by India Arden
The heavy wooden furniture was pushed back against the walls, and the room was now dominated by machines and monitors. To my great relief, Dorothea wasn’t there. It was doubtful she even stayed in the same quarters as her husband, let alone the same room. Even if, once upon a time, they had shared a bed, it would’ve been years ago. Besides, who could sleep with all the electronic humming and beeping?
In the center of all the elaborate equipment was a hospital bed, and on that adjustable mattress, head slightly raised, lay Fathom, the reigning Master of Water. He looked nothing at all like the disapproving middle-aged man who’d regarded my mother’s visits with obvious distaste, or the stately eldest figure of the current reigning Tetrad. Just a decrepit, sunken old man.
“Clear that table,” Blake said, and Chad swept a pile of gauze and medical supplies to the floor. Blake set down the case and popped it open.
The rest of us leaned in to get a look at what was inside. Even me.
The device was about the general shape of a machine gun, but it looked far more complicated than any weapon I’d ever seen—and I’ve watched plenty of Netflix. Where a normal weapon would be black steel or plastic with a few moving parts, the thing Blake had created was a bundle of conduits and tubes. Some of them, I’d liberated from The Great Machine. Others had been scrounged from other sources, probably just as illicit. There was brass and glass, just like the big distiller, but other things too. Modern things. Steel. Even plastic. And a big battery pack taped to the side, the type of thing that would run a power tool, and a collection vessel that appeared to be an insulated stainless steel decanter.
“You can’t possibly be serious!” Gus exclaimed, slurring his words. “This tiny thing? Given how long it takes the real McCoy to piss out a few drops of Arcanum, with this little gem, you should have enough to Transfigure in, what? Maybe a hundred years?”
It was too dim in Fathom’s chambers to see if Blake’s neck had gone red; I was guessing it had. But before he could flip out on Gus, Chad surprised me by jumping to my brother’s defense. “He’s clearly spent a lot of time on this—and he was reassembling the motor on his train set back when you were still masturbating into your teddy bear.”
“Her name was Roxanne.”
“So, don’t be so quick to discount it. I, for one, can’t wait to see it in action.”
Blake hoisted the invention from its case, and turned to the ailing Water Master, who gave a thready moan in his sleep. “If he tries to get away, hold him down.”
“It’s not as if he’ll get very far,” Chad said, and Gus gave a drunken snort.
Blake didn’t take well to his cronies marring the momentous occasion with levity. He gave them a look nasty enough to peel paint from the walls, a look they were entirely oblivious to, and with a huff, turned his attention to his gun. He slipped a wire into the power source and snapped it into place, and the other two immediately fell silent.
Chad reached toward it, then paused, as if he felt something emanating from the machine. “Whoa. Is that…is it safe?”
Blake’s anger gave way to a smug I-told-you-so look. “It hasn’t killed any lab rats, if that’s what you mean. Then again, they don’t have much Arcanum to lose. Stay away from the nozzle and you’ll be fine.”
Chad snatched his hand away, and Gus took a step back, sobering slightly. “Will the oxygen mask be in the way?” he asked, as if he was hoping Blake would change his mind and call the whole thing off.
“Unlikely. The extraction point isn’t in the head.” He marched up to the bed and aimed the nozzle directly in the center of the old man’s torso, right at the solar plexus. He planted his feet, then told the other two, “Expose the sigil.”
I’d spent my whole life thinking those elemental symbols were some kind of artistic license—right up until I saw one appear on Flood’s body. Apparently, I didn’t know half as much about the Arcanum as I’d always thought—and I’d studied alongside the Aspirants. All that time, I had no idea the mark was physically visible, let alone permanent. But when Gus pulled down the blankets and Chad yanked up the Water Master’s hospital gown, there it was, on a jaundiced old body splotched with half-healed bedsores. A spiral within a diamond. Glowing blue. Clearly visible…but just for a moment. And then Fathom realized there was more going on than some nurse checking his vitals and taking things a little too far, and he tried to wrestle down his hospital gown.
