Last Lights
Nico realized the spell had worked on everyone when she got outside, but for one, horrible second she thought it might have been too late.
Jonah was sprawled on the ground, unconscious. Somehow, though, he had managed to get out of the pool and force Chase into it. He was floating, face down, in the icy water.
“Chase.”
The word left Gert like a prayer. Molly wordlessly shifted Karolina into Nico and Alex’s arms, and she ran forward with Gert, helping her to haul Chase from the water. His lips were blue, and his eyes were closed, but as soon as he hit the air, he immediately coughed and started to breath.
Gert was frantic, running her hands across his face, his chest, his shoulders. “He’s so cold,” she murmured, and then she repeated it, louder, “He’s so cold.”
“Let me try and help,” Karolina offered, her voice still raw and quiet. “I can warm him up the fastest.” She was trying to support her own weight, upright between Nico and Alex, but Nico could feel her shaking with the effort. She tightened her grip around Karolina’s waist.
“Just don’t push yourself too hard, okay?” Nico asked, keeping her voice low so that only Karolina could hear her. “Please.”
Karolina smiled weakly and nodded, unwinding her arm from around Alex’s shoulder and leaning more heavily into Nico. She raised her free hand, fingers trembling, and a faint, rainbow colored light moved across the lawn to encompass Chase. Gert watched the colors dancing across his skin, awe struck at seeing him contained in the lights. Nico knew how she felt. Feeling Karolina’s weight against her again, seeing the familiar sparkle of her skin—her existence was more magic than Nico’s staff could ever hope to be. But then something went wrong.
The usually pinkish purple light turned ruby, and Chase’s eyes shot open as Karolina sucked in a breath and crumpled into Nico, her whole body shaking and glowing a harsh, hot red.
“Karolina.” Nico fell under Karolina’s sudden weight, shifting herself to the ground first and clenching her teeth against the jar to her ribs. “Karolina,” Nico repeated, ignoring the simmering heat burning against her skin. “Look at me, look at me.”
Karolina was panting, and her breaths came in heavy gulps. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, glazed with pain. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, “I can’t…. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Her light pulsed violently, searing Nico’s hand where she was gripping Karolina’s bare arm, and Karolina writhed and shouted.
“Help!” Nico shouted, her voice breaking, desperate enough that she would have taken help from anyone, even Jonah, if he could make Karolina’s pain stop. “No, no, no—“
The red light pulsed again, and Nico had to let go of Karolina’s arm or the heat would have seared through her hand, but the burn was nothing compared to the ache that tore through Nico’s chest when she heard Karolina’s strangled cry.
Suddenly Molly was there, and she was picking up both of them, and they were running—running away again, away from the Stein’s, away from Jonah, but Nico wondered, as Karolina’s panicked eyes latched onto Nico’s, whether they were already too late after all.
Four hours later, Nico was curled on her side, knees pulled up to her chest. It hurt her ribs to stay in that position, but the pain kept her awake, and she needed to stay awake. She needed to be ready if the red light, whatever it was, took over again. Karolina was sleeping next to her, no longer glowing or—Nico desperately hoped—hurting.
Nico had survived 98 days without her, and now that she was back Nico couldn’t imagine surviving even one more. But something was wrong. The car ride home had been enough to confirm that.
Chase had told them, after Karolina’s glow had finally subsided, leaving her sweaty and wracked with shivers, that he had watched the same thing happen when Jonah had experimented with her light in the box. His dad—his actual dad, using his own brain— had invented the concept, Chase had admitted, his head down, staring at Gert’s fingers wrapped in his own. Victor had come up with the idea of weaponizing the light. Whether that was true or not, none of the kids knew. But it didn’t matter who thought of it, not really. To Nico, it only mattered how to fix it.
“I know it works kind of like a poison to them,” Chase had said, “like Kryptonite, I guess.”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “Was that really a Superman reference coming from the lacrosse guy?”
The car was cramped, and Karolina’s eyes were closed. Her fists were clenched, one wrapped in Nico’s jacket so tightly her knuckles had turned white. Karolina was leaning against Nico, pale and quiet. Her breath was gentle on Nico’s neck, and as scared as she was, Nico let herself feel that breath, steadily coming in and out, for the rest of the car ride home. They could figure it out. As long as she was breathing, they had time to figure it out.
