Sam
For a moment, she thinks he didn’t come. No one is standing on the sand. A mixture of dread and relief floods her at the thought that tonight won’t happen. She can return to her apartment, fall back into an unconscious state.
Then something moves in the shadows near the stone arches. When she looks there, she sees Ari’s silhouette under the first archway, shadowed against the strange silver of the night.
She stops cold.
In his eyes is the bleakest emotion she’s ever seen, liquid dark with grief. It is so devastating that she tears her gaze away for a moment, unable to bear it. Does she look like that to him? Can he see the hole in her heart, the wound left by her mother’s death?
Did he inflict that wound on her? Does he know why she’s here tonight?
Her eyes go to his hands, tucked into his pockets, and she waits for him to transmute something. But he doesn’t move. He just keeps his distance, and so does she.
“Something’s happened to you,” he says at last. His voice echoes in the cavernlike space.
Now her restraint is wavering. She shakes her head over and over, trying to hold back her tears. “Ari,” she says. “My mother’s dead.”
Now comes a moment of truth. She waits for his reaction to the news, shock or grief or anger, sympathy or disbelief or denial.
Instead, he closes his eyes. Seconds pass. When he opens them again, he says quietly, “How?”
“Someone killed her.” Sam’s words are anguished, sharp as a blade.
There is such pain in her chest that she thinks her heart might be bleeding, her soul twisting in on itself.
She has taken extra doses of sand again tonight, and it makes the world around her seem like it’s shimmering. “Was it you, Ari?”
“No,” he answers.
There is such sincerity in his answer that her anger wavers for a moment. She narrows her eyes at him, fighting to keep her tears from spilling down her cheeks. “Don’t lie to me,” she snaps.
“It wasn’t me, Sam.” His voice is devastating, an endless well.
“And yet you’re at the center of our war,” she says bitterly.
She bends down to pick up a handful of wet sand, and it shifts, melting into a long, sharp shard of glass.
She stands back up and clenches it tight in her fist. They aren’t childhood friends anymore—they are enemies on opposite sides of a chasm, and tonight, there is fire burning between them.
At any moment, Sam knows he could choose to attack her, that she will strike back without hesitation.
She glances beyond the archway and at the cliffs. She has to be ready.
He narrows his eyes at her. She expects him to shift a weapon of his own, braces herself for it, but he just stays still.
“And what about you?” he says at last. “You did it, didn’t you?”
She tightens her lips. “You’re talking about Dominique St. Clair,” she says.
Ari says nothing for a while. And in the silence, Sam’s pristine memory pulls up the moment when she’d lunged at the young woman, how her eyes had fluttered open, her lips parting as Sam stabbed her in the chest. Sam shivers in the cold.
“She and I studied together,” Ari says at last. A new breeze cuts through them and combs his hair back, and Sam thinks she catches a film of tears against his eyes. “She was the best student among us. We graduated into Lumines at the same time.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Sam asks, annoyed.
“Because it might be useful for you to know who you killed,” he snaps back.
Her hands clench in the moonlight, shaking. She used those hands to throw Dominique to the ground, stabbed the girl through the chest with a blade pulled from the wall. She held Dominique down until the girl went still.
And what about Ari? Was he there when her mother was killed? Were his hands stained with her blood?
“And did you know anything about Hanover before his body was returned to us?” she says coldly. “Hanover was my guide when I joined Grand Central. But I suppose that didn’t matter.”
He looks away. “Hanover was retribution,” he answers.
“And what was my mother?” she spits out. “What shall I say at her funeral, Ari? That she was collateral damage?”
Ari says nothing, and Sam’s rage swells.
“She had nothing to do with alchemy!” Sam bites back her tears and hardens her heart. “With any of us!”
“What about Dominique?” he says in a low, harsh voice. “What did she do to you? Wasn’t her death intended to hurt us?”
“She made sand for Lumines. She was as complicit as the rest of us.”
“Philosophers are sacred, Sam. They’re meant to stay unharmed.”
“Is anything sacred in a war?”
Ari takes a step closer to her. “I know who we are,” he says bitterly. “I know she was one of your targets, just as Hanover was one of ours.”
“Then why bother bringing them up?” Sam is bitter now too, whether at Ari or herself, she doesn’t know, but it stirs her heart and brings a lump back into her throat.
