Now she recalls that the alchemist in the restaurant had stirred a shimmering white powder into his drink. It had been such a trivial detail before, barely worth remembering. She tries to imagine what it’s like to take sand and experience its effects. Does it feel like magic? How many others around her had been taking it? Whenever she saw a beautiful person, was it because they had been enhanced by sand? When she’d watched the performers at the theater, had they taken sand? Has it been all around her, all this time?
“How did your mother figure it out?” Sam asks.
“She and my father ran countless tests on batches of sand until they perfected it, and then she built an assembly line for it. An entire new specialization of alchemy—philosophers—was born from their studies.”
“Philosophers?”
“Alchemists who specialize in the process of creating sand. It is a hard field, more brutal on the soul than any other alchemy, as it requires the splintering of tens of thousands of soul fragments into batches of product. It is difficult to find and train philosophers who can withstand that. Even then, they die young.” He smiles thinly. “So they get paid more.”
“Are you the only syndicate who makes it?” she asks.
“Of course not, although ours is well-known as the purest and most expensive. Once the news got out about sand’s creation, there was a suddenand immediate race to reverse engineer our product. Some, like Lumines, sought to make larger quantities than us, to flood the market with cheaper sand in order to cut into our market share. Others tried, with mixed success, to make variations—sand tailored to enhance very specific properties of a person. Philosophers became so valuable that, after many were killed in our jostling for power, the syndicates agreed not to harm them. They are like neutral nations during a war, meant to be protected from any of our usual conflicts.”
“Why?” Sam asks. “Why protect your enemy?”
Will raises an eyebrow at her innocence. “Well, we had suddenly ushered in a new age of alchemy. And what is power in this new age, Miss Lang?”
Sam shakes her head, even though she knows the answer, has known it her whole life.
“Money,” Will says.
Of course it is. And for a moment, Sam feels as if she has become a child again, staring into a beauty so terrible she can hardly bear it.
“If we kept killing one another’s philosophers in retaliation, we would all collapse financially. Because of our shared interest in wealth, we keep the peace—if tenuously.”
Sam’s throat feels tight. “Sand makes that much money?” she whispers.
“More than you’ve ever dreamed possible.”
Sam feels as if everything in her world that she’s known and understood until this point has suddenly tilted. Through Will’s eyes, the world is a different place.
Work hard,her mother always tells her. But all her life, Sam has watched her mother work hard and then struggle and struggle to make enough money to carry them from one month to the next. Yet here, Will is showing her the shortcut. Success is not about working hard, although work is certainly required. It is about bending the rules of the game.
And they are going to teach her how to do it.
“Tell me,” Will says, returning her gaze with his piercing one. “What do you think sand will do to you?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, and for a thrilling instant, she dares to imagine what it would enhance in her. If she can prove herself worthy, they will allow her into this exclusive world. She imagines a perfected version of herself. Someone more beautiful, perhaps, who could make others noticeher and make her mother laugh and make the world turn in her direction. Someone capable of doing anything.
The estate stretches on and on, Will explaining as they go. The complex lower on the hill is furnished with dozens of apartments for assistants and guards and the multitude of people who come and go during the day. Another complex, reserved for visitors unaffiliated with Grand Central, is operated like a hotel. A third building is living quarters for the staff, a fourth for business dealings. Then there is Diamond’s personal home. Another that belongs to Will. The grounds are lushly manicured, the gardens filled with a rotation of flowers, lines of roses and clusters of orange poppies and fat bushes of lavender. Sam notices shaded patio tables in courtyards between the buildings, all supplied with bottles of cold water and juices, vases filled with fresh flowers. They walk under a terrace covered in grapevines. Two rectangular pools overlook the horizon.
It is a level of luxury so extreme that Sam finds it almost as hard to fathom as alchemy. She feels like she is walking inside a dream. As a child, she’d tried to envision the largest house in the world that she could buy for herself and her mother—but when you have never witnessed true wealth before, you don’t know what to imagine.
Now she knows what is possible. Now she understands why money runs the world. She follows Will, lost in the maze of gardens and buildings; every time they uncover a new area of the estate, it leads to more secrets, rooms upon rooms upon rooms. A Fabergé egg that never ends.
At last, they arrive at a large property nestled on the other side of the hill, its main entrance shaded by two rows of cypress.
“This is the Observatory,” Will says. “The alchemists’ college.”
When Will pushes the front doors open, a cool wind greets them. The college is large and square, four long buildings surrounding a central quad, the interiors lined with pale ash wood floors and doors spaced widely apart. A tower looms in one corner. Each building’s quad-facing wall is made of glass panels divided by a black steel grid, and beyond it, Sam sees a massive courtyard paved with cobblestone, bordered by flowers and a trickling fountain and shaded under two enormous oaks.
Will heads toward the courtyard now. When they reach the glass, he pushes against it, and she sees that its central panels are a door.
Now that they are standing in the courtyard, Sam realizes that it isn’tpaved with cobblestone at all, but a mosaic of assorted materials—squares of copper and silver and gold and lead, graphite and asphalt and concrete and platinum, a dozen different types of wood. She kneels for a moment and runs her fingers over the various materials, admiring the gleam of the tiles under the dappled light streaming through the leaves.
Will watches her. “There are hundreds of different panels that make up the floor of this courtyard,” he explains, gesturing at the tiles with his drink. “They are laid out roughly in accordance with the alchemical and chemical periodic tables, as you’ll soon notice.”
“This is where you train?” she asks, her attention still on the tiles.
