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“No,” she mumbled again, racked with tearless sobs.

Patrick knelt in front of her. “Nina. I promised you I’d save them, didn’t I? Hey, look at me.” He took her shoulders in his hands. Waited until her glossy eyes looked up at him. “I swear it, Nina. I’ll get her out. But I need to know you won’t do anything like this again. You have to promise me,” he said firmly. “The Alchemist is dead.”

“No.”

He wanted to shake her.“Yes.”

“He isn’t dead… The bluff.” And her eyes solidified on that which she had been so desperately searching for. “The bluff stores I saw. And the idium I took… How was it siphoned if not by Domelius Becker? He was the last Alchemist.”

And this, Patrick knew, was always how secrets unraveled. Carefully woven fabrications unspooling one after the other.

“No,” he uttered. “Not the last.”

Her eyes narrowed at first, then widened as she understood.

“That title now resides with me.”

Patrick took his coin from his pocket. It was heavier than the usual farthing, more darkly tinted than it should be. Black as terranium. He perched it on the edge of his thumb and flipped it in his practiced way. Only this time, the coin did not land. Instead, it hovered in midair, spun slowly as moonlight refracted off its inky surface.

Nina whispered in astonishment, “You’re the Alchemist.”

CHAPTER 60NINA

Patrick stood and proffered a hand. “Walk with me.”

I was too thrown to do anything but take it. My ears rang. Blood pounded behind my eyes. I barely registered the ground beneath my feet or Isaiah brushing against my calf.

I stared at the man beside me, part of him now unfamiliar. He waited for me to speak.

“I don’t understand,” I uttered. It was muted and waterlogged, as though I was sinking.

“Yes, you do” was his reply. Somehow, we’d arrived back at the laneways and town houses. Streetlights blinked off his irises. “You’re too clever not to.”

As he said it, there it was, the pieces connecting before me. I saw Patrick as he had been, thirteen years ago in that dusty courtyard. Two vials in one hand, and two in the other.I was gonna be on that train home, one way or another.I heard it again now. It clanged off the brick walls of the town houses. It chased the run of a copper pipe.

We didn’t speak again until we stepped back inside Colson’s. Isaiah retreated immediately to his bed. Patrick led me through the dim, behind the bar. His hand on the kitchen door seemed enough to unlock it. I heard the mechanism click with no key in sight.

Inside, the lamps were all out. Patrick went round to each one andpulled their strange cords and in increments, the hotel kitchen came aglow. Bottles and bottles of bluff winked from their shelves.

I nodded, to myself or perhaps to the hundreds of doses.

I almost smiled. Almost. “An Alchemist,” I said.

“And an earth Charmer,” he said.

I did smile then, and it was weak and disingenuous, and matched by Patrick, whose shoulders dropped so heavily I thought he might fold in on himself. “Didn’t think the idium had worked at all, at first. I swallowed it, and it filled me up with all this light. But then there was nothin’. Seemed like I was unchanged. Wasn’t until a few months later when my father took me to Dunnitch to meet with Union members. They had these displays of split terranium ore, the veins of idium already siphoned, and I felt a… a—”

“A frequency,” I finished for him. “A hum.”

He nodded. “I nicked one of the deposits off its shelf. Almost got away with it.”

“But you were caught?” I asked.

“By my dad,” he said. “He realized what I was long before I had a clue.”

I stared around at all those shelves. “You made all this,” I said. If I wasn’t so wrung out, I might have marveled. “How did you learn?”

“Trial and error,” Patrick answered.