Archive of Our Own

Aiden

Like hearts, souls degraded by degrees. Unlike hearts, though, the degradation of souls could fuel alchemy.

Every day, Aiden sat down in front of hundreds of pounds of Grand Central’s proprietary mix of minerals and shredded his own soul for pieces of that tenuous, valuable magic that would convert the myriad of minerals mixed with Philosopher’s Stone into the most valuable drug in the world and the source of Grand Central's considerable wealth and power: sand.

Sand elevated everything about a person. It straightened their posture, glossed their hair, firmed up their handshakes, and cranked their charm up. People spoke faster and more eloquently on sand because they thought faster. But it also elevated peoples’ flaws. The few times Aiden had taken it, he'd completely lost his memories of the hours afterwards. Nick told him later that he'd locked people into hours-long debates about the correct way a dog owner should conduct themselves in society and he was sure Slime had a devastatingly humiliating video of him high out of his mind saved somewhere.

While the use of sand was extremely common, even among people who knew nothing about alchemy, Aiden's job discouraged him from taking it. Philosophers already tended to die young, and they were too valuable to speed up that process anymore. Besides, he didn’t need to charm people like Nick or defend himself like Ludwig. All he had to do was produce the drug that ran through Grand Central’s veins.

A violent jerk of heat down his back made him wince. He pulled his hands off the box, disconnecting from the sand.

Across the room, Ludwig looked up. “You good?”

“Fine,” Aiden hissed through his teeth. “I’ve just been sitting for too long.”

The more hours he devoted to pulling out his own soul, the more hell he wrecked on his body. Aiden was only twenty-eight, but sudden pains like these were happening more often.

He was aging too quickly, and they both knew it.

“Aimen,” Ludwig said, rising from his desk. “Do you need a break?”

Aiden looked down at the box of fine white powder, now sparkling with fragments of his own soul. It was ready to be trucked to the harbor alongside the hundreds of other boxes of sand that he and his fellow philosophers had produced in the past week. All of this sand would be shipped off to Babylonia and Pirenne soon enough, to fuel their celebrities and politicians. Anybody important enough to afford sand took it, and their dealers all got it from one of the major alchemical syndicates.

Every major alchemical syndicate had their own production of sand, but everyone knew that if they wanted to feel the best, smoothest high, they had to go to Grand Central. After all, Grand Central had invented the formula, so they'd had the most time to iterate. Sand was the foundation of all of Grand Central's power. Whereas every other syndicate had been around for hundreds of years, Grand Central wasn't even fifty years old. Their dominance in sand was so influential, though, that they'd been able to establish global power to rival the Lumines.

Grand Central and Lumines might appear like corporations to outsiders, with Grand Central's name stamped onto the glorious art deco facade of the Winged Towers, yet they handled traitors with the swift brutality of gangs, because that was the only way to protect a secret as valuable as the formula for high quality sand.

But Lumines was making serious progress in refining their version of sand, and Aiden was scared that they’d start undercutting their deals with Hong Meng. Aiden was always scared of something shifting in the web of global alchemical power. Things were going so well for him and his family, he didn’t want to watch it come crashing down.

Ludwig walked over to him and placed his warm hands on Aiden’s shoulders, squeezing the tension out of his back. “Relax. This looks great. I think you need to rest.”

“Okay,” Aiden agreed, rubbing his temples. “Let me get my stuff and I’ll head home.”

“Sleep here,” Lud suggested, gently replacing Aiden’s hands with his own to dissolve the migraine growing there. “I won’t be here anyway, I have to meet with the mayor.”

Aiden frowned. “Why? Is something wrong?”

“Just making sure the campaign is to our liking.”

Ludwig tugged his suit jacket on, transforming himself from Aiden’s partner into the sparkling heir of Grand Central. The golden pin with Grand Central’s winged lions gleamed on his lapel.

He pressed a kiss to Aiden’s cheek. “Stay here, okay?”

“I will,” Aiden promised.

“And don’t do any more work!”

Aiden sighed. “I promise I won’t.”

Ludwig

Sliding into the car, Ludwig felt a twist of anxiety in his gut. Aiden looked bad. Maybe Ludwig shouldn’t have signed those deals with Pirenne. He’d clearly overestimated how many philosophers he’d have at his disposal by now. They'd lost one a few months before he'd agreed to send Pirenne this shipment, and he'd hoped that they would have a replacement by now.

But it was hard to find people with the right knack for philosophy. Philosophers were the most valuable students of alchemy, kept out of even syndicate wars, because their work demanded so much of their souls. Grand Central had hoped to get six high-level philosophers from Aiden’s graduating class of fifty, but one had started trading information with Lumines, so to meet the quota, Ludwig had asked Aiden to switch from alchiatry to philosphy when he was twelve. Young enough to make the switch, but not easily, and not without traces of his healing roots lingering in all his alchemy. Ludwig had never told Aiden this, but he could tell when his sand was made by somebody else, and it didn't hit the same without Aiden's soothing alchemical signature zipping through his veins.

