Sam #2
So. She knows. They must all know.
Sam stays silent, quivering.
Diamond sighs. “Why would you work with the police, Mozart? Do you think they are on your side? What were you hoping to accomplish?” Her voice dips, bitter with disapproval. “Was this about your mother?”
Her mother. The words on Diamond’s lips are enough to make Sam turn her eyes up at the woman, hate burning hot in her heart. Her mother. How dare she mention her mother.
Diamond sees the anger in her gaze and tightens her lips. “Of course it was,” she says. “Did they reach out to you first?”
“You—killed her,” Sam whispers.
“I asked you a question.”
Will bends down, and a moment later Sam feels his familiar hand on her neck, then screams, trembling, as pain explodes up and down her body again, fire and venom and teeth, her skin feeling as if it’s being peeled from her flesh.
It wanes again, and Sam shakes against the pavement. She grits her teeth. “You—killed her,” she repeats hoarsely. “Why did you kill her?”
Diamond looks away, then back to her. “You don’t know,” she finally says.
“Your mother had booked passage on a ship meant to take you both to Shanghai. We believe that the meeting she had meant for you both was, in actuality, a plan to put you on that ship the same night. We’d watched the deteriorating relationship between you and your mother for quite some time, and we had opted to stay out of it, but, as you can imagine, her latest move was unacceptable to us. ”
Sam recoils against the street, shriveling into her pain.
All this time, they had been paying close attention to her and her mother’s fraying threads.
Was her mother always doomed to die, then?
How long have they been considering removing her from the picture?
Were they just waiting for an opportune time?
Diamond’s gaze is steady and cool. “It was not done without regrets. Our apologies.”
The woman gives her a near-imperceptible nod, and Sam feels an overwhelming desire to kill her. She tries to ignore the agony in her damaged wrist and moves her other hand instead. A gun starts to form in her palm out of the sidewalk, the pavement cracking and crumbling.
Sebastian steps on her good wrist, then bends down and transmutes the skin of her hand into the pavement. Sam lets out a hoarse shriek. He walks behind her to her ankles, then does the same to them, pinning them down by melting her skin into the ground.
She has been bolted down. She can barely see. Her body trembles uncontrollably.
Diamond stares at her. Sam wants to push away from the intensity of it, but her body feels paralyzed. There is a ringing in her ears. She struggles to hear.
“You killed my mother,” she whispers again. It’s all she can say.
Diamond shakes her head at her in disapproval, and to Sam’s disgust, she feels shame bloom in her heart.
“What did you think was going to happen, Sam? How did you think it would all end? You think speaking to the police will somehow help you feel better about what happened to your mother? You think they can do anything to Will?”
Through her haze of pain, Sam realizes something.
Diamond knows that Sam has been speaking to someone at the station about her mother’s death, that Sam got the footage of Will committing the murder.
But based on what Diamond is saying, the woman doesn’t seem to know that Sam gave Edward details about the rest of Grand Central’s dealings.
That Sam is aiming for Diamond’s arrest. She doesn’t even sound like she knows Edward is the one responsible.
Then Sebastian’s boot slams into her stomach.
Her insides clench in agony. All the air rushes from her lungs.
Another kick comes. A rib snaps. Another kick.
Another rib. Then she stops counting the blows.
Sam can’t see anything anymore—her body breaks out in a sweat from the pain.
She can feel it dripping down her brow through the assault. The tang of blood fills her mouth.
He finally pauses, and she lies prostrate on the ground, broken and shaking.
Diamond tilts her head and leans closer to her.
“Who taught you the art of this trade, Mozart? Educated you, paid you, lifted you out of your poverty? Isn’t that why your mother brought you here?
Isn’t that what you’ve been searching for, all your life?
” Her voice steels. “Do you remember asking for the world? To become great? To make it? Who handed that to you, for free? What would you have become, without me?”
Sam closes her eyes. In the darkness, she sees herself kneeling as a child before this woman and asking for all of those things.
Idolizing her, craving her approval. Hungering for Will, dazzled by his power, wanting to be wanted.
To be great. To succeed. To be seen. She sees herself bowing to Diamond, and Diamond lifting her chin up, offering her a smile that made her feel so special.
Even then, she’d wondered why she was chosen.
