Chapter 25 Sam #2
When Sam gives Will a stricken look, he taps the man’s bared thigh with his boot, and the man flinches. Then Will touches the man’s arm lightly with one hand.
The man goes ramrod straight and screams.
Every hair on Sam’s neck stands on end. The man’s veins are bulging, as if they might burst, and he trembles uncontrollably until Will removes his fingers. The man collapses, whimpering.
At the look on Sam’s face, Will explains, “Water molecules expand when they turn into vapor or ice.”
As if from a great distance, Sam recalls that Will is an elementalist, most adept at transmuting air, fire, water, and earth. But she’s never seen him perform alchemy on a living being before.
“Your turn,” he tells Sam. “Touch his arm.”
She recoils from the thought. The man’s arm is slick with sweat, and she hesitates, her hands lingering in her lap as fists.
“Miss Lang,” Will says firmly.
She reaches out and rests her hand on the man’s trembling arm.
“I want you to transmute away a patch of his skin.”
She looks sharply at him. “What?”
“Change it into something else.”
“Into what?”
“Anything. Metal. Stone. You choose.”
She can feel her heart fluttering, the gory memory of last night flooding back.
Her mind flips through the thousands of textbook pages stored in her memory and her hands recall the formula she’d used on Nicolas.
And yet, still, she doesn’t dare move. Her brain refuses to determine the geometric structure of the man’s skin, to seek out the frightened, beating soul within his cells.
At last, she finds her voice. Her hand jolts away. “I can’t do this,” she whispers.
“I don’t have all fucking day, Miss Lang.”
The authority in Will’s tone is enough to force Sam to move.
She puts her hand back on the man’s arm, takes a shuddering breath, and forces herself to think.
It’s a different experience than acting on instinct, the way she had done last night.
The skin must be changed into something else organic but not necessarily alive: deadwood, maybe, or fiber.
Enough of it must be transmuted in order to make the equation balanced, as metal is far denser than skin.
Then the organic compound must be stripped of its carbon and turned into a mineral, something with a rigid structure.
From there, she can transmute it into a metal or another inorganic material.
Her mind whirls through the necessary steps and complexities, spinning and spinning until she feels dizzy. Beside her, Will regards her with a critical eye. Through her contact with the man’s arm, she can feel his heart beating rapidly.
“What are you waiting for?” Will asks her.
She grits her teeth. She sets the first formula in her mind, pictures the overlapping circles of the transmutation in her mind, and sacrifices a shred of her soul.
Pain blooms in her chest and shoots through her limbs.
But the agony she inflicts on the man makes him arch off the floor with a horrifying scream.
Under her fingers, his skin hardens, shriveling, into a sheet of coal, tearing and splitting away at the edges as the coal condenses. Blood pours from the widening wound.
Nicolas’s wide, horrified eyes. His ruined, burned neck.
She stops, feeling sick, unable to continue to the next transmutation. Her chest throbs with pain, and she leans backward on her arms. Her breaths come in ragged gasps. She thinks she’s going to vomit.
A long patch of the man’s upper arm is stripped of its skin, leaving instead a thin layer of blood-drenched coal covering the muscle and fat underneath. There is nothing elegant or precise about it. This is an ugly transmutation, done viciously and without finesse.
Will doesn’t bother looking at Sam. “Are you ready to tell me?” he says over the man’s screams.
“He was just a friend!” the man wails now, almost too far gone with pain to understand what he’s saying. “He works at the bank!”
“His name?”
The man is crying too hard to speak.
“His name,” Will repeats, annoyed.
“Theo—Bond Temeran—!”
“I see,” Will says thoughtfully. “I know a Theo Bond Temeran. Except he works for Lumines. So that can’t be right, can it? Unless you’ve been dealing with the fox behind our backs.”
Mr. Clarkson’s weeping takes on a new edge of desperation. “Please,” he whispers. “Please.”
Will looks at Sam. “Again,” he says. “And do it better this time.”
“I can’t,” Sam manages to reply. Her eyes are still fixed on the man’s bleeding arm.
“You want to be an alchemist in Grand Central?” Will snaps. “You want to earn your keep? What do you think it is we do, Miss Lang? You think we earn billions by wearing suits and playing at magic all day?” His voice hardens. “We run a business. We leave nothing to chance. And we forgive no wrong.”
She turns her head down, shuts her eyes. All she wants right now is to get out of this room.
Will reaches out and turns her chin toward him. “Look at me,” he orders.
She flinches at his touch, as if he might hurt her the way he’d hurt the man. But he just holds her calmly in place. Then he says, “Miss Lang, do you know how your mother really got her burn wounds?”
