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Ferron gripped her firmly by the shoulders. “Look at me. I need you to stay calm and tell me how to fix this. You know how to do it.”
She choked back a sob. Think, Helena. She was a healer. Someone had an injured eye. She needed to work efficiently if she was going to preserve their sight. Focus.
Ferron gripped her tighter, holding her firmly upright. “Come on. You know how you’d do it. Tell me.”
Ferron was ignorant of this. He placed his hand over hers, their fingers aligning, and she could dimly feel his resonance through her own fingertips before it cut off at her wrists. “Show me.”
Despite how small the wound was, it took ages. Ferron didn’t stop even when Helena’s fingers cramped and failed and fell away, the sensation leaving her ready to scream. “And now?” Ferron asked the moment it was finally over, not giving her even a moment’s respite. She drew a deep breath. “For—for a—a luxated eye,” she said in a voice far calmer than she felt, “you have to morph and retract it carefully or you’ll strain the optic nerve—more.”
“What else do I need to do? How do I fix it?” He gripped her shoulders, still not letting her slump.
“Good, we’re getting somewhere, then. Now what?” He wanted to do more?
“Did you think the thralls were the only things I can control from a distance? This is my house, and my family metal.”
Mic drop 🎤
“I’ve tried to be patient with you, Aurelia. I’ve been willing to overlook your indecent behaviour and petty interferences, but do remember, aside from being somewhat decorative, you are useless to me. If you ever go near her again, or speak to her, or so much as set foot in this wing again, I will kill you, and I will do it slowly, perhaps over the course of an evening or two. That isn’t a threat. It’s a promise. Now get out of my sight.”
Byeeeeee 👋🏼
“Yes, I remember Ferron,” she said, realising that Ilva was waiting for an answer. “Kaine Ferron has offered to spy for the Resistance,” said Crowther.
“He wants you, Marino,” Crowther said. “Both now and after the war.”
“There’s a mirrored entanglement in them. If I do anything to mine, you’ll feel it. I’ll transmute it to warm briefly if I need to meet. Twice if it’s urgent. I’d advise coming very quickly if it ever burns twice.” She inspected the ring. Mirrored entanglement was the way her call bracelet from the hospital worked. It was a form of transmutation that was incredibly rare. Few alchemists had the ability to manage it. It made the pieces very valuable, but they were only useful as long as the entangled pieces were accounted for.
Helena went very still. “I realised it when I was in there for my leg.” Lila’s gaze was faraway, eyebrows furrowing. “At the front—everything’s so focused, you know. The rules are simple. We win some. We lose some. You get hit sometimes. You hit back. You get days to recover if it’s bad. But—” She looked down, her fingers tapping absently along the place where her prosthetic was joined to her thigh. “—in the hospital, every battle looks like losing. I can’t imagine what that’s like.” She looked at Helena. “All you see in there is the worst of it.” Helena said nothing.
He gave a thin smile. “No. That was all.” She retrieved her satchel without a word, gingerly hooking an arm through the strap. She couldn’t get it up to her shoulder. Broken glass tinkled inside. She’d added an emergency kit after last week, thinking that if Ferron was ever hurt again, she would come prepared. The waste of medicine it represented was almost as painful as her ribs, and the broken glass and contents would have contaminated everything she’d foraged that day. Hours wasted.
“In the East, there is a rare metal found deep in the mountains. It is—rarer than gold. Only the Emperor himself is permitted to possess it. We called it mo’lian’shi. It—creates inertia.”
His expression grew mocking. “Don’t you think you’re worth it?” “Oh yes, your rose in a graveyard,” she said, lip curling. “Was the array for me, too?”
“Don’t die, Kaine,” she said. The line he walked frightened her. If the array was the punishment for a failure, what would the price of betrayal be?
A smirk twisted his mouth as he looked at her. “There are far worse fates than dying, Marino.”
“I know. But that one you don’t com...
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“All right, then, but only becaus...
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“You’ve mentioned that regeneration starts with the most vital parts of the body: brain, organs, limbs. When you lost your arm, the reason it didn’t regenerate was because you’d been bleeding too long, and you’d already had to heal from extensive burns. Just because you have the vitality to regenerate doesn’t mean that you necessarily have the physical resources for it. Those have to come from somewhere. If you’re badly injured, you might not have a resonance stable enough to heal yourself, but you can guide it, and the kit can provide support.”
