Another short one! This is hot off the bullshit press in my head, so it's rough. But I have to get it out before I move on to the good stuff in Ch. 9. :*

Ch. 8

Marcato

What Kid didn't like about this suicide infection situation was how illogical it was. How it suffered from an acute imbalance in its cause, effect, and purpose. True, nearly any imbalance gave him painful chills, but this one was positively nauseating. He swallowed some of that bile as he pulled on elbow-length gloves and used several swabs to gather his own samples of the blood beneath the floor. His hands shook as he screwed the tops back on his collection vials.

Recon, collect evidence, stay low on the radar in case these attacks were somehow targeted. His father had been clear in their mission here. But something was telling Kid the situation was escalating far too quickly for mere analysis.

And Soul and Maka were somehow connected to it all. That, he could feel in his gut. He just didn't know how. Yet. All the waiting had him on edge. It was time to act, wasn't it?

Beside him, Liz quirked an eyebrow as she finished packing up her camera. She'd obviously felt the discomfort in his soul. He regretted dragging her emotions into his own turmoil.

"I'm fine," he whispered before she could speak.

She pursed her lips. "Don't look fine. You're even whiter than normal."

"It's just the air in here. And the pews are all mismatched. You know how that gets to me." He offered a half smile. She didn't bite.

"It doesn't all add up to you, does it?"

Damn her perceptive eye. He cleared his throat. "This infection is behaving…irrationally."

"How so?" Liz cast an eye over her shoulder at Patty who was talking (read: flirting) with Antonio with little success. Liz had insisted her sister stay well clear of the blood, and Patty had obeyed. Kid often marveled at how Liz could simultaneously think, fight, flirt, and watch her sister's back. He could learn something from her ability to multitask. As it was Kid could barely handle tying his shoes if something—say a non-color coded book in his library or an unequal number of pears to apples in the bowl in his kitchen—caught his eye.

"An infection spreads organically. It either branches out from organism to organism through contact of some kind or it spreads somewhat evenly from a single point of origin. This one doesn't. In fact, it doesn't seem to follow any discernable pattern at all. Were it truly contagious, meister/weapon pairs would be sharing it at the very least. Were it originating from a single source, that source would become obvious through the connections between the victims. But, as far as we can tell, these poor souls were all completely unconnected, had never met, didn't associate."

"Could it be magic?" Liz swallowed. He knew how much the idea was still foreign to one who'd lived a good portion of her life in the harsh reality of the streets.

Kid shrugged. "It could always be magic, but so far it still doesn't make sense. What purpose are these victims serving? They are children. They aren't spreading the disease. There have been no threats. There is no purpose in killing them. It's all as completely random as I could imagine. No pattern. No balance. No sense. NOTHING!"

Liz put a hand on his forearm to still him. He bit his tongue until it throbbed. It wouldn't do to lose his cool around his troops. He wasn't Lord Death yet, but someday he would be. He needed to learn how not to let the chaos of the world infiltrate his mind. The buzz around him was a caged madness. He smiled to himself. In that area he and Soul could see eye-to-eye.

As if on cue, Soul and Maka returned from outside. Maka's eyes were red-rimmed. The two separated their interlaced fingers almost immediately when they caught his eye. He hoped his frustration with the investigation hadn't made him appear discouraging of their relationship. He wanted them to be happy. Even if it meant their fighting partnership may one day have to end.

He stood and stowed his samples in a bag. He'd brought a small analysis kit with him. He hoped it would give them at least a starting point.

"What's next?" Soul asked.

Kid bit back a cringe. "We go visit Sebastiene."

How many times would Maka have to meet the cold stare of a dead meister or weapon in her lifetime? 10 more? 100? Was this what being a Death Scythe's partner meant? She wouldn't give up her place at Soul's side for anything, but she was coming to realize her childhood image of slaying demons and saving lives as a meister hadn't included the healthy sprinkling of tragedy, of young lives snuffed out.

That was the reality.

She'd been naïve. Even her. A death child born and bred to wield. How could she have been so deluded as to think her great trials were over? That now, as she neared graduation, everything would fall into place. Maybe it was her reading habits. She probably needed to toss the romances for a while.

