Page 88 of Alchemised

D ESPITE THE O UTPOST BEING RETAKEN, H ELENA RETURNED the following week.

Even with necrothralls patrolling, there was no better place to meet.

Anywhere else in the city would have checkpoints maintained with living guards with long-term memories who’d inspect her papers every time she passed through.

Helena was too memorably foreign looking to safely move in and out of enemy territory.

The Outpost, although Undying territory, was only being minimally patrolled by the necrothralls, something Helena would have known if she hadn’t been half asleep during the meeting.

Her leg still ached when she walked on it, a side effect of not being able to heal herself for the several days it took for her resonance to return. Regenerated muscle took time to fully reintegrate, but the injury wasn’t anything permanent.

She navigated the Outpost cautiously, her knife gripped tightly in her hand, but she only saw a few necrothralls at a distance. No solitary necrothralls approached her with missives. She wondered if Kaine had gotten the memo about still using the Outpost.

She was about to leave when her ring burned. She headed for the tenement.

He was seated at the table, waiting, when she arrived. She’d grown so used to seeing him always straddling chairs, it was surprising to see him seated on one properly.

His eyes swept from head to toe, as if expecting her to be bleeding from somewhere again.

“I think it’s time I trained you,” he said as the door shut behind her.

She said nothing. She felt too many emotions to even begin to make sense of them all.

So he was back, no explanation for his month-long disappearance, while she’d been left to endure being written off as a failure and castigated for wasting critical resources on a gamble that had failed to pay off.

Crowther had been scathing, because although the missives had still arrived every four days, Kaine passed on only the information he chose to. They could not ask for anything. Everything they received was at his discretion, for only as long as he chose to provide it.

Relying on Kaine Ferron was like walking on black ice, knowing that at any moment it might break beneath their feet.

Her fingers curled into a fist, feeling the punctures in her palm, not trusting herself to speak.

He tilted his head back. His dark hair was threaded through with silver so that it almost gleamed. “How long have you been healing?”

She paused, calculating. “Little more than five years now.”

There was an almost charring intensity in the way he was looking at her. “I assume you’re aware of the Toll.”

She nodded.

“Have you burned out like that before?”

She shook her head. “No, it was the first time.” Her fingers bumped absently against her chest where the empty amulet hung beneath her clothes. “I used to—handle it better.”

“Well, that’s something at least.” He stood up. “How was it explained to you? I assume that Falcon or the Holdfasts told you about it.”

She looked away, staring out the window.

“Vivimancy is a corruption of resonance that can use vitality as well as the energy of resonance. It’s caused when an unviable soul sustains itself by stealing life from an other.

Souls like that can only be purified through a life of self-sacrifice.

The toll is—penance. It’s giving up what was stolen. ”

His mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. “Right. You mentioned that your mother died when you were young.”

She nodded wordlessly, cold all over. She’d still been in shock from her father’s death when Ilva had her sent away to Matias, a Shrike at the time.

He had been the one to tell her that she was the reason both her parents were dead.

Her mother’s mysterious sickness, diagnosed as a kind of consumption, was the Toll.

Not because her mother had been a vivimancer, but because from the moment of conception, Helena’s defective, corrupt self had leached her mother of life from within her womb, stealing all but those seven years away.

That vivimancers were parasites by nature, and they would rot and burn in the bowels of the earth for an eternity if they did not repent and purify themselves by giving up every drop of the vitality they’d taken.

Just thinking about it made Helena’s head throb. All the years she’d spent hovering over her mother, watching her father attempt cure after cure, running them into debt buying expensive ingredients, and it was Helena who’d been the cause.

“So …” Ferron said slowly, moving idly towards her, “you use your vitality to save—anyone you’re told to save, as penance?”

She wished he’d stop talking.

“I want to show you something.” He was in front of her. “Give me your hand.”

She extended her left hand reluctantly.

He took it and she had barely time to brace herself before his resonance shot down her arm into her chest, and she felt a hard yank.

