Page 184 of Alchemised
Helena knew there were places underground. She’d been down here a few times to retrieve things from the storage rooms. The plateau where the Tower was built was stone and had been extensively excavated over the centuries. She had no idea why Crowther would bring her here.
He led the way, picking up an electric torch from a ledge, clicking it on, and wedging it into the space between where his body and his paralysed arm were strapped together so he could unlock a heavy door. Instead of revealing a room, it revealed a flight of stairs that led down into pitch blackness. The scent of mildew rose from the darkness.
Helena stalled. “Where are we going?”
“On occasion I have—special prisoners who require medical attention. Ivy doesn’t always possess the finesse needed. Come, Marino, show me how much effort you’re worth.”
HELENA DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT the Resistance’s prisoners, but she did know they weren’t supposed to be kept in what amounted to a hole underground. There were ruins beneath the Tower, tunnels and underground rooms, too elaborate to have been made just for Institute storage. Most of them had been transformed into cells filled with unfamiliar prisoners.
She also knew that burn injuries were common in the war, but combat pyromancy was a blunt weapon. It left large burns, not wounds targeted precisely at areas of the body with the highest concentrations of nerve endings.
The person would need to be restrained, and the pyromancer very experienced.
Helena lost track of how long she was down in the dark, eyes straining to pick out details from the unsteady sweep of Crowther’s electric torch that gave her only glimpses of filthy bodies and charred flesh. She healed by touch, reaching out and finding bodies in the darkness.
It felt criminal. Relief, but for what? Further atrocity?
She debrided, regenerated the tissue, closed the open sores, healed fractures, and found many hands with every bone meticulously broken.
Which threat was Crowther making by bringing her here?
“I’ll—I can have Ferron healed by next week,” she said in the lift afterwards, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She was cold all over, and the light hurt her eyes. Complicit. Complicit. Complicit. The word rang through her head. “I’ll get it done.”
Crowther said nothing, his thin, spider-like fingers tapping absently along his paralysed forearm.
She pressed on, speaking quickly. “He’s—I think he’s starting to regenerate normally again. The array will be difficult to work with, but I can do it. I think it could be an advantage in the long run. The injury has made him more emotionally vulnerable than he would have been otherwise.”
Crowther’s fingers stilled. “Don’t mistake that for loyalty.”
Dread shivered in her lungs.
“I don’t. I realise that it’s not necessarily leverage yet, but—the array affects him. He mentioned that it’s become harder to dissuade himself from what he wants. I can take advantage of that.”
“You’re deluding yourself.”
Why was he suddenly sceptical when this was the mission he’d given her?
He looked over. “Kaine Ferron remains the youngest of the Undying. In all this time, there has never been another so young.” He was standing near enough in the lift that she could see the metal fillings in his back molars as he spoke. “He should have been taken advantage of immediately—a boy of immense fortune, not yet a man, fatherless in a war. And yet he has climbed rank. He has no friends, no lovers, not even a particular whore he favours. He is calculating and mercurial and takes risks that anyone else would consider insane.”
“I kno—”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d realise the error in your strategy. He is not a person, he’s not human, and you are not creating a relationship of trust with him. He is an animal.”
Helena stared at Crowther in bewilderment. The lift stopped, the doors opened, and she almost tripped stepping out. “But you told me to—”
“I told you to use vivimancy,” Crowther snarled. “And instead, you offered endless excuses about needing the right opportunities, that it would be too obvious, and now you think the array, this injury, is the solution to your failures.”
“You said to take priority over his original goals. I’m doing that.”
Crowther’s eyebrows dipped into a sharp frown, and he seized her by the elbow and dragged her towards his office, not answering until they were behind closed doors.
“I told you to enthral him with vivimancy.” Crowther’s voice had grown icy. “What you are doing is making him depend on you, to consider you someone he needs. That is entirely different. Can you turn this array off? Control the intensity of its effect? No, you cannot. I did not ask for something irreversible, I asked for a vivimancy-controlled obsession.”
“Well, that’s not how vivimancy works,” she snapped back. “You can’t just turn human emotions on or off, not in a way that gives you the kind of leverage you’re wanting. It’s not magic.”
He glared at her as he seated himself at his desk. “I have no use for tools I cannot control. If you manage to succeed in this manner, you’re more likely to destroy the Eternal Flame than save it. The Ferron family is fuelled by their ambitions. They have always resented the noble families. Now Paladia is built with their steel, and they think that means it belongs to them, whether to seize or ruin. They do not share. They are obsessive about what they regard to be theirs. You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone.”
Terror ran through Helena like a knife, but she squared her shoulders, meeting Crowther’s glare, refusing to back down because she had nowhere to go. Her every bridge was burned. He’d seen to that.
