Page 62 of Alchemised

W HEN H ELENA TOLD C ROWTHER WHAT F ERRON WAS capable of, he had her removed from all the Eternal Flame’s meetings and cut off from any information regarding Luc’s whereabouts.

Everyone assumed it was due to her mysterious “breakdown” which was being whispered about. This was convenient for Crowther but rendered Helena even more of a pariah than usual.

She was relieved when Ferron calmly invited her in the next time rather than accosting her before she’d made it through the door.

The tenement was depressingly drab. Clearly there hadn’t been much concern about the workers living in comfort back when the factories had been running.

“Ready?” he asked, stepping towards her and slipping a black leather glove off.

Helena clenched her own bare hands, feeling the texture of the scar across her palm as she nodded.

He didn’t paralyse her this time. He simply pressed his palm against her forehead. She couldn’t hold back her gasp.

Her eyes rolled back so violently, she could feel the strain down her optic nerves.

Despite knowing what was coming, her mind baulked, panicking, instantly swerving her focus onto things she didn’t want to focus on.

Crowther’s office. His shadowed face.

She forced her attention away.

Luc.

Crowther had cleared her to use the last Eternal Flame meeting she’d attended as a distraction.

They’d been discussing the new method for taking out the liches and Undying, and what they should do with the talismans they’d retrieved. Luc’s unit had brought several back.

The resonance through her mind abruptly stopped, and she stood swaying, trying to force her eyes back into focus, her thoughts swirling.

“Better than I expected,” she dimly heard Ferron saying. “Unfortunately, it won’t only happen once.”

His resonance sliced through her again.

It was worse the second time, like having a wound reopened, ripped larger. It was harder to think.

When Ferron finally let go, Helena felt as though her skull were about to split in two.

Her eyes were welling up with tears, and she bit down savagely on her lip, her chest stuttering as she fought to breathe.

The room swam, threatening to disappear. She swayed, feeling blindly for the wall.

“Drink this.” A vial of something was shoved into her hand. “Otherwise you may black out.”

She placed it in her mouth, doubting that Ferron would poison her, but if he did, she wasn’t sure she’d mind. Her skull throbbed as though there were a drum inside it.

Mouth-numbingly bitter pain relief washed across her tongue. She nearly spat it back into the vial as she realised that he’d given her laudanum for a headache. Did he have any idea how limited opium supplies were in the North?

But it was already in her mouth, so she swallowed.

When she reopened her eyes, the room had a soft luminous quality. She blinked at the way it softened the edges of everything, including Ferron.

“Did this happen to you?” she asked, her tongue sluggish. He was Undying; she didn’t know if they got headaches. Or even slept.

“More than once,” he said. “My training was rigorous.”

She nodded. It was strange how untouched by the war he looked. Yet when she forced herself to look past his appearance, there was an eerie, dangerous stillness about him.

“Why?” she asked.

He stared down his nose at her, eyes growing hard. “To see if I’d be better than my father, or if I’d break under interrogation, too.”

She had never thought about what had been done to Atreus Ferron after his arrest. Everyone knew that he’d confessed; she’d always assumed it had been voluntary.

“Was that—before you killed Principate Apollo?”

Ferron stared at her, his mouth twisting. “Are you wanting a confession? Shall I tell you everything I’ve done?”

She stared into his mocking eyes. “Do you want to?”

There was a flash of surprise that softened his features for an instant. He was lonely.

She’d suspected that he might be. Ever since Crowther had told her about the circumstances of his parents’ marriage, she’d re-evaluated her vague memories of Ferron at the Institute.

She couldn’t remember him having friends.

He’d associated with the other guild students, but he hadn’t spent much time with any particular individuals.

If he had, they would have been inundated with questions and accusations after the murder.

The students in their year had all said things like, “I roomed with him last year, but he barely talked,” and “We were partners in alloy fusion, but he always did assignments alone.”

If he’d been raised on ancestral ambition and little else, always being watched for signs of weakness or vivimancy, he’d probably never had anyone he could risk trusting. Now in war, the stakes had only grown.

He lived among immortal men all consumed by their own desire for power and vengeance. He couldn’t possibly risk trusting anyone.

“Why would I want to tell you anything?” he asked viciously, stepping away from her.

She didn’t press the issue. She didn’t need to know.

She only needed him to realise he wanted to tell someone—

—that he wanted to tell her.

That would make her emotionally valuable to him. It would make her interesting enough that he’d begin to let his guard down.

“Did you want to go again?” she asked after a moment, hoping to impress him.

Instead, he stood. “They used to torture me while Bennet did it. Called it practice—in case I got caught.” His mouth twisted into a sneer. “But it was an excuse. He enjoys it, how it feels to be inside a mind when it’s screaming. If you’re ever caught, that’s what he’ll do to you.”

He didn’t wait for her to respond, just tossed an envelope too quick for her to catch, walking out before it hit the floor.

H ELENA WAS ON SHIFT IN the casualty ward when Ilva Holdfast and Falcon Matias appeared with four girls trailing behind them.

