Chapter 2
KIT
LUMARIA
Kit almost falls through the front door of the steel apartment building, not paying attention as she tries to escape the chill in the air.
Her breath mists the glass pane as she shoves it open, tossing a halfhearted wave at Rion, the creature-walker who she sees almost daily at this time.
Today, he’s manhandling eight different animals, including a wolf, a miniature lion, and what might be the latest designer creation, the urb, which appears to be a mix between a cat and an eagle.
He looks almost as exhausted as Kit is from her day at the Aclesius Center, where she’d once again tended to an inordinate number of patients.
She strides through the lobby to the elevator tubes, pressing her hand against the biopad until it blinks green, allowing the tube doors to open. She boards, leaning back against the rounded glass wall as she shoots up the forty-seven floors to her family’s apartment.
The tube slides open, and she tries to quietly exit. It’s no use — her brother is still awake, his face aglow with blue light coming from the Prism Major.
“Kit.” He glances over at her from his perch on the sofa, grinning.
“Knox. What are you still doing up? Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
Knox rolls his eyes. He’s seventeen and thinks he knows everything. “Yes, mom. But the Blue Dragons were on, and I needed to finish the game. Nash and I bet on it, and I’m so close to sweet victory.”
Kit sighs. She hates it when he calls her that.
Their mother died two years ago, when Kit was twenty-three and just finishing her first year of training.
Though her father has done his best to keep the family together and functional, it felt only natural that as the eldest daughter, Kit stepped into her shoes a bit.
They’d been big shoes to fill. “Don’t complain to me when you wake up with eyes that feel like sandpaper.”
“I will be 150 curi richer, so I think I can deal.” Knox smiles sweetly at her and pushes his messy mop of golden hair out of his face, turning back to the game.
Kit drops her bag by the door, hanging her jacket on the hook and kicking off her boots. “Well, I’m beat, and I’m going to sleep.” She pads through the front room towards the corridor that leads to her bedroom.
“Any more luck today?” Knox asks, stopping Kit in her tracks.
She shakes her head. “No, and more patients with the same symptoms who aren’t responding to treatment. Luminary Ellsworth hasn’t been able to make any diagnosis.”
Knox shakes his head and puts up his hands. “Stay away from me.”
Kit sighs. Every time she comes home, she is putting her family at risk, at least a little bit. She’s taking all the precautions, wearing protective gear, but there’s nothing else to be done. She won’t quit, and she certainly isn’t going to stop showing up simply because she’s afraid.
After her mom died, she’d doubled down on her training, taking on every extra hour she could shadowing Luminary Ellsworth, and studying in her off-hours.
She wouldn’t let something like that happen again, something she still believes could have been easily avoided.
Instead, she’s here, without her, desperately trying to keep citizens alive as an unknown disease takes more and more every day.
“Trying to,” she says, gesturing to where she stands well across the room from him. “Go to bed soon.”
She hears Knox shout at the Prism Major as she closes the door to her bedroom. She’s tempted to fall directly into bed, but manages to convince herself to change out of her dirty scrubs and shower so she doesn’t drag whatever is still on her under her comfortable, clean covers.
It feels like only minutes have passed when she awakes again to the sound of her alarm going off.
She groans and rolls over, pulling the blankets over her head.
She slides her hand out and slaps the bedside table, trying to find the snooze button on her Prism without opening her eyes.
She’s wholly unsuccessful, the alarm only increasing in volume.
She’s forced to open her eyes to grab the device and turn off the damn thing. It’s 4:00 a.m. — she needs to be back at the Center in an hour for her next shift.
She gets up and dresses quickly in the dark, pulling on a clean pair of scrubs and throwing on a sweater over top.
She wanders into the bathroom, using the Prism’s light to guide her, though she quickly realizes that is going to be fruitless.
She needs to cover up the circles under her eyes, and she can’t find the concealer in the dark.
She flips on the light, momentarily blinded, and is caught off guard by how haggard she looks.
She knew that she had dark circles — she’s been getting significantly less sleep than she should be — but her undereyes look like bruises, her face paler than usual.
She sighs, dragging a hand down her face.
She sweeps her long, wavy brown hair into a knot at the base of her neck, quickly swiping on concealer. It’s ineffective at hiding her deep circles, but it’ll have to do.
She makes her way downstairs, hoping to brew a very large coffee before she heads out. Her dad is already awake in the kitchen, his glasses perched on his nose as he reads through a file laid out on the dining table.
“Kit,” he says. “Good morning.”
“Morning, Dad,” she says back, making a beeline for the coffee machine. “You want any?”
Her dad nods. “It was another late one.”
“When did you get back?”
He smiles wryly and checks his watch. “About an hour ago.”
She looks at him, incredulous. “Seriously? Have you slept?”
“I took a twenty-minute nap.”
“Dad! You need to take care of yourself.”
“Kit, this is serious. You know this is serious. You’re seeing it firsthand, are you not? The minister is working around the clock.”
Her dad is the chief of staff for the Minister of Lumaria, meaning he is basically always on call. He doesn’t sleep much during good times, let alone when an increasing number of reports about a mysterious illness are coming in.
“I know it’s serious,” she says. “But you can’t help anybody if you’re not rested.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I could say the same about you. You look like you got run over by an airbus.”
