Helena stumbled back outside, heart racing.
If the clouds would lift, it would get brighter. She huddled on the veranda, waiting. Through the obscuring rain, the house around her looked almost like an immense slumbering creature, curved inwards, the spires like spines.
The rain did not cease. Instead the sky dimmed as dusk fell. At this point in the lunar cycles, even Lumithia, the brighter moon, had waned too much for her light to penetrate the cloud cover.
The light in the doorway had shrunk and weakened.
Helena drew a deep breath; she’d taken the route before. There were steps not far into the shadows. If she found them, she could feel her way back.
It was only shadows. It wasn’t the tank. It wasn’t the nothing. Just shadows.
She wavered in the doorway, and everything grew darker, the remaining light outside beginning to vanish.
Helena felt herself disappearing into it. Terror sharp as talons clawed through her as she forced herself forward. She stumbled, colliding with a table, barely feeling the pain that shot up her shin.
Find the stairs.
It’s only a house.
But she felt the darkness swallowing her, dragging her in, the endlessness so close. She gripped the table, hands shaking so violently that the wood rattled. Something fell, crashing onto the floor.
Breathe. Just breathe.
She fought to breathe but pain splintered her chest. Her heart was racing, beating like a caged bird inside her, breaking itself against her ribs.
She made it a few steps before her legs gave out. She curled up on the floor, the wood like bones beneath her hands. She was disappearing into the nothing again. Into the nothing where she couldn’t move … couldn’t scream … and no one ever came …
She was gripped by the arms and wrenched off the floor.
“What are you doing?”
She blinked in the sudden light, staring into Ferron’s incensed face.
An electric sconce on the wall glowed, a halo in the dark illuminating only them.
She focused on his face, trying not to see the ocean of black surrounding her.
“It was—dark,” she forced out.
“What?”
Her breathing was so rapid, her head swam.
“You’re scared of the dark?” His silver eyes were burning, his voice thick with disbelief.
She tried to pull away—she’d rather suffocate in the hallways than be near Ferron—but he didn’t let go, pulling her over to the stairs, mere steps away, and dragging her to her room, refusing to let her collapse back onto the floor.
“Calm down,” he snarled at her as soon as she was inside the familiar space.
The door slammed.
Helena dropped into the chair, doubling over and gripping the fabric. Her fingers kept twitching, sending shocks of pain to her arms, but she didn’t care. She needed to feel that things were real and tangible, not an abyss of nowhere with her body and nothing else.
The air sliced through the inside of her lungs.
She was in her room. The house had not eaten her, because houses did not eat people. Her mind cleared slowly, that suffocating terror gradually ebbing away, allowing reason to seep back in.
It was almost worse to be rational again, to sit knowing her fear made no sense. It didn’t matter. The part of her that was afraid did not care about being rational.
“What’s wrong with you?”
She started, looking up.
Ferron was still in the room, apparently having lingered to interrogate her now that her fit of panophobia was over.
She averted her eyes.
“If you won’t tell me, I’ll pull the answer out of your head.”
Helena flinched. The thought of his resonance set her teeth on edge. There were parts of her brain that still felt bruised, caved in from the transference.
Her mouth twisted, throat going taut. “I don’t like places I can’t see.”
“Since when? I haven’t noticed you keeping the light on in here constantly. Or are these shadows different?”
Heat rose across the back of her neck. She stared at the iron bars in the floor. “I know this room. It’s the places I don’t know, that I can’t see the end of. I-In the stasis tank, it was always dark no matter how hard I tried to see, and I couldn’t feel anything around me, just my body floating and not moving. It felt—endless. Like I was nowhere. I was—I was there so long. I kept thinking that eventually someone would come but—” She shook her head. “When I see dark places and I don’t know where they end, I feel like I’ll disappear inside them, but this time, I’ll never be found.”
She sounded irrational. She was irrational, but there was no help for it; there was a schism between her reason and her mind, a fault line shearing them forever apart. Her mind did not care whether the fear made sense; it just wanted to never go back.
Ferron was silent for so long that she finally looked up at him, morbidly curious, but he was unreadable. Still as a statue as he stared at her.
It was the first time she’d bothered to just look at him, to see him for what he was, rather than who he was.
His clothing hid it well, but he was strangely slight. Not at all built like an iron alchemist. He didn’t even have the look or presence of a combat alchemist. She couldn’t imagine him with a heavy weapon in hand.
Aside from the predatory intensity to his eyes, his features were almost too fine, like a statue carved a stroke too far.
Everything about him was slim and sharp-edged.
“You know,” Ferron said, jolting her from her thoughts, “when I heard it was you I’d be getting, I was looking forward to breaking you.”
He shook his head. “But I don’t think it’s possible to exceed what you’ve done to yourself.”
CHAPTER 7
FERRON TOOK HER TO AND FROM THE courtyard each day. His mood was always dark after that, and he’d mockingly point out the location of the various light switches that she was “too dense” to observe on her own.
He was so condescending, she wanted to throw a rock at him and was disappointed when she found nothing outside but little pieces of finely milled white gravel.
The courtyard bored her. It was tedious and bitterly cold, the winter snow bearing down in the clouds, although there was never more than a dusting on the ground—enough to leave her feet numb with cold.
When alone, she ventured out of her room, determined to find a passable weapon; even a furniture nail would do. If Ferron wouldn’t slip up and do it, she’d kill herself before another transference session arrived.
In the hours when light trickled through the east windows, if she stayed near the walls and thought very carefully about breathing, she could manage the excursions.
But whenever she left her room for long, the necrothralls began materialising. They didn’t try to stop her or herd her back into her room; they just watched her, hovering like ghostly apparitions.
She tried to ignore them along with the creaks and groans of the house, the shifting shadows, but they made it impossible for her to find any means of suicide. She persisted doggedly, but most of the rooms were locked tight, and those that weren’t held nothing but old furniture and useless knickknacks.
In one old room, she found a painting crammed behind a disassembled bed frame. It was covered by a dustcloth. She pulled it out, curious.
Drawing the fabric back, it was a portrait of the Ferron family. Not Ferron and Aurelia, but Ferron as a boy with his parents.