Sam
The next night passes in a series of flashes.
The fuck you waiting for!
Does Ari do this? Has he ever taken a life? She tries to picture Ari standing over Maclan’s body, blood on his hands, eyes vacant. It seems impossible, until she recalls him pointing the knife at her throat, the way he’d seized her wrist.
He had let her go. But would he ever do it again? Would she, to him?
Hanover meets them inside the gate. Together, they haul Zhukov’s limp body out of the car and up the steps, until they’ve brought him to the lowest floor in the guest complex, to a Confession Room.
Will is already there. Beside him, flanked by several guards, is Diamond. The woman may be gaunt, but she is as properly dressed as ever, in a flawless suit and tie. Sam takes one look at her and knows immediately what is happening here tonight.
The basement feels like it’s closing in around her.
Sebastian deposits Zhukov on the floor, where he is slowly stirring to life.
Diamond doesn’t greet them. Her face is instead turned down at the man, and when he pushes himself laboriously into a sitting position, blinking in bewilderment, Diamond bends down to rest her elbows on her knees, her eyes level with his.
Zhukov recognizes her immediately. He begins to tremble as Diamond studies him.
Sam looks at Will, and Will returns her look with a slight shake of his head. It’s a warning to stay out of Diamond’s way tonight.
When Zhukov speaks, his voice is trembling so badly that Sam doesn’t recognize it at all. He sounds like a different person than the man on the night of Will’s attack.
“Please,” he begs at last, his voice pathetic. “It wasn’t up to me.”
Diamond doesn’t say anything. She just keeps staring, and it’s enough to bring tears to the man’s eyes. When Sam looks down, she sees urine puddling on the floor around him.
An assistant comes into the room, bearing a tray full of tools and a camera on a tripod. He puts the tray on the floor beside Diamond, then sets up the tripod in front of Zhukov before turning the camera on. Zhukov’s cowering figure appears on the camera’s screen, his eyes fixed on himself.
“You’ve done a bad thing, Zhukov,” Diamond says softly to him. “So, I’d like for you to see what happens when you touch my son.”
She is going to make Zhukov watch himself die. And in the gravel of that voice, Sam suddenly realizes that she’s only ever seen the lady with a heart, the one who will help you if you can prove yourself worthy of her time.
She has never seen the other Diamond Taylor, the one who built Grand Central.
The woman reaches toward the tray of tools, picks up a pair of gloves, and pulls them on. Another wave of nausea hits Sam; she remembers that Diamond isn’t an alchemist. She is going to do this with her own hands.
“Thank you for your hard work tonight,” she says to Sebastian and Sam. “Get some rest.”
It’s a dismissal. Sam follows Sebastian out of the room, nauseous over what is about to happen, weak with relief that she won’t have to watch.
Hanover is waiting for her at the end of the hall, where at last she gets to separate from Sebastian, who heads back to his apartment.
Hanover leads Sam up the stairs to her own place.
There, without a word, he hands her a sleeping pill.
“I’ve cleared your schedule for tomorrow,” he says. His voice is soft and kind. “Sleep late, eat a big breakfast. You’re not needed until next week.”
“Thank you, Hanover,” she whispers, taking the pill from his hands.
He turns to go. “You’re going to be all right, Miss Lang,” he reassures her, but there is something solemn in his voice too, as if his declaration is less a promise and more an order. She has to be all right. There is no other option.
Sam takes a shower, collapses into bed, and sleeps a dreamless sleep, her mind gifting her the small mercy of shutting down.
Elsewhere on the estate, the property is quiet, the stillness punctuated by the chirp of crickets. If there are sounds coming from the Confession Rooms, no one can hear them.
Sam has no idea how long Diamond takes with Zhukov.
She doesn’t wake up until afternoon, when the sun finally shifts to stripe her bed with golden light. There is a missed call on her phone from her mother, followed by a couple texts.
Happy Lunar New Year.
No dinner this week?
And then, When are you coming home again?
Sam can’t bear to answer right now, terrified that her mother will be able to tell right away by her tone that something’s wrong.
