to destroy.” Erin pulls the car onto the shoulder of the freeway, putting on her hazard lights before she twists to face them. “You don’t want to be out in the open when she gets here, kids. She doesn’t play fair.”
Dodger looks at her dubiously as she wipes her eyes, like the motion could somehow chase the fog of sleep away. Then she stops, blinking at her hands. Slowly, she brings them closer to her face before pulling them farther away. “Whoa.”
“Depth perception: gotta love it,” says Erin. “Asphodel Baker was the greatest alchemist of her age.”
Dodger lowers her hands. “What,” she says. There’s no question there: the word lacks emphasis, intonation, anything but a flat drop into the world.
“She brewed miracles. She found ways to use electricity and modern methods to speed the production of gold and alkahest—she even perfected the elixir of life. She thought alchemy would bring about a paradise on earth, a world where no one would need to work, or age, or die. Everything about life would be a choice, not a predestination. A remarkable amount of her work lapsed into animism, which she thought was a vital part of the alchemical art, one that had been ignored for too long. She pointed to the existence of natural incarnate forces—Winter, Summer, the Sun and Moon, all those notable assholes—as proof that anything could be embodied, if the alchemist working the process wanted it badly enough.”
“Natural incarnate forces?” asks Roger.
“What,” says Dodger again, still flat, still not asking any questions: she’s protesting something unfair and untrue, and her eyes on Erin are like knives, utterly unwilling to forgive.
Erin sighs. “We don’t have time for this. I need directions.”
“I’m not giving them to you until you start making sense,” snaps Dodger.
“Roger, tell her to give me the directions.” Erin switches her attention to him. “This isn’t the time for childish tantrums.”
“Sounds like you’re about to have one.” Roger folds his arms. “Keep going.”
This time, Erin’s sigh is deeply aggravated. “Baker spent some time trying to bring other American alchemists around to her way of thinking. She wanted them to stop warring with each other and guarding their secrets; she thought if they worked together, they’d be able to gain more ground and uncover more of the secrets of the universe. They saw this as a bid for power, since she was—at the time—the only one of them to have harnessed electricity to her whims. They were sexists and traditionalists, and they joined ranks against her. They began poaching or assassinating her students, to keep her ways of thinking from gaining too much credence with the masses. In the end, desperate, she began encoding her teachings in fiction, hiding them in plain sight.”
“The Up-and-Under books are secretly alchemy primers?” asks Dodger.
Erin nods. “They were intended to show the enlightened mind the way to expand its reach and grasp. The Oz books are similar. Baum was trying to suppress Baker with his own alchemical wonderland. He succeeded—his readership was wider—but he also failed.”
Dodger stares at her for a moment before reaching for the handle on her door. “Okay, that’s it,” she says. “I’m out. If you’ll both excuse me, I need to go explain to my insurance adjusters how my house spontaneously caught fire, and why it wasn’t arson.”
“James Reed was Baker’s final creation and only surviving apprentice. James Reed is, in an alchemical sense, your father. He used his own blood and Asphodel’s bones and the body of a living woman, and he crafted you to be his tools in the world to come.”
Dodger stops mid-reach.
“Reed killed his maker, but not before she finished her masterpiece. All the rules of alchemy, all the trials of the student, the process of purification and reconstitution of the universe into whatever form you chose, she preserved them in her books. And in her notes, of course. All the things she hadn’t had time to encode. Reed took those notes and continued where his master had left off. But where Baker dreamt of a world that would belong to all—an Up-and-Under, a paradise, a fairy country where no one would grow old, or get sick, or die—Reed dreamt of power. Of control. That’s why he’s been working for so long to force the Doctrine into flesh. It’s such a big concept, such a big part of the universe, that it didn’t want to come quietly. It didn’t want to come at all. He needed help. He recruited other alchemists, some through flattery,