Chapter 15 #2
“Pru.” Kit nods at her, sliding on a new pair of gloves before striding to her bedside. She can still feel Task watching her, the hair on the back of her neck prickling with the intensity of his gaze. “How are you today?”
“I’ve been better,” Pruett replies, shifting on to her side and wincing. She coughs, blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. She blinks slowly, eyes opening again.
Kit moves toward her, grabbing the magitech sensor from her pocket to cast a diagnostic over her. She glances at Grayson, in the bed adjacent to her. His eyes are closed, breathing shallow, the Siloslumber still coursing through his veins. Grayson’s chest rattles as he inhales.
She looks back to Pru’s diagnostic. Her fever remains elevated, and her white blood cell levels also remain high.
“I’m just going to take one more sample from you, if that’s alright.
” Kit removes a blood drawing kit from a drawer next to Pruett’s bed, trying to avoid the sinking feeling in her gut as she looks at Pru.
She’s doing everything she can, but if she’s being honest, she doesn’t know if she can save her.
Pru looks horrible, perhaps unsurprisingly, given how ill she was before being moved to the Polaris.
Kit makes quick work of drawing a sample, and then injects her with the newest version of the antidote as well. “Can I get you anything?”
“Something to do?” Pru coughs weakly. “It’s so boring down here.”
“I know,” Kit says, fastidiously ignoring Task as she cleans up. “It’s like a prison in here. I’m sorry. I can see about bringing you a Prism with some digibooks?”
“If this is a prison, it’s the nicest one I’ve ever been in,” Task interjects from his spot on the wall. Kit has to stop herself from rolling her eyes.
“Thanks for your input,” Kit snaps, feeling her patience waning.
She wishes she could force him to leave.
Maybe she can get Luminary Oswald to do something about his constant presence.
It cannot be safe for the rest of the ship that he’s in the quarantine ward day in and day out.
Even if he’s the Hand to the Governor, rules still apply, don’t they?
She turns back to Pru, inclining her head towards Task and mouthing “ignore him.”
Pru smiles, almost laughs, despite the infection swirling through her veins. “It would be easier if he wasn’t so handsome.”
“Thank you, Pru,” Task says loudly, and Kit wants to shake her, even though she knows she’s sick. She should not be inflating his ego like that.
“I have seen urbs that are more handsome than you,” Kit says. “And you’re the only man Pru has seen in weeks, so don’t get too excited.”
“I hardly believe that,” Task says, and Kit can almost hear the smirk pulling at his lips. “And don’t insult urbs. They’re very regal creatures.”
“I cannot stand him!” Kit seethes as she stomps around the lab, pulling out various vials and beakers and slamming them onto the table. One of the vials shatters with her force, and she swears under her breath.
Amaltheia and Nevis are crowded into the room with her, after Nevis insisted that they all have a conversation. “Kit, calm down,” Nevis laughs.
“There’s nowhere else he can be? We need to get Luminary Oswald to do something. He’s distracting me, and the patients.”
Amaltheia clears her throat, and Kit turns away from her station to look at her, eyebrows high. “Do you have something to say?”
Amaltheia presses her lips into a thin line, trying to hide her grin at Kit’s outburst. “You know he’s one of the most sought-after men on Nexarium, yes?”
“Why is that at all relevant?” Kit throws up her hands, exasperated. “And who would want someone like him? He’s an enormous prick!”
Nevis breaks into a grin, helping Kit move several blood samples into the autoclave. “The lady doth protest too much.”
She and Amaltheia giggle, and Kit is about to ask them to leave when Amaltheia schools her features into something more serious.
She crosses her arms and leans against the metal table in the center of the room.
“Look, we’re just teasing. But he’s the Hand to the Governor, one of the most powerful men on the High Council.
I’m just being honest when I say you probably won’t have much success getting him to do anything he doesn’t want to do.
He’s used to getting his way. That’s House Dormius. So just…manage your expectations.”
“That’s absurd,” Kit says. “We’re not on Nexarium, there is no High Council in sight, and he should be following the rules.”
Amaltheia shrugs and Nevis cuts in. “That’s not why we’re here anyway. We wanted to talk to you about something else.” She casts a glance at Amaltheia, who nods. “We were talking, and I mentioned the…incidents back on Lumaria.”
