Sam
On the first day of finals at her regular school, a week after Will pulls her out of classes at the Observatory, Diamond summons Sam early to the Red City.
Sam arrives at the estate right as the air begins to cool. She’s glad to have a reason to skip her afternoon exams. For the past few days, she has drifted through her regular classes in a fog, calculus and American history and biology blurring together. It all seems so pointless. While studying for a quiz, she’ll remember the feeling of skin crisping into coal beneath her fingers. She’ll startle out of discussions in English Lit because she’ll recall the horrible wail from the man in the Confession Room. She’ll think of the revelation about her mother’s injuries, that the restaurant explosion, the beginning of their real suffering, started with Lumines.
And just this morning, a new deposit cleared in her bank account. Diamond has increased her payments from $8,000 to $20,000 a month, easy as that. While the other kids in her class are figuring out how to afford college, Sam is getting paid an executive’s salary to head into the darkness.
Now, as she steps into the Observatory’s courtyard, she notices Will standing beside his mother, dressed to perfection, his hands tucked behind his back. Diamond is as poised as ever, her steely eyes already turned in Sam’s direction.
Sam catches a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the buildings’ windows. She’s wearing a new suit, navy and white and tailored to a perfect fit; a silver chain connects the collar flaps of her shirt. She no longer looks like a child setting foot into a world where she doesn’t belong. She looks like she was born into this. She looks like a stranger.
Sam lingers momentarily on Will, but it is Diamond she’s terrified of approaching. She hasn’t seen the woman in months. Diamond looks paler than she remembers, her face a little gaunter. Or perhaps Sam is recallingher wrong. The waning light casts her in such a way that, for a moment, Sam isn’t sure if she’s real or not, as if she might be an apparition fading with the day.
Sam stops before them. Will hands something gold and gleaming to Diamond, and Diamond holds it up to the light. It is the winged lion, the beast’s eyes narrowed, its jaws open in a noble snarl.
Sam studies the pin and holds her breath. She has seen it countless times on the lapels of everyone at Grand Central—she has noticed it in the city since she was a small child, had admired it engraved on the glass doors of the Winged Towers downtown. She remembers a time when she thought the woman behind the crest was unreachable, an urban legend shared under the breath of the city.
“Why did you first come to me that night, Sam?” Diamond asks. Her voice sounds hoarser than she remembers too, although the cold authority in it remains unchanged.
Sam blinks, and for a moment, she is transported back to that little girl, crouched in the alley behind the Odyssey Theatre.
“We needed the money, ma’am,” she says.
“That’s your mother’s reason. You, Samantha. Why didyoucome to me?”
Sam swallows hard, and a familiar feeling rises in her chest. It is like when her mother asks her a question, knowing that there is only one answer she wants to hear from her daughter. It is the desire to figure out the reply that she is supposed to give. Wasn’t her reason the same as her mother’s? Don’t her chances of survival rise and fall with her mother’s?
But she does have her own reasons now. And the familiar tide of anger in her chest rises, the same feeling that had filled her when Will had told her to punish the man in the Confession Room. She’s here for her mother, for an equalizing of justice. She’s here because Lumines had nearly killed them, and Grand Central is the one who can help her strike back.
But there is more than that, even.
Diamond smiles a little as she watches Sam struggle to put her feelings into words. “You don’t want your destiny relegated to some little apartment next to a strip mall. You’re looking for greater things.”
Greater things. Sam has felt it since she was small, this unquenchable thirst, this desperation to make something big of her life, to matter to someone. She nods.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” Diamond straightens. “Do you understand what loyalty to Grand Central means?”
Sam nods. “Yes.”
“It means we are family now. Something is asked of you, you do it without question. Something cuts you, we all bleed. When there is war, you fight alongside us and no one else. And one day, when we are the only syndicate worth mentioning, we will reap the rewards equally. Should you break this bond, know that there are consequences.”
Sam notes the way Diamond uses the wordwhen.There will be war in the city, it is only a matter of time. The thought makes her shiver in anticipation.
“I understand,” she says quietly.
The woman pins the crest to the lapel of Sam’s suit, and Sam feels the new weight of it resting against her beating heart. There is no turning back now. She is Grand Central, through and through. She belongs to them, just as they belong to her.
And for a fleeting moment, the ambition in Sam flares. She imagines what it might be like to stand in Diamond’s place, the leader of a secret world, capable of giving others a new life. She thinks of the beauty she could create with that kind of power—to make people’s lives better, to makepeoplebetter, to make sure they are seen, to make it possible for them to achieve their wildest dreams. And then she reaches for the stars, dares to think the impossible. That she could do a better job than Diamond.
“Mozart,” the woman says, christening her with an official attribution, and Sam savors her new name. “My little prodigy. Now your life begins.”
Later that week, on the last day of school before graduation, Ari finds her in the hall.
“Are you skipping today?” he asks.
She nods. “Why? What’d you have in mind?”
