Page 86 of Alchemised

H ELENA RETURNED TO THE O UTPOST THAT EVENING, but found the door in the factory wall locked, the necrothrall that usually appeared with the key nowhere in sight.

She went to the tenement, but the unit was cold and empty, too. She lingered for a little while, just to be sure.

The next evening was the same.

She told herself it was a good sign. The healing was a success. Still, it felt abrupt to suddenly have her evenings again.

Helena hadn’t realised how much time she’d spent making salves and journeying back and forth until all those hours were at her disposal once more.

On Martiday, she went foraging and then headed towards the tenements.

She wasn’t even halfway there when a necrothrall stepped out of the shadows, intercepting her. Helena’s stomach clenched. It wasn’t the normal man, but a woman. She showed an iron symbol on her pallid inner wrist and then held out an envelope.

Helena took it, and the necrothrall turned and walked away.

Helena didn’t usually open the missives, but this time she broke the seal and pulled out the contents, looking for instructions or a message.

It was just an encoded intelligence report.

On Saturnis it happened again.

She hadn’t considered that Kaine could do that, but there was nothing about the way his information was passed on that required the in-person meetings.

She spent her newfound free time in the laboratory experimenting with Shiseo, who had become a collegial companion and collaborator.

Because healing was considered separate from medicine and medical care, the two did not always complement each other.

Many sedatives inhibited vivimancy, requiring countering or workarounds in ways that made the healing process unnecessarily complicated.

Healing Kaine, far from Matias’s purview, had allowed her to begin considering the possibilities of chymiatria designed for vivimancy.

She began with tonics to support things like blood regeneration and bone repair, but her primary interest was developing something that would maintain vivimancy’s effects by controlling the body’s inner chymistry.

She and Shiseo synthesised a glycoside from foxglove and extracted alkaloids from nightshade, working piece by piece.

Creating a niche for herself was a consolation because Elain Boyle was becoming widely preferred as a healer.

Helena tried to tell herself it was a good thing to have a healer so naturally likeable.

No one ever jumped or even batted an eye when Elain forgot her gloves, but Elain’s social strengths also undermined her as a healer.

She was too much of a people pleaser, and it affected her methods.

She had a relentless tendency towards prioritising her intuition over her training and healing symptoms rather than causes.

A necessary fever never ran its course when Elain was on shift. People felt better but developed infections more often and recovered slower.

In late Augustus, Basilius Blackthorne tried to retake the southern tip of the East Island.

Blackthorne was one of the Undying that everyone feared.

He didn’t wear a helmet as most of the Undying did, making no effort to hide his identity.

Whether he won or lost his battles, the devastation he left behind was terrible.

He was known for eating his victims on the battlefield.

After days of fighting, when it was clear the attack was a failure, Blackthorne set his own army on fire and sent them as far into Resistance territory as they could get.

The rainy season hadn’t begun; everything was unusually dry.

The flames spread fast, jumping across the tributary between the East and West islands and consuming a large swath of the city.

The sky to the south glowed red as an ember.

The hospital was flooded with burn injuries and lung damage, combatants and civilians alike.

The healers were on duty in the hospital for so long, Helena lost track of the days. She didn’t realise how tired she’d become until she was in the war room, listening to reports, and Ilva made a comment that they were unlikely to have an estimate on enemy losses for another day.

She’d already missed more than a week. She had to go.

When she got up the next morning, the room tilted. Lila was sound asleep, a lump under the blankets on her bed. The battalion had returned black with smoke. Luc had kept the fire from advancing on Headquarters, but even his pyromancy had limits against an inferno.

Helena’s head was hollow, throbbing from exhaustion as she dressed and headed out.

Everything was eerily quiet, as if even the birds were afraid to sing. The smoke hung like a shroud over the city.

Even the Outpost was quiet, but Helena paid no attention, just looking for the necrothrall so she could get Kaine’s missive and head back.

She came around a corner and found four of them. She was so tired, she stopped and stood staring stupidly for several moments, trying to understand why Kaine would send four.

