Ari
The following week, the same materials are laid out on the table in the lab room when Ari arrives, with the glass of water front and center.
Mr. Rudra greets him only with a nod today, while Isla’s face looks more solemn than Ari has ever seen her. After a few days away from this place, he had started to think that he’d failed before he even had a chance to begin, that they had concluded he simply wasn’t ready. And yet, here he is. Even without touching anything, he feels the tingle in his fingertips and dreads the start of the exercise.
Mr. Rudra gives him a questioning look. “Shall we start?”
“Yes,” Ari says, because he knows there’s no other answer to give.
Again, he conjures the geometry in his mind. Again, the man puts his hand on his chest and pulls at his soul so that it feels like a scalpel is cutting through the inside of Ari’s body. Again, Ari screams, unable to hold himself back as the pain washes his thoughts out into white.
Again, sweat trickles down Ari’s neck and back as he trembles against the table, trying to find his soul, trying to understand how to grasp it and channel it. He fails.
“Again,” Mr. Rudra says as Ari blinks stars out of his eyes.
The pain continues. The glass of water stays unchanged. It remains unchanged for the rest of the afternoon.
On and on it goes. Another day passes, and another. They blend together. At night, Ari tosses in restless sleep, dreams of being trapped in that laboratory while it burns around him.
At the end of his first week of failure, Mr. Rudra tells him, “Let’s try something different, Ari.” He bends down to where Ari is shakily pulling himself into a sitting position. “Your family’s monthly stipend will be halteduntil you perform a transmutation successfully.” He turns away without helping Ari up. “A little motivation may help you along.”
During the day, Ari can barely concentrate on his schoolwork. Sam passes him the answers to homework that he’s failed to finish on time, gives him her notes when he can’t keep up. Once, he falls asleep at his desk and startles awake at the bell to feel Sam touching his arm gently, telling him it’s time to go. When he meets her gaze, she has questions in her eyes, and her mouth is tight with concern, and in moments like this, he is tempted to confess everything to her. But there are secrets in her gaze too, some big terrible thing she seems to be bearing on her own. When he stares at her, she looks away and folds back in on herself. Whatever it is, she doesn’t seem to trust him with it.
So he does the same, and they both struggle on, alone.
Ari withdraws from the other alchemy students, feels the looming presence of failure as they take their lessons together. Has everyone else already mastered each of the transmutations in the lab? Perhaps Ari is the last one to go.
One evening, as Ari practices drawing the geometry of the water transmutation, Zan stops to peer over his shoulder.
“Still on that?” he says.
Ari just clutches his pen tighter and keeps his head down.
Zan bumps so hard into the back of Ari’s chair that he shoves his chest into the table. Ari’s hand jolts violently, scrawling an ugly line through his careful circles.
“Steady your hands,” Zan mocks over his shoulder as he heads out of the building.
While the land transforms from the rains of winter to the regrowth of spring, Ari’s progress remains unchanged. His family’s payments are withheld. Stress knots his chest. What must his parents think of the sudden stop? Are they worried for him? Are they upset? Each day, Mr. Rudra grows less patient with him, his voice turning more clipped, his sighs more pronounced. When the man leaves for the evening, Isla will linger at Ari’s side until he’s ready to stand up again. Sometimes, on the worst days, she helps him out to the car.
He dreams constantly of his family. Sometimes it is of his sister and mother talking by the window late at night, of buttery yellow lightilluminating the street outside their home. Other times it is of him returning home, making his way through the familiar, winding alleys until he reaches his family’s door. Once, he is standing in the middle of a crowded street in Surat, and it is Dhuleti, and everyone is singing and dancing. He shouts in delight as he flings fistfuls of bright yellow and fuchsia and turquoise powder into the air. His brother’s teeth are stained blue and gold. His mother laughs and cups his cheeks. His father has joined a human pyramid of revelers as they attempt to reach a buttermilk pot hung high above the street.
Ari wakes with tears streaking his face, his chest heaving with grief, his ears still ringing with the phantom sounds of festivities. After a while, he opens his eyes and looks at his calendar. Holi has already passed. He forgot completely about it this year.
One evening, several hours into his impassable exercise in the lab, a spasm of pain hits Ari so hard that he crumples to the floor. There he trembles, unable to stand, unwilling to bear another round of the agony. Everything around him swims as if underwater. His breathing is shallow; he thinks that if he keeps going, he might faint. Sweat drips against the tiles.
Mr. Rudra kneels beside him. “Get up.”
Ari stays where he is, too weak to obey. His exhausted mind conjures an illusion of Sam at his side, her hand on his arm.
“Getup.”
Ari feels the man yanking him up now with rough hands. Sam vanishes. The world rushes up at him, and suddenly the table is before him again, the glass of water still there. He stares listlessly at it, unable to concentrate. He’s thinking of his mother’s face on the morning Rudra spoke to her, of himself agreeing to this arrangement. He’s thinking of Zan’s sneer, the superiority of his smile and his casual dismissal.Of course he couldn’t do it,he can imagine the boy muttering to the others. He’s thinking of Sam, her wide eyes and faint smattering of freckles, how effortlessly she can learn.
You should be here,he thinks.Not me.
“Again,” Mr. Rudra says.
Ari looks up and meets the man’s eyes. “I can’t,” he says.
