Page 19 of Alchemised

It wasn’t an entirely new concept. Marrying into the resonance was a well-known term for the guild families’ tendency to marry those with either the same or a complementary alchemical resonance. Aurelia and Ferron were just such an example.

While an alchemist’s resonance repertoire was as heritable as hair or eye colour, resonance could also appear or vanish at random.

Neither of Helena’s parents had been alchemists.

Her father had possessed a minor resonance for steel and copper, but not enough to merit training or qualify for a guild.

Her mother had no resonance at all that Helena could remember.

Luc’s great-aunt, Ilva Holdfast, was famously a Lapse, a child of alchemists who never manifested resonance.

Now it seemed Stroud had every intention of testing exactly how heritable resonance was or wasn’t, and she intended to use the prisoners on the Outpost to do it. After all, who else would volunteer for a breeding program because of incentives like food, lodgings, and a retrial?

She thought of Grace, starving and desperate, with brothers too young to work, willing to sell an eye. Helena could only guess how many others were like her.

All those files Stroud had been constantly going through. This must have been what she was working on, winnowing out eligible candidates from the Resistance records.

Helena hid the newspaper in her wardrobe, resolving to drop it somewhere when she next left her room. Her joints were stiff with cold, and she went to the shower, peeling off her wet clothes.

She stood under the hot water until feeling seeped back into her body and the bone-deep cold faded away. She began washing slowly, in no hurry to go back into her freezing room.

As she looked down, she discovered scars that she had no memory of.

The largest was right in the middle of her chest, running between her breasts. The roping scar was raised, slightly puckered, as if her sternum had been split open and stapled back together.

She traced her fingers across it, finding a divot in the bone, the odd sensation of severed nerves.

It didn’t seem like healing had been used. The bone could have been regrown. She could have easily knit the nerve endings back together to avoid the loss of sensation, and then arranged the matrices so that the scarring was less visible.

None of that had happened. The wound had been left to heal without any vivimancy.

Perhaps this was the extensive injury Stroud had mentioned.

No, she couldn’t have been placed in stasis with an injury like that. She began to search her body carefully and found more scars.

Her mind seemed trained to overlook them, but she focused, taking note of each one.

There were traces of a large circular wound that went straight through her calf. Hairline scars, one on her stomach and another between two ribs. Vivimancy had undeniably been used to heal them.

In her right palm there were more scars.

Slits in the palm and fingers, as if she’d gripped a knife blade in her hands, and more oddly, seven tiny punctures.

They were perfectly spaced into a circle in her palm.

Not large but distinct in the way they marred the skin.

She stared at them. The shape felt familiar.

She put her hand down, unsettled, and finally reached up to find the one scar that she did remember.

It was hardly visible, hidden below the shadow of her jaw. It ran long and thin across the left side of her neck, stopping just short of her throat.

F ERRON brOUGHT H ELENA’S DRIED AND cleaned cloak with him when he arrived the next day and threw it at her head.

Helena followed him, surreptitiously dropping the newspaper along the way. On the veranda, he pulled out another paper. The cover story was about a monument the governor, Fabian Greenfinch, was having built in honour of Morrough as New Paladia’s liberator. It would be unveiled the following year.

It was raining again. Helena glanced around, not sure what to do, finding no appeal in strolling about in circles under Ferron’s supervision.

Perhaps she could find a very sharp stick somewhere and stab him with it.

She wandered along the veranda until she was bored, and then sat observing the stillness of the house, trying to guess at how many rooms there must be in a place so large.

She’d thought the Bayards’ house, Solis Splendour, enormous. It had been one of the few freestanding houses in the city, a remnant from long ago. Spirefell was much larger.

When Ferron stood and left, she assumed it was a sign to go back inside. She cast her eyes around and was disappointed to find he hadn’t forgotten his newspaper.

She went to the door. The winter light spilled like quicksilver across the dark floor, but the hallway beyond disappeared into darkness like the opening of a mouth. With the winter drapes, the light was blotted out, creating the dusty suffocating feeling of a tomb. The lights were off.

She groped along the wall, trying to find a dial or switch.

Wind rushed out of the dark, and the smell of dust and rot struck her face like a cold breath, followed by a low, shifting groan that made the house vibrate.

Helena stumbled back outside, heart racing.

If the clouds would lift, it would get brighter. She huddled on the veranda, waiting. Through the obscuring rain, the house around her looked almost like an immense slumbering creature, curved inwards, the spires like spines.

