Sam
“You ready for a job like this?” Sebastian asks her tonight as they arrive across the street from Union Station, which is now closed and shuttered for the night.
“I’ve done plenty of jobs,” she replies.
“Not a hit, you haven’t.” He raps against the windshield in the direction of a rooftop lounge down the street, its strings of lights a glaring warmth against the dark industrial block.
“I can see it on your face. You understand what to do, but you don’t know yet how to strike fear, do you? You’re too new a polemist.”
“I know how,” she says as she steps out of the car, and Sebastian just chuckles.
The rooftop lounge, Minnow, is the hippest new restaurant in Downtown, the kind of place that has a nondescript art deco door with the number 314 emblazoned on it.
The door is closed, but as they approach, it opens from the inside and a hostess greets them with a smile, her eyes gliding right over Sam and onto Sebastian.
“Right this way,” she says.
Inside, the heater is blasting and conversations echo loudly off the walls.
People are dressed as if they are ready for the cameras, and some of them do draw cameras, eyes following them wherever they go.
Overhead, lights hang from transparent wire as if floating in midair; statues hover over koi ponds in the corner.
In this sort of atmosphere, Sam can feel herself disappear into the air, nothing more than an apparition, a nobody among somebodies.
She takes a breath and imagines it dissipating out of her lungs, as if her body isn’t real.
They make their way up the stairs at the end of the common lobby and bathrooms, winding up in the darkness until they emerge on the rooftop, where crowds cluster underneath the comfort of heat lamps.
As they settle into a pair of seats in a cozy corner of the bar, Sam looks around the space.
With her senses heightened, she can feel herself gathering information about every person around them—the new couple seated two tables away, the rowdy bachelorette party, the screenwriters working on a television show, the group of businessmen discussing stocks.
She takes in one full sweep of the space so that she’s memorized all the faces, and as she does, she finds herself unconsciously searching for Ari among them.
But of course he’s not here. She tears her gaze away from the room, reminding herself that they’re here to find Maclan, that his is the only face she should be hunting for in the crowd.
But even as she tells herself this, she finds herself hoping to glimpse a head of dark curls, a glimmer of dark eyes.
They order drinks and some appetizers, yellowtail crudo and charcuterie and old-fashioneds with giant ice cubes.
As they eat, Sebastian says, “Tell me about yourself, Mozart.”
She scowls at him over her drink. “That’s general.”
“Well, here we are together, on our way to an assignment. Best we get to know each other, right?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Sebastian smiles at her. He has an uncanny way of showing all his teeth, weathered skin wrinkling like leather around his mouth, and she looks away from him, tension coiling tight in her stomach.
If she weren’t on sand and practically unnoticeable, she knows they would get looks from others, people murmuring about their stark age difference and wondering if he’s some sort of film mogul.
“It’s because they haven’t used you properly yet. You’re still taking occasional lessons at the Observatory, aren’t you? With Constantine and others.”
“I’ve done plenty.”
“No no, you’ve experimented,” Sebastian explains. “Diamond’s easing you in. Take, for instance, what you once did to your classmate. Nicolas, wasn’t it?”
The desperate eyes, the burnt skin. Sam shivers as the memory appears in her mind. “Why do you know about that?” she mutters.
Sebastian smiles at her. “My dear. Everyone knows about that. Nicolas still walks around with a scar across his neck like he survived a dull guillotine.”
She doesn’t see Nicolas often now, as he works with sand as a philosopher, but sometimes they still cross paths back at the estate. Always, he avoids her eyes. She avoids him too. Best to keep their distance from each other.
“Well, what about it?” she says stiffly, looking out the window and away from Sebastian.
He shrugs. “You could have killed him that night. Maclan too, at the hotel. I heard you sliced his throat. But you didn’t want to give him a fatal wound.”
“I didn’t need to.”
“Why?”
The question is so genuinely curious that Sam looks up at him in disbelief.
Is there a way to recognize a serial killer?
Her mind pores over each detail of his face, the watery brown eyes and the thin, tapering lips.
His limbs are restless, fingers drumming against the table, knee bouncing.
