Chapter 28
KIT
SFS POLARIS
She tries not to think about him while he’s away, to keep herself occupied with her research and trials.
She doesn’t want to worry about him, already has enough pressure riding on her.
And yet, she finds him permeating her thoughts unbidden — a flash of blonde hair or his azure eyes, his perfectly shaped mouth that she has absolutely no business thinking about.
She’s here to work and take care of her patients.
Not pine after a man who is equal parts hot and cold to her, who believes that anybody without power is a waste of space.
Certainly not one who is set to be married next year, if what Alexander Caden says is accurate.
And then there’s the ongoing question of Finn.
He sits next to her now, quietly flicking through the pages of a physical book, his thumb tapping his mouth.
One of the ones he’d taken from the library in Lumaria before they’d departed.
Though most everything is digitized now, there are two university libraries on Lumaria and three on Vermaxian that keep physical books from the last two centuries, highly coveted and protected.
Finn was lucky he was able to smuggle this one off the planet with him.
He’s read it cover to cover four times now, if she’s counted correctly.
The Consortium: The Unabridged History. It would put her to sleep, but then again, she’s not a professor of society and magic.
She loves Finn. Or, loved him. She’s found comfort in him time and again.
The way he wrinkles his nose when he laughs, the kindness he’s shown her and Knox, how he’ll sit patiently and answer her questions for hours.
The way he touches her, almost absentmindedly.
The way he still wants to be around her, even after Pruett’s death, after Kit failed him so monumentally.
He looks up at her from where he’s curled up on the couch, his brown eyes catching her gaze. He bites down on the end of the pen he holds, a hint of a smile on his face. “Yes?”
“Nothing,” Kit says quickly, returning to the digibook she has open on her Prism.
“Hey,” Finn nudges her with a socked toe. “What are you thinking about?”
Kit can’t tell him the truth. It makes no sense to her, really.
And some part of her feels she shouldn’t reveal her concern about Task, especially since nobody is supposed to know where he is and what he’s doing.
“Just a theory I’ve been pondering,” Kit says.
“I need to run it by Ellsworth tomorrow.”
Finn looks skeptical, but nods and turns back to his book, letting out a sigh.
“What?” Now it’s Kit’s turn to ask. The problem about being friends with someone that you dated for three years is that you know all of their tics, their tells — the way their mouth pulls slightly to the left when they’re angry, how they sigh heavily when they’re exasperated.
She knows he’s annoyed about something, even if she doesn’t know what.
Finn’s frown deepens as he turns a page in his book. “I just want you to be careful.”
Kit turns to him, putting the Prism down and crossing her arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Finn raises his brows, pursing his lips as if trying to stop himself from saying something.
“Spit it out,” Kit says, her stomach tightening.
“Look,” Finn says, setting his book on the arm of the sofa. “I just…I know they don’t teach much of this in school in Lumaria, but the way that Nexarium ascended to the most powerful planet in the Consortium was brutal. Kit, it wasn’t soft. They’re not soft.”
She hears his unspoken words: You are. And perhaps she is.
She’s a Luminary. She heals people, takes care of them, makes them better for a living.
She’s never come close to seeing a battle, protected in the capital city of Aventia.
She’s had to make difficult choices sometimes, but always in the name of trying to save someone’s life.
But this power she has, the one that she’s now hiding just under the surface — she thinks it’s a dual-edged sword, and it scares her.
She can save people, certainly, but at the expense of another living thing.
If Amaltheia is to be believed, she can also drain the life from someone, making her a weapon.
She wishes she could share it with Finn, but something tells her to keep it hidden.
That this isn’t something to broadcast widely.
“You’re spending a lot of time with him,” Finn tosses her a pointed look. “And you need to remember that they’re not good people. They’re helping us out of obligation, and because it will get them something in return.”
Kit is quiet, thinking of Task somewhere off on Aquidium, trying to get his hands on the pagadium.
She wonders if he’s doing it because he feels obligated.
She supposes the answer is yes — the ambassador remains sick, so until he’s better, everything that the Nexarians do is to make sure he improves.
“I understand, Finn,” Kit says. “And I’m not spending time with him. He’s in the medical bay when I am because that’s his job.”
