Page 352 of Alchemised
His jaw went tense. “It’ll have to be two trips.”
She nodded vaguely and went to him, noticing the way he leaned towards her without seeming to be aware of it.
She stopped short and lowered her voice. “You should take Lila, before she wakes.”
He drew up. “You want me to go?”
Her expression twisted bitterly. “Well, there’s no point in teaching you any of this, is there?” She lifted a shoulder. “I just thought—if you took her first, maybe we’ll have some time to say goodbye when it’s my turn. But maybe that doesn’t matter.”
She turned away, grateful that she was so drugged, she could finally lie without effort. She could feel Kaine’s eyes on her as she found a stack of thick, high-quality paper in the desk drawer and searched for a pen.
Helena’s heart was pounding, a slow drumbeat of dread as she sat and began to write, slowly and methodically, not looking at him again.
“When I get back, you’ll go, whether or not you’re ready.”
Helena’s heart was in her throat. It took a moment to speak.
“Fine.” She didn’t dare look up.
She watched from the corner of her eye as he went over and hauled Lila up.
He stopped at the doorway and looked back at her. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t leave this room.”
Helena’s throat tightened. She looked over, and her lips parted, to say—
To say—
She looked back down to the paper in front of her. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
The door shut and she didn’t move, expecting it to burst open again. There was a long silence before she finally looked up.
“How did he bring you here?” she asked Shiseo, pressing her hand against the side of her neck and trying to alleviate all the tampering in her body enough to think coherently.
“There was a motorcar. He took it underground. He had a special card that let us through, and we came up in a long lift.”
She turned and went over the box of supplies Shiseo had brought, sorting them as quickly as she could, laying them all out in the small kitchen. She had to work in rushed spurts to stay ahead of the sedative. Taking an etching sheet, she hastily began sketching an array to stabilise her component construction.
“He said you needed me,” Shiseo said after several minutes.
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Helena said, her fingers quickly shaping the various metal bars into a multitude of spheres. “I just needed an excuse so he’d leave and bring me these supplies. I imagine he told you, we lost. Luc’s dead. You should get to Novis, you’ll be safe there.”
Shiseo seemed unconcerned. “What are you doing?”
She paused. “I’m building a bomb. I need to blow up a laboratory.”
There was a long silence. “We used the Athanor components already.”
Helena twitched one shoulder as she began divvying up materials, calculating how much she had. Not enough. She scrounged through the kitchen cupboards and found a bag of flour.
“This is going to be a different kind of bomb,” she said. “It’ll still use some obsidian, but I’m using a different pyromancy principle for this. Luc’s books always warned about using pyromancy in enclosed spaces, because if the flames consume all the oxygen, it creates a vacuum. Obviously, I’m not a pyromancer, but when I was little, there was a mill fire. The flour in the air caught fire, and it burned down the entire building.”
She paused, using her resonance to stall the effects of the sedative again before measuring carbon disulfide into sealed spheres, careful to keep from inhaling any.
Her hands had to be steady, her focus razor-sharp.
“You will burn down a lab?”
She nodded. “The West Port Lab. Do you remember Vanya Gettlich? The woman with nullium in her blood? That was West Port’s doing. If I burn it down, they won’t realise that Kaine rescued Lila. If they think she died in a fire, they won’t look for her. And it’ll be—” She swallowed hard. “It’ll be a quicker death for everyone inside than what will happen to them otherwise.” She pressed her hand against her head again, clearing it, and then nodded him away. “You should go. You won’t want to be here when Kaine gets back, and if I get any of this wrong, I might blow up this building instead.”
