Page 8 of Alchemised
Helena looked at her, bewildered. “What do they want eyes for?”
Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. I just want the money.”
If she weren’t chained to the bed, Helena would have reached towards her.
“Grace, if you do this—that’s not ever going to be healable—”
Grace gave an abrupt, almost wild laugh. “I know eyes don’t grow back. That’s why the pay’s good.”
“Yes, but—”
“Why should I keep them?” Grace sounded nearly hysterical. “So I have two eyes to watch my brothers starve? There’s no food!” She wasn’t whispering anymore. The scars on her face reddened, growing stark. “You don’t know—you don’t have any idea what it’s like now. Where have you been? Why didn’t you save Luc? You were supposed to, but you didn’t. He died! We all watched it. And the Bayards are dead. And everyone in the Eternal Flame is dead—except you. And you think I should care about my eyes?”
Before Helena could answer, or Grace could say more, the sound of footsteps drew close.
Terror washed across Grace’s face, and she fled.
The curtains on Helena’s other side were shoved aside, and several figures filled the space. As one came towards the bed, Helena recognised her interrogator. The lines on the woman’s face were stark with tension.
Helena couldn’t make out the others behind her, but they were an unnatural grey that instantly made her skin crawl, the space within the curtains filling with the smell of preservatives.
“It’s this one,” the woman said. “Quite secure, as I assured you.” She glanced nervously towards the figures, which seemed to move as a collective.
Necrothralls. They were all necrothralls.
She looked at Helena. “The High Necromancer has sent for you. He wishes to watch your examination personally.”
Helena’s chest clenched, and she pulled against the restraints. “No.”
She couldn’t. She couldn’t see him again. The only time she’d ever seen the High Necromancer, Morrough, he’d killed Luc.
Luc, who’d been the whole world to her.
Helena had enlisted in the Resistance and sworn fealty to the Order of the Eternal Flame—not out of faith, but because of Luc Holdfast. Because she might not believe in the gods, but she had believed in him, that he was good and kind and cared about everyone.
She’d promised she’d do anything for him.
But he’d died before her eyes.
Her throat was closing. “No,” she said again as the bed jolted and began to roll, her captors paying her no mind.
It was at the lifts that Helena recognised her surroundings, realised what Central was. The murals and art had been scraped from the walls, the portraits and gilding all gone, leaving the interior brutal and raw, but she knew the intricate metalwork of the lift gate.
She’d seen it every day since she was ten.
She was in the Alchemy Tower. In the very heart of the Alchemy Institute that the Holdfasts had founded.
This was Central.
“What did you do?” Her voice shook with horror and grief. “What did you do?”
“Calm down,” the woman said through gritted teeth, glaring at Helena. She kept glancing at the necrothralls around them.
Helena couldn’t be calm. It was like coming home and finding all the comfort it had once offered torn apart, the beauty flensed, everything once familiar peeled off into ruin.
Helena had come halfway across the world to study in this Tower. Luc had been so proud of the Institute his family had built. It had been the heart of Paladia. She’d known it through his eyes, all the history and meaning of it. Now it was ravaged and mutilated.
The breadth of Luc’s loss was more than she could hold, but somehow she had the capacity to grieve this fragment of it. A sobbing, screaming moan tore from her.