“Eyes are awful. I mean, hopefully if you ever lost one, it would just grow back, but if not…” She exhaled. “The tissue doesn’t matrice the same way. It’s very tedious work, and nerve-racking. You should—probably come to me for that. Well, I mean—”
“They’re sized for you. Titanium and nickel is a mnemonic alloy, which will allow you to transmute them further than most weapons; they’ll still return to form. It has three memory shapes depending on the resonance phase you use, and you can alter them if you wish. That’s why the sheaths are malleable.”
“I must say, Marino, you’ve ended up being quite expensive.”
“If you can present Ferron on his knees, crawling, willing to do anything, within a month, I’ll let you keep him.” Then she shook her head. “But be honest with yourself. There’s no such thing as loyalty in his kind. The
“I just came because I was—worried about you.”
“I’m afraid that someday I’ll come, and you—you won’t be here.”
“I got worried, and I—didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You always have to come back,” she said. “All right? Don’t die. Promise—”
“Nothing! I just spent a lot of time making that medical kit for you, and I did spend an hour teaching you how t-to use it, so—I think it would be really ungrateful if you—d-died.”
The words ran through her like a knife through the chest. She’d thought for so long that she could do anything. For the war. For Luc. That she had it within her to pay any price. Now she’d found her limit.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said. “I thought there was an emergency. If you show up like this for no reason, you risk my cover. I have to guess whether or not I need to respond.”
It wasn’t until he’d told her about Blackthorne that she’d even begun to consider the magnitude of the risk Kaine was taking. Crowther and Ilva had kept her so focused on the danger that Kaine represented to them, she’d never considered the threat they were to him.
Don’t trust me. Don’t trust the Eternal Flame. We’re all liars.
Helena’s dread grew.
“I think I’ve nearly memorised you,” she said. “Especially your eyes. I think I learned to read them first.”
“I memorised yours, too,” he said after a moment, and then sighed, looking away. “I should have known—the moment I looked into your eyes, I should have known I would never win against you.”
She gave a small smile, struggling to stay awake, afraid it might all fade away if she did. “I’ve always thought my eyes were my best feature.” “One of them,” he said quietly.
Kaine Ferron was a dragon, like his family before him. Possessive to the point of self-annihilation. Isolated and deadly, and now he held her in his arms as if she were his. The temptation to give in, to let him have her, and to love him for it terrified her.
He was exacting. Determined to prove to her that this was where she belonged, to ensure that she could never deny what he made her feel.
In the moment his control slipped and his expression was laid bare again, there was no more heartbreak; he was possessive and triumphant. He pulled her close, crushing her to his chest. “You’re mine. You swore yourself to me. Now and after the war. I’m going to take care of you. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. You don’t have to be lonely. Because you’re mine.”
“Well, it’s mostly practical. Amaris flies better from the roof. She’s better at it now, but it used to be hard for her to get airborne.” “Amaris?” Helena repeated slowly. “The chimaera. You saw her last night.” She blinked at him, a memory of an impossibly enormous, winged wolf resurfacing. “I thought…I’d hallucinated.” He gave her a look. “I told you I was getting a chimaera.” “Well, yes, but I assumed it was something—smaller, and you never mentioned it again. I assumed it had died.” He shrugged. “Well, she was small at first. About the size of a foal when she arrived.” “What is she?”
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“When did you realise that I didn’t know you were supposed to die?” she asked rather than stand.
“The first time you arrived on the Outpost. I could tell by the way you looked, you thought it really was forever.”
“Speaking of dying, or rather, not dying…would you mind telling me why I haven’t?”
“It was a failed experiment. Bennet spent weeks trying to heal it, and everything he did made it worse. When it was finally deemed a failure, he tried to scrap my body, but the array was pulling so much energy from the talisman, he couldn’t touch it. He assumed that eventually the energy would run out, or my body would incinerate around it, so they sent me home, because they didn’t want the potential fallout to contaminate the new lab.
“Since my miraculous recovery, Bennet’s tried to repeat the experiment. Every subject has died, slowly and terribly, and Bennet cannot find any explanation for why I alone survived. You are the only person who has never questioned my survival, and I would like to know why.”
“The Stone of the Heavens,” she said.
“I didn’t know that’s what it was, and it’s not—really what the stories said. It was something made by the Necromancer, but Orion ended up with it, and people just assumed it was heaven-sent.”
