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Anastasia and Samael had been playing on the little lawn around the sundial that the Necrolord Prime called The Wabe. No one could say what a wabe was, or if there were any others. They’d asked. The Wabe was an adult favorite, because there was almost nothing impeding lines of sight across it – just the sundial – and it was surrounded by benches. Anastasia figured you needed to be at least twenty to like The Wabe. Samael thought you could probably do alright with it once you were tall enough to reach the shiny bits on top of the sundial that looked like they might come out so you could bite them. They were both four.
Wabe-adjacency was moderately alright. Anastasia and Samael had invented a game that was mostly jumping off of benches and shouting, but then Naugustine said he was trying to teach Aaron and Alexis polynomials and Nigella said they were getting sunburnt and courting head injuries, so Anastasia and Samael were slathered with sunscreen and herded onto The Wabe itself, where everyone could keep an eye on them. Titania offered to read them a story, but she refused to repeat either the one about the children eaten by bears or the one where the dinosaurs all died, so the offer was dropped. The two of them drifted as artlessly as determined children could drift until they were on the far side of the sundial from Augustine’s maths lesson and Nigella’s concern for their craniums. In the tiny patch of scant cover, Anastasia took off her shirt and handed it to Samael, who slung it around the sundial stand at about the level of his head, wrapped the sleeves around his hands, and leaned back.
Samael had one foot in the air, poised to start climbing, when Nercynorn interrupted what she’d been saying to Haniel about cell mitosis to ask “John, would you…?” and God Almighty said “Oh hell.”
God Almighty, Namer of The Wabe, Lord of the Nine Resurrections, took Samael by the armpits, lifted him a very few inches so as not to hit his head, and swung him carefully in the direction of the walkway that separated The Wabe from the benches.
“I regret the sundial more every day,” He said. “Ana darling, would you like to put your shirt back on?”
Ana darling folded her arms in case anyone tried to help with her shirt. “No.”
“If you aren’t going to wear a shirt, you’ll have to get your whole top half sunscreened,” said God. God Himself still had His hands full with Samael, but He was just the kind of jerk who’d get someone else to wield the sunscreen.
Ana picked her shirt up off the grass and put it back on.
“Lovely,” said God. “Come along, you two. Let’s leave people to their lessons and get a snack.”
Alexis and Haniel looked up, clearly hoping that snacks would be generally administered. Aaron picked surreptitiously at a wart on his knuckle. Nigella took a book out of her bag. The Emperor of the Nine House took Anastasia and Samael’s hands and led them away from The Wabe.
God led them first through the shady part of the garden, where the walk was paved with big, flat rocks in haphazard patterns.
“I bet I can jump two stones,” Anastasia said.
“I can jump three,” said Samael.
God let go of their hands. “Show me.”
Anastasia, who was smaller than Samael, barely cleared her two. Samael had nearly half a stone extra on his three.
“We can’t touch the cracks,” Anastasia announced. “They’re acid, so we have to stay in the middles and go real fast before the rocks melt.”
They both dashed towards the House, skipping from stone to stone. Halfway there, Samael dashed back. “You have to run! The rocks are melting!”
“I’m God,” said God. “I can walk on acid.”
Anastasia reached the door first. She hung off the door handle while she waited, half in the cool inside of Canaan House and half in the dreamy warm outside. Samael moved faster than God, but on a considerably less direct course. They reached the door at about the same time.
“The floor inside is totally normal,” said God. He said “totally normal” with the slight emphasis that adults always used when they talked to Samael and Anastasia about floors.
Since the floor could not be acid or piranhas or lava, Anastasia and Samael pretended to be rats. They slid along with their backs to the walls, looking carefully around all the corners. God insisted that they walk down the stairs holding the handrails (“holding handrails” had the same slight emphasis as “totally normal”). Samael gave Anastasia the look that meant he was adding this to their list of ways that God was terrible. They had been keeping the list ever since the time God took the knobs off the stove.
In the refectory, He told Samael and Anastasia to sit at the table, and then got them each one of the smaller breakable plates that adults ate salad off of at lunchtime. He put a ginger biscuit on each plate.
“I am going to make myself a cup of tea,” He said. “When I get back, I will give anyone who hasn’t touched their biscuit yet a second one.”
Anastasia knelt on her chair with her arms on the table as the Emperor of Eight Houses went into the kitchen and closed the door.
Samael scooped his biscuit into his pocket. “Do you want yours?” He asked.
“No,” said Anastasia. “They’re super gross.”
