Alchemised, page 89
“No…” Helena said at the same time as Pace.
Luc turned and gave a low, obsequious bow as someone else emerged from the back of the motorcar. The person was tall, dressed in intricately decorative robes and a cloak of blue and gold, with a crescent-shaped crown rising from his head. Morrough.
He walked in front of Luc, ascending the marble stairs, which ran red with blood. All the remains of the Eternal Flame’s military leaders were in pieces on the ground or dangling against the walls.
Morrough turned as Luc ascended behind him, revealing a masked face; the crescent, like an eclipsed sun, concealed the upper half. The little bit of skin that showed was a pale, lipless mouth.
Helena had never seen Morrough. There had been stories of his appearance at a few early battles, but he’d let the Undying fight his war.
So this was Cetus. The first Northern alchemist.
The silence remained as Luc followed him up the steps obediently, while Morrough surveyed his audience.
“Paladia has followed this family of false deities for too long,” Morrough said in a rasping voice that barely seemed like it could carry. “They showed you fire and gold, and you thought these paltry tricks divine.” The mouth twisted in derision. “I have conquered death. Immortality is my gift, and I do not hoard this secret knowledge but grant it to all who are worthy.”
There were loud cheers at this. But that was not the worst of it. As Morrough spoke, Luc sank to his knees as if he were one of those begging for immortality.
Helena watched Luc’s every movement, trying to make sense of what she saw.
Luc was dead, she knew he was dead. Morrough must have found and reanimated him, made him seem so lifelike in order to have the satisfaction of being his executioner.
As everyone watched, Luc leaned forward, pressing his head to the stones which were slick with blood; it stained his clothes, his skin, his hair. The blood of those who’d followed him and his family so faithfully.
“Do you beg for immortality?” Morrough asked.
Luc paused as though hesitating, as if ashamed, then he lifted his head, looking up at Morrough like a supplicant, blue eyes wide, and nodded.
“You are unworthy,” Morrough said, but he held out a long bony hand as if extending it to Luc. Then his wrist turned, palm faced down, above Luc’s head.
Even from the distance, Helena felt the resonance in the air, and Luc’s head slammed down into the marble, skull splitting, breaking apart like a cracked egg. His face caved in, and his body toppled over, brains smeared across the blood-soaked marble.
The air filled with screams of horror.
Morrough turned away from the body. “Store him. He will never burn.”
Then he entered the Alchemy Tower, the monument his brother had built to memorialise necromancy’s defeat.
* * *
Time passed in a haze. Those who hadn’t gone into the Tower with Morrough began sorting the remaining prisoners, dividing them up, marking the numbers on the shackles into files.
Now that the “festivities” had come to an end, additional cars were arriving. The more decorated members of the Undying, in their black uniforms. Others who appeared to be government officials. The Guild Assembly. Governor Greenfinch.
Most were entering the Alchemy Tower, which had been rinsed of all the blood.
The door of the cage Helena was in screamed open, and guards began pulling the prisoners out, shoving them towards various areas.
“Careful!” Pace snapped as Helena was seized by the arm and dragged to her feet. “Her wrist is broken. She needs medical care. These are smart, capable women. You should—”
The guard sneered at Pace. “We’ve got plenty of prisoners of all sorts.” He looked Helena over. “She’ll go in the cull group, same as you, crone.”
He ignored Pace’s attempts to reason with him, not for herself but for Helena, trying to convince him of her exceptional abilities, as he copied the number on Helena’s shackle onto a list along with Pace’s. They were pushed towards another cage and grabbed by another guard, who shoved them carelessly inside.
Pace tried to resist, still protesting, and she tripped, falling too fast for Helena to react. Her head struck one of the iron bars with a sharp crack, and she didn’t move.
Helena’s left hand was shaking as she braced herself against the bars, using her body to cover Pace as more prisoners were shoved into the cull cage, searching desperately for a pulse. Everyone shoved inside was either badly injured or extremely old. The cadet guarding the war room was slumped beside her, deathly pale, his bowels oozing through his fingers as he tried to hold them in.
She couldn’t help him.
She slumped down next to Pace, lifting her head onto her lap, hoping she was dead, that she wouldn’t witness whatever happened next.
A shadow fell over her.
She looked up, heart in her throat, and then froze at the sight of Mandl.
“My, my,” Mandl said, her wide mouth splitting into a smile, “I thought I recognised that hair of yours.”
Helena was too exhausted to feel anything at the sight of her.
Mandl gestured with a quick flick of her wrist. “Take her out.”
The guards who’d shoved Pace glanced over. “This is the cull cage.”
Mandl turned on him. “I don’t care what ‘cage’ it is, get her out.”
Helena was dragged out, her hand bumping roughly against other bodies. She bit back a moan of pain, and her shoulder was nearly wrenched from its socket again.
“It really is you.” Mandl appraised her as Helena was dropped at her feet. “You certainly put up a fight. Were you afraid I’d find you?”
Helena had scarcely thought of Mandl since she’d finished interrogating her.
