Alchemised, page 50
Burnout was common for defence alchemists, who frequently strained the limits of their range and abilities. It also happened to healers. Once it started happening a lot—
She forced herself to focus.
There was blood everywhere, but two of the necrothralls were still coming towards her.
She fumbled for her knife, lost in the bottom of her satchel, barely managing to grasp it in time.
She aimed for the nearest necrothrall’s throat. Straight through to the spinal cord. With her resonance burned out, she couldn’t transmute the blade, but she twisted it and jerked left. The head toppled off with a grotesque squelch, body following as fiery, white-hot pain exploded up her leg.
When she’d lunged towards one, the other necrothrall had tried to stab at her with a metal spike.
It had missed her torso and gone through her calf.
Helena nearly collapsed, slashing clumsily. She barely managed to sever enough fingers that it couldn’t jerk the spike back out.
Her brain clamoured to pull out the spike, as her calf muscles tore around it, but she knew she’d bleed out if she did. The rough metal shifted, and she bit through the sleeve of her shirt to keep from screaming.
The necrothrall was still coming. Most of the fingers on one hand were gone, but it could still bludgeon her, and she knew the most dangerous part of necrothralls was often their teeth.
She gripped the knife tighter, forced to wait until it reached for her. As soon as it was in range, she grabbed its outstretched hand, her absent resonance like a hole inside her. Teeth swung towards her face, and she shoved her knife straight through the V of the jaw.
Something slammed into the side of her head, sending her stumbling.
The arm was wrenched free of her grasp. Broken fingernails clawed at her skin.
There was thick old blood in her eyes.
She lurched forward. Her left leg failed, but it gave her enough momentum to drive the knife through the top of the skull. Purple blood spurted across her face as the necrothrall collapsed.
Helena stood dazed and gasping for breath, scrubbing at her face. The blood was all she could smell.
She tried to make out where she was using the towers of the city to orient herself. The bridge was on the far side from her, but the tenement was nearby.
She’d hide there first, and then make a plan. She leaned against the wall, trying to keep from putting weight on her left leg. Even dragging it was agony.
She reached the tenement building and crawled up the steps, but it was only as she reached the landing that she remembered that door had a resonance lock. She couldn’t get inside.
She crawled over and pressed her hand against it anyway, as if her resonance were a well and there were some final drops she could plumb, even though she knew burnout often took days to come back from.
She sat back, cursing herself for being so accustomed to the routine to be this careless. Her head was swimming, although she didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or blood loss.
She found the cleanest spot in the corridor and forced herself to look at her leg. Blood had coated her calf and foot, leaving an obvious trail. Fortunately, necrothralls weren’t generally aware enough to notice anything that didn’t move.
Her vision blurred, the pain seeming to crush her ability to think down into a funnel.
No artery, she didn’t think. She debated pulling out the spike, but she didn’t have enough supplies to pack a wound that large.
If she could reach the checkpoint, they’d get her to Headquarters, but no one was going to come looking for her on the Outpost.
She fumbled through her satchel.
The priority was stabilising the spike, and applying pressure to reduce the bleeding. Then she’d plan.
She chewed on an abandoned sprig of yarrow as she wrapped bandages around her leg.
Blood was already seeping through before she’d finished, and her mind had gone sluggish.
She tried harder to focus, head lolling as she struggled to stay alert.
Stay awake. You have to stay awake.
Her vision lengthened. Her legs seemed far away, all the way down a tunnel, and then everything faded away.
“What are you doing?”
Helena started, her leg jerking reflexively, pain bursting through her.
Kaine was standing over her, seemingly having appeared out of thin air.
At least, she thought it was Kaine. Her vision was blurry, and his presence seemed to swallow the space. As his face swam into focus, he was glaring at her icily.
Her heart lurched at the sight of it.
“It’s Martiday,” she managed to say.
“What happened?”
She gestured limply at the metal spike still running through her calf.
He barely glanced at it. “Yes, I noticed. I’ll admit, your commitment to the bit is impressive. I can’t say I expected you to go this far.”
She stared at him, not understanding.
“Tell Crowther I have no time for his tricks. Pull something like this again, and he can consider the deal off.” Kaine turned, walking away.
Her chest felt hollow as she watched him leave, realising that he thought she’d injured herself on purpose.
He paused at the top of the stairs, staring at the trail of blood before looking back at her.
“Get up.” He was speaking through clenched teeth.
She shook her head. “I’m waiting for my resonance to come back.”
His head jerked sharply. “What?”
She looked down. “The fires…there were a lot—I was too tired today. I didn’t realise—never burned out before. So I’m—waiting.”
Kaine walked back over and crouched in front of her, his eyes narrowed. His hair was so much more silver now.
“Marino, what kind of vivimancy do they have you doing in the hospital?”