Samael took her biscuit and started munching it. They both slid down out of their chairs and strolled out the door of the refectory.
“What do you want to do?” Anastasia asked.
“Nuh uh,” Samael responded. “It’s your turn for deciding.”
“Sorry! I forgot.” She thought for a moment. “We should do an experiment.”
Fifteen minutes later, Anastasia and Samael skulked onto a garden terrace. It wasn’t the best terrace for their purposes, but it was the sunny space with fewest overlooking windows as far from The Wabe as they could get without breaking the rule about going in the swimming pool room without an adult.
“We need small sticks,” Anastasia told Samael. “Some for the experiment and some for the control.”
“How many?”
“Six?” Remembering she was supposed to be deciding, Anastasia repeated herself. “Six each.”
Samael poked obligingly at the flowerbeds and started gathering twigs. “What’s your hypothesis?” They shared all their lessons, so they both knew about experiments.
Anastasia took a tube of sunscreen out of one pocket and two plex magnifying lenses out of the other. “I don’t think sunscreen really works.”
“How are we going to test it?”
“We’re going to put sunscreen on these sticks,” Anastasia took about half the sticks from Samael’s hands, “and none on those other ones. Then we’ll use the magnifiers.”
“I’m not doing all the sunscreen,” Samael knew which tasks Anastasia would prefer to avoid. “You have to do half.”
“I’m deciding,” she reminded him.
“If you don’t do any, you only get one stick with sunscreen,” he insisted.
“One is enough.” She handed him the tube. “I’m going to put the control group here. The experiment stick should go there.” She pointed.
Samael flicked the top off the tube, making them both wince at the noise. He squirted some sunscreen on the paving stone, dropped the experiment stick into it, and squished the stick around with his shoe. When Anastasia came to stand beside him and drop a second stick in the little puddle of lotion, he examined her control spot.
“It’s good,” he told her when he came back. “No ants.”
She handed him the un-lotioned sticks and a magnifier. “You do the control. I’ll do the experiment ones right there.” She pointed to a spot near the building.
Anastasia picked the two sunscreened sticks up with just her fingertips. They each went to their designated locations.
The fire suppression system kicked in on Anastasia first.
“I left them alone for one minute,” God protested.
Other adults were having a conversation that featured repeated use of the word “unsupervised." Pyrrha was listening to a shortwave radio. Sam tried to get close to her to hear better, but she held him at arms length. “You’re covered in foam,” she said, as though she thought Samael might not have noticed. Anastasia had filled both hands with foam and was flying them around herself like spaceships. Her mom, Cassy, knelt in front of her and caught both spaceships in mid-whoosh.
“Mouse,” Cassy said. “What did you think you were doing?”
“I was checking if sunscreen works,” said Anastasia. “It doesn’t. If it worked, my sticks would have been inflammable.”
Cassy looked very serious. “Inflammable things catch fire, Mouse.”
“That’s wrong,” said Anastasia. “Flammable things catch fire. Inflammable things don’t.”
“Both flammable and inflammable things catch fire,” Cassy explained.
Anastasia’s eyebrows knotted up. “Then what do those words mean, if they’re not about catching fire?”
“That is what they mean. 'Inflammable' and 'flammable' both mean 'catches fire.'”
“That’s not fair,” Anastasia said. “One of them has to mean something different, or they’d be the same word.”
“It is pretty strange,” Cassy agreed. “They’re different words that mean the same thing.”
“I know about synonyms,” Anastasia said, “but synonyms are actually different words. They’re not the same word but one has a prefix. The same word with a prefix can’t be a synonym.”
“It can, actually.” Cassy tried to flag one of the other adults in the room – God, or Pyrrha, or Nigella, or Samael’s dad Alfred – but they were having a different argument.
Samael shook his hands, making the foam that had been on them fly to the wall. Shaking his head was even better. There had been a lot of foam in his hair. Some of it wound up on the ceiling.
Anastasia was yelling. “You can’t just change the rules for words! It’s a bad way to have words! They have to mean something different!”
Samael tried jumping, and then spinning. His dad caught the back of his shirt before he could do jumping and spinning both at once.
Alfred touched Cassy on the shoulder and said “Showers?” like it was a question. In Samael's experience, "Showers?" was an inevitability.
Cassie nodded. Samael and Anastasia found themselves marched through the back door of the changing room off the gym, and then escorted back upstairs wearing nothing but towels. They got to go through the swimming pool room on the way back though, so even though he'd left the second biscuit behind with his trousers, Samael felt that he came out ahead.