It was like being wrenched forward on a cellular level. Her whole body lurched as if his resonance were hooked inside her, trying to rip her soul out, but before it could budge, a rebound of energy severed it, and Ferron’s resonance slammed back into him with bone-charring speed.

She felt it scorch his fingers as he let go. She almost fell backwards.

“What’d you do—” Her tongue scarcely worked. She doubled over and nearly threw up.

He flexed his hand as if burned. “I just tried to take your vitality by force. Notice anything?”

Helena’s hand pressed against her chest, trying to erase that awful pulling sensation that seemed diffused through her entire body. “It—hurt?”

“It didn’t work,” he said. “It’s not possible to take it by force like that. If it was that easy—” He scoffed. “—Morrough wouldn’t be bothering with most of this. Try it yourself now.”

Helena drew away from his proffered hand. “No, thank you. I get the idea.”

His expression hardened. “I don’t need you to get it, I need you to believe it. You’re being driven by the guilt over crimes you never committed, that you think you deserve to suffer for, and that’s making you a liability for me.”

Of course this was all self-interest on his part. As usual.

“Take my hand,” he said.

She grasped his hand limply.

“You know what your vitality feels like when you use it; feel for mine.”

She shot him a look. “You’re not exactly normal.”

She focused on reaching with her resonance, not merely trying to get a read on his physiology but searching for the actual spark of life within him. Except it was not so much a spark as a small sun.

It was like being flung bodily into the face of Lumithia at full Ascendance, a cold searing burn that etched itself into her teeth and bones.

She tried to ignore it. Pull. She had no idea how to do that. Healing, when it required the use of vitality, worked in the opposite direction, pushing in, giving, but she knew what it felt like when Ferron did it, so she tried to imitate the feeling.

She reached with her resonance towards the overwhelming burn and tried to tug at it. It prompted an instant recoil.

Her resonance rebounded like a rubber band snapping her fingertips. An odd look of amusement flickered on Kaine’s face as she let go.

She swallowed, blinking hard. “But if that’s—if that’s true, then why did my mother die? If I didn’t take it?”

He exhaled. “My father sought treatment for my mother prior to my birth. A vivimancer they employed believed she likely possessed a latent degree of vivimancy, and didn’t realise that using her vitality wasn’t necessary.” He wasn’t looking at her. “Perhaps it was similar for yours.”

Hearing those words, Helena felt like an immense weight had been partly lifted from her.

It was possible that her mother’s death, while still her fault, had at least not been her doing.

She drew a shaky breath, not sure if she could believe it.

Why would Kaine tell her this? Why would he care about her guilt?

“Vitality is a strange thing,” he said, stepping away.

“It doesn’t take much to do things like necromancy or healing.

If it did, necromancers would hardly be a threat, and you would’ve been dead in a week as a healer.

Here’s what’s interesting, though: If I were a necrothrall, you could have ripped out my vitality.

Reanimation doesn’t fully bond with other bodies, it just reactivates a corpse.

Bennet would give almost anything to be able to transfer souls between living bodies, but it always kills them instead.

” He arched an eyebrow. “Do you see where I’m going with this? ”

“No.”

He waved a hand, and despite being halfway across the room, the lock turned and the door opened. Helena was horrified as a necrothrall entered the unit.

“Ferron!” she said sharply, backing away, but she ran into something solid. He’d moved behind her, and when she tried to escape the approaching necrothrall, he gripped her by the shoulders, trapping her in place.

She tried to kick him, her heart racing. “Let go! Let go of me.”

“You’re not going to blast it apart, and you’re not going to attack. When it reaches you, you’re going to take the vitality reanimating it.”

“Are you insane?” She tried again to twist away, but he took her by the wrist and pushed it forwards, firmly, so that her hand pressed against the necrothrall’s chest.

It was a man. He looked as if he’d been around forty.

He’d been dead for a few days at least before being reanimated.

She couldn’t see a visible cause of death, but she could smell it.

It was probably hidden somewhere beneath his clothes.

His eyes were empty, the whites yellow-stained, the skin taut.

“Feel the energy,” Ferron said softly. His hands were warm on her shoulders, simultaneously bracing and trapping her.