Page 298 of Alchemised

He swallowed. “I booked a ship, passage for two. I thought my mother and I could just sail away together, and she wouldn’t know I couldn’t really go with her until it was too late. But when I went to get her, they’d gotten there first. They’d brought the corpse.”

“Oh, Kaine …” Helena was too horrified to say more than that. He was gripping her hand so hard, she suspected there’d be bruises where his fingers were entwined.

“I tried to find a way to run with her.” His voice shifted, starting to grow familiar as the story moved through his life. Traces of his hard, controlled tone beginning to emerge. “I had everything prepared, every detail and contingency, but she wouldn’t leave without me. I thought about forcing her, drugging her, putting her on the boat and sending her away, but I was so afraid she’d come back for me, and I didn’t want to have her locked away. I didn’t want to be someone who caged her again.”

His voice grew deadened. “If I hadn’t gone home that night … she wouldn’t have died. I don’t know why I did.”

He fell silent.

Helena shifted out from under him enough to sit up. She couldn’t look at him without a tearing pain spreading through her chest.

She touched him lightly on the forehead. “Kaine—I’m not your mother.”

He flinched, opening his mouth to deny, but she continued without letting him cut her off. “The Eternal Flame is not going to hurt me if you fail an assignment. They aren’t going to torture or endanger me to punish you. I’m not a hostage. I’m in this war because I choose to be. I’m not fragile. I’m not going to break. Please.” She brushed her thumb over the arch of his cheekbone. “Believe that about me.”

He shook his head. “Let me get you out. I swear it won’t affect my aid to the Resistance. Just let me get you out.”

“I’m not going to run while everyone else is fighting. We can do this together. Let me help you. You don’t have to do everything alone now.”

Despair flooded across his eyes.

“You can’t ask me to run away from the war.”

His lip curled. “Why not? Haven’t you done enough for them? They sold you. What if I’d—” His voice cut off, and he couldn’t meet her eyes. “What if you’d had the same offer from someone who’d meant it. You would have still gone—and if I hadn’t trained you, you would have died rescuing Holdfast.”

“And I agreed to it. All of it. No one ever made me. We don’t get to choose when we’ve done enough and leave others behind to bear the consequences. There are no civilians in a war like this. If they win”—she spread her hands—“everyone loses.”

He clenched his jaw, and she knew what he wanted to say, that he didn’t care. He didn’t care whether anyone survived except her.

Helena gave a sad sigh and dropped her head, burying her face in his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her.

She was almost asleep when she heard the faint whisper of his voice. “I’m going to take care of you. I swear, I’m always going to take care of you.”

KAINE WAS HELENA’S ONLY SOURCE of solace as things within the Resistance deteriorated.

When Lila finally recovered her resonance, her long convalescence seemed to have sucked the life from her. She was unable to spring back the way she usually did, and the scarring from all the surgery on her chest and shoulder was so severe that it bound her movement, requiring extensive healing and therapy to regain mobility.

Helena planned out a potential treatment regimen, but then it was assigned to one of the other healers. Luc had requested that Helena be kept away from Lila as well as himself.

Helena sat staring at Pace’s desk after she was informed of it.

“You’ll still work casualty shifts,” Pace said.

“Right,” Helena said, in a dull voice. “I take it that means Luc’s more lucid, then? If he’s making requests now.”

Since Luc was moved to his private quarters, Helena had not seen or heard a word about him or his condition, although the Council insisted that he was still steadily recovering.

The matron’s lips twitched. “Well, ‘lucid’ is certainly a word you could use.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sure that with time, he’ll even out again. You don’t need to worry about him; there’s plenty of other people doing that.”

Helena nodded slowly, but time was not something that the Eternal Flame had.

Luc was the keystone for the Resistance. Without him, everything grew quickly volatile. Crowther began leaning more heavily on Kaine, using him to seed misinformation and sabotage, as though the Undying army were a machine to be deconstructed. The envelopes with orders were thicker every time Helena delivered them.

Kaine made no mention of what he did, but she could tell he was on the verge of breaking under the pressure. He grew steadily more desperate each time he saw her.

It ate at Helena, watching him erode under everything he was expected to maintain and produce for both sides while Helena was trapped in Headquarters like a caged animal.

Without foraging, she filled her hours with new research, Shiseo taking the lead as they tried to perfect alchemy suppression upon the Council’s request. The Undying were almost impossible to take and keep captive, but with suppression, it might be possible. She knew from Kaine that nullium interfered with the Undying’s abilities and regeneration the same as any alchemist.