Fragments of Alchemy: The Code Keeper

The Epiphany

“Thea!” Tajana whispered as she rushed forward and slid to her knees. “You got the sand back!”

“Some of it,” Thea said. “It might be enough.”

“I’ll keep it safe this time,” Tajana said.

Chadwick flashed his cocky smile, but his mask faltered. Thea looked into his face and somehow saw her own emotions mirrored back at her.

She realized he was wavering under Tajana’s criticism. She was obviously fed up with him for hurting himself and then losing the sand and nearly ruining their plan of escape, and though Chadwick tried to brush off the comment, Thea could tell Tajana’s words were eating at him. Finally, he stood up, swiped his shirt off the floor, and walked around the bookshelf.

Thea reached out to Tajana and carefully poured the sand into Tajana’s hand. Then she got up and hesitantly walked around the shelf to see Chadwick putting his shirt back on. He looked up at the red rippling ceiling and sighed heavily.

She stepped up and patted him on the back. “Don’t blame yourself, Chadwick,” she said softly, so that everyone on the other side of the shelf couldn’t hear.

Chadwick clenched his jaw and tilted his head to the side. Then he looked at Thea. “I promise not to blame myself, if you promise not to blame yourself.”

Thea felt her eyes well up with tears, because she did blame herself for Todd’s death. After all, it had been her plan. She sniffed reflexively and bit her lip.

“Keep your spirits up,” Chadwick said. “We’re going to get through this together.”

Thea nodded, but it was obvious she was filled with doubt. And her chest hurt like someone had pried it open and shoved hot coals inside. She gave herself a hug and tried to breathe as the tears flowed from her eyes.

“Listen, Al. I know what happened to Todd is eating at you. But it was an accident, alright? Nobody could have predicted it. It’s definitely not your fault.”

Thea blinked back the tears and tried to nod, but she found herself shaking her head with a miserable grimace on her face. Todd was dead! She couldn’t take that back now. Her own Mentor had died because of her. She sobbed.

“If it makes you feel better, we’ve all made mistakes since we got nabbed by these crazy Shadows, even Tajana and Todd. You don’t have to be perfect, okay? It’s alright to make mistakes. My mum always says mistakes are the best teacher. Just make sure you learn from this, you hear?”

Thea immediately thought of her own parents. Her mother, who thought Thea could do no wrong, and her father, who was always pushing her to improve, little by little, day in and day out. They both always put so much pressure on her to be perfect. And now, here was Chadwick telling her that it was okay to make mistakes, as long as she learned from them. It was almost impossible for her to wrap her brain around it.

When her mistake led to someone’s death, wasn’t that mistake unredeemable?

“Hey, it’s not like you made that Protection Conversion yourself. It was an accident! And when I hit the shelf, it didn’t kill me. No one would have predicted it would kill Todd.”

Thea nodded and tried to breathe without sobbing.

“It was an accident, you hear me?” Chadwick said, nudging Thea’s shoulder softly.

She nodded with a frown on her face, blinking the tears from her eyes.

“Good,” Chadwick said with a little wink and a smile that made Thea stare down at the floor, her face hot. “You were brilliant, you know that?” Chadwick added. “You’ve got to be the first Initium I’ve ever met who taught herself natural levitation! I just learned how to do that, and it’s still a challenge! That’s very impressive, Al.”

Thea felt herself blushing. “My mom taught me.” She waved her hand as if to say it wasn’t a big deal. She wiped the tears from her face and looked down.

But Chadwick only repeated himself: “It was brilliant.”

“Oh yum!” Quentin said from the other side of the shelf, and Thea and Chadwick went around to see that the Shadows had left a tray of food on the floor. “Let’s eat!”

“Yes! I’m famished!” Chadwick said.

So the four of them gathered around the peculiar meal together. Thea felt like it was probably somewhere around suppertime, and yet the Shadows had brought them some bacon, eggs, toast, sausages, and pancakes, all on one plastic tray without any utensils, dishes, or glassware. There was also a very small plastic cup of water for each of them. It was the strangest meal Thea had ever seen.

Thea picked up a piece of bacon and tried to put it in her mouth, but the thought of eating food right now just made her stomach clench. All she could think about was that giant pool of blood spreading across the floor. She put the bacon down while Quentin wasn’t looking.

