Chapter 31
KIT
SFS POLARIS
Kit wakes up with a pounding headache, her mouth dry and her lips cracked.
It takes her a moment, lying in bed in the cool darkness of deep space, to remember last night — the way that Task had held her, had looked at her, the realization that she could touch him with only a bit of active work on her part.
She looks over, half-expecting that she’d done something stupid like invited him to her quarters, but her bed is empty save for the clothes she’d strewn about last night.
She pushes Task to the back of her mind. She has more important things to do. She needs to go see Knox.
She’s hesitant after last night, though his readings were stable when she’d left him. The magitech scan they’d run after all the chaos had settled down indicated a significant reduction of the black mass, only a few tendrils remaining. But Kit hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up.
She pulls on a clean pair of scrubs and ties her hair back, readying for the day ahead. She walks to the quarantine ward, trying to keep herself calm. She counts her breaths, waits as Wynstann casts a Defendis around her, and then after what feels like far too long, she’s by Knox’s bedside.
His eyes are open, the rash on his chest and neck gone. “Knox?” Kit asks hesitantly.
“Kitty,” he says. His voice is raspy, thin, but his cheeks have color again.
“How are you?” she asks. She pulls on a pair of gloves, to be extra safe, even though the Defendis is supposed to be protection enough. She doesn’t know what lingers in this room after yesterday.
Knox shrugs. “Better, I think?”
“This is the first time you’ve been fully awake in days,” Kit replies. She takes the Calandrian token from her pocket, wrapping her fingers around it as she casts a scan over Knox.
“Woah,” Knox says, looking at the turquoise gridded image of his body hovering above him. “That is epic.”
Kit wants to roll her eyes, but she feels them filling with tears instead. She’s looking at the scan, and there’s nothing. No trace of the swirling black mass anywhere at all. It’s almost as if she’d dreamt it all up, as if it never existed. “Knox,” she chokes out.
“What?” he asks, looking at her as if she’s lost it.
“You’re…you’re alright,” Kit says, a tear spilling over her cheek. “The Fever is gone.”
“It’s gone?” Knox asks. He’s looking up at the scan, squinting. “How can you be sure?”
“I’ll take your vitals again. And I’ll get a test kit to confirm. But the scan isn’t showing anything. It’s like whatever happened yesterday…it destroyed it. I destroyed it.”
Knox snorts. “You destroyed it?”
Kit pauses, realizing what she’s said. She didn’t mean to share anything with Knox about last night. She’d intended to let him live in blissful ignorance. “Nevis and I tried a different antidote last night,” she says. Not entirely untrue.
“Made of what?” Knox asks. Kit pulls down the scan, the turquoise grid vanishing. She worries her lip between her teeth.
“A new magical mineral,” Kit lies. She’s not sure why she’s keeping this information to herself, but what happened last night was strange. She needs to unpack it. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to get the testing kit.”
She returns a moment later, making quick work of drawing Knox’s blood.
She flicks two droplets into the Testing Agent and waits, busying herself with pulling up Knox’s blankets and tidying the small bedside table, upon which her mother’s favorite book rests.
She’d brought it several days ago, when she wasn’t sure if he would make it.
She’d been reading him passages, hoping that she could channel her mother and soothe Knox.
“I heard you, you know,” Knox says, sensing her eyes on the book.
Kit smiles a bit. “Yeah?”
“You sound like her sometimes,” he says, leaning his head back on the pillow.
“I wish I could remember her voice.” Kit glances at where the Testing Agent sits on the cabinet, drumming her fingers against her thigh. Nothing yet.
“I mostly hear her in my dreams,” Knox says. “But I heard you reading Persephone and it sounded like her. I could almost picture her reading it to us when we were children.”
“I looked forward to hearing the next chapter every night,” Kit says, remembering snuggling under the covers, looking up eagerly at her mother as she’d opened the hardcover — a rarity, now. “She came up with such a good ruse to get us to go to bed.”
Knox laughs. “She did.”
Kit looks again at the solution, and lets out a breath as she sees it’s turned blue.
She looks at him, closing her eyes for a second.
Before she can stop herself, tell herself it’s unprofessional, she’s wrapped her arms around him.
“Thank Aaris,” she says, breathing him in.
Her brother. Her very alive, very cured brother.
