Page 155 of Alchemised

Helena inhaled through clenched teeth. “I know. And I will go, per your demands, but I need to speak with—Shiseo. If I can teach him how to use the obsidian I have left, he can pass on the information to the survivors, and then at least they’ll have a chance—”

“You gave your word.”

Helena met his eyes. “You know I will always choose the Eternal Flame first.”

He stared at her, eyes widening as if she’d struck him. His mouth pressed into a hard line, and his gaze dropped. She watched his throat dip, and she kept talking.

“If you force me to leave without speaking to Shiseo, the last thing you will ever do is betray me and everyone I love. A traitor is all you’ll be to me, but if you let me do this, maybe—someday I’ll be able to forgive you.”

Hurt shone from his eyes, an empty look of despair, but she glared back. Too drugged to show more emotion.

“Fine.” His voice was raw with bitterness, and he didn’t look at her again.

She sat up laboriously and drew a map that showed which part of the city the off-site lab was in, hoping that it had escaped notice.

She added a vaguely termed list of things she wanted Shiseo to bring.

“He should be there if no one’s found him.

I’ll need him to bring all this so I can explain how it works. ”

Kaine stared at the map and list, his eyes narrowing. “Who is he exactly?”

“An Easterner. He helps here and there.”

“And you trust him ?”

“More than I can trust you,” she said.

Kaine turned white, but he crumpled the list into his pocket. “Don’t leave,” he said.

She turned away from him. Lila lay beside her, still unconscious.

The instant he was gone, Helena pushed herself and began ransacking the suite, finding and prying free every piece of metal she could.

She was indiscriminate in her destruction; anything that was not immediately visible, she ripped out, and then identified its components and transmuted it down into compact bars of various alloys and metals, pausing every few minutes to clear her head of the drug.

She was certain that Kaine would take her and Lila into Novis first. It was in range.

He’d use Amaris to get across the river without dealing with checkpoints or the paperwork of commandeering a boat.

However, large as Amaris was, Helena doubted the chimaera could carry three.

The river was wide in the basin. Two riders would be enough to wind Amaris and require her to rest before returning.

Helena didn’t trust Novis with Lila, not now with Luc dead. In the hands of Novis, with Falcon Matias circling him, Luc’s son would be little more than a pawn, a Principate raised with the same lies and manipulation that had haunted Luc.

Lila would have to be hidden.

Kaine had somewhere already in mind, but travel arrangements would not be quick. Even if he had money on hand, obtaining safe and discreet passage would be complicated.

She went to the window, peeking out, trying to gauge how high she was, and found a street only a few storeys below.

The suite was in one of the higher parts of the city, far removed from the violence, but there was a large skybridge connected to all the nearby buildings, with a plaza and gardens overlooking the lower parts of the city.

There was also a fire escape just outside the window. Not a functional one, but a decorative sort of balcony made of wrought iron.

She heard footsteps sooner than she’d expected and rushed back to the bed, trying to look dazed when the door opened and Kaine entered, Shiseo behind him.

She pushed herself up, rubbing her eyes. “You found him.”

“Give him your information so he can go.”

Helena slurred her reply. “He’s just an assistant. I’m going to have to go over everything.”

Shiseo blinked at Helena, and she was grateful then for how unreadable he was.

Kaine gave a hiss between his teeth, hands clenching into fists. “Fine.”

She was interfering with his timeline. She could feel his desperate impatience.

“You’ll use Amaris, right? To take us across the river?” she asked.

Kaine’s eyes flicked to Shiseo, but he gave a faint nod.

“Can she carry all of us that far?”

His jaw went tense. “It’ll have to be two trips.”

She nodded vaguely and went to him, noticing the way he leaned towards her without seeming to be aware of it.

She stopped short and lowered her voice. “You should take Lila, before she wakes.”

He drew up. “You want me to go?”

Her expression twisted bitterly. “Well, there’s no point in teaching you any of this, is there?” She lifted a shoulder. “I just thought—if you took her first, maybe we’ll have some time to say goodbye when it’s my turn. But maybe that doesn’t matter.”

She turned away, grateful that she was so drugged, she could finally lie without effort. She could feel Kaine’s eyes on her as she found a stack of thick, high-quality paper in the desk drawer and searched for a pen.

Helena’s heart was pounding, a slow drumbeat of dread as she sat and began to write, slowly and methodically, not looking at him again.

“When I get back, you’ll go, whether or not you’re ready.”

Helena’s heart was in her throat. It took a moment to speak.

“Fine.” She didn’t dare look up.

She watched from the corner of her eye as he went over and hauled Lila up.

He stopped at the doorway and looked back at her. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t leave this room.”

Helena’s throat tightened. She looked over, and her lips parted, to say—

To say—

She looked back down to the paper in front of her. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

The door shut and she didn’t move, expecting it to burst open again. There was a long silence before she finally looked up.

“How did he bring you here?” she asked Shiseo, pressing her hand against the side of her neck and trying to alleviate all the tampering in her body enough to think coherently.

“There was a motorcar. He took it underground. He had a special card that let us through, and we came up in a long lift.”

She turned and went over the box of supplies Shiseo had brought, sorting them as quickly as she could, laying them all out in the small kitchen.

She had to work in rushed spurts to stay ahead of the sedative.

