Chapter 43: Kai's Defining Hour
The third node was in the basement of a children's hospital.
Nobody in the briefing room had wanted to say it out loud. The floor plans had been passed around the table in silence, each person looking at the confirmed energy marker sitting directly beneath a building that contained, at any given time, between sixty and eighty children under the age of twelve.
Croft had been the one to finally say it.
"Right," he'd said. "So that's awful. Moving on. What's the extraction plan?"
Kai had been the one to volunteer.
Not because the others wouldn't have. Because he got there first, and because there was something in him that moved toward the most difficult version of a problem the way water moves toward the lowest point, not dramatically, not with announcement, just inevitably.
"I'll go in as maintenance," he said. "The hospital uses a rotating contractor service. I can have credentials in four hours."
"The node is sealed," Jonathan said. "The energy signature suggests it's been active for at least six weeks. The suppression device will struggle at that density."
"I know what I'll need," Kai said. He looked at Jonathan steadily. "You focus on the northern cluster. I've got this one."
He had gone in the next morning.
The hospital was what hospitals for children always were, too bright and too loud and full of a particular quality of hope that existed nowhere else, the hope of people who needed it most urgently. He had walked its corridors in a maintenance uniform with a toolbox and a Guild issue suppression device the size of a thermos, and he had smiled at nurses and held doors open and found the service elevator to the basement without drawing attention.
The basement was utility space, pipes, electrical panels, the infrastructure of a building that ran continuously. The node was in the northeast corner, behind a ventilation unit, pulsing with a cold light that had no business being in a basement.
Kai crouched in front of it.
He had done dangerous things before. He had cleared high rank Gates, faced monsters that had put him in the Guild infirmary twice and a field hospital once. He had a scar on his left shoulder from a Shadow Stalker's claw and a slight ringing in his right ear that came and went since a mage class creature had detonated too close to his head.
He had never been frightened the way he was frightened right now.
Not for himself.
He pressed the suppression device to the node's surface and began the deactivation sequence.
Above him, sixty something children were in various stages of recovery. He had passed a ward on the second floor where a girl of perhaps eight was drawing at a table by the window, her IV line looped carefully out of the way of her pencil. She had looked up when he passed. She had not looked afraid. She had looked the way children look when they have been in hospitals long enough to stop being surprised by strangers, with a calm, assessing curiosity that was somehow both heartbreaking and formidable.
He thought about her while he worked.
The deactivation sequence was twelve steps. He completed nine of them cleanly. The tenth was where the node pushed back.
Not with force, with frequency. A pulse of energy hit the suppression device and tried to reverse its polarity. He felt it in his hands as a vibration, in his teeth as a low hum, in his chest as something that wanted very badly to make him leave.
He did not leave.
He adjusted the device's calibration with the manual override, a process that required holding a specific pressure point on the casing while rotating a secondary dial with his other hand, which was fiddly and uncomfortable and the kind of task that became very difficult when your hands were shaking.
His hands were shaking.
He steadied them.
He thought about the girl with the pencil and the IV line and the calm assessing eyes.
He completed step ten. Eleven. Twelve.
The node went dark.
The basement was suddenly very quiet.
Kai sat back on his heels and breathed for a moment. His hands were still shaking slightly. He let them shake. That was fine. Shaking after was allowed.
He packed up the suppression device and walked back out the way he'd come.
On the second floor, the girl was still drawing. She looked up when he passed.
"You fixed it?" she said.
He stopped.
"Fixed what?" he said.
She tilted her head. "The cold thing in the basement. I could feel it sometimes at night. My room is right above it." She looked at her drawing. It was a bird, simple, careful, with a great deal of attention paid to the wings. "It's not there anymore."
Kai looked at her for a moment.
"Yeah," he said. "It's fixed."
She nodded as though this was satisfactory and went back to her drawing.
He walked to the elevator. He pressed the button for the ground floor. He stood in the small metal box as it descended and he put one hand flat against the wall and he took three very slow breaths.
Then the doors opened and he walked out into the bright, too loud, hopeful building and went back to work.
He never told anyone about the girl.
Some things you keep not because they're secret but because they're yours.