Sam #2
He gives her that wide smile again. “Oh, I think you do. Stay and see, Sam. Life is infinitely flawed, tortuous and hard and filled with pain. But death? Death is a perfection all its own. The longer you’re an alchemist, the more you’ll understand what I mean. You’ll know why I feel the way I feel.”
Sam looks down and sips her drink. The food on the table suddenly looks unappetizing to her, and she finds herself wishing to get up from the table and walk away, down the stairs and out the door, and then to just keep going, farther and farther, forever.
But she knows she won’t. She won’t because she is bound to Grand Central, because deep down, she knows Sebastian is right.
Every time Will calls for her, she is seen, feels the rush of importance.
When Diamond acknowledges her, she feels like she could fly.
She checks her bank account every week and sees the growing number, three zeros to four to five, more money than she’d ever thought it possible to have.
She’s here because she wants this life. She craves the attention it brings her.
She opens her mouth, suddenly angry at Sebastian for his uncanny observations—but before she can argue, she spots a familiar face that makes her go silent.
It’s Maclan. Kafka. He’s tall and podgy, his beard newly trimmed and streaked with silver, and he’s wearing a turtleneck to hide the slash that Sam gave him the other night.
Now he’s laughing with a friend, his arm wrapped around a wispy girl’s waist. The new dose of sand is flooding Sam’s veins now, and she feels invincible, like she could go right up to his face and still he wouldn’t see her.
Sam and Sebastian exchange a brief look.
A minute later, Maclan pulls away from the girl and excuses himself, makes a beeline for the bar’s bathroom.
Sebastian rises from their table. Sam follows suit. They head in the direction of the bathrooms too, turning down the hall right as Maclan steps into the men’s room. Outside, Sam hesitates for a second. Then Sebastian steps in, and after a beat, Sam does too.
The inside is nearly as dark as the outside, the tiles black and white, the lighting low and intimate.
Maclan is standing in front of one of the urinals, his back turned to them.
Sebastian stops behind the man and waits in the middle of the room.
Maclan hums a tune. His head is tilted up at the tiles, admiring the pattern.
Sebastian walks toward him. As his boots click against the floor, Maclan finally seems to realize he’s not alone—and when Sebastian reaches him, Maclan turns his head a little, as if wondering which urinal the new arrival is going to choose.
Instead, Sebastian grabs the man’s hair and slams his head into the urinal’s wall.
Maclan lets out a startled gasp, but already, Sam can see the man’s hair changing in Sebastian’s grasp—the strands turning into a mass of white porcelain, melding into the urinal wall itself, then spreading to the skin of his entire forehead. The man begins to scream.
Sebastian grins at the sight, his eyes alight with pleasure.
Then he grabs Maclan’s head and yanks him forcibly back from the urinal.
The pieces of his skin and hair that have transformed into porcelain break off.
He falls backward onto the tiles, his forehead and scalp completely skinned, exposing the crimson flesh underneath. Blood gushes down his temples.
He is still screaming. Sebastian rolls him over and presses a knee into his back, hand gripping his arm.
He presses one of Maclan’s wrists against the floor tiles and, before Sam’s eyes, Maclan’s arm melds into the floor, becoming tile itself—Sebastian’s other hand grips the man’s right arm, and that arm too becomes the floor. Maclan thrashes in agony.
Sebastian pushes Maclan’s face down so that the man’s cheek is against the floor.
“Hello, hello, Kafka!” Sebastian exclaims over him. “You’ve been a naughty little fucker!”
Blood stains the whites of Maclan’s eyes. “Reed!” he blurts out. “Reed will hear about this!”
“That’s the goal,” Sebastian answers him in a matter-of-fact voice.
Sam only glimpses the man’s terror before he starts screaming again, because his cheek is now melding into the tiles.
Sam can see the tile turning scarlet, the stone taking on qualities of the blood, the iron adding a metallic sheen.
