Page 159 of Alchemised

“Oh dear,” Mandl said with false concern, still holding Helena fast. “That wasn’t what I meant to do. I was trying to do this.” She grabbed Helena by the back of the neck.

Renewed pain burst through her, shooting down her spine and along every nerve ending. Building and building until Helena’s heart threatened to explode. She’d break all her own bones if it would let her escape. She’d chew her limbs off.

She could feel her mind scrabbling to break free from the agony. Just break. Just break.

“I’m not fragile. I am not going to break. Please believe that about me.”

She’d promised. Her body was seizing, but eventually it stopped. She was dropped heavily to the ground. Her muscles kept twitching. Mandl knelt, reaching towards her again, and Helena cowered away.

Mandl’s wide mouth stretched across her face. “See how quickly you can learn to be afraid?”

She took Helena’s right hand, resetting and healing the broken bones. She would indeed have been an exceptional healer if she hadn’t been a psychopath.

Then something cold pressed against Helena’s newly healed wrist, clicking as it was locked in place.

She stared at it dazedly, struggling to breathe. It was another cuff. The number was different. She couldn’t quite make it out.

Mandl stood, brushing herself off. “Put her in the transport lorry.”

As Helena was being dragged up off the ground, a young man stepped forward, stammering.

“Wait. That—that one, we got her. She’s supposed to be interrogated. I think. Pretty sure someone said something about that.”

Mandl gave a slow reptilian blink. “She was in the cull cage.”

He flushed and scratched his head. “We had orders.”

“Whose orders?”

“Um, it was one of the dead ones. I don’t remember. He told Lancaster something about it.”

“And Lancaster is?”

“Well, he’s in surgery.”

Mandl’s lips pursed, and she looked as if she were about to eat the Aspirant. “So you want me to do what? Put her back into the cull cage? Do you have jurisdiction to take her?”

He stammered and backed away. “I just—it’s what I heard. Maybe someone else would know.”

Helena wasn’t sure if she’d just been saved or damned. Interrogation was what Atreus had wanted. To find the bomber. She struggled to think. Her body kept spasming. All the drugs in it had her mind spinning as they faded away.

Several liches came over and dragged Helena and several other prisoners towards a lorry, shoving them into the back.

Interrogation would be dangerous. If anyone realised she was the bomber, they’d want to know how. Why.

She knew all too well now the dangers of interrogation. There were points where the mind broke, where pain became all there was. The Undying would hurt her in whatever ways were necessary to get the answers out.

Kaine said animancy was special. Rare. If Bennet was dead, Kaine and Morrough might be the only ones left with the ability, which meant they might bring him in and torture her in front of him or make him torture her.

If Morrough interrogated her personally, he’d find Kaine in her thoughts and memories. No amount of evasion could hide him; he was the fabric of her thoughts. Her every action tied to him.

Even if her death was quick, Kaine’s punishment for his betrayal would be eternal. Or else they’d use her, just as they had his mother.

It would be everything he’d feared.

If they found him in her memory.

If.

She had to push him away, like she had pushed away the memory of—

Soren.

She would redirect her thoughts, transmute her memories until her mind stopped running to him. She couldn’t confess to something she didn’t remember.

She pressed her hands against her temples, wincing as she moved her right hand. The bones were repaired, but the tissue damage and bruising remained. The nullium in the manacles hummed, blurring her resonance, but suppression like that was imperfect.

She still had her resonance, though it wasn’t as powerful.

But she didn’t need power; she needed precision and patience.

She closed her eyes, using that feeble strain of resonance on her own consciousness.

After spending so much time navigating the minds of others, it was easy to manipulate her own mind—no reaction, no resistance.

The last two years of her life, she pushed down beneath the surface as if to drown them. There was no other way. Kaine was almost everything now.

Without him, there was just emptiness. Her routines. Hours and days in the hospital that bled together, years of an unending nightmare.

Alone. Everyone dead. Because they always died. She tried to save them, but in the end, they always died. Her life was a graveyard.

Where there was space she couldn’t reconcile, she filled it with Luc. Not his death, not Luc from the war; the Luc she’d promised to save.

The version of him he’d tried to be. The Luc who’d always believed in her.

It was the way he deserved to be remembered.

She was lost in her own mind when the lorry pulled into a warehouse. An old slaughterhouse with meat hooks overhead and metal tables everywhere, and a cement floor that could be easily sprayed down to wash away the blood. The other prisoners began to panic, jostling her from her thoughts.

“They’re not going to kill us yet,” Helena said, her voice raw. “They’re putting us in stasis. To keep us fresh.”

They were pulled out, one by one, and injected with something.