Each alchemical specialty fine-tuned such a specific relationship between the user’s soul and matter that Ludwig had never heard of any alchemist in history—including Newton and Shakespeare—having more than one specialty. But he desperately wished it had been possible for Aiden to continue learning how to heal. And not just because he wanted Aiden to do what he was actually passionate about, either. Alchiatry was plenty valuable during times as tense as these. Slime could’ve used an assistant.

The car rolled to a stop in front of a park. Other congressmen under Grand Central’s thumb liked to meet in hotel bars or dimly-lit restaurants, but Stanz’s family-man image ran surprisingly deep.

Ludwig met him on their usual bench. At this hour, the park was quiet, but something about Stanz’s expression made him wonder if he was imagining his own daughter playing here one day, safe under the protection of Grand Central. Stanz gave them their exclusions from port regulations and taxes and they gave Stanz money and peace of mind. A beautiful exchange that had worked for decades with different mayors.

“How’s the wife?” Ludwig began.

“Mr. Ahgren!” Stanz said with a start. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. Richelle’s good, yeah, she’s good.”

“Glad to hear it. You’ll do well in this election, I’m sure.”

Stanz scratched the back of his neck. “Um, thank you. But my opponent is… formidable.”

“We’ll handle QT,” Ludwig promised.

For the past year, QT had been a consistent thorn at his side as she swayed the people from the familiar strength of Stanz and his Grand Central backing. All her campaigning was, naturally, funded by Lumines and their goddamn fox logo.

Grand Central’s rival syndicate in the United States, Lumines, had its roots in Great Britain in the Middle Ages. They had a firm hold on Gotham, which always got on Ludwig’s nerves because that was where his parents had first discovered sand. Grand Central got its name from Gotham and they had to share the damn place with another syndicate. He wasn’t about to share Angel City too.

“You have a debate next week,” Ludwig said.

Stanz shifted next to him, keenly aware of what Ludwig would say next.

But Ludwig didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to, when the simple action of reaching into his jacket pocket and offering a vial full of sand would achieve so much more than words.

“Thank you,” Stanz said, accepting it clumsily.

Ludwig was already standing. He patted Stanz on his back. “Win for us.”

Stanz

In an ideal world, Stanz wouldn’t take sand. He wouldn’t need it to be the kind of candidate that made Angel City someplace worth living. But he lived in the real world, where he—like a supermodel before they walked—felt that he needed sand, so he did.

He tried to save it for special occasions, because coming down from that sparkling high made him feel jittery with self-consciousness. But when he practiced his points in front of his bathroom mirror, he couldn’t imagine saying them for real without sand.

While his wife slept, Stanz muttered responses to a fake-QT in his head.

By the time he knew which of them would have Angel City, he’d be a dad. In the next couple of months, this house would be transformed by the cries and coos of a whole new person. Every time he thought about that, he felt shaky.

So much was riding on this election. Not just security for his family, but a better future for Angel City. Stanz envisioned a version of the city where corporations like Grand Central and Lumines had a little less power.

When Stanz drove past the Winged Towers, their distinct silhouette unnerved him, and he was sure his constituency felt the same. There was something fishy about Grand Central and the way Ludwig had promised to “take care of” QT. She was a worrying opponent, but Stanz didn’t want her to be hurt.

If Ludwig hadn’t reached out four years ago, Stanz never would’ve had this opportunity. As payback, Stanz owed him a loyalty that felt more and more like a vice squeezing around his own neck.

But if he was going to dismantle something that felt woven into the fabric of his reality, he needed some sleep. Sighing to himself, he turned off the light and went to bed, trying to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach.

Aiden

Aiden couldn’t sleep. Even though the mattress was blessedly gentle on his aching back, something about being on Lud’s bed without him was disquieting. He could hear the air conditioning unit too well, and the dark shapes of his credenza and nightstands felt intimidatingly large even in the large room.

The Red City was beautiful enough to be somebody’s wedding venue, but the parts of it that were designed for Ludwig were eye-wateringly luxurious. Every part of Lud’s life was cushioned to prevent any hint of pain, but it couldn’t protect him from the side effects of sand on his body.

Aiden hoped he hadn’t taken any today. He shouldn’t have needed it for Stanz, but Aiden didn’t know what other meetings he’d had. A man with as much power as Ludwig had needed to be his best, most charismatic self quite often. But beneath all that sparkling charm, sand made him eerily… disconnected from people.

Most didn’t notice because Ludwig was naturally good at seeing people’s motivations, so sand only enhanced his ability to adjust himself to them. But Aiden knew that that wasn’t the same thing as actually listening to the nuances of someone else’s desires.

In general, Ludwig on sand was a Ludwig who listened even less than usual. Which made him pretty annoying in bed.