“Depends who’s injured.” Her head was very light; her consciousness was threatening to rise through the top of her head and float away.
Fingers snapped sharply in front of her face.
“Focus,” he said. “Describe the healing you do. Are you just transmuting physical injuries away or are you using your vitality to keep people alive?”
“Depends…” she said again. She was having trouble making her eyes focus. His own eyes shone, and she stared at them, mesmerised. “We use triage protocol. Can’t afford to lose our combatants. Especially not alchemists.”
His jaw tensed. “I assumed they’d save that for the likes of Holdfast.”
The corridor had stretched into a tunnel once more.
“Luc can’t win by himself,” she said.
Ferron was suddenly very close, reaching towards her. He pulled her up off the ground, sending an inferno of pain through her body. She screamed and fainted.
When her eyes opened again, she was in the tenement unit, lying on her back, her injured leg elevated with a chair. She felt simultaneously better and worse.
She was overwhelmingly thirsty.
Kaine was studying her calf where the spike ran through it.
“How do I heal this?”
She blinked sluggishly, the ceiling swirling overhead.
Think, Helena, you’ve taught healing before. “Numbing the area is the first step, but I don’t have enough blood to…”
Her words slurred away. Explaining the lack of saline and plasma expanders was too many words to string together. Did he even know how to numb? With the new healers, she’d use her resonance at the same time and guide them, so that they’d know what to look for.
She was so thirsty.
She shook her head. “I don’t think…It’s…tricky for beginners…nerves.”
Annoyance flashed across his face. “I did paralyse you once. I’m familiar with nerves.” His bare hand pressed just below her knee. “Here?”
She nodded and barely felt his resonance before her leg went numb. She drew several deep breaths, feeling less shaky now that she wasn’t distracted by pain.
“Um,” she said, swallowing, “you need to identify what’s damaged before you pull the spike out. Nerves, veins—I don’t think it went through the artery, but you should check. Might’ve fractured the bone. Blood flow’s easy to sense. Close the veins and arteries temporarily—not too long.”
Kaine was silent, his bare fingers pressed against her calf, and his eyes went out of focus. She couldn’t feel what he was doing, which would normally bother her, but right now she was not lucid enough to care properly.
He placed his hand on the spike. Despite being numb, she tensed, bracing herself for the grind of metal against tissue.
Rather than pull it out, he transmuted it. The metal rippled in his hand, shrinking out of the wound so that it didn’t drag or tear. Only a little blood spattered on the floor. He dropped the bar, studying the puncture with a critical eye.
“I don’t feel any trace metals left. Do I clean it?”
She nodded, starting to tremble even though the spike was out and the pain was gone. “There’s leftover carbolic dilution in my satchel.”
He rummaged through it and found the vial.
“Lucky I healed you,” she said as he wordlessly unscrewed it and poured the contents over the wound. It looked like water trickling through and joining the puddle of blood on the floor.
Then he began closing the puncture. She warned him to only perform the most basic regeneration, because she didn’t have the physical resources for more.
Gradually the hole in her leg was gone, replaced with delicate, extremely inflamed new tissue, and he partially removed the block on her nerves. Pain rolled through her like a wave. She’d need more healing, but this was enough to get her back.
She tried to rotate her foot, but the muscles weren’t intact enough. She could limp, though.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t acknowledge her, wiping his hands off on a handkerchief and pulling his gloves back on. He radiated impatience as she got up, favouring her left leg. There was a new sort of hardness about him.
Her head was light, but she felt less wobbly.
She touched the door, but her resonance was still just a gap, like a lost tooth. Her fingers skittered across the surface. Before she could say anything, she heard the mechanisms inside move, and the door clicked open.
She looked back, expecting to find Ferron behind her, but he was still across the room.
Chapter 40
Septembris 1786
Despite the Outpost being retaken, Helena returned the following week. Even with necrothralls patrolling, there was no better place to meet. Anywhere else in the city would have checkpoints maintained with living guards with long-term memories who’d inspect her papers every time she passed through. Helena was too memorably foreign looking to safely move in and out of enemy territory.
The Outpost, although Undying territory, was only being minimally patrolled by the necrothralls, something Helena would have known if she hadn’t been half asleep during the meeting.
Her leg still ached when she walked on it, a side effect of not being able to heal herself for the several days it took for her resonance to return. Regenerated muscle took time to fully reintegrate, but the injury wasn’t anything permanent.
She navigated the Outpost cautiously, her knife gripped tightly in her hand, but she only saw a few necrothralls at a distance. No solitary necrothralls approached her with missives. She wondered if Kaine had gotten the memo about still using the Outpost.
She was about to leave when her ring burned. She headed for the tenement.
He was seated at the table, waiting, when she arrived. She’d grown so used to seeing him always straddling chairs, it was surprising to see him seated on one properly.
