Chapter 7
KIT
LUMARIA
It’s just after lunch when Kit enters the room, slipping on a fresh pair of gloves and casting a shield around her face. Three people surround the Ambassador of Nexarium, who lies in the bed in front of her, eyes closed. They are murmuring softly, but they quiet upon her approach.
She quickly scans the group, her eyes stopping on a tall man with a shock of icy blonde hair falling over his forehead.
He wears the uniform of a Nexarium guard, navy blue with a lighter blue stripe up the side, buttoned up to the square high collar around his throat.
A silver pin is attached to his chest, indicating he is the right hand of the Governor of Nexarium.
An important figure, then. Kit has never seen a Guardian from Nexarium in the flesh, only on the news.
And she can’t put her finger on exactly what it is, but this man feels otherworldly.
Maybe it’s the slightly unnatural hair color, or the deep azure eyes, or the way they are very much locked on her. Kit’s breath catches in her throat.
“I’m Katherine Hart,” she says, approaching the ambassador’s bed. “I’m a Luminary here.”
The man with the blonde hair nods. “Task Canmore, Governor’s Hand and major of the Phantom Wing in the Nexarium Force.” He crosses his arms, inclining his head toward the thin man standing next to him. “This is Grayson, the ambassador’s chief of staff.”
Gesturing further down the line, he points to a man dressed in a similar uniform to him, with reddish-brown hair, a smattering of freckles, and a thick beard. He steps forward, extending his hand. “Voss Walther, Colonel, Phantom Wing, Nexarium Force.”
None of those words mean much of anything to Kit, except that all of these people are very powerful.
Probably some of the most powerful people in the known universe.
She feels nervous being around them, which she hates.
She’s never given much thought to power, but standing here with her comparatively miniscule magical healing abilities, she is overcome with a desperate need to show these people how competent she is.
Still, when the colonel steps forward, Kit winces, holding up her gloved hands in apology. “Sorry, I just sanitized.”
Voss nods, dropping his hand and stepping back into the line, his eyes bouncing between Kit and the man lying in the hospital bed.
“How is the ambassador doing?” Kit asks, taking the miniature sensor from her pocket and holding it over him. It projects several readings, and she sighs. She never trusts the technology, even as she takes in the numbers, and she prepares to manually perform several diagnostics, just to verify.
“Isn’t that something you should tell us?” Task asks, crossing his arms and leaning against the windowsill.
She feels heat rise in her cheeks. “Well, yes, but I wasn’t sure if he’d said anything further to you about his symptoms before the Siloslumber was administered.”
“No,” Task says, shortly. “Nothing new to report.”
“Okay, then,” she says quietly, tuning them out as she places two fingers on the ambassador’s forearm, her thumb gripping the outside of his wrist lightly. She counts the thump of his pulse. It feels fainter than it should.
One of the primary symptoms of the illness is coughing up large amounts of blood, though it’s not apparent in every infected patient. The ambassador was brought in hours ago because of exactly that, according to Luminary Ellsworth. Kit wants to hear the story firsthand.
“Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
Task huffs. “We already explained this to the Luminary who met us upon arrival.”
Kit nods, refraining from rolling her eyes, since that would be wholly unprofessional. “I understand that. I work closely with her, but it helps me to hear it as well.”
“We were at lunch,” Grayson says. “Meeting with —” Task shoots him a look, and Grayson quickly course-corrects, as if he was about to reveal something he shouldn’t.
“We were at a lunch meeting. As soon as the ambassador went to take a sip of his water, that’s when it happened.
The blood.” Grayson’s face pales. “It was quite a lot, all over the table. Kind of like a never-ending spout of it, to be honest.”
Kit looks to Task, who is standing still as a statue. She’s quite impressed by it, really. The ability to remain so calm, so stoic, when his colleague is under the influence of Siloslumber, potentially infected with a currently incurable illness. “Anything to add?”
“Just before that, he complained of a headache. One that felt like his head was being squeezed between a vice. Grayson gave him a Pain Draught.” Task reports this information as if he is recapping the weather, his voice a careful monotone.
She nods, taking in the information, processing.
It sounds incredibly similar to the case she saw just an hour ago.
Same presentation — the blood, the headache.
She looks to the sensor readings, which show the ambassador also has a fever.
Same as her other patient. She files this away in her brain.
She’s slowly profiling what she’s seeing, how patients are presenting, and trying to marry that with the limited information they’ve received from the Infectious Disease Bureau at the Ministry of Health.
“His fever is increasing,” she says, watching the floating numbers rise.
