“The doctor will be with you in a second.”

Jericho smiled, nodded, and watched as the nurse left the room. He flexed his arm. The sensation of the band tightening around his arm lingered. He never liked getting his blood pressure taken and the feeling that ensued after. He breathed into his hands to relax, then spent the rest of the time staring at the light-brown wall. His legs dangled from the examination table, and the paper covering rippled with the movement.

The door swung open, in came the doctor, and Jericho stopped swinging his legs. She lent out a hand for Jericho to shake.

“I’m Doctor Yorke. Pleased to finally meet you, Jericho. I should have been here days ago, but I was preoccupied. Such a shame I couldn’t get your base levels before you started training, but it’s fine. We can work with this.”

He nodded.

The doctor was in her late thirties, possibly early forties. He acknowledged she was attractive, especially at her age, although Jericho never thought much about older women. She wore a white lab coat over more casual attire, a light-blue shirt, and black jeans.

She flipped through her notes. “I went over your vitals and over the information you discussed with the nurse. Everything looks normal, maybe too normal. I’m really interested to see if you inadvertently healed any unknown diseases you had while practicing your abilities. Can I tell you something? I am so intrigued by you.”

“Thank you,” Jericho said awkwardly.

“Thank you, doctor,” she corrected.

“Thank you, doctor.”

“It really is nice to meet you. You have such a potent power and words cannot state how eager I have been to meet you. As you know, we’re here to help you cultivate your powers.” She held Jericho’s hand as she spoke. “I might repeat some questions asked by the nurse, but please repeat anything you told her, and feel free to elaborate. What are you capable of healing?”

“I’m not too sure,” he said. Jericho naturally leaned back moving his hands behind him to hold himself up. He more so wanted to release Doctor Yorke’s grip. “I’ve healed broken bones, cuts, but not much else.”

“Is that really all you’ve done?”

“I’m pretty sure.” He then added, “doctor.”

“You healed that billionaire’s daughter. Did you forget? I don’t see any mention of it in the nurse’s notes.”

“Oh, her. I guess I did,” Jericho said.

He purposely kept quiet about healing the girl since he wanted to confirm what they knew. The man who kidnapped him mentioned how they had been watching him for a while. The surveillance might have started since he healed the girl, but he wanted to know if there was a chance they had been watching him before then.

“How could you forget doing such an amazing thing? You know, I’ve treated her once before. She has a nasty autoimmune disease, had rather. It was so bad that I thought it was futile to bother trying. Her father paid a lot just to keep her living. I heard he once hired a person that relieves pain to follow her around and among all the healers he hired, they could only slow down the sickness but never fully heal it. Honestly, if he didn’t have the resources, she would have died ages ago. But now I met you, the person that healed the incurable girl. When you climb up in this organization, why don’t you come work under me?”

Jericho nodded for her to continue the conversation since he was unsure of what to say.

“Never mind that. Forget I even mentioned it but do keep it in mind.” She wrote something down on a clipboard. “From healing broken bones and cuts to curing a supposedly incurable sickness. That’s a rather big gap in progress. She can’t possibly be the only person you have tried to heal. You could have started with a person’s common cold, but, wow, you were ambitious, weren’t you?

“Well, curing that girl was an accident. I didn’t even try.” Jericho recalled the memory of barely shaking the girl’s hand. It was a brief encounter, one he never thought would make him end up here.

“He didn’t try,” she said as she wrote his words down.

“Show me,” she said. She pulled her thumb finger in the antagonistic direction until it cracked. She groaned and presented Jericho with the limp finger. He stared with his eyes popping out and his lips squirming.

“You better get to healing it if you’re so worried.”

Jericho wrapped his hand around her thumb. He closed his eyes, reached the visceral plane, and imbued the broken thumb with energy. She instantly sighed in relief as he started the process.

“So, that’s how it works. You need physical contact.” She spoke as Jericho continued to heal. Using the other hand she wrote her observations down. “We’ll have to test whether you can heal from a distance. If you’re capable of that, then we’ll see how far you can be from a target before you can heal them.”

“I can sort of heal by only hovering my hands over the source. I don’t do it much since I’m not that great at it. It gets tiring and it’s not as efficient.”

“Nothing we can’t improve,” she assured. “Try verbalizing your ability. It should get stronger when you do.”

“It does. Heal!” Jericho surged her thumb with more energy and finalized the healing. “Try moving it.”

She made a fist, outstretched her fingers, and repeated as she moved her thumb around. The thumb moved synonymously with the rest of her hand.

“You’re amazing!” She clasped hands with Jericho and moved her thumb around his hand. “Actually, I think it’s in better condition than it was before. It’s miraculous how the pain went away.”

Jericho forgot where he was and smiled cheesily. He liked the recognition.

“We have one other thing to talk about,” Doctor Yorke said. She pointed at Jericho then lifted her finger to aim at his face. “Your hair.”

“What about it?” Jericho straightened his back and leaned forward. His interest was instantly piqued.

She said, “Actually, never mind. I keep getting ahead of myself. I think I have enough data. Since my team and I are back, we’ll be watching you and your progress, but don’t mind us. We study all the other subjects so it’s a normal thing. I’ll have a sheet that will show you everything I want you to improve and practice. One of my assistants will give it to you.”

Jericho leaned back in disappointment, but then smiled to himself. He was close to wrapping up his first week and he was getting used to being in the prison. Sure, he was held here against his will, but he was improving his abilities, something he was going to do anyway. This only cut out having to pick a school or joining the military. For now, he was okay with his situation, and eventually, he would make plans to escape, but until then, he would coast it out and see what they had in store for him.