“Where all our alchemists train,” he answers.
Footsteps against the tiles make her look up again. This time, she realizes that she and Will aren’t alone. Several students her age have emerged from the building at the other end of the space to gather around the courtyard, their eyes fixed on her. She freezes. They are all in uniform—blazers, skirts, trousers, gleaming leather loafers. An image of austere perfection.
Behind them comes a bespectacled older woman with dark skin and closely cropped black curls. Her eyes are trained on Sam. No one says a word. The silence in the courtyard is so thick that Sam can hear the sigh of wind through trees, can hear herself breathe. It’s a strange feeling, being so noticed, and she wants to shrink away into nothing.
Sam glances up at Will. He just stands there with his hands in his pockets, unbothered. “Well?” he says to her. “Get on your feet.”
You’re here because we want to know if you’re worth teaching.
Sam rises. Will nods at her drink.
“Hold out your glass,” he says.
As she does, he reaches into his inner coat pocket and produces a small glass vial containing a shimmering powder the color of pearl.
Sand.
Her eyes dart up to his. He just nods.
“Remember this,” he says. “Sand will enhance everything about who you are. Your strengths, yes, but also your weaknesses. Your vices. The dark corners of you. Pay attention to how your body reacts. Do you consent?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
Will pours the contents carefully into her drink. The sand swirls, silver curling through the water, dissolving rapidly until the water simply looks like someone has added a shine to it.
He lifts his glass at her. “Drink all of it.”
Sam hesitates. She stares at her drink as if Will has dissolved diamonds in it. She’s never taken a drug before.
“Well?” Will says.
Sam meets his eyes, then looks at the other students around the courtyard. Then she takes a deep breath, lifts her drink to her lips, and gulps it down.
It is slightly sweet, with the faintest aftertaste of metal. Sam drains it. When she’s finished, Will takes the glass from her and hands it, along with his own glass, to the older woman. Sam waits, anticipating and dreading some reaction in her body, maybe a surge of heat or cold, a pain in her stomach. She feels nothing.
Then… something. It’s hard to describe. The world around her seems to sharpen, turn more brilliant. The leaves in the trees suddenly appear more luminous, the tiles beneath her boots more pronounced, their edges exquisitely defined. The light in the air seems to shimmer. She can see everything so well, can discern details in the walls that she shouldn’t be able to notice. Her body feels light, and—if she’s being honest—wonderful. An indescribable strength courses quietly in her veins.
Will circles slowly around her. As he does, he pulls a long strip of white cloth from his pocket. When he passes out of her line of vision she starts to turn with him, but he reaches out and touches her shoulder lightly, and she halts. The silence from the other students threatens to suffocate her. She makes eye contact with one of the boys, who only stares coldly back at her. The girl beside him leans over to whisper something in his ear, and a smile emerges on his lips. Sam’s hands start to tremble. Her body breathes, pores taking in the air.
She senses Will stop behind her, then his nearness as his arms come up on either side of her head. A second later, the white cloth slides over her eyes, and her world descends into darkness.
She sucks in her breath. He is so close to her now that she can feel the brush of his collared shirt at her back. The cloth tightens slightly as he wraps it around her eyes a second time. Then she feels his hands at work behind her, tying the cloth securely in a knot, the movement tugging her head back so that her throat feels exposed.
“What, Miss Lang,” he says, his voice low and calm, “do you think is the most important thing for an alchemist to understand?”
His quiet words send tingles through her entire body. She has a sudden urge to lean back against him. Her heartbeat has become a hummingbird, fluttering wildly for a place to land. The darkness swims around her.
“I don’t know,” she murmurs.
Will finishes tying the knot. His hands brush past her hair. “Einstein was one of our greatest alchemists. Think of his most famous equation. E=mc2. What does it tell us? That mass—m—is equivalent to energy—E.‘Everything is energy,’ he once said, ‘and beyond that is divine.’ He understood the fundamental principle behind alchemy: that all is from one. We are part of an endless ocean of energy, everything seen and unseen.”
All is from one. Everything seen and unseen. Sam looks forward into the darkness and commits Will’s words to memory.
“We call this endless ocean the prima materia,” Will continues. “The first matter. It is all around you, traveling through your body. You and I may seem to have little in common with the trees in this courtyard or the bricks beneath our heels, but peer deeper and you will see that we’re all composed of the same building blocks. And even though we may seem to be fragile creatures, of bone and blood, we are also made of stardust, and within the hearts of our atoms lies the same incredible energy that powers stars, the galaxies, and the universe.”
Sam feels him take a step away from her now, then hears his boots clicking softly against the stone as he comes to face her. One of his hands touches hers, guiding her carefully down until she kneels. Fear and desire lodge in her throat. With the blindfold on, she feels as if she and Will are the only ones in the courtyard.
“How do I channel that energy?” she whispers.
