Happy Lunar New Year.
No dinner this week?
And then,When are you coming home again?
Sam can’t bear to answer right now, terrified that her mother will be able to tell right away by her tone that something’s wrong. So she leaves the call and texts unanswered. By the time she takes a glance at the news, she realizes that Zhukov is already in the headlines. His body was dropped off right in front of the Eastern Columbia Building in downtown, his hands and feet chopped off and looped around his neck with a rope, his eyelids removed, his eardrums punctured, his lips sewn shut. Some of his organs are missing, likely removed before death. The list of grotesqueries goes on; Sam just stops reading after that. She tries to imagine Diamond doing it—her gloved hands covered in blood, crimson dotting her fine suit—and cannot.
Maclan’s death is in a news snippet, too.MAN FOUND DEAD IN RESTAURANTBATHROOM FROM OVERDOSE.Sand was found in the body’s blood. There are some mumbles among local politicians for a renewed federal push to ban the substance, even though the evidence tying the sand to the death is questionable at best. But in syndicate circles, whispers circulate. Diamond had no intention of making the killings subtle. She wants to ensure that those who work for Lumines see what happens when they upset her.
Sam wonders what Ari’s face looked like when he heard about Zhukov and Maclan. She wonders if he knows she was involved, or whether he cares.
After the previous evening, it’s hard for her to feel anything.
Nausea. That, she feels. She goes to the bathroom to throw up repeatedly, until nothing but bile comes up. She goes back to bed. She dozes in an uneasy half sleep until the afternoon has turned into night. She keeps waking up rubbing at her hands, as if they are still stained with blood.
Finally, she goes to pull her shoes on to step out of her apartment for the first time today. As she goes, she checks her bank account, as she frequently does. She stills.
There is a new deposit into her account for one million dollars.
What do you do with a million dollars?
Sam has grown up fantasizing about being richer, but only in the way that normal people were richer than her. Driving your own car instead of taking the bus. Buying new clothes and new books, going out for dinner, taking a vacation, owning a house. Her mother is living well now in her apartment. Money is plentiful and life is stable. But even after years of experiencing the staggering luxury of the Red City, Sam has never really been able to imagine herself in the position of someone like Diamond. To be so wealthy that you can’t spend your money fast enough. So wealthy that money becomes synonymous with power, makes you untouchable, allows you to move carelessly through the world. After the nice clothes and new car and luxury apartment and eating out, what do you buy?
She doesn’t know. She just keeps staring at the new zeroes in her bank account and swallowing again and again, wondering how many zeroes Diamond must have in her holdings to be able to hand out millions like this without a second thought. All her life she has wanted to be seen, but this? This is a new kind of seen.
Everything can be more beautiful.
But doesmoremoney ever become an ugly thing? When does it stop saving your life and start destroying it?
Over the following week, no one brings up the murders. Sebastian never brings it up. Will never brings it up. Hanover never brings it up. Diamond never brings it up. Their meetings are about how next to strike at Lumines’s heart. Sam begins to wonder how she got the money in her account, if the murders were just a loose thread lost in the timeline of life, if maybe they never happened at all. They merge with her nightmares and become something detached from reality.
She stops eating. The bones jut sharply at her wrists; her clavicle protrudes in stark relief. Dizzy spells puncture her days. In the past, she would have written to Ari in the particular way they had, telling him her troubles without telling him, and he would have written back to her something thoughtful and comforting. But where can she go for that now? Her mind spins in circles, exhausted, hoping for relief, coming back again and again to Ari as its solace and then being unable to find him. She tries to imagine what he’d write to her, but the letters in her head are always blank. So instead, she spends long minutes in the bathroom—five minutes, then ten, then thirty—washing her hands under hot water until they’re red and aching. When she hears sirens going by, she has to stop in an alleyway or a convenience store just to collect her bearings, tell herself she isn’t going to be arrested. She checks her hands and makes sure the blood isn’t still there. There’s nothing. Maclan’s death had been ruled an overdose, after all. She can’t be arrested for something that never happened. Can she? She tries to imagine the police showing up at her mother’s house, her mother stirring from her sleep with a grumble, walking to the front door only to see two officers with a list of questions about her daughter.
Her mother.
The next time Sam visits, she makes sure to take a dose of sand in the hopes that it will help deflect her mother’s attention. But when she arrives at her mother’s apartment for dinner, her mother pauses in her cooking to look at her.
“You’ve lost weight,” she says immediately.
A lifetime of being ignored, and yet when Sam actually wants to disappear, she can’t. In irritation, she shrugs off her mother’s concern and sits down on the couch, turns the TV on so she has somewhere else to look.
“I’ve been working a lot,” Sam replies.
Her mother turns away to toss garlic in the frying pan, then long beans and sesame oil. The scent fills the air. “Don’t they feed you?” she says over her shoulder.
“I’m eating. Don’t worry.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m fine.”
Her mother doesn’t answer that. After a while, when dinner is ready and Sam goes to sit at the table, she digs into her food without looking up, eating mechanically. She can tell, logically, that the food is as tasty as ever, but the signals never make it to her brain. In her mouth, it tastes like chalk and paper.
When Sam finally looks up, she sees her mother sitting there, staring at Sam’s hands. They are cracked from being washed so much. Sam removes one hand from the tabletop and sits on it. Why does her mother care so much now? Is it because Sam has been away for so long? Has her absence strengthened her mother’s worry so much that even sand can’t deter her?
Or is it because her mother might knowwhythey are cracked? Because she too has heard of alchemy? Because she knows what it can do to you?
“Are you working on a big case?” her mother asks in a careful, probing voice.
