Page 149 of Alchemised

T IME SLOWED TO A CRAWL THE NEXT day as Headquarters was emptied, the combatants dispatched. There was no time or opportunity to speak to Luc before he was gone.

Helena and all the other healers and medical staff waited in a prepped hospital ward, waiting for news, for injuries. The hands on the clock indicated that the bomb should have gone off, but there was no sound or shudder of an explosion.

No sign that anything had begun.

Of course, it was a smaller bomb, intended to be detonated inside an enclosed area. She wasn’t likely to feel it, and the fighting would mostly be on the West Island.

Knowing that didn’t make it easier to wait. After so many years, she could feel it all coming to an end and dreaded almost every possible outcome.

Perhaps it would end, and they would win and everything would be all right, but Kaine would vanish in the aftermath, and she wouldn’t know if he was dead or alive, trapped under rubble, or had fled somewhere far away.

She would just have to look for him until she knew.

Every tick of the clock made her flinch. The orderlies, medics, and healers were talking among themselves, but Helena stood frozen, her ribs clamping around her lungs.

You made a mistake. You built the bomb wrong. Kaine was caught while planting it and he’s being tortured, and you don’t even know. Everyone is going to die and it’s all your fault.

Her fingertips and arms were beginning to prick, going numb.

The doors burst open. The room was so blurred, Helena couldn’t make out who it was, but she heard shouting: There’d been an explosion on the West Island. The Resistance had attacked.

Helena stood swaying, trying to feel something, but she still felt empty.

Heat flared around her finger. Just once.

She looked down at her hand, at the ring that was barely there, and her knees gave out.

She dropped straight to the floor and burst into tears, pain splintering across her chest.

There were voices around her, but she couldn’t follow them. All she could do was try to breathe, but her lungs refused to open.

A warm hand wrapped around her elbow, pulling her to her feet.

“Let’s sit a minute,” Pace said as she wrapped an arm around Helena’s shoulders and escorted her to her little office in the storeroom. “Elain can call when someone’s brought in.”

She pushed Helena down into a chair.

Helena let herself be herded along, sitting, eyes closed. She pressed her fingers against her chest, feeling the scarring through her clothes, easing her heart rate back down.

When she finally opened her eyes again, she found Pace watching her.

“What’s happening?” Pace asked.

Helena shook her head. “Nothing. I’m just tired.”

Pace’s features were all pinched together. “You know, they say there’s a point when the Toll becomes exponential.”

Helena shrugged. “They say a lot of things about healers. I don’t know that even half of them are true.”

“Perhaps, but I doubt anyone has ever healed to the extent and mag nitude that you have. You have not been well for a long time. You think I couldn’t guess why you started supplementing your treatments with all those tonics and injections?

Your trainees barely know how to heal without them, but you worked solo for years.

For all you know, you could be risking years of your life every time—”

“I don’t think it’s that …” She reached up absently for the chain, but it was long gone.

Pace shook her head, worry etched into her broad face. “Is it the nullium? We’re seeing so many side effects from the bombing, and you had some of the worst exposure of any of the survivors. That’s not even considering your injury at the time.”

Before Helena could shake her head, Pace continued. “We’re going in blind on all this, without any idea of the potential long-term effects. I suspect Luc’s brain fevers are a symptom of residual nullium in the brain.”

Helena looked at her in confusion. “Luc has brain fevers?”

Pace sighed. “You saw what he was like just after the rescue.”

Helena nodded. “I thought they’d stopped.”

“He tries to keep them hidden, doesn’t want to cause worry, but sometimes they’re so severe that he still grows delirious, claws at his skin, won’t let any men in the room, even Sebastian, screaming things like, ‘Get him out.’ Elain has to sedate him until they pass or he’ll injure himself.”

Helena felt as if she had been staring at a puzzle from the wrong angle for months; now she could suddenly see it clearly.

“He says, ‘Get him out’?” Her voice seemed to come from far away.

“Usually.”

Helena’s head throbbed. “Can you—describe these fevers for me?”

Pace’s eyebrows furrowed. “Well, I’ve only examined him a few times.

Elain manages him now; he’s more cooperative with her.

She believes it’s caused by recurring brain inflammation.

The symptoms are delirium, with a rapid heartbeat.