“Healer Marino, we’ve realised that you’re under undue strain as our only healer,” Ilva said with a completely unreadable expression while Matias was droning on about sacred duty, pronouncing an invocation, and draping sunstone amulets around the necks of the four girls.

“Falcon Matias was divinely led to these four. He has interviewed them extensively to verify the sincerity of their faith and the pure intention of their souls. It will be your sacred duty to guide them as they learn to provide Sol’s intercession. ”

There was a pause; Helena didn’t know what to say. When the silence grew painful, she forced herself to nod mutely. Crowther had said there were others who could replace her as healer. She hadn’t expected four.

Matias had always overruled the idea of new healers. It seemed Helena’s outburst had convinced him that any quantity of healers would be better than Helena.

Although the girls were her trainees, Helena was not expected to do all the teaching.

Matron Pace was also assigned to provide the newcomers with basic medical training.

Helena refrained from pointing out that this process would create the very same hybrid of medicine and healing that Matias had always objected to Helena openly utilising.

Matron Pace was already reviewing the hospital security protocols with the trainees, stressing that every patient brought in had to be checked for reanimation before they could be treated.

It could be difficult to determine in victims that had died recently, but every single one had to be vetted twice, once by the guards upon intake and then by a medic or nurse.

Any patients not double-marked with clearance had to be approached with extreme caution; they could be a necrothrall or, even more insidiously, a lich.

Helena tuned out the lecture, resisting the urge to touch the scar on the side of her throat. She’d heard the warning repeated so many times she’d lost count, but every time she did, she wanted to plunge her face into a bucket of ice water and scream.

She knew she should be glad that there’d be more healers, but instead a knot formed in her stomach as she studied each girl.

These were her replacements, because her job as healer was now secondary to her function and purpose as Ferron’s possession.

The knowledge sat like a live coal inside her.

One of the trainees stepped forward, extending her hand, then catching sight of Helena’s gloved hand, she bobbed in an awkward curtsy instead.

“You’re Marino, I know. This is Marta Rumly, Claire Reibeck, and Anne Stoffle. I’m Elain Boyle.”

I N LESS THAN A WEEK, Helena was tired of all her trainees. They did not adapt to their new posts once they began to realise that healing was not an illustrious rank.

Claire and Anne both would barely even try to form a resonance channel. Marta didn’t like getting her hands dirty. Elain Boyle was eager to learn but kept trying to heal dead patients.

They were all prone to thinking that just because they could “feel” how to do something that it would naturally be right, and when cor rected, rather than seek answers, they acted like baby birds, waiting passively, heads gaping, expecting her to hurry over and stuff the relevant knowledge inside.

Being proactive or looking for answers themselves never seemed to occur to them, always waiting to be told what to learn or do.

She couldn’t stop thinking resentfully about them when she returned to the Outpost. Ferron seemed to notice her distraction; he caught her chin, tilting her head back so that their eyes met.

She was keyed up in anticipation for his mental invasion, but instead she felt his resonance, a sensation as insubstantial as spider silk, flicker through her nerves. What was he—

His palm was pressed against her forehead, and she scarcely had time to refocus before her mind was split open and it was all she could do to keep her thoughts of the trainees away from him, trying to keep her focus on the repetitive parts of her life that he found unremarkable.

For all he knew, she spent her days performing inventory, reviewing medical forms, and washing her hands.

When it was finally over, he studied her with an expression she couldn’t place. Rather than step away, he moved closer.

She went stiff, forcing herself to look up at his face so that she wouldn’t focus on the physicality of him. His bare fingers touched her chin lightly, tilting her head back so that her throat was bared.

She felt his resonance again.

Was he testing her, trying to see if she could feel it?

“Remind me, what was your repertoire?” he asked softly.

“Broad,” she said, knowing not to lie—the Guild Assembly might have access to her immigration records. “That’s why the Institute accepted me. There were a few rare compounds that I couldn’t pass with, but for the most part, my resonance is broad-spectrum.”

He tilted his head to one side, still unnervingly close. “What were you going for?”

“I hadn’t decided.”

He gripped her chin. “You were two years into your undergraduate studies. How had you not decided?”

“Luc wanted to travel, and he wanted me to go with him. I thought I could choose afterwards.”

His hand dropped away, resonance vanishing.

“Of course. You must have thought you were so special, being Holdfast’s little pet.” He cast her a sidelong look as he withdrew an envelope and held it out. “Look at you now.”

The scars on her palm itched as she took it.

The envelope bore the same name as always. “Who’s Aurelia Ingram?”

He gave a dismissive shake of his head. “No one.” Then he laughed. “Someone my father contracted me to marry when I was—nine. The guild’s pushing for it. They’re worried about what will happen should I be prematurely consumed by fire.”

“But you’re—” She hesitated, finding the word bizarre to use in conversation. “—immortal.”

“In a way.” He rolled his eyes. “But I could still lose my body at some point. They’d like me to have an heir just in case.

My betrothed has recently come of age, but I visited her once, and I have no intention of ever doing so again.

I keep meaning to write her letters, but somehow,” he shook his head, “they all go astray.”