Not that Aiden thought they’d fuck tonight. To be honest, they didn’t fuck as often as people imagined, or as much as his brothers insinuated in their gross jokes. Aiden still had his own apartment in the Red City, and it usually made more sense for him to stay there than be here.

He always put himself wherever Ludwig asked, though. Aiden owed Ludwig more than love at this point—he owed him loyalty. After Aiden’s dad lost his job, someone from Grand Central had measured the strength of Aiden’s soul and recommended him to Ludwig’s mom, who sent a private car to pick him up from his apartment and whisk him to the Red City.

When he closed his eyes, Aiden could still envision the test Ludwig had made him take that day, kneeling at the paved stones that turned out to not be stones at all but sheets of alchemical materials: zinc, wood, glass, copper, salt. The sun had beat down on Aiden’s neck, and he remembered looking fearfully up at Ludwig and thinking he resembled a god.

Then Ludwig had pulled off his own tie and secured it over Aiden’s eyes, stealing his vision.

Gently, Ludwig moved Aiden’s hand over a stone. “What is it?”

Aiden’s heart had pounded against his chest, aching with the tenuous stretch of his future balanced on this question. He had no way of knowing what his hand was touching.

But if he answered wrong, he’d have to go back to the apartment they were close to getting evicted out of, to brothers as hungry as he was. He’d go back having tasted the luxury of private cars and beautiful campuses knowing he could never have it again. If he answered wrong, this brief moment at nine years old would be the peak of his life.

“Use your soul,” Ludwig whispered.

Aiden had never performed alchemy before in his life, had only heard whispers of it in the streets when people in nice suits sat beside him in restaurants and he paid too close attention to their words and hands as forks melted into spoons in their grip. He wasn’t supposed to have seen even that.

Alchemy was a secret practice settled under layers of corporate bureaucracy and sand purchases.

Rolling over on Ludwig’s too-firm pillow, Aiden remembered how terrifying it had been to squeeze his eyes shut and reach for the brightness in his chest, pulling past the staggering pain until he could feel the crystalline lattice structure under his hand. Like the smell of a childhood kitchen, the structure was so deeply familiar that it defied articulation. He was too young to have a concept of chemistry, but he could feel the arrangement of the atoms and the wonder at that overtook his pain.

“Quartz,” he gasped, then crumpled forward.

Ludwig had grasped his hand, helping Aiden up. Then pulled down the tie. Aiden still remembered how bright the sun had been.

“You were right,” he said, sounding startled.

Aiden was the only kid from his year who’d passed that particular exam. And for that, his brothers were allowed to study at the Red City too. They both became polemists, trained in alchemical combat that hurt just to watch.

Alchemy could steal life from an object, but it could never go in the reverse, so when his brothers turned flesh to wood and bones to metal, even an alchiatrist couldn’t completely undo it. But Aiden spent his first three years in the Red City studying to get as close as he could.

Then Ludwig asked him to be a philosopher instead. It was easier work than negotiating the damaged cells around a bullet wound, but it was much more taxing on his body. He would’ve considered leaving, but for every month they stayed at the Red City, each of the brothers sent home a thousand dollars. And when they graduated, two hundred thousand dollars materialized in the bank accounts that Grand Central set up for them.

Aiden owed everything to Ludwig and his family. Everything.

Nick

Nick had no clue what the upper floors of the Winged Towers were normally used for, because every time he was up there, it was for a party.

Tonight, they were celebrating the birthday of the police chief’s daughter, who was sparkling under the lights in her deep purple gown that swirled around her long, tanned legs. She’d offered him her vape three times and seemed to be going for a fourth when Nick brushed her arm, removing some of the noradrenaline swirling around her systems and replacing it with serotonin. Just for the hell of it, he also morphed some of the nicotine into oxygen in her lungs.

Her friends giggled at the pleasure on her face.

“Tell us about this tattoo,” she said, tracing his sleeve.

He smiled and launched into the same sanitized story that he’d used dozens of times before at parties just like this one, where everyone had a sand-induced sparkle to their skin but were still startled by any little magic trick.

People like this welcomed alchemy into their lives every single day without even realizing it. They watched Nick's coworkers turn flowers to gold and clapped like it was a magic trick. And they were so trusting of sand, so willing to see where this magic drug took them without ever wondering if there might be real magic to it.

Regulators would never be able to do a deeper investigation of it, either, because Ludwig had most of California’s congressmen in his pocket and Lumines had the other ones. Working for Grand Central had made Nick lose most of his faith in humanity, but that was fine because these girls weren’t looking for faith.

They were looking for a good time and a good reminder that their dads shouldn’t upset Grand Central because then they might leave and take their handsome employees with them.

As a bioalchemist, Nick was particularly well-suited for charming people, and sand only made him better at it. His chest felt tender at the end of every night, but he always had a secret to tell or a sealed deal to tell Ludwig about, and that was what mattered.

Tonight, he wasn’t on much sand anyway. Just enough that, when a girl pulled out her phone for a photo and he saw the headline from a digital newspaper, he could smile emotionlessly instead of frowning.

