Alchemised, page 49
“I only went out after light,” she said, trying to slip past. “Just a bit of harvesting. I need to process it.”
Soren was still watching her. “You know, I forgot your hair looked like that. It’s pretty, the way you braid it now.”
“Yes,” she said, forcing a smile, her eyes burning. “It’s best when I keep it braided. I hardly know what to do with myself when it’s like this.”
She went straight to her room and into the shower, scrubbing herself violently, trying to erase the physical memory of Kaine’s hands. The water was hot, and she turned it up until it was scalding on her skin, standing under the spray until she was raw from the heat.
She wasn’t crying. It was just the spray of the shower. It was just water on her face.
She barely towelled off before quickly pulling her hair into two braids so taut they tugged at her face. She coiled them at the nape of her neck, letting the pins scrape across her skin as she lodged them into place.
She didn’t let herself look in the mirror until she was done, until there was not a stray curl to be seen.
* * *
She was restocking the hospital inventory when one of the orderlies materialised beside her, placing several bottles of plasma expanders in a box.
“Crowther wants you to meet him at the lifts, right away,” the girl said without looking at Helena.
Helena turned sharply. The girl was soft-featured with soulful eyes, and Helena was certain she’d seen her before, but the girl was unobtrusive enough that she only flickered on the edge of Helena’s memory.
Of course Crowther would have eyes everywhere, including the hospital. Still, it set Helena on edge.
“Who are you?” Helena said as the girl seemed about to slip away.
“No one.”
“What’s your name?” Helena wanted to know who to look out for on the roster.
The girl glanced up, seeming flattered at the question. “Purnell.”
Purnell. She felt she’d heard the name before. She nodded absently. “All right, you can go.”
The orderly hurried off.
Helena finished restocking and headed reluctantly towards the Tower.
Crowther was waiting for her. The lift went down.
In the tunnels, there was a young boy crouched beside the door. Helena blinked and realised it was Ivy, Crowther’s other vivimancer, her hair tucked up under a cap. She looked like a street urchin.
Ivy stood up and threw open the door. The room contained a single figure restrained in a chair, head slumped forward, breathing shallowly.
“Who is this?” Helena asked, wanting to bolt. The smell of old blood and dampness underground made her sick.
“One of the Aspirants sent to Hevgoss,” Crowther said. “Intercepted and brought back, but he’s proving difficult. He’s quite desperate for a taste of eternal life. He’s requiring more persuasion than he can currently survive.”
Helena expected severe burns but found vivimancy instead.
There were no visible signs of torture. No cuts or any external wounds. Instead the corticospinal tract in his spine had been pinched, paralysing him but leaving his sensory nerves intact.
That way, he would feel everything.
Beneath his skin, Ivy had flayed him, using vivimancy to sever the individual layers of skin. Blood had pooled between each one. In some areas, he was flensed down to the muscle.
It was one thing to heal people injured in battle, but healing torture was a different kind of horror.
Crowther did not seem to think that any physical violation went too far in the war against necromancy, so long as the soul was not violated. Based on the tenets of the Faith and the Eternal Flame, there was nothing wrong with the torture of necromancers or aspiring necromancers; flesh was an inferior substance to eventually be consumed by fire anyway. What these people were willing to do to civilians and the Resistance was far worse than anything Crowther did to them.
The prisoner regained consciousness while she was working on his feet.
“I know you,” he said, raising his head. His Northern dialect was thick, the kind that pulled hard on the consonants.
She glanced up. He had wheat-coloured hair and thick stubble across his face.
“You’re Holdfast’s little foreign bitch.”
She looked away again, ignoring him, determined to finish without speaking. She felt marginally less sorry for him now.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” he muttered while she was finishing his hands. “You’re going to lose this war. No one can stop the Undying. They’re the new gods. Someday I’m going to be one of them. People are going to know the Lancasters.”
She looked up again. Now she remembered him; he’d been at the Institute and left after receiving his certification. A guild family. Nickel, she thought it was.
“Once I’m Undying, I’m going to kill that little bitch so slowly she’ll beg me for it. Everything she does to me, she’ll get it tenfold. And then I’m going to bring her back.” His teeth bared gruesomely.
Helena’s jaw tensed, and she fought to stay focused. She was supposed to leave patients conscious. Crowther didn’t want them waking and finding themselves healed, he wanted them dreading, thinking about what would happen to them once she was done.
Once she finished, she stood and left without a word.
Ivy and Crowther reentered the room together, the door shutting. Screaming began vibrating through the door, echoing down the underground corridor.
Helena walked farther, trying to escape it, but it followed her.
She wandered blindly through the tunnels, not caring if she became lost amid them. They turned and twisted, opening into a large room lit by green glass sconces. There were dozens of tunnels leading into it. The walls were covered with intricate but faded murals. It looked almost like an abandoned church.
