Page 354 of Alchemised

Her head dropped down, and she quickly brushed her fingertips across her cheeks. She cleared her voice and shook her head. “Never mind. I imagine he knows.”

CHAPTER 65

Augustus 1787

HELENA HAD RARELY VISITED THE WEST ISLAND even before the war, but she knew she needed to head south, and down to the lower levels of the island, to reach its small port.

It was dark and quiet; in the plaza, one might not even realise there was a war. The lifts would require fare and identification, assuming that they were even operational, but there were always stairways, some large and others designed for maintenance and service workers. They would be the most efficient. When she came across gates, the locks were usually simple enough for basic transmutational lock picking.

She was almost to the lowest levels before she saw anyone. She reached a gate, and just as she got it unlocked, two people came around the turn of the stairs, heading up. Helena tried to tuck herself against the wall and let them pass without drawing attention to herself, but when she risked a glance up, she gave a gasp of surprise.

It was Crowther. He met her eyes dully, no expression on his face, but he stopped in his tracks as the person beside him turned and looked at Helena.

Ivy gave a small smile. “You got out, too. I hoped you would.”

Helena stared at her in horror, looking again at Crowther, blank-faced and empty-eyed. He was dead.

“What did you do?” Helena’s voice shook.

The smile on Ivy’s face vanished. “The Necromancer has Sofia. He said he’d give her back to me if I gave him the Headquarters and Crowther. They wanted him alive, but they said it was all right if I had to kill him. So I did.”

Because Crowther was believed to be the one making the obsidian. Helena’s head swam.

“You’re the one who gave them all the information?” she said. “Who let them into Headquarters?”

It wasn’t Cetus. Here stood the real traitor.

“I had to,” Ivy said. “It’s the only way to get Sofia back.”

“Ivy, your sister’s dead.”

“No!” Ivy shook her head. “She’s alive. I’ve seen her, she knows me when I visit her. He’ll give her back to me when I bring him Crowther.”

“How could you?” was all Helena could say. “All those people—”

“They would have all died anyway,” Ivy said with a callous toss of her head. “This way, it was quick. I made sure the plan had them all die quick.” She shook her head. “I’m not a traitor. They were going to die no matter what.”

Ivy turned and continued, Crowther’s corpse behind her.

THE WEST PORT LAB WAS a huge, windowless building, originally built as an industrial shipping warehouse. Kaine had given the Eternal Flame an interior blueprint for the lab earlier that year, but there had never been any context to use the information.

There were only small pipes for airflow throughout the building, intended to ward off external pyromancy attacks. The ventilation was poor. Which was exactly what Helena needed.

There were a few smaller buildings scattered around it, and she eyed them warily as she passed.

As she stood studying the warehouse, a necrothrall approached her; her casual presence was enough to merit investigation, but a solitary, unarmed figure wasn’t cause for alarm. As it neared, Helena pressed her hand against her neck, clearing her head again, and then reached out and pulled the energy out of the necrothrall, as easily as plucking a piece of lint off a jacket.

The corpse sagged against her, the smell of rot closing in. She shoved her own resonance through the dead body, reanimating it again.

It wasn’t a very good corpse. It was in the early stages of bloat, the tissue and ligaments all damaged.

She was careful to use only a little energy.

Her new necrothrall turned and held the next necrothrall in place while she repeated the process until there were more than twenty greys gathered around her.

Her focus blurred as the edge of her consciousness fragmented into all the different shadowed minds, but it was only the edges this time; her mind remained her own.

“Find the openings,” she told them as she began activating and distributing her bombs.