Who handed that to you, for free? What would you have become, without me?
“It wasn’t free.”
The words tear out of her throat in a hoarse cry.
Blood seeps out from between her teeth. Sam feels her bracelet still looped around her wrist, the diamond-encrusted rabbit dangling there like a chain.
It wasn’t free because something cannot come from nothing.
Everything has an equal and opposite cost. The equation must always be balanced. Greatness, in exchange for a soul.
Diamond considers her answer. Purses her lips.
Something in her eyes dies then. Perhaps Sam never noticed it there until it was gone.
Without that particular glint, Diamond suddenly looks less to her like the figure that makes her tremble, the figure that protected her and listened to her when she grieved.
Without it, Sam can see the woman’s hollow cheeks and the dying light in her eyes, the cancer slowly eating her from within that will take her someday soon, in spite of all her success and greatness and power.
Diamond bows her head. When she lifts her eyes, they are dry. She rises to her feet. Her expression stays flat, void of that old light, and she regards Sam like an investment that has failed.
“Finish up here,” Diamond says to Will, then gets back into the car with Sebastian.
Will stays on the street, standing beside Sam’s damaged body. As the car pulls away, he bends down to her. His hand comes to rest against where her broken ribs rattle. She can barely breathe now. There is too much pain. She knows she is dying.
Her glazed eyes turn up to see him crouching beside her. Through her agony, she glares at him and lets the hatred in her keep her alive.
He doesn’t react to her expression. Behind his stony face is what looks like genuine grief.
It takes her a second to realize that the rain has picked up, that she is soaking wet. The water mixes with her blood, and tiny streams flow pink around her.
He stares down at her. “I’ve been ordered to leave you here.
In your final moments, remember the oath you once took.
Something is asked of you, you do it without question.
Something cuts you, we all bleed. And when there is war, you fight alongside us and no one else.
” His eyes narrow, hardening. “Remember that you had this family. Remember that you chose to walk away from it. And remember, in your final moments, that you are alone.”
Then his voice quiets, and for a moment, she sees the man who had once, just once, opened his heart to her. “Know that I loved you, Sam,” he says.
He turns away and heads back inside the building. The guards by the door follow him.
Sam trembles in agony. Ari. She pictures him waiting, bound, in the Confession Room, wondering what has happened to her.
Will they kill him tonight? Is he already dead?
The thought is so unbearable that, for a second, she thinks perhaps it’s best that she’ll go too, that they’ll leave this world together, because without him, what else is there?
She’s lost her mother; she’s lost herself.
If she loses Ari, there is nothing else.
It’s getting harder to concentrate, and she is losing feeling in her limbs.
Minutes drag on. Up at the intersection, the construction work finishes, and the barricades are moved.
As she lies dying in the rain, passersby start to come and go on the street.
They step around her weakening body as if she isn’t there at all.
She tries to call out for help to them, but their eyes turn down to her in momentary disinterest before returning to the street.
The sand in her is too strong, and her invisibility blankets her.
“Help me,” she croaks out, but it is just a whisper on the wind.
A woman steps over her; a man goes around her body as he talks on the phone. Dozens pass her without a second glance.
Now she feels the full cruelty of Will’s actions. They had intentionally left her alive long enough to witness how alone she is, had wanted her to spend the final moments of her life suffocating in her own invisibility, calling out in vain for someone to care.
You are alone.
She is crying and can barely feel it. The rain runs down her face and joins the streams around her. The world starts to fade.
Samantha. It is her mother’s voice in her mind now, and she shifts as if she hears it.
Mama. Sam reaches blindly out for her. Mama, here I am. Can you see me?
Sam, you must always try your best. Work hard and reach for the stars. If you do, even the smallest of us can find a way out.
She closes her eyes and attempts to obey her mother’s words. They sound like a promise that there is beauty in this world, if only she can see it, that there is good in this world, if only she can try.
So she tries, seeking her mother in the darkness. But her fingers are numb now. And in those final moments, she can feel her soul beating, something warm and transient and flawed, forever striving toward perfection. Even now, when it is impossible, she can feel her soul fighting to live.
You have to try.
Everything is fading away.
The beat of her soul weakens. The world darkens. And maybe this was always her destiny, her path set the moment she was born.
Ari. Ari, I’m sorry.