Page 126 of Alchemised

K AINE’S CHIMAERA WAS SOMEHOW EVEN LARGER WHEN encountered lucid.

When Helena was dressed and ready to leave, rather than be smuggled through the city, Kaine led her to the high open roof.

The creature stood, stretching and yawning, baring fangs longer than Helena’s fingers, wings spreading so wide they nearly blanketed the rooftop.

The chimaera cantered stiffly towards Kaine, eerie yellow eyes watching Helena, the whites showing, muzzle curled in warning.

“Be nice, Amaris,” Kaine said chidingly, scratching the chimaera behind her ears.

Amaris drooped her head, her lip still curling to the gums, eyes fastened on Helena. It was for the best that Helena had been delirious the night before; she would never have climbed on that animal knowing it was real.

Kaine patted the wolfen monster and then knelt, running his hands up and down a foreleg. Helena could see the horse shape of the leg, but it ended in a paw with huge talon-like claws.

She backed away, giving more space. Despite Kaine’s desire that they all be friends, it was obvious that Amaris did not like anyone but him.

“She’s not growling at you,” Kaine said before Helena could take another step back. “Bennet spliced the legs wrong when he made her. Whenever she grows, the nerves get stretched out, and I have to fix them.”

“What do you mean?” Helena watched. She could tell he was using his resonance as his fingers brushed along the length of the foreleg.

“Bennet only cares about the aesthetics when it comes to the chimaeras. He forces things to fit together even when they shouldn’t.

The reason the chimaeras are so dangerous is that they’re all rabid with pain.

They usually die because the stress kills them.

When Amaris arrived, she bit me about fifty times during the first week.

You may recall that my back was still in tatters at the time.

I nearly snapped her neck after the tenth time, but I thought, I’m in so much pain I’d love to bite someone.

Why would it be different for her? She was all puppy then, but legs like a foal.

Constantly tripping and breaking her wings.

” He glanced back at Helena. “I had a notion of the taming capacity of pain relief, and you’d mentioned how flawed the transmutations were, so I tried to fix what I could.

Once she realised I wasn’t there to hurt her, she stopped biting. ”

He straightened and patted Amaris just below a huge wing. The feathers were as long as Helena’s arms.

He rubbed his knuckles between Amaris’s eyes. “She warmed up to me after that. She’s the only survivor of the whole batch. Bennet tried to take her back, wanted to see why she’d worked. She nearly took his head off. Didn’t you?”

He rumpled the thick fur.

“Come meet her, she’ll be nice now.” He gestured Helena over. He took her hand and let Amaris sniff it. Her teeth remained bared, but her tail slowly began to swing and her wings relaxed. He guided Helena to bury her fingers in the thick fur and scratch behind an enormous, pricked ear.

Helena could feel his eyes on her as she tentatively let her resonance creep in. Amaris trembled but didn’t move or snarl.

She could feel how haphazardly assembled Amaris was, bones and tissue not meant to be combined but forced together nonetheless.

Un like the chimaeras she’d examined in her lab, it was clear someone had tried to correct the excessive flaws, to properly join the muscles, smooth the bone fusions and misjoined ligaments, to block off nerves that caused nothing but pain.

She tried to imagine this monster as a puppy, a foal, a hatchling. Innocent and juvenile and then—

Pain and mutilation.

Of course the chimaeras were savage. How could anything endure so much hurt and not learn only to bite?

“You’ve done remarkable work on her,” she said, her mouth dry. “Is this how you learned to heal?”

“I suppose it was some good practice.”

He looked out over the city, spread below like a glittering crown. Lumithia had yet to rise, leaving whole swaths of the East Island in darkness, but the Alchemy Tower stood above it all, its beacon ever burning.

“We should go now. It’s dark enough to fly without being sighted.”

I T WAS ONE THING TO pet Amaris; it was quite another to mount her. Helena was certain the wolf could bite her in half if so inclined. Kaine stood at Amaris’s head, scratching her ears, while Helena grasped the leather harness and clambered up.

