Alchemised, page 46
She squinted at him. “Why that design? What was Bennet trying to turn you into?”
“I designed it,” he said quietly.
That information was shocking enough to sober Helena. She sat up.
“It was my punishment,” he said. “I expected it would kill me, but if I survived, I didn’t want them to choose what I became. So I asked to design it, as proof of my penance.”
She sat forward, studying him. She wasn’t imagining it; he was different. It was like witnessing a slow metamorphosis. The effect of the array was likely exacerbated by the delay in healing, the deterioration making him more malleable.
His features had grown more defined, still gaunt from sickness, but it had carved the boyishness from his face. He actually looked like an adult now.
She tilted her head to the side. If she saw him, without the context of who he was, she might find him rather handsome.
The thought made her blink so hard, the room went out of focus.
She stood quickly. “I need to go back; the checkpoints close soon.”
Chapter 35
Julius 1786
Helena had the most blistering hangover the next morning and lay in bed, so nauseous she didn’t even feel guilty for sleeping in until someone was sent to remind her that she was due to perform an autopsy.
She almost threw up upon being reminded, but there was no delaying. She spent several minutes transmuting her own body until she didn’t feel sick from standing upright.
The autopsy would take place in the Alchemy Tower’s operating theatre so that Falcon Matias and several of the Flame Keepers who managed the crematorium could observe to ensure she did nothing to violate the sanctity of the body.
Helena’s mouth was dry as she stood before the covered gurney, the metal instruments laid out on a tray, gleaming under a bright light that illuminated her and Gettlich, leaving her audience in the shadows.
She felt disconnected from her body as she pulled the sheet back.
“May I begin?” she said to the darkness.
“Begin,” came Matias’s voice.
There was something particularly horrible about having to cut open the body of someone she’d known, removing the organs and examining the body in components while narrating in detail the kinds of abuse she found evidence of. What she could and couldn’t feel through resonance about the experimentation.
She wished she could cover the face, so she didn’t have to look at it while she was working, but the dead had to be respected.
When it was over, two of the Flame Keepers emerged from the darkness and took the body carefully away. It was important for every part to be burned, to ensure that no earthly remains could hold back the soul’s ascent.
In the war room, Helena listened as the guard reported on how Gettlich had been found and what she’d said. Then Luc recited in an empty voice everything that she’d told him.
General Althorne showed the location of the West Port Lab. Ferron’s contribution. It was better protected than the previous lab had been, the building extensively reinforced to repel an assault. It would be difficult to reach, and they risked too many combatants if they went that far into enemy territory.
“The Council recognises Healer Marino,” Matias said. It was the first time Helena had spoken before the Eternal Flame since her “hysterical outburst.” She hadn’t known that she’d be called on. Matias could give the report himself.
Ilva’s eyes flicked to Crowther as Helena stepped forward.
She wet her lips. “Based on my—examination, the information Gettlich gave Luc—the Principate, appears accurate. It was likely an unsuccessful attempt to neutralise her resonance. There were multiple injection sites throughout the body, some near the brain but most along the arms. It was a variety of metals reduced to microparticles and injected with a carrier fluid into the muscles. I couldn’t accurately analyse it through resonance; there seemed to be some compounds beyond my repertoire. I extracted what I could and turned the samples over to the metallurgists. It wasn’t possible to determine whether the method was successful in suppressing alchemical abilities, although prior to her death, I did have difficulty offering relief through healing.”
“How would such a thing work?” Ilva asked, her fingertips drawing absentminded circles on the table in front of her.
Helena inhaled, hoping that they would not punish the messenger. “My theory is that the injections were intended to create an internal interference with Gettlich’s resonance. By placing the microparticles inside the body near the brain and hands, they thought to obscure Gettlich’s ability to sense metal outside her body. Based on the number of injections, I believe they kept dosing her until she couldn’t resonate anymore, but the quantity of metal was toxic at that point.”
“What are the odds they succeeded?” Althorne asked in his deep voice.
“I couldn’t say,” Helena said.
“What I wish to know,” Falcon Matias said from his seat beside Ilva, “is what the purpose of this experiment is. What use would they have for suppressing resonance?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You’re a vivimancer,” he said pointedly. “Surely you have some idea of how it could be useful for your kind.”
Luc, who’d been slumped in his seat ever since Althorne overruled any possibility of raiding the lab, suddenly straightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Matias smacked his tongue, pressing a handkerchief beneath his narrow nostrils. “It is a relevant question. Healer Marino”—he said the title as if it were an insult—“has the same abilities as those responsible. Because of that, she may have ideas that would not occur to the rest of us.”
Luc’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Helena is a healer. She has devoted her life to our cause. She’s as loyal as anyone. She’s nothing like those responsible.”
