#solf kimblee

He works swiftly and provides no explanation, although he looks up once or twice and meets her curious gaze with an errant flick of his arched brows. He takes a needle and a length of thread from the sewing kit, the stopped bottle of alcohol and paper-wrapped gauze from the first aid tin, and produces from his pockets a pencil and a glittering black glass jar no bigger than a robin’s egg.

She doesn’t recognize the implement he assembles until, like a sudden crack across her face, she sees her father looming above her bed, tracing a serpent into her skin with the sharp edge of a charcoal stick. Her grip tightens painfully on the canvas-wrapped rifle balanced between her knees, and she sees Kimblee noting this, with the slightest tilt of his head. He remains silent, unblinking against her stare, and then turns back to his purpose.

The tip of the needle dips into the glass jar and comes back up, dripping with black, and Kimblee hunches over, balancing his splayed left hand on his knee.

“A touch-up,” he says, a little louder than necessary for the short distance between them. “One mustn’t be caught off-guard out here, and sand has a way of eroding everything it touches.”

The lines of his tattoo stand stark against his preternaturally pale skin—if she hadn’t witnessed him heaving with joy beneath the midday sun just yesterday, howling in his own cacophonous triumph, she might assume he had never seen a second of war, had never ventured forth from the dark bowels of the earth that seemed always to suck her boots into mud.

“Are you surprised?” he asks. “Most alchemists who choose to imprint their work permanently lack the dexterity to carve the symbols themselves.”

She’s seen the professional shops during her brief stopover in East City—disquietly advertised as aesthetic salons or spas. But one need only examine their large, flat windows with slight discernment to see the arrangement of symbols ringing each frame: the planets, the elements, the perfectly conformed circles. A part of her was curious, had wanted to walk in and inquire the difference between the practical application and the heavy frame her father had carved into her spine.

“Do you speak?”

His tone is dry, amused, detached. The needle flashes with firelight every time, before sinking briefly below his skin.

“Or is just that you prefer not to speak to me?”

“My apologies, sir. You’re right—I’ve never seen someone tattoo themselves.”

“You’ve seen what I can do. Would you trust that to anyone else, were it you?”

“No,” she says, mouth dry. “I don’t imagine I would.”

He frowns at his work, and deep in her chest, Riza feels a tug, a pull of hands around her heart. She sets her rifle carefully in the sand, and rises to approach closer. He stiffens momentarily, but then she watches the tension ripple out from his shoulders, and he flexes his hand around the embedded needle.

“Where did you learn that?”

“From someone who was trained, of course,” he says.

“You have other tattoos?”

“Do you?”

Little pinpricks of blood follow behind the needle, and it seems to her that he is embroidering alchemy into his very being. Every alchemist had his own method for carrying that awful weight—and so many content to slough it off in the shielding abyss of night, as though with tossing aside gloves and gauntlets they might toss aside the victims of such deadly knowledge.

“Yes,” Riza says breathlessly. He did not expect this: her confession is met by a quiet exhalation somewhere between incredulous laughter and shaming tsk.

“I’ve shown you mine,” he says, the gleam in his eye finishing the question more aptly than cloying phrase.

“No,” she replies, firm but unthreatened.

“A pity.”

“Far less than you know.”

She places a finger on his open palm, the curve of a crescent trapped within the rigid walls of the triangle she knows symbolizes fire.

“Does it hurt? Going over again?”

“No,” he says, carefully setting the needle tip up, away from the contamination of earth. “It didn’t particularly hurt the first time, either. Did yours?”

“Yes. It was excruciating.”

Too far—she cannot afford to pique the interest of a quantity so unknown and so unstable. Riza retracts her finger, meaning to pull back into the safety of her sleeve, but Kimblee flips his hand and seizes her wrist.

“I’m envious,” he says. “Such a flawless canvas ought to be properly appreciated.”

“I served my purpose well enough.”

He hasn’t let go—his thumb and middle finger nearly meet around the narrow taper of her wrist, and the cold tip of the index finger on his right hand trails from her palm to her elbow.

“Must it always have a purpose?”

She cannot discern the color of his eyes this close—only the reflection of fire flickering in the blackest of depths.

“Everything has a purpose.”

He takes up the needle again: slowly, obscenely, the tip disappears into the ink.

“Nothing vulgar,” she says, shivering the thrill of fear that lances down her neck.

“I would never,” he murmurs with no sincerity in the wounded tone of his voice.

She is impressed with his precision, the flatness of each line, the perfect curvature of each arc. In silence, they both watch the needle press in black and pull out red. He never lets go of her wrist—the dribble of fluid obscures his work, but she know the shape of each pinprick, and he does not waver, advancing through his mess to the end.

He swipes the fresh wounds with alcohol when finished, a painter revealing color and texture with the careful slice of a palette knife. The three principles of alchemy stand in sharp contrast to the flush of her angered skin: salt, mercury, sulfur. He releases his grip, and the faint trace of his circle remains on her skin, in dried blood that flakes into the sand when she rubs her fingers across it.

The needle is waste now and tossed into the dying embers, but Kimblee carefully packs up the rest of his borrowed supplies as Riza winds a length of gauze loosely around her wrist.

“Let it breathe,” he says, holding out her sewing kit and first aid tin exactly as she had. “But try to avoid exposure.”

“Thank you, sir” she replies. His smile fades, and again she feels a tug, deep inside.

“You’re quite welcome, cadet.”