“No. Listen to me: I want you to go with Fletcher. Help him make sure Maisie’s okay, and that she gets away from the coppers. Someone needs to be there for him, and it can’t be me. Not right now.” Maybe not ever again. “I negotiated your freedom, Zhao, and you’re going to fucking take it before Price changes his mind.”
“But—”
“I swear to you, if Zaria is in this building, I’m going to get her out.”
“How can you be—”
“Jules,” Kane implored him, urgently now. “Please—you need to trust me on this.”
There was a long, charged moment, and then Jules gave a slow nod. “All right.”
“Come on,” the copper beside Kane grunted, giving him a shove. Kane silently complied, but not before tossing a final look to where Fletcher had his arms wrapped about Maisie.
He was just in time to see his friend smile.
ZARIA
Zaria watched in part apprehension, part fascination as her mother tracked a circle around the crystal fountain, emptying the vial of soulsteel into the clear water. With a jolt, she realized why the fountain was necessary at all: It was the first step in the alchemological Magnum Opus.Thatwas why Aurora had chosen this location. Not only did it see a constant flow of people—a constant flow of energy—but at the center of it all was a source of running water.
“The universal solvent,” Zaria murmured.
“Yes,” Aurora said, overhearing. She straightened and pulled a second vial from her pocket. This one was tiny, containing a fine black powder. It wasn’t a substance Zaria recognized, but then again, she’d never looked into the ingredients required to re-create a primateria source. “I’m glad to see your father taught you well, at least when it came to alchemology. The first step, and arguably the mostdifficult step in creating the Magnum Opus, is dissolution. You’d think it simple, but an incorrect measurement can make all your work for naught.”
Zaria watched Aurora add several more things to the fountain, giving the absurd impression that it was being treated as an overlarge cauldron. “What’s the black powder?” she asked her mother hoarsely.
Aurora smiled. “Calmactium. It will incite a reaction that causes the water to heat.”
The word was familiar to Zaria. She’d rarely had occasion to use the chemical herself, but she knew it could be combined with other substances to exponentially increase the strength of their certain properties. As she had the thought, to her horror, the fountain began toboil. Steam rose in plumes and saturated the air, dampening her face. Before her eyes, the water in the basin turned a pale, dimly glistening shade of translucent red.
“Come here.” Aurora extended a hand. Zaria found herself shoved forward by Shaw and Pritchard, nearly stumbling into her mother. The two men flanked her as she set her jaw, determined that whatever Aurora requested, she was not going to comply. “Give me your arm.”
“No.”
Aurora’s eyes flashed. This close, it was easy to see that they were a deep shade of blue, so dissimilar to Zaria’s own. “I’m not going to ask you again.”
She was holding a knife, Zaria saw now. It was obvious what came next. “If you want my blood, you have to let me do it myself.”
Giving an apathetic shrug, Aurora handed over the small blade. It was a normal knife—nothing special or alchemological. Zaria pressed the point against the fleshy part of her forearm, heart thudding irregularly. Her blood was the final ingredient needed fortransmutation to occur. After that, assuming everything had been done correctly, crystallization would see the creation of carmot.
“Do it,” Aurora hissed, and the entire Exhibition seemed to hold its breath.
Zaria pushed the blade in, gritting her teeth, and let the blood drip into the crystal fountain.
The reaction latched onto her energy at once, seeming to yank it from her core like some rapidly unraveling cord. This wasn’t like making primateria, where she had to focus her mind and seek out that place of creation inside her—this was being thrust into it headfirst. This was drowning in the confines of her own mind while feeling her life slip away from all sides. Meanwhile, her arm continued to bleed steadily, slick and hot.
The Exhibition had turned fuzzy around her, the only illumination emanating from the four devices positioned at the corners of the space. Two in India, one in China, and one in Egypt. Together they formed a perfect diamond. Their dim glow had stretched into columns of lights that made the glass walls of the Crystal Palace glitter. With each passing moment, the lights synchronously angled closer to the fountain, and Zaria didn’t dare to consider what might happen when they finally met.
Adding her blood to the water in the basin had turned it mostly opaque, the pale red hue seeming to solidify and darken as the transmutation occurred.
“You see,” Aurora said, her voice seeming to drift over from far away, “I placed your father’s primateria source in the very top tier of the fountain. That way, it acts as a guide as the water cycles through.”
Zaria didn’t require any further explanation. The way alchemology worked, you needed to be able to visualize an exact process and the subsequent outcome. That was what Itzal would have done whenhe created the source originally. Just as Aurora had said, it was a guide. Something for the reaction to latch onto in lieu of Aurora pulling from her own energy and performing her own complicated visualization of the steps. All she had to do was provide the ingredients for the reaction to happen on its own, assuming the setup had been done correctly.
And Zaria wasn’t sure it had been. Her mother continually snapped at her to make another incision, to add more blood, to give up more energy. Zaria was pleased to see it didn’t appear to be working, but she also didn’t know how long she could keep this up before her body succumbed. It wasn’t only about the blood loss: Just as when creating regular primateria, the reaction seemed to be pulling the very life from her bones.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she told Aurora, horrified by how weak her voice sounded. Already Pritchard and Shaw had been forced to prop her up between them in the event that her legs gave out, but she was barely cognizant of their presence. “I don’t understand. Shouldn’t the energy you collected from the Exhibition be enough?”
Aurora was standing back a few paces from the fountain, watching the reaction take hold with hungry eyes. Her face was lit bizarrely by the columns of light that slanted around her, now only inches from meeting. She didn’t look at Zaria when she answered.
