Chapter 342: Ahead of the Estimate

Chapter 342: Ahead of the Estimate

Jin was at the top of the Coldwell stairs before he noticed he’d taken them two at a time.

He stopped on the landing and looked back down. One flight, with a rail. On the day of the viewing, he’d stood at the bottom of it and quietly planned to rest halfway.

He wasn’t even breathing hard.

Huh, he thought, and knocked on the door.

The follow-up on Friday confirmed what the stairs had already told him.

[Hemoglobin: normal]

[Stamina assessment: within ordinary range]

[Follow-up: routine, 1 month]

"You’re back," his doctor said, and for once she let herself look pleased without immediately adding a warning. Then she added one anyway. "Normal life. Normal training. But the monthly check stays, and the same-day rule stays. I never found the reason, Jin. That means I can’t promise it won’t come back."

"I know," Jin said.

"I’d like to know why," she said, half to herself, closing the file. "It bothers me."

You and me both, Jin thought, and thanked her.

Glitch’s imaging was the same afternoon, and Dr. Alcott spent a long time looking at it before she said anything.

Then she put the new image beside the one from the week before, and beside that, the one from the first day of the tonic.

Jin didn’t need it explained. The faint threads of color along Glitch’s shoulder channels had nearly gone. After the drill that morning, they had brightened only slightly, and the third image, taken an hour later, showed them settled again.

"That’s not what I projected," Alcott said.

Jin looked at her. "Bad?"

"No." She tapped the screen. "Better than I projected. His channels are where I expected them to be at the end of the full course, and he’s not there yet by the calendar. The tonic’s doing its job. The drills are doing theirs. And his regeneration has been pulling more weight on the inside than I gave it credit for." She shook her head slightly. "I built the timetable on what I’d expect from a beast of his Quality with that much strain. He’s recovering faster than that."

She was quiet for a moment. Jin had learned to wait through her silences.

"I don’t like changing a plan halfway," she said finally. "I like ignoring evidence even less. So I’m revising it."

She turned her tablet around.

[Meridian Medical Annex — Revised Rehabilitation Plan: Glitch]

[Stillwater Tonic: full dose ends Sunday. Maintenance half-dose for 7 days thereafter.]

[Moderate-load checks: brought forward. Three sessions within the maintenance week, minimum one day apart.]

[Imaging: after each session, and 48 hours after the final session.]

[Clearance for breakthrough preparation: dependent on all of the above.]

Jin read it twice.

"So the six weeks—" Jin began.

"The six weeks were my estimate of how long it would take his channels to reach a target," Alcott said. "They’ve reached it early. The original target still stands. That’s what I’m holding him to, not the calendar." She took the tablet back. "And don’t hear what I’m not saying. This plan lets him attempt the moderate checks sooner. It doesn’t say he’ll pass them. If any of those images comes back hot and stays hot, we go back to the old plan and I won’t apologize."

"Understood," Jin said.

"You still say that very quickly," Alcott said.

"I’m still meaning it," Jin said.

That earned him a dry look, which was about as close to a smile as Dr. Alcott came.

Glitch was dozing in the white square when Jin came back down to the lane. He opened one eye as Jin crouched beside him.

"You’re ahead," Jin told him. "She said so. She doesn’t say that."

Glitch didn’t understand the words. He understood the tone well enough, and the warm, pleased pressure that came with it through the bond. His tail swept once across the floor, and he went back to sleep looking smug.

He spent much of the weekend looking beyond the next care appointment.

There had been plenty to organize since Highmarch, but most of it concerned getting well. Now he could look at the Thornwatch panel without feeling as though he was making plans for someone else. Sitting on the feed crate, he opened a file and named it Later.

He compared listings. Interior feed suppliers against the frontier ones on the Thornwatch market board. What a heavy beast cost to move on an airship compared with a road convoy. Bounty ranges on authorized interior targets against the posted frontier ones, so he’d know what the multiplier actually meant in practice instead of in Crowe’s summary.

He started a section for Flicker and quickly discovered he didn’t know what to put in it.

He knew what her avatar could do. He didn’t know what her real body would need once she moved into an active slot. He needed to compare ordinary sparrow guidance with her particular condition, and work out which frontier supplements would help her. An expensive jar with a bird on it wasn’t much evidence.

So he wrote questions instead.

What does a sparrow need before her first threshold?

Who knows birds at Meridian?

Do the cliff-colony supplements do anything, or is it marketing?

It was a short list, but it was the first time in a long while that he’d made one for her that had nothing to do with whether she could stand up.

He went to Coldwell for Sunday dinner, as promised, and brought Flicker in a ventilated carrier on his shoulder.

Elsa was in her room practicing when he arrived. The circle on her desk had shrunk. Aldous had done exactly what Jin predicted.

"Seven seconds in the small circle," Elsa announced. Then the leaf wobbled. "Wait. Don’t talk. I’m concentrating."

The leaf turned slowly above the paper. On the far side of the room, Breeze was sitting in his pen, watching it with fierce attention. His crest had come in properly now, a pale stiff ridge between his ears, and his legs had grown long and slightly too large for the rest of him.

When the leaf dropped, he pounced on the side of the pen, missed, and fell over.

Then he noticed Flicker.

He stared at the carrier. Flicker stared back. Breeze crept to the corner of the pen nearest her, sat down very upright, and wagged his whole back end at her in slow, hopeful arcs.

Flicker turned around on her perch and showed him her tail.

"She’s playing hard to get," Elsa said.

"She’s playing bird," Jin said.

Dinner was stew. Arthur had the depot’s new safety manual open beside his plate and was reading it with the expression of a man finding errors. Elena kept looking at Jin across the table, and eventually she put her spoon down.

"You look well," she said. "You look properly well. I didn’t want to say it in case it went away."

"The doctor says I’m back to normal," Jin told her.

"Good." She picked her spoon up again. "Then you can do the washing up."

Arthur glanced up from his manual, saw the notes file still open on Jin’s phone beside his plate, and read the word Thornwatch upside down.

"Frontier," he said.

"Later," Jin said. "Much later. I’m just looking."

"Mm." Arthur went back to his manual. After a while, without looking up, he said, "When you stop just looking, tell me first. I’ve done the airship. I’ll tell you which pens leak."

Jin glanced at the brace beneath the table. He’d been looking at airship listings as if nobody he knew had ever used one. His father had done far more than that.

"Okay," he said.

He walked home past the little Coldwell market just after nine. There was an egg stall near the transit stop that he’d started checking out of habit. The appraisal ran over the six eggs in the case before he’d even decided to look.

Healthy embryos, with the foundations the labels promised. He’d been getting results like these for over a month.

He kept walking. It still felt strange that there had never been anything. He didn’t know what it meant, and he’d stopped pretending to himself that he did.

His phone buzzed at the academy gate.

[Meridian Medical Annex — Moderate-Load Check 1]

[Monday, 08:00. Covered exercise lane. Supervising: Dr. S. Alcott]

[Protocol attached.]

Jin opened the protocol under the gate light and read it standing there. Approach at a trot. Direction changes. A bracing exercise against a weighted sled. One brief, measured use of an established defensive skill, under monitoring.

It was more than six easy turns. A lot more.

He saved the appointment, smiling. Then he read the bracing requirement again and checked that the monitoring instructions were attached.