to rebuild?”
“I don’t know.” My thoughts coalesced: listening to myself, I learned what I believed. “But of the idea of our children never knowing their nature, always wondering until the change why they don’t fit in—I don’t want that. To me, the choice is to have offspring we can raise and teach, or to accept our place as the water’s last and youngest children.”
What an interesting—terrifying—thing to think.
“She’s not the sort of person who wants everything laid out cleanly,” he said. “Sometimes it even makes her angry. You saw.”
“She might get angry either way—better now than later. I don’t care if you lay it out cleanly, or in subtle insinuations, or in Morse Code. Just have an actual discussion about the possibility of an amphibious child.”
“I’ll think about it.” He traced a line in the snow-covered walk with the toe of his boot. “She won’t listen to you, if you try.”
“I know. That’s why I’m not threatening to do so.” It occurred to me, seeing his discomfort, that after the camps I’d sought connections, while he’d fled them. Perhaps he needed this kind of baroque excuse to let himself get close to someone new. For all I knew, Dawson did too: in many ways her own brittleness seemed a match for his. “Caleb? Let her know that if she’d rather another way out, we’ll find one. I don’t want you to be another man she has no choice about.”
He hunched his chin into his chest. “We’ve talked about that.”
*
December 1945: In San Francisco, the Nihonmachi—Japantown—regenerates in patches. The Kotos find a one-room apartment in a building shared with a dozen other newly released families, and every morning we scatter looking for temporary work that will let us keep the place, and then for better work that will let us save for a larger one. We all want something less reminiscent of the camp’s confining cabins.