The click of his boots stops before her, and she turns her face up toward him. “First, you must prove yourself worthy of such knowledge,” he answers. “Of seeing the unseen.”
His hand tugs one of her hands gently down to touch the tiles. She presses her palm flat, fingers curling against the cool surface. Her skin tingles.
“You are the same matter as this tile,” Will says. “Those with the potential for alchemy can sense that sameness through touch, as well as the rearrangement of that sameness which makes you a human and it a stone. They know instinctively what is around them.” His voice hardens. “Now, tell me. What stone are you touching?”
Behind the blindfold, Sam’s brows furrow. It is an impossible request.
A low murmur comes from the other students. Some giggle. Others exchange words she can’t quite catch. It occurs to her that they must all have had exams to qualify to study here, but she is coming in years after them, with the disadvantage of having been recruited so late. She can sense the restless energy pointed toward her, knows that they are eagerly waiting for her to give up. Her mind, always quicksilver, now feels like it has expanded tenfold. Even with her eyes covered, her memory now unfurls, gathering up the brief instance when she had stared at the courtyard’s layout and spilling out a pristine map of it. In the darkness around her, this map now materializes, as clear as if the blindfold had vanished. She sees the thousands of tiles surrounding them, all in their specific place. But without any prior knowledge, they are just tiles to her. She can’t tell magnesium from copper, lithium from iron.
“Take your time,” Will says, but his voice is unforgiving. “You will only have one chance to do this correctly.”
“I can’t,” she whispers.
“Can’t you?”
“I don’t know the elements.”
“Have we ended our time together so quickly, then?”
She crouches there, her body still tingling with newfound energy, at a loss for where to begin. The murmurs start again at the edge of the courtyard. This time, she catches some of what they are saying.
Too hard.
She overhears this phrase and has to fight back the urge to turn in its direction.
It’s too hard. She hasn’t even had a lesson yet.
There is disdain in the voices now, condescension. She’s losing them. Sam’s heart races with the realization that Will has set her up to fail. His expression last night at the Odyssey had been one of utter disgust, of irritation at the fact that Diamond Taylor had seen something promising in Sam and assigned her to him. He must be trying to rid himself of her, and the way he’s decided to do it is by giving her this impossible task and having her fail it in front of so many witnesses.
Sam clenches her teeth and tells herself to concentrate. What had Will told her? She has to be able to see the unseen, and in order to do that, she needs to know the lattice of the silver’s chemical structure, see down into itsatoms in order to rearrange it. The only way to do so is to think—feel—like an alchemist.
She presses her palm flat against the tile. Around her, the courtyard goes silent, tension hanging heavy in the air. Sam squeezes her eyes shut. The darkness around her is now complete, and she realizes that perhaps Will had blindfolded her not to make the exercise more difficult, but to help her concentrate. She tries to envision the stone beneath her fingers, to guess at its makeup from touch alone. And there, in the darkness, she remembers what Will had said: alchemy requires the soul of the alchemist. In order for her to tap into this prima materia, she must first be able to tap into the heart of herself, that core of light. Her soul.
The sand coursing through her veins guides her. For the first time in her life she can sense her soul, feels it bright and pulsing. She touches it. It seems to ripple within her, and a spasm of sharp pain vibrates through her body. She gasps, and for an instant, she recoils from that bright core.
As she hesitates, she recalls the feeling she had when she first saw the two men—alchemists, she knows now—sitting in the restaurant. She thinks of her mother’s damaged body, the homemade window curtains and the crack in her ceiling and that rising tide within herself, the ambition for more. The promise of greatness. A life that could be transformed into something more desirable.
And then another memory resurfaces from the depths of her mind, of a letter from Ari.
In order to light the fire of ambition in your soul, you must first have been burned.
It comes to her so clearly that she can almost hear Ari’s voice in her head. She hones in on his words as if he alone can save her. How the darkness in her life can also become her source of strength. How she can win. The feeling builds and builds in her chest until it seems to push against the edges of herself, and then she feels it touch her soul, seep into the corners of that light until it all becomes one. She is her soul and her soul is a fire, and beneath that is a current of something hard and sharp rising within her, something that says:
You will not get rid of me this easily.
In the midst of it, she suddenly senses something different under her fingers—not just the cold surface of a metallic tile, but the building blockswithin it,the cubic lattice structure laid out under her hand and merging with the blood cells coursing through her capillaries, the cores of neutrons and protons and circling electrons similar to the neutrons and protons and electrons trembling within herself. Her ears fill with a roaring sound. Somehow, she knows it is the sound of molecules moving, the universe in its endless shifts.
When she realizes the answer, it comes to her first as a familiar feeling. Like she has seen this structure before. She thinks of the periodic table at school, how many protons and electrons are in each element, flipping through the pages of her textbook in her mind until she gets to the one that reminds her of the tile now under her fingers.
“Silver,” she says.
The whispers in the courtyard halt.
“Good,” Will says, and this time, there is the hint of a smile in his voice. Sam’s heart soars until it feels like it might burst. “The next tile.”
She moves her fingers. The metal beneath her hand is different now, but the light of her soul engulfing everything within her is the same, and she senses the structure once again, feels the sameness and difference between it and herself, knows that what she’s sensing are the atoms in the object.
“Magnesium.”