“What’s going on?” he demanded, in a feeble voice muffled by the oxygen mask. “What are you doing?”
“Hold him still,” Blake said coldly. Chad grabbed one arm, but Gus seemed frozen in place, suddenly sobered by the physicality of the old man’s body, the reality of what they were doing.
“You’re neck-deep in this too, sport,” Chad told him with a grim smile. “The staff saw all of us. So, you might as well get with the program, or else we all go down.”
With a look of distaste, Gus grabbed the old man’s other arm and held him, while I frantically cast around for an intercom, a phone, anything to call for help, but saw nothing amid the intrusive medical equipment.
When Blake pulled the trigger and the distiller gun hummed to life, I didn’t just see it, and I didn’t just hear it. Somehow, I felt it. Not with my nerve endings, but with something deeper. A force so ancient, it didn’t resonate in my cells or atoms, but the spaces between.
The gun didn’t light up.
It consumed the light.
Fathom arched up off the mattress, body stiff and wracked with spasm. Even the scream was sucked out of him, leaving nothing but a broken exhalation. It wasn’t an instantaneous thing—that would have been too merciful. It took nearly a minute for the Master’s symbol to go dark, and his body to fall, limp, to the mattress.
And that’s when his monitors began to shrill.
Chad slapped at a bleeping EKG, but the shut-off switch evaded him. Gus recoiled, babbling, “What do we do? What do we do?”
They both looked to Blake, their ringleader, but he was too busy fiddling with his distiller gun to care about the riot of alarms going off all around him. Chad dredged up some bravado and declared, “We were right to be so concerned about Fathom.” He looked me in the eye and said, “Isn’t that so?” Somehow, I nodded. “Turns out we were just in time. The day’s excitement was too much for him and he slipped away.”
“Slipped away,” Gus repeated. “Yeah. That sounds peaceful.”
I stared down at the corpse, horrified, stunned. The oxygen mask hung askew, the bedclothes were twisted, and his face was distorted in a death rictus. Chad tugged down the hospital gown to cover the dead Master’s pathetic nakedness. “A little help here?” he snapped.
Wincing, Gus tried to straighten out the pillows without actually touching the dead man. But my brother? He looked around at the proceedings as if he’d just now noticed they’d left a corpse behind, and said, “Don’t waste your time. He was at death’s door to begin with. Everyone knows it. And if they question our explanation, we’ll just cast suspicion on dear old Flood. After all, it’s not as if any of us had something to gain from Fathom’s death. Not that they know of.” He gave his distiller gun a shake. No, not a distiller. An extractor. He turned to me. “Now be a good sister and call for help. It’s obvious you’ve been dying to sound the alarm all along.”
Maybe so. But not anymore. My voice was barely a croak when I found the intercom. Hesitant, and choked with tears.
Three staff members came running in, attendants with medical training. They yanked a crash cart away from the wall and gathered purposefully around the Water Master’s body. “How can I help?” Blake said, shouldering a nurse aside.
“Please,” the bravest of the team told him. “Just stay out of the way and let us do our job.”
Blake gave the rest of us a supercilious nod, and said, “You heard the man. Let’s get out of their hair.”
I lingered briefly in the doorway as more workers rushed in, while the first batch administered CPR and charged paddle
s. They were rushing around, not because they thought they could save the old man—it couldn’t have been more obvious that he was gone—but because there’d be hell to pay if they didn’t put on a convincing show of effort.
Blake came to get me. He sank his fingers painfully into bruises Chad had made on my arm. On purpose. “Come on, Sis. Time to go revel in our success. After all…none of this would have been possible without you.”
9
With Chad and Gus flanking us, Blake dragged me into a less trafficked part of the estate, the labs and workshops where the four of us had done our schooling. No partiers there, in the dull, dark, utilitarian wing. And the ever-present servants who were usually lingering in the background? None.
Still, my brother might be foolishly brave, but his cohorts weren’t. Blake was the legacy of Fire, but the other two were only Aspirants. And more Aspirants could be trained by the time the next dose of Arcanum was ready. At least…I hoped so.
