Ash did not like any of this one bit.
Not having to cooperate with the hex-slinging man-child.
Not riding in the tiny back seat of this absurdly impractical vehicle with whiny music blaring from a speaker mounted right behind his head, even his short legs so crammed up against the passenger seat in front of him that the aforementioned man-child’s gesticulations jostled him nonstop.
Not being blindfolded, unable to see a thing that was happening around him.
And especially not having dampening bracers on his wrists. Not just for the obvious reason that, with the adamantine-alloy rings disrupting his mana channels, he wouldn’t be able to use magic to defend himself if needed. (And in this, of all situations, he felt like it might be needed.) But also because, without being able to perceive the microscopic world through his tattoos, he couldn’t access his habitual escape from sensory overload—or from the jumbled voices and flashing images that kept looping in his head: audio/visual vestiges of old, ugly, unmentionable things…things that must have waited ages to catch him alone in the dark.
Even his connection to Creuch in the Aether was severed. Never in his life had Ash imagined he’d actually miss the little dickbag crowing Burn, boy, burn! in the back of his head.
He was aware of Navarrete on his left, making some small violent repetitive movement that kept vibrating the seat. Punching her thigh, he guessed—he’d observed it to be a nervous habit of hers. But she was also singing along with Betancourt’s music, the 2000s pop punk or emo or whatever it was currently assaulting Ash’s right eardrum. Ash wondered how she could be so good at putting up a careless front. The best Ash could ever manage was a blank face. Though at least with that, he never had to try. The freeze response came naturally.
“Hey, I really am sorry about the bracers and blindfolds,” said Betancourt. “It’s nothing personal at all. Just a precautionary protocol, and feels all the more important to stick to it, after, well, you know…what happened.”
Ash had no idea what he was talking about. He guessed Navarrete might.
“Gotta do what you gotta do, bruh,” replied the ratcatcher, with a shrug in her voice.
The two continued making smalltalk, which Ash found unfathomable. Their chitchat became a background drone. Ash’s hands started to twitch—him fighting a compulsion to cover his ears. He ended up rubbing his fingers and thumbs together instead…then rubbing his wrists in turns, because adamantine, the alchemical iron used in the alloy for mana dampening bracers, was always freezing cold.
Ash had worked with so-called “cold iron” in the lab and in the field—understood its properties well. But this was the first time he’d ever worn adamantine bracers. He wondered if it was this hellish for everyone, and other mages—like Navarrete right now, or the countless apostates he’d processed as a desk jockey at Enforcement HQ—just hid their discomfort really well…or if Ash himself was just some special kind of weirdo who tended to hang out in his gnostic sense more than most.
It made him think of what he’d found at the crime scenes that morning.
The part he hadn’t told Navarrete.
He’d actually noticed it first in the Arcadia morgue, when he’d examined the remains of Severin and Langit. As he’d steeled himself, readied the tattooed channels on his arm, and laid his palm on Severin’s disembodied boot-clad foot, out of nowhere, Ash had felt himself shoved back in the bounds of his mundane body with its five dull senses—a suffocating sensation, like being crammed in an undersized coffin and the lid slammed shut. He’d broken out in a cold sweat, heart racing—barely managed not to have a panic attack in front of the diener.
There’d been more of it at all ten crime scenes. The quiet residential cross-streets in Ludlow. The empty overgrown lots on Roberts. The small parking lot across from Wissahickon Charter School’s playground. And so on—always when he came across trace remains of Severin and Langit. The shutdown of his channels felt like a plunge into ice-cold, stifling darkness, every time.
Every time, he’d been a little scared he wouldn’t make it back.
What he’d found had been, of course, adamantine—just like the bracers that now chilled his wrists. But the traces he’d found on Severin’s and Langit’s remains hadn’t been the standard adamantine used in bracers like these, the stuff he’d worked with countless times in the lab. The fact that microscopic amounts of this substance had been enough to shut down Ash’s whole mana system meant he was dealing with something he’d never encountered before. Something rare.
And extremely illegal.
Ash had studied their composition and properties in the forbidden texts he’d been secretly collecting since he was a kid. But never in his life had he—or any alchemist he knew—come into contact with a primordial element.
In general, alchemical elements corresponded to mundane ones: azoth to mercury, fulmenine to tin, lunaria to silver. Each mundane element, once an alchemical structure was superimposed, took on magical properties.
Whenever Arcanus mages spoke of alchemical elements, they invariably meant the common-enough celestial elements—like the adamantine used in dampening bracers.
Primordial elements, and the compounds that contained them, were rare; their properties hazardous; their use and possession forbidden by interfaction law. Even the knowledge of their particulate structures was disallowed, as far as Ash knew, for all but an exclusive cabal of the highest-ranking alchemists in the order—namely, Mercurii’s Templars, who alone were privy to the Mysteries of ultimate reality that lay concealed within the Pyramidion. Formulae and diagrams of primordial alchemical structures had long been redacted from all sanctioned arcane texts.
