Being a Green Bone doctor required as much finesse in Perception as it did in Channeling. Anden had always been naturally talented at the latter, but honing the former required countless hours of study and practice. As a student at the Academy, being trained for a future as a Fist of the No Peak clan, he’d learned to think of Perception and Channeling as shield and spear, to be deployed with fast, deadly, and unsubtle force. Perceiving the murderous intent of an assassin and Channeling to stop a heart were entirely different from the delicate work he had to bend his jade abilities toward now. Standing next to the operating table, Anden brought a hand to hover over the upper right portion of the man’s abdomen. He isolated the hepatic artery and Channeled into it with a light, steady touch, feeding in enough energy to form a clot cutting off blood flow to the malignant tumor. It took only a few minutes. Dr. Timo stood nearby, following the procedure with his own Perception and ready to take over if need be. When Anden stepped back and dropped his hand, the doctor nodded in approval, then quickly and expertly closed off a few of the smaller veins, completing the job and ensuring the entire tumor could now be surgically removed with minimal blood loss.
Ordinarily, the surgeon would now step in to perform the resection, but because of the observing foreign visitors, Anden stood around and waited for fifteen minutes while more X-rays were taken and developed, verifying with contrast dye that blood flow to the cancerous growth had been shut down. The Espenians gathered around the X-ray films, making notes on their clipboards and talking to each other. Anden was free to go. He maneuvered unobtrusively past the arriving surgeon and the operating room personnel, stepped out of the room into the hallway, and sat down on a nearby bench. He took off the training band and leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes and riding through the momentary disorienting nausea.
Most Green Bone medical professionals did not take off their green, but Anden was strict about only wearing jade when he was on the job, so to speak. Like penitents and teachers, doctors were technically beholden to no clan and it was considered a breach of aisho to harm them, but Anden’s situation was unique. He was a member of the Kaul family, well known to be the man who’d killed Gont Asch, the former Horn of the Mountain clan. He’d also done work for his cousins in Espenia, participating in the assassination of the smuggler Zapunyo. Doctor or not, he was a Green Bone of No Peak, and he was not willing to take any chances, either with the possibility that he would be considered one of the clan’s warriors or that he would become one, reacting with jade abilities in a lethal way. It would not take much for him to be pulled back onto the path he’d so adamantly rejected.
Anden opened his eyes to see a couple of the Espenian doctors standing in front of him with expressions of great interest. The taller of them, a man with a trim beard and a broad smile, said, “That was an impressive demonstration you gave us back there. Might I ask, where are you from? Are you . . . What are . . .” He gestured with open hands, obviously asking Anden about his ambiguous ethnicity.
The translator standing beside the doctors began to repeat the question in Kekonese, but Anden stopped him and replied in Espenian, stifling the urge to grimace at the foreigner’s awkward inquiry. “My father was Espenian,” he explained. “But I never knew him. I was born in Janloon.”
“You speak Espenian quite well, though,” said the doctor.
“I lived in Port Massy for nearly four years,” Anden explained. “I earned a college degree and worked there before coming back to Janloon.”
“Is that so?” The foreign doctor’s smile grew. “Do you ever go back to visit Port Massy? Would you consider coming to Adamont Capita?” He fished a business card from his wallet and handed it to Anden. “My name’s Dr. Elan Martgen. I’m one of the principal investigative team leaders at the Demphey Medical Research Center. After what I’ve seen during this trip, I’d like to invite some of the practitioners from Kekon to visit us and put on demonstrations of bioenergetic healing techniques to a larger audience of healthcare professionals at our annual medical conference this summer. Of course, we would pay for your travel and accommodations.”
Anden stood up and accepted the card, although he was confused by the invitation. “I’m glad your trip has been useful, but you should invite someone else to your conference. I’m only a student and not qualified to practice yet.” Anden was ahead of his class; the arterial flow blocking he’d done back in the room was not typically performed by students until their third year, but was nevertheless a fairly simple and routine task that an experienced Green Bone physician like Dr. Timo could probably do in his sleep.