Lifting the headset off, he looked at Griffith. Pale, wrinkled, tired. He’d been tremoring, seizing.
Maybe what Cavalon saw in the scope wasn’t the result of what happened, but the cause.
He collected fresh blood from Griffith’s arm, put in the new sample, and checked it. He took a small skin scraping and examined that. Then, he used the biotool to biopsy Griffith’s thyroid, and had a look at those cells. Bone marrow, next. All the same.
Pulling off the headset and gloves, he let out a resounding sigh.
He had to tell Rake. Or rather, someone had to tell Rake. He saw no reason he had to do it himself.
* * *
Cavalon lingered anxiously just around the corner from the control room. He planned to wait and pounce on Jackin when he inevitably left to use the latrine, or eat, or do whatever else optios did.
In the meantime, Cavalon picked at his fingernails, paced nervously, even ducked away into a dark corner a few times when he heard footsteps coming up the hallway. He had zero interest in being cornered by Snyder again.
After only a few minutes, to Cavalon’s intense relief, Jackin appeared, marching out the door toward base camp with a focused glower.
“Oh, uh, Optio?” Cavalon called after him. “North? Sir?”
Jackin stopped short, one eyebrow quirking up. His burns cut up the right side of his neck and had singed a path straight through his black beard. Rake had done a good job cleaning it up, but it’d definitely leave a scar—at least until they could get back inward to a real medical facility. Cavalon didn’t want to think about the likelihood of that at the moment.
“Yes, Oculus?” Jackin asked, tone curt.
“I, uh, have some information about the centurion.”
“Great. Let’s grab Rake.” Jackin turned back to the control room, but Cavalon gripped his arm to stop him. Jackin stared at Cavalon’s hand, then looked back up with a heavy glare.
“I, um,” Cavalon stammered, then let go. “I was thinking, I’d tell you, then you could tell her…”
Jackin scowled. “Seems much easier if you just tell her directly.”
Cavalon lowered his brow, and his voice came out dry and serious. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell her.”
Jackin’s face fell flat. “What does that mean?”
“Yeah, what does that mean?” Rake stood in the doorway, arms crossed, her now mostly dry hair pulled up into a loose bun. Eyebrows raised, she stared at Cavalon and Jackin expectantly.
Cavalon swallowed down a lump. “Well…”
He gave a wary glance over Rake’s shoulder, where Puck and a few others hovered around terminals, working diligently. Still trying to restart the gate, most likely.
He cleared his throat. “Let’s … talk in private.”
Rake’s face fell, then she nodded curtly and stepped between them to march into the hallway. They followed her back to the medbay, and when the door slid shut behind them, Rake turned to Cavalon and crossed her arms. “Out with it, Oculus.”
“I decided to take a closer look at some cells,” Cavalon began carefully, “just to see if I could get an idea about what’s going on.”
“And?”
“And, well, there’s some homeostatic imbalance. Some dysplasia that implies a maturation level that I really don’t understand. The most troubling thing is that there’s an unusual amount of atrophy—”