The PowWow

Naomi's lab had the quality all of her spaces had — ordered, precise, the particular cleanliness of someone for whom a clean workspace was a functional requirement. The equipment was arranged with the efficiency of long use. Everything in its place not because someone had decided it should be there but because it had been there long enough that the place had become the thing's correct location.

She looked up when the three of us came through.

Her eyes went to Jacob first — they always did, with the ease of someone who had stopped pretending they didn't. She set down what she was holding and smiled.

"Give me a moment," she said.

She said it to me and Roiya, which was the polite version of what she actually meant, which was directed at Jacob, which was: come here.

Jacob went. And for Jacob, it wasn’t a requirement, it was wanted. I knew he felt what I felt for Rachel and I was so happy for him to have that. The Lord had certainly blessed him.

I became very interested in a poster on the wall about cellular mitosis. Roiya studied her phone with the attention of someone who had received a text of consuming importance. Neither of us said anything. The brief, quiet sounds of two people who were engaged to be married conducting a private moment in a professional space lasted approximately fifteen seconds.

"Alright," Naomi said.

I turned around.

Jacob was back in his position. His expression had the quality it acquired when Naomi had recently been within arm's reach, that ever so slight smile, with…my God! Was he being a little smug?

I decided that professionalism was needed before I started grinning at my brother. I produced the water bottle.

Naomi looked at it. Then at me. "You want DNA."

"And prints if there's anything workable," I said. "We need a name. If you would be so kind."

She took it with the careful handling of someone who understood chain of custody even when the chain in question was not official. "How long do you need this?"

"Yesterday would be good."

"Sit somewhere," she said, rolling her eyes, yet already moving.

We sat somewhere.

The waiting room adjacent to the lab had chairs that had been designed by someone with strong feelings about function and no feelings whatsoever about comfort, and the three of us occupied them with the patient resignation of people who had waited in worse places. Roiya had her phone out and was doing the compressed internal processing thing she had been doing since the park — thumb moving through her screen without reading anything on it, the physical activity standing in for the internal one. Jacob had his hands on his knees and was looking at the middle distance with the complete stillness of a landmark.

I thought about the man with the bible.

The name we didn't have yet and with God’s grace we would soon, especially with these chairs to wait in. The man with the battered Bible who had been moving through this city for four years, healing people in parks and on street corners.

The recognition on his face when Jacob corrected the Beatitude.

The sadness. I had already decided there was too much military resonance to discount it. I was sure the man had served. I wondered in what capacity.

He had been expecting the correction — not from Jacob specifically, but from someone. A moment like that one. Which meant he understood, at some level, that what he was teaching was not quite what it should be. Which was not the profile of a man in deliberate deception. It was the profile of something more complicated.

I was still assembling what complicated looked like from the inside when Naomi came back.

She set the printout on the table in front of us.

Fletcher James Woods.

I looked at the name for a moment. I think I wanted something more unique, not such a normal sounding name.

I pulled out my phone and called Curtis.

As soon as he answered, I immediately reached out to Rachel with a conference call. I am a gadget genius when I want to be.

"Fletcher James Woods," I said.

The sound of Curtis typing.

"Late thirties," he said, twenty seconds later. "Army veteran. Two tours."

"How'd he separate?" I asked.

"Honorable discharge," Curtis said. The tone of someone reading the data as it arrived. "Whatever else this man is, the Army thought well of him. The service record is — it's good, Levi. Consistently good. Commendations. No disciplinary record. Oh, that’s interesting.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“He was attached to the Chaplain Corps.”

Rachel's voice came through. "I've got the medical side." A pause — the brief organizational pause of a detective sequencing information correctly before delivery. "PTSD diagnosis, service-connected. Treatment was initiated post-discharge and then—" she paused again. "He stopped appearing for appointments. Not resistance to treatment, not refusal. He simply stopped showing up. The notes in the thin documentation that follows suggest nobody could locate him to follow up."

"Didn’t take him long to start wandering," I said.

