Alchemised, page 68
“How do we get out?” she asked as she started checking for injuries, trying to work out how hurt everyone was, how much work it would take to get them conscious and moving.
“Down this tunnel. Go right, then right again, and then straight. There’s an upper floodgate in the far north.”
“Where they released the chimaera?” She remembered the place.
“You’ll have to break it down, but it’ll get you out.”
She nodded. “You have to go before I wake them.”
“I know,” he said, but he didn’t leave, lingering until she looked up. His eyes shone in the dark, as if there were moonlight underground.
He touched her cheek, tilting her face up and kissing her. “Use the ring, call me, if you ever need anything.”
She wanted to say she would, but she couldn’t bring herself to.
He was a spy that they depended on. And she was—
Not his handler. No, that role belonged to Crowther.
She was—
A prison.
“Go,” she said instead. He disappeared down one of the tunnels, his necrothralls following him, as silent as wraiths.
She woke Sebastian first, hoping that he’d be calm and easier to manage. He’d also know what to do. She searched what supplies they had. She’d lost both her daggers, and everything in her satchel was contaminated with floodwater. Only one of the electric torches still worked, providing dim light in the darkness.
When he woke, Sebastian just sat silently staring at Luc’s still face while she gingerly fixed his dislocated shoulder and several shallow wounds that had already stopped bleeding on their own. Finally, he looked at her.
“What happened?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Everything went black. When I woke, you were all unconscious. I was afraid more of the Undying would show up, so I brought everyone here.”
His eyes swept pointedly over her. “Helena, I know you used necromancy. There’s no chance you moved us all here on your own.”
She started to shake her head in denial.
“You reanimated Soren. There was no surviving the blow he took.”
She went still. She didn’t know if it would be better or worse to tell Sebastian that Soren had asked her to.
“That was why he brought you, wasn’t it? I did wonder.”
Helena said nothing. Soren’s death felt like a wound too deep to even wrap her mind around. She didn’t think she could even say his name without choking.
“Is he still—nearby?” Sebastian’s voice was wistful.
Helena’s throat ached. “No. He—he’s gone. I’m sorry.”
There would be no holy fire to liberate Soren’s soul from his body. Somewhere downriver, he would decay into the earth. Lila would never see her twin again. Not even in the afterlife.
Sebastian said nothing for a long moment. “We’ll tell the others we brought them here together.”
There was blood crusted around Alister’s eyes, ears, and nose from the strain of all the transmutation he’d done. She woke him slowly, but he seized into consciousness, clawing at his neck, his eyes wild as they locked on Helena.
“What happened?” he gasped.
“We’re not sure,” Sebastian said, leaning over him. “Are you all right? We need to move before we freeze. Luc’s sick.”
“Where’s Soren?”
“Killed in combat,” Sebastian said shortly. “Marino, can you get Penny up?”
Penny’s leg was wrecked, the tendons ripped out with teeth. There was no saving it. Helena blocked the nerves and fused the bone so she could limp on it. Penny didn’t even cry when she woke, just scrubbed at her face and struggled to her feet.
Wagner was unscathed. Of course he was. Coward. At least she didn’t have to waste any of her energy healing him.
Helena tried to wake Luc. His fever was searing. He’d somehow gotten hotter in the minutes after she’d left him. She tried to cool him, but his body kept fighting it, pushing the fever higher and higher. She’d drugged him too much.
When he regained consciousness, he screamed. The noise reverberated through the tunnels.
“Knock him out!” Sebastian said, lunging forward. “Keep him cold. We’ll carry him back.”
It was fortunate they could smell clean air ahead, because Helena couldn’t have explained how she knew the route out.
Sebastian had an entangled medallion like Helena’s ring. He used it to send a pulse code to Headquarters.
A few times, they heard sounds echoing through the tunnels. Screams. Roars. Splashing. They moved quietly. Helena worried first whether Kaine could have gotten clear and then began to wonder if the reason they did not run into anyone was because he was lurking in the shadows.
When they reached the locked floodgate, Alister broke through the stone wall to get past it. A torrent of icy water rushed by. They struggled through, fighting to find stable footing as they clambered out.
A dense fog hung in the air, and a slim smuggling boat shot into view, moving silently across the water towards them.
Sebastian sighed with relief. “Althorne.”
General Althorne glared at them from the boat as it pulled to shore. His men silently slipped into the water, not even splashing as they came towards the straggling unit.
“Where’s Soren?” Althorne asked, his expression hard as Luc was carefully lifted into the boat.
“Killed in combat,” Sebastian said quietly.
One of the men was lifting Penny into the boat. Alister scrambled aboard himself, smearing away the fresh blood around his eyes with shaking hands, clearly on the verge of burnout.
Althorne looked at Luc, his expression a mixture of concern and relief. “We’ll need to keep him restrained until he’s cleared.”
Helena gestured towards Wagner. “We found him in a cell. I think Crowther wants him. Don’t trust him, he killed Sofia Purnell.”
Althorne jerked his head, and two of his men came over and seized Wagner’s arms.