“You what?” Kit sputters, a ray of betrayal slicing through her. “Neve, those were nothing. Just luck.”
Amaltheia holds up a hand. “What if I told you that I’ve studied the Eight Great over the last two years? While I was training in magical maladies, a primary part of my education was in the Eight Great. We had to learn everything about them, to help us understand side effects.”
“Okay,” Kit draws out the word, skeptical of where this is going.
“And from what Nevis mentioned to me, it sounds to me like you’re… Well, that is to say, you might be demonstrating something I’ve seen in a Vitalis.”
Kit’s breath catches in her throat. “Vitalis?”
“They’re one of the very rare Eight Greats. The last time there was a Vitalis on Nexarium was nearly thirty years ago.”
“What do they do?” Kit demands, a strange sensation coursing through her limbs. She feels light, almost detached, like she’s watching this conversation happen to someone else.
“They can manipulate life force,” Amaltheia explains. “Either imbue someone with life or drain it.”
“And Amaltheia was saying that Vitali can effectively cure someone of an infection, or a disease. Like a healer, but amplified,” Nevis adds.
“There has to be a source,” Amaltheia clarifies. “I can heal with my magic, but I can’t bring someone back from the brink of death. I don’t have that type of power. But Vitali do. If there’s a living thing they can draw from, they can siphon it into someone else.”
Kit swallows thickly, her throat sticky. This makes no sense. But she can’t discount that she’s now responsible for at least three people walking away from the Crimson Fever. And that in every instance, there was a life source in the room — a plant, or a flower. “And what does it feel like?”
“It’s different for every Vitalis,” Amaltheia says. “But generally, a warm sensation traveling through you and into the other person. Or the opposite, if you’re draining.”
Kit feels her face pale. They are describing her experience exactly. But there’s no way. She has no link to Nexarium, no tie to the planet. How could she be a Vitalis?
“Kit,” Nevis says. “I think…it seems like you could be?”
“How?” Kit says the word that has been repeating in her brain.
Amaltheia tucks her curly blonde hair behind her ears and looks a bit sheepish. “That, I am not sure about. But…Nevis wanted me to explain it to you.”
Kit looks to Nevis. “I don’t see how it’s possible. I really don’t. It has to have been luck.”
Nevis shrugs. “Just something to keep in mind, Kit.”
After her conversation with Nevis and Amaltheia, Kit shooed them out.
She needed a moment to herself, to reckon with what they’ve suggested.
She knew Nevis suspected there was something about her that was helping patients recover from Crimson Fever, but when coupled with Amaltheia’s knowledge, she’s reeling.
There’s no power like that on Lumaria. If she does somehow have such a power, she has no idea how it could have happened, where it would have come from.
She wouldn’t ordinarily examine her own blood, but she’d made Nevis draw a vial before she left.
She holds it up to the light, watching as it slides around in the tube.
Deep red bubbles surface throughout. It looks like every other vial of blood she’s ever taken.
Normal. Nothing special. But she puts it into the centrifuge anyway so she can separate out the different components and compare it to the samples from her infected patients.
Once she’s done separating out the platelets, the plasma, and red blood cells, she moves to the cooling chest, pulling out the sample of Pru’s blood she took earlier today.
Still infected, despite the newest version of the pink salt antidote.
Flicking her wrist, she spools it out and drops a tiny bit of blood onto a slide, moving it under her scope to look at it more closely.
Pru’s cells are rounded, and she notes that in the midst of several of them, there is a strange, pulsing energy, almost like a beating heart.
Something that makes the virus jump, contort, move around.
Almost as if it is alive, as if it is conscious.
She knows from the genetic markers it has a magical signature — one they haven’t seen before in a virus, and one that they couldn’t identify on Lumaria.
But, perhaps if she cross-checks known magical signatures, she can identify a relative.
She’s surrounded by people aboard the Polaris with infinitely more magical knowledge than she has, and surely someone or at least some book in the vast Polaris library has information that could be useful.
She flicks a drop of her own blood onto a clean slide, taking a deep breath before she places it under her scope. There’s no way. It wouldn’t make sense.
She steels herself, bending forward to look into the scope, adjusting the magnification to bring the cells into focus.
She studies them. Small, round, a perfect nucleus at the center.
Entirely normal. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
Exactly as she thought. Nothing to see here.