As she goes, she memorizes faces and conversations in the lobby, looking for other signs of Lumines in the hotel. Her skin prickles with premonition. After a while, she glances at her phone.
It’s been fifteen minutes since the meeting started.
The sensation that something is wrong pervades her. She’s not sure why. Then she realizes it’s because, even after all these years, she stillknowsAri, can still recognize the subtle shifts in his voice, had heard an inflection in his tone that gave her the feeling something was going unsaid.
She stops in the lobby again, lingering on the periphery of the party, ignored and invisible to everyone. Minutes drag on. The clusters of guests swell and diminish.
Something isn’t right.
At last, after another fifteen minutes, she whirls around and heads back down the hall. Her heart pounds in a tense, tight rhythm.
This time, as she nears the meeting room, she hears the sound of a door opening and closing.
She pauses, hears footsteps growing distant. Someone has left the meeting.A beat later, she continues down the hall until she passes several corridors leading back out into the lobby. No one here. Her eyes narrow. She turns around and backtracks, until she rounds the bend—
—and walks right into Ari.
Sam reacts before she can think. Her hand shoots out and presses flat against the wall. Ari does the same. In the blink of an eye, they transmute gleaming knives from the wall and point them at each other’s throats.
For a moment, they just glare at each other.
Ari speaks first. “I thought I mistook someone else for you,” he says.
It’s still so strange, looking into those eyes again. “So did I,” Sam answers.
A heavy pause settles between them. Ari takes in her face, as if trying to reconcile the difference in her appearance now to the girl he’d once known. Then he looks at the winged lions on her collars.
“How long have you been with Grand Central?” he asks.
Sam stares defiantly at his raised knife, daring him to use it, but neither of them moves, so they hang instead in this tenuous balance, a sculpture of violence.
“And you with Lumines?” she replies. “You must have been training with them when we were still in school.”
When he doesn’t answer, she nods, understanding. He must have been with them for years, even before she knew him.
Suddenly, a memory dawns in Ari’s eyes. “The terrible accident,” he says, nodding at her. “The one you once mentioned a long time ago, in your letter. That had to do with this, didn’t it?”
The restaurant explosion. Her mother’s injuries. She had vowed during her initiation into Grand Central that she would seek out justice against Lumines for it.
And now Lumines means Ari.
She realizes with a start that Ari might be on sand. Does he use it? He must; nearly all alchemists do. Has it strengthened his charisma in unnatural ways? Even now, the slightest turn of his body toward her made her feel like he was listening to her, giving her the kind of attention that she has craved since he disappeared from her life. She needs to be careful.
“I thought you left the city,” she says instead, avoiding his question.
“I’m not here often. I travel a lot.”
She adds a sarcastic lilt to her words. “You said you’d keep in touch.”
He remains unfazed. “It’s a good thing I didn’t.”
Everything about him is still Ari, but he is colder now, the light in his eyes more distant and calculating, his stance more aloof. It makes her shiver, the way he assesses her as a threat.
And isn’t she doing the same? Doesn’t she look colder to him too, her eyes more vicious than before?
“What are you doing here, Ari?” she says. “Why at this meeting?”
“Just enjoying the party,” he says.
