Page 95 of Alchemised

T HE WAR FROZE ALONG WITH P ALADIA. THE tension between the two sides endlessly strung out. A fragile balance that might be lost at any moment. Every battle was sudden, without warning and with terrible casualties.

The tension between Helena and Kaine felt similar.

There was a new sharpness to him that had not been there before, as though he were being ground down like the edge of a blade on a whetstone.

He’d show up sometimes badly injured, healing very slowly, and snap savagely at her when she offered to help him.

Normally he’d recover by the time she left, but she wasn’t sure how he was being hurt at all. As if this was the consequence of her request that he not die, she was instead forced to witness the misery of his inability to. She worried there was a defect in the array.

One minute he was lounging in a chair, watching her train; the next his eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled onto the floor.

There was a bloodstain under him when she got him on his back. His clothes were soaked with it.

Beneath his uniform, he was heavily bandaged, but his blood wasn’t clotting, and the wound wasn’t healing. When Helena tried to find it, her resonance seemed to fail.

She peeled the bandages off in terror and found a stab wound.

The injury had missed his organs, but whatever had been used had broken off, and there were pieces of it left inside him.

It wasn’t a lot of metal, but he wasn’t healing.

Maier usually handled shrapnel injuries; their treatment wasn’t suited for vivimancy.

Helena’s resonance faded, distorting when she tried to appraise the injury and gauge how much metal was inside the wound.

She didn’t have tools for surgery. She washed her hands and stuck a finger into the wound, catching a piece and pulling it out.

Holding it, she could feel it as a physical, tangible object, but when she channelled her resonance towards it, it felt drawn in towards the metal but then—static.

Her sense of resonance told her there wasn’t anything there.

It began crumbling in her fingers, as though rusting, little bits and grit, corroding in Kaine’s blood.

This was the alloy. The lumithium and mo’lian’shi. Kaine had been stabbed with it, and it had been left inside his body.

“You idiot,” she said to Kaine, even though she knew he was insensate.

She put the shard on a piece of gauze, wiping her fingers. If it distributed through his blood, she wasn’t sure what would happen.

His body was stubborn when it came to its immutability, but based on the way the alloying was interfering with regeneration, the Undying’s progress in blocking resonance seemed much closer to success than the Eternal Flame had expected.

She ran her hands across Kaine’s skin, trying to get as clear a sense as she could of the internal wound, her resonance flickering in and out as if it was riddled with holes.

She retrieved her satchel; she’d put together a full kit of medicines and materials for healing him on the off chance he ever allowed it.

She spread a salve around the wound to slow the blood loss as she tried to figure out what to do.

If she had the stimulant injection she’d been working on, it might help, but she was still working out the right balance of epinephrine.

If she couldn’t use resonance to remove the shards, she’d have to do it with old-fashioned surgery.

Alchemical surgery was much less invasive. Most of the hospitals in the North exclusively employed alchemists, while manual surgery was viewed as archaic and brutal with its large incisions and scars.

She took her alchemy knife and muttered an apology to it as she broke the components apart. A transmutational weapon was complicated to reassemble. It would be near impossible once she was done with it.

She tried not to think about the potential consequences of destroying an issued weapon as she manipulated the metal into a long set of basic manual clamps, using part of the blade to make herself a scalpel. She hoped the clamps would be enough.

She washed, heated, and cooled the metal, trying to get the pieces sterile.

Growing up, she had watched her father perform surgery. After her mother died, she’d preferred it to being alone.

She used her resonance in reverse, identifying the location of the shrapnel bits by the negative space they created. The pieces were delicate, and they crumbled easily. She had to work slowly. She pulled them out, depositing each one on a cloth.

Once she’d removed most of them, Kaine’s body seemed to remember how to heal itself, and the wound began to close while there were still pieces inside.

She had to use the scalpel, making the incision over and over until she had all the pieces out and had irrigated the wound as best she could.

She checked using her resonance several times to ensure that there was nothing left.

There was still a slight hum of interference but nothing large; hopefully, his body could handle it.