She’d had no idea any of it existed, buried beneath the Institute. The screaming seemed to carry along all the tunnels, magnifying and concentrating in the room. The place had a sick, eerie feeling about it.
She entered another tunnel, trying to get away, but no matter which one she took, or which way she turned, they all seemed to lead back to the same room. As if to mockingly remind her that she could not escape herself, and what she had become. This was what the war had made her.
Finally she turned slowly back, walking towards the screaming, tired of running from herself.
She’d climb over tortured bodies, sell herself, and tear out Kaine Ferron’s heart if that was what it took to win.
* * *
She was called in two more times before Lancaster finally broke. By the third time, Helena didn’t think he was still sane.
Waiting in the underground passages, ears plugged to try to keep from hearing what was happening in the next room, she’d reevaluated her assessment of the previous night.
Now that it was a little less fresh, her missteps felt less disastrous.
Kaine did feel some sort of partiality towards her. After all, he’d wanted her to stay.
However, whatever flicker of desire or fondness he felt was barely kindled. Too much fuel too fast would smother it. It was for the best they’d stopped when they did. That he was left wondering what could have happened.
She suspected he burned for things more deeply than he knew. Therefore, the key would lie in cultivating that spark into something beyond his control.
He was too calculating for anything else to be effective. It was all or nothing. Leave him as the threat he was, knowing that he was now infinitely more enabled by her to achieve his desires, or try to redirect his ambition and obsessive nature onto her.
People always said there was no greater temptation than the forbidden.
As for the fact that she wanted him back…that she was so willing.
She chewed anxiously on her thumbnail.
It was for the best. Everyone had always said she was a terrible liar.
The door opened, and Ivy came out. Helena looked over at her. “Again?”
Ivy shook her head, shutting the door. “Crowther’s still working on him.”
Ivy crouched down next to Helena, drawing a finger idly through the dirt on the ground. Helena watched her in silence, trying to ignore the smell of burned meat beginning to permeate the air.
“You know,” Helena couldn’t help but say, “there’s other ways to get information out of people. You don’t have to torture them.”
Ivy looked up with her sharp eyes glittering. “I like hurting them. It’s the best part of the job. The rest is boring.”
“Oh.”
There was a long silence. Finally Ivy spoke up. “Can vivimancy get rid of memories? Make someone forget something so they’d never remember it?”
Helena watched her curiously. “Is there something you want to forget?”
Ivy shook her head, staring down the tunnel, and her face twitched oddly. “My sister, she doesn’t remember things. Matron said it’s called a fugue––her not remembering––but it might all come back someday.”
“Don’t you want her to remember?” Helena asked.
Ivy gave a sharp shake of her head. “No.” She looked up at Helena and laughed. “You think I’m bad. If she ever remembers, she’d go completely mad.”
The door opened, and the stench of burned meat wafted out. “Marino. We’re done now.”
Crowther had drugged Lancaster with something synthetic. He was hallucinating wildly. He’d nearly bitten through his tongue, and Helena had to paralyse him to reattach it. His skin was charred all over, although Crowther was always careful never to burn deep enough to kill the nerves.
Lancaster was babbling. It seemed Helena and Ivy had converged in his mind. One moment he’d struggle violently, nearly biting her hands when they were near him, threatening to pour molten metal through her veins until her eyes burst like grapes, and the next he’d be trying to lean towards her and drawing deep rasping breaths, crooning that she was a sweet thing, how once he was Undying, he’d keep her as a pet with a collar and chain, just like Holdfast.
Then he’d think she was Ivy again, and he’d threaten to eat her. Cut her into pieces. Put her back together wrong. Violate her in every way imaginable.
When she was done, she wanted to peel the skin off every place he’d touched her.
“Why don’t you kill him?” she asked Crowther when she got out of the room. Her skin was still crawling.
He seemed amused by this. “Why?”
“You have what you want. He’s a waste of rations.”
He shook his head. “Until we’ve found the guard he was looking for, we’ll keep him. Morrough’s determination to unearth this Wagner in Hevgoss indicates a significant degree of importance. Lancaster is a uniquely devoted Aspirant. He could be useful as evidence if we are ever in contact with Hevgoss. Don’t worry about him. I’ve never lost a prisoner.”
“Can I go, then?” she said dully. Her clothes were stained with Lancaster’s blood.
“Yes, I’ll escort you,” he said. “You healed Ferron? Was it a success?”
She gave an idle nod without looking at him. Whether he was pleased or disappointed by this, she had no energy to care. “Yes. The procedure was a success.”
There was a pause as they ascended the stairs. Crowther blocked the exit, his eyes skimming across her. “I hear you were out all night and returned—dishevelled.”
Her stomach clenched. “It took longer than expected. The checkpoints were closed for curfew. I had to sleep there.”
Crowther waited but she volunteered nothing else.
His eyes narrowed. “Carry on, then.”
Chapter 39
Julius 1786
Helena returned to the Outpost that evening, but found the door in the factory wall locked, the necrothrall that usually appeared with the key nowhere in sight.
