Page 56 of Veradel
Could my mother wake up?
“What would happen if we just used the raw plasma?” I ask, glancing at the empty bottles scattered around us. If we fail at this, we won’t have any more chemicals to purify the antibodies with. Only the centrifuge to filter out the plasma.
“In human patients?” Taika muses. “They’d probably die, due to some unwanted components in the plasma. Toxins that would shock their system. In the Wall? Probably nothing, because the antibodies wouldn’t be concentrated enough. Okay, now let’s bring this pH back up. Hand me the sodium hydroxide?”
By the time the sun fades once more past his clinic’s window, we have several sterile vials of an opaque liquid that no longer resembles or smells like Lucan’s blood whatsoever.
“Do you actually think it’ll work?” I whisper finally, staring at the vials that look so inconspicuous.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Taika says gently. “But we’ll have to let this incubate for a few days, and in the meantime… even vampires and werewolves need sleep. I daresay you haven’t gotten much since you fell off the Wall the first time.”
I flex my fingers, still feeling the foreign sense of power thrumming beneath my skin and remembering how Lucan said he once ran around the perimeter of the Wall for days and days before he finally fell unconscious. “Apparently, I don’t need as much rest as humans do.”
But Taika gives me a pointed look, peeling off his gloves, so I take that as my sign to leave. Maybe some real, solid rest after everything that’s happened in that time frame wouldn’t be such a horrible idea.
“Thank you,” I tell Taika. “For trying this with me. And teaching me.”
He bows his head. “Thank you for giving us the idea. I’d like to think we could have done it without you, but I’m not sure contact with the Wall would have created enough antibodies in any of our systems. And I never would have been able to acquire the right equipment.”
I nod and cast one last long look at the little centrifuge on the counter before bidding him goodbye, crossing my arms against the nip of the nighttime as soon as I open the front door. It looks like everyone’s gone to bed, the wind warbling through an empty street, so I ease the door shut as quietly as possible and hesitate on the clinic’s ramp.
“You didn’t think I’d be able to sleep without you, did you?”
Lucan’s shape dislodges itself from the shadows across the street, and I instantly feel my chest loosen as I breathe a sigh of relief. He waited for me—for hours, judging by the crumpled, dirt-streaked state of his clothing.
“You’ve slept without me plenty of times before,” I say, taking his outstretched hand as he steps closer. His large, warm fingers thread themselves through mine.
“Never again,” he promises, and chills graze along the back of my neck at the intensity of his words. For the next five minutes, we walk hand-in-hand to his house—where the world suddenly tilts off its axis as he scoops me up off my feet.
“What are you doing?”
Lucan doesn’t even glance down at my best attempt at an affronted expression. He simply marches inside, me against his chest, as if I weigh no more than a rag doll.
“Replacing a bad memory with a good one,” he says simply.
It isn’t until we’re up the spiral stairs, through his bedroom, and toward those glass doors I’ve tried not to look at that I understand: the balcony.I’ll show you how beautiful it can be the first cloudless night we get, he told me on my first night. Is it a clear sky tonight? I forgot to look, so consumed with my thoughts about antivenom.
Placing me on my feet before the glass door, Lucan swings it open.
I step out first, quiet, almost reserved. A heavy weight seems to pull my eyes downward, past the railing, where the dirt road stretches between rows of houses in varying degrees of degradation. A strange sense of fear spreads in my stomach, as if every person still trapped within Xantera might risefrom the ground and wave up at me with jerky, skeletal arms. As if I’ve already failed them and left them behind to rot.
Lucan’s presence steps up behind me, though, magnetic in the opposite way of the Guardians’. I feel his thumbs grip the sides of my face. And tilt it up.
Finally, my eyes lift to the sky.
For a few seconds, I blink, adjusting to the blanket of rich, velvety black speckled with bright lights. The stars. They look far enough away to be separate universes, yet my hands twitch upward anyway, as if I might be able to touch them. What would they feel like? Soft and silky like fabric? Warm and sticky like honey? Or something else entirely?
“You are not a Chosen One anymore, Saskia,” Lucan says from behind me, his warm, rough hands still cupping the edges of my face. “And you don’t have to keep looking down.”
I lean my head back against his chest, wishing I could cement that declaration into my heart, but something keeps tugging at my peripheral. What if no one else ever gets to experience the stars like this? What if all my friends I left behind never get to see the night sky with no Wall around their entire world?
“What if…” I start out loud, swallowing thickly and squeezing my eyes shut. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“The antivenom?” he questions me as his rough palms skate down my arms.
I nod, trying to loosen the tension in my body, but somehow, my muscles cord further into cold marble. Lucan carefully slides the straps of my dress down my arms before his thumbs press into my constricted shoulder muscles, working their way between my shoulder blades. The light pressure feels a little like heaven.
“All we can do is try,” he says finally. “And keep trying. Over and over again, until the world caves.”
