Alchemised, page 52
It meant that Luc came back less. Even Crowther was often gone.
She took her report to Ilva, who never left Headquarters.
“Well?” Ilva asked when Helena entered her office.
“He’s asked for my alloy,” Helena said, sitting down in front of the desk and handing over the envelope. “He said he’ll take care of it.”
Ilva looked up, a gleam like sunlight in her pale-blue eyes. “Did he?”
Helena looked down at her nails. The nail beds were all stained with dirt, and her skin was tinged green from cuttings. “He said it’s thanks for healing him.”
“I’m sure.” There was a melodic note of sarcasm in Ilva’s tone.
Helena bit her lip. She hated debriefings like this, disclosing all her conversations and interactions, laying out Kaine’s words, his tells, his lack of tells. Letting Ilva or Crowther dissect him as if performing a kind of emotional vivisection, identifying his weaknesses and vulnerabilities so that Helena could be sent back to try to exploit them with greater precision.
“Anything else?”
She looked up to find Ilva studying her closely. The brusqueness had thawed after Kaine had resumed training her. Now that Helena had potential use, she was worth their time again.
“With the way things are going, I don’t think we should discount the possibility that Ferron may kill me.”
Ilva straightened, her thin lips vanishing. “Are you asking to be pulled out, Marino?”
There was a sudden intensity in her voice.
Helena’s chest tightened as she shook her head.
“No. We need the information. I just—I want to know what I should prioritise. Elain is probably best suited as my replacement, but there’s still a lot of basic medical knowledge she needs to learn, and that’s not even considering some of the more advanced healing techniques that she’s been afraid to do. She’s not as driven. I think the Council will need to officially designate her as my alternate so I can push her harder.”
“I’ll speak with Jan and look over the hospital’s reports. If you could make a list of which areas would have the least redundancy, that would be useful.”
“All right.” Helena’s voice came out stilted and mechanical. A thought occurred to her. “Shiseo—he’s a metallurgist. Could I ask him to test my resonance for my alloy?”
Ilva coughed. “If you’d like.”
Helena stood to leave.
“Helena,” Ilva called softly just as she reached the door.
She paused, looking back. Ilva’s expression was unreadable.
“Tell me, what’s your strategy with Ferron now?”
Helena paused, feeling tired. She couldn’t rightly remember the last time she hadn’t been tired. She leaned against the door, letting it brace her.
“I think…he wants me. Treating the array changed things between us, but he knows what I’m doing.” She swallowed hard. “He’s very obsessive about things. I think he always has been, but the array makes it worse. If things go according to plan, that’ll be good for us. I don’t think he’ll ever abandon the Eternal Flame then. Willingness seems critical with him, and he knows mine is conditional on the Eternal Flame’s survival. But—given how far he’s willing to go for things, I’d say there’s a chance he’d destroy anything that stood in his way. That might include me.”
Ilva was silent, still watching Helena.
Helena felt raw, as if she’d been flayed and was now being kept under observation. “Maybe I’m just overthinking it.”
Ilva looked down at her desk, picking up a glass paperweight and rolling it in her hands. “You’ve done much more than I expected.”
Was that supposed to make her feel better?
Standing there, Helena thought she should feel something, but instead her heart seemed to be compacting inside her chest, growing smaller and harder day by day. She used to think she had so much to give that she could never run out; now she felt like an upended pitcher, with an impatient cup waiting for the last drop.
“I’m not—” she started, and then paused. She twisted at the ring around her finger. “I think he’s lonely.”
Ilva straightened, rising several inches in her seat. “I hope you’re not getting attached, Helena. The Eternal Flame is depending on you to stay on mission. If you’re compromised, you should say so.”
Helena shook her head, regretting the comment. “Never. My loyalty will always be to the Eternal Flame.”
Ilva’s expression remained wary. “You know,” she said slowly, “I can only keep Luc and his unit away from the worst fights if we know which ones they’ll be.”
Helena’s heart slammed into her throat. “I know.” Her voice was tight. “I’m doing everything I can. I’ll never do anything that could risk Luc.”
Ilva’s posture softened. “All right, then. You can go.” She waved her hand in dismissal, returning to her files.
Helena turned, then gave a brittle laugh. “You know, I just realised, if I succeed, you’ll control Ferron the same way you use Luc to control me. It makes me feel rather sorry for him.”
Ilva didn’t look at her. “Well, he’ll deserve it more than you do.”
Chapter 42
Octobris 1786
When Helena asked Shiseo if he could test her resonance for a weapon alloy, he’d seemed surprised by the request.
“You don’t know?” he asked, looking up as he adjusted the temperature under an alembic.
“I never got around to it,” she said, trying to make the request seem casual. Shiseo was an excellent collaborator, but he was excruciatingly private. He never spoke of himself or the Eastern Empire except in ways specific to their work.
“It’s all right if you don’t have time,” she said. “It’s mostly curiosity.”
Shiseo blinked slowly. His expressions were even more unreadable than Kaine’s. “Remind me, what part are you from?”