He grumbled but didn’t resist, clearly preferring Resistance captivity to the Undying.
“You are all currently in custody for your violation of orders,” Althorne said, once the boat was pushed off. There was no bite to his words.
They’d rescued Luc; any censure for that would be a formality.
Helena slumped against the side of the boat. The journey passed in a blur—docking on a concealed wharf, being herded up a staircase and into the back of a lorry.
When they arrived at Headquarters, Penny, Alister, and Luc were taken away to the hospital ward. Wagner was placed in a cell. Helena and Sebastian were checked, cleared of serious injury, and escorted to their rooms to be locked inside with guards stationed at the doors.
Helena was glad not to be kept in the hospital, even though she could have used the saline and plasma expanders. She stripped out of her wet, ruined clothing, hands shaky and trembling, and took a shower, washing away the filth of the tunnels and spring melt.
As the traces vanished, she grew eerily removed from what had happened, as though at some point during the battle, she’d left her body and couldn’t return to it. Back in her room where everything looked familiar, it felt as if it had been a dream.
Soren wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be.
She would go out and see him sitting next to Luc in the hospital.
The memory of him, dead in her arms, felt like a tear in the fabric of her mind, as if the way she’d tethered him back to life had been ripped out when the connection between them broke. The person she knew and the body she’d reanimated had been tied together, and now there was a wound left.
He couldn’t be dead.
It was a horrible dream.
She stared down at her hands. Somehow she’d expected them to be stained or blackened by her necromancy.
What would Sebastian tell the Council? He’d have to tell the truth in a report. Once the truth came out, there’d be consequences.
It would have been a lesser crime to have murdered Soren. Murder was only a mortal crime; necromancy was a crime upon this life and the afterlife.
She packed away all her possessions in her trunk and sat waiting.
There was a loud banging on the door. She stood, ready.
“Helena! Helena! There’s something wrong with Luc!” It was Elain outside. “We need you in the hospital!”
All thoughts of arrest vanished.
“What’s wrong?” Helena opened the door, and the guards stepped back to let her out. She rushed towards the lifts with Elain.
“We’ve done all the examinations and doubled-checked for talismans, and he’s clear. But his organs—they’re all poisoned. I don’t know what they could have done. We tried reversing the damage, but they won’t regenerate. We were trying to get his fever down and Pace had me wake him, but he started screaming. Now he won’t stop, and he doesn’t let anyone near. He’s hurting himself.”
Luc was in a quarantine room at the far end of the hospital. She heard him before she saw him.
His eyes were deranged, his face gaunt with scarlet stains in the cheeks. There was a ripple of heat coming off him as if he were molten gold.
Ilva was standing helplessly in the doorway, along with Althorne, Maier, Pace, and several medics. Ilva kept trying to talk to him, but Luc didn’t seem to hear anything. The screaming faded as his throat stripped itself raw. He’d seemingly forgotten how a body worked. He seized, his arms and legs and fingers and head all tilting into bizarre angles, and then he slammed himself into the wall.
“I brought Helena,” Elain said breathlessly.
Luc’s head swivelled. He stared at Helena. His eyes seemed to grow, bulging from their sockets, head weaving like a snake.
“Hel—” he croaked. He reached for her. His fingers looked broken, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Hel—”
“Careful, he’s been violent,” she dimly heard Pace say. She paid no mind.
She reached out, laced their fingers together, and touched the side of his face with her knuckles. His skin was so hot, it almost burned. He somehow bent his fingers, not seeming to notice the pain, clutching her hand, pulling her close.
“I’m here. What’s wrong?” She numbed his hand, setting his fingers quickly.
His eyes had gone out of focus, and he started shuddering. “Out—” he moaned, shaking his head. “Inside—”
She pressed her hand against his forehead, ignoring the way his skin scalded her hand, letting her resonance flow into him, trying to find the source of what was wrong. What was she missing?
“Hel—” Luc was saying again.
Pain exploded through her chest.
The world went careening, spinning. Vicious red burst across her vision, slamming into the back of her head. An endless ringing filled her ears.
She struggled to focus her eyes. She couldn’t breathe.
She clutched at her chest. Noises were elongated. Faces loomed over her.
Something grabbed her. She gave a panicked scream, going for her knives, but they weren’t there. She clawed wildly to free herself.
“Calm down, Marino,” Matron Pace was saying. “You’re all right, just a bad scare. Knocked your breath out.”
The raw terror ebbed. The room came slowly back into view.
She was on the floor, breathing raggedly, pain consuming her chest as she tried to make sense of what had happened.
Luc was on the other side of the room. His expression had turned scorchingly lucid.
“You—” His eyes were suddenly clear and burning. “You used necromancy on Soren.”
The accusation hung in the air like the lull between lightning and thunder.
Everyone froze.
Helena pushed herself upright.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped, struggling to speak. Her lungs were seizing for air, sending jolts of pain through her ribs. She knelt and almost doubled over on the floor of the hospital. “I tried to heal him. I’m sorry.”
“He was alive. Why didn’t you just heal him?” Luc’s voice was racked with grief.
