Page 13 of Alchemised

I T TOOK H ELENA MERE MINUTES TO EXPLORE every corner of her room and the adjoining bathroom.

She was provided with only the most essential objects: soap, towels, a toothbrush, and a metal cup for water.

She squeezed the cup, trying to bend it and work it.

If she could break it, she’d have a nice sharp edge to slit her arteries open.

After several minutes of trying, all she had were dents in her thumbs and throbbing pain in both wrists.

Next she tried pulling down the mirror, but it was welded to the wall so firmly she couldn’t even get her fingers under it. It didn’t break when she tried hammering it with the cup, either.

She stepped back, glaring at the glass, and winced at her reflection.

She scarcely recognised the person scowling back. Sallow skin that had seen no light in more than a year, long black hair tangled almost to mats around her face. Her features were all sunken. She’d look like a necrothrall herself if not for her furious dark eyes.

She went back to the bedroom and was disappointed to find that there weren’t any drape cords for her to try to hang herself with. She checked behind all the curtains, in case one had been missed.

Just live, Helena, a voice in her mind begged.

She paused, fingers tracing the pattern on the curtain, trying to stifle it.

Luc … oh, Luc. Of course he would haunt her, refusing to accept a pragmatic choice.

If he were there, he’d be telling her that her plan was terrible.

He’d hated that kind of thing. People sacrificing themselves because of him or his family.

He always felt responsible, convinced that if he was better, he could save everyone.

She could hear him now, telling her stubbornly that she wasn’t going to die. She could come up with a better plan if she’d just stop fixating on this one.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Luc. This is the best I can do.”

She went to the door leading to the hallway.

The instructions to stay out of sight implied she could leave her room. Her body trembled in anticipation, heartbeat quickening.

She gripped the knob, and it turned easily. The heavy door swung open, revealing a long corridor spilling into darkness, but rather than exhilaration at this freedom, Helena’s heart stopped.

The sconces along the wall were no longer illuminated. She hadn’t noticed how ominous the corridor was, thin and winding, full of creeping shadows like teeth that gave way to a mouthlike darkness.

She was used to constant light in Central.

She stood frozen. It was irrational. It was a house. She’d seen too many real, awful things to be afraid of shadows and hallways, but her legs wouldn’t move. The doorknob rattled in her hand.

The darkness was like a pulsing oesophagus, the long shadows swaying with the wind, threatening to swallow her. If she stepped out, she’d fall into the cold, awful, unending dark again.

She would never be found.

Terror coursed through her as the shadows stirred again, crawling towards her.

Her chest spasmed, sending a shock of pain through her lungs. She shrank back into the room and shut the door, her body pressed close against the reassuring surface of it, lungs and heart pulsing. She couldn’t breathe.

She knew the terror of the stasis tank would haunt her, but she had not realised the way it had rooted itself inside her, grown through her nerves and organs to paralyse her.

She stayed crouched, without sense of time, until there was a rap at the door, the soft clatter of dishes, and retreating footsteps.

She cracked the door open and found a cloth bundle and a tray of food. Pulling them inside quickly, she tried not to see the vanishing darkness again.

The door safely closed, she stared in revulsion. The meal was pig slop, as if someone had taken kitchen scraps and the day’s leftovers, put them in a pot, and boiled them. She’d sooner starve.

She shoved the tray aside.

Untying the bundle, she found sets of underclothes, wool stockings, and one dress, red as blood.

There were stitch marks along the hems and the neck and bodice from where the details and lace had been carelessly ripped off to make it as plain as possible.

Helena wished bitterly she hadn’t flinched at the sight of those roses.

She looked over at the food again. She’d have to be careful around Aurelia.

At the bottom of the bundle were three sets of slippers. Dancing slippers by the look of them, impractically thin-soled and delicate shoes with ribbon laces, cast off because the fabric on the toes was wearing thin and they’d lost their satiny sheen.

Aside from the stockings, Helena put it all into the wardrobe, preferring to remain in the thin scratchy dress from Central.

Another tray arrived the next morning, somehow worse. Helena was hungry enough by then to pick out the few bites that hadn’t been so boiled that the colour had leached out.

