Seraphine had a condition.
She used that word deliberately, clinically, because the alternatives — disease, disorder, affliction — carried a weight of helplessness that she refused. The condition was called Vortigen's Syndrome, named for the researcher who had identified it in the aftermath of the Awakening, and it was rare enough that most doctors had only read about it rather than seen it.
The simplified version: her immune system, in its enthusiastic attempt to protect her from Ascendant bioelectric fields — a response that her mother's early research suggested was not random but inherited, bred into the Voss bloodline by some ancestor who had made a very strange bargain — had begun attacking her own tissue. Slowly. Methodically. Like a soldier who didn't know the war had ended.
She had maybe three years left. Possibly four, if the new compound she was developing worked the way she hoped.
She hadn't told anyone this. There was no one to tell.
She told Kael on the second day, because he asked, and because he asked in the way of a man who already suspected the answer and was offering her the choice of whether to lie. She found she didn't want to. There was something about his particular brand of blunt, careful attention that made deception feel like a waste of the time she didn't have much of.
He was quiet for a very long time after she told him.
"The compound you've developed," he said. "The Nullifier. Does it help with the syndrome?"
"That's not why I made it."
"That's not what I asked."
A pause. "It addresses one of the mechanisms. Yes."
Something shifted in his expression — something tectonic, happening far below the surface. "Then it's even more important that the Choir doesn't get it."
"I know that."
"And your survival—"
"Is not the primary concern," she said sharply. "My mother died for this work. I'm not going to protect it by making it conditional on what it does for me personally."
He looked at her with those silver eyes, and she had the uncomfortable sensation of being seen more clearly than she wanted.
"I think," he said quietly, "that you are the most stubborn person I have ever met."
"You've been looking for me for sixteen years," she said. "You knew my mother. What did you expect?"
The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile. She filed it away anyway.