Page 164 of Alchemised
Helena had no opportunity to more than register her despairing guilt as the fallout of the battle filled the hospital. She had to work.
Your fault. You should have known. Ferron’s a monster. A born traitor, just like his father. She had never done so much healing, working in such a frenzy that the amulet around her neck almost burned against her skin. Two of the trainee healers collapsed, their resonance shot from burnout.
It was more than a day before someone told her they hadn’t lost. The attack was not a failure but a spectacular success. The Resistance had the ports; they’d retaken most of the East Island. Battles were still raging in the south-west corner, but they expected to retake the entire island.
Even once it was confirmed, Helena still barely believed it. The injuries just kept coming.
The Resistance found prisons filled with dissidents. One of the largest buildings near the ports had been a laboratory. The Resistance brought back lorries filled with medical supplies and tools that Helena had not laid eyes on in years. Real anaesthetic and antiseptics. Cases upon cases of opium resin. Gauze and fresh bandages.
But the elation that filled the hospital as all the supplies poured in vanished as the victims from the laboratory began to arrive. Medics and nurses who’d worked unflinchingly for years had breakdowns over the victims and had to be excused.
The laboratory had not only been making chimaeras with animals. The victims arriving were nearly unrecognisable, experimented on in ways that defied reason. Bodies methodically dismembered and reassembled. There were so many.
Attempts to treat them fell to Helena. The surgeons were at a loss, and the trainees couldn’t take it. There was nothing Helena could do, either. No matter what she tried, they all died.
For their combat forces, the Retaking was over quickly. What the Undying had spent years slowly carving into, recovered in one coordinated sweep. It was regarded as a military triumph for the ages.
For the hospital it was an unending nightmare.
Reports that Morrough had returned were followed by rumours of extreme upheaval among the ranks as blame fell. Then came the counterattacks and attempts to retake the ports.
It took weeks before things finally calmed, the hospital shifts slowly resumed the normal rotation, and more trainee healers were brought in. Crowther and Ilva somehow knew exactly who possessed the latent resonance for it, even when the girls themselves did not.
Helena was so exhausted by the end that she could barely talk for several days. As if she’d forgotten how to be human anymore.
Pace kicked her out of the hospital when she found her in the supply room, mechanically taking inventory, saying that barring an emergency Helena was not to come back for four days at least.
Helena didn’t know what to do but resume her old schedule, and so when Martiday arrived, she rose with the dawn, took her satchel, and went out of the city. The spring flooding had ebbed, and the wetlands had come into bloom.
There were flurries of insects dancing in swarms, light glistening on their wings. Sun limned the eastern stretch of the mountains, turning their ridges gold. The wind no longer rattled the dead reeds but whispered through marsh grass. The air was filled with warbling birdcalls. The wetlands were lush with new growth, brimming with life. Helena could have harvested for hours and still left plenty behind. She took only what she thought was most valuable before she washed her hands in an alga-green pond and headed to the Outpost.
She’d barely had time to think about Ferron, but she figured she should at least check and see if he’d left any messages. She’d received no instructions from Crowther since the attack.
She caught sight of him the instant the door opened. He was leaning his hip against the table. His shoulders were stooped, arms hanging limply at his sides.
“You look awful,” he said as she came through the door.
She stopped short. “You look worse.”
He gave a strained laugh. “Do I?”
She was too shocked to reply.
His face had grown gaunt, as if he’d lost almost all his remaining weight, the bones of his skull jutting starkly through his skin.
He looked—
—like a corpse.
Her heart lurched into her throat.
His skin was grey and papery, eyes sunken. His dark hair hung limp around his face. Dirty and uncombed.
He didn’t appear to have eaten, slept, or bathed in all the weeks since Helena had last seen him.
“Are you—are you a—are you dead?” she forced herself to ask. Could he be killed and then made into a lich using his own body? Was that possible?
He cracked a smile that made his lower lip split, a trickle of red blood running down his chin. It healed instantly. “You’d think that, wouldn’t you? No. Still—alive.”