He didn’t like bringing Ludwig bad news.

Ludwig

When he got home, Nick was waiting at the door, looking anxious.

“What is it?” Ludwig demanded.

“Stanz is in the news.”

"Let me see.”

Nick shoved a phone in his face. The headline read: Favored Mayoral Candidate Accepts Bribes linked to Grand Central. Naturally, it was released by one of the journals under the Lumines’ control.

“Fuck,” Ludwig hissed.

Nick tried to reach out, but Ludwig pulled away, not wanting any bioalchemy done to him now. It still freaked him out a bit, how someone could force an emotion onto his body with just a touch. Nick could, and had, literally force someone to piss themselves.

“I’m sorry, boss. If it helps, the evidence is pretty flimsy.”

“Poke every hole you can in it,” Ludwig instructed. “I’ll deal with this tomorrow.”

“Got it.”

Ludwig was about to leave when he remembered what he’d sent Nick to do. “And the police chief’s daughter?”

“She’s all in.”

“Good.”

He stormed into his room, stilling when he saw Aiden sleeping peacefully. His long, lean body was curled under the thick comforter. Ludwig wanted to stay in the doorway forever, watching Aiden look so painless.

Instead, he got ready for bed and slid under the blankets, onto the mattress that someone else had bought for him because other people decided every aspect of Ludwig’s home and life except for Aiden.

If his family had had it their way, Grand Central would’ve locked Aiden in a factory leaning over enormous piles of sand for sixteen hours a day until his soul was expended and they delivered a cold message to his father about an underlying heart condition. Then they'd stick another student in his place. Only Ludwig’s intervention had saved Aiden from that fate.

There were so many alternate paths Aiden’s life could’ve taken, if only he hadn’t caught Ludwig’s eye during elementary school. Ludwig was the one who'd recognized the brightness in Aiden's eyes. When he'd told his mom about it, she agreed to let him bring Aiden to the Red City. But, she warned, Ludwig would be responsible if he failed the tests.

Not everyone was cut out to be an alchemist. The vivacity and strength of a soul was what differentiated an alchemist from a dead body.

People said that those souls were rare, but Ludwig thought it was really just rare to find such souls young enough. Shredding ones’ own life force required a certain pain tolerance that could only be taught to kids before they learned better. If Aiden had gone unnoticed for another decade, he probably wouldn’t have been able to look inwards at his own fragile source of magic and yank.

Now, he did it for hours on end every day. Just for Ludwig and Ludwig’s deals.

The blankets shifted. “Ludwig?” Aiden’s hand patted around until it came to rest on Ludwig’s face.

“Hi,” Ludwig said quietly.

“Missed you.”

“I know. I missed you too.”

“How’s Stanz?”

“He’s fine. I’m sure he’ll win.”

“Not worried ‘bout QT?”

“No,” Ludwig lied, “I have her handled.”

Aiden

“Should I get Nick?”

Aiden shook his head, waving Ethan away. Already, the pain was fading. “I’m fine. Sorry for scaring you.”

Ethan didn’t look scared at all, though. He looked frustrated.

“You’re going too far.”

“Lud needs a lot of sand.”

Ethan’s mouth pressed into a flat line. He looked so serious, shoulders back, gaze sharp. Pure Grand Central polemist without a trace the kid Aiden had helped raise. His winged lion pin shone in the light, making Aiden realize that he'd forgotten to put his own on that morning. Aiden technically outranked his brother, but no onlooker would think that.

“If you keep going like this, you’ll die.”

Aiden exhaled. “It won’t be much longer. Only until the election.”

“That’s months away!”

"The other philosophers are helping. Don’t worry, okay? This is temporary.”

He tried to sound reassuring to Ethan, but it fell flat because he didn't totally believe himself. QT was the most frustrating roadblock Aiden had ever seen Ludwig encounter. He was asking Aiden to stay over almost every night.

But every night, when he slid into bed, he promised things would be alright. Aiden was very familiar with Ludwig’s promises. They were the foundation of their whole relationship. When anxiety gnawed at the edges of Aiden’s mind, he looked at the designer suits in his closet and the imported wines in his little wine fridge and tried to remind himself that Ludwig kept his promises.

After four days straight of this, though, Aiden had to say something.

“I feel like I’m your wife at home getting all these letters pretending that the warfront is just fine,” he told Ludwig in the courtyard where he’d taken that entrance exam. The last strands of sunlight shone on the gold and steel, and one square of glass reflected the pinks and purples of dusk.

In the Red City, even the air smelled sweeter. It broke Aiden’s brain, how a syndicate as brutal as Grand Central could operate out of a campus this idyllic. They operated a goddamn hotel here.

Ludwig laughed quietly. “It’s not like that. I promise things are chill.”

“You’re lying. I know you are.”

“Aimen—”

Aiden exhaled. “It’s… Well, I won’t tell you that it’s okay, but I understand that you’re trying to protect me. I just wish you didn’t feel like you had to.”