So she leaves the call and texts unanswered.
By the time she takes a glance at the news, she realizes that Zhukov is already in the headlines.
His body was dropped off right in front of the Eastern Columbia Building in downtown, his hands and feet chopped off and looped around his neck with a rope, his eyelids removed, his eardrums punctured, his lips sewn shut.
Some of his organs are missing, likely removed before death.
The list of grotesqueries goes on; Sam just stops reading after that.
She tries to imagine Diamond doing it—her gloved hands covered in blood, crimson dotting her fine suit—and cannot.
Maclan’s death is in a news snippet, too.
MAN FOUND DEAD IN RESTAURANT BATHROOM FROM OVERDOSE.
Sand was found in the body’s blood. There are some mumbles among local politicians for a renewed federal push to ban the substance, even though the evidence tying the sand to the death is questionable at best. But in syndicate circles, whispers circulate.
Diamond had no intention of making the killings subtle.
She wants to ensure that those who work for Lumines see what happens when they upset her.
Sam wonders what Ari’s face looked like when he heard about Zhukov and Maclan. She wonders if he knows she was involved, or whether he cares.
After the previous evening, it’s hard for her to feel anything.
Nausea. That, she feels. She goes to the bathroom to throw up repeatedly, until nothing but bile comes up. She goes back to bed. She dozes in an uneasy half sleep until the afternoon has turned into night. She keeps waking up rubbing at her hands, as if they are still stained with blood.
Finally, she goes to pull her shoes on to step out of her apartment for the first time today. As she goes, she checks her bank account, as she frequently does. She stills.
There is a new deposit into her account for one million dollars.
What do you do with a million dollars?
Sam has grown up fantasizing about being richer, but only in the way that normal people were richer than her.
Driving your own car instead of taking the bus.
Buying new clothes and new books, going out for dinner, taking a vacation, owning a house.
Her mother is living well now in her apartment.
Money is plentiful and life is stable. But even after years of experiencing the staggering luxury of the Red City, Sam has never really been able to imagine herself in the position of someone like Diamond.
To be so wealthy that you can’t spend your money fast enough.
So wealthy that money becomes synonymous with power, makes you untouchable, allows you to move carelessly through the world.
After the nice clothes and new car and luxury apartment and eating out, what do you buy?
She doesn’t know. She just keeps staring at the new zeroes in her bank account and swallowing again and again, wondering how many zeroes Diamond must have in her holdings to be able to hand out millions like this without a second thought.
All her life she has wanted to be seen, but this? This is a new kind of seen.
Everything can be more beautiful.
But does more money ever become an ugly thing? When does it stop saving your life and start destroying it?
Over the following week, no one brings up the murders.
Sebastian never brings it up. Will never brings it up.
Hanover never brings it up. Diamond never brings it up.
Their meetings are about how next to strike at Lumines’s heart.
Sam begins to wonder how she got the money in her account, if the murders were just a loose thread lost in the timeline of life, if maybe they never happened at all.
They merge with her nightmares and become something detached from reality.
She stops eating. The bones jut sharply at her wrists; her clavicle protrudes in stark relief.
Dizzy spells puncture her days. In the past, she would have written to Ari in the particular way they had, telling him her troubles without telling him, and he would have written back to her something thoughtful and comforting.
But where can she go for that now? Her mind spins in circles, exhausted, hoping for relief, coming back again and again to Ari as its solace and then being unable to find him.
She tries to imagine what he’d write to her, but the letters in her head are always blank.
So instead, she spends long minutes in the bathroom—five minutes, then ten, then thirty—washing her hands under hot water until they’re red and aching.
When she hears sirens going by, she has to stop in an alleyway or a convenience store just to collect her bearings, tell herself she isn’t going to be arrested.
She checks her hands and makes sure the blood isn’t still there.
There’s nothing. Maclan’s death had been ruled an overdose, after all.
She can’t be arrested for something that never happened.
Can she? She tries to imagine the police showing up at her mother’s house, her mother stirring from her sleep with a grumble, walking to the front door only to see two officers with a list of questions about her daughter.
Her mother.