Page 81 of Alchemised

“On occasion I have—special prisoners who require medical attention. Ivy doesn’t always possess the finesse needed. Come, Marino, show me how much effort you’re worth.”

H ELENA DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT the Resistance’s prisoners, but she did know they weren’t supposed to be kept in what amounted to a hole underground.

There were ruins beneath the Tower, tunnels and underground rooms, too elaborate to have been made just for Institute storage.

Most of them had been transformed into cells filled with unfamiliar prisoners.

She also knew that burn injuries were common in the war, but combat pyromancy was a blunt weapon. It left large burns, not wounds targeted precisely at areas of the body with the highest concentrations of nerve endings.

The person would need to be restrained, and the pyromancer very experienced.

Helena lost track of how long she was down in the dark, eyes straining to pick out details from the unsteady sweep of Crowther’s electric torch that gave her only glimpses of filthy bodies and charred flesh. She healed by touch, reaching out and finding bodies in the darkness.

It felt criminal. Relief, but for what? Further atrocity?

She debrided, regenerated the tissue, closed the open sores, healed fractures, and found many hands with every bone meticulously broken.

Which threat was Crowther making by bringing her here?

“I’ll—I can have Ferron healed by next week,” she said in the lift afterwards, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She was cold all over, and the light hurt her eyes. Complicit. Complicit. Complicit. The word rang through her head. “I’ll get it done.”

Crowther said nothing, his thin, spider-like fingers tapping absently along his paralysed forearm.

She pressed on, speaking quickly. “He’s—I think he’s starting to regenerate normally again. The array will be difficult to work with, but I can do it. I think it could be an advantage in the long run. The injury has made him more emotionally vulnerable than he would have been otherwise.”

Crowther’s fingers stilled. “Don’t mistake that for loyalty.”

Dread shivered in her lungs.

“I don’t. I realise that it’s not necessarily leverage yet, but—the array affects him. He mentioned that it’s become harder to dissuade himself from what he wants. I can take advantage of that.”

“You’re deluding yourself.”

Why was he suddenly sceptical when this was the mission he’d given her?

He looked over. “Kaine Ferron remains the youngest of the Undying. In all this time, there has never been another so young.” He was standing near enough in the lift that she could see the metal fillings in his back molars as he spoke.

“He should have been taken advantage of immediately—a boy of immense fortune, not yet a man, fatherless in a war. And yet he has climbed rank. He has no friends, no lovers, not even a particular whore he favours. He is calculating and mercurial and takes risks that anyone else would consider insane.”

“I kno—”

“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d realise the error in your strategy. He is not a person, he’s not human, and you are not creating a relationship of trust with him. He is an animal.”

Helena stared at Crowther in bewilderment. The lift stopped, the doors opened, and she almost tripped stepping out. “But you told me to—”

“I told you to use vivimancy, ” Crowther snarled. “And instead, you offered endless excuses about needing the right opportunities, that it would be too obvious, and now you think the array, this injury, is the solution to your failures.”

“You said to take priority over his original goals. I’m doing that.”

Crowther’s eyebrows dipped into a sharp frown, and he seized her by the elbow and dragged her towards his office, not answering until they were behind closed doors.

“I told you to enthral him with vivimancy.” Crowther’s voice had grown icy.

“What you are doing is making him depend on you, to consider you someone he needs. That is entirely different. Can you turn this array off? Control the intensity of its effect? No, you cannot. I did not ask for something irreversible, I asked for a vivimancy-controlled obsession.”

“Well, that’s not how vivimancy works,” she snapped back. “You can’t just turn human emotions on or off, not in a way that gives you the kind of leverage you’re wanting. It’s not magic.”

He glared at her as he seated himself at his desk.

“I have no use for tools I cannot control. If you manage to succeed in this manner, you’re more likely to destroy the Eternal Flame than save it.

The Ferron family is fuelled by their ambitions.

They have always resented the noble families.

Now Paladia is built with their steel, and they think that means it belongs to them, whether to seize or ruin.

They do not share. They are obsessive about what they regard to be theirs.

You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone. ”

Terror ran through Helena like a knife, but she squared her shoulders, meeting Crowther’s glare, refusing to back down because she had nowhere to go. Her every bridge was burned. He’d seen to that.

