Sam #3
Will circles slowly around her. As he does, he pulls a long strip of white cloth from his pocket.
When he passes out of her line of vision she starts to turn with him, but he reaches out and touches her shoulder lightly, and she halts.
The silence from the other students threatens to suffocate her.
She makes eye contact with one of the boys, who only stares coldly back at her.
The girl beside him leans over to whisper something in his ear, and a smile emerges on his lips.
Sam’s hands start to tremble. Her body breathes, pores taking in the air.
She senses Will stop behind her, then his nearness as his arms come up on either side of her head. A second later, the white cloth slides over her eyes, and her world descends into darkness.
She sucks in her breath. He is so close to her now that she can feel the brush of his collared shirt at her back.
The cloth tightens slightly as he wraps it around her eyes a second time.
Then she feels his hands at work behind her, tying the cloth securely in a knot, the movement tugging her head back so that her throat feels exposed.
“What, Miss Lang,” he says, his voice low and calm, “do you think is the most important thing for an alchemist to understand?”
His quiet words send tingles through her entire body. She has a sudden urge to lean back against him. Her heartbeat has become a hummingbird, fluttering wildly for a place to land. The darkness swims around her.
“I don’t know,” she murmurs.
Will finishes tying the knot. His hands brush past her hair.
“Einstein was one of our greatest alchemists. Think of his most famous equation. E=mc2. What does it tell us? That mass—m—is equivalent to energy—E. ‘Everything is energy,’ he once said, ‘and beyond that is divine.’ He understood the fundamental principle behind alchemy: that all is from one. We are part of an endless ocean of energy, everything seen and unseen.”
All is from one. Everything seen and unseen. Sam looks forward into the darkness and commits Will’s words to memory.
“We call this endless ocean the prima materia,” Will continues.
“The first matter. It is all around you, traveling through your body. You and I may seem to have little in common with the trees in this courtyard or the bricks beneath our heels, but peer deeper and you will see that we’re all composed of the same building blocks.
And even though we may seem to be fragile creatures, of bone and blood, we are also made of stardust, and within the hearts of our atoms lies the same incredible energy that powers stars, the galaxies, and the universe. ”
Sam feels him take a step away from her now, then hears his boots clicking softly against the stone as he comes to face her.
One of his hands touches hers, guiding her carefully down until she kneels.
Fear and desire lodge in her throat. With the blindfold on, she feels as if she and Will are the only ones in the courtyard.
“How do I channel that energy?” she whispers.
The click of his boots stops before her, and she turns her face up toward him. “First, you must prove yourself worthy of such knowledge,” he answers. “Of seeing the unseen.”
His hand tugs one of her hands gently down to touch the tiles. She presses her palm flat, fingers curling against the cool surface. Her skin tingles.
“You are the same matter as this tile,” Will says.
“Those with the potential for alchemy can sense that sameness through touch, as well as the rearrangement of that sameness which makes you a human and it a stone. They know instinctively what is around them.” His voice hardens.
“Now, tell me. What stone are you touching?”
Behind the blindfold, Sam’s brows furrow. It is an impossible request.
A low murmur comes from the other students.
Some giggle. Others exchange words she can’t quite catch.
It occurs to her that they must all have had exams to qualify to study here, but she is coming in years after them, with the disadvantage of having been recruited so late.
She can sense the restless energy pointed toward her, knows that they are eagerly waiting for her to give up.
Her mind, always quicksilver, now feels like it has expanded tenfold.
Even with her eyes covered, her memory now unfurls, gathering up the brief instance when she had stared at the courtyard’s layout and spilling out a pristine map of it.
In the darkness around her, this map now materializes, as clear as if the blindfold had vanished.
She sees the thousands of tiles surrounding them, all in their specific place.
But without any prior knowledge, they are just tiles to her.
She can’t tell magnesium from copper, lithium from iron.
“Take your time,” Will says, but his voice is unforgiving. “You will only have one chance to do this correctly.”
“I can’t,” she whispers.
“Can’t you?”
“I don’t know the elements.”
“Have we ended our time together so quickly, then?”
She crouches there, her body still tingling with newfound energy, at a loss for where to begin. The murmurs start again at the edge of the courtyard. This time, she catches some of what they are saying.
Too hard.
She overhears this phrase and has to fight back the urge to turn in its direction.
It’s too hard. She hasn’t even had a lesson yet.
There is disdain in the voices now, condescension.
She’s losing them. Sam’s heart races with the realization that Will has set her up to fail.
His expression last night at the Odyssey had been one of utter disgust, of irritation at the fact that Diamond Taylor had seen something promising in Sam and assigned her to him.
He must be trying to rid himself of her, and the way he’s decided to do it is by giving her this impossible task and having her fail it in front of so many witnesses.
Sam clenches her teeth and tells herself to concentrate.
What had Will told her? She has to be able to see the unseen, and in order to do that, she needs to know the lattice of the silver’s chemical structure, see down into its atoms in order to rearrange it.
The only way to do so is to think—feel—like an alchemist.
She presses her palm flat against the tile.
Around her, the courtyard goes silent, tension hanging heavy in the air.
Sam squeezes her eyes shut. The darkness around her is now complete, and she realizes that perhaps Will had blindfolded her not to make the exercise more difficult, but to help her concentrate.
She tries to envision the stone beneath her fingers, to guess at its makeup from touch alone.
And there, in the darkness, she remembers what Will had said: alchemy requires the soul of the alchemist. In order for her to tap into this prima materia, she must first be able to tap into the heart of herself, that core of light. Her soul.
The sand coursing through her veins guides her. For the first time in her life she can sense her soul, feels it bright and pulsing. She touches it. It seems to ripple within her, and a spasm of sharp pain vibrates through her body. She gasps, and for an instant, she recoils from that bright core.
