Page 243 of Alchemised
Helena blinked. “Me?”
“Yes.” He leaned forward and caught her chin, tilting her face so that the light from the windows fell across it, a pale slice of winter. “What happens to you?”
“When you’re—gone?”
He gave a short nod.
“I don’t know,” she said with a short hysterical laugh. She pulled away. “Like you said, I’ve always been expendable, so maybe they’ll offer me to the next spy.”
“Don’t joke. I want a real answer.” There was a sharp undercurrent to his voice.
She met his eyes then. “I promised I was yours. You made me swear it. I didn’t make plans.”
Anger darkened his face. “Surely there’s something you’re looking forward to now.”
She reached out, her fingers brushing over his heart. “No. I’m—spent.”
As she stood, she thought of Luc standing on the top of the Alchemy Tower, so close to the edge. She hadn’t understood why he’d gone there. How she and everyone else who needed him weren’t enough to hold him back, but now that edge called her, the abyss that would open once she’d split across the marble.
The air swam, her eyes struggling to focus because all she could hear was the drumbeat of her heart inside her skull.
Everyone who touches you dies.
“What do they want?” His voice was almost a whisper.
She looked back. “What?”
“Is it—actual crawling? Or was there something more constructive Ilva had in mind?”
Her throat closed. “I—I’d have to ask.”
“Find out. I’ll do it.” He looked exhausted, but now there was an edge of something seething in him.
“Are you really offering?” she asked, certain it was a trick.
He gave no response.
“Why are you offering?” Her voice rose, a note of hysteria in it.
He looked up at her a moment. “I realised just now that I’d miscalculated something. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d made you marketable.”
The words thudded against her chest. “Oh.”
Apparently, Crowther was right after all. The Ferrons were possessive enough to eat themselves alive before they’d let go of anything they considered theirs.
“I’ll bring an answer back,” she said.
He gave a short nod and looked away from her, saying nothing else as she went and pulled on her cloak, using it to hide her ripped clothes. She slung her satchel over her shoulder.
His hand twitched as she reached the door, but when she glanced back one last time, he’d looked away, still leaning against the wall, staring across the room, so pale he could have been a ghost.
She walked out of the tenement into a downpour of rain. She stood beneath it, trying to gain her bearings, drawing rapid breaths. She was on a precipice; she could still feel that edge, the plunge if she misstepped.
She kept her hood pulled up at the checkpoint, but she was familiar enough that they waved her through without being thorough. A security failure, but she was grateful for it. She split from her usual route, heading to the drop point. She couldn’t show up at Headquarters like this.
As she neared it, signs of the war began to appear, as they did in every part of the city below Headquarters. The walls were scorched and distorted from combat.
The drop-point safe house was little more than a sub-basement storage room.
