Chapter 553 | Unrealistic Expectations

Chapter 553: 553 | Unrealistic Expectations

"Blood. Tissue. Possibly spinal fluid if the numbers keep trending this direction." She pulled her hand back and made a note on her tablet without looking at it. "Your mother figure agreed to expanded diagnostic access. You’re an interesting problem. I like interesting problems."

"Most people buy me dinner first."

She looked up from the tablet. Her expression didn’t change. "I don’t do dinner. I do patients. You’re a patient." She set the tablet down and reached for something on the counter. "Lie down."

The examination table was cold against my back. The ceiling had one of those drop-tile configurations that existed specifically to give patients something to stare at while doctors did things they didn’t want to watch. I counted tiles. Fourteen by twenty-two. Two hundred and ninety-eight tiles total, assuming the pattern held to the edges.

Juno appeared in my field of vision, looking down at me with those half-lidded eyes that somehow managed to be both bored and intensely focused at the same time. She had a syringe in one hand now. Not small.

"This is going to hurt."

"You’re supposed to say this might pinch a little."

"I don’t lie to patients. Lying to patients creates unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations create trust violations. Trust violations create difficult follow-up appointments." She positioned the needle against the inside of my elbow. "This is going to hurt."

It hurt.

Not the sharp sting of a normal blood draw, but something deeper, like she was pulling something out of me that didn’t want to leave. I watched the vial fill with blood that looked normal enough, red and thick and doing all the things blood was supposed to do.

"Your pain response is dampened."

"What?"

"You should have flinched more. Most patients flinch." She pulled the needle out and pressed a cotton ball against the puncture with her thumb. "Either you have an abnormally high pain tolerance, or you’re suppressing your response deliberately."

"Maybe I’m just tough."

"Maybe." She didn’t sound convinced. "Hold this."

I held the cotton ball while she labeled the vial and set it in a tray beside two others I hadn’t noticed her fill. She’d been busy while I was counting ceiling tiles.

"Turn over."

I turned. The examination table was somehow even colder against my chest and stomach than it had been against my back. I felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with the missing gown and everything to do with the way Juno Mak looked at me like I was a puzzle she was going to solve whether I cooperated or not.

Her fingers found my spine again, tracing the line of vertebrae from the base of my skull down to where my lower back curved. She stopped at a spot I couldn’t see.

"The burn scarring is almost gone. Four days ago, this tissue was necrotic. Black fire residue in the wound margins, energy signature I still haven’t identified, cellular damage that should have required grafting at minimum." Her voice dropped, and I could hear something that might have been fascination underneath the clinical flatness. "Now it’s pink. Healthy. New. Like the damage never happened."

"So I’m healing well. That’s good news."

"That’s not healing well. That’s not healing at all. That’s replacement. Your body isn’t repairing the damaged tissue. It’s growing new tissue and absorbing the old." She pressed harder, and I felt something shift under her touch. "This is what I mean when I say your file is fiction. Rare-tier Channelers don’t do this. Nothing in the standard taxonomy does this."

I stayed very still.

"I want to run more tests."

"What kind of tests?"

"The kind that tell me what you actually are." She pulled her hand back, and I heard her move to the counter again. "Halloran is closed until Monday. Emergency security protocols. Nobody on campus except essential medical staff and a skeleton crew of security personnel. That gives me three days to collect data without institutional oversight asking questions I don’t want to answer."

I turned my head to look at her. She stood at the counter with her back to me, arranging instruments on a tray with the casual familiarity of someone who had done this thousands of times.

"You want to use me as a guinea pig."

"I want to understand what I’m treating." She turned, and her dark eyes met mine without flinching. "The alternative is treating you based on your file. Your file says you’re a Rare-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot range and a twenty-pound lift capacity. If I treat you based on your file, I will prescribe interventions calibrated to that ceiling. Those interventions will be forty percent less effective than doing nothing, because your body is already outpacing anything I could provide." She crossed back to the table and stood over me. "I don’t like being less effective than nothing. It offends my professional standards."

"You have professional standards?"

"I have exactly one. Don’t let patients die when I could have saved them." She reached down and pressed two fingers against the base of my spine, and I felt that almost-pain sensation again. "You almost died. In my wing. On my watch. Because the numbers I was given didn’t match the numbers I was seeing, and I had to waste time figuring out which set was real." Her voice stayed flat, but something underneath it had gone hard. "That won’t happen again. I won’t let it."

For a long moment, neither of us said anything.

Then she pulled her hand back and made another note on her tablet.

"Tomorrow. Eight AM. I want a full panel. Blood work, tissue samples, stress testing." She looked up. "Unless you have objections."

"What happens if I object?"

"Then I treat you based on your file and we both pretend the numbers make sense." She tucked the tablet under her arm. "But you won’t object. You’re too curious about what you are to walk away from someone who might be able to tell you."

She was right. I hated that she was right.

"Eight AM?"

"Eight AM. Don’t eat breakfast. Don’t engage in strenuous activity before the appointment." She paused at the curtain. "And tell your girlfriend to be gentler with the ribs next time. The monitor data from a few nights ago was very informative."

She was gone before I could formulate a response.