Tajana and Thea sat quietly while Chad and Quentin ate, but eventually Thea’s cousin noticed that Tajana and Thea weren’t eating and said, “Do you think they poisoned the food?” Then he spat out his mouth-full and wiped his tongue with his sleeve.

“No Quentin, the food is perfectly safe,” Tajana said. “We’re just ... not that hungry.”

Chadwick kept shoveling the food into his mouth, so Quentin went back to eating too. It was uncomfortably quiet, and Thea looked at Tajana to see that she looked a little nauseous. Thea’s stomach was swimming with queasiness too. Eventually Quentin broke the awkward silence by asking Thea to play the Chimaera game.

“What Chimaera game?” Chadwick asked.

“We try to match Chimaeras to their Recreant counterparts,” Thea explained. “It helps me learn Chimaera names. It’s like Guess That Chimaera.”

“It sounds like you could also think of it as matching a famous Chimaera’s given name to its common name?” Tajana said.

“Yeah!” Quentin said with a nod. “Like how Dragon was the first vesperta.”

“You mean volucerta,” Chadwick corrected him.

“Whatever,” Quentin said, but his face went pink.

“Can we play too?” Tajana asked.

“Yeah!” Quentin said.

“Hang on,” Chadwick said. “I don’t play lame-sounding games.”

Quentin glared at Chadwick. “Then don’t play!”

“It’s okay, Quentin,” Thea said. “We should give our game a better name anyways.”

Quentin crossed his arms and shook his head angrily.

“Could you call it Chimaera Combinations?” Tajana said with a gentle smile at Quentin.

Chadwick smirked.

“Nah, we can think of something cooler than that,” Thea said before Chadwick could call that name dumb, too. “What about the First Alchemist’s Fusions, or the First’s Fusions?”

“What does the First Alchemist have to do with it?” Chadwick asked. “Any Alchemist can have a Chimaera.”

“It’s because the First Alchemist created all the Chimaeras,” Quentin said.

“That’s not true,” Chadwick said. “The First Alchemist created the first three Chimaeras in the shadow of the World Tree. That’s why his name is Trismegistus. Tri means three.”

“That’s only a legend,” Quentin said hotly. “That’s not what really happened.”

Thea’s stomach did a flip. “Chadwick, what did you just say?” she asked.

“I said the First Alchemist created the serpenscis, the aquilatris, and the vombaetus,” Chadwick said, his face turning rather red.

Quentin got up on his knees and pointed at Chadwick. “The First Alchemist created all the Chimaeras when he defeated the First Chimaera, like my dad says. Isn’t that right, Thea?”

“No, hang on Quentin. Chadwick, what did you say the First Alchemist’s name was?” Thea grabbed Chadwick’s shoulder, suddenly feeling too dizzy to sit up on her own.

“Whoa, are you okay, Al?” Chadwick grabbed Thea and held her up. “Is it your Kundalini again?”

“No!” Thea snapped. “Tell me, who was the First Alchemist?!”

“Hermes Trismegistus,” Chadwick said with a confused look on his face. “What’s it matter?”

Thea suddenly had the urge to laugh and cry simultaneously. It mattered a great deal, because if Veneficus Charu had told the truth when he said the First Alchemist was Hermes Trismegistus, then that meant Ruis Pethboc was the liar.

“Hermes Trismegistus is the name of one of my characters, in a story I started writing a year ago,” Thea explained.

Tajana and Chadwick both stared at Thea, bewildered.

“I wrote a book about Hermes Trismegistus before I knew anything about Alchemy,” Thea explained. “How did I just so happen to name my character after the First Alchemist?”

“Hang on,” Chadwick said with a puzzled look on his face. “Why didn’t you know anything about Alchemy?”

Thea shrugged, but before she could answer, Tajana interrupted. “Maybe you heard the name from somewhere. Maybe your parents said something about the First Alchemist before. My foster father has a few famous proverbs from Hermes Trismegistus he loves to say.”

Thea shook her head. “I don’t think so. At my history lesson, I was so shocked because I thought Hermes was just a character in my book. None of this makes any sense.”

“Is this a bad thing?” Quentin asked hesitantly.

Thea smiled. “No, Quentin. I think this is a very good thing,” she replied, because she finally knew the truth. It meant that Charu had told the truth. Thea was pretty sure that meant Veneficus Ruis Pethboc was the one who lied about the First Alchemist. Professor Ruis had convinced Thea to trust him and his list of Shadow Spies. And that proved that Quentin’s dad wasn’t working for the Breaker, and neither was Guru Ellhorn.

