Captured by the Enemy

Chapter 2

It was the woman from earlier.

Helena was no longer on the table or in a lorry. There was a hard mattress under her, and the strong sterile scent of antiseptic everywhere.

A dim grey ceiling loomed overhead.

Through the pain, energy was suddenly roaring through her veins, growing into a searing heat that burned in her hands as they flexed. She could feel her consciousness sharpening and everything growing brighter, clearer. She twisted, and metal bit into her wrist.

“None of that. You’ll break your bones before you break out of those shackles. Answer my questions and I might let you get up before that drug wears off. I understand it can be quite painful otherwise.”

Unable to move, Helena felt her mind begin to race instead. An injection, some kind of harsh stimulant. Trapped inside her, the energy poured into her brain, and her scattered, panicked thoughts were narrowing into crystalline focus.

“Helena Marino. You”—there was a sound of shuffled pages—“should be dead according to your 1273 file. You were marked for culling, due to unspecified ‘extensive injuries.’ But the 19819 designation means you were selected for stasis.” More pages were shuffled. “However, there’s no record that you ever arrived there or underwent processing.” The woman sucked her teeth. “You have not existed anywhere in our file system since Augustus of last year. Fourteen months. And now we find you in the very stasis warehouse you never arrived at. How is that?”

Helena blinked slowly, trying to process the information. Fourteen months?

“Obviously no one can survive in stasis that long. Even at six months with perfect conditions it’s nearly impossible, and you weren’t even stored properly. So where did you come from? And who put you there?”

Helena turned her head away, refusing to answer.

The woman hummed, stepping closer. “You’re not in any trouble. Tell me the truth and this will all be over. Where were you before you were placed in stasis?”

The question was enunciated slowly.

Helena said nothing, although her jaw was burning to move. Her body started to tremble as her heartbeat drove the drug deeper into her veins.

There wasn’t anyone left to protect, but she refused to cooperate with her captors. To make anything easy for them, even their filing system.

Besides, she hadn’t been anywhere else.

“Where. Were. You. Before stasis?” The woman was speaking loudly.

Helena’s throat tightened, trying not to even think about the answer, because it tore her apart to remember.

Before the warehouse, she’d been captured along with everyone else, crammed into cages outside the Alchemy Tower, where all the prisoners had been brought so they could witness the “celebrations” of the war’s end.

She could still smell the smoke and blood in the summer heat, hear the raucous cheers as Resistance leaders died, their screams fading. Watching them die, and knowing it was still not over, even then.

Some necromancer in the crowd would hurry forward, eager to show off, and in a matter of seconds that dead body would get up again. Someone Helena had trusted or served under, brought back with reanimation. A necrothrall, an empty automaton corpse. They’d be slit open, their skin in ribbons, organs excised, eyes blank, face slack, and they would be used to kill the next “traitor” in an even more brutal way.

The executions had not stopped until the air was red with a mist of blood.

General Titus Bayard’s dead body was used to kill his wife. Slowly. Making him eat the strips of her as he cut them off.

Each death had carved out a piece of Helena until there was a cavern of grief inside her chest. When there wasn’t anyone left worth publicly killing, they’d put her in that stasis tank.

The other prisoners had been unconscious as they were paralysed, needles inserted in their veins, tubes shoved down their noses, breathing masks adhered to their faces. Not Helena.

She had been kept awake, aware of the claustrophobic horror of all that was happening to her, as she was locked inside her body and left in the dark. Waiting for someone to come for her.

No one ever did.

Fingers snapped in front of Helena’s face, jolting her from her memories. The woman was glaring at her.

“I’m not having a filing error damaging my reputation. If you won’t answer, I’ll stop doing this the easy way.”

Helena flinched.

“See? You do understand me.”

Her stomach shrivelled, but she locked her jaw.

The woman stepped closer. Helena’s eyes strained to make her out. A squarish face with impatiently pursed lips. A medical uniform.

“Perhaps an example is in order.” The woman’s hand pressed against Helena’s neck. Helena gave a sharp gasp as burning-cold energy surged through her, towards her spine.

It wasn’t an electric jolt like in the tank; it burrowed from the woman’s hand and into Helena like a needle. The channel of energy sang through her like a tuning fork, until both resonated along the same wavelength.

The woman clenched her fingers. Pain burst through every nerve in Helena’s body. She gave a gasping, garbled scream, body seizing, hands wrenching at the cuffs.

“Be still.”

A flick and Helena went limp. She couldn’t feel anything below her chest. As if her spine were severed. Her blood roared in panic.

A wave of the woman’s hand, and the void of numbness vanished.

Soap-roughened fingers trailed dangerously along Helena’s arm.

“Understand now?”

The woman’s resonance was still running through her like a current, a visceral warning. Helena managed to nod shakily. She should have realised: The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

“I knew you’d catch on. Let’s try again.”

Helena’s throat grew thick, her eyes burning. Every nerve twinged, her blood roaring in her ears. What was the harm in answering?

“Where did you come from?”

“Wsss—th—w-housss—” Helena fought to make her tongue cooperate.

“None of that foreign nonsense. Speak Paladian,” the woman said sharply.

There was no such thing as a Paladian language; the woman was speaking in Northern dialect. Helena wanted to tell her that but didn’t think it would help. She swallowed and tried again, but her tongue slurred everything together.

The woman sighed. “Why do you Resistance fighters always waste my time? Perhaps if we jolt your brain, you’ll remember how to speak a proper language.”

She gripped Helena’s head this time. A wave of resonance surged through from both sides like cymbals slammed together.

Everything went red. The scream wrenched from Helena’s throat was animal.

The hands were snatched back. “What on earth?”

Helena wasn’t sure if the woman was running in circles overhead or if the room was spinning.

“What is this? Who did this to you?”

Helena stared dazedly up as the red faded from her vision. Her hands were twitching and spasming, convulsively jerking against the chains. She didn’t know what the questions meant.

“Something has been done to your mind,” the woman said, sounding bewildered but also strangely excited. “Some kind of transmutation. I have never encountered anything like it. I’m going to have to report this. I’ll need a specialist. You have—” The woman paused. “There’s no name for this! I’ll have to come up with a name…”

She seemed to be talking mostly to herself. “Transmutational barriers inside a brain. How is that possible? I have never—there are—patterns in it.”