“I just can’t figure out how Lumines knows so much.”

“Do you think we have a spy here?”

“That or we’ve got more loose ends than I thought.”

Aiden knew how carefully Ludwig’s family managed Grand Central’s affairs. “There’s no way it’s that.”

“I’m looking into everything. How’s your end of things?”

Boring. Tedious and painful at the same time. The more sand Ludwig took, the more Aiden had to make. And Ludwig was consuming a lot. He was going through multiple vials a day, equivalent to nearly a dozen pills. What exactly did he think all that charisma and energy was going to achieve for him?

“Fine,” Aiden said.

“You know, you’ve made a lot more sand than I asked.”

“Because there’s nothing else I can do!” Aiden said into the wind.

Ludwig’s car arrived. “You can take a rest,” Ludwig said.

Rest was the last thing Aiden wanted to do. “I don’t want to do that,” Aiden tried to say.

But Ludwig was already folding himself into the car.

Slime

Something fishy was going on. This was the third patient in a month that he had to repair after a practice session with Ethan. He knew polemists were brutal, but they were usually more considerate to him.

The polemists could turn their enemies’ skulls into iron all they wanted, but the second they started doing it to each other, it became Slime’s problem.

As the on-site alchiatrist, Slime’s services were supposed to be available for emergencies. He wasn’t some personal healer hired to clean up the messes of one polemist who couldn’t control himself, and he made sure the trainer knew that. But every time he complained, she shrugged apologetically.

“I’ve told him, but he’s so fast! Which we appreciate, of course. But I turn around and—”

Slime waved his hand, understanding immediately. “I get it. It’s not your fault. I’ll talk to him myself.”

But Ethan was made of all the steel that Aiden lacked. He looked Slime dead in the eyes and said, “You don’t understand.”

That had been two weeks ago. As he hollowed out the wooden knuckles of Ethan’s poor victim, wishing Ethan had just turned his sweat into a mild acid because at least damaged skin cells could be healed with alchemy, Slime vowed to take the nuclear option. He had to tell Ludwig about this.

But the next time he saw the guy, Ludwig was getting into another private car with that dangerously focused gaze that meant he was on way too much sand. Lately, that was the only expression Slime saw him wear.

“Owww!” the kid wailed.

“Sorry, man,” Slime said. “Should’ve defended yourself better.”

“It hurts!”

Alchemy always did.

That was why Slime’s own chest sparked with pain right now, and why Aiden walked like he was about sixty years old. Slime and Nick had both tried fixing him in their own ways, but their relief was always temporary and at a cost to themselves.

It was a tough equation to balance, and Ethan was making it worse every time he hurt one of his colleagues.

Slime kind of understood, though. Grand Central’s inner politics were enough to make a man turn to drastic measures. Maybe the other polemists were bullying Ethan for being a nepotism hire or something. Seemed incredibly immature for grown adults, but it was possible. Or maybe Ethan just had issues with self-control. No matter what, though, it was Slime’s problem now and Slime didn’t need any more problems.

Looking at his patient, his head swam with all the transformations he’d have to do. Reaching for his bottle of sand pills, he took one dry and let the world sharpen.

Ludwig

Turning fire to water using the power of his own soul had hurt less than Aiden’s heartbroken expression. He wasn’t trying to hold Aiden at a distance, but what else could he do? Syndicate business was as dangerous as it was dazzling, and he didn’t think it was wrong to shield Aiden from as much of it as he could. Aiden had suffered enough already, putting his body through the sandmaking process.

Ludwig had noticed the careful way he held his weight, trying not to agitate his back like he had earlier that morning. It was sickening.

Shoving three pills of sand in his mouth, Ludwig looked out the window at the gleaming Winged Towers looming over Angel City’s beautiful skyline, trying to remind himself of what Grand Central could accomplish. What they already had accomplished.

One spy wasn’t going to take down the empire his parents had built in less than a generation.

“Stop here,” he said, taking another two pills.

The driver stopped in front of Minnow, the new restaurant that Aiden’s older brother had already staked out. He was waiting for Ludwig at the bar, nursing an Old Fashioned. When Ludwig approached him, eyes followed his every stride.

He could feel the gazes of the guests as sharply as the heat of the restaurant. On this much sand, the world was almost painful to behold, like a movie in such brutally high definition that you could see every pore on an actor’s face. He felt invincible.

As he ordered his drink, Ludwig watched the door, waiting for the Lumines informant to fall into his trap. Background chatter crashed on his ears like waves that the sand in his veins wouldn’t let him get used to. The police chief’s daughter was telling someone about the cute guy she’d met at her birthday, wondering when she’d see him again.

The bartender was trying to ignore the texts he kept getting from his ex but was distracted to the point of mixing the wrong drink for Ludwig, who accepted it anyway, listening to the ice cubes rattle and the forks scrape against plates.

