The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 537

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. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

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."

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