Page 313 of Alchemised

Her eyes slid shut.

WHEN SHE TRIED TO OPEN her eyes again, they were heavy, as if her lashes had tangled. When she tried to move—her body wouldn’t.

She tore her eyes open. There was glaring light, and everything was blurred until she found a vague dark shape near her. She recoiled, then squinted.

Kaine was standing beside her, pale and wide-eyed, his face impossibly haggard.

“You …”

The word emerged cracked and croaking. Her tongue was thick and dry, as if she hadn’t touched water in days. She couldn’t feel anything below her neck.

She tried to look down but couldn’t move.

She was paralysed.

Her eyes crossed as she tried to look down her body. All she could make out was an intravenous drip in her arm. When she squinted, she could see saline and other things in upended glass vials all running down into the tube.

“What?” she asked. The words crackled in her throat and slurred across her tongue. “What’d you do …?”

“What did I do?” Kaine repeated slowly. “I saved your life.”

He was breathing unsteadily. “Crowther, with his endless demands, has the High Necromancer taking a myriad of precautionary measures. Only three people knew about that bombing before it happened. And I wasn’t one of them. When I got word, I thought I was being paranoid sending my thralls in. Surely, they’d understand that I can’t stop every fucking thing. This was for my peace of mind, I told myself. To see the fallout, so I’d know how bad things were. You wouldn’t be there, of course. I told myself you wouldn’t be there, you’d be safe in Headquarters, because that is the damned deal. Isn’t that what you promised? That they wouldn’t punish you? I knew—I told you this would happen—”

His voice broke.

“Wasn’t … Crowth—” Speaking moistened her tongue at least, but she was dying for water. Her mind was still foggy. She couldn’t understand how she was there.

“Don’t defend them!” Kaine looked feral with rage. “Do you have any idea how close you came to dying? It took an entire medical team to keep you alive. Why would they leave you alone in that fucking hospital if they weren’t trying to kill you?”

“Were … evacuating,” she said slowly, pacing her words, her tongue gradually complying.

“Alone?”

“I was—in charge.” She felt eerily lucid. “Soldiers—didn’t deserve to die alone.”

She tried to get up. She felt as if she’d be able to think more clearly if she could just sit up for a minute and figure out what had happened to her.

“Well, I didn’t see anyone there while you were dying.”

She wasn’t sure why she was trying to reason with him, but she wanted him to calm down so that she could reorient herself.

“It’s a war, Kaine. People die. Given your personal death toll, you should know that better than anyone else. You know that I’m not going to prioritise my survival over everyone else’s.”

He stared at her for a long terrible moment, the rage stark on his face. “Well, you should.” He was suddenly ice-cold, and his eyes gleamed so silver that they were almost white. “Because I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the entire Order of the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them. Given that the risk to their lives is the only way to make you value your own.”

Helena stared at him, dumb with shock that slowly twisted into rage.

“How dare you? How—dare you!” Her voice rose so high, it cracked.

If she could have moved, she would have thrown herself at him and tried to beat him to death with her bare hands. She wanted to scream at him.

But beyond her fury was an even greater sense of horror at what this meant. He’d become the very threat that Crowther had feared. Once he would have been loyal to them for the sake of avenging his mother, but Helena had usurped that, given him a new and uncontrollable source of obsessiveness and rage.

She closed her eyes, unable to look at him, and the ouroboros flashed through her mind, that image of endless self-annihilation. A dragon forever consuming itself.

She gave a rasping sob that rattled her lungs violently, and as she fought to breathe, the room went still.

The surface beneath her shifted. Fingers tucked a stray curl behind her ear before brushing across her cheek.