Each second turned syrup-slow, weighed down by all the sensations that Ludwig could feel and account for too easily. When people waved in his direction, his smile felt painfully wide. He wasn’t the right person for a mission like this, he knew. He should’ve sent someone with a subtle personality that could be rendered invisible by sand.

But the idea of a spy in his midst had scared him too much. An insider could tear down the whole operation, sure, but more importantly, they could hurt Aiden. This wasn’t just a matter of security for Grand Central. This was personal. So he showed up personally.

Ten seconds into his drink, his polemist’s drink shattered on the counter. Confused, Ludwig looked up to the entrance of Minnow.

And his heart dropped.

Aiden

“You look stressed,” Nick said, meeting Aiden in the courtyard.

“It’s fine.”

“Give me your hand.”

Aiden obeyed and felt his heartbeat lower as Nick transformed the cortisol in his body into dopamine. Even his back felt better. Though he primarily worked as Lud’s assistant, Nick was an accomplished bioalchemist who was often employed on missions to charm information out of people. Aiden could see why he was so effective—the easy bliss in Nick’s touch was enough to make him want to give up secrets he didn’t even have.

“Thanks.”

“I keep trying to do that for Lud but he won’t let me.”

“He’s on a self-sacrificial streak for some reason.”

Aiden shook his head. “I don’t know why he’s like this.”

“It’ll be better once the election is over.”

“But what if QT wins?”

Nick ran his hand through his hair. “Then we’re a little screwed. But we’ll make it work. They can’t make sand like we can. They don’t have the infrastructure for it.”

“With enough money, they could match our factories in, like, two years. We don’t have much time to hold this together.”

“Lud knows that. He has this under control.”

Aiden wished he could believe Nick. “Where’s Slime?” he asked.

“Inside. Someone got fucked up in training and he's healing them.”

Aiden winced. “Hope they’re okay,” he said as he headed to Slime’s office.

Slime was the healer Aiden had believed he’d become. When Aiden arrived, he was turning strips of gauze into a synthetic skin replacement that would help his patient’s face wound heal faster.

“Are you injured? No? Then wait outside like everybody else. Ethan’s been keeping me really fucking busy,” Slime said, barely sparing Aiden a glance.

“I just wanted to ask one thing.”

“No respect for medicine around here,” Slime muttered, like Aiden didn’t have the utmost respect for alchiatrists. When he looked at Slime, he saw everything he could have been.

“Has Lud come by here recently?" Aiden asked. "Like, in the past two weeks?”

“No. Is he hurt?”

“Not exactly, I just… He seems really stressed about QT.”

“That’s not my problem. If he’s stressed, he should go to Nick.”

But he wasn’t doing that, either. All Lud was doing was knocking back more and more sand, walking farther and farther from his humanity as he stepped closer to the glossy, emotionless charisma expected of a great corporate leader.

It was fucking terrifying.

Ludwig

In the doorway of Minnow stood Ethan.

He was a tall guy, but he looked so goddamn small as he cast around for the Lumines handler who was supposed to take some information off his hands.

Ludwig glanced over at Aiden’s older brother, who was frozen in place, and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“Fuck no!” His hand shot out and pulled Ludwig back. “That’s Ethan, you can’t—”

Ludwig’s voice frosted over, glossed by sand. “I can do what I must,” he said, and pulled away to follow Ethan to the bathroom. The tiled room was empty except for the two of them, and when he saw Ludwig’s face, mutual understanding settled over them both.

Ethan reached for the porcelain sink, pulling out a knife in the blink of an eye. Ludwig could almost taste his alchemical signature in the air, a colder iteration of Aiden’s.

Ethan looked as fierce as he did during all the training sessions Ludwig spectated, but there was a thousand times more heat behind it now. He was furious, which made him stupid.

Ludwig dragged the oxygen and nitrogen in the air into a blazing fire that he flung at his unprotected face.

Ethan cowered back, throwing the knife blindly as he covered his wounded eye.

Midair, Ludwig grabbed the knife by its porcelain hilt and overpowered Ethan's alchemical signature with his own. Shredding his soul just a fraction, he lengthened the blade. He wasn’t as adept in converting metals as a polemist, but didn’t feel so different from earth.

“I fucking hate you," Ethan snarled.

Guilt pulsed under Ludwig’s skin like a second heartbeat. “Grand Central gave you life,” he said, stepping forward. The words felt like they were coming from a million miles away. “Why would you betray us?”

“You’re killing Aiden! He fucking collapsed the other day and you weren’t even around to see it!”

Ludwig squeezed his eyes shut. His soul screamed.

“You’re mind-fucking my brother,” Ethan continued darkly.

“I’d say I’m normal fucking him too.”

Ethan growled, a sound from the back of his throat, as he scrabbled for another knife from the floor. The blade was wickedly curved as he hurled it across the bathroom.

Ludwig couldn’t dodge the knife neatly, but he could bend the air around it into acid that ate away at the metal.