“Nico.”
Nico blinked, startled back into the present. A pair of blue eyes was watching her, and Nico, ridiculously, couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across her face. “You should be sleeping,” Nico whispered, scooting forward until her forehead was touching Karolina’s. “It’s the middle of the night.”
Karolina pressed her lips quickly to Nico’s and smiled. “I would, but my girlfriend is watching me sleep, which I’m pretty sure she herself told me herself was creepy.”
Nico snorted and looked down, shaking her head. But when she spoke, her voice was quiet. “You were gone for so long… some nights the memories of you felt like they were too good to really be true at all.”
“You know,” Karolina said, softly, “the only thing I could think about in that tube for so long was that I never got the chance to tell you that I love you.”
Nico’s eyes snapped back up to see Karolina’s face, not as a projection, not silent and asleep, but real and vibrant and seeing her—loving her. Karolina’s expression was earnest, eyes wide and bright. Just like Leslie had described those months ago, under the stars. After everything that had happened, Karolina still managed to see the world with the same open heart that she had at 9 years old, and Nico loved her so much she was entirely overwhelmed with the reality of it.
“No matter what they put me through in there, I knew I had to get back to you and tell you, tell you every day for as long as you’ll hear it,” Karolina said, eyes searching Nico’s. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Nico whispered. “I mean really, I do—I love you so much.”
Karolina laughed, and it was the best sound Nico had ever heard. She closed the distance between them, pressing her mouth to Karolina’s, tasting each other’s smiles at first until the kiss intensified, deepening as Nico’s tongue slid against Karolina’s lip and into her mouth. Karolina wove her fingers through Nico’s hair, pulling her closer.
“Actually, if I remember right,” Karolina teased, her breath mingling with Nico’s, mischief in her eyes, “you lamp me. Or maybe lump me? I don’t think I heard the word love in there, though.”
“Mmm,” Nico agreed, sliding her fingers up Karolina’s side, relishing the shiver that ran through Karolina’s body at her touch, “I do lamp you, though. I’ll prove it right now.”
Karolina bit her bottom lip, fingers tracing the contours of Nico’s face. “How are you going to do that?”
Nico smiled. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” she murmured. And then she pressed her lips back against Karolina’s, and she let herself get lost in the galaxy of the night.
The next morning, Karolina was still sleeping when Nico woke up. She looked over at her, sunlight playing in the tangles of her blond hair, and she slid out of bed as quietly as possible, ignoring her protesting ribs. Funny how the pain hadn’t bothered her too much last night.
She was still smiling to herself, retracing the newly formed memories, when she walked into the living room for training.
“Nico, we need to talk,” Alex said.
His expression wiped the smile from her face immediately. Gert and Chase looked just as somber.
“About the red light?” Nico asked, trying to stay casual. “Yeah, we have to figure out what’s going on with that so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. But she seemed fine last night.”
Alex and Chase exchanged looks, and Gert’s eyebrows furrowed. A fresh wave of familiar fear began to rise in Nico’s stomach.
“What? What’s going on? Gert?”
Gert looked at Nico, her brown eyes full. “Alex managed to send the information from Jonah’s computer to his yesterday at the lab. He found out—he found out what’s going on.”
Nico raised her eyebrows, anger bubbling through her worry. “Which is what, exactly?”
Alex quickly pushed his glasses up on his nose and flipped his computer screen toward Nico.
“It looks like Jonah was experimenting with Karolina’s energy, like Chase said. He was doing a few things with it, but one of them was taking it and weaponizing it,” Alex explained, pointing to some graphs on the screen that Nico ignored. “Basically, he extracted the natural radiation that Karolina emits when she glows, and he recalibrated it to be more focused. Only he wasn’t just taking the energy from her. He was testing it against her. It looks like, from these calculations, that the new energy irradiated her body in a way that it wasn’t designed to handle. Usually, her light functions through a kind of osmosis, where it passes through her and out into the air because her body is less concentrated with the radiation than the atmosphere, so her skin acts as a kind of semipermeable membrane. Even when she’s not intentionally glowing, she emits harmless low level radiation that our eyes can’t see.”