“I hoped I would.” Mandl’s breath rushed across Helena’s. She smelled sharp and acrid, like formaldehyde. “I’m going to make sure Bennet gets you for one of his special projects.”
The guard cleared his throat.
“What now?” She turned on him sharply.
“They’re saying Bennet’s gone.”
“What?”
The guard lowered his voice. “Rumour is that Hevgoss was responsible. Bombings are—their sort of thing. No one’s saying much, though. Stroud took a batch earlier and had to bring them all back. Says the whole lab’s gone. Bennet and all the rest. But word’s not supposed to get out among the—” He gestured around the commons.
A glimmer of triumph sparked in Helena’s chest. Bennet was gone; he would never hurt Kaine or anyone else ever again.
Mandl stood, stunned. “But then what about the stasis warehouse. Will it be decommissioned?”
Before the guard could reply, she answered herself. “Of course not. The Undying will still need pristine bodies in reserve. Even without Bennet.”
She looked down at Helena again, who tried not to look as if she was listening.
“Well, if he’s gone, that means that I’m responsible for the selection process.” She leaned forward and grabbed Helena by the back of the arm. “I think I’ll have you as my first pick.”
Mandl’s resonance stabbed through Helena’s hand. Her nerves were suddenly on fire, being torn apart. Agony shot up her shoulder, through her body, and into her brain as if a splintering spike were being driven into her.
Her muscles began spasming as she screamed.
“Oh dear,” Mandl said with false concern, still holding Helena fast. “That wasn’t what I meant to do. I was trying to do this.” She grabbed Helena by the back of the neck.
Renewed pain burst through her, shooting down her spine and along every nerve ending. Building and building until Helena’s heart threatened to explode. She’d break all her own bones if it would let her escape. She’d chew her limbs off.
She could feel her mind scrabbling to break free from the agony. Just break. Just break.
“I’m not fragile. I am not going to break. Please believe that about me.”
She’d promised. Her body was seizing, but eventually it stopped. She was dropped heavily to the ground. Her muscles kept twitching. Mandl knelt, reaching towards her again, and Helena cowered away.
Mandl’s wide mouth stretched across her face. “See how quickly you can learn to be afraid?”
She took Helena’s right hand, resetting and healing the broken bones. She would indeed have been an exceptional healer if she hadn’t been a psychopath.
Then something cold pressed against Helena’s newly healed wrist, clicking as it was locked in place.
She stared at it dazedly, struggling to breathe. It was another cuff. The number was different. She couldn’t quite make it out.
Mandl stood, brushing herself off. “Put her in the transport lorry.”
As Helena was being dragged up off the ground, a young man stepped forward, stammering.
“Wait. That—that one, we got her. She’s supposed to be interrogated. I think. Pretty sure someone said something about that.”
Mandl gave a slow reptilian blink. “She was in the cull cage.”
He flushed and scratched his head. “We had orders.”
“Whose orders?”
“Um, it was one of the dead ones. I don’t remember. He told Lancaster something about it.”
“And Lancaster is?”
“Well, he’s in surgery.”
Mandl’s lips pursed, and she looked as if she were about to eat the Aspirant. “So you want me to do what? Put her back into the cull cage? Do you have jurisdiction to take her?”
He stammered and backed away. “I just—it’s what I heard. Maybe someone else would know.”
Helena wasn’t sure if she’d just been saved or damned. Interrogation was what Atreus had wanted. To find the bomber. She struggled to think. Her body kept spasming. All the drugs in it had her mind spinning as they faded away.
Several liches came over and dragged Helena and several other prisoners towards a lorry, shoving them into the back.
Interrogation would be dangerous. If anyone realised she was the bomber, they’d want to know how. Why.
She knew all too well now the dangers of interrogation. There were points where the mind broke, where pain became all there was. The Undying would hurt her in whatever ways were necessary to get the answers out.
Kaine said animancy was special. Rare. If Bennet was dead, Kaine and Morrough might be the only ones left with the ability, which meant they might bring him in and torture her in front of him or make him torture her.
If Morrough interrogated her personally, he’d find Kaine in her thoughts and memories. No amount of evasion could hide him; he was the fabric of her thoughts. Her every action tied to him.
Even if her death was quick, Kaine’s punishment for his betrayal would be eternal. Or else they’d use her, just as they had his mother.
It would be everything he’d feared.
If they found him in her memory.
If.
She had to push him away, like she had pushed away the memory of—
Soren.
She would redirect her thoughts, transmute her memories until her mind stopped running to him. She couldn’t confess to something she didn’t remember.
She pressed her hands against her temples, wincing as she moved her right hand. The bones were repaired, but the tissue damage and bruising remained. The nullium in the manacles hummed, blurring her resonance, but suppression like that was imperfect.
She still had her resonance, though it wasn’t as powerful. But she didn’t need power; she needed precision and patience. She closed her eyes, using that feeble strain of resonance on her own consciousness. After spending so much time navigating the minds of others, it was easy to manipulate her own mind—no reaction, no resistance.
