The alleys of Central City were narrow and dark. They ran between old stone buildings. But Isaac McDougal had learned something long ago: darkness did not protect you from people who could sense you in other ways.
He pressed his back against a wet wall and listened. He heard boots on stone. Three men, maybe four. Their lanterns made yellow light in the darkness. Military Police. He almost smiled.
He raised his hands. He let the alchemy move.
Water answered him. It always did. Instantly. Completely. As if it had been waiting for him. The water was everywhere—in the gutters, on the wet stone walls, pooling where a broken pipe leaked. All of it came to him at once.
One officer had time to shout. Another had time to run. But neither had time to survive. The steam came up from the alley wall, boiling hot, exploding outward. Then came ice—a long spike of frozen water that was harder than stone. The third man's lantern broke against the frozen ground. The darkness came back.
McDougal stepped over the bodies without looking at them. He had stopped looking at bodies a long time ago.
He had circles to draw.
---
Two blocks away, Roy Mustang stood in the lamplight in front of Central Command. He looked at the orders in his hand. His face showed that he was not happy about them.
"The Führer was very kind," Lieutenant Hawkeye said next to him. Her voice showed nothing.
"The Führer," Mustang said, "is very good at giving problems to other people and calling it a favor." He folded the orders. "I have to find a rogue State Alchemist. In Central City. When we were supposed to be in Reole." He looked at her. "And I have to use our young genius while I do it."
From down the corridor came the sound of heavy metal steps. Then a higher voice complained loudly about how long the hallways were.
Edward Elric was fifteen years old and five feet and two inches tall. If you mentioned his height, he would probably break something. Right now he looked like someone who had received orders he did not want. Behind him, Alphonse moved like a suit of armor. The armor itself seemed sorry for existing.
"So who are we looking for?" Edward asked. He sat in a chair without being asked.
Mustang put a file on the table. The photograph inside showed a man with a hard face and sharp eyes. "Isaac McDougal. You may have heard of him. They call him the Freezing Alchemist."
"He quit after Ishval."
"He quit after Ishval," Mustang said, "and then he developed some strong feelings about the State Military. He decided to show those feelings through public violence." He looked at Edward. "He is a trained soldier, Fullmetal. He is dangerous. And he has already killed four Military Police officers tonight. So when I tell you to be careful—"
"I heard you."
"I am going to say it again anyway."
Edward was already reading the file.
---
They found him by following the screams.
The alley smelled like sulfur and something else—something sharp and cold that made your nose hurt and your eyes water. The sharp ghost smell of water that had been made into shapes it did not want. Ed ran around the corner and stopped. Two Military Police officers were pinned against the wall by ice. Their coats were completely frozen. Their faces were white with shock—not from the cold, but from fear. They were lucky, Ed thought. They were only pinned. They were not dead.
McDougal stood in the middle of the alley. Both his hands were raised. Water was spinning slowly around him in circles. He turned when he heard footsteps.
"They keep sending children," he said.
Ed felt something burn in his chest. That anger always came when someone called him a child. But he made himself ignore it. He was being adult. "Isaac McDougal. You are under arrest."
"Am I." McDougal looked at him like a man looks at a door. Not angry. Just asking: will this door hold? "You are the Fullmetal Alchemist. The young one. Where is your alchemy circle, boy?"
Ed clapped his hands together.
The alchemy moved through him like a breath. Easy. Fast. The ground under their feet went up in a wave of stone that should have knocked McDougal down. But the Freezer's water came up as a wall of ice. It broke through the stone and stopped the wave. McDougal's hands moved again. The temperature dropped ten degrees in one second. Steam came screaming toward Ed's right side—boiling hot.
Ed turned into it. The steam hit his arm with a sound like wet cloth on a hot pan. It disappeared against steel. He felt the heat through the metal, far away and small, and moved forward through the cloud.
McDougal's eyes went to the metal arm. Something changed in his face. Not fear. Just recalculation. "Interesting," he said.
The fight was short and clean. Ed was fast enough and strange enough to keep McDougal from using his water from far away. That was McDougal's biggest strength. When Al came from the other side and closed off the alley, McDougal had nowhere to go. He went to his knees on the stone.
Al made a sound like relief, but through steel.
Ed watched McDougal's face as they put the restraints on his wrists. McDougal looked at his own wrists. Then—so quick Ed almost did not see it—the corner of his mouth moved. It was almost a smile.
The tattoos on McDougal's hands lit up bright blue-white.
The restraints did not break. They became liquid for a second, then hard again, but completely wrong—not holding a prisoner anymore. McDougal was already moving. Water came up around him from places where there should be no water. Then he was gone. Into a pipe, Ed thought. Through a drain. Both, maybe. The alley held only two frozen officers and the fading ghost of alchemy.
Ed stared at the empty stone for a moment.
