Sam
She doesn’t want to remember any of it, but her perfect memory mercilessly records every detail, searing the horror forever into her mind.
She spends the rest of the day at the police station, seated before a young, bespectacled detective as he asks her procedural questions.
Miss Lang, my name’s Edward Sinclair. Miss Lang, do you know if anyone might have wanted to hurt your mother?
Miss Lang, did you see anything suspicious in recent days?
Miss Lang, did your mother tell you anything odd?
Numbly, she answers his questions and watches as he plays her the surveillance footage from the grocery store. He tells her the murder itself happened on the side of the building, where there is no tape available.
It’s unfortunately a common occurrence in the city. Perhaps someone thought she would have money on her for a grocery run.
On and on and on. They’ll continue investigating, they’ll keep her updated, they’ll order an autopsy. Sam wants to say aloud, What’s the point? What can an autopsy find? She imagines looking into a hollow chest cavity, searching for the light of her mother’s soul when it can never return.
She knows she should act more attentive, given that Dominique’s death is still under investigation and she should probably watch how she speaks to the police, so she tries her best—but after a while, Edward’s earnest voice blurs into one long train in her mind until she can barely understand him.
She should be cautious, but her mother is gone, and she just doesn’t care about anything else anymore.
After they return to the Red City, Will suspects Lumines’s involvement while Diamond floats assigning a task force to find the culprit.
Sam hears it all as if underwater. She imagines the room submerged in the ocean, the salt filling the cavities of her nose and mouth and throat, growing heavy in her lungs.
The others sit in their positions on the couches, their hair drifting in the current, seemingly unbothered.
Sam opens her mouth to scream and bubbles come out in a torrent.
The others seem functional, but she is drowning.
“Sam.” She realizes Will is talking to her, his voice quiet and firm. “Did anyone at Lumines know about your mother?”
Sam struggles to focus on his words. She imagines a Lumines operative approaching her mother in the parking lot of that grocery store. Then she remembers Ari. Ari knows her mother’s name.
“Yes,” she whispers, too numb with grief to keep secrets any longer.
“Who?” Will asks.
“Shakespeare.” Her voice is barely audible.
Will tightens his lips, and Sam shakes her head. No. It can’t be him.
But what if it is? What if Ari told Lumines about her mother?
The thought is far too painful for her to bear, makes her sick to her stomach. Her mind is spiraling now, turning any little thought into evidence and creating conclusions that aren’t there.
“Have you been talking to him?” Diamond asks.
Sam’s head hurts. She can’t think straight. “Yes,” she murmurs.
“When?” Diamond says.
“There’s a beach,” Sam hears herself saying. She doesn’t even quite realize that she’s confessing their secret. “We used to meet there as kids.”
Will looks briefly at his mother before turning back to Sam. “Have you met him there recently?”
“Yes. Once. Before the trip to Oxford.”
Will leans toward her. His eyes are impenetrable, his voice flat and dangerous. “And were you supposed to meet him again?” he asks.
“Maybe,” Sam answers numbly. “I don’t know.”
Will looks like he wants to say something else, but a look from Diamond stops him. He stares at Sam, searching her gaze, before he finally straightens. “It’s good you told us.”
At last, Sam retreats to her apartment. She lies down on her bed and watches the light fade against the wall.
Outside her open window, she can hear the birds singing their evening song.
Eventually, she gets up and closes the window and draws the curtain, so that the tangerine rays of sunset no longer slant across her bed, and her room is shrouded in gray.
It’s good you told us.
Her thoughts spin with Will’s words. She confessed her secret meetings with Ari, but her chest feels empty at her own betrayal, no regret or guilt, just a numbness that threatens to swallow her whole.
Tomorrow is the full moon. She is going to see Ari again, except this time she will be setting a trap—Grand Central will be watching them, ready to take Ari as a hostage.
And then what? Will he confess to killing her mother, once they interrogate him? Can she bear the thought?
Without the light and her watch and her phone, Sam loses track of time.
Her mind, always so pristine, suddenly develops holes.
Through them fall bits of her memory, spiraling into oblivion.
She falls asleep and then jolts awake an hour later, able to recall every word the police said but unable to remember where she put her copy of the detective’s report.
She ends up tearing through the entire apartment for it before she finally recalls that she’d shoved it into a kitchen drawer by the door.
She looks through the report until she realizes she can’t remember her mother’s birth name.
