Page 101 of Alchemised

“I guess so,” Helena said dully. “That must be it.”

Penny was nodding as she stepped back. “It’s all right. You just stay with me. I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”

Helena was too dazed to resist as Penny pulled her out of the alcove into another room, where Alister was currently playing the piano.

Soren was now playing a card game in the corner, and Lila had disappeared.

Several people, including Luc, were crowded around the piano singing.

Penny installed Helena on a sofa and then, after trying to coax her into joining, went over to the piano, too.

Helena sat tense, waiting for Penny to grow distracted so she could slip away, but before she could, Luc caught sight of her and immediately left the group.

He dropped onto the seat next to her. “I’m glad you’re still here. I was afraid you’d snuck out already.”

She gave a mute shake of her head.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Tired is all.”

He leaned forward. “Your trainees not pulling their weight?”

“No, they’re fine. Just—always seems to be something new to do.”

“I don’t know, I think you like being busy.” There was a teasing note in his voice.

Helena’s stomach clenched into a hard knot. “Maybe so,” she managed to say.

Soren slunk over and slid across the arm of the sofa into the space on the other side of Helena. “You two have to hide me. Someone told Mum we were gambling.”

“You’re dead,” Luc said with a laugh. “Did you manage to win at least?”

Soren shook his head mournfully. “Fuck me, why’s Lila coming over here?”

“Language in your mother’s house,” Luc tsked, “and as your precious sister approaches.”

“Fuck off.”

Lila was headed in their direction with a large, intricate box hanging from her neck. She stopped in front of them. “Mum has me on photo duty.” She tapped the contraption.

Soren groaned.

“Sit up and hold still. This thing is finicky.” Lila was peering into the apparatus, adjusting lenses, shifting back and forth. “Soren, don’t you have a spine somewhere? How do you manage to slouch in armour? You’re folded up behind Helena like a wet noodle. Luc, poke him, would you?”

Luc reached behind Helena and obliged.

“Much better.” Lila grinned, and Luc instantly did, too. “Right. No serious faces, it’s solstice. Be cheery.”

They stared at the contraption, and just before the click, Luc’s arm wrapped around Helena’s shoulders, squeezing tight. Helena tried to force the corners of her mouth up as the camera flashed.

Luc moaned, shielding his eyes. “Sol’s light, I think I’m going blind.”

“Soren, Mum wants a picture of you and Dad.” Lila peeled a reluctant Soren off the sofa and dragged him into the next room.

Helena watched them go and felt as though her chest were being crushed. Her hands were clenched into fists so tight, the leather bit at her knuckles.

“Are you thinking about your father?” Luc asked quietly.

She hadn’t been, but perhaps that was what was wrong with her. She should think more about all the people who were dead, whose common trait was the way their life had overlapped with hers.

Whether or not vivimancy was a curse, she was becoming quite sure that she was one.

“Hel, what’s wrong?” Luc touched her arm.

She looked at him and realised that she was being forced to choose. Luc or Kaine? She could only save one. She had to choose Luc, but it was going to kill her to do it.

“I have to go.” She started to stand.

“No, you don’t.” He wrapped his fingers around her hand. “You always say that, but I’m not letting up this time. Stay with us.”

He gave a teasing, pleading smile.

He’d always had a terrible talent for persistence. From the very start, when he’d found her crying after her first class because the lecturer’s Northern dialect was thick and spoken so quickly.

He’d coaxed the whole thing out of her in a dusty corner of the library. The next week, the lecturer had talked slower and wrote all the key terms on the board so Helena could copy them down and look them up. Having Luc in her life had always felt like magic.

There’d been no reason for him to go out of his way for her, but he had, and then he kept doing it.

He’d just picked her out on that first day and decided she was the friend he wanted.

And if that required sitting for hours in the library while she did homework, even though he hated homework, that was what he’d do.

She couldn’t imagine her time at the Institute without him. It was like imagining the world without the sun in it.

“Come on now, what’s wrong?” he asked, leaning in so their heads were together.

Everything. Everything was wrong and it was going to be wrong forever, and it wasn’t their fault but they were paying for it. She couldn’t tell him that; it would be too cruel to rip everything away, to expose the lie that was his whole life when it was all he had.

“Everyone seems so happy,” she finally said. “It makes me afraid.”