“Chadwick, I don’t think my Guru and Venarius Malus are working for the Breaker. In fact I think they were trying to help me,” Thea said.

“You thought my dad was working for the Breaker?” Quentin asked in the smallest of voices.

“Well, to be fair, he did make Todd erase my memory. I still don’t know why he did that. But Veneficus Pethboc lied to me about the First Alchemist,” Thea tried to explain. “He gave me this list of people who work for the Breaker. Your dad was on it, and your dad too,” Thea said, nodding at Quentin and then at Chadwick.

“You think my dad works for the Breaker,” Chadwick said. “You think I am the next Breaker, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” Thea insisted. “And I never did. We’re all kidnapped,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t think anyone knows who the next Breaker is.” Thea opened her mouth, but then stopped and looked at Quentin. Finally, she took a big breath and said, “I could be the next Breaker or even the next Giver.”

“Can I ask you something?” Tajana said suddenly, nearly interrupting.

She turned to look at Tajana. “Um, sure.”

“Why would you believe a tutor who gives you a list of Shadow Alchemists? It sounds really suspicious to me.”

Thea stared at her. Why had she trusted Pethboc? Looking back on it, she remembered wondering if she could trust him, but by the end of her lesson, she had stopped questioning him completely. Since then, it hadn’t even occurred to her that Veneficus Pethboc had lied.

Why not?

Finally, she just shrugged.

“Did he do anything odd?” Tajana asked.

“Odd, like what?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Like … it could be anything, really. There’s plenty of Conversions that Alchemists can use to trick people.”

“Wouldn’t I notice though?” Thea asked.

“Maybe not,” Chadwick said. “If the Conversion Circle was underneath his clothes, he could Convert any Conversion secretly and you’d never know.”

“Right. You can Convert without saying the Code Word out loud.” Thea pressed her lips together into a fine line. She shook her head at herself. How had all this time gone by and she never stopped to wonder if Ruis Pethboc had lied to her?

“What do you think he did?” she asked, not sure if she wanted to know.

“With a bit of your DNA, like from your hair, he could have used the Invocation Conversion on you to make you believe him,” Tajana said. “Maybe he took a bit of your hair from a brush in your room or something?”

Thea’s eyes went wide. “He had my blood!”

“Your blood?” Chadwick asked.

“He pricked me with a needle to heal a burn on my arm.”

Chadwick snapped his fingers. “He used your blood with the Invocation Conversion. That’s got to be what he did!”

Thea let out a sigh. So she had been manipulated this whole time. “You’re right. I should have realized it sooner. I’m sorry you guys.”

“Don’t worry, Thea,” Tajana said. “We forgive you. Right guys?” She looked hard at Chadwick

Chadwick looked at Tajana and then back at Thea. With a flutter in her chest, Thea looked from Chadwick to Tajana, who looked at Chadwick, and then back at Thea.

“I think what’s important to remember,” Thea started carefully, thinking about her first history lesson, “is that the Trinitas was created to hold together a fragmented world.”

Tajana nodded. “You’re right! Doesn’t that make us a team?”

“A team?” Chadwick said.

“A team,” Thea affirmed. “We need to work together to protect the world.”

“But I thought the Keeper and the Giver protect the world from the Breaker,” Quentin said.

“I really don’t think the Breaker wants to destroy the world, though,” Chadwick said with a grin. “If the world was brought to dust, he wouldn’t have a place to live either, right mate?”

“Oh.” Quentin made a face and then nodded. They all had to admit that what Chadwick said made a lot of sense. Even if the Breaker was the leader of Shadow Alchemists who kidnapped them, it didn’t mean he wanted to destroy the world.

“No matter what happens in our futures, today, right now, we’re on the same team,” Tajana said. “We need to get out of here, and we can’t do it alone. It’s going to take all of us working together. Are you with me?”

“I’m with you,” Thea said, and she reached out for Tajana’s hand.

“All the way,” Chadwick said, and he put his hand on top of Tajana’s and Thea’s.

Quentin put both hands in and smiled. “Me too!” he piped up, and Chadwick laughed. Thea looked at Tajana, who smiled grimly back at her. Thea blinked tears out of her eyes and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. They were a team. They’d get through this together.