Chapter 32 #2
“You’re fucking infuriating,” she says, and she means it.
The hot and cold, the constant questioning.
She’s stuck between wanting to slap him and wanting to pull his face towards her and kiss him, and she hates that her emotions are so extreme.
Nothing about him feels level or safe. She doesn’t feel at all in control whenever she’s around him.
He smiles more, his lips pulling back to show his perfect, white teeth. “Then I’m succeeding,” he says.
“In what, driving me crazy?”
“No, love,” he says, still smiling that stupid smile. “In keeping your interest.”
She throws up her hands, the coffee sloshing around inside of her mug. “You can be interesting without also being infuriating.”
“It’s the same thing for me.” He glances behind Kit through the doors she stands in front of. “Oswald is coming this way.”
Kit tenses up. She does not want Oswald to see her with Task.
She pivots, pressing her palm against the pad to the right, waiting for the doors to slide open.
She walks through, meaning to intercept Oswald before he can exit and see Task standing out there in his sleeping clothes, before he can assume something about the nature of their relationship.
“You’re welcome!” Task calls through the door as it begins to slide closed.
Fuck, she thinks.
Kit blushes, turning toward Oswald, whose white eyebrows are raised. He says nothing, just gives her a knowing look and then shakes his head. She feels as though she’s just made an idiotic mistake, like she’s just been called out by a professor at the Agrippa Institute.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he says, finally. “Come, come.”
Kit stands in the lab with Nevis and Oswald, staring at the images displayed on the wall in front of them.
Stills of the magitech scans they’d taken of the Ambassador and five of the infected an hour ago, the black mass encapsulating each of their bodies almost entirely.
Although they hadn’t seen much improvement in Knox, they’d administered the pagadium antidote to six of the infected in an attempt to quell the Fever’s growth.
She’d hoped that with slight tinkering to the measurements of the pink salt and pagadium, plus an added drop of acterin, it would be enough, but it hadn’t been. The Fever raged on.
“Dammit,” Kit grumbles, her eyes hot. She doesn’t want to cry. She knows it won’t help anything, but she’s so angry, so frustrated. She doesn’t want to be reminded of her inadequacy, but the proof of it hovers in front of her.
“It’s alright, Luminary Hart,” Oswald says gently. “We’ll figure out what we’re missing.” He adjusts his glasses, leaning in to inspect the images more closely.
“The immune system isn’t responding in the way I’d anticipated,” Nevis says quietly. She’s scrolling through notes on her Prism, eyes flicking across the page.
“No shit,” Kit says. She needs to stop swearing in front of Luminary Oswald.
It’s incredibly unprofessional, but rage is surging through her, threatening to break free.
“The immune system isn’t responding because the antidote isn’t binding to the cells for long enough.
It’s like it gives them a brief respite, and then evaporates. ”
“Let’s back up,” Luminary Oswald says, sitting at Kit’s desk and spinning the chair to face the two younger Luminaries. “Sit down.” He gestures to the two chairs tucked under the workstation. “Let’s go over what happened in the quarantine ward a few days ago and try to piece together what we know.”
“I don’t…” Kit starts, her voice catching in her throat.
She doesn’t want to relive it. The Fever was terrifying, and she remembers the chaos, the way it dove for Nevis, the way it had taken everything from Grayson.
But she tries to detach herself, replay everything as if she is merely watching it unfold, an impartial observer.
“It’s important,” Luminary Oswald says, voice firm.
Nevis recaps the counter-curse they’d discovered, their efforts to draw runes in blood around the ambassador to quell the part of the Fever that was built on black magic. They’d somehow gotten it wrong, and it’d drawn the Fever out.
“So it’s somehow become…alive,” Oswald says, stroking his chin.
“It’s feeding on the magical cores of people,” Kit says.
“Tullia mentioned she thought it was possible, and I think that’s right.
It gets stronger by consuming magic, and that’s why our antidotes aren’t working.
We’ve been trying to target its traditional properties, but not its magical ones.
The runes were intended to focus on its magical elements, but we got them wrong.
It’s possible that if we’d done them right, it would have effectively killed it, not drawn it out. ”
“That may be,” Oswald muses. “But still, somehow your brother was cured.”
Kit shrugs. “I don’t know how.”
Nevis shoots her look, as if to say, are you sure about that?
“Are you prepared to try it again, given what happened?” Oswald asks.
Kit isn’t sure. There’s risk involved, obviously, but people are still sick, and they need to do something.
“Hold on,” Nevis cuts in, a hand up. “I have other relevant information, before we decide whether we want to mess with the runes again.”
Oswald raises his brows, as if to say, go on.
“I did some more digging this morning with Amaltheia,” Nevis says. “After I saw that the ambassador’s antibodies weren’t responding exactly the way that we’d hoped, I wanted to look into pagadium further. How much do you all know about the Symmetry?”
“Only what Tullia told me,” Kit says. “That it governs magic in the Consortium.”
Oswald presses his lips together, as if trying to decide what to say. “I’m familiar with the Symmetry.”
Kit whips her head to him in shock, slamming a palm on the table. Oswald grimaces, as if this was the reaction he was concerned about. “What do you mean? ”
“Luminary Hart,” Oswald says, calmly, “we can talk about this another time.”
“Why weren’t we ever taught anything about the Symmetry?” Kit bulldozes.
“The important thing is that we’re aware of it now,” Nevis tries to soothe Kit.
Kit settles back into her chair, seething.
She reasons this is something she can address later, but she feels as though Luminary school has left her woefully underequipped.
Something this big, this essential about the universe, they should have been educated in.
Oswald knows somehow, but he’d acted as if it was something he was hesitant to reveal.
“Anyway,” Nevis continues, once Kit has slumped further into her chair and crossed her arms over her chest with a huff.
“There are certain minerals in the Consortium that are reactive to black magic. Some amplify its effect, and some counteract it. As a light mineral, pagadium negatively interferes with black magic, which is why it helped to bolster the effects of the pink salt. But there are other minerals in the universe that can also dampen the effects of black magic, and I think we need something stronger than the pagadium. Something with more force to make it bind to the black magic, tamp it down.”
Kit taps her foot, pondering. “Like what?”
“Ophinium, for one. Peridian, for another,” Nevis responds, chewing on her lip. “The issue is…they’re very rare. Hoarded by a few.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” Oswald says, cutting his eyes towards Kit, as if he knows she’d done something suspect to get her hands on the pagadium. Asked someone suspect to get it for her.
Kit doesn’t think she can ask Task to retrieve something else for her, and she’s depressed at the idea of having to tell him it didn’t work.
After everything he’s done, she feels guilty, even if it’s not her fault.
Even as she knows he’d ultimately made the decision to get it. “What if we try the runes again?”
Nevis looks uncomfortable. Oswald nods once.
“We should try it again, since something had to have gone right for Knox to be cured. But let’s come up with a contingency plan.
In the interim, we should brew more of the latest antidote, Luminary Hart.
Even if it’s not binding for long enough, it’s doing something. ”
“Alright,” Kit says, her mind on Task. She can’t ask him to do more. There’s got to be another way. “I’ll make more.”
“Very good,” Oswald says, standing up. “Luminary Hart, find me later. Bring one of the Nexarian healers. We’ll try the runes again.”