The last two years of her life, she pushed down beneath the surface as if to drown them. There was no other way. Kaine was almost everything now.
Without him, there was just emptiness. Her routines. Hours and days in the hospital that bled together, years of an unending nightmare.
Alone. Everyone dead. Because they always died. She tried to save them, but in the end, they always died. Her life was a graveyard.
Where there was space she couldn’t reconcile, she filled it with Luc. Not his death, not Luc from the war; the Luc she’d promised to save.
The version of him he’d tried to be. The Luc who’d always believed in her.
It was the way he deserved to be remembered.
She was lost in her own mind when the lorry pulled into a warehouse. An old slaughterhouse with meat hooks overhead and metal tables everywhere, and a cement floor that could be easily sprayed down to wash away the blood. The other prisoners began to panic, jostling her from her thoughts.
“They’re not going to kill us yet,” Helena said, her voice raw. “They’re putting us in stasis. To keep us fresh.”
They were pulled out, one by one, and injected with something.
The process was horrifyingly well synchronised. Rote. As the prisoners went limp, they were hoisted onto long tables, side by side. A guard went down the line stripping their clothes off.
A few tried to fight. One boy got kicked in the gut for his efforts before the needle went into his neck. He called out for his mother, for Sol, for Luc.
The woman—Mandl, her mind belatedly supplied—stood observing, and when Helena was pulled out, she waved her towards the far end of the warehouse. “Put her over there. I’ll deal with her personally.”
A needle sank into the side of Helena’s neck. It was thick, the dose of paralytic unnecessarily large.
Her muscles went numb, but not her sensory nerves. She could feel things, just not move.
Mandl’s face appeared above her, a satisfied smile on her lips, eyes skimming from head to toe. “You think you know what’s about to happen to you, don’t you?”
Helena lay there as Mandl pulled her hair out of the way and placed something adhesive at the base of her neck, over her spine.
“This is to keep your muscles in order.”
An electric pulse caused Helena’s body to seize, muscles contracting and releasing several times.
Mandl’s fingers trailed across Helena’s cold skin, seeming to tremble with excitement. Needles with tubes sank into her arms.
“Pity about Bennet,” Mandl said. “I always found his ideas inspirational. If he got you, he’d keep you alive for ages if I asked. Interrogations are so quick, and you’ll be completely spoiled after that.”
She placed a mask over Helena’s face that stretched from above her eyebrows all the way down over her chin. There was some kind of adhesive that sealed it against her skin. It was transparent enough that Helena could just barely see through it and watch as Mandl picked up a large syringe with a pale-blue liquid inside. “This would put you in a nice little coma. Bennet said it’s like making meat tender by keeping the pigs calm before slaughter.”
She squeezed the plunger. Helena heard it spatter onto the floor.
Then there was the sound of paper tearing as Mandl ripped a form off a clipboard, crumpling it. For a moment she could make out the number at the top, 19819.
Without that form, there would be no record that Helena was there. She’d vanish. A clerical error.
Mandl combed her fingers through Helena’s hair. “While you’re waiting, I want you to think about all the things I’m going to do to you when I come back.”
Mandl turned away. “All done here. Put her under with the rest.”
Helena was lifted onto a cart that went rattling across the floor into a second room. It was bitterly cold. Helena could see the rows of sectioned tanks from the corner of her eyes. The photographs from the raid flashed in her memory, all the bodies floating inside them. All dead.
The guards, wearing large rubber gloves to their shoulders, lifted one prisoner after another and slid them into the tanks, hooking the tubes and wires into a row of machines that ran along the far end.
Helena’s heart was pounding harder and harder as she was picked up and the cold fluid closed around her.
She couldn’t move. She was trapped inside her own body, like a cage sealing her within her mind. The cold seeped into her, slowing her heart, dropping her metabolism. It felt like forever and like no time at all before the light vanished, too.
Helena was left in darkness and silence.
Her heart was pounding in unadulterated terror. The lid was inches from her face, but she couldn’t see it. Freedom so close but utterly beyond reach.
She tried to breathe slowly but couldn’t. She started panting, heat and steam filling the mask over her face.
She tried to scream, but all that came out was a weak uneven whimper. Her body grew colder and colder, and her lungs spasmed as her panic used up the limited oxygen coming through the mask. Her chest began aching and burning for air. She kept trying to breathe, but there was nothing to breathe.
She was relieved when she passed out. It was better than being awake.
Something burning hot jolted her back to consciousness.
She’d forgotten where she was and panicked as it all rushed back. The tiny, enclosed space beneath the surface, in the dark. Not enough air, and she couldn’t move.
The burning came again, cutting her panic short as she tried to place where the sensation was coming from. She knew that feeling.
Her hand. Her left hand was burning. The ring. Her heart stalled.
Kaine. He’d come back and found her gone. She’d told him she’d be waiting, and she wasn’t there. The ring burned again and again and again.
He was looking for her. He’d come for her.
He always did.
But she could not think about it.
She had to forget. If she remembered and was interrogated, Kaine could not be found.