She couldn’t breathe enough to explain herself, to describe how quickly Soren was gone, that he’d known he’d die, and that he’d asked her to do it.
“I’m sorry, Luc.”
“Get out…” He wasn’t looking at her anymore. His gaze lost focus, and he swayed.
“Luc, you’re sick—”
“Get out!” He closed his eyes, starting to shudder again, his breathing coming faster and faster as if being in the same room with her was about to drive him mad. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
He started clawing at his chest, screaming, tearing grooves into his skin as if trying to tear his own heart out.
“Luc?” another voice broke in.
Lila stood in the doorway, a crutch under one arm. Rhea was beside her, helping her walk.
The scars on Lila’s face and chest showed vividly where she was stitched together.
Luc’s eyes shot open at the sound of her voice.
“Lila…” he said, his voice both grief-stricken and filled with relief, as if he hadn’t believed she was still alive until that moment.
Several people tried to hold her back, murmurs of Careful, but Lila let go of her mother, reaching desperately towards Luc. She let her crutch fall and toppled into his arms, clinging to him.
“I told you to run,” Lila was saying, clutching him close. His hands were shaking as he touched the laceration running down her face.
Lila brushed across the gouges he’d clawed in his chest. “What did they do to you?”
He just shook his head and pulled her closer, burying his head against her shoulder, arms wrapped around her.
It was painfully intimate. If there had been any doubts about whether or why Luc had handed himself over, they were all gone now.
There was a touch at Helena’s elbow. She looked up and found Ilva, who nodded towards the door.
Helena pushed herself to her feet and slipped out before Luc noticed her again. When she passed Rhea, she looked away.
It was Lila who coaxed Luc into bed, who persuaded him to let Pace and Elain examine him again, to accept an intravenous drip in his arm, and take the medicine needed to bring his fever down.
Helena sat on a hospital bed in the main room, an intravenous drip in her arm, while Elain fixed a fracture in her sternum and spread a salve across the bruise that spanned most of her chest, then treated the back of her head, where she’d hit the far wall.
It wasn’t the first time Helena had been injured by a patient, but it felt different.
Luc was never going to forgive her for what she’d done to Soren. She’d broken him.
The curtain around the hospital bed rustled, and Ilva stepped through. Elain lingered until Ilva glared, and then the healer fled. Helena closed her shirt and didn’t look up.
“We’re taking reports on what happened,” Ilva said, her tone unreadable.
Helena sat numbly. Would they put her on trial now? Or would it wait until after the war?
“What have you heard?” she asked in a dull voice.
Ilva cleared her throat. “Luc is delirious, his version of events hardly reliable given that he was not only severely injured but also heavily drugged. Alister and Penny both gave statements that Soren Bayard died protecting them. Sebastian Bayard—” Ilva paused for a moment. “Sebastian corroborates this, and claims that the two of you managed to drag the others to safety after the rising floodwater washed away a large number of the attacking forces.”
“And?” Helena asked.
“Lucien—hallucinated Soren Bayard’s alleged reanimation. Perhaps Soren fell briefly. In the confusion of a battle, it is impossible to know. The point is, this was a heroic rescue. The Principate was saved though the price was great. Sol’s will was done.”
Helena knew she was supposed to be grateful, but she also knew the lie wasn’t for her sake. It was all for the story. It didn’t matter what had really happened, only what people believed.
“The obligations of Soren and Sebastian’s vows supersede any orders by the Council,” Ilva said. “Alister and Penny were obeying the orders of their direct superiors. You would have a reprimand on your military record for your participation, but as a healer you’re not part of the military. Matias will be the one to decide what sort of reprimand you deserve. Until then, you’ll be off duty. I believe it would be best if you stay out of sight until the official story has circulated.”
Helena went back to her room and collapsed into her bed, exhaustion rolling over her like a wave. It was dark oblivion at first, but then the landscape of her mind morphed.
She was sinking, down, down. There were teeth sinking into her. Hands clawing, curling around her limbs, tearing her apart. She kept fighting. Cold fingers carving gouges through her flesh, stabbing into her bones. She tried to fight. The weight bore down on her.
Her bones cracked. Teeth sank into her flesh. The tendon behind her knee ripped out. Wet hands found her mouth, clawing in so deep she couldn’t bite down. Her jaw gave way, ripping until her throat tore open. She was still fighting as water closed over her head.
Helena started violently awake, gasping to breathe, hands clutching at her open throat.
Just a dream, just a dream, she tried to tell her pounding heart.
Not really a dream, though. A memory. Soren’s memories postmortem were lodged inside her consciousness as though they were her own. Bright and lurid in all their details.
She hadn’t known necromancy was like that. That she would never be free of the person she brought back. No wonder necromancers went mad. Who could stay sane with the minds of the dead inside them?
The place where Soren had been was like a pit of festering guilt. Her body and mind had been cored, and now something dead and rotting was left there. Everyone always talked of what a curse necromancy was. Warned against it and its consequences, but Helena had been so convinced of its necessity, and so distracted by the eternal consequences, that she’d never paused to consider there being immediate ones.