“What if there were video cameras?” Gus asked nervously. Not upset that they’d just murdered an Arcane Master—just scared they’d get caught.
Chad said, “There wouldn’t be. Fathom’s been pretty scarce these past few months. He didn’t want anyone seeing him like that. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to leave a record of it.”
“But what exactly did that thing do to the old man?” Gus veered away from Blake as he walked, as if he feared the extractor might suck the life out of him too, were he to accidentally brush up against it. “Scramble his neurological impulses? Disrupt his heartbeat?”
“I told you,” Blake said calmly. “It’s a highly focused instrument.” He paused beside the door to an unused laboratory—the one he’d taken over as his workroom—and handed me off to Chad. My arm throbbed as Chad clenched it, right over all the old bruises, and held on tight. As if I was capable of outrunning any of them. “It distilled his Arcanum.”
Blake unlocked the door and ushered us all in.
As children, the four of us had spent many hours in the lab. While regular kids took app development and women’s history, we were drilled in alchemy and humors. Modern science too, of course. But with Arcanum not entirely understood yet, our education had to be thorough.
The room and all its contents had been retired after the accident—the one where Blake’s rival lost half his face. The tools had been expanded, with more sensitive oscilloscopes and hotter convection ovens replacing the rows of identical student equipment we’d all once used, and the schoolroom putty color of the walls was repainted a smoldering amber. But the industrial flooring where he’d been standing was still slightly scorched. When I thought about how long Blake had waited to commandeer that room for himself, and how much satisfaction he must’ve got from looking at that scorch, I felt physically sick.
Blake turned on a spotlight in the center of the room and placed the extractor on the table beneath it. He took stock of each of us with a long, pointed look, then wordlessly unscrewed the stainless steel bottle from its seating.
It sloshed as if it was at least half full.
All three of us caught our breath. “It can’t be,” Gus said, in an awed tone of voice that hinted, maybe it is.
Arcanum is so potent, it’s measured in drams—the amount of arcanum it takes to fill the sacred vessel could fit in the palm of your hand. But the bottle in Blake’s hand? There’d been a definite slosh.
“It’s condensation,” Chad insisted. “Mostly water. Seriously, what else could it be?”
“Really?” my brother purred in grand self-satisfaction. Goosebumps raced down my arms. “Does water do this?” In a delicate motion, he decanted a single drop of fluid on his fingertip and held the bead up to the light.
Water really didn’t bead like that.
A wicked smile crept across his face, and he dipped his hand toward the floor.
The bead defied gravity…and crawled up into his palm.
Chad stared, mouth open, dumbfounded. Gus literally reeled. My vision tunneled as if I might pass out. Wars were fought in the amount of time it took to distill a drop of Arcanum. Presidents came and went. Children became teenagers and adults got old. And there Blake was, playing with it like a yo-yo.
Because what did a single drop matter when he had enough Arcanum to slosh?
“How much is there?” Chad said breathlessly. “We need to measure it. Do you realize how huge this is? There might be enough for an actual Transfiguration.”
“Hell, yeah,” Gus said, “And then some—I heard it. I’ll bet there’s enough for us all.”
Blake scraped the bead of Arcanum into the stainless steel bottle and quickly capped it.
“It can’t possibly be Arcanum,” Chad said reflexively, but the words were hollow.
“But what if it is?” Gus said. “It looks right. It acts right. What else could it be?”
Chad was a businessman. He knew you couldn’t materialize something precious from thin air. “How could there possibly be this much Arcanum in one man’s body?”
“Not just any man,” Blake said, “but an Arcane Master. Think of him as a petri dish. The old man’s been carrying around the Arcanum for nearly fifty years. That’s five decades it’s been changing his physiology. Half a century to take seed.”
“You can grow a hell of a tree in that amount of time from just a tiny seed,” Gus said. “Why not Arcanum?”
Chad wasn’t buying it. “If that’s the case, why wait years for the distillation process if the Arcanum can simply be extracted?”