Her mother? “What?” she whispers, confused.
“Do you know how?” he repeats calmly.
She swallows, heart hammering, trying to think. “There was a gas leak at the restaurant,” she says.
“No,” he says simply. “Lumines set that explosion.”
The men at the restaurant. The fox pins glinting on their suits.
“Your mother’s boss owed them money. He tried to pay his debts in counterfeit dollars.”
Hayes. The explosion. The week spent at the hospital, the agony of watching her mother writhing in pain at home. The smell of charred skin and poultices of egg yolk. Sam stays frozen and can’t speak.
“So when I ask you to do this, I want you to remember who we’re up against. I want you to remember who has hurt you before, and who is on your side.”
How had she never considered why Lumines frequented that restaurant, that Hayes had ties to them?
And then, a sudden realization—did even her mother know?
Sam suddenly recalls the muted fear her mother had shown when the Lumines men had complimented her during their lunch, how angry she’d been when she’d discovered Sam’s interest in looking up things about alchemy.
Has she understood what alchemy was, all this time? Does she know the syndicates exist?
Will releases her, and she stares down at the trembling man before them.
She’s shaking too, still fearful—but now there is something else rising in her chest, a feeling of rage, strong and deep and purposeful.
She was so helpless back then, when her mother was suffering, had no outlet at the time for her grief and worry.
“Don’t be afraid,” Will says. “I’m right here.”
His voice is hard but strangely comforting. He’s telling her that she isn’t alone, that he is going to protect her. It is exactly what she needs to hear.
Sam places a hand on the man’s bleeding arm and gathers her soul.
She feels a fragment rip from it and breaks out in a sweat at the pain. Beneath her hand, the man’s skin changes, tears, shrinks into a sheet of glass so thin that it cracks against the bleeding flesh exposed beneath.
He shrieks and arches, shaking violently, straining against his bonds. Sam can’t bear to watch. She turns her eyes to the marble floor and sees blood seeping down the narrow grout between the tiles.
“You know how we deal with traitors,” Will says to him.
“No,” the man begs. “No, no, it’s not what you think. I can explain. Please, Will. Please.”
But Will’s interest has waned. He replaces the gag and gets up, leaving Mr. Clarkson there to tremble at the pain from his ruined arm. Then Will gestures for Sam to follow him out.
Sam swallows hard as the door shuts, cutting off the man’s loud cries.
Her head rings in the peaceful corridor.
On either side, the guards bob their heads to Will again.
Their faces are expressionless, even bored, as if they’d heard nothing of what had happened inside.
When Sam passes them, their gazes automatically avert from her, so apathetic of her presence that she feels less like she is ignored, and more like she truly is invisible.
Sand will enhance everything about you.
Neither she nor Will says a word. As they head back up the stairs and out into the golden afternoon, she struggles to comprehend what he has just told her. What she has just done. Other workers and staff pass them, nodding at Will while disregarding Sam completely.
What, exactly, is sand enhancing her into?
“How long have you known?” she finally asks Will. “About my mother?”
“I’ve always known,” he replies.
Her anger rises again. He’s always known. From the instant she mentioned it at the Odyssey, from the instant he brought her here for the first time.
“Then why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Why would I do that?” he says with a sigh. “So it could hurt you sooner? So you could run off and try to get revenge before you were ready?”
“So you waited, because then you could force me to do that?” she snaps, nodding back toward the building.
He smiles thinly at her accusation. “No alchemist can be forced into a transmutation,” he says. “Your soul won’t come to you unless it wants to be called forth. There was a part of you that wanted to do it, Miss Lang. Just as you did last night.”
And he’s right, of course. She had reached out and aimed to hurt, had pictured the alchemists in the restaurant and what she wanted to do to them in retaliation.
She had done it because the man deserved it, because he was friends with the fox and the fox had been the one who’d hurt her mother and nearly destroyed their lives.
Because this is justice. And the feeling in her chest is so sure, so true, that she recoils from it in fright.
“You’ll get used to it.” Will looks at her. “I’ll show you how.”
Sam tries to nod, but her heart feels numb. She has crossed an irreversible line, destroying what is alive. Her body heaves, nursing the loss of a piece of her soul, and her stomach growls, famished.
“I don’t want to get used to it,” she says.
For a moment, Will walks in silence. There is a new light in his eyes, as if she has just become useful to him, as if he has suddenly seen something valuable in her. And in that instant, Sam finally processes his words.
I’ll show you how.
He is graduating her. He is taking her under his wing. He is going to train her himself.
“You were right, Miss Lang,” Will finally says. “You don’t belong in that class.”