Chapter 29
KIT
SFS POLARIS
Kit puts her hand to Knox’s clammy forehead. His hair is sweat-slicked, waves matted. Blood leaks from his mouth, from his ears, and his chest rattles as he breathes in. His heart rate is sluggish, oxygen and blood pressure low. Abysmal readings, overall. “Hey,” she says, smoothing back his hair.
He struggles to open his eyes, and when he does, they’re unfocused. “Mom?”
“It’s Kit,” she says. “Your sister.” Knox sucks in a breath, tries to keep his eyes open with great difficulty. “It’s okay,” she says. “You can go back to sleep if you want. I’m sure you’re tired.”
“Feel like shit,” Knox mumbles, eyes drooping. He settles his head into the pillow, turning it away from Kit’s hand. She reaches into her pocket for the small vial she’d brought with her, the pagadium antidote she’d concocted yesterday with Ellsworth.
“I have something that should help with that,” Kit says. She can’t keep the hope out of her voice.
Knox doesn’t reply, asleep again. Kit double-checks that his chest is still moving up and down, and then she draws up a syringe of the antidote.
She needs to get this into him as soon as possible, with those readings.
She flips open the IV port, injects the syringe into it.
It’s empty in a few seconds, and she wonders if she’s gotten the dose right, makes a note to check on him in an hour to see if he needs more.
She’ll bring Nevis with her then so she can take a blood sample, see what his antibodies are doing.
But for the first time since the outbreak, Kit feels optimistic.
She’s made progress. She’s used to research taking an incredibly long time, to the trials and errors, to the smallest change making an enormous difference, but she didn’t have the luxury of time with this.
To have made this big of a leap in two months is nothing short of a miracle.
Now if only she could make this much progress on understanding the power she possesses, why she has it, she’d be two for two. She supposes she should take the wins where she can get them, though.
Two hours later, and the antidote doesn’t seem to have made any measurable difference in Knox. She’d brought Nevis with her to take his blood, and she’s waiting for her to bring an update. If the trace of Fever in his blood has decreased, it’ll mean there’s at least something happening.
In the meantime, she sits, her fingers on a vine of ivy. She’s not had time to practice her power much, but she reasons that if she’s a Vitalis, she should be able to imbue Knox somehow. But she’s also scared to try it, because what if she wields it incorrectly, and drains him entirely?
She sighs, thinking of her mother. She’d always supported her, there with a kind word or a hand on her shoulder.
When she’d fallen and scraped her knees, her mother had scooped her up, carried her back to the apartment and bandaged her up, telling her she would be okay.
Later, when she hadn’t scored high enough on her entry exam for the Agrippa Institute, her mother told her she believed in her.
That she could try again. And she did, even managed to get in. She could use that support, now.
Her thoughts are interrupted by Nevis walking into her lab. She puts up a hand before Kit can say anything. “Trust me, you’ll want to hear this.”
“Is it working?” Kit blurts.
Nevis worries her bottom lip between her teeth. “Not yet. The viral load looks the same. But it’s only been two hours. It may take longer than that for the effects of the pagadium to take hold.”
Kit’s face falls. She’d hoped it would be quicker, an immediate solution to bring Knox back from the brink of death.
“I actually wanted to talk to you about something else,” Nevis starts, shifting her weight on her feet.
“Shoot,” Kit says, though she doesn’t care what Nevis has to say. Doesn’t care about anything that isn’t curing Knox of the Fever.
“When I was on duty earlier today, the black tendrils on the ambassador’s face and chest had worsened significantly.
They’d spread to his arms, and when I went to try to start a new line, they moved.
The tendrils on his wrist wove together, creating a webbing that I couldn’t breach with the needle.
Anytime I moved to a different place, the same thing happened.
It was as if the Fever was alive, as if it was able to read me, respond to my movements before I’d made them. ”
“What the hell,” Kit whispers, suddenly interested. She knew she’d seen the black vines moving.
“It gets worse,” Nevis says, grimacing.
“Worse?”
“I’ve been studying Ambassador Remulus’ immune system’s responses to the virus, and it’s not behaving as I’d expect.
Usually, the immune system will start to coat the infected cells or bind to the viral cells when they’re fighting a virus.
