Page 218 of Alchemised
The tension between Helena and Kaine felt similar.
There was a new sharpness to him that had not been there before, as though he were being ground down like the edge of a blade on a whetstone.
He’d show up sometimes badly injured, healing very slowly, and snap savagely at her when she offered to help him.
Normally he’d recover by the time she left, but she wasn’t sure how he was being hurt at all. As if this was the consequence of her request that he not die, she was instead forced to witness the misery of his inability to. She worried there was a defect in the array.
One minute he was lounging in a chair, watching her train; the next his eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled onto the floor.
There was a bloodstain under him when she got him on his back. His clothes were soaked with it.
Beneath his uniform, he was heavily bandaged, but his blood wasn’t clotting, and the wound wasn’t healing. When Helena tried to find it, her resonance seemed to fail.
She peeled the bandages off in terror and found a stab wound.
The injury had missed his organs, but whatever had been used had broken off, and there were pieces of it left inside him.
It wasn’t a lot of metal, but he wasn’t healing.
Maier usually handled shrapnel injuries; their treatment wasn’t suited for vivimancy.
Helena’s resonance faded, distorting when she tried to appraise the injury and gauge how much metal was inside the wound.
She didn’t have tools for surgery. She washed her hands and stuck a finger into the wound, catching a piece and pulling it out.
Holding it, she could feel it as a physical, tangible object, but when she channelled her resonance towards it, it felt drawn in towards the metal but then—static. Her sense of resonance told her there wasn’t anything there. It began crumbling in her fingers, as though rusting, little bits and grit, corroding in Kaine’s blood.
This was the alloy. The lumithium and mo’lian’shi. Kaine had been stabbed with it, and it had been left inside his body.
“You idiot,” she said to Kaine, even though she knew he was insensate.
She put the shard on a piece of gauze, wiping her fingers. If it distributed through his blood, she wasn’t sure what would happen.
His body was stubborn when it came to its immutability, but based on the way the alloying was interfering with regeneration, the Undying’s progress in blocking resonance seemed much closer to success than the Eternal Flame had expected.
She ran her hands across Kaine’s skin, trying to get as clear a sense as she could of the internal wound, her resonance flickering in and out as if it was riddled with holes.
She retrieved her satchel; she’d put together a full kit of medicines and materials for healing him on the off chance he ever allowed it. She spread a salve around the wound to slow the blood loss as she tried to figure out what to do. If she had the stimulant injection she’d been working on, it might help, but she was still working out the right balance of epinephrine.
If she couldn’t use resonance to remove the shards, she’d have to do it with old-fashioned surgery.
Alchemical surgery was much less invasive. Most of the hospitals in the North exclusively employed alchemists, while manual surgery was viewed as archaic and brutal with its large incisions and scars.
She took her alchemy knife and muttered an apology to it as she broke the components apart. A transmutational weapon was complicated to reassemble. It would be near impossible once she was done with it.
She tried not to think about the potential consequences of destroying an issued weapon as she manipulated the metal into a long set of basic manual clamps, using part of the blade to make herself a scalpel. She hoped the clamps would be enough.
She washed, heated, and cooled the metal, trying to get the pieces sterile.
Growing up, she had watched her father perform surgery. After her mother died, she’d preferred it to being alone.
She used her resonance in reverse, identifying the location of the shrapnel bits by the negative space they created. The pieces were delicate, and they crumbled easily. She had to work slowly. She pulled them out, depositing each one on a cloth.
Once she’d removed most of them, Kaine’s body seemed to remember how to heal itself, and the wound began to close while there were still pieces inside. She had to use the scalpel, making the incision over and over until she had all the pieces out and had irrigated the wound as best she could. She checked using her resonance several times to ensure that there was nothing left. There was still a slight hum of interference but nothing large; hopefully, his body could handle it.
She washed her hands and stashed half of the shrapnel pieces in a bottle, which she hid in the depths of her satchel, and then placed the rest in another more obvious bottle, in case Kaine demanded she give them back.
The wound left a scar that didn’t fully fade away. Looking him over, it wasn’t the only one.
