Sam
Three days after Hanover goes missing while on an errand to Koreatown, his body is returned to the front gates of the Red City.
Ari couldn’t have set this up. Could he?
He declared to her that he wouldn’t report their meeting back to Lumines—but she knows better than to trust him.
What if he had indeed told them everything?
What if he knew that she was supposed to accompany Hanover that night? What if he had concocted the plan?
“He wasn’t a polemist,” Will says now as they gather with Diamond at the estate. “He doesn’t work directly on deals. He was outside the scope of typical retaliation. He was, however, a part of our inner circle, a loyal crewman for decades.”
“Indeed,” Will agrees.
Sam feels a black anger rise in her chest. Hanover, who was the first kind face she saw at the estate, who delivers her payments and notices her moods and sees her when she wants to be seen. They attacked him as mercilessly as they attacked Will.
“What do we do, then?” Sam asks.
“An eye for an eye,” Diamond says quietly.
They both look at her.
“And what might be considered an equivalent?” Will says.
“Well,” Diamond says coolly, “what are the eyes of Lumines?”
They all know the answer to this—a syndicate’s philosophers. But Sam blanches. Philosophers are not to be harmed. What Diamond is suggesting goes against this unspoken rule.
“The other syndicates are going to disapprove,” Will says.
“They’ll come around.”
Sam shivers at Diamond’s words. They’ll see it as a reasonable retaliation for targeting Diamond’s most trusted manservant. They’ll say it’s a one-time deal.
“Lumines has a philosopher attending the Oxford conference this year,” Diamond continues. “Dominique St. Clair. Cleopatra.”
“At the conference?” Will lifts an eyebrow at his mother. “It will be trouble, getting out before the news spreads like wildfire.”
“Then we’d better make sure we act quietly.” Diamond looks at Sam this time, and with a wave of dread, Sam realizes that she’s being tapped to attend. To commit the assassination alone.
Will looks skeptical. “She’s too new,” he says.
“And yet she’s done quite well, hasn’t she?” Diamond replies. “No one will notice her or what she’s doing. You’ll both be gone before anyone realizes what’s happened.”
“This isn’t a routine job we’re talking about. This is an execution of a philosopher. Every syndicate will be talking about this.”
“Then I suppose we’ll be putting her to the test.”
Sam stays where she is, silent and rigid, listening to them speak around her.
At last, Diamond looks at her. “Can you do it?” she asks.
Can you do it? She’d done it to Maclan, had handed Zhukov over to Diamond. She can do it, but the thought makes her tremble all over. Worse, she’ll be on her own. There is no mention of Sebastian joining them.
But Sam looks into Diamond’s eyes and sees a vein of her own mother there, questioning her worth. Her heart surges, aching to please, and she gives the only answer she can.
“Yes, ma’am,” she says.
“Good.” Diamond leans back in her chair. “Go pack your things. You’re leaving for Oxford with Will tomorrow.”
The trip overseas falls, yet again, on a week when Sam would have gone home to have dinner with her mother.
“Where to?” her mother asks over the phone.
“Berlin,” Sam replies. “They’ve never sent me overseas before.”
“Berlin.” There’s a pause on the other end of the line before her mother continues. “Why are you going to Berlin?”
Sam explains, following a script that Will approved to tell her mother. It’s a business conference and she has been asked to sit in on meetings for a global deal. All the while, she fights down waves of nausea, the dread of her looming assignment perpetually pushing against her chest.
“Tell me when you’re leaving and where you’re staying,” her mother says. “So in case something goes wrong, I know where to reach you.”
Sam swallows and follows through on her lie. “I will.”
She emails her the false tickets that had been bought for her and the false hotel booking in the city center, even shows her the spots in the city she’s planning to tour during her spare moments.
She sends her mother so many pieces of the lie that, for a moment, even she thinks that perhaps this is where she’s really going, this is what she’s really doing.
Two days later, her mother texts. Will you come over when you return?
I promise, Sam types back.
They arrive in Londinium at midnight, where a team is waiting for them on the tarmac with several black town cars. The next morning, the day before they leave for Oxford, Will takes her—of all things—shopping.
“Why?” she asks as their chauffeur drives them to the luxury boutiques on Bond Street.
It’s a sunny day, the blue sky a backdrop for rows of trees ablaze with summer blossoms. Following them in a second car are two polemists, far enough to be discreet, near enough that Sam can spot it when she looks over her shoulder.
“You’re about to attend a conference for a science that prizes perfection above all else,” Will answers.
“And?”