“Because I don’t want to feel nothing at their deaths. I don’t want you to feel nothing.”
She bristles. “What does it matter how I feel about anything? You act like we have a choice. You think you’re so holy. What are you? Reed’s little bioalchemist, selling sand to the world?”
“I never said I was a saint,” Ari says through gritted teeth. “But she didn’t deserve to die.”
“My mother didn’t deserve to die. And yet she’s gone.
” She closes her eyes and feels the world spinning around her.
But the more Ari denies his involvement, the less sense any of it makes to her.
The most logical thing for Lumines to do would have been to take her mother hostage, use her as collateral against Sam.
It seems impractical for them to just want her dead. It was effort that amounted to nothing.
“Sam,” he says, falters, and stops. There is an anguish in his voice so deep that it scares her. “Sam, listen to me.”
“Why should I?” she says hoarsely.
“You have no idea,” he says.
“Is this about Dominique?” Sam snaps. “Did you love her?”
“I loved you,” Ari says harshly.
Sam blinks, and her retort dies on her tongue. The world suddenly stops spinning around her, the dizziness making way abruptly for a strange stillness. Her heart pounds in her chest.
“No, you didn’t,” Sam whispers.
“I hate that I did.” His eyes glint in the darkness. “I hate that I still do.” He looks like he regrets saying it, but it’s too late to go back now, so he plunges on. “I loved you, Sam. And in spite of everything, I love you now.”
She looks away so that the darkness hides her expression, and bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. There is too much pain in her chest now; she has to release it somewhere. When she looks down at the blade of glass in her hand, she realizes that her grip has deformed the hilt.
Is Will watching this exchange between them, reading their body language? Can they hear their conversation from the ledge?
“I don’t believe you,” she murmurs.
It isn’t true. But she says it anyway, the words nearly drowned out by the sound of the tide. Ari says nothing. She thinks she can hear his heart cracking.
“I know,” he answers.
She’s quiet for a moment at that. The tide is higher tonight than during their first meeting, the waves lapping against the rocks at their feet.
Ari turns to nod at the ocean. “There’s a crack in the archway,” he says. “In a minute, the moon is going to move into position there, and this spot will be bathed in light.”
She’s careful not to turn her full attention toward where he’s looking. It’s a common enough tactic, throwing someone off guard by telling them to focus somewhere else. Instead, she looks and simultaneously clocks where she’s standing, whether it’s a good place for her to do what she needs to do.
They wait quietly as the moon makes its way toward the gap in the arch. Beyond them, the tide laps and pulls noisily against the rock, white foam visible in the darkness, hungry for land.
When it happens, it is sudden. The first ray of silver finally comes through the gap, and all at once it seems like they are bathed in silver light, and the world around them seems to change color.
Sam stays still and takes it in, and has the curious sensation that they’ve entered that strange middle space again, where they no longer exist in a world with other people.
“Sometimes,” he finally says, “I imagine that we never met. I sit without you in that classroom and make friends with someone else. You live in some other place in the world. We go about our lives just like billions of other people, never crossing paths.”
His eyes hold an endless grief. It should be a good thing, because at least grief is real and alive.
Sam thinks of how, someday, there will be a lack of light in both their gazes.
A fragment of soul, chipped away each time they give it up for a transmutation.
A piece of themselves, sacrificed each time they use their talent.
She can already see the first slight dulling in Ari’s eyes, the dying of those embers. Perhaps he sees the same in her.
She can’t be here. She can’t do this.
But she just looks away and out at the black ocean. “It’s a useless way to think,” she says.
“It would have made life easier.”
“And yet we’re here.” She shakes her head. “Echoes of who we used to be.”
“Who did we used to be, Sam?”
“Two kids who needed each other.”
“I still need you,” he says softly.
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t move away either. The moon shifts, and the light quivers. After another moment, Ari leans down toward where the water meets the rocks and puts a hand into the gentle tide, letting his fingers skim the surface.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
He nods back at the tide and moves his fingers.
The surface of the sea lights up, a million pinpoints of blue-white glitter hugging the shoreline in both directions, then expanding out toward the quivering reflection of the moon, as if a sheet of bioluminescent creatures has suddenly come to life in the water.