When Sam gives Will a stricken look, he taps the man’s bared thigh with his boot, and the man flinches. Then Will touches the man’s arm lightly with one hand.
The man goes ramrod straight and screams.
Every hair on Sam’s neck stands on end. The man’s veins are bulging, as if they might burst, and he trembles uncontrollably until Will removes his fingers. The man collapses, whimpering.
At the look on Sam’s face, Will explains, “Water molecules expand when they turn into vapor or ice.”
As if from a great distance, Sam recalls that Will is an elementalist, most adept at transmuting air, fire, water, and earth. But she’s never seen him perform alchemy on a living being before.
“Your turn,” he tells Sam. “Touch his arm.”
She recoils from the thought. The man’s arm is slick with sweat, and she hesitates, her hands lingering in her lap as fists.
“Miss Lang,” Will says firmly.
She reaches out and rests her hand on the man’s trembling arm.
“I want you to transmute away a patch of his skin.”
She looks sharply at him. “What?”
“Change it into something else.”
“Into what?”
“Anything. Metal. Stone. You choose.”
She can feel her heart fluttering, the gory memory of last night flooding back. Her mind flips through the thousands of textbook pages stored in her memory and her hands recall the formula she’d used on Nicolas. And yet, still, she doesn’t dare move. Her brain refuses to determine the geometric structure of the man’s skin, to seek out the frightened, beating soul within his cells.
At last, she finds her voice. Her hand jolts away. “I can’t do this,” she whispers.
“I don’t have all fucking day, Miss Lang.”
The authority in Will’s tone is enough to force Sam to move. She puts her hand back on the man’s arm, takes a shuddering breath, and forces herself to think. It’s a different experience than acting on instinct, the way she had done last night. The skin must be changed into something else organic but not necessarily alive: deadwood, maybe, or fiber. Enough of it must be transmuted in order to make the equation balanced, as metal is far denser than skin. Then the organic compound must be stripped of its carbon and turned into a mineral, something with a rigid structure. From there, she can transmute it into a metal or another inorganic material.
Her mind whirls through the necessary steps and complexities, spinning and spinning until she feels dizzy. Beside her, Will regards her with a critical eye. Through her contact with the man’s arm, she can feel his heart beating rapidly.
“What are you waiting for?” Will asks her.
She grits her teeth. She sets the first formula in her mind, pictures the overlapping circles of the transmutation in her mind, and sacrifices a shred of her soul.
Pain blooms in her chest and shoots through her limbs. But the agony she inflicts on the man makes him arch off the floor with a horrifyingscream. Under her fingers, his skin hardens, shriveling, into a sheet of coal, tearing and splitting away at the edges as the coal condenses. Blood pours from the widening wound.
Nicolas’s wide, horrified eyes. His ruined, burned neck.
She stops, feeling sick, unable to continue to the next transmutation. Her chest throbs with pain, and she leans backward on her arms. Her breaths come in ragged gasps. She thinks she’s going to vomit.
A long patch of the man’s upper arm is stripped of its skin, leaving instead a thin layer of blood-drenched coal covering the muscle and fat underneath. There is nothing elegant or precise about it. This is an ugly transmutation, done viciously and without finesse.
Will doesn’t bother looking at Sam. “Are you ready to tell me?” he says over the man’s screams.
“He was just a friend!” the man wails now, almost too far gone with pain to understand what he’s saying. “He works at the bank!”
“His name?”
The man is crying too hard to speak.
“His name,” Will repeats, annoyed.