It took an embarrassingly long time, like scaling a furry mountain. Helena was worried about kneeing or elbowing Amaris and struggled to get a good grip. Kaine swung up behind her in one easy movement.

He was barely seated before Amaris leapt off the roof.

They plummeted straight down and then the huge wings spread out, catching the air and carrying them skywards.

Kaine flew Amaris so high, the air grew thin.

They kept their distance from the city and towers, flying near the mountains until they reached the dam.

Amaris banked sharply, so fast the Outpost blurred and the wind from her wings rattled the windows as they sped past. One of the factories had a large open roof that they landed on.

Helena’s legs scarcely held her as she slid off, desperately grateful for solid ground and convinced that humans were not meant to fly, and it was an abomination for them to do so. She tried to appear grateful and not look too green as she scuttled away from the chimaera.

Kaine followed her. Now that the introduction to Amaris and the journey were over, there was an undeniable look of resentment in his eyes again, as if letting her return to Headquarters was not yet something he was convinced of.

Helena pretended not to notice as she headed for the gate, but it only made his mood darken. Finally, she stopped. “What is it?”

“Don’t go,” he said softly.

“You know I have to.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t. They don’t care about you.”

The words were like a raw nerve being plucked. The pain hummed inside her. Before, she would have denied it, because Luc was there and he would never turn on her, but that was no longer true.

Still, she was unmoved. She shook her head. “We can’t let the Undying win. There is too much at stake. I have to go where I can do good.”

A look of fury joined his resentment. “No, you don’t.

It doesn’t matter how many times you break yourself, the gods don’t care.

There’s no reward. This”—he threw his hand out, gesturing at the city, the mountains, and the black sky that Lumithia now radiated down from—“is the Abyss. We’re already in it.

None of it matters. Sacrifice and pain, the universe does not care. ”

“You’re wrong,” she said.

He opened his mouth to argue, to offer an endless list of examples of how cold and uncaring the world was, but she didn’t need to be told.

“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said.

“A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers.

As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that part of the universe does.

” She smiled at him. “Doesn’t that make it all a little brighter? ”

He looked despairing.

She gave a helpless shrug. “I want to do good in the world. That was what my father wanted most for me.” She looked down at her hands.

“I know most people won’t think I have. I’ve done things now that I don’t think I’m supposed to be forgiven for.

But I want to be remembered as someone who tried at least.”

She stepped back, but he caught her.

“Helena—”

She pulled free. “Be careful, Kaine. Don’t die.”

“C ROWTHER’S LOOKING FOR YOU,” THE gatehouse guard said as he let her in.

Helena nodded and headed to the Tower.

Crowther was seated in his office, his right arm strapped to his body as if it were paralysed again, and he looked at Helena with a degree of disgust unlike anything she’d ever seen before. It reminded her of how the guild students used to look at her, but intensified by magnitudes.

The fingers of his right arm were squeezed into a fist. Which meant it still worked and he was intentionally depriving himself of it.

It took her a moment to understand. This was because she was a necromancer now.

“I was told you wanted me,” she said, pretending not to notice his expression.

“Hours ago,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I’m here now.”

Crowther snapped the ignition rings on his left hand, and a deep red orb of flames filled his hand before his fingers squeezed into a fist, skin glowing for a moment before the light extinguished.

“The prisoner you brought back refuses to cooperate without you, and Ilva …” His expression twisted with fury.

“Ilva insists on a light touch until we know who he is. I have wasted an entire day waiting for you. Where were you?”

Helena avoided his eyes. “Ilva said it would be best to keep out of sight until the official story had circulated.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Helena set her jaw and met his eyes. “I was with Ferron, but I’m sure you already worked that out.”

He gave a scathing laugh that made her scalp crawl. The venom in his expression was so shocking, it was as if she were not even human anymore.

“It’s not as if I wanted to use necromancy,” she said, deciding to drag the unspoken source of his fury into the open. “There was no other way. Soren wasn’t near recovered enough for a mission like that. What was I supposed to do? Let Luc die?”