Chapter 537 | An Honest Baseline

Chapter 537: 537 | An Honest Baseline

Juno pulled a chair from somewhere I hadn’t registered, set it at the foot of my bed with the specific economy of someone who has done this nine thousand times, and sat down with one ankle crossed over the other knee. She produced a pen from behind her ear, clicked it once, and began writing in my chart without looking at me.

"Your burns are closing at three hundred and twelve percent of the rate I’d expect from a documented Rare-tier Channeler." She said this the way someone mentions the weather. "Your rib fractures are knitting along stress lines that suggest your bone density exceeds the registered human ceiling by a margin I’m choosing to call statistically significant rather than physically impossible. Your spleen contusion resolved itself six hours before I got to it, which means either you have an undocumented regenerative secondary or your body decided internal hemorrhaging was boring and moved on."

The pen clicked again. She looked up.

"I need you to tell me which one."

Sloane’s hand tightened on the hospital gown at my chest, her fingers going rigid. Through the bond I felt her protective instinct flare bright and hot, the specific frequency of someone who has already decided that the answer to any question about my medical file is no.

Diane didn’t move. She sat in her chair with her hands folded and her blue eyes fixed on Juno with the particular stillness of a woman who has been reading rooms for twenty years and recognizes when someone in the room is not performing.

"I heal fast," I said. "Late manifestation. Progressive development. The whole thing’s still—"

"That’s the version." Juno’s dark eyes didn’t blink. "I’ve read the version. I’ve read it twice. Category Seven, progressive manifestation syndrome, non-standard developmental trajectory, flagged for potential secondary functions. Charles Weber signed the diagnostic at the Whitmore office with a notation about unusual Core diffusion patterns." She wrote something in the chart that I couldn’t see from my angle. "The version is very well constructed. The version would survive a standard compliance review. The version does not explain why the tissue along your thoracic spine is regenerating from a burn pattern that should require surgical debridement and is instead producing new epithelial cells at a rate I associate with organisms that are not, strictly speaking, human."

Sloane made a sound in her throat. A low vibration.

"Who are you reporting to," Sloane said, and her voice had gone to the register I recognized from combat, flat and controlled with heat banked underneath.

Juno looked at Sloane the way she looked at everything. With clinical completeness and zero social accommodation. "Dr. Voss. Who is asleep. Because it’s two in the morning and she’s been stabilizing your professor’s chest cavity for nine hours."

"I mean who else."

"Nobody." The pen went behind her ear again. Juno pulled something from her coat pocket and unwrapped it with the casual disregard of someone eating during a patient consult because she considered the patient’s discomfort about that irrelevant to the assessment. Granola bar. She bit into it. Chewed. "Nobody else has looked at his numbers in the detail I’ve looked at them because Dr. Voss handles the big-picture triage and delegates the granular tracking to me, and the granular tracking is where the math stops making sense."

Diane uncrossed her legs and leaned forward approximately half an inch, which in the specific dialect of Diane Fitzgerald body language constituted a full forward charge. "What would it take for the math to make sense to you and stop being a subject of conversation."

Juno finished chewing. Swallowed. Looked at Diane with the half-lidded attention of someone sorting whether the question was a threat, a bribe, or a genuine inquiry and arriving at the conclusion that all three applied equally.

"An honest baseline." Juno pulled a second chart from beneath the first, this one blank. "I don’t need his file. The file is a work of fiction that somebody talented spent significant effort making look like nonfiction, and I’m not interested in participating in a literary criticism seminar at two in the morning. What I need is a set of numbers that correspond to what his body is actually doing so I can build a treatment protocol that doesn’t accidentally kill him by assuming he’s something he isn’t."

The room went quiet except for the monitor and the distant hum of the medical wing’s ventilation. Sloane’s hand remained pressed over my heart, counting beats. Through the bond I felt her fear and fury churning together in a combination that would have been dangerous if she weren’t injured and exhausted and running on fumes.

Diane’s expression did not change.

"You understand what you’re asking," Diane said, and the drawl had thinned to something precise and sharp, stripped of the warmth she used in client meetings and parent-teacher conferences and the specific voice she reserved for telling Sloane to eat breakfast. This was the voice that closed deals and ended careers.

"I’m asking for his vitals." Juno bit the granola bar again. "Not his life story. Not his Aspect classification. Not whatever web of institutional documentation somebody built to keep a specific set of numbers off a public docket." She glanced at me. "Your burns should have required grafts. They’re closing on their own. If I treat you according to your chart, I’m going to prescribe interventions calibrated to a Rare-tier Channeler’s recovery ceiling, and those interventions will be approximately forty percent less effective than doing nothing at all, because your body is already outpacing anything I could provide. The risk isn’t that I’ll hurt you. The risk is that I’ll slow you down."

I processed this while horizontal and medicated, which was not the ideal configuration for deciding whether to hand a stranger the keys to the most dangerous secret in the building. The Oracle Feed remained quiet. The System offered nothing. The bond pulsed warm at my sternum where Sloane’s hand maintained its vigil, and through that connection I could feel her running the same calculation I was, weighing the cost of trust against the cost of refusal and arriving at the same uncomfortable answer from a different direction.

Diane turned to me. Not to Sloane. To me.

"It’s your call, sugar." The drawl came back, soft. The pet name landed heavier than it should have, carrying nine years of breakfasts and arguments and the specific weight of a woman who picked up an eight-year-old from a state facility with paperwork already signed and never once asked him to be grateful. "I can make this conversation go away. I’ve made harder conversations go away. But she’s treating your spine, and your spine is currently growing back in a manner that her training has not prepared her for, and if you say the word I will handle this the way I handle everything and you will never hear about it again."

I looked at Juno.

Juno sat at the foot of my bed eating a granola bar at two in the morning with a blank chart in her lap and absolutely no investment in whether I found her trustworthy. She was going to build a treatment protocol. She was going to build it with accurate numbers or inaccurate numbers. The only variable my decision controlled was whether the protocol worked.

"Nngh." Sloane pressed her forehead against my shoulder, the undamaged one. "I hate this. I hate that she’s right. I hate that you’re going to tell her."

"I haven’t said anything."

"I can feel you deciding." Her voice muffled against the hospital gown. "Through the bond. Your heart rate goes flat when you’ve made up your mind about something, did you know that? It goes flat and then everything else in you gets louder. You did it before you jumped in front of me."

That landed somewhere soft and deep, and I let it land.

"My stats are higher than my file says," I told Juno. "Significantly."

Juno’s pen came out from behind her ear. She clicked it once. "Define significantly."

"His physical attributes are approximately—" Diane started.

"I want him to say it." Juno’s dark eyes stayed on me. "He’s the patient. The patient tells me his numbers. I verify through observation. That’s how baselines work."