Helena prepares to leave Kaine’s tower, and Kaine introduces her to his chimaera, Amaris. Kaine explains that Bennet’s chimaeras are savage because their bodies are painfully misassembled, and that Kaine earned Amaris’s trust by using resonance to relieve and repair some of her pain. Helena examines Amaris and recognizes both the cruelty of the creature’s making and the skill of Kaine’s healing work.

Kaine flies Helena on Amaris back toward Headquarters. Before Helena goes inside, Kaine asks her not to return, arguing that the Resistance does not care about her and that sacrifice has no cosmic meaning. Helena refuses to abandon the war, insisting that because she cares, at least one part of the universe cares, and she wants to be remembered as someone who tried to do good. She leaves after warning Kaine not to die.

At Headquarters, Crowther confronts Helena with open disgust because of her necromancy and orders that she never leave Headquarters except to liaise with Kaine. Their argument is interrupted by Ivy, who demands to know where Sofia is. Helena realizes Sofia was Ivy’s sister and explains Sofia died during Luc’s rescue. Ivy blames Crowther, revealing Crowther had promised to protect Sofia if Ivy obeyed him; Crowther blames Ivy for telling Sofia about the tunnels, burns and kicks Ivy, then orders her neutralized once she leaves.

Crowther, Helena, and the translator Hotten interrogate Wagner. Wagner explains that he helped Morrough solve the problem of harvesting life energy by making victims blame someone else, allowing Morrough to bind sacrificed souls to a chosen prisoner while keeping control through shards of Morrough’s own bone. Wagner describes the creation of the Undying as power sources: nine sacrifices are drained into one recipient, whose soul is buried beneath the others while a lumithium-coated bone shard keeps the prisoner from dying. Helena understands that this is how Kaine was made, and Wagner admits the Undying’s necromancy was an accident.

After the interrogation, Headquarters falls into crisis when Ivy evades capture. Crowther moves prisoners and tries to seal the tunnels, but Wagner is later found hacked apart by reanimated corpses, with a message reading that Crowther is next. Helena works in the hospital, where Penny, now amputated below the knee, tells Helena that Lila faces a tribunal and will likely lose rank because Luc’s compromised feelings are being punished through Lila. Helena eases Penny’s phantom pain, but their conversation about Soren’s reanimation turns into a painful argument over faith, corruption, and whether survival through necromancy can ever be justified.

Days later, Lila’s resonance still has not returned despite chelation treatments, and Helena and Shiseo continue analyzing the metal shards and Lila’s blood. Elain is made lead healer and Luc’s personal healer, while Helena’s chymiatria becomes increasingly important to the hospital. Crowther’s ban on Helena leaving Headquarters threatens her ingredient supply, and the quiet of the lab leaves Helena alone with grief, guilt, and longing for Kaine, whose absence makes her feel less human and more like a tool of the war.