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“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said. “A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers. As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that part of the universe does.” She smiled at him. “Doesn’t that make it all a little brighter?”
She pulled free. “Be careful, Kaine. Don’t die.”
This was because she was a necromancer now.
“What were you supposed to do?” he repeated slowly, standing. “You were supposed to stay in Headquarters. You have one job, Marino, and that is to stay alive and intact so that Ferron can have his weekly proof of life. But it seems I have expected too much of your skills of deduction,
so let me be crystal-clear: Unless you are liaising, you will not set foot outside of Headquarters ever again. The only reason I am not having you thrown in prison to stand trial for necromancy is because you now exist to keep Ferron in line.” Helena’s throat closed. “It was your plan. I was working with what I had.” Crowther’s eyes bulged. “My plan?” “It was your informant from the hospital who gave Soren all the information. Where else would Purnell—” Before she could finish the question, the door burst open, and a boy flew into the room.
“I would strongly advise keeping yourself alive, Marino.”
“Morrough had made a deal with the militocrats. He was trying to find a way of controlling the power of life. He said that mastering it, harvesting it, was the key to immortality. He promised the leaders that he’d teach it to them if they provided him with the materials to test it, but the prisoners”—Wagner shrugged—“were resistant. They didn’t want to cooperate. They knew they would die.”
Orion’s victory against the Necromancer. “It was my idea that solved it.” Wagner thumped his chest. “My father, he was a warden, so was my grandfather. Prison uprisings are a dangerous thing. There are prisons the size of towns. To keep order, it is important that the guards are not the enemy. Instead, you make the prisoners think their trouble is other prisoners, a different unit or sector. Those prisoners are the reason this prisoner has less; the rules they hate are those prisoners’ fault. By making privileges always at the expense of others, the prisoners forget who has made those rules.
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“He stopped trying to contain or bind the energy to himself. Instead he used another prisoner inside the array.” He spread his hands wide. “He had a strange alchemy. With his power, he pulled the energy out and bound them to the soul of a chosen prisoner. The other prisoner would suffer all the anger, and Morrough
“With his bones,” Wagner said, raising his eyebrows. “I saw it. He used his alchemy to contain all the souls inside pieces of his own bones. It was strange, but if a piece stayed with the prisoner in the array, they could not die, even if they tried. Then Morrough could keep the power.” The phylacteries. It was exactly what Kaine had described. “The souls of the others, they would feel that life, they would try to resist, but the prisoner could not be killed. Still…slowly their mind would—” Wagner touched the sides of his head, pulling invisible strings as though unravelling something. “Are
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The sacrificial victims were placed on the nine points. Morrough would open the chest cavity of the chosen recipient
prisoner and place a piece of one of his own bones inside as the final component of the array. After somehow tethering their life force to that bone, he would activate the array. The array created a pull so terrible that the sacrifices shrivelled into husks, stripped of life until it was drawn into the recipient, trapping their soul beneath the layers and layers of the others, like an insect trapped in a spiderweb. Morrough would cut off a shard of the bone, coat it in lumithium, and leave it inside the prisoner’s body. Then he’d place the rest back inside his own. The information fell in line
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“He was a selfish man. The lives of others were, to him, a resource. I am no fool. When it was a success, I ran. I knew he would try to find me someday. He would not share credit in his great discovery. I thought
“How are all the Undying able to use necromancy?” she asked. Hotten translated the question. “Accident,” Wagner said with a barking laugh. “He never knew why.”
But when Ilva and Althorne went with Crowther for a follow-up interrogation, Wagner was found dead, hacked to bits by the reanimated corpses of the two guards stationed outside his cell. The remains had been assembled to read: Crowther Next. Luc was still in the hospital, under constant watch.
that word. She swallowed hard. “If one person’s actions are enough to damn everyone, then the gods are terrible, and Sol is the worst of all.”
remember when you first came here. We were in the same dorm. You said that Paladia was the most beautiful place in the whole world. The Shining City, you called it. You said that in Etras people didn’t really believe in the gods, but here in the North, you understood why they did, because how else could a place be so beautiful. Don’t you remember that?”
What they’ll do to us if we lose will be far worse than death.” She shook her head. “There will be nothing purifying about it.”
Whenever she thought of him, she felt as though a piece of her was missing. The war had drilled itself into her bones, carving away at her until there was hardly anything left except what made her useful, an ideal component in an elaborate machine, but Kaine had reminded her that she was human; that not every trait and ability and quality she possessed only mattered insomuch as it was useful to someone else. That she was allowed to breathe sometimes. Now, in his absence, she felt herself suffocating.
She’d never heard a necrothrall speak. Motor function was one thing, but reanimation of the language parts of the brain was too much. Necrothralls didn’t talk. They never talked.
Her chest tightened as she thought about those rooms underground where Crowther had taken her so many times now. The blood. The burns, the flayed body parts, tangled nerves, split open and twisted apart in horrible, terrifying ways. Helena’s name was beside Crowther’s in those prisoner logs. Her handwriting cataloguing in clinical terms the injuries she’d healed, the condition of the prisoners when they died or were placed into those horrible underground cells. She knew it was intentional on Crowther’s part, having her listed as the medical personnel on-site. Leverage.
