CHAPTER 38
Julius 1786
HELENA 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 …
WHEN 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. , and kissingShe threw up over the dam, and again crossing the bridge, retching into the river. Rather than feel better, she felt worse. e ceiling for aShe 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 y to alleviateviolently, 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 hing into thetaut 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.
beyond whatSHE WAS RESTOCKING THE HOSPITAL inventory when one of the orderlies rself becausematerialised 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 ompared to awithout 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 membered itroster.
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 some areas,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 people werescreaming seemed to carry along all the tunnels, magnifying and concentrating in the room. The place had a sick, eerie feeling about it.
She entered another tunnel, trying to get away, but no matter which one she took, or which way she turned, they all seemed to lead back to the same
was thick, theroom. As if to mockingly remind her that she could not escape herself, and what she had become. This was what the war had made her.
Finally she turned slowly back, walking towards the screaming, tired of running from herself.
She’d climb over tortured bodies, sell herself, and tear out Kaine Ferron’s heart if that was what it took to win.
SHE WAS CALLED IN TWO more times before Lancaster finally broke. By the third time, Helena didn’t think he was still sane.
Waiting in the underground passages, ears plugged to try to keep from hearing what was happening in the next room, she’d reevaluated her assessment of the previous night.he thought it Now that it was a little less fresh, her missteps felt less disastrous.
Kaine did feel some sort of partiality towards her. After all, he’d wanted her to stay.en I’m going However, whatever flicker of desire or fondness he felt was barely kindled.
Too much fuel too fast would smother it. It was for the best they’d stopped when they did. That he was left wondering what could have happened.
She suspected he burned for things more deeply than he knew. Therefore, the key would lie in cultivating that spark into something beyond his control.
He was too calculating for anything else to be effective. It was all or nothing. Leave him as the threat he was, knowing that he was now infinitely more enabled by her to achieve his desires, or try to redirect his ambition and obsessive nature onto her.
People always said there was no greater temptation than the forbidden.
As for the fact that she wanted him back … that she was so willing.
She chewed anxiously on her thumbnail.
It was for the best. Everyone had always said she was a terrible liar.
The door opened, and Ivy came out. Helena looked over at her. “Again?”
Ivy shook her head, shutting the door. “Crowther’s still working on him.”
Ivy crouched down next to Helena, drawing a finger idly through the dirt on the ground. Helena watched her in silence, trying to ignore the smell of burned meat beginning to permeate the air.
“You know,” Helena couldn’t help but say, “there’s other ways to get information out of people. You don’t have to torture them.”
Ivy looked up with her sharp eyes glittering. “I like hurting them. It’s the best part of the job. The rest is boring.”
“Oh.”
There was a long silence. Finally Ivy spoke up. “Can vivimancy get rid of memories? Make someone forget something so they’d never remember it?”
Helena watched her curiously. “Is there something you want to forget?”
Ivy shook her head, staring down the tunnel, and her face twitched oddly.
“My sister, she doesn’t remember things. Matron said it’s called a fugue––her not remembering––but it might all come back someday.”
“Don’t you want her to remember?” Helena asked.
Ivy gave a sharp shake of her head. “No.” She looked up at Helena and laughed. “You think I’m bad. If she ever remembers, she’d go completely mad.”
The door opened, and the stench of burned meat wafted out. “Marino.
We’re done now.”
Crowther had drugged Lancaster with something synthetic. He was arely kindled.hallucinating wildly. He’d nearly bitten through his tongue, and Helena had to paralyse him to reattach it. His skin was charred all over, although Crowther was always careful never to burn deep enough to kill the nerves.
Lancaster was babbling. It seemed Helena and Ivy had converged in his mind. One moment he’d struggle violently, nearly biting her hands when they were near him, threatening to pour molten metal through her veins until her eyes burst like grapes, and the next he’d be trying to lean towards her and ambition anddrawing deep rasping breaths, crooning that she was a sweet thing, how once he was Undying, he’d keep her as a pet with a collar and chain, just like Holdfast.
Then he’d think she was Ivy again, and he’d threaten to eat her. Cut her into pieces. Put her back together wrong. Violate her in every way imaginable.
When she was done, she wanted to peel the skin off every place he’d touched her.
“Why don’t you kill him?” she asked Crowther when she got out of the
room. Her skin was still crawling.
He seemed amused by this. “Why?”
“You have what you want. He’s a waste of rations.”
He shook his head. “Until we’ve found the guard he was looking for, we’ll keep him. Morrough’s determination to unearth this Wagner in Hevgoss
indicates a significant degree of importance. Lancaster is a uniquely devoted Aspirant. He could be useful as evidence if we are ever in contact with Hevgoss. Don’t worry about him. I’ve never lost a prisoner.”
“Can I go, then?” she said dully. Her clothes were stained with Lancaster’s blood.
“Yes, I’ll escort you,” he said. “You healed Ferron? Was it a success?”
She gave an idle nod without looking at him. Whether he was pleased or a fugue––herdisappointed by this, she had no energy to care. “Yes. The procedure was a success.”
There was a pause as they ascended the stairs. Crowther blocked the exit, his eyes skimming across her. “I hear you were out all night and returned— dishevelled.”
Her stomach clenched. “It took longer than expected. The checkpoints were closed for curfew. I had to sleep there.”
Crowther waited but she volunteered nothing else.
His eyes narrowed. “Carry on, then.”
ds when they
ng for, we’ll
indicates a significant degree of importance. Lancaster is a uniquely devoted Aspirant. He could be useful as evidence if we are ever in contact with Hevgoss. Don’t worry about him. I’ve never lost a prisoner.”
“Can I go, then?” she said dully. Her clothes were stained with Lancaster’s blood.
“Yes, I’ll escort you,” he said. “You healed Ferron? Was it a success?”
She gave an idle nod without looking at him. Whether he was pleased or disappointed by this, she had no energy to care. “Yes. The procedure was a success.”
There was a pause as they ascended the stairs. Crowther blocked the exit, his eyes skimming across her. “I hear you were out all night and returned— dishevelled.”
Her stomach clenched. “It took longer than expected. The checkpoints were closed for curfew. I had to sleep there.”
Crowther waited but she volunteered nothing else.
His eyes narrowed. “Carry on, then.”