“I feel fine.”

“Noted,” Alaric said, holding a tuning fork against Gavriel’s collarbone. Hyran’s tuning fork.

Rook: They are taking turns and sharing.

“I have felt fine since I woke up.”

“Also noted.”

“Then why am I still here?”

“Because ’fine’ is a word patients use and ’cleared’ is a word healers use, and one of those words outranks the other, and the ranking is not in your favor.”

“Arm up,” Hyran instructed on his other side. “Left.”

“This is ridiculous.”

Gavriel raised his left arm. Hyran passed the tuning fork along the underside, from shoulder to wrist. The pitch climbed again at the shoulder. Descended at the elbow. Stabilized at the wrist.

“Other arm.”

Gavriel rolled his eyes and raised his right arm. The fork hummed evenly. Stable. Baseline. Unremarkable.

“Interesting,” Hyran murmured.

“I am begging both of you to stop saying words like ’interesting’ and ’different’ and ’anomalous’ while poking me with things and start saying words like ’cleared’ and ’fine’ and ’get out of my office.’”

“You are in my office,” Alaric corrected from behind him. “And you are none of those things until I say you are.”

Hyran produced the purple vial. Uncorked it. Held it six inches from Gavriel’s chest.

The liquid inside the vial moved. Toward Gavriel. The surface tilted, defying gravity, the fluid climbing the glass wall nearest to his body as if drawn by a magnet.

Hyran pulled the vial back. The liquid settled.

“Oh come on,” Gavriel said.

Hyran held it close again, ignoring Gavriel. The liquid surged toward Gavriel a second time. Stronger.

Hyran corked the vial. Set it down. Picked up the crystal rod. The rod was clear, transparent, the kind of instrument mages used to isolate magical frequencies the way a prism isolated light.

He held the rod in front of Gavriel’s chest. Rotated it. Slowly.

The rod caught something. A faint shimmer appeared inside the crystal, gold in color. Hyran rotated the rod further. A second shimmer appeared. Different frequency. Different color. Green, faint, threaded through the gold like ivy through a fence.

Hyran froze.

“What now?” Gavriel asked.

Hyran didn’t answer.

He looked entirely too excited by whatever the hell he was seeing.

His eyes were still on the rod. The gold shimmer pulsed. The green thread wound through it. Both frequencies existed in the same crystal, occupying the same space, coexisting in a pattern that Hyran was reading like a language whose alphabet he recognized and whose sentence he had never encountered.

“Hyran. What.”

The mage didn’t respond.

Then Gavriel noticed the flask.

It was floating. Alaric’s flask, the copper one he kept on the corner of his desk filled with whatever astringent tea he drank by the gallon, was hovering three inches above the desk surface. Steady. Stable. Suspended in midair with the casual defiance of an object that had decided gravity was optional.

Gavriel looked at it. Blinked. Looked at Alaric to see if the healer had noticed.

Alaric was staring at the flask. His pen had stopped moving. His journal was forgotten. His face was wearing an expression that Gavriel had never seen on it.

Gavriel glanced behind him.

Three books on the shelf behind his chair were hovering. An inch off the shelf, maybe two, holding position in the air like gravity was optional.

As Gavriel turned to look, the books fell. All three. Simultaneously. They hit the shelf with a triple thud that was too synchronized to be coincidence and too sudden to be gravity reasserting itself gradually.

The flask dropped at the same time. Copper hitting wood. Tea sloshing over the rim.

The room held four seconds of silence.

“Weird,” Gavriel said lightly, with a shrug.

The shrug was the shrug of a man who had just watched objects levitate around his body and whose reaction to the levitation was a one-word assessment and a shoulder movement that communicated “these things happen.’

Alaric looked at Hyran. Hyran looked at Alaric.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Gavriel asked. “This is Drakenfell. Shit like that happens all the time”

Hyran looked at Alaric. Alaric looked at Hyran. The look lasted one second and carried a conversation that Gavriel was not invited to and whose invitation had been deliberately withheld.

“Several things,” Hyran said. “All of which will be shared when the data supports sharing. Currently, the data supports more testing.”

“You are the most unhelpful helpful people I have ever met.”

“Thank you,” Hyran said. “That is the goal.”

“What kind of additional testing?” Gavriel asked with a sigh.

“The kind that requires me to prepare instruments I do not currently have in this room and consult references I do not currently have in my memory.” Hyran began packing his satchel. The packing was methodical. Calm. The calm of a man who was choosing calm because the alternative was a reaction that would generate questions he was not ready to answer. “Alaric, can you clear him for duty?”

“Cleared,” Alaric confirmed. “But you come back every day.”

“And no lifting things,” Hyran added.

“I didn’t lift anything,” Gavriel said.

Both men looked at him. The looking was identical. Two sets of eyes, one healer and one mage, both conveying the same message through different faces, and the message was: yes, you did, and the fact that you don’t know you did is the part that concerns us.

Alaric looked at him over the rim of his glasses. The look held for three seconds. Three seconds of a healer deciding how much truth a patient could carry and whether the carrying would produce compliance or panic and which of those outcomes served the diagnostic process better.

“No,” Alaric said. “It has never happened before. With any patient. Ever. In the history of this office. Go to your quarters. Rest. Tomorrow.”

Gavriel left. The door closed behind him.

Alaric and Hyran stood in the healer’s office surrounded by a tea-stained desk, three fallen books, and the specific silence of two men who had just watched a Gamma make objects float and whose floating was going to require a conversation that neither of them was ready to have.

“Well,” Alaric said.

“Well,” Hyran agreed.

“I need a drink.”

“Make it two.”