Sam
Sam sees the expression change on Ari’s face. It’s how she knows. She whirls around in time to see Will emerge like a phantom from the shadows—and in her chest, she feels the last vestiges of her strength gathering for a final onslaught.
To a casual observer, Will looks calm. But Sam recognizes the violence there, in the set of his jaw and the flat darkness of his eyes. He bends down, sweeps his hand against the tiles, and pulls a gun out of the ground. In the same move, he points it straight at Ari.
Sam lunges at him, desperate to close the distance between them so the gun is no longer an advantage. Her hand closes around its muzzle, transmuting it shut.
But her recent wounds have weakened her.
She can’t move fast enough. Before she can pull away, Will has seized a fistful of her hair.
Sam feels herself pulled so viciously forward that she loses her footing and falls against him.
She grabs his shirt, transmuting the nitrogen in the cotton to a nitric acid—it reacts violently with the fabric’s carbon, catching fire, but he is ahead of her again, his elemental skills stronger than hers, snuffing it out before she can even coax it to life.
He seizes the injured part of her wrist and she screams as ice laces across the back of her hand, blackening into frostbite.
Suddenly she feels his grip on her loosen. For a second she’s free, and the absence makes her lose her balance. She falls to the ground, her hand still tingling from the intense cold.
When she looks up she sees Ari standing in front of her, shielding her. His eyes are narrowed and focused on Will.
“Careful,” Will says. “You’re on my turf now.”
“I’m adaptable,” Ari replies.
Sam crouches in place, breathing heavily, as Ari steps into the center of the courtyard, his figure dappled in moonlight and shadow, eyes grave and gleaming. Will circles with him, moving steadily. The heels of his boots click against the tiles.
“Reed’s favorite alchemist,” Will says as they go. “You could have gotten everything you wanted, had you cooperated with us.”
“You don’t know much about what I want,” Ari answers. Sam sees his feet tap the tiles carefully as he moves, as if he’s sensing the elements under his boots.
“I know more than you think. In the end, we all want the same things.”
“Money?” Ari asks. His foot shifts again.
“Freedom,” Will answers. “Money and power are just the paths to get there.”
“And do you feel free?” Ari says.
As an answer, Will kneels and brushes his hand against a tile close to his boot.
A wall of steel—thin, sharp as a blade—slices up from the stony ground and rushes toward Ari in a wave. It leaves a large crack in its wake.
Ari sidesteps it nimbly, skids to a crouch, runs his hand against the tiles. Sam sees where he touches his fingers, her memory calling up the order of the tiles. He’s mixing an explosive.
Sodium|Potassium|Water
He flattens his palm against the tiles, calls upon the metals and the air, and then flings his hand at Will.
A fireball sears the night—Sam squints at the blinding flash of light. Will throws his arms up protectively around his head as sparks shower the courtyard ground—simultaneously, a shield of stone rises up before him, leaving a groove in the floor.
But Ari is already on the move. He reaches Will through the shroud of smoke left by the explosion and presses his hand against the stone. The entire structure changes into glass and shatters, fragments flying in every direction.
None of it touches Will. He has two blades in his hand, one steel and one of glass combined from some of the flying shards—now he strikes out at Ari, once, twice, cutting him on his upper arm before he can dart back fast enough.
Sam struggles to her feet and heads deeper into the courtyard, careful to stay in the shadows.
In the circle, Ari jumps backward, arching away from the blades. Will drops to one knee and flattens his hand against the floor. A stream of black tar slices across the courtyard floor and under Ari’s feet. He sinks into the thick liquid.
Immediately, Ari reaches down to touch the tar, changing it into water, but before he can finish, Will is on him, hand reaching for his throat.
If he grabs Ari with his hands, he could kill Ari on the spot.
Ari is forced to pause in his transmutation of the tar into water—he falls backward onto the tiles, one leg still trapped in the tar.
His arm comes up, creating a thin stone barrier between himself and Will at the last second.
Will crushes the stone into powder. But before he can seize Ari’s throat, Ari’s hand darts out and presses against the side of his face.
Something burns—there’s an acrid smell, and Will jerks away with a snarl, a burning red mark on his cheek.
Ari’s hand too has been burned. As Will stumbles off him for a second, Ari sits upright and frees his leg from the tar, transforming the last of it into water.
The two crouch across from each other, then rise to their feet and circle each other again.
Sam’s vision is beginning to blur. She makes her way deeper into the shadows as Will turns his back to her, his focus on Ari. Ari’s arm is dripping with blood now, dotting the courtyard in a semicircle as he goes, the drops black in the night.
“You’re wasting your time,” Will calls to him. “Where do you think you’ll go, even if you escape?” He nods toward the dark shaft that Sam opened up.
Ari doesn’t answer him. He’s concentrating on Will’s steps.
Will laughs at his silence. “You don’t know,” he says. “You think you can just get out of here and find some new life. You think you’re not bound to this, like me.”
“You don’t have to be bound to this,” Ari says to him.
“I am who I am.”
And this time, Sam catches a hint of grief in his voice, that softness she once heard when they lay together in his bed.
Her gaze shifts to the ground right behind Will. There, she sees a familiar element, its tile glinting once in the moonlight.
Gold.
Ari’s finger tracing the circle on her hand, then the dot in the center.
She doesn’t have much strength—she can’t spend much energy on a long transmutation. But this, she can do.