She went to the tenement, but the unit was cold and empty, too. She lingered for a little while, just to be sure.
The next evening was the same.
She told herself it was a good sign. The healing was a success. Still, it felt abrupt to suddenly have her evenings again.
Helena hadn’t realised how much time she’d spent making salves and journeying back and forth until all those hours were at her disposal once more.
On Martiday, she went foraging and then headed towards the tenements.
She wasn’t even halfway there when a necrothrall stepped out of the shadows, intercepting her. Helena’s stomach clenched. It wasn’t the normal man, but a woman. She showed an iron symbol on her pallid inner wrist and then held out an envelope.
Helena took it, and the necrothrall turned and walked away.
Helena didn’t usually open the missives, but this time she broke the seal and pulled out the contents, looking for instructions or a message.
It was just an encoded intelligence report.
On Saturnis it happened again.
She hadn’t considered that Kaine could do that, but there was nothing about the way his information was passed on that required the in-person meetings.
She spent her newfound free time in the laboratory experimenting with Shiseo, who had become a collegial companion and collaborator.
Because healing was considered separate from medicine and medical care, the two did not always complement each other. Many sedatives inhibited vivimancy, requiring countering or workarounds in ways that made the healing process unnecessarily complicated. Healing Kaine, far from Matias’s purview, had allowed her to begin considering the possibilities of chymiatria designed for vivimancy.
She began with tonics to support things like blood regeneration and bone repair, but her primary interest was developing something that would maintain vivimancy’s effects by controlling the body’s inner chymistry. She and Shiseo synthesised a glycoside from foxglove and extracted alkaloids from nightshade, working piece by piece.
Creating a niche for herself was a consolation because Elain Boyle was becoming widely preferred as a healer. Helena tried to tell herself it was a good thing to have a healer so naturally likeable. No one ever jumped or even batted an eye when Elain forgot her gloves, but Elain’s social strengths also undermined her as a healer. She was too much of a people pleaser, and it affected her methods. She had a relentless tendency towards prioritising her intuition over her training and healing symptoms rather than causes.
A necessary fever never ran its course when Elain was on shift. People felt better but developed infections more often and recovered slower.
In late Augustus, Basilius Blackthorne tried to retake the southern tip of the East Island. Blackthorne was one of the Undying that everyone feared. He didn’t wear a helmet as most of the Undying did, making no effort to hide his identity. Whether he won or lost his battles, the devastation he left behind was terrible. He was known for eating his victims on the battlefield.
After days of fighting, when it was clear the attack was a failure, Blackthorne set his own army on fire and sent them as far into Resistance territory as they could get. The rainy season hadn’t begun; everything was unusually dry. The flames spread fast, jumping across the tributary between the East and West islands and consuming a large swath of the city. The sky to the south glowed red as an ember.
The hospital was flooded with burn injuries and lung damage, combatants and civilians alike.
The healers were on duty in the hospital for so long, Helena lost track of the days. She didn’t realise how tired she’d become until she was in the war room, listening to reports, and Ilva made a comment that they were unlikely to have an estimate on enemy losses for another day.
She’d already missed more than a week. She had to go.
When she got up the next morning, the room tilted. Lila was sound asleep, a lump under the blankets on her bed. The battalion had returned black with smoke. Luc had kept the fire from advancing on Headquarters, but even his pyromancy had limits against an inferno.
Helena’s head was hollow, throbbing from exhaustion as she dressed and headed out.
Everything was eerily quiet, as if even the birds were afraid to sing. The smoke hung like a shroud over the city.
Even the Outpost was quiet, but Helena paid no attention, just looking for the necrothrall so she could get Kaine’s missive and head back.
She came around a corner and found four of them. She was so tired, she stopped and stood staring stupidly for several moments, trying to understand why Kaine would send four.
Then it dawned on her that they were not his. These were ordinary combat necrothralls.
She immediately began backtracking, noticing only then that the encampments that covered the Outpost were torn apart. The Undying had retaken the Outpost, and she had walked straight into it.
She turned and fled, only to run into another group of necrothralls.
She had to retreat again, winding through the maze of buildings and factories. She tripped over a body, not reanimated.
Every time she escaped one group, she stumbled across another.
Necrothralls didn’t generally move fast, but they didn’t need to. They were herding her away from the gate, from the bridge, from the only way off the Outpost.
She ripped her gloves off as she was cornered in a tight alley and backed away until she hit the wall. It was narrow enough that they could only enter a few at a time.
They shuffled forward.
A few carried weapons. It was hard to say what was worse.
When they got in range, she shoved her hands towards them, forcing her resonance outwards, closing her eyes instinctively.
Her resonance flared for a moment and then burned out like a lightbulb filament.
She opened her eyes, barely seeing the remaining necrothralls approaching because of how raw and wounded she felt inside, as if she’d ripped out a vein.
