Chapter 24 #2
There’s a knock at her door and she hurries toward it, sliding it open to reveal Nevis and Wynstann, the slight glow of a Defendis shield around them both. They push past her towards Knox, who is still sprawled on Kit’s bed, barely moving.
“Knox!” Nevis says, using her magitech sensor to cast a diagnostic over him while grabbing his wrist to check his pulse. “Can you hear me?”
Knox mutters something, and Wynstann pulls out a needle and an IV bag from his satchel, starting a line in Knox’s arm.
Kit is standing frozen in the doorway, watching it happen as if she’s outside of her body.
Nevis opens Knox’s eyes and shines a light into them while murmuring to him quietly as Wynstann moves back to the door, rolling in a stretcher.
He and Nevis try to hoist Knox on to it, but he’s heavy. All six foot two of him is not especially easy to maneuver, and Kit finally manages to unglue herself, running over to them to grab his legs as they try to get him onto the stretcher.
“Let’s move,” Wynstann says, hanging the bag on the metal bar above Knox’s head and starting to push him out Kit’s door. “We need to administer a dose of Brontium as soon as possible.”
“It might be too late,” Kit says unhelpfully, following them out and down the corridor, trailing behind her brother.
“It might not be,” Nevis says, tossing her a look as she waits for the lift that will bring them to the first floor.
“Knox,” Kit cries, running her fingers through her brother’s hair, over his clammy forehead, tears in her eyes. “Please hang on. Please.”
His eyes open briefly, lock with hers. “Still here,” he mumbles, and just hearing his voice is enough for the moment. He’s still with her.
They pile into the lift, shooting down to the first floor, and Wynstann and Nevis hurtle through the vestibule, bursting into the quarantine ward.
Kit lingers along the wall, not capable of moving and not wanting to get in the way of Nevis and Wynstann, who operate as a well-oiled machine.
If she wasn’t so upset, she’d be impressed with how smoothly they dance around each other, passing off tools and muttering readings to each other as they circle Knox.
She sees Wynstann administer a dose of the Brontium and feels a rush of relief, hoping it’s enough to quell the infection for a moment — just until she can work with nixos a bit more, figure out what she’s been missing.
Fifteen minutes later and the flurry of activity has died down, the lights in the quarantine ward dimmed purple again to encourage sleep.
Nevis quietly reshelves medicines in the background while Kit sits on the edge of Knox’s bed, dabbing gently at his chin to wipe away the bloodstains there.
Knox is asleep, courtesy of a hefty dose of Siloslumber, but she can still hear the dull rattle in his chest and blood continues to seep from the corners of his mouth.
A Guardian Kit doesn’t know — decidedly not Task — sits next to the ambassador’s bed, keeping vigil.
Wynstann had managed to administer a heavy dose of eRad, a drug specifically manufactured to counter radiation sickness, to him in the hours after the ward was hit by the solar storm, mitigating the worst of it.
But the radiation had damaged the ambassador’s already weak immune system, and the Fever had dug its claws into him even more deeply.
He hasn’t woken up in weeks, and black, hazy tendrils have started to creep down from his hairline, up from his chest. Sometimes, if she looks at them for too long, Kit thinks she sees them move, wavy lines bending and swaying.
She tries to avoid the Guardian’s gaze as she bends forward, gently stroking Knox’s hair away from his forehead. She gets to her feet. She needs to go to the lab.
Task
The Guardian on watch had told him what had happened last night in the ward, Kit’s brother rolled in on a stretcher just after midnight, nearly comatose with the Fever.
He knows he should feel something about it, but he won’t let himself.
He keeps the protective coating in place around his heart, builds up the barriers in his mind so that only his immediate next step is apparent to him.
Bringing Kit coffee. That was what he’d set out to do. Because her brother is sick, and if he knows her, she’ll be in her lab. This will have energized her, or at least whipped her into a right state, and he’s betting she didn’t sleep.
He’ll knock on her door and she’ll open it, her eyes red from pulling an all-nighter, her hair falling from the knot she usually keeps it in. Her perfect little mouth frowning when she sees it’s him. Or maybe smiling. He thinks they’ve perhaps moved on to smiling at one another, at least sometimes.
