Page 59 of Dragon 7

The doctor reached my cot.

He was middle-aged, tall, with a thin face and tired eyes behind small round glasses. He bowed once to Yoichi, then turned to me with a bright expression. "Tora, may I check you?"

"Yes."

He picked up my wrist for a pulse, and I looked at his face for the first time properly.

Then, I left the space again.

A hospital room came to me and beeping from a machine. An old man lay in a bed with his eyes closed and his mouth open. A tube was taped to his lower lip.

The doctor sat beside the bed in a hard plastic chair with his shoulders shaking. His hands covered his face as he cried. “Father, I’m going to miss you.”

And then the monitor flat-lined.

I gasped.

The doctor blinked down at me. "Are you in pain? Tora, where—"

"I'm so sorry about your father."

His hand stilled on my wrist. "My father?"

"Yes." I swallowed. "You have my condolences."

“Thank you, but. . .” His brow knitted. "He passed ten years ago."

"Oh." A shiver ran down my back.

"How did you know that my father passed?"

"I. . .uh. . ." I glanced around and saw the lantern, Yoichi, and the women laughing in the background as Deja said something else. "I think I saw you crying by his hospital bed."

The doctor stepped back. “But no one else was in there when that happened. And. . .I have told no one this.”

"You saw it, Tora?" Yoichi raised his eyebrows.

I nodded. "Y-yes."

"Even more interesting."

The doctor stared at me like I'd grown another head. He cleared his throat and looked at Yoichi. “Should we—”

“She’s fine.” Yoichi gave him a slight nod. “Just check her vitals.”

The doctor went back to checking my pulse. His fingers shook a little.

I turned to Yoichi. "Is this all my imagination?"

"I doubt it. You're to get gifts too from the sacrifice." He held my eyes. "And you've always been an inquisitive individual with the ability to read people. Sometimes the gift is an amplification of talents already present within."

"An amplification."

"Yes."

That's a real diplomatic way to say I'm seeing inside people's lives without permission.

The doctor wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and pumped it. The pressure climbed and released. He wrote a number down on a clipboard.