Helena exhaled, fingers skittering across the medical textbook she was reading. She’d had an idea for an injected drug for emergency situations where a heart needed intense stimulation, but she was uncertain about the composition she’d developed.
“Etras. It’s south. Out in the sea. The crescent of islands between the two continents. Not many alchemists there, since there isn’t much metal, and no lumithium.”
“Is that why you came to Paladia?”
She nodded without looking up. “My father thought my repertoire was too special to be—wasted there.”
Shiseo gave a mysterious little hum and nodded. “I will bring my set to test you, but I would like to ask a favour, if I may.”
She straightened, and now she was looking at him curiously. “Of course.”
“The metals from that woman’s blood some months ago. I heard about them. May I try identifying them?”
Helena’s mouth went dry at this casual mention of Gettlich. She’d had no idea Shiseo was even aware of the event, much less knowledgeable enough to have picked up on the fact that there was anything unusual retrieved from the body. Several metallurgists had tried to identify all the trace metals and compounds found in the blood samples without success.
Shiseo’s expression had not changed; he wore the same mild look he always did. “I heard that some are not identified.”
“I’ll ask for a sample.”
When Shiseo returned to Helena’s lab, he brought a little case that was filled with glass vials, each with pure compounds and metals inside, labelled in a script that Helena couldn’t read.
He arranged them in rows. “These”—he pointed to the closest—“are common Paladian metals. These”—he pointed to the second and third rows of compounds—“are a little more rare. We will see.”
He removed them one by one, and Helena used her resonance to manipulate them into hollow spheres while he timed her. Then he used his own remarkably wide repertoire to slice them into quarters and examine the evenness of her distribution, the orderliness of the structure, grading each aspect on a chart.
If some were graded lower than others, there was a mathematical formula to calculate the level of lumithium emanations necessary to balance the potential alloy’s resonance to match the alchemist’s base level.
“You have an interesting repertoire,” he said in his quiet voice as they moved into the third row of vials. “Very unusual. Good attention to detail. I am surprised you are not a metallurgist.”
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” she said, handing another metal back for grading. “It felt like whatever I chose, someone was disappointed. Everyone—” She fluttered her fingers but, catching herself gesturing, folded them in her lap. “Everyone wanted a lot for me, and I’m not sure I ever knew what I wanted.” She shrugged. “Probably good that I didn’t, since it didn’t matter in the end.”
Shiseo didn’t reply. He was studying the notes he’d taken, then he looked at her, staring at her folded hands. “I don’t think a steel weapon would suit you.”
“What?” Her resonance for both steel and iron were excellent. There was no reason why she wouldn’t be perfectly suited for a steel alloy, it was what most metallurgists were specialised in. Almost all the weapons in Paladia were steel.
“You are exceptional with titanium. I met the titanium guildmaster once, and even his work was not so perfect.” Then he picked up a piece of her nickel work, studying it as well. “Have you ever tried nickel-titanium alloy?”
She shook her head.
“It would make a better weapon for you. Very light. You’d waste your strength with steel.”
“This isn’t for a weapon,” Helena said quickly. “It’s just—curiosity.”
Shiseo just made a little click with his tongue. “Well…if you wanted a weapon, I would advise you to use nickel and titanium. Don’t limit yourself to what Paladians do.”
She couldn’t imagine giving Kaine Ferron, heir of the iron guild, a resonance alloy without any iron in it. Titanium and nickel might not even be in his repertoire. She’d be asking for a weapon he couldn’t sense or transmute. It would seem like a threat.
After some pleading, Shiseo finally consented to writing a steel alloy, too.
She almost threw the titanium alloy away, but Crowther instructed her to include it. He wanted to see what Kaine would do.
* * *
Elain did not undergo any new training.
When Helena had tried to add the additional training sessions and one weekly foraging trip, Elain had filed a formal complaint with Falcon Matias that she was being overworked and had never agreed to be an apothecary, and of course, not only did Matias side with Elain, but he’d wanted to know how and why Helena was an apothecary, and who had approved it.
A moratorium was placed on Helena’s lab work, and the next thing she knew, it was not her lab at all but Shiseo’s, and Ilva had Helena passed off as the lab assistant, tasked with running errands and fetching supplies from the wetlands for him.
It was all technicalities, and better than being banned from chymiatria, but it still felt like a blow.
Her only solace was anticipating a bespoke knife. She’d given the alloy slip to Kaine, and he’d taken it without comment.
It was hard to temper her expectations. Whenever she used any kind of tool or weapon, she’d wonder what it would feel like to hold something made to resonate with her. Lila treated her weapons like they were children, naming them, coddling them, spending hours caring for them, ensuring they were in perfect condition. It was the same with her prosthetic and armour. They were so intrinsically customised, it made them an extension of herself.
However, Kaine made no references to the knife. Helena began to habitually push the thought down so she wouldn’t experience a pang of disappointment every time she saw him.