That is not a good sign. In her last patient, his fever continued to increase until it spiked. It never broke. They’d tried everything in their arsenal, but the increase was so rapid, nothing had worked. They’d lost him. She’d lost him.
“Then stop it,” Task says, looking at her like she’s an idiot.
Which she is not, thank you very much. She graduated top of her class, trained for three years in Nyx, the small coastal Lumarian city known for its infectious disease program, and then apprenticed with Luminary Ellsworth for a year, all before getting to this point.
“Of course, I’ll try everything I can,” she says. “It’s just that —” Kit stops, unsure she should reveal that they’d just lost their last patient.
“What?” Task demands.
She shakes her head, placing her fingertips on the ambassador’s wrist again. “Nothing. Let me try some cool towels and start a new bag.”
Task
This was not at all how it was supposed to go.
The trip with the ambassador was supposed to be easy, mostly for show.
The ambassador was supposed to sign a new treaty, recommitting to support Lumaria as an ally, and then they were supposed to promptly get back on their Hopper and return home.
Of course, the unspoken side mission was for Task to study Kit.
Draven had underestimated Task’s level of preparation, as always.
Task does nothing half-assed, always feeling like he has something to prove.
He’s studied Katherine Hart since the day Draven asked him to capture her and bring her back to Nexarium.
Her family, her schooling, her habits, her schedule.
All in order to grab her, load her on to the ship, and take her home.
Alive, for once, which is not his usual modus operandi.
So as he stands in the stark white room at the Aclesius Center, Lumaria’s most prestigious medical complex, he already knows who she is.
At least on the surface. He supposes he should be grateful that Remulus’ contracting Crimson Fever has brought them here, into her wing no less. A solid excuse for running into her.
He tracks her movements as she wanders around the room — hanging a new bag on the ambassador’s IV pole, placing cool towels over his brow, holding the magical sensor above him to read his vitals again.
Task tries to decipher what it’s made of; thinks it’s some kind of hybrid between technology and magic.
The little tool is like nothing he’s seen on Nexarium, and they have everything, every type of power you could imagine. Draven has built an entire court around it, leveraging different powers to create an unstoppable force, carefully constructed to accentuate his own ability to read minds.
The diagnostic glows softly above the ambassador, though Task understands absolutely nothing that is being presented.
“Well?” he demands.
Kit shoots him a glare. “Give it a moment, will you?” She presses the compress against the ambassador’s head again with her left hand, keeping the device extended above him so she can see how he responds.
Task presses his lips together, impatient.
Remulus cannot die on this planet. Transporting a body in one piece through the space-time continuum is much harder than you would think, and they’d have to bring him back to give him a proper burial.
Nobody had prepared for that potentiality, though perhaps they should have, given the reports they’d received of the illness.
But what were they supposed to do? Bring a coffin with them?
That feels morbid, even for Task, and he carries pain and suffering around daily.
“His fever is going down,” Kit says, her eyes flicking to her diagnostic again. “The fluid is helping, as are the cold towels.”
“Thank fuck,” Task mutters.
She frowns at him. “I beg your pardon?”
Voss elbows Task in the ribs. “Language.”
Task clears his throat. “I just said thank god.”
“Sure,” Kit says, hiding a small smile, turning back to her diagnostic. “We’re not out of the woods yet, though.”
“That would be too easy,” Task says.
She snorts a laugh, and then seems to catch herself. Task raises his eyebrows at her, letting her know her laugh didn’t go unnoticed.
She ignores him, though he sees a faint blush on her cheeks as she busies herself reading the diagnostic again. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was riling her a bit. Not that that is at all relevant or important, given the current situation.
He leans back against the wall again, adopting a relaxed affect, even though inside, he is a bundle of nerves. He glances at Voss out of the corner of his eye and heaves a sigh. Voss angles his head at the door, indicating they should leave Kit to her work.
Task doesn’t want to leave. He wants to keep watching her work on the ambassador, to understand what she does, how she does it. Especially because he knows she’s powerful, but she isn’t privy to that same knowledge.
Draven had been clear he wanted it to remain a secret until he’d brought Kit back to Nexarium, to preclude her from learning about it and making her a threat unnecessarily, but also to prevent others from discovering it and attempting the same type of extraction.
He nods to Voss, following him as he heads toward the door across the room. He twists to look over his shoulder at her one last time, and their eyes lock. It feels like ice in his veins when her eyes meet his, and he sucks in a breath.
He hurries out into the hallway to catch up with Voss, wondering what the hell that was all about.