Taking an etching sheet, she hastily began sketching an array to stabilise her component construction.

“He said you needed me,” Shiseo said after several minutes.

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Helena said, her fingers quickly shaping the various metal bars into a multitude of spheres. “I just needed an excuse so he’d leave and bring me these supplies. I imagine he told you, we lost. Luc’s dead. You should get to Novis, you’ll be safe there.”

Shiseo seemed unconcerned. “What are you doing?”

She paused. “I’m building a bomb. I need to blow up a laboratory.”

There was a long silence. “We used the Athanor components already.”

Helena twitched one shoulder as she began divvying up materials, calculating how much she had. Not enough. She scrounged through the kitchen cupboards and found a bag of flour.

“This is going to be a different kind of bomb,” she said.

“It’ll still use some obsidian, but I’m using a different pyromancy principle for this.

Luc’s books always warned about using pyromancy in enclosed spaces, because if the flames consume all the oxygen, it creates a vacuum.

Obviously, I’m not a pyromancer, but when I was little, there was a mill fire.

The flour in the air caught fire, and it burned down the entire building. ”

She paused, using her resonance to stall the effects of the sedative again before measuring carbon disulfide into sealed spheres, careful to keep from inhaling any.

Her hands had to be steady, her focus razor-sharp.

“You will burn down a lab?”

She nodded. “The West Port Lab. Do you remember Vanya Gettlich? The woman with nullium in her blood? That was West Port’s doing.

If I burn it down, they won’t realise that Kaine rescued Lila.

If they think she died in a fire, they won’t look for her.

And it’ll be—” She swallowed hard. “It’ll be a quicker death for everyone inside than what will happen to them otherwise.

” She pressed her hand against her head again, clearing it, and then nodded him away.

“You should go. You won’t want to be here when Kaine gets back, and if I get any of this wrong, I might blow up this building instead. ”

“You will not come back?”

Helena used the mortar and pestle to grind obsidian into micro-shards. “Of course I’m going to come back. I told Kaine I’d be waiting for him. It’s just—”

She paused and blinked back tears. “I made a deal to leave, and I have to keep it.” She swallowed hard. “He’ll be—he’ll be alone here. I have to make sure he’s safe before I go.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs made that awful whistling sound, and she doubled over, clutching at her chest, trying to get her fingers under the chest brace.

Shiseo took the mortar and pestle from her.

“Your wrist motion still needs practice,” he said as he ground up the obsidian for her. “Like this, see?”

She watched, the sedative taking effect. Her chest slowly stopped convulsing. She let him finish before straightening with a wince.

When he was done with the obsidian, he helped her transmute metal bars into the various shapes she needed. He was better at delicate transmutation work than she was; he made beautifully delicate pins that would be removed to allow the carbon disulfide to evaporate and ignite the white phosphorus.

Helena made as many bombs as she could. The Hevgotian ambassador had a very large, sturdy rucksack that Helena filled with them, hoping that all the spheres were even and wouldn’t break during the journey.

She took her knives from her satchel, shoving them into the pockets of a tasselled jacket, along with the few remaining supplies from her emergency kit, and pulled a cap down low to hide her face and dark hair.

After hesitating, she lay one of the obsidian knives on top of the note she’d written. Kaine should have one, if he didn’t already.

She slung the rucksack onto her back, careful not to jostle it, and then went over and unlatched the window, leaning out. There was a red haze rising from the north end of the city, but the beacon of the Eternal Flame, which had burned for centuries, visible for miles, was gone. Extinguished.

She was about to climb out the window when Shiseo spoke up.

“Wait.”

She looked at him.

“You will come back?”

She pressed her lips together and nodded, slipping one leg over the sill.

“Wait,” Shiseo said again. He drew a deep breath.

“I am not in the habit of holding on to—things. People.” He shook his head.

“I was very young when my father regretted his marriage. I was a disappointment. My mother’s family did not rise as expected, so he put us aside and began again.

When my half brother became Emperor, I was seen as a threat, but he sent me to oversee the imperial mines, and I thought perhaps he did not want to kill me.

But when I was accused of stealing imperial metals, I realised I must always wander. ”

Helena knew he was trying to communicate something important, but she was too stuck on one point. “Your brother is the Emperor?”

Shiseo waved the question off and seemed very focused on the story he was telling her.

“I always thought it better to let life flow by quietly. For many years, I did.”

Helena was not sure if she was touched or exasperated by his sudden need to tell her this.

“When they said you had died, I—I regretted that I did not know you well. I do not like to presume. To ask questions. But I—enjoyed our lab.” He smiled at her.

Helena exhaled, smiling back. “Me too. I wish we could have worked on other things.” She slid through the window onto the metal balcony.

“Wait.”

She tensed with frustration.

He reached after her. “I should go. If I am caught, I will tell them about my brother. They will not kill me. You see?”

He held out his hand for the rucksack, the urgency visible in his face.

Helena looked at him for a moment and then pushed his hand away. “I’m going to use necromancy to plant the bombs. It has to be me.”

His hand dropped.

“Take care, Shiseo,” she said. She started to turn, then paused. “If I don’t come back—if you ever see Kaine, tell him—tell him that I—”

Her head dropped down, and she quickly brushed her fingertips across her cheeks. She cleared her voice and shook her head. “Never mind. I imagine he knows.”