In the case of magical maladies, especially if you are imbued with an ability, it will create a protective shell around a person’s magical core.
Except, with the ambassador, his magical signature is becoming fainter, and the black mass we saw is becoming larger.
I ran another magitech scan the other day —” At this, Kit shoots her a glare, which Nevis swats off.
“It was twice as big as when we last scanned. More solid. It’s almost as if it’s… feeding off his magic, somehow.”
“Is that possible?” Kit asks, more to herself than to Nevis. She feels so out of her depth here, not having direct experience with this kind of thing.
“I think anything is possible with this virus, Kit,” Nevis replies.
Kit searches the ship for Amaltheia or Wynstann, but only manages to find Tullia in the fifth-floor lounge-turned-triage.
Kit hasn’t gotten to know her as well as the others, but she’s from Nexarium, and surely she knows just as much about nixos as the other two.
Maybe more, given she’s older than them by a handful of years.
“Tullia,” Kit calls, striding up beside the woman. She’s peering at a vial of Testing Agent, glancing over her shoulder at a group of Lumarians who huddle together on a couch.
“Luminary Hart,” Tullia replies, nodding. “How can I help you?”
She’s so formal, Kit thinks. But she plows ahead. “You know we’ve identified the magical signature of the virus as an evolution of nixos, right?”
Tullia nods, adding a drop of blood into a new batch of Testing Agent. “Yes, word travels fast aboard.”
Kit pauses, thinking of how to word her question. Tullia is apt to think she’s insane, but she needs to confirm that it’s possible. “Have you ever heard of nixos feeding?”
“Feeding?” Tullia repeats.
“Yes, like off its host,” Kit replies, impatient now.
She can feel Tullia looking her over, casting silent judgment.
It reminds her of how Task looked at her, before they’d become whatever it is they are now.
Tentative friends, she supposes. A friend whose lips she only sometimes imagines tasting, whose touch she only sometimes finds herself longing for.
“…never heard of it happening, but I suppose yes, it’s possible.”
Kit tunes back in to the end of Tullia’s sentence, mentally kicking herself for zoning out. She doesn’t want to ask the older woman to repeat herself, so instead, she follows up with, “How?”
“Nixos is a manifestation of dark magic, the balancing force in the galaxy.”
“Balancing force?”
Tullia rolls her eyes. “Do they teach you anything in Luminary school?”
Kit feels her cheeks color. “We don’t have magic like yours,” she says, defensive. “We learn about it in theory only, not in practice, and certainly not in the same depth that you do. What need would we have for it?”
Tullia gestures around, shaking her head, a bit incredulous — this, right here, is the need.
“Quick primer: the galaxy has two magical forces, radios and malus. They balance each other — we call it the Symmetry. Too much radios, you need more malus. Too much malus, you need more radios. In general, magic isn’t inherently bad or good; it’s neutral, and how you wield it makes it either radios — light — or malus — dark.
And with the most powerful abilities, there’s an automatic balancing force.
A side effect that makes it…uncomfortable for the wielder in some way. ”
“You’re talking about the Eight Great?” Kit asks.
“Yes, there’s always a cost,” Tullia replies, shaking up the potion to disperse the newest blood droplets.
Even amid chaos, amid her brother being ill, she finds her mind on Task, on his power, and on the cost of it. She wonders what it is, what it does to him.
“Because malus acts as a balancing force, I think it’s possible it could feed on its opposite — radios. Or it might feed on any type of magic, warping it for its own purposes.”
“Its own purposes,” Kit mumbles, trying to understand what those could be.
Tullia inclines her head over her shoulder to the group. “I need to get back to them. Hope this helped.”
She leaves Kit standing there, a bit dumbfounded.
She doesn’t know what to make of the information Tullia just gave her, how to piece together all these disparate threads.
She’ll get Nevis, go to the library, and they’ll find something else to try with the pink salt.
Maybe they need to focus on combatting the dark magic, instead of the virus.
“This is absurd,” Kit whispers, she and Nevis hovering at the foot of Knox’s bed. They’d run a detailed scan on Knox earlier, draining one of the Calandrian tokens entirely, and it had revealed the same black, swirling mass taking hold in Knox’s body.