He nodded slowly, his worry clearing. “I know, it’s hard to believe it might be over soon.

Doesn’t feel real.” He nudged her with his shoulder.

“That’s why it’s so important to have people that ground you.

” He glanced towards the next room where Lila and Soren were kneeling beside their father as Rhea snapped a photo.

“When it doesn’t seem possible, it helps to think about everything I’m waiting for. ”

Helena’s chest clenched, wondering what fantasy Luc had spun for himself to get up each day.

When she said nothing, he gave her a sidelong grin.

“We’ll finally go on our trip. Once everything’s over and settled, Ilva can manage a bit longer.

It won’t be the big trip like we said, but if we wait for the Abeyance, we could take a fast ship to Etras and spend at least a week there before the tides come back.

I’ve always wanted to see the lost cities. I’ve still got your map on the wall.”

“That’s not going to happen, Luc,” she said, her voice low. Even if he had to believe in this lie, she couldn’t be a part of it. She couldn’t live as a prop in this deceit.

“What?”

She looked down at her gloved hands, as emptiness hollowed her lungs.

She swallowed hard. “When this is all over, I don’t want you to think of us as friends anymore. I think it will be better that way for both of us.”

“Why?” He looked horrified.

“Because I’m not your friend anymore. Your friend Helena Marino died in a field hospital six years ago. She doesn’t exist anymore. I need you to let her go.”

He didn’t, though. Luc caught her hand again. His face was stricken, and he was so beautiful.

Even in the depth of winter, he looked limned in sunlight. Divine or not, the Holdfasts had a look as if they were born to be immortalised in marble. Like the sun, born for eternity.

Helena was not a planet or any celestial thing. She was just a human bound tight to the present, to the brevity of existence, and she could feel time running out.

“No. I won’t let you go,” he said. “I can’t. Hel, just tell me what’s wrong, and I’ll fix it. You and me, we’re friends forever.”

She pulled away from him, shaking her head.

All Luc knew was Paladia, alchemy, and the Eternal Flame, with their ideals about the refinement of fire, of trials and sacrifice, the purity of suffering. That it would be worthwhile eventually, in the next life if not this one.

Maybe if Helena were at the front, she could believe in all that, too.

But she’d spent every day of the last six years watching people die.

She lived in the aftermath of every battle, breathed in the devastation until she was drowning in it.

Nothing and no one would ever convince her that anything noble or purifying could come from this scale of suffering.

That any rewards could ever be worth it.

To trick people into embracing it was cruelty. But how could she tell Luc that? That none of it had ever meant anything. That the miracles he believed in were mere sleights of hand, bought and paid for with betrayal. She couldn’t.

“If I was ever your friend, let me go now.” She jerked her hand free and fled the house.

Her heart was beating so hard, it hurt. The blood pounded in her ears until she could barely hear the wind, the cold slicing across her cheeks.

Snowflakes fell, spiralling onto the street.

She paused and looked up at the sky.

It was supposed to be good luck, snow on the solstice. A brightening of the longest night.

She stood watching it fall until her hands and feet were numb with cold. She wanted to stay there and freeze to death. She’d read it was a gentle way to go, like falling asleep.

The beacon of the Eternal Flame burned overhead. She turned, putting her back to it, wandering without destination. There was nowhere to go. Her life was so small. Beyond the gates of the Institute, she was homeless.

She followed the only route she knew by heart.

It was eerily still on the Outpost. The snow-heavy clouds had a dim silver glow from the moons.

She’d always found the Outpost so ugly next to the elegant, natural lines of the islands’ architecture, but now she found the brutality of the towering steel, concrete walls, and jutting smokestacks fitting.

She didn’t want to be somewhere beautiful.

There was no pretence on the Outpost, no ornamentation to distract the eye; it didn’t hide what it was. Which was more than she could say about the city or Institute.

A lie. All of it a lie, the celestial emblems that decorated the island, all those murals and paintings of the Holdfasts, the sun always rising with them. All lies.

Her face grew numb, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn back. She went towards the tenement.

The door unlocked easily even though her fingers were stiff. The wind rattled the windows.

She sat at the table, resting her head on the edge, and closed her eyes.

The door banged open.

Her head shot up, and she stared in astonishment at the sight of Kaine in the doorway.