As she hesitates, she recalls the feeling she had when she first saw the two men—alchemists, she knows now—sitting in the restaurant.
She thinks of her mother’s damaged body, the homemade window curtains and the crack in her ceiling and that rising tide within herself, the ambition for more.
The promise of greatness. A life that could be transformed into something more desirable.
And then another memory resurfaces from the depths of her mind, of a letter from Ari.
In order to light the fire of ambition in your soul, you must first have been burned.
It comes to her so clearly that she can almost hear Ari’s voice in her head.
She hones in on his words as if he alone can save her.
How the darkness in her life can also become her source of strength.
How she can win. The feeling builds and builds in her chest until it seems to push against the edges of herself, and then she feels it touch her soul, seep into the corners of that light until it all becomes one.
She is her soul and her soul is a fire, and beneath that is a current of something hard and sharp rising within her, something that says:
You will not get rid of me this easily.
In the midst of it, she suddenly senses something different under her fingers—not just the cold surface of a metallic tile, but the building blocks within it, the cubic lattice structure laid out under her hand and merging with the blood cells coursing through her capillaries, the cores of neutrons and protons and circling electrons similar to the neutrons and protons and electrons trembling within herself.
Her ears fill with a roaring sound. Somehow, she knows it is the sound of molecules moving, the universe in its endless shifts.
When she realizes the answer, it comes to her first as a familiar feeling.
Like she has seen this structure before.
She thinks of the periodic table at school, how many protons and electrons are in each element, flipping through the pages of her textbook in her mind until she gets to the one that reminds her of the tile now under her fingers.
“Silver,” she says.
The whispers in the courtyard halt.
“Good,” Will says, and this time, there is the hint of a smile in his voice. Sam’s heart soars until it feels like it might burst. “The next tile.”
She moves her fingers. The metal beneath her hand is different now, but the light of her soul engulfing everything within her is the same, and she senses the structure once again, feels the sameness and difference between it and herself, knows that what she’s sensing are the atoms in the object.
“Magnesium.”
“Good,” Will murmurs. The whispers start up again.
They make their way around the tiles, and she gets them right every time.
Tungsten. Salt. Nickel. Copper. The longer they go, the faster she gets, the more streamlined the feeling in her body, until she can barely tell where her own body ends and the tile begins.
All is from one, everything seen and unseen, and she understands this now, savors the deep knowledge that resonates within her, never wants it to end.
At last, she hears Will approach her, then feels his hands pulling the blindfold off her eyes.
She squints in the afternoon light, the feeling in her body suddenly disrupted.
The roaring in her ears cuts off, and the real world sounds eerily quiet.
Her eyes dart down, away from the glare through the trees, then toward her spectators.
And there, she sees Diamond Taylor standing some distance from the others, the woman’s arms folded across her chest, those dark circles still under her eyes, regarding Sam with a tilt to her head.
It reminds Sam a little of the critical way her own mother sometimes glances at her, and her body reacts accordingly, going rigid with the anxiety to please.
There is only one difference. All of Diamond’s attention is fixed on her. The glare of it is almost more than Sam can bear, and yet she can’t imagine having enough.
Will’s hands are folded behind his back, and for the first time, a small, thoughtful smile touches the edges of his lips.
The pleasure of his approval surges in Sam’s heart. In that instant, she knows she will do whatever it takes to get it again.
At last, Will looks away from her and turns his attention to the professor. “You’ll have a new student tomorrow morning. Make sure she catches up with the others.”
Suddenly Sam realizes that maybe Will hadn’t set her up to fail, after all. He had chosen this test to prove her worth to the others. To start her on a more equal footing.
Will lifts a hand. It is an immediate dismissal, and as if snapped out of a daze, the other students file away back down the hall, in the direction of their classroom. Diamond has already left. Sam hadn’t even noticed the woman turn away.
As the others clear out, Will straightens. “Diamond doesn’t typically show up for evaluations of apprentices,” he tells her.
Sam had been an exception. The special treatment sends a pleasant tingle through her.
“Did I pass?” she says hesitantly.
He studies her with a sober expression. Finally, he says, “No untrained apprentice has ever passed that test.”
Never. So, it was an impossible test, and yet Sam had done it.
“What—” She halts, then starts again. “What does that mean?”
“It means that tomorrow, I want you to come here again. I’ll send a driver for you.”
She swallows hard and looks down at the tiles, the tide of ambition in her now quavering in the face of reality.
Today she had told her mother that she was going to study with Ari after school, and her mother, busy doing odd jobs, had nodded without paying her much heed.
But how long could she get away with that?
“You don’t like this plan,” he says, noting her expression.
“I…,” she says in a low, hesitant voice.
Shame wells in her chest. “That is, when I first came to find Diamond Taylor, I came because I needed money. My mother and I—we’re not doing well.
She can’t keep going alone. And I can’t spend all my extra hours training here without getting paid.
We have to make rent by the end of the week. ”
Her voice trails off as she becomes too embarrassed to ask outright for money.
Will looks unconcerned. “Yes, we’re aware of your home situation.” Then he reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a thick white envelope. He hands it to her.
She looks at him in surprise. He had been carrying this the entire time, as if he’d known she would pass her test today.
Her fingers skim the edge of the envelope, breaking the seal, and for the rest of her life, she will remember this moment in luminous detail, when she finds herself staring down at more money than she’s ever seen in her life.
“Two thousand dollars a week,” Will says to her. “More, once you have learned enough to start working for us. Will that suffice?”
“Yes.” She falters again. “I—”
“You are with Grand Central now,” he says. “There will be many things to fear, but money will never be one of them again.”