Then, in one swift motion, he plunged his long knife into the poor kid’s—Ethan was a grown adult, but it was impossible to see him as that—chest.

“I’m sorry it had to be like this.”

Aiden

Sitting on Ludwig’s desk was a tungsten cube that he’d made out of a rock in his backyard that used to be big enough lean against when you sat. Now, because of how dense tungsten was, that rock was able to sit in the palm of someone’s hand.

During his education in the Red City, alchemy had been explained to Aiden as an equation, equalizing the reactants with the products and using the soul as an enzyme. It had seemed so simple, but Aiden still remembered how it had felt to watch Ludwig bring that concept to life.

Sweat had poured down Ludwig’s face and back and Aiden had thought he’d watch his idol die right in front of him. Who will inherit Grand Central? he remembered wondering. Who will look after us?

Alchemy, like all forms of power, required sacrifice. It was just particularly upfront about the specific way that sacrifice looked. An alchemist could make platinum or crystal out of just about anything, but they never made

Pain split down his back like a fucking bolt of lightning. Aiden pressed harder on the box. Just a little more, then he’d be done for the night.

The door slammed open. “AIDEN!”

Aiden sprang up. “What’s wrong?”

His older brother was panting desperately. “Lud… He killed him.”

“Who?”

When he answered, all the sand in front of Aiden lost its sparkle, reduced to nothing but a pile of powdered minerals.

Ludwig

The worst part about a fight between alchemists was having to clean up afterwards. Ludwig melted the knife into Ethan’s t-shirt and turned the blood into water that he then evaporated into steam. The broken porcelain he repaired with dirt from the potted plant in the corner.

Ludwig hadn’t wanted to be an elementalist. He’d thought the only specialty worse than dealing with elements was making sand. Elementalists only had the same four basic elements for every scenario. At least polemists got to use every kind of material, even if they were mostly making guns and knives out of it.

His tutors had insisted, though. Elementalism was one of the most long-lived forms of alchemy, they reminded him. His parents were elementalists, and that was what had allowed them to discover not only the identity of the Philosopher’s Stone but the right blend of other minerals that could unlock sand.

Now, Ludwig despised how rudimentary his alchemy felt. His hands shook as he rearranged the structure of the particles in dirt into the particles of silicon and aluminum needed for porcelain. He could feel the molecules rearrange themselves just as clearly as he could feel the pounding of his own heart.

If he were on less sand, he would’ve thrown up several times by now.

And by the time all evidence of alchemy had been removed from the bathroom, he had half a mind to rip out his own heart for the physical pain. He couldn’t believe that he made Aiden do this for him all the time.

Fuck. Aiden.

When he stepped back into the restaurant and saw all the appalled gazes swung his way, he didn’t say anything. He was the fucking heir to Grand Central and if they’d wanted to do something, they should’ve done it when they first heard the shuffles and thuds.

If they’d heard at all. It was technically possible that Ludwig had rearranged the air around the bathroom to absorb all their sounds and people were only looking at him like this because of all the sand running through his veins. But he'd been so distracted by everything, he couldn't account for every bit of alchemy he'd done.

Regardless, Ludwig knew that when he walked away, he knew the only real consequences he’d face would be from Aiden.

Aiden

Aiden looked up at him. His god. His savior. The murderer of his own fucking family.

“What,” he choked out, “the hell?”

“He betrayed us,” Ludwig said, and he sounded exactly like the villain that Lumines depicted him as.

Aiden wondered if he was hallucinating. Was that a normal consequence of too much alchemy?

“But you murdered him.”

And his hands were somehow clean. Without any remnants of Ethan’s body, Aiden felt even more like he was drifting through a nightmare.

Ludwig swallowed. His goddamn winged lion pin was slightly askew, but it still shone like the slab of gold that he’d been standing on only hours earlier. “I had to enforce consequences.”

“You killed him!”

Ludwig looked at his shoes. “He’s not dead.”

Aiden’s heart stopped.

“Where is he?!”

“Slime’s office.”

Aiden tore out of the room.

In Slime’s office, Ethan was laid out on the patient bed. His face was wrapped with gauze and blood bloomed from his stomach.

“An inch higher and he’d be dead,” Slime said gravely. He looked at Ludwig. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“He wasn’t,” Aiden bit out, ire boiling in his chest. He’d torn his own soul into little more than scar tissue for this fucking bastard? “He was high off too much sand to think.”

He should’ve seen this coming. Not the attempted murder of his brother, but a future where the violent wildness of Ludwig’s eyes led to something like this.

The descent had just been so fast.

“Get out,” Aiden seethed. “GET OUT, LUDWIG!”

He waited until he heard footsteps leaving to sit at Ethan’s bedside.

“I’ve handled the internal bleeding, but his eye…”

Aiden looked at the burns on his face and his veins burned with fury. “I’ll kill him.”

But that was for later. Now, he simply asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

And, holding Ethan’s limp hand, he remembered how noble the destruction of his soul could feel, when he was healing instead of producing.