We thought it was related to his organ damage, but they appear to be separate conditions. ”

“What’s the opium for?” Helena asked.

Pace sighed and looked away. “His fevers seem prompted by a condition of the nerves. Calming him keeps them from growing so severe. We’ve tried everything, but inhaling the vapours is the only thing that prevents them.

If he becomes fully delirious, it can take days before he recovers, and he requires extensive treatment to get back on his feet. ”

“That’s just—masking the symptoms. That’s not fixing anything. You should have told me this was going on.”

This couldn’t be.

“Helena,” Matron Pace said firmly, “he’s been examined over and over by myself and Maier and Elain. There’s no cause. It’s all in his mind. Managing the symptoms is all we can do. He was specific that he didn’t want you involved. Every time your name was even brought up, he worsened.”

“And you never questioned that?”

Pace looked at her pityingly. “It’s not as if you have any particular experience with brain fevers.”

Helena shook her head. Pace was wrong. She had a great deal of recent experience with brain fevers. She knew exactly what caused them. Animancy.

But that wasn’t the only time she’d encountered brain fevers. She’d seen them before that. The exact symptoms Pace had described. The impossibly hot fevers, as if the mind were trying to burn something out from inside it. The self-mutilation, screaming, “Get him out.”

She’d seen all of it just before her father had been murdered.

At the field hospital.

But Luc had no talisman like those liches had. He had been checked and rechecked. It would have been found.

… unless the talisman had not been coated in lumithium, which would make it undetectable.

Morrough had captured Luc but hadn’t killed him, and they’d thought it was only because they’d arrived in time.

But maybe they’d been too late after all.

She jolted out of her seat. Pace reached out, trying to stay her, but Helena bolted from the room, running through the hospital and straight to the war room. There was no one there except a cadet, who looked up nervously and told her that she didn’t have the clearance to be there.

She glared at him. “Do you know where Crowther is? It’s urgent I speak to him.”

He shook his head, clearly sullen about guarding an empty room. “No. They were looking for him earlier. Disappeared last night, it seems.”

That made no sense.

It was as if she were standing in a trap laid with dominoes. She could feel them falling around her. Closing in.

“Do you know where Luc’s battalion is?”

The boy rolled his eyes and drew himself up. “You don’t have clearance to—”

Helena eyed the map on the table. There was a golden flag amid the sea of blue.

She turned and left before the cadet was done talking.

She ran to her lab, snatching up everything she could get her hands on. First, her new set of knives. Then a couple of obsidian knives Shiseo had been experimenting with. She ransacked her remaining healing supplies.

Shiseo entered with a box from the off-site lab as she was cramming a final vial into her overfilled satchel. He was probably the only person who would take a warning from her without asking for proof or an explanation.

“Get out of Headquarters,” she said. “Take everything you can and go back to the off-site lab. I’ll send word if it’s safe to come back. I can’t explain now, but something’s about to go wrong.”

She went to Crowther’s office, but it was empty. Where was he? There was no time to search. She headed out.

She traversed the island on foot. She knew from flyovers which parts were still intact, and that she was headed in the right direction when the air began to smell of smoke and burning flesh.

Whenever she spotted Resistance units, she asked for updates.

Reports were contradictory, but there were consistent stories of many necrothralls dropping, leaving whole districts with only a few bewildered Aspirants to defend them.

They were making piles of the necrothralls and burning them to ensure they couldn’t be recovered and reanimated.

With all the good news, Helena began to doubt herself. Was she paranoid? It was going so well. She refused to turn back, though; she had to find Luc.

A broad-shouldered commander that she vaguely recognised as part of Luc’s battalion stepped out of a building.

“Marino?” He said her name doubtfully.

“I need to see Luc,” she said, gripping an obsidian knife in her pocket so hard the handle bit into her skin.

“Well, he’s not here, he’s fighting,” the man said.

She must seem insane. “I know, but it’s urgent. I can work with the medics on-site until he comes back.”

The commander looked confused but didn’t object.

Healing at the front had none of the organisation used in the hospital.

Most of her work was stopping blood loss by staunching and closing wounds, healing only the simple injuries.

The priority was completing the most urgent interventions and then sending the patients on to Headquarters for full treatment.