"That's my read," Rachel said.

"There's more," Curtis said. "Bipolar II, secondary diagnosis. Documented prior to discharge. And—" keys "—possible dissociative episodes in the record, though the documentation gets very thin after separation. Whatever was being tracked, it stopped being tracked when he stopped being findable."

I looked at Jacob.

He was looking at the printout Naomi had produced.

"He served well," I said. Not a question. Just the observation settling into the room and finding its correct weight.

"He served very well," Curtis said. Quietly, with the quality Curtis brought to things that deserved respect.

Naomi had been standing at the edge of the conversation with the patient professional attention of a woman who had information of her own and was waiting for the correct moment to introduce it. The moment arrived. We followed her back into her station in the morgue.

"The healings are real," she said.

The conference call was still open. Curtis and Rachel both heard it.

"I have several of the people from Rachel's list in medical records I have access to," she continued. "The before-and-after is not ambiguous. What happened to these people is not placebo, not spontaneous remission, not the natural resolution of a condition that was going to resolve anyway."

She looked at us. "Whatever Fletcher Woods does when he prays over someone, it works. The data confirms the accounts."

Roiya was looking at the printout with Jacob.

"I also have something else," Naomi said.

She moved to her workstation and brought up the file with the focused ease of a woman who had been working toward a presentation and was ready for it. She had been working on the comparative cellular biology since our last big case — the project she had started in Jeremiah's living room over the Voss tablets, the data she had been assembling with the patient thoroughness of someone who understood that the correct conclusion required the correct foundation and the correct foundation took time.

"The results are complete," she said.

She pulled up the first display.

"Jacob," she said. His name the way she always said it — with a familiar gentleness in her voice. "The structural analysis is consistent across every tissue sample and every test."

She pointed at the screen. "Cellular density, metabolic efficiency, tensile response — all of it operating at levels that have no standard human baseline. Not elevated above average. Above the documented range. The literature doesn't describe what Jacob's cells are doing because nothing in the literature has encountered it before."

Jacob looked at the screen. Said nothing. Received it the way he received most true things — without surprise, without performance, just the quiet acknowledgment of something confirmed rather than revealed. I tried to remember how many times either of us had ever been sick enough to require doctors.

"Levi," Naomi said.

I looked at the second display.

"Nerve conduction velocity," she said. "Cellular movement speed is basically off any chart we have." She looked at me with the composed attention of a scientist delivering a finding that satisfied her. "You are operating at speeds my medical background doesn't account for. What you experience as fast is not trained reflex. It is structural. It is what you are."

I looked at the numbers.

I had known this the way you knew things that had always been true — not as a discovery but as a background fact, present since before there was language for it. Seeing it in numbers on a screen did something different with the knowing. Made it specific. Gave it the weight of documented fact rather than experienced reality.

"And Roiya," Naomi said.

Roiya looked up from the printout.

The third display came up.

"Both," Naomi said. "Expressed at a different register — not at the extremes Jacob and Levi represent individually, but comfortably above any documented human range in both dimensions." She turned to look at Roiya directly. "You are structurally strong beyond the human baseline. And you are fast beyond the human baseline. You are not one or the other. You are both."

The room was quiet.

On the call, Curtis and Rachel said nothing. The silence of two people receiving information they had understood abstractly for some time and were now receiving in the specific and documented form that made abstract understanding into something else.

Roiya looked at the screen.

Then she looked at her hands.

The same way she had looked at them in the boxing ring after the combination that had sent Chad to the canvas. The same way she had looked at them outside M. Alcott's apartment after I almost didn't stop. The look of someone being introduced, again, to what they were — not for the first time, but in a new way, at a new depth, with new specificity.

She turned her hands over. Looked at the back of them. Then the palms.

Nobody said anything.

I looked at Roiya's hands.

Then at Jacob’s.

Then at my own.

Lord, I thought, with the quiet that arrived sometimes instead of words. We are what we are. Help us be what you made us for.