Page 4 of Alchemised
Helena flinched.
“See? You do understand me.”
Her stomach shrivelled, but she locked her jaw.
The woman stepped closer. Helena’s eyes strained to make her out. A squarish face with impatiently pursed lips. A medical uniform.
“Perhaps an example is in order.” The woman’s hand pressed against Helena’s neck. Helena gave a sharp gasp as burning-cold energy surged through her, towards her spine.
It wasn’t an electric jolt like in the tank; it burrowed from the woman’s hand and into Helena like a needle. The channel of energy sang through her like a tuning fork, until both resonated along the same wavelength.
The woman clenched her fingers. Pain burst through every nerve in Helena’s body. She gave a gasping, garbled scream, body seizing, hands wrenching at the cuffs.
“Be still.”
A flick and Helena went limp. She couldn’t feel anything below her chest. As if her spine were severed. Her blood roared in panic.
A wave of the woman’s hand, and the void of numbness vanished.
Soap-roughened fingers trailed dangerously along Helena’s arm.
“Understand now?”
The woman’s resonance was still running through her like a current, a visceral warning. Helena managed to nod shakily. She should have realised: The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
“I knew you’d catch on. Let’s try again.”
Helena’s throat grew thick, her eyes burning. Every nerve twinged, her blood roaring in her ears. What was the harm in answering?
“Where did you come from?”
“Wsss—th—w-housss—” Helena fought to make her tongue cooperate.
“None of that foreign nonsense. Speak Paladian,” the woman said sharply.
There was no such thing as a Paladian language; the woman was speaking in Northern dialect. Helena wanted to tell her that but didn’t think it would help. She swallowed and tried again, but her tongue slurred everything together.
The woman sighed. “Why do you Resistance fighters always waste my time? Perhaps if we jolt your brain, you’ll remember how to speak a proper language.”
She gripped Helena’s head this time. A wave of resonance surged through from both sides like cymbals slammed together.
Everything went red. The scream wrenched from Helena’s throat was animal.
The hands were snatched back. “What on earth?”
Helena wasn’t sure if the woman was running in circles overhead or if the room was spinning.
“What is this? Who did this to you?”
Helena stared dazedly up as the red faded from her vision. Her hands were twitching and spasming, convulsively jerking against the chains. She didn’t know what the questions meant.
“Something has been done to your mind,” the woman said, sounding bewildered but also strangely excited. “Some kind of transmutation. I have never encountered anything like it. I’m going to have to report this. I’ll need a specialist. You have—” The woman paused. “There’s no name for this! I’ll have to come up with a name …”
She seemed to be talking mostly to herself. “Transmutational barriers inside a brain. How is that possible? I have never—there are—patterns in it.”
She touched Helena again. Helena flinched, but the resonance was not for torture this time, just a frisson of energy through her brain that turned everything luridly red again.
“This is elaborate, beautiful, professional work. A vivimancer manually rewiring the human consciousness.”
