Page 133 of Alchemised
Helena sat stunned. “I’ve never used my vivimancy to—”
“But you could, couldn’t you?” His face hardened, dark eyes narrowing. This was the point of the conversation, the destination he’d been leading her to the whole time. “Your job, Marino, is to use any means necessary to bring Ferron to his knees. You will use those cursed abilities of yours to make him forget he ever wanted anything but you.”
Her throat closed, her face burning. “I don’t think that’s even possible—”
“Then make it possible. Or are you just the compliant lamb that Ilva sees you as?”
Helena flinched.
“If you only want to be a victim, then by all means, go. Or you can do things my way, and Kaine Ferron will not be your owner, he’ll be your target, and your job will be to get as much information out of him as possible until it is we who have no more need of him.” He gave a thin smile. “The choice is yours.”
WHEN CROWTHER FINALLY LET HER leave, Helena felt as drained as if she’d just pulled another three-day hospital shift. He told her he’d “send word” when he had a date and location for the first liaison, and until then she was to behave as usual.
She went to the library archives and found old copies of the newspapers that had been printed after Principate Apollo’s assassination. There’d been a picture of Ferron included. His student portrait, taken only a week before.
She stared at the boy in the black-and-white photograph.
He was in his student uniform, the crisp white collar that kept the chin up, and the pins on his jacket with his guild sigils, iron and steel. Guild students only ever wore their guild metals, while Helena had been required to wear a sash with pins for all the metals she was ranked as competent in, as if she didn’t already stick out enough.
He had dark hair but pale Northern skin and eyes, and his expression was tense with just a hint of prideful defiance in it, as if he’d known then what the photo would be used for.
She studied him, memorising the details, trying to imagine what he’d be like now, more than five years later.
When she ran out of newspapers to read, she checked out several medical textbooks, as well as studies and theories on human behaviour and the mind.
She couldn’t find a reason why she wouldn’t be able to emotionally and physically enthral him with vivimancy the way Crowther wanted, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was doable. Only theoretically possible.
It couldn’t be anything too overt, only enough to alter the heart rate and stimulate certain hormones and reactions to stimuli until there was an ingrained physiological response. Using vivimancy would simply be taking a shortcut in old behavioural experiments.
Helena knew from years of healing that most people couldn’t tell when resonance was being used on them unless the manipulation was overt. That was part of what made people so afraid of vivimancers: the idea that something could be done without their knowledge.
But if Ferron ever suspected it, he’d kill her in a heartbeat.
Which meant it would be a gradual process, requiring her to know Ferron intimately, to be able to read his body and emotions. The feelings she evoked would have to seem natural. Subtle as poison until he was too far gone for a cure.
CHAPTER 25
Februa 1786
THE LIAISON POINT SELECTED WAS ON THE factory Outpost north of Headquarters. The Outpost was a huge satellite structure built in the river just below the hydroelectric dam, erected atop enormous pillars that held it above even the highest storm floods, but near enough to benefit directly from the electricity generated there.
The factories there had been shuttered by the war, and the Outpost decimated by both sides during early attempts to control it for potential weapons manufacturing. There’d been such massive and extensive destruction, it was eventually rendered virtually defunct. Once in ruins, it wasn’t strategic enough for either side to prioritise holding it, and since disputing the territory further could have endangered the dam, it was mutually abandoned.
Neither side wanted Paladia without electricity, or waist-deep in water.
Even before the war, Helena had considered the Outpost one of the ugliest things she’d ever seen, a brutal black stain on a picturesque landscape. In addition to being an eyesore, the Outpost had filled the skies with black smoke, poisoned the water, and left vile bogs of foul sludge throughout the wetlands that flooded into the water slums and low districts during Ascendance.
She’d never gone anywhere near it.
In the late evening on the designated day, she changed out of her uniform, leaving all her possessions carefully packed in her trunk, including the sunstone amulet. She hadn’t worn it since the meeting, the mere sight of it making her feel sick.
She dressed in civilian clothes that were as nondescript as possible. With her hood pulled up, hiding how dark her hair was, she was hardly memorable. Just a person trying to stay out of the war’s path. The Undying didn’t usually bother civilians; they preferred Resistance soldiers as their necrothralls because they came armed and trained to fight.
The route was relatively simple. She only had to walk north from Headquarters and cross the bridge to the mainland. Because the northern tip of the island was built on the plateau, she didn’t have to navigate through the various levels of the city. The roadway gate was closed. The guards stationed at the pedestrian door checked the papers and identification Crowther had provided and let her through.
The river swirled below, not even flood season yet, just all the water from the mountain storms.
She reached the mainland and followed the road to the dam, then took a second bridge across the water to the Outpost. She was startled by the number of people there. Because the facility was abandoned, many of the poorer civilians who weren’t alchemists and were afraid to ally with either side had fled there: The Outpost was the only place removed from the fighting that didn’t require enduring the winter brutality of the mountains.
