Chapter 31 #2
She’s still staring out the window, lost in thought, when she sees him approaching, reflected in the glass.
He’s not in uniform. A smooth black sleep shirt and trousers cling to his frame and his platinum hair is tousled, sticking up on one side.
She almost never sees him unkempt like this, and she bites her lip, trying to hold in a smile.
“Can’t get enough of me?” Kit says when he drops onto the sofa next to her.
“No such thing as too much of you, love,” he replies, his lips curling up on one side.
Kit’s face heats, her stomach flipping. The things he says to her sometimes. “Well, I’m tired of you.” It’s a bold-faced lie, and she doesn’t know why she says it, except to try to force the fluttering in her stomach to stop.
“Oh?” Task raises an eyebrow, leaning his elbows on the table in front of him, looking directly at her. She feels warmth flood her belly as his blue eyes land on her own.
“You’re basically stalking me.”
“Stalking?” Task scoffs. “It’s not my fault I have a job to do, and you just happen to be there.”
“Is this a part of your job?” Kit gestures between them.
He shakes his head, his voice suddenly softer. “Not tonight. No.” He puts his chin in his palm, rolling his neck from side to side. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither,” Kit says, twirling the glass between her hands.
“Or, well — I didn’t want to go to sleep.
After my shift.” She looks down at her white Luminary scrubs, a smear of blood on her pant leg that she somehow missed until just now.
She feels the heat of his knee against her own, the place where his leg just brushes hers a tingle of pins and needles.
She tries to ignore it. “Can I ask you something?”
“Depends what it is,” Task says. He’s immediately guarded, and Kit thinks it must be exhausting for him to have to constantly rebuild his walls.
She takes a breath in, preparing to bring it up again. He’d cut her off when she’d tried to ask him about it before, but it feels like something has changed between them, that maybe he’ll answer her now. “Do you know about Vitali?”
Task
That was not the question he was expecting. He feels his gut lurch, immediately alert. First Tullia, and now Kit.
Kit was bound to figure it out. She’s clever.
It was only a matter of time. He’s more concerned about how much she’s put together.
If she’s just discovered her power, that’s one thing.
If she somehow discovered that it came from her mother, that her mother was Draven’s original Vitalis, then things are about to get infinitely more complicated for him.
Task looks at her out of the corner of his eye, shifting in his seat. “Yes.”
“They’re one of your Eight Great, aren’t they?” She puts her palms on the table, face down, and Task can see her hands shaking.
He nods, not offering anything more. He’s trying to suss out what she knows, doesn’t want to jeopardize anything. Though he’s not completely sure what he’s trying to avoid jeopardizing — his relationship with Kit, or his mission. The two are mutually exclusive.
“So forthcoming,” Kit mutters, sarcasm dripping from her tone.
“Well,” he says slowly, eyes scanning her face, “what do you want to know?”
“Do you think it would be possible…that is to say, could it be possible for someone living elsewhere to possess one of the Eight Great? Someone that isn’t of Nexarian descent?” Kit drums her fingers on the table, twists her lips as she waits for his answer.
“I suppose so, yes,” Task replies. “If someone from Nexarium moved to another planet, bred with someone else, then yes. It would be possible.”
Kit nods, swallowing. “But that’s the only way?”
He can see her mind working, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together.
He wants to just tell her about her mother, but he won’t.
He’s not that selfless. “We’re the only planet with the Eight Great,” Task replies, shrugging his shoulder.
“I don’t see how else someone would wind up with such a power. ”
Kit is silent again, staring out the window in front of her. She brings her fists to her mouth, pressing them into her lips as she nods. “Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. “Okay.”
“Kit,” Task says slowly. Playing the part. Acting as if he doesn’t know a very major piece of information about her past. “Is everything alright?”
She turns her head, eyes on him again. She pushes a strand of wavy brown hair behind her ear. “I examined my own blood a few weeks ago. It looks…different from the samples of the infected, and different from any of the normal cells I’ve seen from Lumarian citizens.”
“Hmm,” Task says, noncommittally.
She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re being strange.”
“I’m not,” he says, an automatic deflection. “But what you’re telling me is odd.”
Kit shrugs. “So you think it’s possible?”
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Task says, exasperated for reasons he can’t fully explain.
Maybe it’s that she’s too observant, too clever for her own good.
That she’s on to him. That she’s making it impossible for him to stay away from her.
That she’s dragging him from his bed in the middle of the night because he can’t stop thinking about her, about what it would feel like to press his lips against hers.
“Well, yes,” Kit says, “but I’m just confirming.
I figured if anyone would know, it’d be you.
” She’s not wrong. Amaltheia may have knowledge of the Eight Great, but Task is surrounded by them daily.
She takes a deep breath in, letting it rush out as she says, “Because if I am somehow a Vitalis, then I’ve been lied to. Somewhere along the way.”
Task sees the pain flash behind her eyes momentarily. He knows it well. He can see her reckoning with all that she’s been led to believe, and all that she doesn’t know.
“Sometimes people lie to us to protect us,” Task says, wishing he could make himself believe those words as he thinks about Draven, and the strange things he’s uncovered recently.
Kit tilts her head, her big green eyes on him. He feels like he’s drowning in her. “What would I need protecting from?”
He should say me, or Draven, or Nexarium, but he says none of it, just holds his palm out on the table, his heart thundering in his chest.
She glances at it, hesitant. “Aren’t you worried I’ll hurt you?”
“You didn’t the other day.”
“I…I have to actively think about it, though. I did more research, and it’s a bit like a shield, but if I don’t focus, it could drop, and I might —”
He’s not above begging her, thinks he’d do just about anything if she’d just touch him again. “Kit,” he says, voice hoarse. “Hold my damn hand.”
She rolls her eyes, but steels herself, lacing her fingers through his. “Only because you’re so demanding.”
He lets out a long breath, feeling the warmth of her palm in his, and thinks, not for the first time, that he’s not going to be able to do this.