Helena Marino wakes in agony inside a stasis warehouse as workers open her tank. Blinded by light and coated in stasis gel, she panics, resists the men dragging her out, scratches one of them, and is struck unconscious.

Helena later regains awareness on a metal table while a woman questions the workers about why Helena was conscious. The woman learns Helena has two inmate numbers, no matching facility record, and appears to be an anomaly. Helena pretends not to understand, but the woman detects she is awake, dims Helena's senses, has necrothralls move Helena, and transports her toward Central after warning the workers to send corpses for reanimation and living prisoners to the Outpost.

In a sterile room, the woman revives Helena with a painful stimulant and identifies her as Helena Marino. According to the files, Helena should have been culled for unspecified extensive injuries, yet another designation shows she was selected for stasis; she has been missing from records for fourteen months, far longer than anyone should survive stasis. Helena refuses to cooperate, remembering the end of the war: Resistance prisoners caged outside the Alchemy Tower, leaders executed, corpses reanimated as necrothralls, General Titus Bayard's body used to kill his wife, and Helena left conscious while sealed in a tank.

The woman escalates from questioning to vivimantic torture, using resonance on Helena's living body to inflict pain and briefly paralyze her. When Helena struggles to answer through slurred speech, the woman sends resonance into Helena's brain and discovers something unexpected: Helena's mind has been transmuted with elaborate barriers and rerouted pathways. Using a resonance screen, the woman shows Helena that parts of Helena's consciousness have been deliberately altered or cut off by expert vivimancy.

The woman questions Helena about her past as an Etras-born alchemy student sponsored by the Holdfasts, about Apollo Holdfast, Luc Holdfast, the lost Resistance, and Morrough's killing of Luc. After the woman leaves to report the unprecedented mental work, Helena examines her restraints. She recognizes lumithium manacles placed on her during the victory celebrations and understands that they are keyed to blur and suppress her resonance, leaving Helena unable to use alchemy or escape.