Page 129 of The Alchemists

They crossed the quad in a noisy flock, accents and languages and signing bouncing off each other, the lighted dorms winking at them merrily. Seb was in high spirits, his anxiety gone, or largely diminished. He took Lily’s chilly hand in his and twirled her, then dipped her, catching her low and kissing her deep. Her cheeks flushed with cold and happy embarrassment. She felt suddenly that raw pang, that knife-edged joy. Another treasure found, just in time for her to know what it would be to lose it. But even the future couldn’t diminish the warmth of belonging, of having found a pack to run with.

And what a pack they were. Tori, wearing sensible enough shoes, gave Liesl—tired from her bout—a piggyback ride, and then Adriana begged one off Sebastian. He crouched gamely, and with a whoop, they were racing, Adriana kicking her heels in like Seb was a noble steed. Lily linked arms with Daphne, and they signed sloppily together, an improbable pretzel.

“Is that Hawleyhurst? Who’s he with?” Asher mused to no one in particular.

“That’s Evan Danielson,” Rafael craned to follow Asher’s gaze. “Dunmoody.”

“What the hell are they doing together?”

Lily heard the frown in Asher’s voice. She looked, recognizing the young man she’d seen Hawleyhurst with at the ball, and her insides coiled sharply. Evan Danielson, she repeated to herself as a reminder to ask Seb, once he was back in earshot.

But then they were at the Manuscript, all of them cramming into the big circular booth at the back, ordering too much wine, a tableful of food, all of it out of her price range, but she didn’t care anymore. This close to the end, it didn’t matter; she couldn’t take it with her.

They were laughing and Asher was telling them about the sudden about-face in his thesis—about how he was combining his Metaphysics and music majors to work on something called an Ætheric Synth—a multimedia display that would allow music and lyrics to be translated into shape and color and feeling. She became dizzy with Daphne’s blush, and the sight of her knee pressed against Asher’s, and she forgot all about Evan Danielson, as she took another sip of wine and leaned into Seb’s warmth and the deep woodsy scent of him.

* M&M— The New School of Mind and Metaphysics, founded in 1940 on the California coast by Winston Mott.

* So named for Ascalon, the legendary spear that St. George used to slay the dragon.

SEB

By the end of their rowdy dinner on that second night of the tournament, Seb felt like himself, fully, finally, for the first time in weeks. That night, as he stared at the cracks in his dark-flattened ceiling, he was strategizing—planning which matches to scout the following day. When he slept, his dreams were branching things, full of oak leaves and Orbs, flourishes and Ætheric flames.

He had a bye the next day and woke invigorated. The weather was mild, so he met Lily on the quad, lattes in hand from a nearby café. She swung her leg over the frame of her bike as it coasted to a stop and landed next to him, cheeks deliciously pink, eyes bright from her ride.

They spent the entire day in an empty corner at the top of the stands studying his potential opponents. They spread out across the seats, heads pressed together over a notebook, passing the pen back and forth to scribble unintelligibly, using it as a pointer, whispering furiously together. His heart swelled. Nothing felt as natural as this—being with Lily, being clever with Lily, making plans that they could put into perfect action.

People watched them, and he soaked it up, meeting flighty gazes with his own steadfast one until the weaker party flinched away. It was delectable to see them trying to solve for “Allsaires + Perkins,” especially the ones who thought they knew. None of them knew. Lily was a secret, a cipher that only he had learned to unravel. People thought he had chosen her, that she was the lucky one. They had no idea.

A rotating cast joined them over the course of the afternoon. Asher brought coffee and lunch, a rough edit of the new music for their piece, and Daphne. He watched Daphne watch the match. Chant joined them to watch Raf advance easily up the charts. He and Seb were on opposite ends of the same bracket, and they would meet in the semifinals if nothing ridiculous happened. Chant pointed out that Raf liked to shift his weight and pivot onto his back foot before attacking with his Orb. Lily wrote it in the notebook. Tori came for Liesl’s bout against a blond giant from M&M, and they sighed collectively as she lost after a bitterly fought match. Lily waited until Tori left to write about the giant.

Lily had to meet her Gran for errands, so no one joined Seb as he watched the final match of the day, between a Dunmoody student named Evan Danielson and Mistvane’s Khalid Tynes. Tynes was good; Seb knew his play style well enough, but Danielson, a relative mystery, was better. He favored an unrelenting attack style intended to tire out his opponents. Somehow, Seb had missed him in regionals, but still there was something familiar about him. It itched at the back of his mind as he watched the bout; it itched as Danielson bared his very white teeth on winning; it itched as he walked back to Millay Tower after checking the board for the next day.

The next morning, Asher was home with a cappuccino and real breakfast waiting for Seb. He sat at the island, reading a paperback book with the cover folded over backward—ruining it irreparably—but the breakfast was good enough that Seb could almost forgive him for his crimes against books.

“You’ve gotta stop being so good to me. I owe you too much already,” Seb said, shoveling eggs into his mouth.

“Consider it payback for Shane Waltham.”

Seb considered. In late elementary and middle school, Asher had been even skinnier than he was now and had not yet figured out how hair product worked. Coupled with his dusky-tan skin, it had made him the primary target of their class’s bully. Seb, however, had been far more into kung fu movies and rather more bloodthirsty as a youth than he was now, so he’d stepped up against Waltham and his cronies every week for nearly a year, until he broke Waltham’s thumb so badly that it had to be reconstructed with pins. Seb had his own scars—one under his chin from getting his face smashed into a fence, and another on his knee. The rest had faded.

“For someone whose favorite word was ‘fag,’ he really did have terrible gaydar,” Seb mused, shuddering at how well he could still recall Waltham’s nasal slurs.

“Truly atrocious,” Asher agreed. “Nina and I broke up last night.” He said it so casually that for a moment Seb thought he might have imagined it.

“What?” Seb blinked at him. Asher set down his paperback. He looked sad, sort of. “Who ended it?”

“It was mutual. Ish.” Asher stared at an unfixed point on the wall. Then: “I ended it.”

“Why? How is she?” He knew why.

“She’ll be fine. I didn’t really realize what it was supposed to be, you know?”

“I don’t know. What’s ‘it’?”

“A relationship. Until you and Lily, I didn’t know what it could be.”

Seb swallowed his toast. “Yeah, well…” he trailed off. He had too many ways to finish that thought, all of them this morning as bitter as bad coffee. “And you feel that with Daphne?” It wasn’t a question, so much as an invitation.