The process was horrifyingly well synchronised. Rote. As the prisoners went limp, they were hoisted onto long tables, side by side. A guard went down the line stripping their clothes off.

A few tried to fight. One boy got kicked in the gut for his efforts before the needle went into his neck. He called out for his mother, for Sol, for Luc.

The woman—Mandl, her mind belatedly supplied—stood observing, and when Helena was pulled out, she waved her towards the far end of the warehouse. “Put her over there. I’ll deal with her personally.”

A needle sank into the side of Helena’s neck. It was thick, the dose of paralytic unnecessarily large.

Her muscles went numb, but not her sensory nerves. She could feel things, just not move.

Mandl’s face appeared above her, a satisfied smile on her lips, eyes skimming from head to toe. “You think you know what’s about to happen to you, don’t you?”

Helena lay there as Mandl pulled her hair out of the way and placed something adhesive at the base of her neck, over her spine.

“This is to keep your muscles in order.”

An electric pulse caused Helena’s body to seize, muscles contracting and releasing several times.

Mandl’s fingers trailed across Helena’s cold skin, seeming to tremble with excitement. Needles with tubes sank into her arms.

“Pity about Bennet,” Mandl said. “I always found his ideas inspirational. If he got you, he’d keep you alive for ages if I asked. Interrogations are so quick, and you’ll be completely spoiled after that.”

She placed a mask over Helena’s face that stretched from above her eyebrows all the way down over her chin.

There was some kind of adhesive that sealed it against her skin.

It was transparent enough that Helena could just barely see through it and watch as Mandl picked up a large syringe with a pale-blue liquid inside.

“This would put you in a nice little coma. Bennet said it’s like making meat tender by keeping the pigs calm before slaughter. ”

She squeezed the plunger. Helena heard it spatter onto the floor.

Then there was the sound of paper tearing as Mandl ripped a form off a clipboard, crumpling it. For a moment she could make out the number at the top, 19819.

Without that form, there would be no record that Helena was there. She’d vanish. A clerical error.

Mandl combed her fingers through Helena’s hair. “While you’re waiting, I want you to think about all the things I’m going to do to you when I come back.”

Mandl turned away. “All done here. Put her under with the rest.”

Helena was lifted onto a cart that went rattling across the floor into a second room. It was bitterly cold. Helena could see the rows of sectioned tanks from the corner of her eyes. The photographs from the raid flashed in her memory, all the bodies floating inside them. All dead.

The guards, wearing large rubber gloves to their shoulders, lifted one prisoner after another and slid them into the tanks, hooking the tubes and wires into a row of machines that ran along the far end.

Helena’s heart was pounding harder and harder as she was picked up and the cold fluid closed around her.

She couldn’t move. She was trapped inside her own body, like a cage sealing her within her mind. The cold seeped into her, slowing her heart, dropping her metabolism. It felt like forever and like no time at all before the light vanished, too.

Helena was left in darkness and silence.

Her heart was pounding in unadulterated terror. The lid was inches from her face, but she couldn’t see it. Freedom so close but utterly beyond reach.

She tried to breathe slowly but couldn’t. She started panting, heat and steam filling the mask over her face.

She tried to scream, but all that came out was a weak uneven whimper. Her body grew colder and colder, and her lungs spasmed as her panic used up the limited oxygen coming through the mask. Her chest began aching and burning for air. She kept trying to breathe, but there was nothing to breathe.

She was relieved when she passed out. It was better than being awake.

Something burning hot jolted her back to consciousness.

She’d forgotten where she was and panicked as it all rushed back. The tiny, enclosed space beneath the surface, in the dark. Not enough air, and she couldn’t move.

The burning came again, cutting her panic short as she tried to place where the sensation was coming from. She knew that feeling.

Her hand. Her left hand was burning. The ring. Her heart stalled.

Kaine. He’d come back and found her gone. She’d told him she’d be waiting, and she wasn’t there. The ring burned again and again and again.

He was looking for her. He’d come for her.

He always did.

But she could not think about it.

She had to forget. If she remembered and was interrogated, Kaine could not be found.

She couldn’t think about him. Trapped, frozen, without use of her hands, she could only draw her resonance inwards. She was used to pushing it out for combat. Now it was like a net she closed around her own mind.

She could feel the faint texture in her mind of her manipulations, altering her thoughts, bending them around all the things she must not think about.

She followed the new paths, over and over, wearing new grooves into place, teaching her mind to settle there and look no further.

She counted. She made routines. She tried not to remember.

If Kaine found her, he’d understand.

She could wait.

Hold on. You promised you wouldn’t break.