After Helena returns from the Outpost, Crowther immediately summons her and questions her report that Kaine Ferron’s resonance felt wrong. Helena says Ferron may be impossible to transmute because he is Undying and unchanged since his student portrait. When Crowther suggests a test subject, Helena refuses on the grounds of her healer’s oaths, but Crowther sharply tells her that this assignment requires a vivimancer willing to break people open for intelligence.

Helena gives Crowther Ferron’s entangled silver ring and explains that Ferron intends to use it only to summon her in emergencies. Crowther recognizes its likely connection to Ferron’s mother, Enid, a silver alchemist once tied to Atreus Ferron. Crowther recounts that Enid suffered miscarriages, that doctors suspected vivimancy in her unborn child, and that Atreus hid at his country estate and even employed vivimancers to manage the pregnancy before Kaine’s birth.

Crowther explains that rumors later spread that Kaine was a Lapse, forcing Atreus to present Kaine to guild society and eventually enroll Kaine at the Institute to protect the Ferron family’s authority. Crowther reveals that he was placed on the faculty as Kaine’s academic advisor in order to watch him for signs of vivimancy. Crowther regrets that he was reassigned before Kaine returned after Atreus’s execution, implying that missed warning signs may have changed the course of events.

The next week, Helena arrives at Ferron’s tenement and studies the hidden lock with her resonance. Before Helena is ready, Ferron drags Helena inside, pins Helena against the wall, and uses vivimancy to paralyze most of Helena’s body while allowing Helena to breathe only after terrifying her. Ferron then pushes his resonance into Helena’s mind and forces Helena’s memories backward until Ferron sees Helena coating his ring with an elixir.

Ferron releases Helena and demands to know what Helena did. Helena explains that the elixir bends light to make the ring difficult to notice, an unfinished undergraduate project that works only on small objects. Ferron is impressed despite insulting Helena’s competence, and he explains that the invasive technique is not true mind-reading but animancy, a manipulation of the brain learned from Artemon Bennet and used on captured Resistance fighters.

Because Helena could become a liability if captured, Ferron explains how animancy works: fear and focused memories expose what a person most wants to hide. Ferron tells Helena to choose a valuable but expendable secret to focus on under interrogation, so that more important information remains hidden. Helena accepts the lesson, and Ferron warns that Ferron will test Helena again the following week.