While treating Kaine Ferron’s back, Helena Marino notices silver-white streaks in his hair and a silver gleam in his eyes, suggesting the altered sunstone core and the active array may be changing him. Ferron tells Helena he is being given a chimaera to train as a test, despite his injuries. When Helena asks whether he could kill it, Ferron presses Helena to think practically, and Helena suggests exploiting flaws in the creature’s unstable transmutation to hasten its deterioration.

Helena is summoned after Resistance patrols find Vanya Gettlich, a long-missing scout, grievously wounded but alive. Because Gettlich has lumithium and other metals distributed through her body, the guards restrain her before Helena can treat her. Luc arrives, defies the guards, and comforts Gettlich while Gettlich reports that she was captured near the West Port lab, used in experiments meant to suppress her alchemy, injected with metal, and then abused and left for dead by guards ordered to dispose of her. Helena confirms the metal poisoning and internal injuries are beyond her ability to heal, so Helena can only give Gettlich laudanum as Gettlich dies.

Gettlich’s death devastates Luc, and the Council confines him to prevent him from attacking the lab. Because of the metals in Gettlich’s body and the suspicious circumstances, the Council suspends normal mourning rites and orders an autopsy. Falcon Matias assigns Helena to perform it under observation, threatening mutilation and spiritual punishment if Helena violates the body. Helena dreads the task because Gettlich was one of Helena’s early instructors, but Helena accepts because Matias’s orders are not optional.

That evening at the Outpost, Ferron appears sharper and stranger than usual, and Helena treats his healing back. When Helena tries to leave, Ferron keeps the door closed and reveals he has cleared the room to test Helena’s fighting ability. Helena refuses because Ferron is injured and because Helena relies on vivimancy, but Ferron forces the issue by sending a crowd of necrothralls into the room. The thralls trigger Helena’s trauma from the hospital massacres; cornered and panicking, Helena lashes out with vivimancy and destroys all the necrothralls in a burst of blood and viscera. Ferron blocks Helena’s reflexive resonance when Ferron grabs her, then cleans Helena’s face and sends her to shower while the room is restored.

Furious and shaken, Helena drinks heavily from Ferron’s liquor and tells Ferron she hates him and blames him for the war’s devastation. Ferron questions when Helena became a vivimancer, and Helena drunkenly recounts the field hospital massacres: liches infiltrated the hospitals as feverish patients, blocked the doors, killed and reanimated everyone, and Helena’s father died because he could not fight former colleagues and patients who had become necrothralls. Ferron says the hospital liches were a failed Morrough and Bennet experiment involving talismans in living hosts, which reminds Helena of Gettlich’s case. Helena then asks whether Ferron can feel the array; Ferron admits it is reshaping him, making ruthlessness easier, and reveals he designed the array himself so Bennet and Morrough would not decide what he became if he survived. Helena realizes Ferron is undergoing a slow metamorphosis before she abruptly says she must return before the checkpoints close.