Page 91 of Alchemised

W HEN H ELENA ASKED S HISEO IF HE COULD test her resonance for a weapon alloy, he’d seemed surprised by the request.

“You don’t know?” he asked, looking up as he adjusted the temperature under an alembic.

“I never got around to it,” she said, trying to make the request seem casual. Shiseo was an excellent collaborator, but he was excruciatingly private. He never spoke of himself or the Eastern Empire except in ways specific to their work.

“It’s all right if you don’t have time,” she said. “It’s mostly curiosity.”

Shiseo blinked slowly. His expressions were even more unreadable than Kaine’s. “Remind me, what part are you from?”

Helena exhaled, fingers skittering across the medical textbook she was reading. She’d had an idea for an injected drug for emergency situations where a heart needed intense stimulation, but she was uncertain about the composition she’d developed.

“Etras. It’s south. Out in the sea. The crescent of islands between the two continents. Not many alchemists there, since there isn’t much metal, and no lumithium.”

“Is that why you came to Paladia?”

She nodded without looking up. “My father thought my repertoire was too special to be—wasted there.”

Shiseo gave a mysterious little hum and nodded. “I will bring my set to test you, but I would like to ask a favour, if I may.”

She straightened, and now she was looking at him curiously. “Of course.”

“The metals from that woman’s blood some months ago. I heard about them. May I try identifying them?”

Helena’s mouth went dry at this casual mention of Gettlich.

She’d had no idea Shiseo was even aware of the event, much less knowledgeable enough to have picked up on the fact that there was anything unusual retrieved from the body.

Several metallurgists had tried to identify all the trace metals and compounds found in the blood samples without success.

Shiseo’s expression had not changed; he wore the same mild look he always did. “I heard that some are not identified.”

“I’ll ask for a sample.”

When Shiseo returned to Helena’s lab, he brought a little case that was filled with glass vials, each with pure compounds and metals inside, labelled in a script that Helena couldn’t read.

He arranged them in rows. “These”—he pointed to the closest—“are common Paladian metals. These”—he pointed to the second and third rows of compounds—“are a little more rare. We will see.”

He removed them one by one, and Helena used her resonance to manipulate them into hollow spheres while he timed her.

Then he used his own remarkably wide repertoire to slice them into quarters and examine the evenness of her distribution, the orderliness of the structure, grading each aspect on a chart.

If some were graded lower than others, there was a mathematical formula to calculate the level of lumithium emanations necessary to balance the potential alloy’s resonance to match the alchemist’s base level.

“You have an interesting repertoire,” he said in his quiet voice as they moved into the third row of vials. “Very unusual. Good attention to detail. I am surprised you are not a metallurgist.”

“I wasn’t sure what to do,” she said, handing another metal back for grading.

“It felt like whatever I chose, someone was disappointed. Everyone—” She fluttered her fingers but, catching herself gesturing, folded them in her lap.

“Everyone wanted a lot for me, and I’m not sure I ever knew what I wanted.

” She shrugged. “Probably good that I didn’t, since it didn’t matter in the end. ”

Shiseo didn’t reply. He was studying the notes he’d taken, then he looked at her, staring at her folded hands. “I don’t think a steel weapon would suit you.”

“What?” Her resonance for both steel and iron were excellent. There was no reason why she wouldn’t be perfectly suited for a steel alloy, it was what most metallurgists were specialised in. Almost all the weapons in Paladia were steel.

“You are exceptional with titanium. I met the titanium guildmaster once, and even his work was not so perfect.” Then he picked up a piece of her nickel work, studying it as well. “Have you ever tried nickel-titanium alloy?”

She shook her head.

“It would make a better weapon for you. Very light. You’d waste your strength with steel.”

“This isn’t for a weapon,” Helena said quickly. “It’s just—curiosity.”

Shiseo just made a little click with his tongue. “Well … if you wanted a weapon, I would advise you to use nickel and titanium. Don’t limit yourself to what Paladians do.”

She couldn’t imagine giving Kaine Ferron, heir of the iron guild, a resonance alloy without any iron in it. Titanium and nickel might not even be in his repertoire. She’d be asking for a weapon he couldn’t sense or transmute. It would seem like a threat.