Task
He’s in his usual spot, black mask pulled up over his face, eyes on Ambassador Remulus.
He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t disappointed Kit wasn’t on shift today.
His thoughts have been on her since last night, since she’d touched him and he’d felt no pain.
He hadn’t truly realized how lonely he was, how deeply he’d longed for that casual touch, for the promise of feeling normal, until he’d felt her fingers laced through his and it calmed him, for a moment, before it sent a jolt of desire through him so strong, he thought he’d lose his head.
“Major Canmore,” a voice rips him from his reverie. Tullia smirks at him from across the room, as if she knows she’s caught him in the midst of a thought he shouldn’t be having.
“Tullia,” he nods at her, schooling his features.
She comes around the ambassador’s bed, casting a diagnostic and frowning.
“What is it?” Task asks, watching as she taps something into the Prism embedded in the wall next to his bed.
Tullia glances at him. “You heard what happened the other night?”
Task arches an eyebrow. “The other night?”
Tullia sits next to him in the empty chair, folding one leg over the other. “Kit and Nevis tried a nixos counter-curse.” She rolls her eyes, huffs. “Idiots.”
“Hardly,” Task retorts, defending Kit almost involuntarily. “It was clever of them to research a nixos counter-curse, braver still to try it.”
Tullia’s lips curl into a half-smile. “If I didn’t know any better, major, I’d think you were sweet on her.”
Fuck. He needs to get it under control if Tullia, of all people, is picking up on it. He manages a brusque, “Nonsense.”
“Anyway, they messed up the runes. Those are incredibly challenging to get right, even for those of us trained in the magical Symmetry. Instead of killing the Fever, it drew it out. That’s how Grayson died.”
Task had heard Grayson had died, knew Kit had done something to get the Fever under control, but he wouldn’t let Tullia know that. Best to keep his cards close.
“Kit…she managed to quell it.” Tullia turns to face him more fully, something dancing in her periwinkle eyes. She half-smiles again. “You know, Major Canmore, the last Vitalis we had on Nexarium was unmatched. Her lifeblood — her light magic — was the most powerful Nexarium had ever seen.”
Task’s stomach tightens at her words. The way she’s said it, the way she looks at him, what is she implying? She can’t know, can she? He pushes the anxiety down, flattens his voice. “And how is that relevant?”
Tullia shrugs a shoulder. “She was the only one that was ever fully effective at countering nixos.”
“It was probably just a fluke,” Task replies.
“Whatever you say, Canmore,” Tullia says. She stands, pulling the curtain shut behind her as she exits, leaving him with his heart in his throat.
Kit
Kit sits at a small bistro table in the third-floor lounge, her hands wrapped around a glass of whiskey she shouldn’t have poured herself.
It’s past midnight, and she looks out the reinforced glass window in front of her, across the greenish-blue aurora that hovers in front of them.
Space is eerie, but beautiful. She both hates being trapped here, and oddly at peace.
Her job isn’t easy, but there is a sense of routine, of purpose, that she didn’t expect to find.
She finally managed to reach her father earlier.
She could tell he wanted to ask her questions about her research, but that he also didn’t want to put undue pressure on her.
So instead, they mostly focused on how Knox was doing, about Finn and Nevis, and what show her dad had started watching in the early hours when sleep refused to come.
Kit had avoided mentioning Task, unsure how to explain whatever was burgeoning between them to her father.
She was certain he’d have feelings about Task, as he did about every man Kit had dated that wasn’t Finn.
Though Kit wasn’t dating Task. They were barely doing anything at all, save talking in the sundome…every night. And researching together for hours at a time. And ribbing each other when they weren’t doing any of that.
She sighs. She can admit to herself that she’s growing fond of him, in spite of his cold facade. When they’re alone, she’s fairly certain she gets a side of him that almost nobody else does. She feels proud of that, in some ways.
Though she’d called her father because she wanted to ask him about her mother, she hadn’t been able to get the words out of her mouth.
As soon as she’d gone to inquire, she’d frozen up, and quickly pivoted to a less fraught topic, missing her chance.
Now, questions about her blood, her genetic makeup, linger in the back of her mind, none of it making sense.
Unless her parents had lied to her.
She swallows over a lump in her throat, running her tongue along the inside of her cheek as she ponders this.
Why would they have lied to her about her mother’s background? What was so important that it needed to be hidden?