Ari
He didn’t think she would come tonight.
But there she is, her body partially hidden in the shadows, her eyes trained on him as he approaches her.
The moon is so bright that it makes the night look like a strange day soaked in silver light, and for a moment he thinks they must be existing in a dream realm, because surely this cannot be real.
A faint memory comes to him from his lessons at the Central Library’s gallery, about how the earliest Babylonian alchemists had worshipped their moon god Sin.
In this light, he can understand what must have awed their ancestors.
Even with his particular knack for noticing her, her presence is so quiet that it takes him a second longer to convince himself that it is really her. Then his eyes go to her hands and he notices that she’s already holding a weapon, transmuted or not, a black gun that seems to melt into the night.
His reflexes tell him to place his hands on the rocks and arm himself with something too, but he forces the feeling down.
His eyes dart to the overgrown path along the cliffside. “Are you alone?”
She doesn’t answer at first. When she finally takes a step forward, she points the gun straight at him. The back of his head tingles, as if bracing for a hit.
“Are you?” she asks.
“No one else knows about this place.” He nods at her. “Except you.”
He stays where he is, hands still out and open where she can see them, skin still tingling. Sam approaches him slowly, the gun trained on him, until they are separated only by a dozen feet. The light tonight is so brilliant and strange, and the way it illuminates her takes his breath away.
“Why did you tell me you’d be here tonight?” she asks.
Now she is bathed entirely in moonlight. Her hair has turned bright as a coin. “I knew you’d come if I did,” he replies.
She scowls at him. “That’s a bold assumption.”
“Yet here you are, Sam.”
“You think we’re still on a first-name basis.”
“What should I call you instead, then?” Ari says. “Mozart? Their famous prodigy?”
“I’m not named for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” she replies.
“Oh? Who, then?”
“His sister.”
His lips tighten in understanding. “The invisible talent,” he murmurs.
“Why do they call you Shakespeare?” she says archly.
“I suppose I’m good with words.”
There are secrets in Sam’s eyes now, along with some past hurt that she won’t share. “Words for hire,” she says with disgust. “For Reed.”
“Don’t pretend that no one pulls your strings,” he answers.
“All that time I knew you,” she says, “all those afternoons when you’d apologize and rush away to that black car. You were working for him.”
“And what were you doing?” he replies, nodding at her gun. “Running errands for Diamond Taylor?”
Her eyes narrow. “Why’d you want me to come here?”
He looks around the beach, at their strange reunion under this bright moon. “I don’t know,” he says honestly.
She continues holding the gun up and doesn’t come closer.
They don’t say anything, and for a while, their presence is acknowledged only by the crash of soft waves.
The tide pools near the arches fill with seawater.
Ari imagines the ocean life in them, silent hermit crabs and tiny fish, sparks of souls, all going about their lives as he faces his former friend and wonders whether they will both survive this night.
At last, Sam lowers her arm. She looks at his hands again, as if to make sure he isn’t touching anything, and takes a step closer.
“This is a trap,” she says to him. “Lumines knows about this, don’t they?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he replies.
“Answer my question, Ari.”
“They don’t know about this place.”
She tilts her head at him skeptically, and he can tell that she’s considering his answer. “How can I believe you?”
He shrugs, even though a shiver of anticipation is still running through his body. “The burden of proof is not on me. Believe what you wish.”
“You’re playing a game with me.”
“And aren’t you? Isn’t that all this is?”
“Then what should we do, Ari?” She taps her gun against her leg, and he leans toward the archway, ready to put his hand against the stone. “There’s no good reason for me not to kill you right now. Will would be pleased. Why shouldn’t I?”
The fact that Sam says Will—instead of Diamond—interests Ari, and his soul stirs, wanting to dig for more information.
He puts his hand against the archway’s stone.
Sam tenses at his gesture, but he goes ahead with a transmutation anyway, changing a layer of the stone into a steel knife with a hilt of marble.
He holds the blade down by his side and takes a slow step toward her.
“That’s quite an assumption, that you could do it,” he answers. “I’d say we’re equally capable of destroying each other.”
