Alchemised a novel, p.49
Alchemised: A Novel, page 49
His jaw tensed. “I assumed they’d save that for the likes of Holdfast.”
The corridor had stretched into a tunnel once more.
“Luc can’t win by himself,” she said.
Ferron was suddenly very close, reaching towards her. He pulled her up off the ground, sending an inferno of pain through her body. She screamed and fainted.
When her eyes opened again, she was in the tenement unit, lying on her back, her injured leg elevated with a chair. She felt simultaneously better and worse.
She was overwhelmingly thirsty.
Kaine was studying her calf where the spike ran through it.
“How do I heal this?”
She blinked sluggishly, the ceiling swirling overhead.
Think, Helena, you’ve taught healing before. “Numbing the area is the first step, but I don’t have enough blood to …”
Her words slurred away. Explaining the lack of saline and plasma expanders was too many words to string together. Did he even know how to numb? With the new healers, she’d use her resonance at the same time and guide them, so that they’d know what to look for.
She was so thirsty.
She shook her head. “I don’t think … It’s … tricky for beginners … nerves.”
Annoyance flashed across his face. “I did paralyse you once. I’m familiar with nerves.” His bare hand pressed just below her knee. “Here?”
She nodded and barely felt his resonance before her leg went numb. She drew several deep breaths, feeling less shaky now that she wasn’t distracted by pain.
“Um,” she said, swallowing, “you need to identify what’s damaged before you pull the spike out. Nerves, veins—I don’t think it went through the artery, but you should check. Might’ve fractured the bone. Blood flow’s easy to sense. Close the veins and arteries temporarily—not too long.”
Kaine was silent, his bare fingers pressed against her calf, and his eyes went out of focus. She couldn’t feel what he was doing, which would normally bother her, but right now she was not lucid enough to care properly.
He placed his hand on the spike. Despite being numb, she tensed, bracing herself for the grind of metal against tissue.
Rather than pull it out, he transmuted it. The metal rippled in his hand, shrinking out of the wound so that it didn’t drag or tear. Only a little blood spattered on the floor. He dropped the bar, studying the puncture with a critical eye.
“I don’t feel any trace metals left. Do I clean it?”
She nodded, starting to tremble even though the spike was out and the pain was gone. “There’s leftover carbolic dilution in my satchel.”
He rummaged through it and found the vial.
“Lucky I healed you,” she said as he wordlessly unscrewed it and poured the contents over the wound. It looked like water trickling through and joining the puddle of blood on the floor.
Then he began closing the puncture. She warned him to only perform the most basic regeneration, because she didn’t have the physical resources for more.
Gradually the hole in her leg was gone, replaced with delicate, extremely inflamed new tissue, and he partially removed the block on her nerves. Pain rolled through her like a wave. She’d need more healing, but this was enough to get her back.
She tried to rotate her foot, but the muscles weren’t intact enough. She could limp, though.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t acknowledge her, wiping his hands off on a handkerchief and pulling his gloves back on. He radiated impatience as she got up, favouring her left leg. There was a new sort of hardness about him.
Her head was light, but she felt less wobbly.
She touched the door, but her resonance was still just a gap, like a lost tooth. Her fingers skittered across the surface. Before she could say anything, she heard the mechanisms inside move, and the door clicked open.
She looked back, expecting to find Ferron behind her, but he was still across the room.
CHAPTER 40
Septembris 1786
DESPITE THE OUTPOST BEING RETAKEN, HELENA 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 another. 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.
She’d never touched a necrothrall with resonance like this, never experienced the dissonance of life and death entwined. There was a heart beating sluggishly, oxygen-deprived blood crawling through the veins. There was no life; it was just energy.
The living had a vibrancy, but the necrothrall was dead. It was like a perpetual electric shock on an animal corpse to make the systems function.
“Do you feel it?” Ferron asked.
She gave a shaky nod.
“Then take it.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled. It was like a plant in loose soil. The energy came loose, and a shock of power ran up her arm.
The world went silver-white, as if she’d exploded in place and then instantly reconstituted.
She dimly heard the muffled thud as the necrothrall hit the ground.
She blinked to find Kaine kneeling beside the corpse.
He touched the hand for only a moment, and the dead man sat up, standing and walking back out.
Kaine looked at her. “If you’re ever attacked by necrothralls again, don’t waste your energy obliterating them. Just rip out the reanimation.” He looked away. “It’s possible it may keep the Toll at bay for you.”
Helena said nothing. Beneath her skin, her nerves were still buzzing.
“I didn’t know that was something vivimancers could do,” she said, trying to get her thoughts straight.
“I don’t think that most can,” Kaine said, straightening. “It’s something only animancers are capable of.”
He said it so casually that it took Helena a moment to process his words. She looked at him sharply.
