Page 202 of Alchemised
Her leg still ached when she walked on it, a side effect of not being able to heal herself for the several days it took for her resonance to return. Regenerated muscle took time to fully reintegrate, but the injury wasn’t anything permanent.
She navigated the Outpost cautiously, her knife gripped tightly in her hand, but she only saw a few necrothralls at a distance. No solitary necrothralls approached her with missives. She wondered if Kaine had gotten the memo about still using the Outpost.
She was about to leave when her ring burned. She headed for the tenement.
He was seated at the table, waiting, when she arrived. She’d grown so used to seeing him always straddling chairs, it was surprising to see him seated on one properly.
His eyes swept from head to toe, as if expecting her to be bleeding from somewhere again.
“I think it’s time I trained you,” he said as the door shut behind her.
She said nothing. She felt too many emotions to even begin to make sense of them all.
So he was back, no explanation for his month-long disappearance, while she’d been left to endure being written off as a failure and castigated for wasting critical resources on a gamble that had failed to pay off.
Crowther had been scathing, because although the missives had still arrived every four days, Kaine passed on only the information he chose to. They could not ask for anything. Everything they received was at his discretion, for only as long as he chose to provide it.
Relying on Kaine Ferron was like walking on black ice, knowing that at any moment it might break beneath their feet.
Her fingers curled into a fist, feeling the punctures in her palm, not trusting herself to speak.
He tilted his head back. His dark hair was threaded through with silver so that it almost gleamed. “How long have you been healing?”
She paused, calculating. “Little more than five years now.”
There was an almost charring intensity in the way he was looking at her. “I assume you’re aware of the Toll.”
She nodded.
“Have you burned out like that before?”
She shook her head. “No, it was the first time.” Her fingers bumped absently against her chest where the empty amulet hung beneath her clothes. “I used to—handle it better.”
“Well, that’s something at least.” He stood up. “How was it explained to you? I assume that Falcon or the Holdfasts told you about it.”
She looked away, staring out the window. “Vivimancy is a corruption of resonance that can use vitality as well as the energy of resonance. It’s caused when an unviable soul sustains itself by stealing life from another. Souls like that can only be purified through a life of self-sacrifice. The toll is—penance. It’s giving up what was stolen.”
His mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. “Right. You mentioned that your mother died when you were young.”
She nodded wordlessly, cold all over. She’d still been in shock from her father’s death when Ilva had her sent away to Matias, a Shrike at the time.
He had been the one to tell her that she was the reason both her parents were dead.
Her mother’s mysterious sickness, diagnosed as a kind of consumption, was the Toll. Not because her mother had been a vivimancer, but because from the moment of conception, Helena’s defective, corrupt self had leached her mother of life from within her womb, stealing all but those seven years away. That vivimancers were parasites by nature, and they would rot and burn in the bowels of the earth for an eternity if they did not repent and purify themselves by giving up every drop of the vitality they’d taken.
Just thinking about it made Helena’s head throb. All the years she’d spent hovering over her mother, watching her father attempt cure after cure, running them into debt buying expensive ingredients, and it was Helena who’d been the cause.
“So …” Ferron said slowly, moving idly towards her, “you use your vitality to save—anyone you’re told to save, as penance?”
She wished he’d stop talking.
“I want to show you something.” He was in front of her. “Give me your hand.”
She extended her left hand reluctantly.
He took it and she had barely time to brace herself before his resonance shot down her arm into her chest, and she felt a hard yank.
It was like being wrenched forward on a cellular level. Her whole body lurched as if his resonance were hooked inside her, trying to rip her soul out, but before it could budge, a rebound of energy severed it, and Ferron’s resonance slammed back into him with bone-charring speed.
