Helena knew it was a lot to take in, so she patiently waited for him to let it all settle in. It was at least a topic that Helena could talk about now. She had accepted her death, had moved past it haunting her nightmares. Lately, her nightmares had stopped. It had been after Christina's ghost had been here, when Helena had finally accepted it, let go and truly opened her heart to Emily. Her dreams had been pleasant. But of late, the nightmares had returned after all the changes that had happened. A full night's rest was no longer part of her life and she was rarely rested. When she slept, that is.
"No, she was at the bed and breakfast with Leena and Mrs. Frederic." Licking her lips, Helena decided she should explain the Warehouse's defenses and so forth. "The Warehouse has a defense system that activates a barrier around the outside of it. Nothing can get in or out of it. It can act as a barrier to an outside threat to the Warehouse and protect the Warehouse, but it can also serve as a barrier to protect the world from a danger within the Warehouse. Sykes had hidden the artifact nuclear bomb in his wheelchair and took me to China to open the lock on the Regent's Sanctum. He needed me because my mentor at Warehouse 12, Caturanga, designed the lock. Sykes was convinced I knew how to open it. The lock was a game of chess set so that the player was in check to start with. The player sat in a chair and was locked into it, and played. If the player won the game, the lock opened, but if the player lost, a blade descended and killed them."
Pausing briefly to take a drink of her tea, Helena looked back at Steve. "Sykes had the other young man that worked for him sit in the chair and he used Cecil DeMille's Riding Crop on me, which allowed him to control the movements of my body. He forced me to play the game, but I got that young man killed. Pete and Myka showed up then, and using the Crop, Sykes forced me to put Myka in the chair. I almost got her killed, but she told me to take a breath and I remembered something Caturanga had told me once, and I opened the lock. Once it was open, Sykes apparently told another of his men to do something to trigger the outer barrier to be activated around the Warehouse. During the ensuing struggle, Sykes was killed and the back door to the Warehouse, which is what the lock had kept locked, was closed without a way to open it again. That is when Myka, Pete, Artie and I discovered the bomb. It was a piece of masonry from the House of Commons in London, which Artie said had absorbed the entire concussive force of the German luftwaffe. It was in a protective case and was wired to another bomb with a counter on it. While the other three tried to neutralize it and open the protective case and Claudia, Leena and Mrs. Frederic tried to figure something out on their end, I poked into the Warehouse's system, found an anomaly that allowed me to reroute part of the outer barrier to a spot within the Warehouse. So I put it around the other three. It had to be activated from outside the barrier, so I chose to die so they could live." A sad smile crossed Helena's face. "In those last moments, knowing I was going to die, I smelled apples. I'd smelled them before when I first was recruited to Warehouse 12. I stopped smelling them after I lost my daughter. Smelling the apples is a sign that the Warehouse likes you, though not everyone smells them. In those moments before my death, the Warehouse had accepted me once again."
There were tears in Helena's eyes as she remembered those last moments, of looking into Myka's eyes and being both afraid and not afraid of death. It had been a quick and painless death, at least. But it was also a noble one, one that showed Helena just what she was capable of doing when she loved someone.