Ari #3
She studies the structure of it with her touch.
The thousands of pages she’s read and internalized now come to the surface, and she tries once again to transmute the plant, concentrating on the capillaries in the leaves, bringing forth the circles and geometry in her head, thinking of the necessary steps to turn the leaves into wood.
If no one will guide her, then she will just have to guide herself.
Her brow furrows, and this time she keeps reaching, even as the ache in her own soul grows into a real pain.
Her lips part; she winces. Continues on.
She isn’t sure if it’s supposed to hurt this much, but she doesn’t want to stop either.
Again comes that sensation, right at the edges of her fingertips, the transmutation so close to happening.
A sudden jolt of pain shoots through her, and her eyes fly open.
She lets out a gasp. Her fingers dart away from the leaves in her hand, as if she’s just been burned.
Something in her chest stings like skin ripped from flesh, and she doubles over, her breaths hurting, slightly frightened but mostly surprised.
Excited.
Had she done it?
And immediately, she feels a desire to tell Ari, knowing he would be fascinated too, that he would care.
Her eyes dart up to the courtyard, as if thinking about him might conjure him here, as if she’ll see him walking toward her and she can wave him over with a grin and say, Ari, look what just happened, look what I did. I have something I need to tell you.
But when she looks up, Ari isn’t there. Instead, she sees her classmate Nicolas walking toward her, a bag slung across one shoulder.
“Look who’s staying late today,” he says.
She swallows her excitement and puts the leaves down, surprised that someone has noticed her. Nicolas has never bothered speaking to her before.
“Oh,” she replies. “Hello.”
“You heading out or something?”
“What?”
He nods at her foot. “That’s the tile that leads out to the back alley.”
She shakes her head and looks down at the nondescript stone tile under her boot. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh. I figured you were sneaking out somewhere. Everyone does it.” He shrugs. “All the buildings have a tunnel out to the alley. For emergencies, in case of a raid.” He comes over to look curiously into her hand. “What are you doing, then?”
“Oh,” she says, looking down. “Nothing. Reading some books.”
He whistles at the title of the book in her lap. “Bioalchemy,” he muses. His gaze goes to the leaves that had been in her palm. “You’re skipping way ahead.”
She doesn’t answer him, just smiles hesitantly.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” he asks her.
“Not much to talk about,” she answers.
“Not even when I’m asking you a question?”
Her initial pleasure at his attention fades. There’s an aggressiveness in his voice that makes her tense.
“I’m just passing some time before I head home,” she says.
He takes a seat beside her, then picks up one of the leaves that she had dropped.
The instant he holds it, his eyebrows lift in mild surprise—he can tell that she has partially transmuted them, can tell that its stiffness resembles the texture of wood more than a leaf.
Sam stares at it too, the ache still pulsing through her chest.
“Bioalchemy’s forbidden for junior apprentices, you know,” he says.
“I know,” she replies.
“Professor Obasi said messing with organic compounds can lead to dangerous consequences,” he continues, nodding at her. In the lengthening evening, his eyes are hidden in shadows. “You could really hurt someone.”
“I’m just playing with leaves,” she says.
She sees a hint of cruelty in the curl of his lips and knows he wants to tell the professor what she’s done. “I’ll keep this,” he says, pocketing the leaf.
“Don’t tell her,” Sam says.
He lifts a brow. “So you are scared.”
“I’m not scared,” she says, narrowing her eyes.
“Maybe you should be. You barged your way into the Observatory on nothing but Will’s generosity.”
Now she hears the envy in his voice. “I’m not trying to compete with you,” she says.
He holds his hands up disarmingly. “We’re not even on the same track. I’m to be a philosopher. Who said you were competition?”
She starts gathering up her books. She doesn’t like how the atmosphere has changed, and the knot in her chest tells her she should leave.
Philosopher. She recalls what Will had once told her about the field, that they are both the most valuable and the most difficult to train.
That they will die young. A part of her tries to take pity on Nicolas for that.
“See you in class tomorrow,” she mutters, then rises and turns her back.
He gets up and follows her. “Hey,” he says. “I was talking to you.”
She keeps walking. Behind her, his steps quicken. A jolt of fear ripples through her.
“Hey,” he says, his voice harsher now. “I was talking to you.”
He reaches out and grabs her by the elbow, his hand clamping down so hard that it hurts. He yanks her back to him. She drops her books, and they clatter to the ground. He seizes her collar and pulls it sideways, snapping off a button from her blouse and exposing her collarbone.
Her fear explodes as a wave of heat in her chest. Her hand shoots out at him, finding his neck, and when she presses against the skin of his throat, she closes her fingers.
This time, she feels the structure of his skin and flesh and bones with ease, and a fragment of her soul disintegrates in a blinding shard of pain.
Suddenly Nicolas’s face is right before hers, his eyes widening in horror, his mouth open and gurgling. A strangled, high-pitched scream comes from him, thin and unnatural, a sound that raises every hair on Sam’s neck. Her eyes dart to where her hand has gripped Nicolas’s throat.
She yanks her hand away.
Nicolas collapses, choking, gurgling, his hands on his throat. Only now, through his trembling fingers, does Sam see what she did.
All across his neck, where her hand had been, is a burn so deep that his skin has been charred white.
She freezes, paralyzed at the sight. She couldn’t have done that.
She hardly even recalls performing a transmutation.
But she had, and the feverish memory of doing it returns—a formula that had rushed through her, that she had pulled out from the vast depths of her mind.
The instinctive way she had called on her soul, how her hand seemed to know exactly what to do and how to twist. She had felt the skin change to fire and ash beneath her fingers.
Her stunned gaze stays on the wound. It is such a deep, vicious mark, the flesh crisped away, the edges black and white and bloodied.
Nicolas looks at her with desperate terror, tries to speak, fails, and falls to his knees, one of his hands still trying in vain to clutch at his throat.
At last, Sam finds her voice. “Help!” she calls out. The word comes out hoarse and quiet. She tries again. “Help, someone help us!”
No one comes.
“Help!” This time, she screams.
There is the sound of footsteps against pavement.
But to Sam, it sounds muffled and distant.
She is alone in the courtyard with Nicolas, their figures illuminated only by the flicker of lanterns.
And in the moment before help finally arrives, she finds herself transfixed by his bloodshot eyes.
Through them, she feels as if she can see straight into his soul, the amorphous fog of life that holds a human together, can see it twisting over and over in agony as he fights for survival.
And somehow, beneath her horror at what she has done, she feels a hint of something else.
Satisfaction, perhaps. Vengeance. Most of all, a strange, dark joy lingers even as other alchemists arrive on the scene.
She hears its voice in the back of her mind, finds herself both shrinking from and leaning into it.
It says:
You will never forget me now.