Nico was staring at the charts now, wracking her brain to remember freshman science classes. She wasn’t thinking about the word irradiated. She couldn’t. “Okay, so now what? The light is more concentrated or something?”
Alex and Chase exchanged another glance, and Nico snapped. “Would you stop doing that and just tell me what the hell is going on?”
“The light is more concentrated, basically, yeah,” answered Chase. “It’s more concentrated than what her body is designed to handle, but it’s also more concentrated than the atmosphere outside of her. So there’s really nowhere for it to go.”
Alex nodded. “Her skin isn’t designed to release that much radiation all at once, so some of it goes but not enough. Even the molecules that are released can get reabsorbed because the whole thing has kind of short circuited her system. It gets worse when she tries to glow because it forces more out than her body can handle, which is what causes the pain and the burning.”
Nico blinked, unable to process the wall of information all at once. “But she’s—now that the experiments have stopped, she’ll get better, right?”
Chase looked down, and Alex’s eyes softened. “I don’t think so, Nico. The healing tube was stopping it from progressing before, but it’s sort of like an alien version of radiation sickness. Once it’s there…”
“No,” Nico stated, “no, we didn’t get her back just to watch her— no. There has to be something we can do, a cure, anything.”
“Chase figured out that it’s not dangerous for other people,” Gert said, biting her lip. “The radiation exists in a third category, not ionizing or nonionizing. It’s unique, so you can stay as close to her as you want without… she doesn’t have to be alone.”
Gert’s words, more than any scientific explanation, cut through Nico’s desperate denial. “How—“ Nico choked on the words, too thick in her throat, and then she braced herself and tried again. “How long?”
“A couple weeks,” Alex said, his voice unnaturally strained. “Maybe less.”
Black spots danced in Nico’s vision, and she sat down hard on one of the dilapidated couches, sinking into the cushions.
“You guys didn’t tell her about the cure first?” Molly asked, her voice ringing loudly from the stairs where she was just emerging from her bedroom. “I told you last night, you should have started with the cure.”
Nico’s eyes snapped up, and hope rose in her, cutting through the despair with razor sharp precision and pain. Her eyes filled with tears. If there were hope to hang on to, then she had to do it. No matter how much farther it would leave her to fall if it collapsed.
“There’s a cure?” Nico croaked, her voice cracked. “Why the hell wouldn’t you have led with that?”
“A cure for what?”
All five of them immediately turned toward the voice, still raspy with sleep. Karolina glanced around at them, bemused, and then asked her question again, directed at Nico. “A cure for what?”
Nico opened her mouth to answer, completely at a loss for what to say, how to begin to explain, but before she could try Karolina suddenly went alarmingly pale. “I don’t feel well,” she said, and then ran toward the bathroom.
“I want to know every single thing about the cure when I get back down here,” Nico announced over her shoulder as she dashed up the stairs after Karolina. “Starting with how to get it.”
Karolina was on the bathroom floor, leaning back against the bathtub with her eyes closed and her breathing shallow. Before Nico could say anything, Karolina leaned over the toilet, retching into the bowl. Nico rushed forward and dropped to her knees, pulling Karolina’s hair back with one hand and rubbing her back with the other.
“It’s okay,” she murmured softly, ignoring the rising sense of dread building in her chest, “you’ll be okay.”
Karolina spit weakly and then leaned back again, eyes still closed, catching Nico’s fingers with her own. Nico slid closer to her, wiping the sweat beaded across her forehead. Then she noticed the blood on Karolina’s lips. Panicked, she glanced into the toilet. Blood. She was throwing up blood. Nico fought back her own sudden nausea, and she softly wiped the blood from Karolina’s lips with her thumb.
Karolina opened her eyes.
“The cure is for me,” she said. Her voice was weak but not unsure. “I’m dying.”
Nico’s eyes filled with tears, but she shook her head. “That’s not going to happen. I won’t let that happen.”
