Page 297 of Alchemised

He always did.

Yet each day it felt as though the odds were being pushed higher. Steeper. The war teetered on the brink of calamity. She wasn’t sure how far the array and his own determination could take him before everything came crashing down.

He was walking a razor’s edge.

When he slept, she’d stare at his face and will his survival.

She’d make it happen. They’d go away, across the sea so no one would ever find them. She promised herself she’d find a way. She promised him: There would be an after.

“I’m going to take care of you. I swear, Helena, I’m always going to take care of you.” She heard him muttering the words against her skin or into her hair in such a low voice, she could barely make them out. Some days the compulsion seemed worse than others.

She heard him repeating it over and over one night. He usually stopped after a little while, but this time he didn’t.

She lifted her head and held his face between her hands so that she could meet his eyes. “Kaine, I’m all right. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

He stared at her with the same bitterly resigned expression he’d worn while training her and whenever she turned to leave, like he was bracing himself, waiting for what he regarded as inevitable.

The war was a cage with no escape.

He subsided and rested his head on her chest, listening to her heartbeat, arms framing her. She tangled her fingers through his hair, and it was quiet, but she could feel him mouthing the words.

She hesitated before she spoke.

“Tell me about your mother, Kaine. Tell me everything you could never tell anyone.”

He went silent. She slid her fingers over his shoulders, tracing the interconnected scars from the array. “You can tell me. I’ll help you carry it.”

He didn’t speak for such a long time, she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Then he turned his head, just enough that she could see his profile.

“I’d never seen anyone tortured before,” he said at last. “She was—the first person I ever saw tortured. He—” His jaw trembled as he struggled for words. “—they experimented on her. Even though she wasn’t even—she hadn’t done anything.”

As he spoke, his eyes grew wide. He stared across the room, his gaze far away.

Helena watched and she could see him, just sixteen and home for the summer holidays.

Home, walking unknowingly into a nightmare that he would never escape.

“I thought—” His voice was suddenly younger. Boyish. “For a while I thought that if I killed the Principate soon enough, she’d recover. That I could fix it all. But she was—a shadow of herself when I returned. I think—I think she tried to hold on over the summer, show a brave face while I was there, but—

“I wasn’t even gone a month.” The words were low, wavering.

Helena laced her fingers through his hair. He closed his eyes and drew his chin down, his body contracting inwards.

“After I killed the Principate, it took more than a day to get back, and they knew I’d done it. They’d heard, but they didn’t let her out until I gave him that fucking heart—still beating. She kept having these fits; she’d crumple on the floor, or stop breathing, or sit rocking and muttering. I brought in doctors, but they said there was nothing wrong with her but a weak constitution and tendencies towards hysteria. They recommended institutionalising her, or administering all these tonics and injections that left her in a stupor.”

Helena squeezed his hand, running her fingers across the array.

Calculating, Cunning, Devoted, Determined, Ruthless, Unfailing, Unhesitating, and Unyielding.

To avenge his mother. In penance for all the ways he believed he’d failed her.

“I’m so sorry, Kaine.”

He was quiet. He closed his eyes and drew a sharp breath.

“Then—” His voice cut off.

“Then—” It failed again. “She’d been doing better, I thought she might even recover, but I—I—We’d taken a new district. There was a list of families we were supposed to make examples of. Father, mother, two children. After we killed the parents, they reanimated the mother, had her with the older girl. I was supposed to come up with something with—with the father and the younger one. Little thing, wearing two braids with bows on them. There was a birthday cake. I think it was hers. Durant dragged her over by her hair and handed her to me—I knew what they wanted but I ran.”