After some pleading, Shiseo finally consented to writing a steel alloy, too.

She almost threw the titanium alloy away, but Crowther instructed her to include it. He wanted to see what Kaine would do.

E LAIN DID NOT UNDERGO ANY new training.

When Helena had tried to add the additional training sessions and one weekly foraging trip, Elain had filed a formal complaint with Falcon Matias that she was being overworked and had never agreed to be an apothecary, and of course, not only did Matias side with Elain, but he’d wanted to know how and why Helena was an apothecary, and who had approved it.

A moratorium was placed on Helena’s lab work, and the next thing she knew, it was not her lab at all but Shiseo’s, and Ilva had Helena passed off as the lab assistant, tasked with running errands and fetching supplies from the wetlands for him.

It was all technicalities, and better than being banned from chymiatria, but it still felt like a blow.

Her only solace was anticipating a bespoke knife. She’d given the alloy slip to Kaine, and he’d taken it without comment.

It was hard to temper her expectations. Whenever she used any kind of tool or weapon, she’d wonder what it would feel like to hold something made to resonate with her.

Lila treated her weapons like they were children, naming them, coddling them, spending hours caring for them, ensuring they were in perfect condition.

It was the same with her prosthetic and armour.

They were so intrinsically customised, it made them an extension of herself.

However, Kaine made no references to the knife. Helena began to habitually push the thought down so she wouldn’t experience a pang of disappointment every time she saw him.

He finally decided she was “passable” at the forms and moved on to attacks and techniques specific to her abilities.

“You’re still doing it wrong,” he said, standing and stalking over to her.

“The idea is to target the tendons. You start low. Left Achilles, then the inside of the right thigh; they fall, and your blade is there to catch them through the throat and into the skull. That is when you’ll punch your fist into their chest and rip out the talisman. ”

He demonstrated again, but she kept dropping the knife. The attack wasn’t complicated, but the knife-work had to be done with her off hand, so that her right hand could perform the human transmutation at the end.

Three transmutational shapes in seconds while using her non-dominant hand tested the limits of her coordination.

He stepped behind her. Not being able to see him made her keenly aware of how close he was.

There was a pause before his hands wrapped around hers, fingers brushing across the inside of her wrists, her back against his chest.

She could feel him through her resonance, and even though she wasn’t directly touching him, she was so keyed up from her constantly flowing resonance that it formed a torus of energy around her. She tried to block him out, but she was too frayed to only attenuate on her knife.

His arms ran against the length of hers as he guided her down into a low lunge, her left hand angling to catch a tendon, transmuting her knife into a curve, then—with a quick flick of the wrist upwards—using a straight-edged blade to take out the hamstring of the opposite leg.

In this same upwards movement, the blade widened into a brutal spike intended to maximise brain damage.

Then he drove her other hand forward in a brutal punch into empty air. With her resonance behind it, she’d go straight through the bone and find a talisman.

“It’s one movement,” he said, his voice near her ear.

A shiver ran through her gut. Helena could barely hear his words over her own heartbeat.

“You go quick. Hit as many points as you can. Tendons are the best way to slow them. A blade through the brain will knock them out for a few seconds, at least, and keep them disoriented for longer. Even if you miss the talisman, they won’t recover immediately.

The regeneration will focus on the brain. But miss that blow and you’re dead.”

He took her through the movement one more time slowly, and then faster to demonstrate the upward lunge of a counterstrike intended to be fluid and quick as lightning.

“Do you feel it now?” he asked, his voice low, the heat of his breath near her ear, brushing through her hair, making it impossible to focus.

She didn’t think he was helping at all. There was an intense pressure that grew inside her whenever he was close, a sort of frantic desperation, like swimming up towards the surface yet never reaching it.

She nodded shakily, and his hands slipped away from her wrists.

“Go again.”

W HEN THE T OWER BELL WENT off, the air vibrated. An attack warning, or else a call to be ready. For fighters to go out, and for the hospital to prepare.

The sirens in the hallway began blaring loud enough to split her skull as Helena hurried towards the hospital.

“What do we know?” she asked as she tied on her apron, stripping her gloves off to wash and sterilise her hands.