It means perfection. It means, I like you the way you are, Sam.
She lunges for it right as Will turns to look at her over his shoulder. Her hand stretches out for the gold.
Will grabs her wrist before she can reach it. He trips her and flips her to the ground, then pins her throat under his knee. Sam’s eyes widen. Her body fights weakly to push him off.
Will turns his gaze down at her. In the night, his eyes are dark and glittering.
Ari darts forward. He touches a tile and a spear of silver appears in his hand. But he’s too far away.
The edges of Sam’s vision are turning black.
Why isn’t Will killing her? He’s close enough.
With the last of her strength, she flattens her palm against the ground.
Feels cool metal against her fingertips.
She calls on her soul, lets out a wrenching cry at the pain that rips through her at the transmutation, her body giving it all she has left.
Will suddenly stops moving. His eyes widen, his lips part.
He looks down to see a golden, needle-thin spike piercing straight through his chest from front to back, impaling him on the gleaming metal. Sam’s hand is in midair, trembling slightly, the gold tile beside her empty.
Will tries to grab her face with his hand, to transmute something, anything—but the wound makes him falter.
A second later, Ari is there, shoving Will off her and pinning him to the ground.
Will tries to rise. His hands are wrapped around the spike, still trying to transmute it into something else, trying to pull it from his body.
But he can barely grip it now, and Sam did what Sebastian once taught her—she fused his flesh right into the gold, so that it is part of his body, impossible to pull out.
Sam stares at him and feels a tide of something terrible in her chest.
There is an indescribable grief in his eyes.
She sees a man who once showed her what was possible in this world, who once laughed with her in bed and gave her a glimpse of his heart, who had suffered his own darkness and betrayal.
But it doesn’t matter, because the boy has drowned behind the man who killed her mother, who hurt her so badly, who left her to die on the street, invisible and unmourned.
No, not entirely unmourned. There had been sorrow in his eyes in that moment. And suddenly Sam realizes that Will hadn’t killed her just now because he was not the one who’d wanted her dead.
Know that I loved you.
Who alerted Demeter to her location, when she was dying on the street?
Will tries to say something to her, shudders, and blood drips from his mouth.
“Sam.” It’s Ari’s voice, clear and true. It cuts through the fog in her mind, and she looks up at him, struggling to focus. She feels so weak now.
“Sam, we have to go,” Ari says. He’s touching her arm, pulling her up to her feet and toward the yawning tunnel.
Off in the distance, she can hear the approach of voices and radios, officers talking to one another as their lights cut through the darkness.
She turns to stare down the shaft. This is her chance to leave it all behind.
Grand Central, Lumines—she could forget about her deal with Edward and leave with Ari and they could find their way out of here, go somewhere else in the world.
Maybe they can have the freedom that Will claimed they all want.
Sam stares down into the shaft, and in its darkness, she conjures up the video footage of her mother’s final moments, she remembers the last time she ever heard her mother’s voice.
She can’t leave. She can’t do it. Not while Grand Central goes on. Not while the syndicates are still here.
The police are close now. Any minute, the first of them will burst through the complex’s doors and out here into the courtyard.
Sam touches Ari’s hand. “Go,” she whispers.
He narrows his eyes, sensing a change in her thoughts. “We go together.”
“The police need me.” Sam nods at him. “I’m their key witness. They’ve offered me immunity. But they’re not going to give that to you.”
His jaw tightens. “I don’t care.”
“I do.” Sam’s desperation is rising. “If we’re going to have a chance together, you need to go now. Or they’ll catch you.”
“Sam, please.”
She seizes his arm. “Ari, I was never meant to go with you.”
Ari stays where he is, torn, his heart breaking, his eyes locked on her, not believing her. It is all Sam can do to not weep before him. She clenches her jaw and lets anger rescue her from her grief.
The voices are too close now. Louder, Sam snaps, “Go!”
Ari releases her, tears his eyes away, and jumps into the shaft. He vanishes into the darkness. Sam replaces the door over him, transmuting it back into smooth stone, so that the police won’t be able to tell where the ground below changes into a tunnel.
She is still crouched there when the first police emerge into the courtyard, their boots echoing against the tiles. When one of them addresses her, Sam is already raising her arms.
“Hands up, Miss Lang,” the officer says to her. It’s strange, hearing them say her name, acknowledging her presence here. Overhead, a helicopter roars.
Sam keeps her arms up and says nothing. She pictures Ari, disappearing into the darkness.
In some other universe, she is with him, both having taken the chance to escape, both of them with a shot at a future.
She tries to imagine it as the police force her arms behind her back.
She feels the world tilt around her. Now she is on the ground, her cheek pressed against the pavement, her side throbbing.
Now she is spent. Now her strength is truly waning.
As they cuff her, she finds herself admiring the glow of their flashlights against the cement.
It flickers back and forth, like the way the puddles around her old apartment complex would quiver with raindrops.
The clip of boots around her reminds her of how she used to head up and down her old apartment complex’s steps.
She sees dandelions growing from a crack in the tiles, beautiful and alive, their buttery yellow heads tilted up to the night sky, waiting patiently for the morning sun.
It’s been a long time since she’s noticed them.
Somewhere in the distance, an officer is reading out her rights. Behind her, she can hear someone say Diamond’s name.
Sam closes her eyes.
In another world, she is at Ari’s side, and they are free.