“You gave me to him,” she said, her voice full of fury. “Now, and after the war. Those were the terms. You said it was Ferron or lose, and so I chose him. When was he ever expected to let me go?”

She drew a shaky breath. “You said to make myself the mission for him. He is changeable right now, and this may be the only moment in which he ever will be. If you think what I’m doing is too dangerous, then give me a different option, because this is the only way I can give you what you asked for. ”

She could see anger in Crowther’s eyes, but he said nothing.

What had he expected her to do? Had he really believed that vivimancy could create obsession in Ferron without a sense of need? That it was a faucet she could turn on and off? Did no one understand what vivimancy was?

Crowther sat staring at her, and she could almost see the pieces moving as he adjusted his strategy, weighing what to do. When he said nothing for several minutes, she eventually turned to leave.

The corridors of the Tower felt too warm and enclosed in the summer heat. Helena could barely breathe.

She went out onto a skybridge.

Down below, Luc and Lila were sparring against their unit while Soren was calling out critiques of their forms. A small crowd was gathered to watch.

Knowing Ilva, she’d probably told Soren or Lila to do something to preoccupy Luc and keep him from fretting over the West Port Lab.

Combat alchemy could be so beautiful, it was almost hard to remember the violence of its purpose, and the ceaseless ugliness left in its wake.

Helena watched, listening to the cheers below, heart aching.

She’d always thought that she could do anything for her friends. She didn’t need recognition, just the comfort of knowing she’d done what was necessary. Pragmatism had stolen away any lustre of heroism from her, and she kept telling herself it was all right …

But she was so lonely.

Her fingers wrapped around the empty amulet, the points catching on her palm. There was a dull sense of emptiness that never went away now, a slowly growing wound that she couldn’t heal.

She couldn’t fix herself anymore, and no one else seemed inclined to even notice she was breaking.

You are all alone, and when the war is over, you will still be alone.

She blinked as the figures below blurred into halos of gold and silver.

T HAT NIGHT, SHE STUDIED THE array with a renewed sense of urgency. It had become a familiar sight, but when she paused to take it in, it was horrifically stunning. Designing it had required the work of a meticulous alchemist.

Which Ferron had been, prior to becoming an assassin.

She couldn’t imagine designing something so intricate, knowing that every line drawn would be an incision into her own skin.

“I think I can close the wounds soon,” she said.

He was silent for a strangely long time. “Really?”

His voice was so toneless, she couldn’t read his reaction.

“It will be experimental, the procedure,” she said as she applied ointment. “But I’m familiar with how your regeneration works now, and how it intersects with my resonance. There’s only one thing …”

He tensed. She watched the subtle ripple of his back, incisions widening.

“What?”

“The Abeyance. Resonance will be at its lowest ebb. It would make working with the lumithium in the alloy on your shoulders easier, but I’m not sure if completing the array with its effects reduced is safe or not.”

“It shouldn’t matter, but with low ebb, I’ll regenerate slower.”

“That’s fine. Preferable actually.”

She was at the door when he spoke up behind her. “Marino.”

She looked back.

“There’s a rumour Bennet’s experimenting with alchemy suppression.”

“Why?” she asked, hoping he knew something, that she’d be able to take new information back to Crowther, proof of Kaine’s continued usefulness.

Kaine didn’t shrug, but his expression shifted to communicate that he would if he could. “Who knows.”

She stepped away from the door. “You mentioned once that Morrough thinks Paladia is key to the immortality Hevgoss wants. Do you think he could be looking for the Stone of the Heavens?”

He set down the drink he was pouring. “You think the High Necromancer came here to steal a magical orb that doesn’t exist?”

She flushed. The stone was a fairy tale. The belief that Sol’s blessing was a physical object was a misinterpretation of the early artistic renderings of Orion Holdfast. The region had been prescientific and illiterate at the time; the imagery was all that many people knew.

While the historical records had been corrected, the myths had endured. Helena had believed there was a real stone for years until Luc awkwardly corrected her.

“No,” she said quickly. “I know it’s not real. I just thought maybe Morrough heard the stories and came here thinking it was. It’s not like there’s any reason Sol couldn’t have made it a stone.”

Ferron scoffed. “You believe in Sol?”

She shifted, gripping the strap of her satchel. “Yes, well, maybe not exactly the way people here do, but—you don’t? Not—not at all?”

Kaine’s lip curled. “Not at all.”