Page 84 of Alchemised

H ELENA SAT UP BUT DIDN’T MOVE TO leave. She just sat beside him on the sofa, trembling as she fought back tears. She looked over at the clock and a wave of despair washed over her.

“The checkpoints are closed now,” she said. “I can’t get into the city until morning.”

He sighed, sitting back and looking away from her.

She wrapped her arms around herself, pulling her shirt closed, fumbling at the buttons, her chest hitching as she tried not to cry.

“Why are you crying?” he finally asked.

She smeared at her cheeks with her hand. “Because I’m lonely, and kissing you, and you don’t even like me.”

He looked at her and then tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a full minute.

“Why do you think I was kissing you?” he finally asked in a tight voice.

“Because I’m here.”

He looked at her again. “Why’d you kiss me?”

She stared across the room at a tapestry of Tellus, spinning the earth into being.

“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”

The decanter was on the floor, abandoned. Helena snatched it up. There was only a little left. She had a lingering hope that if she finished it, she might reach the point of inebriation beyond feeling.

He watched her drink and then leaned back, slinging an arm over his eyes. When she glanced over, his arm had slipped down, and he was asleep.

She stared at him for a long time, studying his features, trying to pinpoint the changes in his face, but her own eyes were heavy.

She should get up. Move to the chaise over by the desk.

Her vision dimmed. She’d let her eyes rest, just for a moment. Then she’d go …

W HEN SHE WOKE, SHE WAS still on the sofa, and so was Kaine, except somehow they’d ended up tangled together. Her face was crushed against his chest, his elbow prodding her ribs, and his chin was digging into the top of her head.

It was a miracle that neither of them had fallen off the sofa.

Helena didn’t move immediately; her head was on the verge of cracking open. She suspected that any sudden movements would result in a lot of smoky, overly expensive whisky coming back up.

She managed to slip a hand up to her face, using her vivimancy to alleviate some of her nausea before slowly extricating herself.

Kaine didn’t even twitch. He was insensate. He probably hadn’t slept properly since spring.

She gripped her satchel and went to the heavy door, prying it slowly open, and fled without looking back.

She threw up over the dam, and again crossing the bridge, retching into the river. Rather than feel better, she felt worse.

She made her way slowly back towards Headquarters, wanting to kick herself. She’d kissed Kaine Ferron. Not a fake, strategic kiss but a real one, and he’d returned it, and it would have been the perfect opportunity to take the next step, but she’d blown it.

Kaine had handed himself to her on a platter, gone above and beyond what Crowther and Ilva had ever hoped, and Helena had sabotaged herself because it wasn’t real and she’d wished it was.

She’d let herself become wrapped up in her feelings at being compared to a rose and called lovely, at having aspects of herself that no one had ever liked treated as a source of desire.

Apparently that was all it took for Ferron to seduce her.

Just thinking about it left her cold, a pit of nauseous shame threatening to choke her.

“Hel.” Soren’s voice broke into her thoughts as she came through the gatehouse into Headquarters. He was sitting with a group of the guards.

She stared at him, dazed by her own thoughts, too hungover to speak.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “What happened to your hair?”

She didn’t understand the question until she reached up and remembered it was loose, tangling around her shoulders.

“Brambles,” she lied promptly.

His eyebrows knit together, studying her with his deep-set eyes. “You should be careful out there, especially during the Abeyance.”

“I only went out after light,” she said, trying to slip past. “Just a bit of harvesting. I need to process it.”

Soren was still watching her. “You know, I forgot your hair looked like that. It’s pretty, the way you braid it now.”

“Yes,” she said, forcing a smile, her eyes burning. “It’s best when I keep it braided. I hardly know what to do with myself when it’s like this.”

She went straight to her room and into the shower, scrubbing herself violently, trying to erase the physical memory of Kaine’s hands. The water was hot, and she turned it up until it was scalding on her skin, standing under the spray until she was raw from the heat.

She wasn’t crying. It was just the spray of the shower. It was just water on her face.

She barely towelled off before quickly pulling her hair into two braids so taut they tugged at her face. She coiled them at the nape of her neck, letting the pins scrape across her skin as she lodged them into place.