"Huh," he said.
---
Mustang's meeting was not warm.
"You walked up to him," Mustang said. He stood very still, the way he did when he was working to keep his voice calm. "You did not know what he could do."
"I found out what he could do," Ed said. "That is called finding information."
"That is called being reckless. I will not accept the difference." The Colonel sat down and pressed his fingers to his eyes. "He put transmutation circles on his own skin, Fullmetal. His hands are his circles. You cannot take his hands away. You cannot restrain him like a normal person. He can do alchemy as fast as he can move his hands. As fast as he can think." He looked up. "This is what happens when you act without knowing the facts first."
"With respect, sir," Al said carefully, "we did not have those facts before Edward acted."
"Which is why you gather the facts first." But the anger had left Mustang's voice. He looked at both of them—the boy in the red coat with the metal arm, the hollow armor that breathed like it was a habit. For a moment he seemed to be thinking about something else entirely. "McDougal served in Ishval," he said quietly. "He was good. He did his job well. But something there changed him. He is not just a criminal. He is a man who thinks he is doing something necessary." He paused. "Those are always the most dangerous."
Edward said nothing. He was looking at the photograph again. In black and white, McDougal's eyes looked like a man who had already decided that some costs were worth paying.
Ed had seen eyes like that. He had seen them in a mirror.
---
The sun was barely up when Armstrong found McDougal.
Major Armstrong was impossible to miss. He was six feet tall with muscles like stone, and right now he was crying. When Armstrong cried, light seemed to shine from him. He had been searching Central City's outer streets, and he did it with no subtlety at all. That was how Armstrong did everything.
McDougal was crouching behind a loading dock. He was drawing the last parts of a circle into the stone with a tool. The shadow fell over him suddenly.
"Isaac McDougal," Armstrong said. His voice was full of sadness. "Please. Give yourself up."
What happened next was a battle that cleared people from four whole blocks. Armstrong's alchemy of stone against McDougal's alchemy of water. Heavy weight against flowing precision. Each one stopped the other. They made bigger and bigger attacks. The loading dock looked like the earth had fought a war there. Ed and Al came running when they heard the noise, but by then McDougal had already found his way out. He slipped around Armstrong's earth in a gap too small, too fast. Armstrong could not follow.
He was gone again. Into the city's streets.
But not for long.
---
Mustang found him in a plaza near the eastern gate. For a moment the two men just looked at each other across the wet stone.
"Flame Alchemist," McDougal said. His voice sounded like a man checking things off a list. "I was wondering when you would arrive."
"You have made it impossible to miss you." Mustang's gloves were already on. "It ends now, McDougal."
The Freezer smiled. It was not a happy smile. "I know what you are," he said. "I know what all of you are. The Führer's soldiers. His tools. Do you know what he is building? Do you know what Central Command is planning for this country?" He raised his hands. Water came up from the drains and gutters and morning damp. It rose in a wall. "You are burning things to keep people warm in a house that is already on fire."
Mustang snapped his fingers.
Flame met water. Both men disappeared into thick white steam. McDougal came out the other side running. Fire could not hurt him as long as he could keep himself wet. He knew that. The Colonel knew it too. He ran toward the circle. The last circle. Almost complete.
He pressed his hand to the cold stone.
And the city screamed.
---
The ice came up all at once.
Not in one place. In six places. Six columns of white ice exploding from the circles at the same moment, with a sound like the world was breaking. Then they grew, spread, connected. They reached three stories high and kept going. People ran from the rising walls. Windows broke from the cold. In the plaza outside Central Command, soldiers ran for higher ground as the earth itself became something dangerous.
Ed and Al stood at the edge of one expanding wall of ice. Ed thought: *he needed power for this. No human alchemist has this much power.*
"A Philosopher's Stone," Al said quietly.
"Yes," Ed said. He watched the wall of ice slowly cover a fountain, consuming it. "It must be."
Three hours ago, they had seen the pattern in McDougal's movements. Not random circles. Circles at compass points. At precise distances. All pointing inward. He had gone to the center—a narrow street east of headquarters, where two of the lines intersected. There was McDougal, both hands pressed to the stone, putting all his power into the city's ground.
He looked up when he heard them coming.
"Do you understand now?" he demanded. His voice was rough. "Do you understand what they are? What they are doing?" He stared at Edward. "You are a weapon. They are pointing you at the country and you do not even know it."
"I know plenty," Ed said. His voice came out cold.
"Do you?" McDougal's eyes went to Al. They stayed there. Something in his face changed—something that was not quite sadness. "That suit of armor," he said slowly. "There is no one inside it, is there."
Al became very still.
"The armor. The metal arm." McDougal looked at Edward with eyes that held no anger. "You tried to do it. You tried to bring someone back using Human Transmutation. Both of you." He said it quietly, like he already knew. "What were you trying to bring back?"
