Page 139 of The Alchemists

In the blue glow of the screen, Lily cast. She sent her will out like a bomb. The display fritzed, flashing itself in staticky light as unfamiliar symbols ran across the screen in every direction. Then it resolved, and Lily had two copies of each letter: the originals, and a typed version.

She began to read.

SEB

“Don’t you dare think about letting me win just because you’ve leveled up.”

Across from him, her rich hair flowing down her back below her helmet, Adriana glared.

“Don’t be fucking insulting.”

The air between them crackled with invisible—well, not to him—energy. His heart had thrown its throttle, and it growled in anticipation. Magic thrummed through him, turning his skin hot and electric, itchy with the need to do, make, create, become.

Seb had never been so alive. After the suite had gone to bed the night before, he’d sat at his laptop and the essay for Oxford had poured out of him. He’d sent it to Chant at three in the morning and uploaded it with Chant’s edits to his application after lunch.

Everything was happening now, fate spiraling in tighter and tighter. He locked eyes with Adriana.

Five years they’d been circling each other, waiting for this moment. He’d won the tournament the year before, but Adriana had been injured. The year before that, they’d both lost in the semifinals. Five years ago, they’d sat on the bluffs at M&M, overlooking the midnight sea as it crashed against the cliffs and made this promise, sealed on a cheap bottle of wine and a pinky swear. They’d made the promise as children—full of themselves, full of passion. They weren’t children anymore.

That night had been the last of the tournament, after the closing ceremonies. Neither of them had even made it to the quarterfinals. Raf had been knocked out in the second round, but they’d seen themselves—their fire and hunger, the way Cantrèa made them feel real and vital—in each other.

Looking at Adriana’s hair on the bright golden-orange of her plastron, Seb remembered, suddenly, Raf’s head in his lap—warm and sleepy drunk—while he and Adriana had been sharing a vision of the future. He’d been running his fingers through Rafael’s hair and marveling at its impossible softness. He hadn’t known that another boy could have hair that felt like spun silk.

He hadn’t known until then that being with another boy could feel safe, comfortable. Every moment before then had been snatched behind backs and closed locker room doors, and temporarily empty houses, and houses that were not temporarily empty for as long as they were supposed to be.

But here, in California, with Raf, he’d seen what it might be: natural, easy, something that kindled a fire in the heart of him that he didn’t need to smother. In California, no one was paying attention to where two visiting freshmen spent their nights. In California, no one really cared so much anyway. It was California. Things were different. He was in a T-shirt on a night that felt like a stolen summer kiss, while back in New York, muddy snow obscured all of Windermere’s best features.

That night, he and Conrad had not yet been anything except the idea of a possibility, a quickening hope in Seb’s stomach. They would not be anything yet for weeks, because it wasn’t until California that Seb grew the courage necessary to hurl himself at that unknown, to face rejection or much worse.

Seb cleared his mind.

He whispered to the Æther, “I need to do this myself.”

The match began.

They drew out the beginning, savoring it, both of them knowing that once it got going, it would be over fast because they were fast. They danced from zone to zone, into each other, feinting and glancing away, twin savage grins on their faces. They could hear, feel even, the audience growing antsy in the stands. This was a performance as much as it was a game, and it was bad form to keep your audience waiting.

Seb made the first move.

He darted in, his steps crossing to turn him around Adriana’s back at the last minute, extending his foil to hit her under her armpit as she spun to face him. She feigned a block, accepting the hit and spinning the other way to catch him directly in the chest. He stumbled backward, and she was after him in a flash, faster than anything. He re-centered his weight; he was ready.

They fought like that, back and forth, the world silent around them except for the heavy punch of their breath and the hiss and slap of their foils, for a long time. They scored touch after touch, staying just within each other’s reach, for five minutes, ten, an impossible length of time in a bout moving this fast, this hard.

His match with Danielson may have been the most important of his life, even if he hadn’t known it going in, but this—this was the one he’d been waiting for, the one he’d been wishing into existence his whole life.

Nothing—not an inch between them—was given freely. All of it, each touch, each parry, was earned in sweat and preparation. When Adriana broke the spell-seal by summoning Ascalon, shrieking after Seb with blinding light and blinding force, he knew exactly why she’d chosen it. When he hit her with Goethe’s Prism⁠*—an illusion in his weakest discipline, and one he never used in play, one that had taken him agonizing days and multiple attempts to prepare before transferring it to his foil—it was for exactly those reasons.

When, nearing the impossible ninety-minute mark that would signify a move to sudden-death play, Adriana broke Seb’s Orb against the sand with an attack that he’d had to bend backward to avoid taking to the face, the world went still and silent.

When their eyes met, between the shimmer of gold as Seb’s Orb dematerialized and Adriana’s transmuted itself into a leaf made of sparkling light, there was only happiness and a promise: this is not the last time. This is only the first time.

When he dropped his foil and tackled her around the waist, picking her up and spinning her wildly in a circle, her joy was volcanic.

The stands erupted.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)—another influential Ætheric polymath—who, among many other literary and scientific pursuits, published Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) with an Ætheric addendum in 1810.

LILY