“Nico.” Karolina said her name so gently it was breaking Nico’s heart, right then, there on the cracking bathroom floor. “I need you to know that—“
“No,” Nico whispered, fierce and pleading, “please. Please promise me that you’ll fight this. Promise that you’ll fight this with me until we find the cure, okay?”
Nico searched Karolina’s eyes, willing her to be okay, to stay. “Don’t give up,” she whispered, resting her forehead against Karolina’s. “Please don’t give up.”
Karolina gave her a watery smile, tears spilling down and dripping onto their joined hands. “I promise,” she agreed, nodding against Nico.
Nico knew that she had been asking a lot when she begged Karolina to promise to try and fight the poison, but as the days slipped by and Karolina’s pain got worse and worse, the weight of that vow became an unrelenting, crushing force.
For the next week, Nico spent most of her time taking care of Karolina, who was so tired and weak that she spent almost all day and night either asleep or throwing up. She had spiked a fever less than 48 hours after they had gotten her back, and to everyone’s horror, it sporadically activated the red, blazing light. Nico knew she would never be able to erase the echoes of Karolina’s strangled cries, the look of terror in her wide, searching eyes. Karolina was dying, and Nico had no choice but to admit that to herself as she wiped the blood from her chapped lips, brushed the tangles from her snarled hair, used every spell Nico could think of to lessen Karolina’s pain, diminish her agony.
It had been 9 days, and they still didn’t have the cure. But now, finally, they did have a plan to get it. It taken them so long to find because they had assumed it was in the Stein’s lab. But it was Robert who had kept it. Robert who, Nico had been surprised to discover, invented it. And Robert who agreed to give it to them—as long as Nico was the one to meet him to pick it up.
Alex had wanted to go with her, but Nico refused. She drove alone, back through the winding streets of her old neighborhood. The mansions seemed ominous in the dark, their towering shadows forcing the suburban streets to reveal that even they had secrets. Nico pulled into her driveway and shut off the engine. She told Robert she would go that far, but she wasn’t coming inside. True to his word, he was waiting outside the garage.
“Thank you for coming, Nico,” he said, when she got out and walked near enough to hear him.
His hair looked more flecked with grey than it had last time she had seen him, and the scar on his neck was still raised and light pink. She pushed the memories of him as a loving father from her mind, ignored the nostalgia that he must have known could surface from being back here again after months and months had passed. He was the key to Karolina’s survival. The fact that he was her father was incidental.
“Do you have it?” Nico asked, keeping her tone neutral.
He nodded, his eyes filled with sadness. “It’s in here,” he said, picking up a briefcase from where it had been sitting near his feet and offering it to her. “But it’s not finished yet.”
“What?” Nico’s attempt to be civil dropped away as a dozen reminders of betrayal latched back in. “You told us on the phone that you had a cure, that you made it.”
“I do have a cure,” Robert agreed, reaching forward to comfort Nico. She jerked away from his touch. “But I’m the only one I’ve tried it on. Gert said that you needed it for Karolina, but I hadn’t incorporated alien biology into my equation yet. It will eradicate the red light in humans because I assumed that was why Jonah was weaponizing it—to use it against use.”
Nico could barely control the rage she felt coursing through her, drowning out the sound of anything but the blood rushing in her ears. She reached out for the briefcase.
“Give it to me.”
Robert frowned. “Nico, if you show me where you’re staying, let me help you, I could adapt it. I’m sure I could.”
Nico’s hands were shaking with the effort not to blast her father into oblivion with her staff. “So that’s why it had to be me to come and get the cure,” she hissed. “You thought you could manipulate me into showing you where we’ve been staying this whole time.”
“No, Nico,” Robert said, sounding desperate now. “I genuinely want to help you and Karolina. But I knew if I told you it wasn’t ready then you wouldn’t come, and I had to see you. I had to tell you how sorry I am that things have turned out this way.”
The staff extended in Nico’s hand, and she stared at Robert with eyes glinting as hard as steel. “Give me the fucking briefcase. Now.”
He extended it again, holding in front of him, moonlight glancing off the silver handle. She snatched it out of his hand, got in the car, and drove away without looking back.