She didn’t let herself look in the mirror until she was done, until there was not a stray curl to be seen.

S HE WAS RESTOCKING THE HOSPITAL inventory when one of the orderlies materialised beside her, placing several bottles of plasma expanders in a box.

“Crowther wants you to meet him at the lifts, right away,” the girl said without looking at Helena.

Helena turned sharply. The girl was soft-featured with soulful eyes, and Helena was certain she’d seen her before, but the girl was unobtrusive enough that she only flickered on the edge of Helena’s memory.

Of course Crowther would have eyes everywhere, including the hospital. Still, it set Helena on edge.

“Who are you?” Helena said as the girl seemed about to slip away.

“No one.”

“What’s your name?” Helena wanted to know who to look out for on the roster.

The girl glanced up, seeming flattered at the question. “Purnell.”

Purnell. She felt she’d heard the name before. She nodded absently. “All right, you can go.”

The orderly hurried off.

Helena finished restocking and headed reluctantly towards the Tower.

Crowther was waiting for her. The lift went down.

In the tunnels, there was a young boy crouched beside the door. Helena blinked and realised it was Ivy, Crowther’s other vivimancer, her hair tucked up under a cap. She looked like a street urchin.

Ivy stood up and threw open the door. The room contained a single figure restrained in a chair, head slumped forward, breathing shallowly.

“Who is this?” Helena asked, wanting to bolt. The smell of old blood and dampness underground made her sick.

“One of the Aspirants sent to Hevgoss,” Crowther said. “Intercepted and brought back, but he’s proving difficult. He’s quite desperate for a taste of eternal life. He’s requiring more persuasion than he can currently survive.”

Helena expected severe burns but found vivimancy instead.

There were no visible signs of torture. No cuts or any external wounds. Instead the corticospinal tract in his spine had been pinched, paralysing him but leaving his sensory nerves intact.

That way, he would feel everything.

Beneath his skin, Ivy had flayed him, using vivimancy to sever the individual layers of skin. Blood had pooled between each one. In some areas, he was flensed down to the muscle.

It was one thing to heal people injured in battle, but healing torture was a different kind of horror.

Crowther did not seem to think that any physical violation went too far in the war against necromancy, so long as the soul was not violated.

Based on the tenets of the Faith and the Eternal Flame, there was nothing wrong with the torture of necromancers or aspiring necromancers; flesh was an inferior substance to eventually be consumed by fire anyway.

What these people were willing to do to civilians and the Resistance was far worse than anything Crowther did to them.

The prisoner regained consciousness while she was working on his feet.

“I know you,” he said, raising his head. His Northern dialect was thick, the kind that pulled hard on the consonants.

She glanced up. He had wheat-coloured hair and thick stubble across his face.

“You’re Holdfast’s little foreign bitch.”

She looked away again, ignoring him, determined to finish without speaking. She felt marginally less sorry for him now.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” he muttered while she was finishing his hands. “You’re going to lose this war. No one can stop the Undying. They’re the new gods. Someday I’m going to be one of them. People are going to know the Lancasters.”

She looked up again. Now she remembered him; he’d been at the Institute and left after receiving his certification. A guild family. Nickel, she thought it was.

“Once I’m Undying, I’m going to kill that little bitch so slowly she’ll beg me for it. Everything she does to me, she’ll get it tenfold. And then I’m going to bring her back.” His teeth bared gruesomely.

Helena’s jaw tensed, and she fought to stay focused. She was supposed to leave patients conscious. Crowther didn’t want them waking and finding themselves healed, he wanted them dreading, thinking about what would happen to them once she was done.

Once she finished, she stood and left without a word.

Ivy and Crowther reentered the room together, the door shutting. Screaming began vibrating through the door, echoing down the underground corridor.

Helena walked farther, trying to escape it, but it followed her.

She wandered blindly through the tunnels, not caring if she became lost amid them.

They turned and twisted, opening into a large room lit by green glass sconces.

There were dozens of tunnels leading into it.

The walls were covered with intricate but faded murals.

It looked almost like an abandoned church.

She’d had no idea any of it existed, buried beneath the Institute. The screaming seemed to carry along all the tunnels, magnifying and concentrating in the room. The place had a sick, eerie feeling about it.