“How can I trust you?”
“Trust my lack of emotional investment,” he replies. His eyes are flat and soulless. “Nothing is ever personal to me. I follow the deal.” He smiles darkly. “And if yours is the best one, you will have my loyalty.”
She stares at him and knows he’s telling the truth. Decades earlier, it had been Diamond seated across from him, offering him a new life in exchange for that life being dedicated to her. Sam watches him consider this new offer and wonders if he’ll really do the same. Would he bow his head to her? Would she be able to keep him on a leash? Would she be able to hold her own, in this world of alchemy?
She nods. “I’ll sign it,” she says.
He looks at her with his lips pressed together, as if mildly surprised by her answer. “Out of curiosity, why would you want to come back?” he says. “I thought you wanted out.”
Because,she thinks,there is only one way to destroy a system, and it is at its helm. It is from the inside.
But there is something else.
Something not logical, that she doesn’t want to admit. It is the thrill that just rose in her at the thought of belonging. It is the part of her that has grown up in this world, daring to think of how alchemists can fit into a new era. Her knowledge, her skills. The luxuries that have accumulated in her life, big and small. It is the part of her that she’d recognized as a child, the need for something greater, the ambition for more. The inability to just give up on all she’s sacrificed. It is the memory of those moments when she could imagine herself in Diamond’s position and envision what she could do, if given the chance. It is the desire to be part of something.
It is the gnawing fear that, without alchemy, she’s nothing.
If Sam could see herself as she now stares back at Sebastian, she would see a set of eyes that look older than the youthful face they inhabit, the sight of a soul being chipped away.
“Because,” she says, “I belong here.”
Sebastian smiles thinly at her words, then raises his glass of champagne to her.
“That you do,” he answers.
Gotham, New York
