He didn’t use resonance as he spoke. It would have made things worse if he had. Just being close to him, her body intuitively calmed even though she remembered so vividly all the ways he’d hurt her inside this cold prison of a house.
A tremor ran through her.
“It’s just a little longer,” he said, “and this will all be over.”
She had so many questions, though. What happened? Why didn’t you come? Why did you hurt me? Why did you rape me?
Why did you become High Reeve?
“Why—” Her voice broke. “—why did you kill everyone?”
He seemed startled by the question, as if he’d expected one of the others. “I was trying to find you.”
Her heart stalled, body and mind torn between horror and relief.
“You looked for me?” Her voice cracked.
A look of anguish flashed across his eyes. “Of course I looked for you. I looked everywhere for you. Did you think I left you there?”
She tried to remember what she’d thought. “I was supposed to be interrogated. There was so much of you in my head. I thought, if I didn’t remember, they wouldn’t be able to find you. No one ever came. I thought everyone must be dead.”
He looked as though she’d gutted him and stepped back, turning away from her.
“I looked for you everywhere. In the wreckage first, then Central and the Outpost, but you’d disappeared. There was a transfer slip about a person of interest captured near West Port, and you’d been listed as too injured for rehabilitation and culled. I went through all the dead trying to find you, but you weren’t there. I went through every prison, every file, but you’d disappeared, so I volunteered to track down anyone missing. I thought eventually something would lead to you.” His jaw clenched. “I had to bring them all back. If I’d failed, the job would have been reassigned.”
He didn’t meet her eyes as he said this, staring across the room. “I went to Hevgoss quite a few times. Thought maybe you’d somehow ended up there. I was even in that warehouse once, checking all the files there for anyone who might match your description. But I didn’t open the tanks so—”
His jaw trembled visibly, and he didn’t say anything else—just turned back to sorting through the tray.
“Why didn’t you assume I was dead?” she asked.
His hands stilled. “I had to know.”
He drew a deep breath. “This room is safe, but Morrough has eyes in the house. He watches from the hallway sometimes. Now that you’re pregnant, he’s unlikely to have you brought in again, but as long as it was a risk, there was always the chance he’d see anything that happened here.”
Understanding slowly dawned on her. All these months, Kaine had been performing for Morrough through Helena’s eyes, knowing that any moment that passed between them might be seen.
What had been real, then? Any of it? None?
A wave of exhaustion struck. She felt as if all her memories had been shaken and lay jumbled and upended, out of order. It was hard to even think clearly.
She wanted to sleep, to sink back into the abyss, but she was afraid that her memories might slip away again. That Kaine would vanish, and when she woke it would be Ferron again, ice-cold and cruel.
Try as she might, the two were categorically separate in her mind.
Kaine, she knew.
But Ferron was a monster. Her fear and hatred of him were rooted in her bones. That horrific chair of bodies, his pile of victims. She couldn’t forget that.
Her head throbbed, her skull threatening to crush her eyes out of her head. She squeezed them shut. The bed dipped, and Kaine took her arm. She felt her veins swell, and there was a prick of a needle as he put in a new intravenous drip.
“Don’t pull this one out,” he said as he worked. “All your years in a hospital, and you’re still a terrible patient.”
He laid her arm down and began going through the vials again, finding one and adding it to all the tubes that joined with the saline running into her arm.
“You should sleep now,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“What if I forget again?” Her voice was small, nearly trembling with fear.
He didn’t answer.
“Will you—will you go back to being the way you were, if I forget?”
“It’s almost over now,” he said, not answering the question.
She could feel the drugs in her veins, a heavy shroud bearing down on her. She fought to keep her eyes open, to stay awake, to remember.
“Then what?”
The room seemed darker.
“You’ll take care of Lila, the way you promised you would.”
THERE WAS A CRACK OF faint light cast between the curtains when her eyes opened again. She could see the room, her prison. Kaine was gone.
She was only awake a few minutes before the door opened, and one of the necrothralls entered. Helena stared.
“I saw you before …” Helena said as the necrothrall set down a tray with a bowl of soup on it. “I was here, before.”
Why would she have been here?
“Shhhhh …” The necrothrall released a soft, hissing breath through her teeth, shaking her head as if in warning.
She reached into a pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper, holding it out to Helena.
There was only one word, written in clear strokes.
REST.
The paper slipped from her fingers and the necrothrall took it immediately, returning it to her pocket before offering soup.
Helena forced a few spoonfuls down, but her body recoiled, trying to hurl them back up. She tried not to think, to stop trying to remember, but it was like trying to ignore Lumithia in Ascendance.
All that time, Kaine had known her. From the moment she’d arrived.
The transference process … it was her idea. The procedure she’d wanted to use on Titus Bayard.
And Shiseo …
She looked down at her wrists in renewed horror.
Transference, the manacles—those weren’t things that Kaine had known of. It was Shiseo who’d known. Transference was the reason Morrough had wanted the repopulation program started.
Her throat convulsed, and she vomited all the soup onto the floor beside the bed.
She tried to stop thinking about it. To remember herself from before, to reconcile who she was with the person she’d forgotten. In the process of forgetting, she’d flattened herself, forgotten all her anger. Her capacity to be monstrous.
That was the person Kaine wanted. Who he’d done all this for.
But that Helena didn’t exist anymore. All that was left now was a shadow.
It was dark when Kaine returned.
Her heart rose with relief, but dread rushed through her at the sight of him. She stared at him in the dark as he stayed by the door, clearly not intending to linger, coldly appraising her from across the room.
She didn’t know what she wanted him to do. She didn’t want him there, but not seeing him was worse because when he was gone, he might be dead; she’d never see him again.
“Are you angry with me about something?” she asked when he didn’t speak.
His lips vanished into a line, and he entered, shutting the door. “No.”
He went to a window, pushing back the curtains enough to let in a soft gleam of silver light. He was in uniform.
Helena watched him, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that was so different now.
“You are,” she said. “I feel like I know you are, but I don’t remember why.”
He didn’t look at her. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all in the past.”
“Why look for me, then, if the past doesn’t matter?”
His jaw clenched. “Do you remember how you were captured?”
She nodded. “I blew up the West Port Lab.”
He gave a short nod, still staring out the window. “Do you remember why?”
She furrowed her eyebrows. The answer felt obvious, but she couldn’t remember exactly.
“Don’t push if you can’t recall,” he said, glancing towards her sharply when she was silent.