Chapter 545 | The Answer Is Not On His File [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 545: 545 | The Answer Is Not On His File [CASTLE BONUS]

The ceiling of the Halloran medical wing had one hundred and forty-seven tiles. Imara Steele knew this because she had counted them across four days of lying flat on her back with a burned arm packed in green mesh and nowhere else productive to put her attention.

She was counting them again when Dr. Voss finished checking the nerve conduction in her right hand for the thirtieth time.

"The regeneration in the median nerve is progressing," Sera said, her voice carrying the unhurried quality that made students calm down before she touched them. "Slower than I would like. Faster than the initial trauma suggested."

"So I’ll get my fingers back."

"Probably by the end of the week." Sera set the diagnostic tablet on the side table without a click, because Sera Voss did not make unnecessary sounds. Her silver-black braid hung over one shoulder the way it always did, and the thin silver bracelet on her left wrist caught the fading light through the window. "You’re bored."

"I’m fine."

Sera looked at her with those pale grey eyes that read the difference between what a person said and what a person meant, and Imara had spent enough years around dangerous people to recognize when she was being seen all the way down.

"Fine," Sera repeated. There was warmth under the word, the kind that came from someone who had held people together in worse conditions than a well-lit medical wing. "Then I’ll let the IHC know you’re ready for questioning. They’ve been waiting."

Imara made a sound.

It came out before she could stop it, a low pained hiss through her teeth, and she felt her jaw pull tight around the burned skin that had not finished healing near her collarbone. Her ruined forearm throbbed in sympathy. Every part of her that had charged a full Bom Ba Ye into a creature that shrugged it off like weather filed a complaint at once.

"I guess I’m still a little hurt," she said.

Sera Voss chuckled. "I’ll tell them tomorrow," Sera said. "You’ll survive one more day of my company."

"Bold assumption."

Imara turned back toward the window.

The sun was going down over Creston Hills, and the light coming through the glass had gone the specific orange that only happened for about eleven minutes at the tail end of a California day. A single bright streak of yellow cut across the middle of it, a contrail or a plane or just the way the atmosphere bent the last of the light, and Imara’s chest did something she did not have a clean word for.

Because she had seen that exact color already this week.

She had seen it wrapped around a boy who dropped forty feet through the collapse field and landed in front of a monster that had put her flat on her back. Golden threads crawling up his forearms and across his shoulders like electricity that had decided to become armor. He had pulled her out of the way of a hand that would have caved in her skull, and for one second, before her ribs registered how hard she had hit the stairs, she had seen his eyes above the half-mask.

Amber. Steady. Not afraid.

Eighteen years old and not afraid of a thing that had already terrified her.

"Lukas," she whispered.

"Hm?"

Imara coughed. Her ribs did not appreciate it, but the sound covered the fact that she had said his name out loud in front of the one person on this campus who noticed everything.

"The student," she said, recalibrating. " What’s his status?"

Sera picked her tea up from the windowsill.

"He’s being discharged tomorrow night," Sera said.

Imara stared at her.

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." Sera took a sip. Her grey eyes had gone somewhere over the rim of the cup, somewhere that was not the medical wing and was not the sunset, somewhere internal and professional and quietly fascinated. "The burns should have required grafting. Six weeks minimum, and that’s if the tissue accepted the donor cells without rejection. His body is closing the wounds on its own. The rib fractures are knitting along the stress lines faster than his registered classification accounts for. A splenic contusion resolved before I finished stabilizing his chest cavity."

"That’s not a Channeler."

"No," Sera agreed, and there was something under the word that Imara recognized because she carried her own version of it. Curiosity. The particular hunger of a specialist who has encountered a problem their training did not prepare them for. "It’s not a Channeler. Or if it is, it’s a Channeler with a secondary function nobody bothered to write down."

Imara said nothing.

Sera set the tea down and folded her hands in her lap, and when she spoke again there was a thread of something almost wistful running under the clinical tone.

"I asked Juno to pull a tissue sample from the burn margins on his back," she said. "The regeneration there is behaving differently than the impact damage. Slower. There’s a residual signature in the wound edges that doesn’t match anything in the standard Aspect Core taxonomy, and I’ve spent long enough looking at Cores to know when I’m looking at something that isn’t one." She paused.

"If I could get a proper cellular study, I think I could tell you whether that boy has a healing Aspect layered under whatever he’s registered for. Which would be extraordinary, because healing Aspects that operate on the self are vanishingly rare, and the ones that also produce combat output are rarer still, and the ones that produce combat output while healing the self and generating whatever that golden field was do not, to my knowledge, exist."

She stopped. She seemed to hear herself.

"I’m going on a tangent," she said.

"You’re allowed," Imara said. "You saved my arm. Go on your tangent."

Sera’s mouth curved, small and dry, and she shook her head. "It can wait. He’s a patient before he’s a curiosity. But I’d very much like to understand what I stabilized, and I don’t think the answer is on his file."

Imara nodded. Her eyes drifted back to the window, to the last of the orange bleeding out at the edges, to the yellow streak that had already started to fade toward grey.

Lukas Belmont.