Chained in Central, Helena smells a nearby necrothrall and is secretly approached by Grace, a former hospital orderly. Grace warns Helena not to call the Undying liches because greys can listen. Grace explains that many former Resistance prisoners scarred their own faces to make themselves less desirable to the Undying and their followers, who abuse labelled Resistance survivors with impunity.

Grace tells Helena that the Eternal Flame is gone, the remaining prisoners were sent to the factory Outpost, and all are controlled by cuffs, curfews, and the threat of the High Reeve. Grace reveals that Lila Bayard was the first escapee brought back dead; Warden Mandl displayed Lila’s corpse at the gate in paladin armour. Grace says there is no Resistance left because the High Reeve kills anyone suspected of organising, and she admits she has come to Central to sell one eye for money to feed her younger brothers.

Before Helena can answer Grace’s accusations that Helena failed to save Luc Holdfast, Doctor Stroud arrives with necrothralls and announces that the High Necromancer wants to observe Helena’s examination. As Helena is wheeled away, she recognises Central as the Alchemy Tower, the ruined heart of the Holdfast-founded Alchemy Institute. The sight devastates Helena because the Institute had been Luc’s legacy and home.

In an examination room, a nervous specialist studies Helena’s brain and says the transmutational alterations to her memory pathways should be impossible. Morrough, now monstrously altered and eyeless, probes Helena with agonising resonance, triggering memories of healing war victims and Luc’s death. Stroud brings in Shiseo, who identifies Helena as a healer and replaces Helena’s old incomplete suppressors with invasive nullification cuffs that fully deaden Helena’s resonance.

Morrough summons Warden Mandl, who confesses she hid Helena’s records and left her conscious in stasis for vengeance because Helena had been a vivimancer associated with the Holdfast Institute and the Eternal Flame. Morrough kills Mandl by ripping a lumithium-like reliquary from her body, then transfers Mandl into a decaying vivimancer corpse and sends the resurrected Mandl back to the Outpost as punishment.

The specialist suggests Helena may have altered her own mind and survived stasis through limited internal resonance, but Morrough still wants the hidden memories recovered. When Stroud proposes vivisecting Helena’s brain, Shiseo interrupts with information about General Bayard’s late-war treatment: a healer may have attempted to enter and heal Bayard’s mind from within. Morrough recognises the implication as soul mithridatism, orders Stroud to record Shiseo’s knowledge, and assigns the High Reeve to perfect gradual transference so Helena’s protected memories can be accessed.