She wanted to try leaving her room again, but the thought made her stomach twist into a vicious knot.

Instead, she preoccupied herself with exercise, performing callisthenics. She needed to at least be able to climb a flight of stairs without having her legs threaten to give out. Her arms were weak, too, but anything that required her to put weight on her wrists was out of the question.

She stared bitterly at the manacles. She’d always been so proud of her hands—all the things she could do with them.

The longer she spent preoccupying herself with excuses not to leave the room, the guiltier she grew.

Anyone else in the Resistance would have already mapped the house, identified potential weapons, and murdered both the Ferrons.

Lila would never allow herself to be so weak. It wouldn’t matter what she was scared of. But Helena had never been much like Lila. She had to do things her way. Better to wait, let Ferron come to her.

He was sure to turn up soon.

She could only guess at what transference would entail.

She thought of Crowther’s corpse in Central with the lich inside it. Perhaps that would be her soon, except still alive, aware of what was happening to her as Ferron took over, possessing her mind and body.

At least if she had to see Ferron frequently, she’d have opportunities to figure out what made him tick. To find a weakness.

She racked her memory for what she knew of the family. The Ferrons were entwined with the alchemical industrialisation of the last century.

They had formed the very first iron guild shortly after Paladia’s founding.

Iron was one of the eight traditional metals associated with the eight planets: lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, iron for Mars, copper for Venus, quicksilver for Mercury, silver for Luna, lumithium for Lumithia, and gold for Sol.

Being intractable and highly prone to corrosion, iron was regarded as lowly and ignoble, especially when compared with incorruptible substances like silver, lumithium, and gold.

The Ferrons themselves had also been common.

Blacksmiths and ironworkers making ploughs and farm tools more often than holding illustrious jobs like forging steel weapons for the Eternal Flame the way other iron alchemists had.

As time passed and new metals were discovered, iron remained a stubborn and base fixture until the Ferrons developed a method of efficient alchemical steel manufacturing.

With the precision of their iron resonance, they could assure quality at an industrial scale that no one else could match.

It had changed the world, and it had changed the Ferrons.

They’d transformed from trade workers to a new and incredibly wealthy working class, the world transforming with them.

It didn’t matter whether theologically iron was classified as celestially inferior; the modern world was built with Ferron steel. Factories, railway lines, motorcars, even Paladia itself as its architecture shot skywards, climbing with the industrial boom.

Spirefell, deteriorated as it now was, had clearly been built as a monument to that growing influence and wealth, and the family’s immense pride in it.

Helena’s first memory of Kaine Ferron was during Year Two, not as a person but merely a name on a list. Helena had ranked first on the National Alchemy Exam for their year, beating out Ferron, who’d taken the spot the year before.

Luc had been so proud of her, loudly proclaiming that Year One barely counted, because it had been Helena’s first year ever studying alchemy, and she was doing it in her second language.

Helena had almost fainted with relief. Her scholarship at the Institute depended on her academic performance, and the exam was a significant part of her evaluation. Her father had given up everything in Etras to bring her to Paladia; they would have been ruined if she’d lost her scholarship.

During the six occasions Helena took the national exam, top rank had swung like a pendulum. Helena Marino. Kaine Ferron.

A rivalry, albeit an indirect one, never openly acknowledged.

He was guild. Guild students didn’t speak to “the Holdfast pet.”

She couldn’t imagine how he’d become High Reeve.

He’d been academic track like her. Not a specialised combat alchemist like Lila, or double track, the way Luc had been. Why would a guild heir be hunting down and killing all the surviving Resistance members?

The more time she had to think about it, the more a seething sense of hatred filled her at knowing, even distantly, someone so evil.

In a way, it was strangely poetic that it was Helena who’d been brought as a captive to Spirefell.

She’d beaten Ferron before. If she was careful, and clever, she would do it again.

W HEN F ERRON DIDN’T APPEAR ON the second day, Helena forced herself into the hallway, ignoring the way her organs shrivelled and her throat closed.

She hugged the wall, letting her fingers trace the wainscotting, not caring that the dust crept into the grooves of her fingerprints, blackening them like an infection.