Page 83 of The Alchemists

Eventually, she heard noise from outside and slipped out of bed. She scooped one of Seb’s Cantrèa sweatshirts from the floor and joined Asher in the living room. He clearly hadn’t slept. He’d clearly been crying. He made coffee with none of his usual satisfaction, and they sat in near silence, waiting for the others to wake up.

Sebastian was the last up. Seeing him emerge, rumpled and morning-raw, wasn’t as charming as she’d imagined it. When she pictured their first morning together, it was sheepish and sweet. Sebastian looked like he’d been hit by a truck—they all did.

“I think we should give up,” he said, after they’d picked at breakfast, after they’d searched his room and confirmed that the disc was gone. His eyes lingered on Lily, on the gruesome bruise spreading beneath her eye. “It’s not worth it. It’s not worth this.”

“No,” she said, surprising all of them with her force. “That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he’s doing this.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t want to win; he just doesn’t want you to.”

He looked at her, and he seemed like himself for the first time since the winery. “You’re sure?”

“We have to win now.”

“I don’t want anything to happen. I couldn’t live with⁠—”

Lily took his hand, squeezing fiercely. “I can make my own choices. Let’s bury him.”

Seb squeezed back.

“On another note, Sebastian.” Tori fidgeted. “I don’t want to tell you what to do, and if you never want to talk about it again, that’s one hundred percent your right, but…have you considered therapy? Dr. Metcalf at the health center is great. I think she could really help?” Tori bit her lip. Lily had never seen Tori look anything less than completely self-assured.

He stared out the window as he contemplated. “Maybe.” He swallowed. “Yeah. I’ll try it.”

Around noon, back in her own dirty clothes, Lily biked home and showered. She spent the afternoon sitting on the striped loveseat with her head in her Gran’s lap, crying, as Gran stroked her hair and they rewatched their favorite trashy show, starting over at the beginning.

SEB

As the Reaper’s Moon waned through November, they settled into a shared rhythm. Seb practiced Cantrèa, finding a new, singular focus in himself, winning his bouts by stunning margins. He went to therapy, and danced with Lily, and read letters by long-dead people with Lily, and sometimes even played Cantrèa for fun with Lily, and did alchemy with Lily, and kissed her every chance he could.

The first alchemy lab after the winery, Gemma had shown up to class with her arm cast in black fiberglass, and it took all his self-control not to ask her about it. Over Thanksgiving break, he and Asher went to the City for Reg’s engagement party and drank themselves silly on overpriced cocktails. He spent half the party furiously drunk-texting Lily under the bar, then locked himself in the bathroom after she sent him a picture in her underwear.

They started properly working on their dance piece. They emailed back and forth with the archivist of the Huguenot Museum. They held hands as they walked across the quad, even though everyone was talking about them. Seb talked about everyone talking about them in therapy with Dr. Metcalf.

He liked Dr. Metcalf. She was in her late forties, with a sort of clichéd maternal warmth, tempered by an unwillingness to suffer half-assed attempts at subterfuge, whether they were self-inflicted or directed at her. She wanted him to consider the possibility of filing charges. He wasn’t going to.

“We should do it next weekend,” Lily said, as they broke apart in Studio C, sweaty and panting. Seb’s shoulders ached. His quads burned.

“Do what?” Seb frowned at her, not sure if he’d missed something about the choreography.

“Get the disc back. We need it before the next clue.” She pushed her soaking bangs off her forehead, swigged from her water bottle, and passed it to him.

Suddenly, he was too tired to do anything but sit down. She was right; of course she was right. Other than going through Windermere’s letters, they’d stalled out on the Elumnara. It was one thing to say they wanted to keep going, another to actually do it, when the bruise under Lily’s eye had only recently faded, when Seb was sitting across from Dr. Metcalf sometimes twice a week, when they’d seen Conrad walking across the quad, seemingly untouched by everything.

“Do you have a plan? You have the look of someone with a plan.” He quirked an eyebrow at her. She paced back and forth in front of the mirrors, putting him in mind of a lion sick of being caged.

“I wouldn’t go that far. I have maybe…a plan of a plan.”

“Okay, so what’s step one?”

She performed a spin that took her to her knees and used the momentum to slide along the floor, landing in front of him. Her mouth was twisted into the tiny knot it formed when she was terribly pleased with herself and trying not to show it.

“Recon.”

Conrad lived with three other Cert-Year members of the lacrosse team in the apartments known as “The Steps,” so named for the seventy-five stairs one had to climb if they wanted the most direct route from the main part of campus. His apartment was on the east side of the block, bordering a strip of woods that gave way to the orchard, and then the woods proper where Seb had found Lily on that October day that felt so long ago now.

Currently, he and Lily were on their stomachs in that strip of woods, clad in black, and freezing. Lily had cast the same illusion she had at the winery, but being inside the enchantment, he could still see their breath hanging in the air. He’d cast a cantrip for warmth, but it had faded ages ago and he was afraid to cast another in case someone noticed. Instead, he took a sip from the flask that Asher had prepared for them, but that too had turned tepid. This was taking much longer than planned.

Lily lowered the binoculars and scratched down another note with a sigh. Seb was mostly decorative on this particular venture, ostensibly playing lookout, but anyone who might be wandering around at this time of night was either inebriated or themselves likely up to no good, and thus unlikely to notice them. Instead, he’d mostly been entertaining a very fulfilling fantasy involving the library stacks and Lily in this cat-burglar getup. She looked very good in a black beanie with the cuff folded over.

“Who the hell put these wards up?” She gritted the words out through chattering teeth. “It definitely wasn’t him. These are basically pro. Actually pro.”