Rather than answer Luc, Falcon Matias turned his gaze back to Helena. “Healer Marino, prior to this autopsy, you performed a transmutational dissection, did you not?”
Helena nodded, fingers flexing inside her gloves. “At the Council’s request—”
“That was a yes or no question,” Matias said sharply.
“Yes.”
“And during that dissection, you used transmutational abilities to examine and reverse the creation of the chimaera in ways that any other medical personnel would have been incapable of, did you not?”
“I was instructed to—”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
Matias turned his attention triumphantly back to Luc. “Then my question stands. Healer Marino, as a vivimancer, what would you consider the potential use of people with suppressed alchemy?”
The room faded from view, and all Helena could see was Gettlich, cut open, her arms with the skin purpled and greyish around the injection sites, the holes left behind from the syringes, and her own subconscious puzzling out the methodology, trying to understand the intent and technique, unable to keep from noticing avenues of improvement because that was how she’d been trained to perceive all forms of alchemy. Even torture.
If she admitted those theories, it would be proof of what she was. If she refused, she might endanger the Eternal Flame by withholding imperative information.
“It would control prisoners,” Crowther said before she could answer, “or they may endeavour to weaponise it. Or use it to make human subjects easier to manage during their experimentation. There are many possibilities, Falcon.”
Matias glanced scathingly towards Crowther. There were mutters in the audience. Crowther almost never spoke during meetings.
Helena gave a stilted nod. “There may be a number of potential uses for suppressing alchemy, but there’s currently no evidence that they’ve discovered a reliable means of doing so, only that they’re attempting it.”
“We should prepare for the possibility, but keep the information away from the general population,” Ilva said. “We have no need for fearmongering over something that may never come to pass. And Matias.” She turned imperiously to gaze at the Falcon. “Need I remind this Council that Healer Marino’s work and title come with the blessing of the Faith and the Principate?”
Matias nodded sourly as Helena went back to her seat.
It was both unsurprising and undeniable that Falcon Matias wanted Helena removed from the Eternal Flame, possibly the Resistance. With all the trainee healers, Helena was no longer the necessity she’d once been. Luc might be the only obstacle to that.
The Council was supposed to be five equal votes, but Luc had greater sway than the other four members combined. They could outvote him, but they’d never dared to veto him openly.
They preferred to simply keep him in the dark.
Luc had an overpowering sense of what was right, his decisions ruled by conscience, but as a result, he was left out of many of the Council’s deliberations, nudged to spend his time at the front where choices did not involve such delicate politics.
Helena watched him sitting among the Council, Ilva and Matias on one side and Althorne and Crowther on the other, like a marionette unaware of its strings.
Helena wished she could save him from it, but she knew that left to his own devices he would blindly sacrifice himself at the first opportunity.
* * *
Crowther gestured to Helena to follow him when the meeting ended.
“Is Matias going to be a problem for me?” she asked once they were alone.
“Yes,” he said as they walked across the skybridge into the Alchemy Tower.
They entered the lift, but rather than ascend to his office, he inserted a key and the lift went down.
“He wants you gone, and now he’s begun taking steps to achieve it.”
Helena swallowed hard. “Is that something you’ll allow?”
He glanced towards her. “Are you doing anything that would make interfering worth the effort? Insofar as I’m aware, the only thing you’ve done for the last several weeks is waste our limited opium supplies on Ferron.”
The lift was still descending. They passed the ground floor. Helena’s stomach seemed to drop with it.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“To see how useful you can be,” was all Crowther said as the lift lurched to a stop and the doors opened, revealing a dark passage.
Helena knew there were places underground. She’d been down here a few times to retrieve things from the storage rooms. The plateau where the Tower was built was stone and had been extensively excavated over the centuries. She had no idea why Crowther would bring her here.
He led the way, picking up an electric torch from a ledge, clicking it on, and wedging it into the space between where his body and his paralysed arm were strapped together so he could unlock a heavy door. Instead of revealing a room, it revealed a flight of stairs that led down into pitch blackness. The scent of mildew rose from the darkness.
Helena stalled. “Where are we going?”
“On occasion I have—special prisoners who require medical attention. Ivy doesn’t always possess the finesse needed. Come, Marino, show me how much effort you’re worth.”
* * *
Helena didn’t know much about the Resistance’s prisoners, but she did know they weren’t supposed to be kept in what amounted to a hole underground. There were ruins beneath the Tower, tunnels and underground rooms, too elaborate to have been made just for Institute storage. Most of them had been transformed into cells filled with unfamiliar prisoners.
She also knew that burn injuries were common in the war, but combat pyromancy was a blunt weapon. It left large burns, not wounds targeted precisely at areas of the body with the highest concentrations of nerve endings.
The person would need to be restrained, and the pyromancer very experienced.