“And you don’t have the appropriate attire for it,” he says dryly.
“How do you know I don’t?” she retorts.
He sighs, casting her a lingering look, and she shudders, pleased. “Do you want to argue with me over nothing?” he says. “Or do you want me to buy you something nice?”
Despite the busy streets, the places they visit are empty when they arrive and stay empty until they leave.
Louis Vuitton and Hermès close their doors, offering them an exclusive experience.
At Dior, Will is recognized the instant he steps inside and, within minutes, they are escorted upstairs to a private lounge, where flutes of champagne and trays of tea cakes and desserts are waiting for them.
The sales team flutters nervously around Will, asking if he would like something to drink, something to eat, asking what they’re looking for while they bring out racks and racks of clothes.
The polemists wait quietly by the stairs, their eyes trained on the commotion.
Sam tries on an array of items tailored specifically for her because the House already knows her measurements.
She slides on shoes wrapped in silk, selects a clutch studded with diamonds.
There are no price tags to be seen anywhere.
She has no idea how much any of their purchases cost, and Will seems to have no interest in asking.
In fact, even though the entire experience is drenched in money, not once is money ever mentioned.
As when she’d seen the million dollars deposited into her account, Sam gets the dizzying sensation of being unmoored, that she is now navigating through a world she has never before been allowed to touch.
Again, she feels that mixture of excitement and fear.
Of course Will knew that she didn’t have the right attire.
She’s new money. She understands what a million dollars is, but she has no idea that there’s an entire culture within wealth, does not speak the language of it.
Will is fitted for a new suit, a sapphire so deep that it looks nearly black, with thread-thin lines of orange on the collar. Sam goes to a private room to try on a series of dresses, baby blues and butter yellows and midnight blacks. Each fits her like a glove.
When Will is called in to see the final dress, he stands there and studies her for a long moment. Sam fights to remain still before his searing gaze, dismayed at the flush rising on her cheeks, hoping he won’t notice.
If he does, he doesn’t reveal it. But his eyes wander the length of her, and after a while, he turns to the tailor. “That’ll do,” he says, and takes his leave.
As the tailor flutters about her and fusses over the hem, Sam lets out a shaky breath and tries to steady herself. But when she closes her eyes, she can still envision him standing at the edge of the room, watching her as if she were being stripped bare.
At Harry Winston, a saleswoman settles them on a velvet sofa in a private room and then brings out trays of jewels for them to inspect.
Sam peers at a bracelet with a small rabbit set in the middle of it, Peter Rabbit with his jacket and shoes before he loses them in his flight from Mr. McGregor’s garden.
It is all platinum and white sapphires. It reminds Sam of her Rabbit, the used stuffed animal from her childhood.
She is still staring when she hears Will’s voice next to her. “Do you like it?” he asks.
Sam looks at him, stunned into silence, and nods.
Will gestures at the saleswoman. The saleswoman immediately comes forward, carefully removing the bracelet with gloved hands. She holds it out for Sam to inspect.
“One of a kind, miss,” she declares as Sam peers at it.
Will doesn’t ask how much it is, and the woman doesn’t offer.
For them, it might as well be free. Sam stares in disbelief at the bracelet.
The act of buying an object like this without knowing a price is foreign to her.
Surely she can’t be allowed to just put it on and take it outside, not without checking a tag. She looks at Will skeptically.
“It’s yours,” he says.
Sam opens it and slides it onto her wrist, where it gleams. Tentatively, she touches the stones, as if unsure whether or not they’re real.
Alchemy has made her too sensitive to the authenticity of a thing, as anything can become anything else.
But all she senses here are pristine gems, pure in form all the way through.
Will watches her, amused. “Do you approve?” he says.
She turns her wrist this way and that. “How much did this really cost, Will?”
He takes her wrist in his hand and turns it. His thumb slides across where her vein runs. “How much do you like it?” he says.
She thinks of her mother braiding her hair carefully into a crown, weaving ribbons into the strands.
Her mother holding a sheet of old fabric up to her as a child, telling her what kind of dress she can make from it, golden light from their barred window searing their silhouettes against the cloth.
Her mother painstakingly drawing patterns with a marker, cutting them out, sewing deep into the night.
Her mother giving her a dollar at the local church’s yard sale, letting her buy a used stuffed rabbit, smiling as she hugged it to her chest all the way home.
Then she looks at the sparkling bracelet, convinces herself that this beauty is more than that beauty.
“It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever owned,” she says.
“Well.” His hand lingers against her skin for a moment before he finally releases her. “Then it costs more than anything in the world.”