Page 250 of Alchemised
“Soren too? Or just Lila?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t tried him. We just got them in. She’s bleeding out, and I can’t feel anything!”
“Check Soren,” Helena said. “I need medics for Lila, and Pace. Tell her I need her now.”
She moved next to Lila. The neck was one of the few openings in her armour if her helmet had been off. Her blood was soaking the bed. She’d been hooked up to an intravenous drip with plasma expanders, but it wouldn’t do any good if they couldn’t get her to stop bleeding.
Lila’s head was lolled back. She was still conscious, muttering under her breath, over and over. “… told him—to run. I—told him—t-to run—”
Helena reached out with her resonance and felt the horribly familiar disruption of nullium.
She’d hoped to be wrong. That Elain was just hysterical. Or even burned out.
Anything but this.
The nullium was much stronger than the shrapnel Helena had retrieved from Kaine. Altered in some way to intensify the effect.
She tried to at least get a vague sense of the size of what had been driven into Lila’s chest cavity. Trying to determine if there was a risk of puncturing her heart if they put pressure on the wound. It was like peering through fog. Her hands felt as though they were asleep, needlepoints pricking across her nerves as she tried to search for the most intense sense of dissonance.
It was long and slender. It had likely pierced her lung, possibly grazed her heart, but it was hard to tell.
This was so much worse than she and Shiseo had been prepared for.
“What is it?” Pace appeared at her side.
Helena was pressing gauze over the wound, trying to keep it from bleeding more. Lila had gone silent.
“It’s nullium. She’s going to need manual surgery to get it out. Maier isn’t trained, but you were in the hospitals, back when they still used it, right?”
Pace went very white. “It’s been a long time. I only assisted.”
Helena drew a harsh breath. She couldn’t disclose her own surgical experience with nullium. “I—used to help my father, sometimes. If you’ll lead, and I keep her stable, then maybe. Is Soren—?”
She was afraid to know if Soren had nullium injuries. If she and Pace had to choose which twin to save, protocol dictated that the person with better odds of survival should receive priority, but as paladin primary, Lila had priority.
“The others can heal him,” Pace said. “He took a bad blow to the head, but it’s nothing Elain can’t manage.”
Helena closed her eyes as she fought to stay calm, trying to will Lila to survive, because this time she could not make her do it.
“Move her into the operating theatre,” Pace said. “I’m sure Maier will help as much as he can. We’ll need medics and nurses for support. I’ll brief them. You keep her stable.”
It had been only a handful of times that Helena had assisted her father with surgery. Before the massacre.
Observant with a good head in a crisis, he’d said. But that was a long time ago.
Handing over surgical instruments was very different from performing surgery without resonance. No one was prepared. The nullium they’d been familiar with only interfered when they worked with it directly. This was much more diffuse.
When Lila was sedated, Matron Pace used a long pair of clamps to reach into the puncture just above Lila’s collarbone and pull out a long, rusting spike. It was fragile, degrading already due to the unstable fusion. Shards kept breaking off, forcing Pace to reach in over and over, removing them piece by piece.
Helena could feel through her resonance that even with the bulk of the spike removed, there were shards dissolving into Lila’s blood. The nullium was spreading through her body like a fog, thicker and more impenetrable with every passing moment.
The fragility of the nullium was both a gift and a curse. It had taken the path of least resistance. There was a small puncture in Lila’s lung, but her heart was not damaged, nor her oesophagus. It had stayed within the cavity. But the pieces were everywhere, and the alloy was so unstable that it was rapidly dissolving.
Pace wiped her forehead with a cloth. “We’re going to need to do a thoracotomy to get the pieces out. Is she stable enough?”
An alchemical surgeon like Maier could normally perform a thoracotomy without needing to open a patient. It only needed incisions large enough to get slender tools inside; with training and resonance, their instruments were an extension of their fingers and senses.
Helena held back her resonance, using ordinary touch to check Lila’s vital signs, because it was easier than trying to parse all the interference. “She’s holding on.”