He finally decided she was “passable” at the forms and moved on to attacks and techniques specific to her abilities.
“You’re still doing it wrong,” he said, standing and stalking over to her. “The idea is to target the tendons. You start low. Left Achilles, then the inside of the right thigh; they fall, and your blade is there to catch them through the throat and into the skull. That is when you’ll punch your fist into their chest and rip out the talisman.”
He demonstrated again, but she kept dropping the knife. The attack wasn’t complicated, but the knife-work had to be done with her off hand, so that her right hand could perform the human transmutation at the end.
Three transmutational shapes in seconds while using her non-dominant hand tested the limits of her coordination.
He stepped behind her. Not being able to see him made her keenly aware of how close he was.
There was a pause before his hands wrapped around hers, fingers brushing across the inside of her wrists, her back against his chest.
She could feel him through her resonance, and even though she wasn’t directly touching him, she was so keyed up from her constantly flowing resonance that it formed a torus of energy around her. She tried to block him out, but she was too frayed to only attenuate on her knife.
His arms ran against the length of hers as he guided her down into a low lunge, her left hand angling to catch a tendon, transmuting her knife into a curve, then—with a quick flick of the wrist upwards—using a straight-edged blade to take out the hamstring of the opposite leg. In this same upwards movement, the blade widened into a brutal spike intended to maximise brain damage.
Then he drove her other hand forward in a brutal punch into empty air. With her resonance behind it, she’d go straight through the bone and find a talisman.
“It’s one movement,” he said, his voice near her ear. A shiver ran through her gut. Helena could barely hear his words over her own heartbeat. “You go quick. Hit as many points as you can. Tendons are the best way to slow them. A blade through the brain will knock them out for a few seconds, at least, and keep them disoriented for longer. Even if you miss the talisman, they won’t recover immediately. The regeneration will focus on the brain. But miss that blow and you’re dead.”
He took her through the movement one more time slowly, and then faster to demonstrate the upward lunge of a counterstrike intended to be fluid and quick as lightning.
“Do you feel it now?” he asked, his voice low, the heat of his breath near her ear, brushing through her hair, making it impossible to focus.
She didn’t think he was helping at all. There was an intense pressure that grew inside her whenever he was close, a sort of frantic desperation, like swimming up towards the surface yet never reaching it.
She nodded shakily, and his hands slipped away from her wrists.
“Go again.”
* * *
When the Tower bell went off, the air vibrated. An attack warning, or else a call to be ready. For fighters to go out, and for the hospital to prepare.
The sirens in the hallway began blaring loud enough to split her skull as Helena hurried towards the hospital.
“What do we know?” she asked as she tied on her apron, stripping her gloves off to wash and sterilise her hands.
Whatever had happened did so without warning. Normally as soon as significant fighting started anywhere, messages to Headquarters were dispatched and the hospital was prepped. This time the sirens had gone straight to full alert.
“Nothing yet,” Pace said as she directed medics. She’d only returned from the other hospital a few days ago, worn to the bone, but she never stopped working.
Orderlies and nurses rushed around, making sure everything was ready.
The bell was still sounding.
“I’m going to the main gates to find out what’s happening,” Helena finally said.
Out in the courtyard, without the walls acting as a barrier for the sound, she could feel the Tower bell’s ringing in her teeth, its low cadence a vibration in her stomach.
The noise finally cut off as she reached the gates. There were dozens of soldiers and guards, all awaiting orders. Even Crowther was lurking, curious as everyone else.
“Do you know what’s happened?” Helena asked a guard.
“Ambush,” he said, his eyes locked out towards the street. “Don’t know much more than that. Two teams went out. That’s all I know. We’ve heard nothing else.”
There was a commotion beyond the gates.
Then she heard Luc, his voice pure rage. “Let go. Let me go!”
Then there were other voices. Shouts of “Watch out!” and “Hold him!” and a scorching whoosh of flames.
“Let me go!”
Helena went forward instinctively, along with a dozen others.
There was an explosion of fire as she emerged from the gatehouse to the sight of nearly a dozen people trying to drag and wrestle Luc towards Headquarters. Soren, Sebastian, Althorne, and several others from Luc’s unit had him by the arms and legs, trying to pin him to the ground.
Luc had been disarmed, but they couldn’t pry his ignition rings off his fingers. Fire sparked but suddenly vanished as Crowther darted forward. His left hand swept through the air and extinguished the flames as he clenched his fist.
“Marino, put him down!” Crowther snapped.
“You left her! Let me go!” White fire exploded off Luc, flame tearing in all directions, violent and uncontrolled, fuelled by rage. Luc lurched to his feet.
A tongue of metal shot out, Althorne’s arm jerked back, Luc hit the ground, and there were several people on him again. Fire erupted and vanished.
“Marino!” Crowther snarled.
Luc lunged violently, ripping one hand free, and a wall of fire shot in all directions. It slammed into Crowther, and he hit a wall with a sickening crunch.
Everyone froze, including Luc.