Kit’s mouth drops open. Her dad is not one to mince words, but still. “Gee, thanks, Dad.”
“Just saying,” he shrugs.
“And for that, you can pour your own cup.” She turns back to the coffee, filling her steel canister to the brim. “I’ve got to go.”
“Good luck,” Dad says, lifting his eyes from the page again. “And be careful, Kit. We don’t know what this is or where it’s come from.”
Kit takes the airbus to the Center, as usual.
She hates driving, especially this time of year.
It feels as though it’s constantly snowing, and weaving between the high-rises in a certifiable snowstorm is not her idea of a good time.
On the airbus, at least, she doesn’t have to pay attention to her surroundings.
Someone else is in control. A brief moment of respite from the Center, where she is always on, always overseeing something, always double-checking and triple-checking portions or procedures or patient charts to make sure she’s not missing anything.
She warms her frigid hands with her coffee as she waits for her stop, watching as Lumarian citizens enter and exit the bus.
Word of the illness has been spreading, and today is the first day she sees citizens in public with masks or scarves covering their faces.
She wonders when the Ministry of Health will mandate it.
Certainly, at the Center, they are already required to wear protective equipment, and she washes her hands more times a day than she can count.
Downtown Lumaria zooms past the windows as the airbus shoots through the intersection, blowing a yellow light.
The Center comes into view on the left, and Kit presses the red Stop button to signal she needs to disembark.
She gathers her bag and her coffee and stands, making sure to keep her balance as the bus comes to a stop.
She takes a breath as she gets off, looking up at the towering Center before steeling herself to tackle another day.
“Kit!” Her name is being called again, and she feels like she can’t move fast enough.
“Mr. Allred, his fever is spiking.” She sees Nevis — her best friend from Luminary school and now colleague — down the hall, beckoning to her.
Nevis looks frazzled, her red hair falling from beneath her cap, blood smears on the front of her scrubs.
Kit’s been here under an hour, and already, they are overwhelmed.
New cases keep pouring in. Those that were already admitted to the Center are worsening.
Kit is sure she’s seen more blood today than she’s ever seen in her life.
With the number of clots that people are coughing up, she feels she should have worn a red pair of scrubs today.
Kit races towards Nevis, throwing out the pair of gloves she was wearing on the way. She grabs a new pair outside of Mr. Allred’s door and slips them on.
“Stay calm,” she says quietly to Nevis. Nevis, for all her cleverness, has always been anxious, prone to overwhelm. That’s not ideal in the current circumstances, where seconds matter, where the choices they make matter.
Kit enters the room, her clogs scuffing against the white floors, Nevis on her heels. She sees a small plant on Mr. Allred’s windowsill — a hydrangea. Not in season on Lumaria, but somehow thriving nonetheless. The pink flower at least brings a shock of life to this place filled with so much death.
Kit strides towards Mr. Allred, who is sitting up in his bed in the midst of a coughing fit. Blood spills from his lips.
“Mr. Allred,” Kit says. “I’m just going to take a scan so I can see what we’re dealing with.”
Mr. Allred nods, wiping the back of his hand along his mouth and leaving a trail of blood. His skin is sallow and sweat drips from his brow. He looks worse than he did yesterday.
Kit takes the small sensor from her pocket, holding it over Mr. Allred’s chest. It’s one of Lumaria’s early magitech developments, a miniature scanner than can read the body’s vitals in under a second.
Even faster than a magically cast diagnostic would read.
A panel hovers above him, emanating from the little contraption, numbers and graphs and a diagram that shows his heart rate and oxygen levels.
Kit looks at them, pursing her lips. The readings are abysmal. To her left, Nevis is also looking at his numbers. Both are careful to keep a straight face, though they can see that he is rapidly deteriorating.
“Can you get me another bag of fluids?” Kit asks Nevis, tapping the sensor so the diagram falls away and tucking it into her pocket.
Nevis nods, turning to head out of the room.
“Is it bad?” Mr. Allred asks. “Please be honest with me.”
Kit pauses. It’s always hard for her to decide what to do in these moments, how truthful to be. Sometimes hope can help a patient pull through, but based on Mr. Allred’s latest diagnostic, Kit doesn’t feel she can lie. “Yes,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”
Mr. Allred drops his head back to the pillow, tears leaking from the corner of his eyes. “There must be something,” he says. “My wife — my daughter.”
“We’re doing everything we can,” Kit says, taking the IV bag from Nevis as she returns with it.
She replaces the near-empty one over Mr. Allred.
“May I?” She gestures towards the bed next to him.
She wouldn’t normally be this familiar, but Mr. Allred was her teacher in elementary school, a friend of her parents, and she feels as though she can’t leave him.
She’s responsible for him, and if he dies, if she loses him, it will be her fault. Again.
Kit places her hand on Mr. Allred’s arm, meeting his eyes. Her hand is warm on his cold forearm, and she swears she feels a rush of warmth passing through her palm, like sunlight streaming through a window.
“It’ll be okay,” she says, before standing up. She glances at the hydrangea on the windowsill once more before exiting his room. She thinks it’s drooping slightly, some of the color leached from its fronds, but she might be seeing things. She’s exhausted, after all.