Page 53 of Alchemised
WHEN SHE WOKE AGAIN, SHE did remember, and she was screaming. Her mind was aflame with fever. She veered in and out of lucidity. Sometimes remembering transference, other times lost and confused.
Run away.
She was supposed to run away, to go somewhere. But she needed—something.
She wouldn’t go without it.
In the middle of the night, she wandered outside into the courtyard, icy rain pouring from the sky, searching. She lay on the ground, trying to make her head cool from the fire raging inside it. If her mind were cool, she’d remember what she was looking for.
“What are you doing? You’re freezing yourself to death, you idiot.” Ferron carried her inside.
Her skin was so cold that even the servants’ dead hands burned as they stripped off her wet clothes.
When they finally left her, she tried to get back out, but the door and windows were locked fast. Eventually they bound her to the bed so she would stop clawing her fingers raw on the door, trying to escape.
She was left, trapped, forced to endure the lurid, blood-drenched nightmares as she burned away.
Every time she closed her eyes she was at the Institute, bright and golden and gleaming as it had once been, hurrying up the Tower steps for a class, her textbooks pressed tight against her chest, Luc ambling beside her. There was someone else with them, but even her dreams flinched away from the face.
Then Helena would blink or look down to take notes, and when she looked again, the world would be in ruins. All the students slumped over in their seats, cut open, their blood spattered across the room. Helena the lone survivor amid the carnage.
In one dream, Penny was laid out on a medical table, strapped down and screaming as faceless figures vivisected her before the assembly of dead students.
In another, it was Ferron at the front of the room as if called up for a demonstration. He stood there, morphing steadily from a dark-haired boy into a pale silvery nightmare, his colour turning into blood that dripped from his hands.
When the fever broke, Helena’s limbs had atrophied again. She had no idea how much time had passed. She stumbled and trembled like a kitten when she walked. It was as if the synapses in her brain were misaligned.
She was grateful that Ferron did not come and harass her about going outside. She didn’t want to see him again because she had a very clear memory of pressing her face against his hand without any idea of who he was.
In charge of her care? A very generous way of describing himself.
She paused, replaying the interaction. His slow enunciation as he’d answered her question. She’d been speaking in Etrasian.
As she recovered, she kept having dreams about Luc, memories. Not forgotten ones but moments from the past that made her chest ache at their recollection.
“Come on,” Luc whispered after finding her studying in the library, “you’ve been in here for two days. You’re going to start growing mushrooms out of your ears.” He tugged one of them teasingly. “You need sunshine. I need sunshine.”
“I need to finish analysing this array structure,” she hissed, trying to elbow him away as he began stealing her pens. “Go away.”
Luc never went away no matter how she threatened him. He’d mope and sulk, making progressively more and more noise until the librarians ordered Helena to take him outside, as though the next Principate were a recalcitrant pet.
When they were older and she’d started doing lab work, he couldn’t just make noise to disrupt her, so instead he’d threaten to go off and get into trouble, and hadn’t she promised his father to keep him out of trouble?
They would go into the city, and he’d show her all the best places. The prettiest fire chapels and immense perihelion cathedrals, hidden water gardens, little bookstores and cafés.
All the towers and gardens and views of Paladia that she had ever loved, she had known because Luc had shown them to her. She had loved the city through his eyes. She wished she’d given in more often.
When Helena finally managed to leave her room again, her mind played tricks on her. The house seemed wrong somehow, different from what she remembered. The light was from the wrong angles, the windows in the wrong places, doors where they shouldn’t be.
“The brain inflammation is much better this time,” Stroud said when she came to examine Helena. Her resonance was moving beneath the surface of Helena’s skull like a worm. “I don’t like that you had a seizure again, but only one is an improvement. I think a monthly schedule will be about right.”
Stroud was barely gone when Ferron arrived and stood at the foot of her bed, hands clasped behind his back, studying her through languid eyes.
“Did you know it’s nearly solstice?” he said at last.
No. She had no idea of the date. She knew there was a month between transference sessions, but she hadn’t been sure of when she’d arrived.
The winter solstice marked the end of the year in the North. It was one of the most significant events of their calendar. Southern coastal countries, where the days did not ebb and grow so dramatically, tracked the year by Lumithia’s lunar tides.
