A week after the Outpost is retaken, Helena returns there because necrothrall patrols are safer for clandestine meetings than living checkpoints. Her leg still aches from the wound she could not immediately heal, but her resonance has returned. When Helena's ring burns, Helena goes to the tenement and finds Kaine Ferron waiting, abruptly announcing that he needs to train her.

Helena is angry that Kaine vanished for a month and left the Resistance dependent on whatever intelligence he chose to send. Kaine questions Helena about healing, burnout, and the Toll. Helena repeats the doctrine taught to her: vivimancy is corrupt, vivimancers steal life, and the Toll is penance. This recalls Helena's childhood belief that her own existence killed her mother, a claim Matias once used to burden Helena with guilt.

Kaine challenges that belief by trying and failing to rip vitality from Helena by force, then making Helena try the same with Kaine. The failure proves that vitality cannot simply be stolen from a living person. Kaine suggests Helena's mother may have had latent vivimancy and may have unknowingly spent her own vitality, as Kaine believes happened with Kaine's mother, partly relieving Helena's certainty that Helena directly consumed her mother's life.

Kaine then summons a necrothrall and restrains Helena while forcing Helena to sense the reanimation inside it. Helena pulls the energy free, collapsing the thrall until Kaine reanimates it again. Kaine explains that Helena should remove reanimation rather than waste power destroying necrothralls, and that doing so may help hold off the Toll. Kaine also reveals this ability belongs not to ordinary vivimancers but to animancers, confirming his suspicion about Helena.

Afterward, Kaine turns to combat training and finds Helena's skills dangerously weak. He warns Helena that the Eternal Flame now treats everyone on the East Island without the right papers as an enemy, including civilians and children. Over the following week, Kaine drills Helena brutally in basic forms. When Kaine kicks Helena in the back to punish a lapse in guard, Helena refuses to continue, accusing Kaine of forgetting that Helena can be permanently injured. Helena leaves, telling Kaine he is a terrible teacher.