Sam
William Taylor is twenty-four.
They pass through two sentried gates, where the guards tip their hats to Will and let them through. The roads are wide and impeccably paved, not a single crack to be seen anywhere, and at intersections are signs engraved in iron plaques against stone.
NO PHOTOGRAPHY. NO VISITORS. PERMITS ONLY.
“I have only one rule for you today,” Will tells her as they finally pull up before a set of massive gates. The words RED CITY are carved into one of the pillars. “You don’t speak about what you see here. Do you understand?”
There is a slight accent in his voice that she can’t place, a note of elegance so subtle that she loses it if she concentrates too hard, and a grace to his movements that makes her think of professionals, of grown-ups, of someone who has experienced more life than anyone she’s ever met.
Most of all, perhaps, he feels older because he talks to her like she is a child.
“Yes,” she says meekly, dwelling on how he’d brightened the streetlamp at night, how the gun had formed in his hands from the bricks of a wall.
The granite barriers on either side of the gates are draped in curtains of purple and pink bougainvillea, and tall Italian cypress hide most of the property from view. Sam holds her breath as the gates now swing open, revealing a driveway leading deep into the lushness.
Will stops the car in the center of a circular cobblestone lot at the bottom of a green hill, up which winds a stone pathway that disappears over the top. From down here, Sam can only glimpse a few roofs covered in red terra-cotta Spanish tiles, white walls blanketed with climbing roses.
As Will steps out, a valet hurries over to take the car keys from him.
“Mr. Taylor,” he says with a bow of his head. Will nods in return.
A second person comes bearing a tray with two hot white towels and glasses of ice-cold water with strawberry slices and sprigs of mint. “Ms. Taylor’s meeting is running late, sir,” he says as Will wipes his hands with one of the towels. “She wants you to go ahead.”
“We’ll start at the Observatory, then,” Will says.
“I’ll let her know,” the man replies. “She’ll come along shortly.”
“Thank you, Hanover.” Will tosses the towel back on the tray and takes one of the drinks.
Sam watches the luxurious ritual in silence.
After a second, the man named Hanover looks at her and glances meaningfully down at the tray.
It hadn’t occurred to her that she was being offered the second towel.
Hanover gives her an encouraging smile as she hesitantly takes it, wiping her hands in the way she’d seen Will do, and takes a sip from the second drink.
It is cold and refreshing, the mint tingling against her tongue.
“Good?” Hanover asks her with a wink.
His eyes are kind, and she finds herself smiling back. “So good,” she answers, and he gives her a pleased nod.
“Best of luck today, Miss Lang,” he says. “Constantine isn’t easy to please.”
Sam follows beside Will as they make their way up the stone steps of the hill. As they go, he briefly touches the edge of his glass, leaving a trail across its dewy surface. Sam blinks. There is now a pink tint to the drink. It didn’t look like that even a second ago, before he touched it.
Sam’s curiosity gets the best of her. “You changed it?” she asks.
“Don’t ask me to change yours.” He takes a sip. “You’re too young to drink.”
She realizes that he’s somehow added alcohol to his. “But—you just touched it with your hand,” she says, trying to get him to explain it. “Like you changed that streetlight and made the gun, back at the Odyssey.”
“Mm.”
“How did you do those things?”
“Alchemy.”
He says it like he’s giving her the time or the weather report, the word emerging from him so casually that at first Sam thinks she misheard.
But there it is. Confirmation from someone else of the thing she has wondered about for so many years, information she had struggled to acquire, now being offered to her as if it’s no big deal.
“But alchemy isn’t real,” she says faintly, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
“That so?”
“How can it be?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I…” Her voice fades away. She feels dizzy, even though she has witnessed it over and over again. “I’m not sure what to believe.”
“Then leave.” He looks away from her in disinterest and takes another sip.
She shakes her head, still confused, unsure how to reply. “No,” she answers with determination. “No, wait, I want to stay. I just mean … I don’t understand how it’s possible.”
At her blank expression, he smiles. “In theory,” he says, “anyone can become an alchemist, just like anyone can become a nuclear physicist. But some are obviously more suited for it than others. So it goes with alchemy. All you technically need is a soul, but most don’t have one strong enough for it, could attempt a transmutation their whole life and never successfully call upon that soul.
