Elana stood outside Dominik’s lab. Not a soul marked the vaulted stone hallway. She wondered about the absence of activity for a second before remembering it’d already been dusk by the time she’d finished the telepathy extract. She had no idea what the current time was—ten o’clock perhaps? Elana rubbed her scratchy eyes and tried to ignore the itch in her left temple from the uzhas.

  I’ll die if you leave me, the uzhas said.

  Elana’s brow furrowed. Excuse me?

  I see what you’re planning. You’re going to take the healing extract and kill me.

  I’m not pulling consciousness from you, I’m cutting off access to my mind. You’ll be fine.

  You don’t know that.

  Elana dug into her pocket and pulled out the healing extract. I’m an Alchemist, I live by educated guesses.

  She uncapped the phial and drank the extract, ignoring the cry of anger in her mind from the uzhas. A burning sensation swept through her. The itch faded from Elana’s mind, leaving her strangely empty—as though a part of her had been scraped away.

  “What the depths am I doing?”

  Silence responded.

  Elana tugged at her thick fingers, faint pops echoing through the still corridor. Was she really considering tackling Chernov and a dozen of his men? Bile rose in her throat as she thought about what they might do to her if she failed. What they might do to her family.

  She swallowed hard and wiped away the sheen of sweat slicking her forehead. Stumbling, she made her way back to her lab, doubt nipping at her heels.

  A few minutes later, she reached the small room. Nothing had changed in the hours since she’d left. The two phials of telepathy extract still sat in the rack on her workbench, and her journal lay open beside it. She retrieved the journal and flipped through a few pages, easily reading the coded words. She’d only taught Mikhail the code, now she just had to pray he’d been smart and not told anyone he knew it. That fact alone could put him in danger if the wrong Alchemists got it.

  Elana shut her eyes, fighting back tears. After a few calming breaths, she opened her eyes, picked up her pen, and wrote.

  After a page, she blew the ink dry and shut the journal, slipping it into her coat. Her hands shook as she grabbed the phials of telepathy extract, pocketed one, and uncapped the other. The familiar muck-like odour filled the room as Elana drank. She grimaced as she waited for the pain.

  Grey dots materialised in her mind’s eye, but no agony.

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  “Huh…” Elana pushed that puzzle aside and walked to the cold box in the wall alongside the window. Inside lay eight steel phials of liquid uzhas. With the new dose of telepathy extract, she could see the swirling grey of the dormant uzhas inside each phial as she grabbed them. It wasn’t much, but she didn’t need a lot to accomplish the plan spinning around her head.

  A thought struck her, and she returned two phials to the cold box, then poured the other six into a beaker. It quickly warmed and turned to a cobalt mist that seemed to regard her with suspicion. As soon as all the extract turned blue, she focused on it and extended her mind. The uzhas hesitated, then connected.

  Anger, rage, and pain ripped through her mind and she doubled over, gasping.

  Who… you? the uzhas asked, probing her, crawling through her thoughts.

  A friend, she said, pushing it out of her head.

  It resisted, unsuccessfully.

  The familiar itch inside her skull returned as it left her. Once out of her system, she could only locate it by the itch and the faint smudge of misty gas floating before her face.

  We don’t have time to sit around sharing pleasantries, Elana said. Chernov has the rest of your kind trapped in the vault, and I may be the only person in this building who cares enough to try free you.

  The uzhas seemed to consider this a moment. Who are you?

  “Elana,” she said. “My name is Elana.” She removed another phial of uzhas from the cold box.

  Elana, the uzhas said. Eeeeelana.

  The previous uzhas hadn’t been joking about intelligence diminishing as it shrank. She ignored the uzhas and emptied the phial into the beaker, watching as the translucent liquid turned into a hazy mist.

  The uzhas she bonded with floated through the air and hovered above the beaker. A mix of curiosity and anger swept over her from the uzhas.

  Why? it asked.

  “Because uzhas and uzhasgart make us powerful.” An unfamiliar loathing boiled through Elana’s veins. “My people lust for that which makes them powerful.”

  The uzhas accepted this and dropped into the beaker.

  A shiver raced up Elana’s spine as the two clouds of gas morphed into one. She grinned. It actually worked. Now, one final test… Elana retrieved the final phial of uzhas from the cold box and removed the cap before returning it to the box. “I want you to try and merge with the dormant uzhas,” she said.

  Elana could sense the scepticism from the uzhas, but it obliged and split into two clouds. Elana’s eyes went wide and her jaw dropped. “How did you do that?”

  The uzhas regarded her scornfully. Can’t you? it said as one cloud seeped into her body, allowing her to see the second as blue.

  “That’d be a neat trick.”

  The second cloud of uzhas drifted into the freezing box and Elana grinned. So it was true, cold didn’t affect bonded uzhas.

  The uzhas floated towards the dormant grey pool of uzhas in the phial and slipped into the liquid gas.

  Elana held her breath. For several long seconds nothing happened, then, with a crack, the phial shattered. Elana stumbled back, throwing her arms in front of her face as shards of the phial slashed past her, biting harmlessly into the thick leather of her coat. She dropped her arms and saw only a blue cloud in the cold box.

  Glee swept through her bond with the uzhas. We grow! it said as it streaked about the lab.

  Confidence surged through Elana, her plan might just work. She strode into the corridor, the uzhas trailing behind her.

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