She doesn’t back away as he approaches her, nor does she lift her gun to point it at him again. But so long as he remains out of reach, she has the advantage. Still, Ari keeps walking.
He finally stops before her. Only a foot of space separates them now.
Sam’s hand is tight against her gun, her finger resting on its trigger.
Ari grips his knife firmly at his side. Now they are both within range to kill.
They stare at each other, as if each daring the other to make the first move.
Ari’s heart pounds at their little game.
“Will doesn’t know I’m here,” she finally says.
Again, Will. Not Diamond. Ari’s intuition flickers at the way she’s wording her phrases, and he wonders how much Will has been running things behind the scenes lately. He decides to try a new tactic.
“I hope he’s recovering well,” he says.
At that, she lifts a brow wryly. “Do you?”
“It wasn’t my decision to attack him.”
“Well, they paid for it with their lives.”
“Yes,” he says. “You made sure of that, didn’t you?”
She doesn’t answer right away. They haven’t seen each other in five years, but he can still sense when the conversation between them has halted, when Sam no longer wants to tell him something.
She must have been involved with the killings of the Lumines crewmen.
And if he could wager money on it, he’s willing to bet that she had never taken a life before that.
A wave crashes, the sound filling the air. When it ebbs, she finally says, “You look different, Ari.”
He takes in her moon-bright hair and her dark, calculating eyes, and feels that old ache tug hard in his chest. He tries to imagine the girl he once knew melting a man’s skin into the floor of a bathroom.
“You look,” he answers, “like something is haunting you.”
He hits true, because her gaze shutters. “I’m fine,” she says.
He lowers his hand and his voice. “Sam,” he says quietly, and notices the way she flinches at the sound of her name, as if she doesn’t hear it often. “I know you had no choice.”
She scowls at him. “I didn’t come here for you to patronize me.”
“I’m just stating a fact. Diamond manages your decisions, I get it.”
Sam stiffens, and he can tell his words are turning her wary. “Diamond has better things to do than that,” she says.
“What better things does she have to do than run her empire by utilizing her new Mozart?” he presses. “Because that’s what we’ve seen, unexplained incursions into our territory and leaks of our schedules. Diamond has been sending you to do that, hasn’t she?”
Her eyes are impenetrable. “Figure out your own problems.”
“Except these aren’t the kind of moves Diamond usually makes.”
“I’m not here to discuss what we are and aren’t doing.”
He nods at her. “Of course not.”
“And what about you, Ari?” Sam turns the questions on him now. “How do you like your job for Reed?”
Careful, Ari reminds himself. Just as he’s trying to dig for information from her, so can she from him. “Well enough,” he replies.
“Word has it that Doherty has cut some sort of deal with Lumines, in exchange for campaign favors.”
“Is that why you’re here tonight, then? To get some answers?”
“I thought that’s what we were doing here, questioning each other.”
“Okay, then. What other questions do you have for me?”
She seems to gather herself then, and when she speaks again, she says, “Ari, why did you stop answering my messages?”
He hadn’t expected the pivot, and for a moment, he’s quiet. “Because I work for Lumines,” he answers.
“But you’ve always worked for them. You didn’t know back then that I was with Grand Central, and I didn’t know you were with Lumines. What changed?”
He looks out at the black ocean. A part of him tenses, waits for her to take the chance to shoot him. But nothing happens, and when he turns back to her, she’s still waiting for his reply.
“I thought you were going on to college,” he answers. “A new life. How could I fit into that without putting you in danger?”
“You didn’t even give it a chance. You were my only friend, Ari, and you just disappeared.”
Now he sees the girl he used to know, the wide, hurt eyes, and his heart twists, his mission for Reed falling away.
“I couldn’t bear to keep you,” he says quietly.
She studies his face. “Because you were afraid I’d find out that you were an alchemist?”
He gives her a somber look. “Because I wanted to protect you. I thought you were too good for that.”
Too good for me. And he realizes that he still believes it, even now, even as she looks away from him.
