Ari
Mr. Rudra gives him a questioning look. “Shall we start?”
The pain continues. The glass of water stays unchanged. It remains unchanged for the rest of the afternoon.
So he does the same, and they both struggle on, alone.
“Still on that?” he says.
Ari just clutches his pen tighter and keeps his head down.
Zan bumps so hard into the back of Ari’s chair that he shoves his chest into the table. Ari’s hand jolts violently, scrawling an ugly line through his careful circles.
“Steady your hands,” Zan mocks over his shoulder as he heads out of the building.
While the land transforms from the rains of winter to the regrowth of spring, Ari’s progress remains unchanged.
His family’s payments are withheld. Stress knots his chest. What must his parents think of the sudden stop?
Are they worried for him? Are they upset?
Each day, Mr. Rudra grows less patient with him, his voice turning more clipped, his sighs more pronounced.
When the man leaves for the evening, Isla will linger at Ari’s side until he’s ready to stand up again.
Sometimes, on the worst days, she helps him out to the car.
He dreams constantly of his family. Sometimes it is of his sister and mother talking by the window late at night, of buttery yellow light illuminating the street outside their home.
Other times it is of him returning home, making his way through the familiar, winding alleys until he reaches his family’s door.
Once, he is standing in the middle of a crowded street in Surat, and it is Dhuleti, and everyone is singing and dancing.
He shouts in delight as he flings fistfuls of bright yellow and fuchsia and turquoise powder into the air.
His brother’s teeth are stained blue and gold.
His mother laughs and cups his cheeks. His father has joined a human pyramid of revelers as they attempt to reach a buttermilk pot hung high above the street.
Ari wakes with tears streaking his face, his chest heaving with grief, his ears still ringing with the phantom sounds of festivities. After a while, he opens his eyes and looks at his calendar. Holi has already passed. He forgot completely about it this year.
One evening, several hours into his impassable exercise in the lab, a spasm of pain hits Ari so hard that he crumples to the floor.
There he trembles, unable to stand, unwilling to bear another round of the agony.
Everything around him swims as if underwater.
His breathing is shallow; he thinks that if he keeps going, he might faint. Sweat drips against the tiles.
Mr. Rudra kneels beside him. “Get up.”
Ari stays where he is, too weak to obey. His exhausted mind conjures an illusion of Sam at his side, her hand on his arm.
“Get up.”
Ari feels the man yanking him up now with rough hands.
Sam vanishes. The world rushes up at him, and suddenly the table is before him again, the glass of water still there.
He stares listlessly at it, unable to concentrate.
He’s thinking of his mother’s face on the morning Rudra spoke to her, of himself agreeing to this arrangement.
He’s thinking of Zan’s sneer, the superiority of his smile and his casual dismissal.
Of course he couldn’t do it, he can imagine the boy muttering to the others.
He’s thinking of Sam, her wide eyes and faint smattering of freckles, how effortlessly she can learn.
You should be here, he thinks. Not me.
“Again,” Mr. Rudra says.
Ari looks up and meets the man’s eyes. “I can’t,” he says.
“You can.”
“I can’t last another round.”
Mr. Rudra nods, holding his gaze, considering.
Then he suddenly slams his hand down against the table. Ari jumps. The man’s fingers curl against the wood.
And as if the table is made of water, the man transmutes a knife out of it, pulling from it a blade molded from the table’s iron bars, a hilt from the wood.
It happens in the span of a second. Then he stabs the knife deep into the table, barely an inch from Ari’s hand, the motion shaking the table so fiercely that it knocks over the glass, spilling water across the surface.
“If you tell me again that you can’t,” Mr. Rudra says, “you’ll be admitting that I traveled across the world to recruit a boy who fooled me into thinking that he was worth something.
And I don’t keep what has no value.” He pulls the knife out, leans his elbow against the wood, and points the blade at Ari.
“So. Are you worthless? If so, tell me again, so I know for sure.”
Ari stares at the knife. He should be frightened, and maybe he is—maybe this is his response to fear.
But all the pain he has endured in here has exhausted him so thoroughly that all he feels is a calm rage.
Perhaps he will die tonight. His entire body is still shaking, but something about the transmutation of this knife seems to tingle in the air, as if he can feel the way that the man had reached inside himself and torn a fragment of his soul from its source, had bound it to the elements in the wood and metal and created an entirely new object from it.
The illusion of Sam beside him whispers in his ear. You are about to become invincible.
The anger in him stills like a glass surface, and in that stillness, something calls from within himself. He feels an energy in him shift. There is a lurch in his body, a sudden brightness.
Ari looks at the water spilt across the table. He puts his hand in it. The rings of sacred geometry appear unbidden in the calm of his mind, then the latticework of ice, and this time, he grips something deep in his chest. And pulls.
The pain changes—turns sharp—as if a film of skin has been peeled from his flesh.
The water freezes in an instant. It happens so quickly that Ari doesn’t even see the change—it is simply liquid one instant and ice the next.
Ari is so startled that he tries to yank his hand back—but of course it is frozen to the spot, and he tugs uselessly for a second before his fingers finally come free in a burst of ice crystals.
“Ha!” Mr. Rudra tilts back into his seat and drops the knife onto the table, then claps his hands together.
“So, you grow teeth when on the edge of life and death, is that it? I’ll have to be harsher with you.
Do you see this, Archimedes?” He gestures at the ice.
“Look at the uniformity of this first transmutation. The fine detail! He is a precise one.”
Ari’s head swims as he stares at the ice. Sweat is still drying on the back of his neck, and his hand is tingling from the cold. Pain buzzes through his body, alongside the thrill of his first transmutation. Something in his chest aches deeply, and he feels a curious sense of loss.
When something terrible happens, do we become the best version of ourselves?
“I’m not worthless,” he says to the man. And for the first time, his voice is not gentle but sharp, a wave of fury daring a response.
Mr. Rudra regards Ari with a thoughtful expression. Then he reaches out and grabs Ari’s chin with a firm hand. Ari winces, skin tingling.
“Now you’ll become a true alchemist,” the man says. “And what an exquisite blade you will be.”