“Maybe you should be. You barged your way into the Observatory on nothing but Will’s generosity.”
Now she hears the envy in his voice. “I’m not trying to compete with you,” she says.
He holds his hands up disarmingly. “We’re not even on the same track. I’m to be a philosopher. Who saidyouwere competition?”
She starts gathering up her books. She doesn’t like how the atmosphere has changed, and the knot in her chest tells her she should leave.Philosopher.She recalls what Will had once told her about the field, that they are both the most valuable and the most difficult to train. That they will die young. A part of her tries to take pity on Nicolas for that.
“See you in class tomorrow,” she mutters, then rises and turns her back.
He gets up and follows her. “Hey,” he says. “I was talking to you.”
She keeps walking. Behind her, his steps quicken. A jolt of fear ripples through her.
“Hey,” he says, his voice harsher now. “I wastalking to you.”
He reaches out and grabs her by the elbow, his hand clamping down so hard that it hurts. He yanks her back to him. She drops her books, and they clatter to the ground. He seizes her collar and pulls it sideways, snapping off a button from her blouse and exposing her collarbone.
Her fear explodes as a wave of heat in her chest. Her hand shoots out at him, finding his neck, and when she presses against the skin of his throat, she closes her fingers. This time, she feels the structure of his skin and flesh and bones with ease, and a fragment of her soul disintegrates in a blinding shard of pain.
Suddenly Nicolas’s face is right before hers, his eyes widening in horror, his mouth open and gurgling. A strangled, high-pitched scream comes from him, thin and unnatural, a sound that raises every hair on Sam’s neck. Her eyes dart to where her hand has gripped Nicolas’s throat.
She yanks her hand away.
Nicolas collapses, choking, gurgling, his hands on his throat. Only now, through his trembling fingers, does Sam see what she did.
All across his neck, where her hand had been, is a burn so deep that his skin has been charred white.
She freezes, paralyzed at the sight. She couldn’t have done that. Shehardly even recalls performing a transmutation. But she had, and the feverish memory of doing it returns—a formula that had rushed through her, that she had pulled out from the vast depths of her mind. The instinctive way she had called on her soul, how her hand seemed to know exactly what to do and how to twist. She had felt the skin change to fire and ash beneath her fingers. Her stunned gaze stays on the wound. It is such a deep, vicious mark, the flesh crisped away, the edges black and white and bloodied.
Nicolas looks at her with desperate terror, tries to speak, fails, and falls to his knees, one of his hands still trying in vain to clutch at his throat.
At last, Sam finds her voice. “Help!” she calls out. The word comes out hoarse and quiet. She tries again. “Help, someone help us!”
No one comes.
“Help!” This time, she screams.
There is the sound of footsteps against pavement. But to Sam, it sounds muffled and distant. She is alone in the courtyard with Nicolas, their figures illuminated only by the flicker of lanterns. And in the moment before help finally arrives, she finds herself transfixed by his bloodshot eyes. Through them, she feels as if she can see straight into his soul, the amorphous fog of life that holds a human together, can see it twisting over and over in agony as he fights for survival.
And somehow, beneath her horror at what she has done, she feels a hint of something else. Satisfaction, perhaps. Vengeance. Most of all, a strange, dark joy lingers even as other alchemists arrive on the scene. She hears its voice in the back of her mind, finds herself both shrinking from and leaning into it.
It says:
You will never forget me now.