“The Eternal Flame has recently obtained new information about the process that the Undying undergo to gain their immutability. I was asked to question you about the details. To verify the information.”
“Call me, and I will come.”
“You’re mine. You’re mine.” He’d repeat the words over and over. “Say it. Say you’re mine.”
“I promise, Kaine. I’m always going to be yours.”
“Be careful.” It was always the last thing she said to him before he left her on some rooftop. She would hold his face in her hands, staring into his eyes. “Don’t die.”
“You’re mine. I’ll always come for you.” He always did.
“I’m going to take care of you. I swear, Helena, I’m always going to take care of you.”
me to run away from the war.” His lip curled. “Why not? Haven’t you done enough for them? They sold you. What if I’d—” His voice cut off, and he couldn’t meet her eyes. “What if you’d had the same offer from someone who’d meant it. You would have still gone—and if I hadn’t trained you, you would have died rescuing Holdfast.”
We don’t get to choose when we’ve done enough and leave others behind to bear the consequences. There are no civilians in a war like this. If they win”—she spread her hands—“everyone loses.”
“I’m going to take care of you. I swear, I’m always going to take care of you.”
Shiseo designed a nullium cuff to create targeted resonance suppression, locking around the wrist to blur the resonance into a feeling like static.
Helena tested it, locking one around her own wrist, flexing her fingers, sliding it up her arm. When it was near her elbow, she could push through the interference. She shook her head. “These don’t fully suppress the resonance.”
“If we really wanted to completely erase it, I think it would have to be internal,” she said. “If the nullium were encased in ceramic, that would prevent the corrosion and biointerference. If you put a thin tube of it right through the wrist here”—she pressed her fingers against the space between the radius and ulna—“the cuff could slot around a suppression spike and alchemically lock in place. I bet there wouldn’t be any resonance then.”
You’re killing him. You’re killing him. This is because of you.
finger, thinking about the array sketch Wagner had drawn. Nine points. Northern alchemy almost always used either five or eight, the elemental or celestial numbers. Those were the only array formulas even taught at the Institute, the exception being the Holdfasts’ pyromancy, which operated with a seven-point array, but Helena only knew of that because she’d helped Luc with his homework.
Lila Bayard, who so often came back from battles nearly unscathed, who always recovered miraculously from her injuries, who adapted to a prosthetic leg in months when everyone said it would be a year. Who had never struggled to recover from an injury until she lost her resonance.
“You’re a vivimancer,” Helena said.
Maier did it. Ligature, same week I got back. It was—it was one of the Falcon’s conditions. So, like I said, not pregnant.”
“You weren’t even seventeen. You’d barely lived enough to know what you wanted.” “I feel pretty alive right now,” Helena said through gritted teeth. “And I’m fine.” “Being alive is not the same as living. I hope someday you’ll have a chance to realise the difference.”
It was found filled with large tublike tanks of fluid with bodies inside, tubes connected to veins, and breathing masks fastened over the noses and mouths. Resistance fighters. All dead, but their bodies still warm.
“That’s enough, Mandl,”
“Why were you keeping prisoners in tanks like that?” Mandl tried to resist, but a memory flitted across her consciousness. A man in uniform was speaking: “—keep the best specimens…” Mandl’s attention in the memory wandered to a buzzing fly and everything went out of focus.
Rows of the bodies laid out on gurneys next to the tanks. A bloated corpse with yellowish eyes, grey discoloured skin. Squeezing the arm of a young man and saying, I’ll take this one next.
“It keeps them fresh.” “Fresh for what?” “Anything. New bodies for the Undying. Test subjects. Thralls. The thralls last longer when they’re new.” Mandl was panting openmouthed, her lips growing chapped. “How long are they kept there?” Mandl smiled cruelly. “There’s high demand, so usually not more than a few months. Electric shock keeps the muscle toned. We slow the vitals.”
“I’m so tired. Everything I do feels like I’m delaying the inevitable, saving someone one day so they’ll die in a worse way tomorrow. I wish I’d never become a healer.”
Get up. You have to get up.
She would not die. She would wait. Someone would come back and find her. Maier could operate. Shiseo would work night and day to find the right chelator, and she would make herself recover quickly.
She’d promised Kaine that she was safe, that nothing would happen to her. She could not die.
He was breathing unsteadily. “Crowther, with his endless demands, has the High Necromancer taking a myriad of precautionary measures. Only three people knew about that bombing before it happened. And I wasn’t one of them. When I got word, I thought I was being paranoid sending my thralls in. Surely, they’d understand that I can’t stop every fucking thing. This was for my peace of mind, I told myself. To see the fallout, so I’d know how bad things were. You wouldn’t be there, of course. I told myself you wouldn’t be there, you’d be safe in Headquarters, because that is the damned deal. Isn’t
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