Page 99 of Alchemised
“It was nothing,” he said, but his hands were both behind his back.
He shifted, as if he was about to leave. Even though she didn’t want to be anywhere near him, the alternative was being alone with her thoughts.
“Why’d you kill Lancaster?” she asked.
“He endangered my assignment. I would have done a formal execution, but I was busy, and I wanted him taken care of.”
“So you killed him in the middle of the hospital?” she said, eyeing him doubtfully.
“I was going to kill him in his hospital room, but he tried to run.” He shrugged. “I improvised.”
The image of Lancaster lying split open while Ferron gutted his remains was seared into Helena’s mind.
Ferron rolled his neck. “If you have no more questions, we should get this over with. Sofa, or bed?”
The words were like a steel rod rammed down the length of her spine, and it took her a moment to realise he intended to check her memories.
She’d assumed that was over now. “I thought—”
Thought what? That she wasn’t still a prisoner and that in exchange for her body, she’d now be permitted her mind? She swallowed her words and went to the sofa.
He followed her, expression unreadable as he extended his hand, fingers barely grazing her forehead before his resonance slid through her skull.
By the time he stopped, Helena felt as though she’d collapsed inwards upon herself. Reliving all the recent days made her jaw clench until her teeth threatened to crack.
She lay slumped back on the sofa, Stroud’s threat echoing in her head.
She pressed her face into the fabric of the sofa, smelling the age and dust, and tried to shut out the surrounding world. Ferron left without a word.
HELENA’S EYE HAD RECOVERED ENOUGH to finally handle light again, so she pushed the curtains back, her new room revealing a view of the courtyard rather than the mountains. Outside, the world had metamorphosed, showing early signs of spring. The deadened grey she was accustomed to now showed pricks of colour amid the toppled grass and the tree branches.
A few weeks before, she would have been comforted by it, but there was a pit inside her now, even beauty turned to horror.
Two days. Her thoughts circled relentlessly, like a trapped animal ready to gnaw off her own limbs to escape.
In war, rape had always loomed as a possibility. There were stories about the prisoners in the laboratories, warnings of what could happen to women captured from Resistance territory. But rape for the purpose of pregnancy was a layer of intention that she still had not fully wrapped her mind around.
Her experiences in the matter of pregnancy had never been favourable.
Precautionary measures were in short supply during the war. Girls would show up at the hospital from time to time, nervously asking to talk to Matron Pace. Oftentimes, that was the end of it, but other times, they’d keep coming back.
Helena had been an only child. As an apothecary, her mother mostly prevented pregnancies. It was the village midwives who handled the rest. Mothers only came to a surgeon like Helena’s father when things had gone wrong. Most of the babies Helena saw growing up were deformed, or deathly sick, or stillborn.
That pattern continued during the war. As a healer, Helena was only summoned when a baby was born too early or had gotten stuck in the wrong position, or the milk wouldn’t come in because there wasn’t enough food. She would be asked if she could do something. Most often she couldn’t. The babies were tiny and fragile, and even vivimancy couldn’t fix everything.
She’d watch the mothers break, something seismic inside them rupturing. They’d scream sometimes. Others would be silent, and that was often worse in the end.
Helena had been grateful that it would never be her. She would never marry or have children, so would never have to endure losing them.
It was the one thing she’d thought herself safe from.
She lay in bed unable to sleep. Lumithia was nearing her biannual Ascendance, waxing so full that the night glowed silver, the light stark against the black shadows. The air had a nearly constant feeling of resonance.
Helena flexed her fingers, wishing she could shove her hand inside her body as easily as Ferron had into Lancaster’s belly. She’d rip out her organs right there in the bed.
The thought of her body’s forced complicity made her sick, and yet the idea of not becoming pregnant left her frozen with fear. Stroud’s threat kept ringing in her head.
Faced with the choice of struggling or cooperating with her own rape so that it would not be as bad as it could be made her feel so guilty, her mind threatened to shear apart. If the destination was inevitable, her only choice was in how horrifying the journey would be.
