I screamed, but Adam and Perenelle couldn’t hear me.
“We have to get out and help her,” cried Max. “Why can’t I move?”
My heart—whatever it was made of right now—tightened in my chest. Max didn’t fully comprehend our predicament. We weren’t simply hiding in a painting. We had truly transformed, but it wasn’t our own intent that had changed us. It was Perenelle’s power with color, pigments, and paint that had brought us into the painting. We were helpless.
“We’re not helpless,” Max said.
I would have fallen to my knees if I hadn’t been trapped in suspended animation. “You heard me?”
“You were talking to me.”
“I was only thinking about what I should tell you. I wasn’t using my voice.”
“Zoe. You have no voice here. I understand enough to see it’s our essences that are here—our spirit and soul combined—but our physical bodies are only representations.”
“Our vocal cords don’t exist.” I felt my way through what Max had said. He was right. And it meant far more than he imagined. “It’s our intent that matters here.”
“You have an idea. I can tell.”
I looked out of the painting. Perenelle was on her knees, her hands grasping helplessly at her eyes.
“We can’t help her until we get out,” said Max. “How do we do it?”
“I don’t know if it will work,” I said. “But you know about the penultimate step of an alchemical transformation.”
“When the opposing elements finally come together,” he said, “right before transcending into something new—the elixir or the stone or the new pure element the alchemist was working to create.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The Chemical Wedding, when sulfur and mercury, the sun and the moon, have gone through all of their challenges—all the chemical steps of alchemy—and are able to join forces.”
“The opposites have united.”
“The rational and the intuitive?” asked Max.
“You’re talking about the two of us now.”
That was the challenge Max and I had to overcome from the start. He’d consciously chosen a life of rationalism, rejecting anything that couldn’t be fully understood. I followed my heart and let my senses lead me. It’s how I’d discovered my aptitude for plants long before I had a mentor to teach me.
“You were already talking about us,” said Max.
Was I? I’d been thinking about Nicolas and Perenelle. Traditionally in alchemy, sulfur is the male solar energy, the Red King, and mercury is the female lunar energy, the White Queen. But with Nicolas and Perenelle, nothing was average about them, even their alchemy.
Nicolas had the mercurial, curious personality, a “Renaissance man” before the Renaissance existed, always wanting to understand the whole world around him, but never interested in wielding power. Perenelle was filled with a sulfurous fire that burned in her to escape the narrow confines of what was expected of a talented woman of her time, erupting in her passion to be so talented a painter that the hidden alchemical messages in her artwork would be displayed for people who weren’t the chosen few to study alchemy if it called to them.
The Flamels didn’t flip the rules society or of alchemy, but they bent them. The White King and the Red Queen were the most powerful alchemists who’d ever lived, and they were the ones who’d raised me in their alchemical training. Nicolas was the nursing mentor, and Perenelle the jaded protector. With them as my guides, I’d achieved the final stage of alchemy far younger than perhaps anyone alive.
“You’re their alchemical child,” said Max, sensing my thoughts. “The final step of alchemy. If anyone can get us out of this painting, it’s you.”
“No,” I said. “You’re wrong. The only way I’m getting us out of here is with your help.”
Max and I were the opposites who together might just be powerful enough to break free. He and I weren’t the same as Nicolas and Perenelle. Max was sulfur and I was mercury, but I was the sun where he was the moon. We weren’t balanced enough on our own, and we were so much younger than the Flamels. But together?
I tried to lift my legs, but I didn’t even know if I had legs. If I could only get to Max, we could try—
“Hold out your hand to me,” he said.
“You’re too far away.”
“I’m right here.”
I felt his hands on mine, and then I felt a band of copper slip onto my ring finger. A malachite stone of swirling green was set into the band.
Malachite. The stone of transformation.
“This wasn’t exactly the proposal I was planning on,” said Max. “I can’t get down on one knee, because I can’t feel my knees. But… Zoe Faust, I don’t know how much time we’ll have together, but I love you more than the sun and the moon and everything in this world that I don’t claim to understand. I was hoping for a real wedding, but even if an alchemical Chemical Wedding is all we get… Will you marry me, Zoe?”
My body buzzed, and I could feel every molecule of my paint-formed body down to my toes. Toes? I could feel my toes!
“Yes,” I said as I jumped into his arms.
I’d moved from Thomas’s eye to young Zoe’s eye. It was possible to move.
I kissed Max. He tasted of copper and fire and flower petals and quicksilver and a hundred other elements that I was at one with. But the strongest of all was the green malachite.
“How did you keep the stone with you?”
“It’s a copper mineral.”
“And copper is one of the elements in Perenelle’s paintings. She sensed it. I don’t know how much time is passing, but while we still have a chance, we need to try and get to her.”
I also needed to save something important to her. Her notebook. I couldn’t see it clearly, but I felt its energy. It was a new addition to the painting, like me and Max. I reached out and felt my fingertips grip the thick parchment. I sensed the oak galls of the ink in its pages. This was her notebook.
I kissed Max one last time, not knowing if it would be the last time. I didn’t know what would happen when we tried to pull ourselves out of the painting. Would we leave part of ourselves behind? Would we break our bodies, spirits, or souls? This was untested territory.
Focus your intent on getting us out, I said to Max in my mind, us saving Perenelle, and having a life together.
I know you’ll miss Thomas.
He’s not really here. It’s his memory. You’re the one who’s really here. You and our life outside of this painting.
I shared my intent with all the elements I could sense around me, grabbed tightly hold of Max, and pulled as hard as I could.