She washed her hands and stashed half of the shrapnel pieces in a bottle, which she hid in the depths of her satchel, and then placed the rest in another more obvious bottle, in case Kaine demanded she give them back.

The wound left a scar that didn’t fully fade away. Looking him over, it wasn’t the only one.

She placed her hand in the centre of his chest, letting her resonance seep through.

He was still weak with blood loss; the residual metal was impacting his blood regeneration.

She propped his head on her lap and very cautiously poured an elixir down his throat, using her resonance to ensure it ended up in his stomach and not his lungs.

Even unconscious, his expression was tense, as if braced for a blow.

She brushed his hair back from his forehead, trying to smooth the tense furrow between his eyebrows, and just sat with him for a while. When he felt closer to normal, she leaned forward, her fingers touching the back of his head to help him wake.

His eyes shot open.

Faster than she could move, his hand was around her throat, jerking her down as he jolted upright, his expression panicked fury.

He recognised her, catching her an instant before the back of her head slammed into the ground. Her neck snapped back, and her vision went white, pain shooting through her skull.

“What?” He still sounded dazed.

She felt his hands along her neck, resonance along her spine, as her vision swam back into focus. He was kneeling over her, the back of her neck cradled in his hands. Her heart was in her throat, pounding with such shock she could barely breathe.

Kaine was also breathing hard. “What the fuck, Marino?”

“You—passed out,” she managed to say.

He looked at himself, only then realising he wasn’t wearing a shirt and that the wound was gone. She thought he’d relax once he understood, but he looked angrier.

“I nearly killed you.”

“You were hurt,” she said, releasing a shaky breath. “Badly. Even by your standards.” She sat up and winced, touching the side of her neck gingerly. “As previously established, it’s my job to keep the Eternal Flame’s assets alive. You’re one of them.”

“I wasn’t going to die,” he said scathingly, but he leaned towards her.

She almost drew back, but he reached out tentatively and she made herself hold still.

He pulled her hand away from her neck, his eyes fastened on her throat, his fingers moving slowly down the length of it. She felt his resonance under her skin, warm along her spine. Another crack in his facade of indifference.

“Were you not supposed to be healed?” she asked, suppressing a shiver as his finger brushed along her neck. “I can—cut you open and put it all back in if you want.”

His fingers stilled, and he glared at her. “I’m not your patient.”

He might have been intimidating if he wasn’t sitting on the floor, both hands cradling her neck, tilting her head slowly from side to side. He’d clearly come around to taking spinal injuries very seriously.

Her heart was beating even harder now, remembering his fingers in her hair, pulling her towards him. When she was alone, she often went back to that memory, wondering what could have happened.

She drew a shivering breath and reached up, her fingers wrapping around his wrist. “I can’t let you die.”

He stilled. She felt his pulse against her fingers. She watched his eyes darken, the slow shift of black expanding as the heat of his hands bled into her skin.

He shook his head. “They don’t let me die.”

She squeezed his wrist tighter. “Are they—is Bennet still experimenting on you? I thought if you survived the array, then he couldn’t—”

He pulled his hand free. “I have this habit of surviving against all odds. Deserves to be studied, apparently.”

Without thinking, she reached out, touching his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Kaine.”

He looked startled, and it made his expression turn so young and scared, as if a part of him was still that sixteen-year-old. Then he went rigid, wrenching himself away from her touch, and when he looked at her again, he’d turned vicious. He shook his head as if in disbelief.

“You are unbelievable,” he said. “Truly.”

She didn’t know what he meant.

He shook his head. “When you first showed up here, I didn’t think you’d have it in you, but you are truly something else.”

Her gut twisted into a hard knot. “What do you mean?”

“You will do anything for that family, won’t you? But someday, Hold fast will realise you don’t belong in his kingdom of gold and purity. I wonder what he’ll do with you then.”

She knew he was trying to hurt her, but it was something she had thought about so much, the sting of it had worn away.

“He won’t have to do anything; you took care of that for him.” She gave a tight-lipped smile. “But even if you hadn’t, I knew I’d be expendable from the moment I became a healer.”

She thought that would silence him, but he laughed.