Then she tries to write it out in Mandarin but can’t get the characters right.
At first, she thinks she’s just tired. When it still doesn’t come to her, she goes back through her old text threads with her mother in an attempt to find it.
She can’t. The panic in her chest begins to build.
Why can’t she remember? She used to have her mother’s official name down so crystal clear that she’d written it out for her teachers before when she needed to help her mother fill out school forms. But it isn’t there on the shelves in her mind, no matter how hard she looks.
What is meant to be a brief thought turns into a frantic search, until she finally curls up on her bed and closes her eyes in an attempt to crowd out the fear in her head.
Suddenly, she jumps out of bed and goes to the door to get her purse.
She needs another dose of sand. That will help jog her memory.
She digs in her purse until she finds a vial, pops one of the pills into her mouth, waits.
One isn’t nearly enough, so she opens the bottle again and takes a second dose, then a third.
Soon, she feels the fading of her panic and the heightening of her senses, the rush of clarity and confidence that comes with the philosopher’s stone.
On sand, at least, she is powerful. She can find a way out of this darkness.
She circles the room once, repeating this to herself, before climbing back into bed.
There, she hallucinates a memory from when she was eight years old.
The room around her is no longer her home at the estate but her old bedroom in the apartment she used to share with her mother.
She shivers; her body feels cold in the way it does when she has a fever, and maybe she does, because her mother is bending down over her now and holding a hand against her forehead, a concerned furrow to her brow.
Sit up, Sam. Sit up. You have to take this.
Her mother is holding a small mug of awful black liquid up to her lips, and Sam recoils instinctively at the familiar smell.
She has asked her mother a dozen times what it’s made of, and her mother always rolls her eyes at her.
What does it matter? It contains ginger and Cinnamomi ramulus and dried roots of Bupleurum and the worse it tastes, the better it is for you.
Sam forces herself to drink the hot tonic, fighting against her gag reflex until she has swallowed it all.
Her mother takes a seat at the other end of the bed, pulling two pillows over to prop herself up.
She has been on vigil in this room with Sam for days, and it is now two in the morning, and maybe the exhaustion has worn down her walls.
The room is silent; the neon blue from the store sign outside casts a faint glow against her bed.
Her mother just stares at her, then away at the sign, as if reading it over and over.
Sam’s stomach churns and she’s afraid she’s going to throw up, but there’s nothing in it, and after a minute, the nausea passes.
Why did you have a baby? she asks her mother. When life is already so hard?
Her mother looks at her. Because I didn’t want to be alone.
She says it in a small voice, one that Sam doesn’t recognize, and it sounds strange. When has her mother ever felt alone? She never seemed bothered by staying home on weekend nights or cooking their meals instead of going out to bars or dating around or taking care of Sam when she’s sick.
Sam has never, not once, considered that her mother was lonely.
But she thinks of it now that her mother is telling her this, and for the first time, she looks, really looks, at her mother and notes all the features that they don’t have in common, her mother’s beauty that once caught the attention of a photographer, her mother’s meticulous and practical ways against Sam’s dreamy ambitions, her mother’s skill at drawing graceful lines and Sam’s lack of any artistic ability.
And then she thinks of the thing they do have in common: the fire for something more.
She pictures her mother when she used to be alone, before she brought Sam into her life, and sees a young woman sitting primly against a couch in a nondescript place, yearning for something.
Even now, she can see that ache in her mother. Always reaching, always out of reach.
And then Sam isn’t eight anymore, she isn’t sitting in their old apartment but on her bed at the estate, and sunset has come and gone.
Tomorrow. She thinks of Ari, pictures him in her room until she can practically see an apparition of him in the corner, bathed in the darkness of an early evening. He stares at her and says nothing.
Ari. Did you do this?
In the tide of her grief, she feels an undercurrent of anger. Then she realizes the anger is at herself. She thinks about how a butterfly can flap its wings and change the world, how she had once dismissed this theory on a school exam because you can’t know what the future could have been.
But she was wrong. She does know. She could have planned to meet her mother a day earlier, and her mother might still be alive.
She could have picked up the phone and spoken to her.
She could have done anything, any small thing, differently, and her mother could be on the other end of the phone right now, she could be alive and they could be having a conversation together.
Sam could have said she was sorry. She could have told her she loved her.
But she didn’t.
And now here they are.