Sam,hisSam. Her dark eyes glittering under the full moon.
He has to get out of here, he is trapped, the metal shards are digging into his throat, he can’t escape, he is going to die,he is going to die.His hands fly up—one to his neck, one gripping Rudra’s shirt collar.
“Stop,” he gasps, eyes shut, brows furrowed. “Help me. Please.”
Rudra’s laugh vanishes, and his expression stills into a statue. He grips Ari’s face so hard that Ari makes a muffled sound of pain. “I can’t help you,” he growls close to Ari’s ear. “No one is safe in this war. Don’t think that you will be spared just because Reed has decided to favor you. All of us are pawns in this game.”
And all of a sudden, Ari remembers Zan. He recalls the way Rudra had dragged him, sobbing, into the laboratory, how the sound of his cries had cut off abruptly. Zan is gone. Dominique is gone, too. Only Ari is left, teetering over a ravine, his life on a thread.
This is how they do it, turning us against each other.
Then the thorns are retracting, smoothing out. Rudra transmutes them back into a sheet of glossy metal, pushes it back into the fridge until it looks like nothing had happened. He releases Ari.
Ari collapses. He barely feels the impact of cold marble against his cheek. There, he curls up and shudders uncontrollably, wheezing as he struggles to breathe, hands clawing at the floor, panic still racing through his body. Trickles of blood run down his neck, mixing with his sweat.
Rudra puts his hands in his pockets and regards Ari coolly. Ari registers that the man is standing in a puddle of spilled tea. The man notices too, and wipes his shoe off on Ari’s trembling body.
“Remember your place,” Rudra says. “Or I’ll kill you.”
Then he steps over Ari and heads out the door, leaving Ari to fight off his panic alone.
There is, of course, the theory of entropy, which states that when left on its own, everything in the universe will naturally tend toward maximum disorder. And yet, the universe does not. Stars burst into existence and light the darkness. Dust and gas cluster into planets. Life arises, against all odds, in direct opposition to chaos. And the universe, which should be nothing but a vast sea of particles, teems with complexity, pushing constantly toward something greater.
Application of Chaos Theory to Alchemyby Böhme, 1978
