“Because I don’t find it recreational,” she says coldly.
Sebastian nods, and Sam feels another chill creep down her spine. He is sincerely trying to understand. “It’s because you don’t know yet how it feels,” he says.
“How what feels?”
“Killing.”
Sam doesn’t answer.
“If you did,” he goes on, “you wouldn’t have let them live. You would have followed through.”
“I think you’re projecting,” she mutters.
A thin laugh. But when she looks at him again, his face is sober. “I was once on death row, you know. I deserved to be there. I killed thirty-fourpeople over the span of two decades, and when they finally arrested me, it felt like a relief. My insatiable need to take life had finally been acknowledged.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t care all that much about dying myself. But while I waited for my execution date, they kept me in a straitjacket in a hundred-square-foot cell. Do you understand that kind of torture, for an alchemist? Being unable to create, unable even to take my own life? Like cutting the hands off an artist.”
“You fancy yourself an artist,” she says.
“Itisan art,” he replies. “Knowing how, and how quickly. Knowing where and when. A perfectly executed job is a masterpiece worthy of being studied.”
He speaks of taking a life as if it is painting a canvas. Sam can feel her soul curling tight, as if she is seated next to the reaper himself.
“You don’t think you’re a monster,” she says.
“Oh, I very much do.” He nods. “I’m not a good person, Mozart. I wanted and deserved my sentence. Every person I killed, I killed with full awareness.” His eyes narrow. “But an artist is an artist. I can’t help but see people the way I see them. Is it that different from a businessman’s obsession with money? An artist’s compulsion to paint?”
Sam swallows and presses her hands into her lap. “Why didn’t they execute you?”
“One day,” he says, “I got called in for an interview with a parole officer. They said I was going to be pardoned.” He looks at Sam and chuckles. “Pardoned. Me. By the time I got out a few weeks later, Diamond Taylor was there to meet me in my hotel room. She offered me a job, doing what I’m best at. I kill for her, and in exchange, I get my freedom. I had no personal loyalty to Diamond, but I couldn’t pass up that good of a deal.” He shakes his head, smiling. “The rush of taking a life. You don’t know it yet. You will soon.”
Sam swallows. In her lap, her hands are trembling.
“Do you understand what you’re doing tonight?” he asks her.
She does, and yet she hasn’t quite registered it. She has tortured a man in a basement, and she has cut the throat of a man in the heat of a fight. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to kill a person. She has tried not to think about what her assignment tonight really means. They are taking care of business. They are handling people for causing trouble. They are fixing a problem.
At her hesitation, Sebastian grins. “Constantine tells me that when you take sand, people don’t notice you. You fade into the background. People look away from you in disinterest, as if you aren’t there at all. When asked, they can’t remember your name or whether you were even there. They walk away and don’t realize you’ve entered or left a place. They look at you on security camera footage and think you’re a nobody, just passing through.”
Sam looks out the window. The city is awash in neon lights now, as bright in its own way as during the day. Down on the street below, smoke rises from a taco stand’s griddle as a cook scrapes carnitas into a corner. There are half a dozen people clustered under a bus stop, expressions listless, perhaps dreaming of another life.
“I don’t need your analysis of me,” she says.
“My dear girl,” Sebastian says, handing her a silvery-white pill. A second dose, so soon after her first. She takes it from him, eager for the rush of it to bolster her resolve. “Listen to me. I’ve seen a hundred alchemists in my lifetime. They all have the same hunger in their eyes as you. Some deep, desperate, innate desire formore,the ambition for perfection. It’s what drives all of us. Be honest. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Sam says nothing, but his words bring back a surge of her old emotions from childhood, the need to please, the need to become better. Everything can be more beautiful.
“I’m here because I needed to save my mother,” she says.
“Mm.” Sebastian chews thoughtfully on a slice of raw yellowtail. “And now that she’s saved, why are you here?”
“I don’t think I really have a choice, do I?”
He gives her that wide smile again. “Oh, I think you do. Stay and see, Sam. Life is infinitely flawed, tortuous and hard and filled with pain. But death? Death is a perfection all its own. The longer you’re an alchemist, the more you’ll understand what I mean. You’ll know why I feel the way I feel.”
Sam looks down and sips her drink. The food on the table suddenly looks unappetizing to her, and she finds herself wishing to get up from the table and walk away, down the stairs and out the door, and then to just keep going, farther and farther, forever. But she knows she won’t. She won’t because she is bound to Grand Central, because deep down, she knows Sebastian is right. Every time Will calls for her, she is seen, feels the rush of importance. When Diamond acknowledges her, she feels like she could fly. She checks her bank account every week and sees the growing number,three zeros to four to five, more money than she’d ever thought it possible to have. She’s here because she wants this life. She craves the attention it brings her.
She opens her mouth, suddenly angry at Sebastian for his uncanny observations—but before she can argue, she spots a familiar face that makes her go silent.
It’s Maclan. Kafka. He’s tall and podgy, his beard newly trimmed and streaked with silver, and he’s wearing a turtleneck to hide the slash that Sam gave him the other night. Now he’s laughing with a friend, his arm wrapped around a wispy girl’s waist. The new dose of sand is flooding Sam’s veins now, and she feels invincible, like she could go right up to his face and still he wouldn’t see her.
