Page 132 of Alchemised

T HE U NDYING USED THE FIRST NULLIUM BOMB in the middle of spring.

The Resistance had known an attack like that was coming; the use of nullium had been growing ever since the Undying had used it against Lila, and although the injuries were severe, as a combat weapon nullium was limited in its utility because of how fragile it was. As a bomb, however, it was devastating.

A few tiny pieces of shrapnel were all it took to wipe out an alchemist’s resonance. If it dissolved and was distributed through the blood, the hospital had to manually suture the wounds, administer chelating agents, and then wait for the patient’s resonance to recover.

Expert alchemical medicine combined with healing had made recovery for Resistance fighters efficient; so long as a combatant didn’t die from blood loss, injuries that in other parts of the world would take months to recover from could be healed here in days or weeks.

With nullium, however, convalescence slowed to a crawl.

The hospital had prepared as much as they could, medics and surgeons learning about manual surgery and the chymistry department producing a large supply of chelating agents, but logistics were not enough to improve morale.

People were terrified. Alchemy and resonance were everything; the idea of being without was like returning to a pre-alchemical stone age.

Ilva, who took so much in stride, seemed knocked permanently off balance after Luc’s capture, failing to comprehend and proactively address the fallout. Perhaps because she was a Lapse, she was incapable of understanding the emotional severity of the mere threat, its impact on morale.

The only bright spot was that Luc seemed to abruptly realise his responsibilities.

Largely cloistered in his rooms, he suddenly reappeared at an assembly that Althorne had called to soothe Resistance unrest. Luc appeared dressed all in white and gold, burning with righteous indignation.

Physically, he was shrunken. Though his armour concealed most of it, his features were visibly gaunt.

Still, it was as though his body were merely a shell now, and his soul shone through. He seemed to radiate life.

“Morrough, like every necromancer before him, wants the Resistance to be afraid, and for the Eternal Flame’s light to be extinguished,” he said, his blue eyes burning.

“We will not give them that satisfaction. Paladia is ours. We built this city as a beacon; that light has protected the world from necromancy’s stain for generations.

The gods are on our side. Sol is unconquerable.

The laws of nature will not give victory to corruption.

We will not fail; we know the rewards our ancestors received for their faithfulness and bravery, and we will taste the same! ”

There was a grimness in his voice, and yet he was strangely breathtaking as he spoke, like the sun at its zenith. She could feel the mood in the air shift from uncertainty and fear to conviction. To faith.

Luc kept speaking, describing the city in the loving detail of one who knew it intimately, describing the dreams he and his father had had for Paladia’s glorious future.

The next thing Helena knew, there was a counteroffensive being assembled. Squadrons readied. Luc’s new battalion, who had not yet even seen combat together, went out with four others and seized a district of the West Island.

Helena watched from a skybridge as they all returned in a victory parade, followed by cheers. Luc was standing on the back of a lorry, Sebastian beside him, waving as they swept through the gates.

Lila had not gone. Officially it was because she was still in recovery, but the reality was that the tribunal had not yet begun, the leaders concerned over how Luc might react.

If he used his power as Principate to directly oppose the Council and military leaders, there was no real means to overrule him that wouldn’t result in a complete collapse of leadership, potentially fracturing the Resistance.

So long as Luc acknowledged Lila as his paladin primary, Lila could ignore what the rest of the Council said—her vows were to Luc.

And so Lila remained in limbo. Not cleared for combat, but not really injured anymore, either.

She stood at the door of the Tower, applauding with everyone else, but grief shone in her face.

The counterattack had been so sudden, so brazen, the Undying had hardly mounted a defence.

Similarly, the Council was blindsided by Luc’s abrupt embrace of full leadership, and left scrambling in the wake of his decisiveness.

The success of the offensive made him difficult to argue with, especially when Resistance morale rose with his ascent to claim his place on the Council.

The battles began to blur together. Except now there was a medical ward for nullium injuries, and the casualty rates skyrocketed, infections and disease becoming an increasing threat.

