Page 362 of Alchemised
Even if her death was quick, Kaine’s punishment for his betrayal would be eternal. Or else they’d use her, just as they had his mother.
It would be everything he’d feared.
If they found him in her memory.
If.
She had to push him away, like she had pushed away the memory of—
Soren.
She would redirect her thoughts, transmute her memories until her mind stopped running to him. She couldn’t confess to something she didn’t remember.
She pressed her hands against her temples, wincing as she moved her right hand. The bones were repaired, but the tissue damage and bruising remained. The nullium in the manacles hummed, blurring her resonance, but suppression like that was imperfect.
She still had her resonance, though it wasn’t as powerful. But she didn’t need power; she needed precision and patience. She closed her eyes, using that feeble strain of resonance on her own consciousness. After spending so much time navigating the minds of others, it was easy to manipulate her own mind—no reaction, no resistance.
The last two years of her life, she pushed down beneath the surface as if to drown them. There was no other way. Kaine was almost everything now.
Without him, there was just emptiness. Her routines. Hours and days in the hospital that bled together, years of an unending nightmare.
Alone. Everyone dead. Because they always died. She tried to save them, but in the end, they always died. Her life was a graveyard.
Where there was space she couldn’t reconcile, she filled it with Luc. Not his death, not Luc from the war; the Luc she’d promised to save.
The version of him he’d tried to be. The Luc who’d always believed in her.
It was the way he deserved to be remembered.
She was lost in her own mind when the lorry pulled into a warehouse. An old slaughterhouse with meat hooks overhead and metal tables everywhere, and a cement floor that could be easily sprayed down to wash away the blood. The other prisoners began to panic, jostling her from her thoughts.
“They’re not going to kill us yet,” Helena said, her voice raw. “They’re putting us in stasis. To keep us fresh.”
They were pulled out, one by one, and injected with something.
The process was horrifyingly well synchronised. Rote. As the prisoners went limp, they were hoisted onto long tables, side by side. A guard went down the line stripping their clothes off.
A few tried to fight. One boy got kicked in the gut for his efforts before the needle went into his neck. He called out for his mother, for Sol, for Luc.
The woman—Mandl, her mind belatedly supplied—stood observing, and when Helena was pulled out, she waved her towards the far end of the warehouse. “Put her over there. I’ll deal with her personally.”
A needle sank into the side of Helena’s neck. It was thick, the dose of paralytic unnecessarily large.
Her muscles went numb, but not her sensory nerves. She could feel things, just not move.
Mandl’s face appeared above her, a satisfied smile on her lips, eyes skimming from head to toe. “You think you know what’s about to happen to you, don’t you?”
Helena lay there as Mandl pulled her hair out of the way and placed something adhesive at the base of her neck, over her spine.
“This is to keep your muscles in order.”
An electric pulse caused Helena’s body to seize, muscles contracting and releasing several times.
Mandl’s fingers trailed across Helena’s cold skin, seeming to tremble with excitement. Needles with tubes sank into her arms.
“Pity about Bennet,” Mandl said. “I always found his ideas inspirational. If he got you, he’d keep you alive for ages if I asked. Interrogations are so quick, and you’ll be completely spoiled after that.”
She placed a mask over Helena’s face that stretched from above her eyebrows all the way down over her chin. There was some kind of adhesive that sealed it against her skin. It was transparent enough that Helena could just barely see through it and watch as Mandl picked up a large syringe with a pale-blue liquid inside. “This would put you in a nice little coma. Bennet said it’s like making meat tender by keeping the pigs calm before slaughter.”