But none of these features define a person with a twisted mind.
“Because I don’t find it recreational,” she says coldly.
Sebastian nods, and Sam feels another chill creep down her spine. He is sincerely trying to understand. “It’s because you don’t know yet how it feels,” he says.
“How what feels?”
“Killing.”
Sam doesn’t answer.
“If you did,” he goes on, “you wouldn’t have let them live. You would have followed through.”
“I think you’re projecting,” she mutters.
A thin laugh. But when she looks at him again, his face is sober.
“I was once on death row, you know. I deserved to be there. I killed thirty-four people over the span of two decades, and when they finally arrested me, it felt like a relief. My insatiable need to take life had finally been acknowledged.” He shakes his head.
“I didn’t care all that much about dying myself.
But while I waited for my execution date, they kept me in a straitjacket in a hundred-square-foot cell.
Do you understand that kind of torture, for an alchemist?
Being unable to create, unable even to take my own life? Like cutting the hands off an artist.”
“You fancy yourself an artist,” she says.
“It is an art,” he replies. “Knowing how, and how quickly. Knowing where and when. A perfectly executed job is a masterpiece worthy of being studied.”
He speaks of taking a life as if it is painting a canvas. Sam can feel her soul curling tight, as if she is seated next to the reaper himself.
“You don’t think you’re a monster,” she says.
“Oh, I very much do.” He nods. “I’m not a good person, Mozart.
I wanted and deserved my sentence. Every person I killed, I killed with full awareness.
” His eyes narrow. “But an artist is an artist. I can’t help but see people the way I see them.
Is it that different from a businessman’s obsession with money? An artist’s compulsion to paint?”
Sam swallows and presses her hands into her lap. “Why didn’t they execute you?”
“One day,” he says, “I got called in for an interview with a parole officer. They said I was going to be pardoned.” He looks at Sam and chuckles.
“Pardoned. Me. By the time I got out a few weeks later, Diamond Taylor was there to meet me in my hotel room. She offered me a job, doing what I’m best at.
I kill for her, and in exchange, I get my freedom.
I had no personal loyalty to Diamond, but I couldn’t pass up that good of a deal.
” He shakes his head, smiling. “The rush of taking a life. You don’t know it yet. You will soon.”
Sam swallows. In her lap, her hands are trembling.
“Do you understand what you’re doing tonight?” he asks her.
She does, and yet she hasn’t quite registered it.
She has tortured a man in a basement, and she has cut the throat of a man in the heat of a fight.
But she doesn’t know what it’s like to kill a person.
She has tried not to think about what her assignment tonight really means.
They are taking care of business. They are handling people for causing trouble. They are fixing a problem.
At her hesitation, Sebastian grins. “Constantine tells me that when you take sand, people don’t notice you.
You fade into the background. People look away from you in disinterest, as if you aren’t there at all.
When asked, they can’t remember your name or whether you were even there.
They walk away and don’t realize you’ve entered or left a place.
They look at you on security camera footage and think you’re a nobody, just passing through. ”
Sam looks out the window. The city is awash in neon lights now, as bright in its own way as during the day.
Down on the street below, smoke rises from a taco stand’s griddle as a cook scrapes carnitas into a corner.
There are half a dozen people clustered under a bus stop, expressions listless, perhaps dreaming of another life.
“I don’t need your analysis of me,” she says.
“My dear girl,” Sebastian says, handing her a silvery-white pill.
A second dose, so soon after her first. She takes it from him, eager for the rush of it to bolster her resolve.
“Listen to me. I’ve seen a hundred alchemists in my lifetime.
They all have the same hunger in their eyes as you.
Some deep, desperate, innate desire for more, the ambition for perfection.
It’s what drives all of us. Be honest. Isn’t that why you’re here? ”
Sam says nothing, but his words bring back a surge of her old emotions from childhood, the need to please, the need to become better. Everything can be more beautiful.
“I’m here because I needed to save my mother,” she says.
“Mm.” Sebastian chews thoughtfully on a slice of raw yellowtail. “And now that she’s saved, why are you here?”
“I don’t think I really have a choice, do I?”