By the time she got back to the hostel, she had a plan. Part of her wondered if it made her more like her parents than she wanted to admit, but she didn’t care. It could save Karolina—it was the only thing that could. And she was going to do it regardless.
She burst inside, suitcase in hand, expecting to see Alex and Chase working in the living room, but instead she was met by an empty room and red lights flashing from the treehouse. Only this time, there was no yelling, no screams of pain. It was silent. And the silence sent a bolt of fear so powerful through Nico that she almost forgot about her plan altogether, almost forgot about the briefcase in her hand. She sprinted up the stairs, pushing past Chase and Alex, who were standing near the treehouse door. Karolina was on the bed, the red lights dimming back into her skin. Gert and Molly were next to her, holding her hands, and they both looked up when Nico came in. But Karolina’s eyes stayed closed.
“What happened?” Nico asked, her voice somehow sounding a million miles away. “When did that start again?”
Molly’s lip was quivering, but she managed to answer Nico through her tears. “Not long after you left,” she told her, voice breaking. “At first she was awake, but then she just passed out. She kept glowing, but she wasn’t screaming or moving or anything. And now she’s—well, she feels cold, Nico.”
“Her heart’s still beating,” Gert whispered, two fingers pressed gently against Karolina’s neck. “And she’s breathing.”
“We need to give her the cure now,” Alex said, nodding toward the briefcase still clasped in Nico’s hand. “She’s not going to survive another attack like that.”
“No, we…” Nico’s voice broke, and she dropped the briefcase, moving toward the foot of the bed. “We can’t. It was designed for humans. It wouldn’t work on her.”
Her words hung in the air, and no one broke the silence that followed. Alex grabbed Nico’s shoulder, squeezed once, hard, and then walked slowly from the room. Chase and Molly drifted out, too, Chase throwing a comforting arm around Molly as she cried into his chest. Gert stood to leave, blinking back tears that were coming hard and fast, but Nico stopped her on the way out.
“In five minutes I need you to come back in here, okay?”
Gert tilted her head, confused. “What… what do you mean?”
Nico gripped Gert’s shoulders and looked into her eyes, needing her to understand. Needing her to trust. “In five minutes, come back here, and use what’s in the briefcase, okay?”
Gert looked from the case to Karolina to Nico. Her eyes widened.
“Nico, I don’t—“
“Gert,” Nico interrupted, her voice shaking. “Will you do it?”
Gert nodded and then wrapped Nico in a hug, squeezing her tight and hard. Then she pulled away without glancing back and shut the door behind her.
Nico took a deep, steadying breath and walked toward the bed. Karolina’s eyes were still closed, her cheeks hollowed and pale from months of experiments and over a week of debilitating sickness. Nico slid into the bed next to her, gently running her fingers across Karolina’s cheek. She tucked a strand of blonde hair away from her eyes.
“On the day Jonah took you, you promised me that everything would be alright. You said there was no leaving each other, not anymore.”
Nico’s voice broke, and she paused, closing her eyes, before continuing. When she opened them again, Karolina was watching her.
“Hey,” Karolina murmured, her voice so soft Nico had to strain to hear it. “I thought we weren’t allowed to give up.”
Nico shook her head, relief and dread coursing through her in equal measure. It would be harder if Karolina was awake. She didn’t want to see the look on her face when she realized what was happening. “I’m not. How could I, after you’ve been so strong.”
Karolina’s eyes were glistening, and her face crumpled as Nico watched. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “Nico, I’m so sorry, but I don’t think I can keep my promise. I can’t fight this much longer, and I want—I need you to know how much I love you. Loving you taught me what love is. I never wanted to let you down.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Nico answered, gently wiping Karolina’s cheeks where her tears fell, “You couldn’t let me down, okay? Hey, I mean it.”
Nico tipped Karolina’s chin up, letting herself drink in the fact that she was real, she was there. “If we had to do it all again, every day, all the shit, all the bad, I would do it in a heartbeat just to relive this past year with you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I had been in the dark for so long that without you, I might have forgotten there was light at all. You’re my light.”
Nico kissed Karolina, quick, salty with the taste of tears and blood, and then she activated her staff. Karolina frowned, suddenly confused.