“How’d you realise?” she said.
A thin smile curved across his face. “It was just a guess.”
She flushed.
“I did think you were rather quick to catch on with the memory trick.” He straightened. “Now that you’re not at risk of keeling over from performing a bit of basic transmutation, I want to see your combat forms.”
Her stomach sank. She could already feel his impending judgement.
“It’s been a while,” she said, digging for her knife from her satchel. It had fallen to the bottom, and she had to dig out several bundles of herbs and sphagnum moss to find it. “I wasn’t very advanced. Academic track, you know.”
“So was I,” he said, watching her through insolently lidded eyes, but she could see a gleam of silver beneath his lashes. “You should be wearing that knife. You can’t afford to waste time fumbling through that bag of yours, and you should have at least two of them.”
“Two knives would get in the way of my vivimancy.”
He raised his eyebrows. “With thralls, yes, but not if you’re fighting the Undying. Or a chimaera.”
She looked up. “Couldn’t I still use vivimancy?”
“If you’re close enough to touch them, they’ll have already killed you. You don’t regenerate. To survive, you need distance.”
She looked down at the knife in her hand. It was annoyingly hefty, but everything standard-issue was. “A knife isn’t going to give me much more reach than I already have, and if I’m walking around armed, I’m more likely to be noticed. It’s safer to be mistaken for a civilian. Necrothralls usually leave them alone.”
“Not anymore. With the losses incurred this year, now that the Eternal Flame controls the entire East Island, there are no civilians any longer. Anyone on the East Island, or elsewhere without the right papers, is an enemy, and may be treated as such.”
Helena’s mouth went dry. “Anyone?”
“Man, woman, or child. When the Eternal Flame was constantly losing territory, the Undying could afford to be magnanimous, but the goal is eradication now.”
HELENA KNEW ABOUT COMBAT FORMS. Academically.
She had also practised them, but it had been a very long time.
Kaine seemed to think she was the most incompetent combatant he’d ever seen. After only brief observation, he started her all the way back with first-year forms, drilling them on and on until they were perfect.
After he was relatively civil about the animancy, she wasn’t prepared for how merciless he’d be about combat. He was completely vicious. It was only marginally preferable to being chased around the room having furniture thrown at her.
“I doubt this is going to save me from anyone,” she said after a week, growing uncomfortably sweaty. Her arm trembled as she raised the knife over her head for the hundredth time and channelled her resonance, altering the length and curve of the blade.
The corridor had stretched into a tunnel once more.
“Luc can’t win by himself,” she said.
Ferron was suddenly very close, reaching towards her. He pulled her up off the ground, sending an inferno of pain through her body. She screamed and fainted.
When her eyes opened again, she was in the tenement unit, lying on her back, her injured leg elevated with a chair. She felt simultaneously better and worse.
She was overwhelmingly thirsty.
Kaine was studying her calf where the spike ran through it.
“How do I heal this?”
She blinked sluggishly, the ceiling swirling overhead.
Think, Helena, you’ve taught healing before. “Numbing the area is the first step, but I don’t have enough blood to …”
Her words slurred away. Explaining the lack of saline and plasma expanders was too many words to string together. Did he even know how to numb? With the new healers, she’d use her resonance at the same time and guide them, so that they’d know what to look for.
She was so thirsty.
She shook her head. “I don’t think … It’s … tricky for beginners … nerves.”
Annoyance flashed across his face. “I did paralyse you once. I’m familiar with nerves.” His bare hand pressed just below her knee. “Here?”
She nodded and barely felt his resonance before her leg went numb. She drew several deep breaths, feeling less shaky now that she wasn’t distracted by pain.
“Um,” she said, swallowing, “you need to identify what’s damaged before you pull the spike out. Nerves, veins—I don’t think it went through the artery, but you should check. Might’ve fractured the bone. Blood flow’s easy to sense. Close the veins and arteries temporarily—not too long.”
Kaine was silent, his bare fingers pressed against her calf, and his eyes went out of focus. She couldn’t feel what he was doing, which would normally bother her, but right now she was not lucid enough to care properly.
He placed his hand on the spike. Despite being numb, she tensed, bracing herself for the grind of metal against tissue.
Rather than pull it out, he transmuted it. The metal rippled in his hand, shrinking out of the wound so that it didn’t drag or tear. Only a little blood spattered on the floor. He dropped the bar, studying the puncture with a critical eye.
“I don’t feel any trace metals left. Do I clean it?”
She nodded, starting to tremble even though the spike was out and the pain was gone. “There’s leftover carbolic dilution in my satchel.”
He rummaged through it and found the vial.
“Lucky I healed you,” she said as he wordlessly unscrewed it and poured the contents over the wound. It looked like water trickling through and joining the puddle of blood on the floor.