I knew the answer to that. Because it took a nasty little mind like Blake’s to come up with the idea. Someone entitled enough to think he deserved every power and privilege. Someone ruthless enough to take a life to get it. And someone dogged enough to figure out how to take what he wanted.
In the distance, an ambulance siren whooped. Too late for Fathom. Much too late.
Blake turned to me. “Well, Aurora? You’ve been toiling at The Great Machine for years. You’ve had a better look at the Arcanum than any of us. Hell, you even had the honor of bearing the Vessel from the distilling chamber. What’s your verdict?”
There was so much sarcasm in his voice, so much obstinance, as if he was daring me to contradict him just so he could shoot me down. I answered the only way I could: with the truth. “Arcanum is present all around us—the sea, the earth, the sky. But the human body? We don’t know. We have no way of measuring. Before today, I would have said it might be possible, but only in theory. But now?” I glanced at the extractor and shuddered. “It looks like Arcanum to me.”
I never knew how Blake was going to react, and this time was no different. Instead of satisfying him, my answer only made him more curious. “What did you get out of it, I wonder? All those years, trapped underground like an earthworm, chewing your way through a miserable, unsung life…and for what?”
That hurt. Much more than I would have expected.
He turned to a cabinet and pulled out a tempered glass graduated cylinder. “If I were to pour—right now—how long would it take the Arcanum to turn gaseous and escape into the air?”
“It depends,” I said quickly. “Room temperature. Thermal conductivity—”
“Minutes? Seconds?”
The boiling point of Arcanum is elusive. I shook my head helplessly. “I can’t say.”
He tutted mockingly. “And yet you claim to be the expert. Well, then. If you don’t know, I suppose we’ll need to find out.”
Like the techs maintaining The Great Machine when the last drop of Arcanum wobbled at the tip of the nozzle, everyone in the room held their breath as Blake screwed off the top of the decanter…and poured.
Three drams. Enough for a Transfiguration.
Stubbornly, I told myself the contents couldn’t possibly be Arcanum. But the way the stark overhead light gleamed off its milky, silvery surface, it sure as hell looked like it. I didn’t say it out loud. But my brother knew me—too well—and he saw the recognition in my eyes. With a pair of tongs,
he picked up the glass cylinder, and the metallic semi-solid liquid bowed as if it wanted to creep up the sides.
“Tell me,” he said. “All that time, thanklessly slaving over that archaic contraption, were you ever once jealous that you—the first-born child of the House of Fire—weren’t in line to receive it yourself?”
Maybe. But now I was faced with the very real possibility that I might. Not as an Aspirant, but an unwilling test subject.
In the mid-Nineteenth Century, while the rest of the country was fighting itself, the original Font was discovered while an enterprising family mined for lead, hoping to make bullets. Who’s to say what inspired them to taste it? Maybe the desire to create a new patent medicine. Although they never documented their reasoning, the four Thompson brothers Transfigured into the first Arcane Tetrad.
Their sister Grace, however….
She evaporated.
Blake knew the story as well as I did. He held my gaze for one long moment, the dose of Arcanum raised between us, surface quivering as its temperature rose toward the cusp of its variable boiling point. “Please,” I said simply, but the Arcanum was forming beads on its own surface. The official Vessel was stainless steel, opaque, so I’d never actually seen that amount of Arcanum before. It was beautiful…or maybe horrible. I couldn’t quite decide.
But one thing was very clear. At that moment, I realized I’d known all along that Blake hadn’t grown out of his cruelty. I’d simply chosen to ignore it. Because even a cruel ally was better than none at all.
And now I would pay the price.
I was so sure he’d test the Arcanum on me—shove the glassware to my lips and have his horrid friends hold my head while the Arcanum vaporized into my sinuses and down my throat—that I was stunned when, instead, he placed the vessel to his own lips. At the touch of his warmth, the Arcanum rushed up to meet him. And in less than the span of a heartbeat, it was gone.
For just a moment, I saw a glimpse of the child my brother used to be. Too smart for his own good, always, but on rare occasion, haunted by the fear that maybe he’d acted without a key piece of knowledge…and maybe his machinations would come tumbling down around him.