First came overcrowding, followed by shortages in clean linens and bandages, and then the blood infections began and sickness followed.

Helena was on shift for days sometimes, ignoring Kaine’s signals unless they were messages for Crowther. Work at least kept her from wearing grooves of worry through her mind.

When she was alone, she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling as she twisted Kaine’s ring around and around her finger, thinking about the array sketch Wagner had drawn. Nine points.

Northern alchemy almost always used either five or eight, the elemental or celestial numbers.

Those were the only array formulas even taught at the Institute, the exception being the Holdfasts’ pyromancy, which operated with a seven-point array, but Helena only knew of that because she’d helped Luc with his homework.

She’d never heard of a nine-point array. She had no idea how it was supposed to work, and her only sample was full of obvious errors and drawn by someone wholly unfamiliar with alchemical principles.

How could she reverse what had been done to Kaine if she didn’t understand the method? She moved her fingers, trying to visualise the energy channels. Her mind kept going back to Soren.

She smothered the thoughts, burying them with animancy, trying to force her mind to go around her memories of him.

It kept niggling at her, though—not his destruction but the moment in which he’d died.

She always tried to break the resonance connection before a patient died, but she’d been fully focused on Soren in that moment.

The energy, the sensation of it, running through her like an electric current kept coming to mind whenever she tried to imagine channelling through a multiple of three.

It made her wonder. If Morrough could trap living souls inside bone, and the first Necromancer placed an entire town of living souls into a Stone, what would happen if someone captured the other form of energy? Had anyone ever done it?

The next time she felt a patient on the verge of death, rather than break away, she left the connection open and tried to hold the energy as it struck. It seared through her resonance, leaving her hand numb and twinging for hours.

Well, it made sense that she couldn’t just hold it.

It would need a container of some sort. The sunstone amulet had been …

quicksilver? Or glass? Maybe crystal. She tried a variety of substances from the storerooms, smuggling odd metals and other compounds into the hospital inside her pockets, to see if the energy would channel into any of them.

Sunstones cracked, while metal set her pocket on fire. In a box shoved to the back of a storage room, she found several large chunks of obsidian. Volcanic glass did have a higher melting point than normal glass.

She stuck a piece in her pocket.

She gripped it when she felt a patient’s vitality grow thin.

He was one of the nullium patients, hit with shrapnel that had ripped apart his organs, and the infection hadn’t responded to treatment.

She could force his heart to keep beating, but it would only make his death take longer; he’d die the moment she left.

His skin was burning with fever, and he was gripping her hand, speaking to someone unseen, the words coming slower and slower.

She swallowed hard and kept her resonance open as his eyes went still. The death surge ran through her like an electric shock straight into the obsidian.

Her arm went briefly numb. When sensation returned, he was dead, and the obsidian hummed warm against her fingers. She could feel it, that strange dark energy.

Her fingers trembled as she closed his eyes, pulling the sheet over his face. Had she just trapped a soul in volcano glass? She squeezed it. No. She knew what that energy felt like, the amulet and Kaine. This was different.

Still, she tried to pretend it wasn’t there while she finished her shift.

She hurried to her lab. She opened the door, and stopped short at the sight of Lila, curled up on the floor, her face swollen, eyes red.

Helena froze. Gods, the tribunal. It must have begun.

She’d hardly seen and hadn’t spoken to Lila since before Luc’s rescue. She’d returned to her room one day to find all of Lila’s things gone and heard about a private memorial service held for Soren only afterwards.

As much as she had wanted to try to explain herself, she couldn’t, because officially Soren had simply died.

But Luc would have told Lila the truth.

Helena stood frozen, not sure what could have possibly driven Lila here.

“Lila.” Helena set the obsidian down, moving tentatively. “Lila, what’s wrong? What happened?”

Lila stared at Helena without responding for a long time.

“I made a mistake,” Lila finally said, her voice barely a whisper, “I’ve made such a mistake.”

Helena swallowed hard. “It’s—all right. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Whatever you’ve done—I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”

Soren’s ghost seemed to hang between them.