His eyes swept from head to toe, as if expecting her to be bleeding from somewhere again.
“I think it’s time I trained you,” he said as the door shut behind her.
She said nothing. She felt too many emotions to even begin to make sense of them all.
So he was back, no explanation for his month-long disappearance, while she’d been left to endure being written off as a failure and castigated for wasting critical resources on a gamble that had failed to pay off.
Crowther had been scathing, because although the missives had still arrived every four days, Kaine passed on only the information he chose to. They could not ask for anything. Everything they received was at his discretion, for only as long as he chose to provide it.
Relying on Kaine Ferron was like walking on black ice, knowing that at any moment it might break beneath their feet.
Her fingers curled into a fist, feeling the punctures in her palm, not trusting herself to speak.
He tilted his head back. His dark hair was threaded through with silver so that it almost gleamed. “How long have you been healing?”
She paused, calculating. “Little more than five years now.”
There was an almost charring intensity in the way he was looking at her. “I assume you’re aware of the Toll.”
She nodded.
“Have you burned out like that before?”
She shook her head. “No, it was the first time.” Her fingers bumped absently against her chest where the empty amulet hung beneath her clothes. “I used to—handle it better.”
“Well, that’s something at least.” He stood up. “How was it explained to you? I assume that Falcon or the Holdfasts told you about it.”
She looked away, staring out the window. “Vivimancy is a corruption of resonance that can use vitality as well as the energy of resonance. It’s caused when an unviable soul sustains itself by stealing life from another. Souls like that can only be purified through a life of self-sacrifice. The toll is—penance. It’s giving up what was stolen.”
His mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. “Right. You mentioned that your mother died when you were young.”
She nodded wordlessly, cold all over. She’d still been in shock from her father’s death when Ilva had her sent away to Matias, a Shrike at the time.
He had been the one to tell her that she was the reason both her parents were dead.
Her mother’s mysterious sickness, diagnosed as a kind of consumption, was the Toll. Not because her mother had been a vivimancer, but because from the moment of conception, Helena’s defective, corrupt self had leached her mother of life from within her womb, stealing all but those seven years away. That vivimancers were parasites by nature, and they would rot and burn in the bowels of the earth for an eternity if they did not repent and purify themselves by giving up every drop of the vitality they’d taken.
Just thinking about it made Helena’s head throb. All the years she’d spent hovering over her mother, watching her father attempt cure after cure, running them into debt buying expensive ingredients, and it was Helena who’d been the cause.
“So…” Ferron said slowly, moving idly towards her, “you use your vitality to save—anyone you’re told to save, as penance?”
She wished he’d stop talking.
“I want to show you something.” He was in front of her. “Give me your hand.”
She extended her left hand reluctantly.
He took it and she had barely time to brace herself before his resonance shot down her arm into her chest, and she felt a hard yank.
It was like being wrenched forward on a cellular level. Her whole body lurched as if his resonance were hooked inside her, trying to rip her soul out, but before it could budge, a rebound of energy severed it, and Ferron’s resonance slammed back into him with bone-charring speed.
She felt it scorch his fingers as he let go. She almost fell backwards.
“What’d you do—” Her tongue scarcely worked. She doubled over and nearly threw up.
He flexed his hand as if burned. “I just tried to take your vitality by force. Notice anything?”
Helena’s hand pressed against her chest, trying to erase that awful pulling sensation that seemed diffused through her entire body. “It—hurt?”
“It didn’t work,” he said. “It’s not possible to take it by force like that. If it was that easy—” He scoffed. “—Morrough wouldn’t be bothering with most of this. Try it yourself now.”
Helena drew away from his proffered hand. “No, thank you. I get the idea.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t need you to get it, I need you to believe it. You’re being driven by the guilt over crimes you never committed, that you think you deserve to suffer for, and that’s making you a liability for me.”
Of course this was all self-interest on his part. As usual.
“Take my hand,” he said.
She grasped his hand limply.
“You know what your vitality feels like when you use it; feel for mine.”
She shot him a look. “You’re not exactly normal.”
She focused on reaching with her resonance, not merely trying to get a read on his physiology but searching for the actual spark of life within him. Except it was not so much a spark as a small sun.
It was like being flung bodily into the face of Lumithia at full Ascendance, a cold searing burn that etched itself into her teeth and bones.
She tried to ignore it. Pull. She had no idea how to do that. Healing, when it required the use of vitality, worked in the opposite direction, pushing in, giving, but she knew what it felt like when Ferron did it, so she tried to imitate the feeling.
She reached with her resonance towards the overwhelming burn and tried to tug at it. It prompted an instant recoil.
Her resonance rebounded like a rubber band snapping her fingertips. An odd look of amusement flickered on Kaine’s face as she let go.
She swallowed, blinking hard. “But if that’s—if that’s true, then why did my mother die? If I didn’t take it?”
