Page 167 of Alchemised
He dropped his head, exhaling unevenly. “How fortunate that you got such a thorough overview of my physiology while I was passed out.”
“Yes, it is,” she said curtly, and pulled out more poison.
He moaned through his teeth, his hands spasming repeatedly when the handkerchief brushed his back again.
He hadn’t even made a sound with his arm ripped off.
She paused, hands hovering.
“Would a sedative work on you?”
“No,” he said dully. “Everything wears off. I can barely get properly drunk.”
She tentatively touched the base of his skull.
“I usually work locally when blocking pain, but there’s a place here in your brain. If I stimulate it, it’ll put you to sleep. You won’t feel anything. Your body shouldn’t interpret that as tampering since I’m not blocking anything. Do you want me to try?”
“You can—” His voice caught. “You can do that?”
“Yes. I think so.”
He was silent. She watched the flutter of his ribs as he breathed unsteadily.
“Try, then, I suppose,” he said. “It’s not like there’s ever been anything stopping you from killing me.”
She ignored the comment. “You should lie down, then.”
The table was cracked down the middle, but still stable enough, so she assembled it into a makeshift bed, spreading out his cloak. His hands trembled, gripping her shoulder as she helped him stand, and he groaned under his breath as he leaned his weight on her. His whole body was shaking violently as he nearly collapsed onto the table.
She laced her fingers through his hair until she found the dip at the base of his skull just below the occipital protuberance.
It required only a little shift in the energy until she felt the peace of numbness flood through his body as he slipped unconscious.
She could work more easily now that Ferron wouldn’t flinch every time she touched him. She drew out the infection, wiping it away, but all she could think about was how old the injury must be.
She should have come back sooner. This was her fault: She’d assumed he’d leave the city to burn, and she’d pushed him from her mind.
She’d been so terrified he would betray them that she’d never stopped to consider what would happen if he didn’t.
Her hands trembled, hovering over the now clean wounds, as she debated what to do. She wanted to pry the metal out of his bones, but the titanium had bonded.
She gripped her amulet, desperate for any sense of reassurance.
The injury was more than merely incisions and metal transmutation. The array was active; she could feel the hum of resonance moving through it. Altering an active array was extremely dangerous. The kind of thing that cost limbs.
Attempting it might kill them both.
She had to figure out a way to make Ferron survive it, but it was rooted into him and drawing on the energy emanating from the talisman, diverting what should have been regenerating him and instead sending that power along the pathways of the array.
There was no containment circle to limit it. It was activated constantly, the symbols not acting on an external target as they would in a lab, but on Ferron. The power was being diverted, mutated, and then fed back into him in a closed loop.
That would kill a normal human, but Ferron didn’t die so easily—yet he also couldn’t change. Helena was beginning to understand how the Undying were “immortal.” He was not ageless; his body was trapped in time, his regeneration keeping him exactly as he was. It did not let him change, not with age or injury. But the array was designed to change him. The mutated power existed for the sole purpose of alteration, and that contradiction was killing him in a way far more profound than the mutilation of his back.
He was in a crucible, and he was the crucible, and he would either die terribly or be wholly alchemised into something that could survive the paradox.
She studied the symbols, trying to understand what they were intended to do.
She’d never seen an array intended to act on a person, but she was well versed in alchemical notation.