God, she’s so, so, so beautiful, and in this illuminated moment he can hardly stand to look at her.
Old wounds are reopened, emotions once put to bed are unearthed.
Everything in him aches for her. She is all he wants.
“Well,” she says, “I guess I’m not.”
“What reason did you have for joining Grand Central, then?”
“Because,” she says, “we needed the money.”
We. Ari realizes she means her mother, and in a flash, he recalls the terrible thing that had happened to her in their youth. His heart twists. She had kept her struggles secret, but perhaps he had failed her by not trying harder to help. Perhaps they had both failed.
“Then we would have lost each other, anyway,” he murmurs.
They stay silent for another beat.
“What are you going to tell Lumines?” she asks him. “When you give them the rundown of our little meeting?”
“You know I won’t,” he says.
“Then what’s the point of this?” Sam snaps.
“Because,” he says, and pauses again. “I missed you.”
Her fists clench, unclench. Her lips tighten. “I don’t know what to do with that, Ari,” she whispers.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” he replies, and transmutes the knife in his hand into salt water, letting it drip from his hand to join the tide. She watches him do it. After a while, she transmutes her gun too, letting it disintegrate into the air as sand.
He looks at the dancing reflections of moonlight on the water. “I’ll try to come here at every full moon,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see you here again. Maybe not.” He nods, then takes a step away from her. “But now you know.”
She doesn’t say anything to his offer of a regular secret they can keep, and for a moment he hopes that she doesn’t take it to heart at all, that she just turns on him for good. It would be easier for them that way, knowing for sure that their friendship is at an end.
But instead, her lips tighten. And in her expression, he sees a flicker of hesitation, some acknowledgment of the idea. A maybe.
Will she come here again? He can’t be sure, but the possibility fills him with hope and dread as he watches her turn away, her face now shadowed.
“Good night, Shakespeare,” she says over her shoulder.
Ari stays on the beach until long after Sam is gone. Then he makes his way along the path too, until he reaches where he’s parked his own car.
Inside, he closes his eyes, steadies his heart. Then he calls Isla.
She picks up almost immediately. “How’d it go?” she asks.
Ari’s heart is still tight. He thinks about the odd way Sam had answered him, mentioning Will instead of Diamond, knowing more is there.
Something wedged deep in his heart doesn’t want him to share everything with Isla, hurts to do it.
He looks at the road winding into the darkness and imagines Sam staring back at him with those liquid dark eyes.
He is falling dangerously back in love with her; the tide of her is threatening to drown him. At the last moment, he saves himself, reminds himself that she isn’t his friend anymore.
“About as well as it could have,” he answers.
“Good. Reed will want the full details. When you get back, head straight to his place. He’s tapped you to attend the Oxford conference.”
At that, Ari’s full concentration shifts to Isla. “Why? What’s happened?”
He can almost hear the smile on Isla’s face when she answers. “We’re going to attack Grand Central again. Put them back on defense right away, full pressure, no letting up.”
They’re escalating, and quickly. Ari’s stomach turns.
“Reed wants you negotiating on our behalf with Neuewelt and Pirenne at Oxford,” she continues.
He starts to shake his head. “Rudra’s job, not mine,” he says firmly. “We’re antagonizing him too much, too soon.”
“No time to worry about that. We need to gather allies before things escalate with Grand Central, and Reed knows you’ll do a better job at it.”
“But what’s the attack before the conference? What are we doing?”
“We just got our hands on Hanover.”
Hanover. Diamond’s assistant.
Ari feels his stomach lurch. Did they move on Hanover tonight because they knew Sam would be preoccupied here with him?
“Why didn’t Reed tell me?” Ari asks.
“He didn’t need to,” Isla replies, and Ari thinks he hears a note of pity for him in her voice. “You weren’t going to be involved in it, anyway.”
Ari has the sensation that everything revolving around him is out of his control. Rudra, Grand Central, the conference, Sam. He is sinking deeper into the mud, and he doesn’t know how to get out. All he can do is agree.
“Hanover’s unlucky day,” he mutters.