The silence was complete.
Then Edward hit him.
It was not a perfect use of alchemy. It was just a stone pillar coming up from the ground with too much force. It caught McDougal in the stomach and threw him into the frozen street. Ed stood over him, breathing hard, his hands in fists. His face showed something complicated that he was not going to examine right now.
"Do not," he said. Just those two words.
McDougal lay on the ice and looked at the sky. He was smiling faintly. The smile of a man who had just confirmed something he suspected. Then he rolled to the side and water came up around him, and Ed lunged for him. But McDougal was already sliding with the water, around a corner, gone.
Ed stood in the frozen street and breathed.
"Brother," Al said softly.
"I know," Ed said. "I know. Come on."
---
They found him at the end of the alley.
Or rather: King Bradley found him first.
The Führer was not large. He was not young. He wore his eyepatch and his uniform like he wore everything—with ease, with complete authority. And he was walking toward McDougal with his sword already drawn. He moved with casual, unhurried steps that were somehow more frightening than any display of speed.
McDougal raised his hands. Water came up. He was fast. He had always been fast. The ice walls that came up from the street were thick and high enough to stop any man alive.
Bradley walked through them.
Not around. Through. The sword moved in the dark between one block and the next and the blocks became pieces and the pieces became nothing. McDougal's eyes went wide. His hands moved faster, pulling water up from the street, from underground, from places that should not have water. And Bradley kept walking. The blade was a silver line in the gray morning. Each attack McDougal made was broken before it even formed. Then Bradley was through the last wall and the sword was already finishing its stroke.
McDougal fell.
He fell slowly, Ed thought, watching from the alley mouth. He had time to fold at the knees and go down deliberately, like a man kneeling. He hit the stone and lay still. His blood ran out into the gutter in a thin dark stream.
In the stream, something caught the light.
Something small and red, no larger than a stone pebble, turning in the current. It reached a crack in the stone and fell through it. When Ed had taken two steps toward it, it was already dust. Pink-gray dust, spreading in the water. Then nothing.
Bradley turned and looked at Edward with his one uncovered eye.
"Ah," he said pleasantly. "Fullmetal. Good timing." He put his sword away. "You and your brother are well, I hope?"
Ed looked at the place where the red stone had been.
"Fine," he said. "We are fine."
---
Somewhere in the city, in a narrow office, Mustang stood at the window and watched the ice on the streets start to melt in the morning light. It would take hours. It would take all day, and the streets would be flooded. The lower districts would smell like the river. He had written his report in twenty minutes. Then he sat still for a long time, thinking about a man who had fought in Ishval and come home wrong. A man who had spent his last months trying to unmake something he could not name.
He thought about what McDougal had said in the plaza.
*You are burning things to keep people warm in a house that is already on fire.*
He thought about it for a long time. Then he put that thought away, carefully, in the place where he kept other thoughts he was not ready to act on.
Hawkeye knocked and came in without waiting. She always did.
"The Elrics are asking about Reole again," she said.
"Tell them we leave tomorrow."
"You told them that yesterday."
"Then tell them again." He turned from the window. "What do we know about the Philosopher's Stone?"
Hawkeye's face did not change. She was very good at that. "Not much. Officially."
"Unofficially?"
"Also not much." She paused. "But McDougal had one. He used it for the ice. And now it is gone."
"He got it from somewhere." Mustang looked at the city outside, at the melt-water running through streets where ice had been. "A person cannot make a Philosopher's Stone. Which means someone gave it to him. Or he found it. Which means there are more." He let the sentence hang in the air.
Hawkeye said nothing.
"Look into it," he said. "Quietly."
---
Far to the south, in a dusty town called Reole where the sound of a Radio Priest came from open windows in the hot afternoon, a woman sat at a table. She had a glass of water in front of her and a newspaper in her hands. She was beautiful in a way that was also somehow wrong—too perfect, too still, like a painting. Across from her, a heavyset man with a glass eye ate his food without speaking.
She put the newspaper down.
"The Freezing Alchemist is dead," she said.
"A waste," the man said, chewing.
"He would have made a good sacrifice." She turned the glass slowly in her fingers. "He used the Stone too quickly. The Stone burns bright and then it burns out. He must have known that." She thought about this. "He was in too much of a hurry."
"And us?"
She looked out the window at the town. At the people moving through their ordinary afternoon. They did not know what was coming. They did not know that their town and its Radio Priest were already part of a calculation they could not see.
"Our work begins soon," she said. "And we have time to do it correctly."
Outside, a bell rang for evening services. The people of Reole turned toward the sound, as they always did, as they had been doing for months. Below the window, the town went about its life. The woman watched it with eyes that held no warmth and no cruelty. Only the patient, unhurried attention of someone who had already done the mathematics.