Then there are those who have a particular kind of soul, one able to withstand the punishing nature of alchemy.
” He points his drink at her. “My mother has a talent for identifying those with a natural gift for alchemy. And you’ve caught her eye.
” He sighs. “So, Miss Lang, you’re here because we want to know if you’re worth teaching. ”
Worth teaching. Teaching what—alchemy? They want her to learn this impossible thing? A bubble of panicked laughter wants to emerge from her lips. How many alchemists are out there? How many Wills?
Through her fog of thoughts, she realizes that they’ve reached the top of the hill.
Will nods around them. “To the public, we are a corporation. In actuality, we are an alchemy syndicate. A secret society, of sorts. You happen to be on one of Grand Central’s properties, the Red City, fifty acres that we call home. ”
Sam looks around, struck dumb with amazement. From the top, she can see all the way to downtown, has a perfect view of Diamond Taylor’s iconic Winged Towers dominating the landscape. Along the hill sit several mansions, each draped in roses and ivy.
“Are there others?” she asks.
“Properties?”
She shakes her head. “Alchemy syndicates.”
“Many others.”
Many others. “How long have you—they—been around?”
“Alchemical societies have existed for thousands of years. Alchemy was widely banned centuries ago, by both churches and states. Our science was considered sacrilegious, our scientists heretics, so secret societies were necessary for our survival. Babylonia, symbolized by the basilisk, was founded in Babylon at the height of its power. Belle Epoque, the stallion, was formed during its eponymous era in nineteenth-century France. Lumines, the fox, was born during the Dark Ages and directly influenced the start of the Renaissance.”
Sam suddenly thinks back to the men eating lunch, gold fox pins gleaming, tapping their Oxford shoes against the floor, changing forks into spoons. Lumines. So, they had belonged to another syndicate.
Her eyes go to the winged lion on Will’s lapel. “What about Grand Central, then?” Sam asks.
“We were founded thirty years ago, in the 1980s.”
So young. “Why…?” Sam starts to ask.
Will smiles at the surprise on her face. “Have you ever heard of the philosopher’s stone, Miss Lang?”
She has heard the term before, if only in movies and books. “It’s a magical object?” she ventures.
“It was alchemy’s holy grail for centuries. Calculus albus, or the ‘white stone.’ A symbol of the glory of heaven, a substance capable of gifting immortality and of changing metals into gold. The source of all perfection. The heart of alchemy.”
Sam notices his use of past tense. “But alchemy no longer seeks it?”
“Because we found it.”
She is ill with fascination. “Grand Central discovered it?”
“My father did,” Will says. “He met my mother at Harvard in the early eighties. She was attending the Business School; he was working on his chemistry PhD. He was also an alchemist and, like many other alchemists, searching obsessively for the philosopher’s stone.
He discovered it during his graduate lab work, coming up with an equation so elegant and simple that it is often compared to Einstein’s equation of general relativity.
But at the time, the world was in the throes of a vicious recession.
Alchemists needed to pay the bills as much as anyone else.
What use was a single philosopher’s stone created in a lab?
” Will nods at Sam. “My father discovered the philosopher’s stone.
But it was my mother who thought of turning it into what we call sand. ”
Sam shivers. “What is sand?”
“Sand is the philosopher’s stone—distilled into a drug.
For a moment, sand enhances everything about who you are.
Models who take sand will appear so beautiful they seem almost unreal, their eyes brighter, their hair glossier, their features perfected.
Movie stars on sand become the most charming version of themselves, their talent enhanced to its full potential.
Scientists on sand are so illuminated that they make startling breakthroughs.
Technologists on sand created the phones in our hands and the Internet as we know it.
Athletes on sand can push their bodies almost beyond feasibility, into the realm of the supernatural. ”
Sam’s skin prickles. Sand. They had figured out how to manufacture perfection.
Now she recalls that the alchemist in the restaurant had stirred a shimmering white powder into his drink.
It had been such a trivial detail before, barely worth remembering.
She tries to imagine what it’s like to take sand and experience its effects.
Does it feel like magic? How many others around her had been taking it?
Whenever she saw a beautiful person, was it because they had been enhanced by sand?
When she’d watched the performers at the theater, had they taken sand?
Has it been all around her, all this time?