He finds himself hovering outside her lab door, holding two tins of hot Vermaxian coffee, trying to figure out how to balance them in one hand so he can knock.
Almost as if she senses him, the door slides open and she’s there.
So much better in person than she is in his mind.
Almost incomparable, really. His mind doesn’t do her justice.
She’s truly flawless, standing there with a little frown on her lips, arms crossed as she looks up at him.
He could write books about those lips, he thinks.
“I brought you coffee,” he says dumbly, holding it out to her. She grabs it and their fingers brush, a tendril of pain and electricity shooting through him. “My men told me what happened last night, with your brother.”
Kit is silent, takes a sip of her coffee. Task feels as though he’s made a grave error somewhere, that perhaps he’s miscalculated every single thing that’s occurred between them, because she’s just studying him, not saying anything as he stands there and shifts uncomfortably on his feet.
“Are you alright?” Task asks her, eyes flicking between her eyes and her mouth as he runs his tongue over his lips, tries to right himself.
Kit sighs, finally says, “Fine.”
Task raises an eyebrow, tilts his chin down a bit. “Fine?”
Kit shrugs a shoulder, turns on her heel and wanders back into her lab.
There are specimens everywhere, tubes of blood scattered across the table, three separate digibook pages displayed on the screens in front of her, and a near-empty jar of pink salt overturned on the worktable.
Frankly, it looks like a plasma cyclone hit.
“Have you slept?” Task asks, stepping through the doorway, though he already knows the answer. Of course she hasn’t.
“There’s no time for sleep,” she replies, her voice flat as she takes another sip of her coffee and types something into the Prism, switches the digibook pages on the screen.
Task is troubled, and more than a bit puzzled. He’s never seen her like this. Her affect is off. She seems shut down, checked out, not herself. He trails her through the lab, watching as she aimlessly picks things up and puts them down.
“Kit,” he says. She ignores him, moving to the centrifuge and lifting the lid. “Kit,” he says again, his voice firm as he comes up behind her.
She turns, looks up at him again, and her eyes are filled with tears, balancing on the edges of her lower lashes, threatening to spill over.
She bites down on her lip, shakes her head a bit, and Task immediately understands what’s happening.
He’s all too familiar with it — walling off to the point where it’s hard to even make sense of the things that are in front of you.
It’s a way to avoid pain. He is tempted to take her in his arms, hold her until she calms down, but he keeps his distance.
“He’s going to die, Task,” she whispers, and then the tears are falling, streaming down her face as she stands there, scrubbing at her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“No,” he says firmly. “He’s going to be fine.
You’re going to figure out the cure, and it’s going to work.
” He says these things definitively, as if they are some well-known truth, because he senses it’s what she needs.
A bit of hope. Something he hasn’t had in a long time.
And then, because he is learning he has zero self-control around her, can’t be bothered to do any of the things he’s said, he grips her upper arms, presses his hands to her.
She blinks up at him, and he braces to take in some of her pain.
He feels it then, deep and twisted, a midnight blue swirling around inside of her.
He doesn’t always see auras with pain, but this one is recent, fresh, and hers, and he can almost feel the color itself twining into his hands.
He packs it away into the well in his chest, siphons a little more — just enough so that he feels her relax in his grip, her shoulders slumping a bit as she sighs. “Better?”
“Marginally.” She leans her head forward, resting it on his chest and he looks up to the ceiling, away from the top of her head.
He shouldn’t have done it, but she was hurting and he could help.
It’s rare that he can help. Usually, he’s the one doing the hurting.
But he shouldn’t have asked her about it.
He’s walking such a fine line, trying to keep the pain echo hidden from her, and if he took too much, if she feels improved in an unnatural way, he’ll risk revealing it to her.
She takes a step back and he drops his hands from her arms, studying her face again.
“Thank you,” she says, and his heart picks up its pace, wondering if she knows. “For the coffee.”
His lips twitch into a small smile before he arranges his features into a straight line again. “A good excuse to come bother you, I suppose.”