Ludwig

Ludwig looked at the pile of empty sand vials in his trash and almost vomited. It was fucking disgusting.

“What did you do?” Nick demanded.

“I fucked up.”

“Obviously. Did you fucking cheat on him?”

“No. Much worse.”

Nick tried to reach for his hand, but Ludwig pulled away. He didn’t want Nick to ease his emotions. He deserved every piece of pain he felt.

His whole life, he’d been raised to value Grand Central over everything. His morals, his friends, his own soul. Any struggle could be smoothed over if only he had more money, more power, more sand.

One day, his parents promised, Grand Central would take back Gotham and all of his training and pain would be worth it. One day, the agony he put Aiden through day in and day out would be worth it because each and every one of those dynastic syndicates would bow before Grand Central.

The Ahgrens would rule the world of alchemy if they played their cards right, which meant there was no room for mercy and no room for people who couldn’t stomach that mercilessness.

He’d only deviated from those instructions once, when he kissed Aiden that first night under the stars.

It was after Aiden’s high school graduation, on the cusp of a life dedicated entirely to Grand Central. Aiden was still wearing his cap and gown. They’d just finished taking pictures in front of the Red City’s beautiful hotel. Aiden’s brothers had already gone back to their apartments and Red City was unusually quiet.

Aiden had been talking about how close he came to turning parts of his blue polyester gown gold in a little magic show—because that was all regular people believed alchemy could be—to match the school colors and Ludwig had praised him for not bringing attention to himself like that.

“Do you think we’ll be able to do it one day, though?” Aiden had asked. “Be open about alchemy? It could help so many people if we could use alchiatry in hospitals.”

And Ludwig, who hadn’t yet killed a man, had said, “Once Grand Central controls all the other syndicates, we’ll be able to do whatever we want because we’ll be too powerful for anyone to stop us.”

“But surely there has to be a less… aggressive way to do that. We must be able to help people now.”

“Slime helps those he can, but alchiatry isn’t exactly a sustainable alternative to regular medicine.”

“I know it’s not, but it could be a last resort. Slime can do things that doctors could only dream of. It hurts him, but doctors hurt themselves all the time by overworking.”

“That’s not ideal either.”

Aiden had sighed. “I just want things to be better.”

“They will be,” Ludwig had promised, “with you working for me.”

He still remembered the way the air had shifted, like all the trees had opened up their blossoms at once. When Aiden tilted his head, Ludwig could see all the hope in his eyes. He’d looked so young before he started producing sand at an industrial scale.

“Do you really think so?” Aiden had asked, stepping closer.

Their breaths had mingled in the sweet springtime air.

“I know so.”

And when they kissed, it had been the most natural thing in the world, as satisfying as alchemy but without the pain.

QT

On the thin bridge connecting the Winged Towers, QT smiled as her assistant delivered wonderful news.

She gazed upon the sparkling city at her feet, looking out to the port where tonnes of sand were being quietly moved onto cargo ships destined for Babylonia and Pirenne. Those boxes were stamped with the winged lions, but it was only a matter of time before that logo matched the fox sparkling on her lapel.

Every step had gone perfectly, just as she’d promised the leader of Lumines.

QT hadn’t been born or raised in the fold of alchemical syndicates, but she knew the rhythms of power well enough. After all, syndicate leaders weren’t so different from bishops in the way they commanded authority. They were just more honest about how money-hungry they were.

At first, their magic had astounded her. She watched them pull her pin out of the stone facade of a building, watched them dye their hair by passing it under their palms, watched them turn glass opaque as if they were flipping the pages of a book. They made magic look like such an idle activity that when she learned the cost, it had floored her at first. Now that she was a more experienced politician, she understood it well.

Lumines wanted such simple things from her: a deal of their own with the port and law enforcement that looked the other way when it came to them. QT could give them even more than that. She was sure of it, just as she’d been sure that the way to break down Grand Central was by driving a wedge between its heir and his best philosopher.

It wasn’t proper to go directly after a philosopher—even QT didn’t think her chances were good with an all-out syndicate war—so she’d needed to be creative. Coaxing Ethan to her side wasn’t half the challenge she’d anticipated it being. He’d wanted it, wanted to get back at Mr. Ahgren’s control over Aiden.

Everything had laid itself out so nicely, just like the city below her. Messy if you were on the ground, maybe, but QT wasn’t on the ground. She had a bird’s eye view, courtesy of the flashy tower that Ludwig’s parents had designed because they were too proud of themselves for their wildly addictive drug. Too proud to watch the world burn in their search for power.

QT was smarter than them. She didn’t even need sand to do what she did. She took it before important events, like the debate she had with Stanz tomorrow, but she trusted the sharpness of her mind and the abilities of her makeup artists and hairstylists.

The light shifted and she saw her own reflection in the glass. Her straight posture and focused eyes, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, and her fox pin, glinting in the light like a knife.

It was time for the Lumines to rise over Angel City.