Then it dawned on her that they were not his. These were ordinary combat necrothralls.

She immediately began backtracking, noticing only then that the encampments that covered the Outpost were torn apart. The Undying had retaken the Outpost, and she had walked straight into it.

She turned and fled, only to run into another group of necrothralls.

She had to retreat again, winding through the maze of buildings and factories. She tripped over a body, not reanimated.

Every time she escaped one group, she stumbled across another.

Necrothralls didn’t generally move fast, but they didn’t need to. They were herding her away from the gate, from the bridge, from the only way off the Outpost.

She ripped her gloves off as she was cornered in a tight alley and backed away until she hit the wall. It was narrow enough that they could only enter a few at a time.

They shuffled forward.

A few carried weapons. It was hard to say what was worse.

When they got in range, she shoved her hands towards them, forcing her resonance outwards, closing her eyes instinctively.

Her resonance flared for a moment and then burned out like a lightbulb filament.

She opened her eyes, barely seeing the remaining necrothralls approaching because of how raw and wounded she felt inside, as if she’d ripped out a vein.

Burnout was common for defence alchemists, who frequently strained the limits of their range and abilities. It also happened to healers. Once it started happening a lot—

She forced herself to focus.

There was blood everywhere, but two of the necrothralls were still coming towards her.

She fumbled for her knife, lost in the bottom of her satchel, barely managing to grasp it in time.

She aimed for the nearest necrothrall’s throat. Straight through to the spinal cord. With her resonance burned out, she couldn’t transmute the blade, but she twisted it and jerked left. The head toppled off with a grotesque squelch, body following as fiery, white-hot pain exploded up her leg.

When she’d lunged towards one, the other necrothrall had tried to stab at her with a metal spike.

It had missed her torso and gone through her calf.

Helena nearly collapsed, slashing clumsily. She barely managed to sever enough fingers that it couldn’t jerk the spike back out.

Her brain clamoured to pull out the spike, as her calf muscles tore around it, but she knew she’d bleed out if she did. The rough metal shifted, and she bit through the sleeve of her shirt to keep from screaming.

The necrothrall was still coming. Most of the fingers on one hand were gone, but it could still bludgeon her, and she knew the most dangerous part of necrothralls was often their teeth.

She gripped the knife tighter, forced to wait until it reached for her. As soon as it was in range, she grabbed its outstretched hand, her absent resonance like a hole inside her. Teeth swung towards her face, and she shoved her knife straight through the V of the jaw.

Something slammed into the side of her head, sending her stumbling.

The arm was wrenched free of her grasp. Broken fingernails clawed at her skin.

There was thick old blood in her eyes.

She lurched forward. Her left leg failed, but it gave her enough momentum to drive the knife through the top of the skull. Purple blood spurted across her face as the necrothrall collapsed.

Helena stood dazed and gasping for breath, scrubbing at her face. The blood was all she could smell.

She tried to make out where she was using the towers of the city to orient herself. The bridge was on the far side from her, but the tenement was nearby.

She’d hide there first, and then make a plan. She leaned against the wall, trying to keep from putting weight on her left leg. Even dragging it was agony.

She reached the tenement building and crawled up the steps, but it was only as she reached the landing that she remembered that door had a resonance lock. She couldn’t get inside.

She crawled over and pressed her hand against it anyway, as if her resonance were a well and there were some final drops she could plumb, even though she knew burnout often took days to come back from.

She sat back, cursing herself for being so accustomed to the routine to be this careless. Her head was swimming, although she didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or blood loss.

She found the cleanest spot in the corridor and forced herself to look at her leg. Blood had coated her calf and foot, leaving an obvious trail. Fortunately, necrothralls weren’t generally aware enough to notice anything that didn’t move.

Her vision blurred, the pain seeming to crush her ability to think down into a funnel.

No artery, she didn’t think. She debated pulling out the spike, but she didn’t have enough supplies to pack a wound that large.

If she could reach the checkpoint, they’d get her to Headquarters, but no one was going to come looking for her on the Outpost.

She fumbled through her satchel.