Standard celestial adamantine was the stuff you used if you wanted to dam up someone’s mana channels, to staunch their flow.
Primordial adamantine was what you’d use to stop a fucking flood. To wall off a gash in material reality—for example, a nexus.
Its presence on Severin and Langit’s corpses was clearly an important clue.
… But not one Ash was ready to trust to Navarrete.
The ratcatcher wouldn’t have any useful input anyway, he’d reassured himself. She was the brawn in this operation, not the brains. It was pretty much up to Ash himself to figure out what it meant anyway.
But he wasn’t planning on reporting it to Sauvage anytime soon, either. Not when there was a very real possibility the Master-General, on hearing about this development, would take a rookie like Ash off the case at once, and reassign it to someone with the highest possible security clearance, who would go into the field with a troop of Ordinators—who could neither know nor tell secrets—and cover up all evidence of apostate alchemy…and confiscate or destroy any forbidden substances found.
Truth was, if this Lex person or one of his associates had access to primordial elements, or knowledge of how to make them…Ash wanted to get to them himself before anyone else did.
He lost his train of thought as the emo music blasting his ear suddenly switched to some kind of monotonous, white-sounding rapping over a generic dance beat with flatulent synths, then just as quickly switched back.
“Vernon, fucking—!” came Betancourt’s voice. “No. Stop trying to play your comedy music on my Kenwood sound system.”
“You never let me play my music,” pouted Zhao.
A power struggle evidently ensued. The music switched back and forth a couple of times, then finally settled on a new pop punk song, which, to Ash’s dismay, Navarrete and Betancourt both started singing along with at the top of their lungs.
“Yes! Girl! You fuck with Motion City Soundtrack?” said Betancourt.
“Hell yeah,” said Navarrete. “You like good music, man.”
“I like good music, too,” said Zhao, and the weird rap song started playing again. The lyrics were something about the vocalist wanting to sit on someone, in an apparently nonsexual way. Zhao started bouncing wildly, the back of his seat jarring hard against Ash’s knees.
“Dude, I told you no Tim and Eric,” came Betancourt’s voice.
Zhao started rapping along with the song, Betancourt talking over him in a raised voice, accompanied by sounds of a vigorous scuffle:
“Vernon.”
“This is what—”
“Dude, don’t you dare.”
“—I do, this is—”
“Vernon, I’m driving.”
“—what I do, this—”
“Vernon, I swear to God.”
“—is what I do, I—”
“Dude, stop trying to sit on me! Get off me! I’m fucking driving! Jesus!”
The car swerved, tires squealing. Ash braced himself, digging his fingernails hard into the leather of the seat.
“Are you fucking happy now, Vernon?” Betancourt exploded. “I almost got into a fucking accident! What the fuck is wrong with you, man?”
The music switched off altogether. There followed a tense—but to Ash, welcome—silence.
A few seconds later,
“Hey…Vern. Sorry I yelled,” said Betancourt.
Zhao’s response, which Ash could barely hear, and which followed an awkwardly long pause, was the tiniest of grunts.
Betancourt let out a heavy sigh. “It’s been a really fucked-up few days, huh, bud.”
After that, nobody said anything—or, Ash thanked his lucky stars, sang—for the rest of the ride.
Still, he couldn’t relax. That coffin feeling, the contents of the emptiness inside had him wanting to explode out of his skin. As much as he’d hated the ruckus, it had been a distraction. Ash bored his nails into the heels of his hands, then started pinching his thighs. Noticed Navarrete seemed to be punching her leg harder beside him, which agitated him even more.
There was a crushing feeling in his chest, a stinging behind his eyes. Don’t you dare fucking panic. Ash knew, because of Dad, because of Bram Baptiste, and other kids in his Academy days—letting them see you scared was suicide.
He winched his eyes shut tight, took a breath. A new kind of thought came to him. He found his hand slipping into one of his coat pockets, a new one he’d sewn on just that morning, to hold a special item.
His fingers traced the shape of the crystal rose, and suddenly he could see the object vividly in his mind’s eye, every bit as clearly as if with his gnostic sight—the flawless geometry of its petals, both individually and in their arrangement relative to one another. Then came an explosion of color, a vision of the most perfect human face he’d ever seen, and the ivory of a grand piano’s keys vibrating against his fingertips, reverberating his whole being, while the fine hairs on his left forearm listed curiously toward a stranger’s near-touch.
A humming warmth at Ash’s center bloomed outward, washing away the darkness and cold. There came a pleasant tingling in his limbs, pockets of tension releasing, yielding involuntary movements, easing his body into alignment—bright energy flowing, electric and alive. Almost as if, somehow, in spite of the bracers, mana was moving, unobstructed, through his entire system.
Ash rested in the center of this warm and weightless feeling. Heard his thinking mind ask itself how this could even be possible. Almost giggled out loud.
‘As within, so without’—right, Val? A fellow alchemist would know.
His mind’s eye brought up the symbol from Valentine’s card.
‘Perfection is possible.’
It’s really out there, isn’t it?
I know I haven’t seen the last of you…
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