The rain did not cease. Instead the sky dimmed as dusk fell. At this point in the lunar cycles, even Lumithia, the brighter moon, had waned too much for her light to penetrate the cloud cover.

The light in the doorway had shrunk and weakened.

Helena drew a deep breath; she’d taken the route before. There were steps not far into the shadows. If she found them, she could feel her way back.

It was only shadows. It wasn’t the tank. It wasn’t the nothing. Just shadows.

She wavered in the doorway, and everything grew darker, the remaining light outside beginning to vanish.

Helena felt herself disappearing into it. Terror sharp as talons clawed through her as she forced herself forward. She stumbled, colliding with a table, barely feeling the pain that shot up her shin.

Find the stairs.

It’s only a house.

But she felt the darkness swallowing her, dragging her in, the endlessness so close. She gripped the table, hands shaking so violently that the wood rattled. Something fell, crashing onto the floor.

Breathe. Just breathe.

She fought to breathe but pain splintered her chest. Her heart was racing, beating like a caged bird inside her, breaking itself against her ribs.

She made it a few steps before her legs gave out. She curled up on the floor, the wood like bones beneath her hands. She was disappearing into the nothing again. Into the nothing where she couldn’t move … couldn’t scream … and no one ever came …

She was gripped by the arms and wrenched off the floor.

“What are you doing?”

She blinked in the sudden light, staring into Ferron’s incensed face.

An electric sconce on the wall glowed, a halo in the dark illuminating only them.

She focused on his face, trying not to see the ocean of black surrounding her.

“It was—dark,” she forced out.

“What?”

Her breathing was so rapid, her head swam.

“ You’re scared of the dark?” His silver eyes were burning, his voice thick with disbelief.

She tried to pull away—she’d rather suffocate in the hallways than be near Ferron—but he didn’t let go, pulling her over to the stairs, mere steps away, and dragging her to her room, refusing to let her collapse back onto the floor.

“Calm down,” he snarled at her as soon as she was inside the familiar space.

The door slammed.

Helena dropped into the chair, doubling over and gripping the fabric. Her fingers kept twitching, sending shocks of pain to her arms, but she didn’t care. She needed to feel that things were real and tangible, not an abyss of nowhere with her body and nothing else.

The air sliced through the inside of her lungs.

She was in her room. The house had not eaten her, because houses did not eat people. Her mind cleared slowly, that suffocating terror gradually ebbing away, allowing reason to seep back in.

It was almost worse to be rational again, to sit knowing her fear made no sense. It didn’t matter. The part of her that was afraid did not care about being rational.

“What’s wrong with you?”

She started, looking up.

Ferron was still in the room, apparently having lingered to interrogate her now that her fit of panophobia was over.

She averted her eyes.

“If you won’t tell me, I’ll pull the answer out of your head.”

Helena flinched. The thought of his resonance set her teeth on edge. There were parts of her brain that still felt bruised, caved in from the transference.

Her mouth twisted, throat going taut. “I don’t like places I can’t see.”

“Since when? I haven’t noticed you keeping the light on in here constantly. Or are these shadows different?”

Heat rose across the back of her neck. She stared at the iron bars in the floor.

“I know this room. It’s the places I don’t know, that I can’t see the end of.

I-In the stasis tank, it was always dark no matter how hard I tried to see, and I couldn’t feel anything around me, just my body floating and not moving.

It felt—endless. Like I was nowhere. I was—I was there so long.

I kept thinking that eventually someone would come but—” She shook her head.

“When I see dark places and I don’t know where they end, I feel like I’ll disappear inside them, but this time, I’ll never be found. ”

She sounded irrational. She was irrational, but there was no help for it; there was a schism between her reason and her mind, a fault line shearing them forever apart. Her mind did not care whether the fear made sense; it just wanted to never go back.

Ferron was silent for so long that she finally looked up at him, morbidly curious, but he was unreadable. Still as a statue as he stared at her.

It was the first time she’d bothered to just look at him, to see him for what he was, rather than who he was.

His clothing hid it well, but he was strangely slight. Not at all built like an iron alchemist. He didn’t even have the look or presence of a combat alchemist. She couldn’t imagine him with a heavy weapon in hand.

Aside from the predatory intensity to his eyes, his features were almost too fine, like a statue carved a stroke too far.

Everything about him was slim and sharp-edged.

“You know,” Ferron said, jolting her from her thoughts, “when I heard it was you I’d be getting, I was looking forward to breaking you.”

He shook his head. “But I don’t think it’s possible to exceed what you’ve done to yourself.”