Beside her, beside the metal slab where Sebastiene lay sheeted in white, Soul took her hand and she let him. His fingers were ice. It still made her feel warmer.

"Sebastiene Speciali. Age 9. Resident of Florence. Cause of death appears to be asphyxiation," the medical examiner, a portly woman with thinning red hair pinned under a hairnet, folded back the sheet from the boy's face and neck. A purple bruise slithered around his throat. The mark reminded Maka so much of Medusa's snakes, she nearly vomited.

"Anything unusual in his tox-screens or other areas of his body?" Kid was all business, even in the face of horrors like this. Only sometimes did it slip, usually when he was confronted with something overtly asymmetrical, that he was actually human-ish inside, Maka thought.

Although he wasn't totally human. Not really. He was a young death god. Maka had to remind herself of that constantly. And cut herself some slack for not being as logical and level-headed as Kid tended to be. Sometimes she wondered if she wasn't too human.

"Nothing at all in his tox. Not even antibodies for many of the usual childhood maladies. In fact, this boyo was as healthy as they come, mio dio." She shook her head in pity.

"How come he's got scabs?" Patty piped up. Maka had almost forgotten about the younger Thompson sister. She'd been unnaturally quiet since they'd entered.

The ME squinted at what Patty was pointing to—an eraser-sized, bull's eye-shaped scab on the back of the boy's upper arm. It looked puffy and red.

"I took samples from the wounds. Is nothing," she said. "He is a boy. He maybe scratched a bug bite and it got infection. But there is no toxin in the boy's body."

"I don't know. It looks kinda…" Patty looked up at Kid.

"Symmetrical." Kid breathed, eyes narrowing.

"No, no, no. You don't understand. Is nothing. Nothing there." The ME crossed her arms over her ample chest.

"Did you test for every known pathogen and toxin?" Soul asked. Maka was surprised. Science-pukey stuff wasn't normally his thing. And, to be honest, he was a bit squeamish in these situations.

But she could feel his gentle worry in her soul and realized he was saying what he thought she would say. For her. Because she wasn't saying anything. Her anxiety had left her frozen. So stiff, it seemed one wrong move could crack her in half. She nudged his soul back in silent 'thank you.'

The ME scoffed. "Of course. I test for everything. Everything on the books."

"But this bug wouldn't be on your books, would it? You wouldn't even know what to look for if someone, say, created a brand new pathogen and injected this boy with it?" Kid asked.

"The boy's body would show antibodies. Would show reaction to pathogen. Even mysterious one," the ME insisted. "You don't understand the human body."

But we aren't human, Maka thought absently, noticing the faint scars on the boy's hands. He'd obviously begun practicing with a weapon of some kind. Maybe even an inanimate, non-demon kind like a regular old kitchen knife. Like she had. She'd practiced wielding, throwing, slashing—with every pointy thing she could get her hands on—as a child of his age. She'd dinged up the kitchen cabinets in her father's apartment so badly Spirit had had to replace them by the time she was 10.

"What do you mean?" The ME raised an eyebrow at her. Maka hadn't realized she'd spoken aloud. But everyone was staring at her in expectation.

She cleared her throat. "We're meisters and weapons. We aren't, really, totally human. We heal faster, we jump higher, we fight harder. And this pathogen has only affected us, so far. Maybe that means we don't react to it like a normal human would."

The ME crossed herself and mumbled something in Italian, probably a prayer. Maka wanted to roll her eyes. She bit her lip to quell the urge. No sense in alienating these people more than their "demonic" presence already did.

"Would you please prepare a few slides of this boy's blood for me? Taken from the wound site, if you could," Kid asked. She nodded, back to business quickly.

"Patricia, what else do you see?" Kid nudged Patty with a shoulder.

But she was already kneeling down to inspect the wound with her laser eye. "It does look like he scratched it. Maybe it itched. It also looks like it healed once and then he reopened it. There's scar tissue around the edges. I'd say it was at least couple of days pre-mortem when he got pricked."

"So from whatever point this kid was injected, if he was injected, there might be more lag time than we thought," Liz said, patting her sister on the back.

"Given the time between the other deaths, that means we might be looking at more outbreaks soon," Kid whispered. "Someone, somewhere, is probably already walking around infected. And they have no idea."