“Nico, what—“
“Transfer the red radiation to me,” Nico whispered, not taking her eyes off of Karolina.
Karolina’s eyes widened, realization setting in.
“No!” she tried to shout, wincing with the effort, her voice coming out barely above a croak, “Nico, no!”
But the spell was already working. Red light spilled from Karolina, pouring from her body and filling the air with a poisonous, flaming glow.
The fact that it didn’t seem to be hurting Karolina as it flushed from her system was Nico’s last coherent thought as the light enveloped her, burning impossibly hot when it flooded through her skin. And Karolina’s frantic, pleading face was the last thing she saw before the darkness collapsed in on her mind.
Nico was not conscious when Karolina’s desperate calls for help brought the rest of the kids running back into the room, Gert leading the way. She couldn’t hear Karolina begging her to stay.
“Nico, no, no, no…” Karolina sobbed, hands running in vein across Nico’s face, her shoulders, her arms. “Please, God, no. I can’t—I can’t.”
Nico wasn’t watching as Karolina unraveled even as her strength returned, didn’t see Molly wrap her arms around her, comforting her and trying to keep her back so Gert could inject the cure into Nico’s suddenly lifeless, limp arm.
Nothing echoed in the blackness that had surrounded Nico, even though Alex was shouting at Gert, asking her if the cure would work, repeating that the only reason Karolina had survived the radiation as long as she had was because of her alien DNA.
“A human couldn’t handle those levels,” he yelled, his hands moving from his hair to his glasses and back again. “What good’s a cure if she’s already dead. It could have killed her instantly to absorb that much.”
Nico was pale and still where she had slumped onto the bed, and Karolina broke away from Molly to lift her shakily onto her own lap, cradling her head as soon as Gert injected the cure. Nico didn’t feel the needle enter her arm or the deep blue glow of the antidote surge into her veins. She didn’t feel Karolina’s lips as they pressed against her forehead, breathing promises and prayers against her skin, begging Nico to come back to her.
Time didn’t exist for Nico, so she didn’t know that minutes had passed without her stirring, and she didn’t realize she had missed the first half of a desperate, whispered story Karolina was murmuring to her.
Instead, the first thing Nico heard was the part of the story she had suspected but dreaded.
“What happened to you, in my mind, over and over—there was nothing I could do to stop it. I think the only reason I stayed sane was because some part of me knew that it wasn’t real. That you were out there, alive, looking for me.”
Karolina’s eyes searched Nico’s unresponsive face, but Nico didn’t know that. She kept listening, though.
“I never doubted that you would find me, Nico, not once. So I forced myself to survive, no matter how many times they killed you, no matter how many ways I watched you die. As long as the real you was still okay, I could handle anything. Your ability to survive in the darkness, to use it as your lifeline, it kept me alive.”
With a jolt, Nico realized she could feel arms wrapped around her, feel fingers tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “But Nico,” Karolina’s voice dropped, broken and impossibly soft. “I also knew that if the worst happened to me, if I didn’t make it, you would find a way to survive. You’re strong, so strong, and as much as it hurt being in that box, I was so relieved it was me and not you. I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have kept it together.”
Karolina closed her eyes, a tear sliding from her chin onto Nico’s face. If she had been watching, she would have seen Nico’s face twitch slightly where it hit. Nico felt it.
“I can’t do this without you,” Karolina whispered. “You found me once. Please, please come back to me again. Open your eyes, Nico. Please,” Karolina breathed. “Open your eyes.”
Nico had lost Karolina for 98 days. She had watched her struggle with pain and sickness for 9 more. But when she opened her eyes, the cure having finished its purifying path through her body, she stopped counting. Because the first thing Nico saw was a pair of ocean blue eyes, widening in shock and joy. Karolina gave a sob of relief, lifting Nico up, cradling Nico’s head against her own.
“You’re okay,” Karolina said, as much to herself as to Nico. “You’re okay.”
Nico pulled back just enough to look fully into Karolina’s face. “No leaving each other, right?” Nico breathed, smiling as she leaned in to kiss Karolina with all the strength she had left. “We’re home.”