Sam
When Sam arrives at the secret beach, the full moon is already high in the sky. The path down to the water is so overgrown that she has to transmute away the tangled bushes and brambles until she finally reaches the sand. She doesn’t turn to look up at the cliffside, where she knows Will and other Grand Central crewmen are waiting and watching patiently.
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.
He doesn’t move forward. After a while, Sam heads toward him, until she pauses under the archway. Here, she can see his face clearly.
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’tlieto 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?”