She’s not sure why she felt the need to explain herself to Finn; perhaps something leftover from the ashes of their relationship. Part of her doesn’t want to disappoint Finn, to risk losing him. He’s been her tether, steady through all of this, even with the death of his sister.
And she also knows that what she’s just said to Finn isn’t entirely true.
She has been spending time with Task. She’s gone out of her way to find him outside of the medical bay, and he keeps showing up in the library when she’s researching, helping her pore over the digital catalogs when he could be doing anything else.
“I care about you,” Finn says definitively, crossing his arms. She steals a glance at his forearms, heat in her cheeks. She loves the words. Loves that he’s saying them. But they feel false. If he cared about her, really, that should have been enough to keep them together. “Just…please be safe.”
Kit is tempted to roll her eyes, but she manages to keep her face straight, leveling her gaze on him. “Finn, I appreciate your concern. Sincerely. But I promise you, I’m safe. My eyes are open. You don’t have to worry.”
“Good,” he says, nodding once, returning to his book.
Kit is in the lab early today, fully covered by a positive pressure suit she’d pulled on with great reticence.
Tullia and Wynstann had been worn down, unable to conjure a sufficient Defendis for her, and the dredges of Amaltheia’s healing power had gone to casting the one currently protecting Oswald.
She’d had work to do, so hadn’t had much of a choice in donning the thing.
She glances at Oswald on the other side of the room, moving samples of a pathogen he’d grown overnight into a tray with a deft flick of two fingers. She’s glad for the company, even if they don’t speak to each other much while in the lab.
It’s heavy, hot in the full suit, and there’s a constant hum from the filtration system.
She’d have thought that by now, they would have come up with something more streamlined than this, but 2,000 years later and it still looks like what the researchers wore during the Dark Ages, when a global pandemic had threatened Americana.
It wasn’t what ultimately took Americana out — that was thanks to government turmoil, world war, and a well-orchestrated intervention by the significantly more advanced Nexarium Force — but it certainly helped quell numbers a bit before that.
Kit pulls a tray from the incubator on her right.
Time to see whether the antibodies that had been generated against a sample of the Raxian influenza they’d grown would bind to the Fever pathogen.
She extends a finger, flicking her wrist in an up and down motion until the solution containing the antibodies fills the tray, and replaces it in the incubator, setting a timer for an hour.
She looks up when a chime pings throughout the lab, indicating there is someone outside. Her heart seizes when she sees a head of icy blonde hair in the Prism over the door, leaning against the wall in that lazy way.
“You have a visitor,” Oswald says, without looking up. Kit feels her cheeks heat.
“I’m aware,” Kit says. She presses down on the comm button to speak to Task, “I need thirty minutes. Can you wait?”
Task looks up toward the camera, and she thinks she spots a new cut on his face, his uniform disheveled, a tear through the upper sleeve.
She wants to run out to him, a surge of relief coursing through her as she realizes he’s alright, he’s here, but she needs to decontaminate before leaving the lab.
“I’d wait all day for you, love,” Task says, smirking up at the camera, his blue eyes dancing, as if he knows that Oswald can hear everything.
Kit rolls her eyes, releasing her hold on the comm button. “I’ll be back in an hour,” she says. “The antibodies need to incubate, and I need to go retrieve something.”
Oswald raises his white brows, a small smile playing on his face beneath his cast mask. “He did say he’d wait all day.”
Kit inwardly groans. Of course Oswald wouldn’t let that one go untouched. The more time she spends with the old man, the more reluctantly fond of him she grows. “I heard him.”
“Sometimes it’s good to keep a man waiting,” Oswald says, his eyes crinkling as he dips his head in Kit’s direction.
“Not this one,” Kit mutters. The longer Task waits, the testier he’ll grow. And she really wants to get her hands on the pagadium, so she can begin working on a new version of the antidote.
Oswald shrugs a little, the same smile still tugging at his lips. “What do I know?”
She appears outside of the lab twenty-seven minutes later, fully decontaminated and freshly showered. She’s relieved to see that he’s still there, flipping one of his lumi-daggers in his hand.
“Finally.” He steps away from the wall into the dim light of the corridor.