Helena lost track of how long she was down in the dark, eyes straining to pick out details from the unsteady sweep of Crowther’s electric torch that gave her only glimpses of filthy bodies and charred flesh. She healed by touch, reaching out and finding bodies in the darkness.
It felt criminal. Relief, but for what? Further atrocity?
She debrided, regenerated the tissue, closed the open sores, healed fractures, and found many hands with every bone meticulously broken.
Which threat was Crowther making by bringing her here?
“I’ll—I can have Ferron healed by next week,” she said in the lift afterwards, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She was cold all over, and the light hurt her eyes. Complicit. Complicit. Complicit. The word rang through her head. “I’ll get it done.”
Crowther said nothing, his thin, spider-like fingers tapping absently along his paralysed forearm.
She pressed on, speaking quickly. “He’s—I think he’s starting to regenerate normally again. The array will be difficult to work with, but I can do it. I think it could be an advantage in the long run. The injury has made him more emotionally vulnerable than he would have been otherwise.”
Crowther’s fingers stilled. “Don’t mistake that for loyalty.”
Dread shivered in her lungs.
“I don’t. I realise that it’s not necessarily leverage yet, but—the array affects him. He mentioned that it’s become harder to dissuade himself from what he wants. I can take advantage of that.”
“You’re deluding yourself.”
Why was he suddenly sceptical when this was the mission he’d given her?
He looked over. “Kaine Ferron remains the youngest of the Undying. In all this time, there has never been another so young.” He was standing near enough in the lift that she could see the metal fillings in his back molars as he spoke. “He should have been taken advantage of immediately—a boy of immense fortune, not yet a man, fatherless in a war. And yet he has climbed rank. He has no friends, no lovers, not even a particular whore he favours. He is calculating and mercurial and takes risks that anyone else would consider insane.”
“I kno—”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d realise the error in your strategy. He is not a person, he’s not human, and you are not creating a relationship of trust with him. He is an animal.”
Helena stared at Crowther in bewilderment. The lift stopped, the doors opened, and she almost tripped stepping out. “But you told me to—”
“I told you to use vivimancy,” Crowther snarled. “And instead, you offered endless excuses about needing the right opportunities, that it would be too obvious, and now you think the array, this injury, is the solution to your failures.”
“You said to take priority over his original goals. I’m doing that.”
Crowther’s eyebrows dipped into a sharp frown, and he seized her by the elbow and dragged her towards his office, not answering until they were behind closed doors.
“I told you to enthral him with vivimancy.” Crowther’s voice had grown icy. “What you are doing is making him depend on you, to consider you someone he needs. That is entirely different. Can you turn this array off? Control the intensity of its effect? No, you cannot. I did not ask for something irreversible, I asked for a vivimancy-controlled obsession.”
“Well, that’s not how vivimancy works,” she snapped back. “You can’t just turn human emotions on or off, not in a way that gives you the kind of leverage you’re wanting. It’s not magic.”
He glared at her as he seated himself at his desk. “I have no use for tools I cannot control. If you manage to succeed in this manner, you’re more likely to destroy the Eternal Flame than save it. The Ferron family is fuelled by their ambitions. They have always resented the noble families. Now Paladia is built with their steel, and they think that means it belongs to them, whether to seize or ruin. They do not share. They are obsessive about what they regard to be theirs. You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone.”
Terror ran through Helena like a knife, but she squared her shoulders, meeting Crowther’s glare, refusing to back down because she had nowhere to go. Her every bridge was burned. He’d seen to that.
“You gave me to him,” she said, her voice full of fury. “Now, and after the war. Those were the terms. You said it was Ferron or lose, and so I chose him. When was he ever expected to let me go?”
She drew a shaky breath. “You said to make myself the mission for him. He is changeable right now, and this may be the only moment in which he ever will be. If you think what I’m doing is too dangerous, then give me a different option, because this is the only way I can give you what you asked for.”
She could see anger in Crowther’s eyes, but he said nothing.
What had he expected her to do? Had he really believed that vivimancy could create obsession in Ferron without a sense of need? That it was a faucet she could turn on and off? Did no one understand what vivimancy was?
Crowther sat staring at her, and she could almost see the pieces moving as he adjusted his strategy, weighing what to do. When he said nothing for several minutes, she eventually turned to leave.
The corridors of the Tower felt too warm and enclosed in the summer heat. Helena could barely breathe.
She went out onto a skybridge.
Down below, Luc and Lila were sparring against their unit while Soren was calling out critiques of their forms. A small crowd was gathered to watch.
Knowing Ilva, she’d probably told Soren or Lila to do something to preoccupy Luc and keep him from fretting over the West Port Lab.
Combat alchemy could be so beautiful, it was almost hard to remember the violence of its purpose, and the ceaseless ugliness left in its wake.