Then he began closing the puncture. She warned him to only perform the most basic regeneration, because she didn’t have the physical resources for more.
Gradually the hole in her leg was gone, replaced with delicate, extremely inflamed new tissue, and he partially removed the block on her nerves. Pain rolled through her like a wave. She’d need more healing, but this was enough to get her back.
She tried to rotate her foot, but the muscles weren’t intact enough. She could limp, though.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t acknowledge her, wiping his hands off on a handkerchief and pulling his gloves back on. He radiated impatience as she got up, favouring her left leg. There was a new sort of hardness about him.
Her head was light, but she felt less wobbly.
She touched the door, but her resonance was still just a gap, like a lost tooth. Her fingers skittered across the surface. Before she could say anything, she heard the mechanisms inside move, and the door clicked open.
She looked back, expecting to find Ferron behind her, but he was still across the room.
CHAPTER 40
Septembris 1786
DESPITE THE OUTPOST BEING RETAKEN, HELENA 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 another. 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.
She’d never touched a necrothrall with resonance like this, never experienced the dissonance of life and death entwined. There was a heart beating sluggishly, oxygen-deprived blood crawling through the veins. There was no life; it was just energy.
The living had a vibrancy, but the necrothrall was dead. It was like a perpetual electric shock on an animal corpse to make the systems function.
“Do you feel it?” Ferron asked.
She gave a shaky nod.
“Then take it.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled. It was like a plant in loose soil. The energy came loose, and a shock of power ran up her arm.
The world went silver-white, as if she’d exploded in place and then instantly reconstituted.
She dimly heard the muffled thud as the necrothrall hit the ground.
She blinked to find Kaine kneeling beside the corpse.
He touched the hand for only a moment, and the dead man sat up, standing and walking back out.
Kaine looked at her. “If you’re ever attacked by necrothralls again, don’t waste your energy obliterating them. Just rip out the reanimation.” He looked away. “It’s possible it may keep the Toll at bay for you.”
Helena said nothing. Beneath her skin, her nerves were still buzzing.
“I didn’t know that was something vivimancers could do,” she said, trying to get her thoughts straight.
“I don’t think that most can,” Kaine said, straightening. “It’s something only animancers are capable of.”
He said it so casually that it took Helena a moment to process his words. She looked at him sharply.
“How’d you realise?” she said.
A thin smile curved across his face. “It was just a guess.”
She flushed.
“I did think you were rather quick to catch on with the memory trick.” He straightened. “Now that you’re not at risk of keeling over from performing a bit of basic transmutation, I want to see your combat forms.”
Her stomach sank. She could already feel his impending judgement.
“It’s been a while,” she said, digging for her knife from her satchel. It had fallen to the bottom, and she had to dig out several bundles of herbs and sphagnum moss to find it. “I wasn’t very advanced. Academic track, you know.”
“So was I,” he said, watching her through insolently lidded eyes, but she could see a gleam of silver beneath his lashes. “You should be wearing that knife. You can’t afford to waste time fumbling through that bag of yours, and you should have at least two of them.”
“Two knives would get in the way of my vivimancy.”
He raised his eyebrows. “With thralls, yes, but not if you’re fighting the Undying. Or a chimaera.”
She looked up. “Couldn’t I still use vivimancy?”
“If you’re close enough to touch them, they’ll have already killed you. You don’t regenerate. To survive, you need distance.”
She looked down at the knife in her hand. It was annoyingly hefty, but everything standard-issue was. “A knife isn’t going to give me much more reach than I already have, and if I’m walking around armed, I’m more likely to be noticed. It’s safer to be mistaken for a civilian. Necrothralls usually leave them alone.”
“Not anymore. With the losses incurred this year, now that the Eternal Flame controls the entire East Island, there are no civilians any longer. Anyone on the East Island, or elsewhere without the right papers, is an enemy, and may be treated as such.”
Helena’s mouth went dry. “Anyone?”
“Man, woman, or child. When the Eternal Flame was constantly losing territory, the Undying could afford to be magnanimous, but the goal is eradication now.”
HELENA KNEW ABOUT COMBAT FORMS. Academically.
She had also practised them, but it had been a very long time.
Kaine seemed to think she was the most incompetent combatant he’d ever seen. After only brief observation, he started her all the way back with first-year forms, drilling them on and on until they were perfect.
After he was relatively civil about the animancy, she wasn’t prepared for how merciless he’d be about combat. He was completely vicious. It was only marginally preferable to being chased around the room having furniture thrown at her.
“I doubt this is going to save me from anyone,” she said after a week, growing uncomfortably sweaty. Her arm trembled as she raised the knife over her head for the hundredth time and channelled her resonance, altering the length and curve of the blade.