When the man keeps shrieking, Sebastian makes an annoyed sound and runs his hand across the man’s mouth.
Thread transmutes in a bloody line from the man’s skin, weaving in and out through his lips like stitches until his screams turn into a frothy gurgle.
Sam is frozen to her spot at the sight. Her mind has turned blank. She is back in the Confession Room, the man blubbering at her feet, sobbing for mercy.
Sebastian rises to his feet, rubs his neck, and nods at Sam. “Finish up.”
She just stares at him. She doesn’t know what he means.
“You want him to keep yelling?” Sebastian says, sharply this time. “Someone’s going to come through that door.”
Still, she doesn’t move. Her eyes shift back to the writhing man, unable to separate his body from the floor.
“Weren’t you bragging to me a minute ago about how much you already know?” Sebastian steps closer to her. His eyes are narrowed now, and he is somewhere between anticipation and glee. “Well, girl, here’s what your fat paycheck has been for. Do your job.”
Sam bends down and presses her hand against the tiles. A searing pain shoots up her arm and wedges in a spot deep in her chest, the ache of ripping away a piece of her soul, and beneath her fingers, the tile breaks off in her hand.
But still, she cannot move. The man tries in vain to pull himself up. His muffled screams turn into a wail as he realizes he is going to die.
Sebastian’s voice next to her ear snaps her out of her reverie. “The fuck you waiting for!” he hisses. “Kill him!”
And this time, somehow, Sam finds the resolve to do it. She grips the jagged tile, presses it to Maclan’s bloody, skinless forehead—and transmutes it in an instant into a needle-sharp blade of steel. It pierces straight through the man’s head and out the back of his skull.
He jerks once, violently. The wail cuts off. His writhing stops.
The bathroom plunges into an odd silence. When she stands up and looks at Sebastian, the man has his arms crossed and a smile on his face. “It always takes a sec, the first one,” he says. “You have to get past the hurdle. It’ll be easier for you from now on.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. There are no words inside her. The blood pooling underneath the man has widened into a scarlet lake all the way around his body.
Sebastian kneels next to the body and puts a hand on the man’s ruined head.
“Don’t forget to clean up after yourself,” he says over his shoulder.
As Sam looks on, he transmutes away the blade in the man’s head, the steel turning back into tile and then crumbling into dust, the hole in Maclan’s head closing at both ends.
Sebastian re-forms the dust of the tile back into the floor, making the floor whole, and turns the blood on the tiles into water.
There’s no way to turn the broken porcelain strands on Maclan’s head back into hair, so instead he transmutes part of Maclan’s coat into a surprisingly realistic synthetic imitation of skin and hair over the scalped head.
It all takes less than thirty seconds. When Sebastian steps away again, Maclan looks like he just collapsed on the floor.
Sam stays frozen until Sebastian taps her on the shoulder. She startles.
“Come on,” he says.
Sam manages to follow him out of the bathroom.
Sure enough, a server is already heading down the hall past them to check on the noise.
He looks annoyed, probably assuming there was a heated argument by the urinals, some drunk guy who left a mess.
He passes Sam without a second glance, barely registers Sebastian.
Outside, the party continues. Cassiopeia and Orion have blinked into existence overhead.
Sam hurries toward the stairs leading back down and out into the street.
She keeps her head down. No one bothers to look their way.
Against her will, her mind continues to memorize the conversations they hear as they head to the stairs, storing a stream of useless information in her memory.
“—and have you seen the latest episode?—”
“—Oh my god, how funny! Did you—”
“—Right? Me too, I thought—”
They make it down the stairs and outside, and all the meaningless conversations from inside cut off.
No one notices them as they make their way past a cluster of people huddled by the valet stand.
Not a single person turns their head. At her side, Sebastian walks with his hands in his pockets and a serene look on his face, as if he has been waiting all day to breathe. She can hear him humming.
They are across the street and getting into their car when Sam hears, from a long distance, someone on the rooftop let out a scream.