Chapter 253: One Wingbeat
Chapter 253: One Wingbeat
Jin had not pressed confirm.
The option had been sitting on his screen since the night before, patient in the way only software could be patient, and he had gone to sleep with it open and woken up with it still there. The Engine had never punished him for waiting, and that was one of the few rules he trusted without reservation, especially where Sync was concerned.
He ate breakfast. He walked to the academy’s beast-care wing with Glitch pacing beside him at an insultingly slow speed, bandage strapping visible across the left hip and behind the right foreleg, tail dragging just enough to make his opinion clear.
You’re not being oppressed. You’re being kept.
Glitch huffed and put his head against Jin’s ribs hard enough to move him half a step sideways.
Verrick was already in the observation room when Jin came in, sleeves pushed up, reading yesterday’s thermal trace off the wall display with a mug of something going cold beside her elbow.
"Six-hour readings held," she said, without turning around. "Both circuits. Appetite’s up a fraction."
"I know. I want a quiet day for her."
That got her to turn.
Jin kept going before she could decide what kind of request it was. "Baseline samples this morning, before anything. Feeding increased about a third, prepared and ready rather than fetched later. Room regulation continuous, not cycled. No circuit scheduled today or tomorrow. And I’d want her observed through the afternoon and again tonight, not just the immediate window."
Verrick let a second go by.
"You’ve brought me the whole plan before asking," she said. "That’s new."
"I’m efficient."
"You’re eleven weeks late to being efficient." She pulled a stool over with her foot and sat on it. "What are you actually doing to her?"
There it was. Jin had known the question would come, because Verrick was good at her job and because she had watched him produce three separate feeding and timing adjustments that had worked better than they had any right to.
"An adjustment," he said. "Based on the rehabilitation record and my own appraisal work. It’s developmental, not a treatment. It should improve baseline vitality, coordination, thermal regulation, and core stability."
"Should."
"That’s why I want her in your monitoring instead of in my room."
Verrick looked at him for long enough that Jin started counting the ceiling tiles.
"Say it plainly," she said. "If this goes wrong, what am I looking at?"
"Overload from a change she can’t process. Temperature climb, exhaustion, appetite crash." His attention returned to the thermal trace on the wall. "Which is why I want a full baseline first and no other stress on her today."
"And you’re not going to tell me where you’re getting the method."
"No."
She surprised him by laughing, one dry note. "At least you didn’t invent a diet chart this time." She stood and reached for the sample kit. "Baselines in twenty minutes. Bring your lizard, he’s calmer when he’s in the room and I’m tired of arguing with him through glass."
Glitch, hearing his name, made a low sound that was either agreement or a threat.
They ran the baselines. Verrick set the feed trays out early, adjusted the room until the thermal readout stopped drifting at all, and then went to update the day board so that nobody would schedule Flicker for anything.
Flicker lay in her regulated cradle with her wings folded and her eyes half-lidded, watching Jin the way she always did — like she was waiting for him to finally admit he’d been hiding something good.
He sat down where she could see him and opened his phone.
[Controlled Sync — Flicker]
[Limited Controlled Sync: available]
[Transfer ceiling: automatically restricted to recipient safe capacity]
[Eligible transfer: foundational development only]
[Projected effects: vitality | coordination | thermal stability | basic Astral Core reinforcement]
[Excluded: major combat growth | Dual Fire-Wind Core]
No slider. No override. No negotiation panel hiding behind a submenu — he’d looked for one twice.
Fine. Take what you’ll give.
He pressed confirm.
Flicker’s head came up first. Her whole body went tight, wings half-spreading against the cradle padding, claws flexing once into the fabric. She did not cry out. She simply held that position, rigid, while something moved through her that Jin could feel only as a pressure at the far end of the bond, like heat coming off a wall in a corridor he wasn’t standing in.
The thermal readout climbed.
Jin watched the number and not the bird. Point four. Point six. Point nine, and he had already decided what he’d shout for at one point four —
It stopped at one point one and held.
Then her wings came down. Her body loosened by degrees, shoulder first, then neck, and she sank into the cradle with her beak slightly parted, breathing fast and shallow.
Verrick was through the door before Jin had put the phone away. She read the wall, put two fingers along the base of Flicker’s throat, checked the tail feathers, checked the eyes.
"Temperature spike, respiration up, no tremor," she said. "That’s what you expected?"
"That’s what I expected."
"You’re a bad liar when you’re relieved." She reached past him and dragged the feed tray closer. "She’ll want that inside an hour."
[Limited Controlled Sync complete.]
[Foundational development integrated.]
[Excluded growth remains stored.]
[Recipient status: consolidation demand — elevated rest and intake required.]
Flicker ate more that afternoon than she had in a week, and then slept for eleven hours, and then woke and ate again. Verrick moved her feeding to four smaller servings and stopped pretending she wasn’t checking on her twice a night.
There was no emergency. Jin kept waiting for one anyway, which was how he ended up doing his Engine work in the observation room’s corner chair for two days with his shoulder against the wall.
The mat session came on the third morning, after two clean sets of readings.
They used the soft rehabilitation floor, the one with the padded rim, and Verrick knelt at the edge with a support cloth across her knees because that was the rule and Jin had never once argued with it.
Flicker started the way she always started. Feet planted. Weight shifted left. Wings out for the correction.
For eleven weeks that had meant a wobble, a stumble, and Jin’s hand out to catch her.
This time the correction came clean — and kept going.
Her wings beat once. Properly once, both together, timed, and her whole body came off the mat.
Not far. A handspan, maybe less. Her feet cleared the surface for perhaps a second, her tail fanned to steady it, and then she came down again with her claws finding the mat in almost the right place and her chest heaving.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Glitch got up too fast. He was halfway across the floor with his head low and his throat rumbling before Jin caught the bandage strapping in the corner of his vision and put a hand flat on his shoulder.
"Sit down before you tear something."
Glitch sat down. The rumble did not stop, and the feeling pushing across the bond was enormous, warm, and entirely too pleased with itself, as though he had personally arranged the whole thing.
Flicker turned her head to look at all three of them, one at a time, and did not seem tired enough to stop.
"No," Verrick said. "That’s the session."
Flicker’s wings twitched.
"That’s the session," Verrick repeated, calmly, and gathered her up in the support cloth.
Jin had a whole argument ready and discovered he didn’t want to make it. He watched Flicker get carried back to the cradle instead, her head craned over Verrick’s arm to keep him in view, and let the argument stay where it was.
"Log it however you want," Verrick said over her shoulder. "But don’t write flight."
"I wasn’t going to."
He opened the rehabilitation record and typed it in as plainly as he could manage.
One controlled flutter. Landed clean.
He looked at the line for a while. Then he added the time, because the time mattered, and closed the record before he could make it into anything larger than it was.
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