The anatomy lab was in the building that housed the medical school's first-year curriculum, a space that smelled of preservative and copper and the particular clean-antiseptic quality of rooms devoted to the serious business of understanding what people were made of.
He had the Diagnostic Sight. He had known, academically, what the structures it showed him were named. He had not, before the anatomy lab, been in the presence of the actual structures as physical objects that he could handle and examine with both his hands and his perception simultaneously.
The first week, the cadaver they were assigned was an elderly man, clearly well-preserved, whose life had been long enough that the body showed decades of accumulated decision — healed fractures, surgical scars, the specific texture of tissues that had done their work for eighty-plus years. He stood at the table with his section group and felt the Diagnostic Sight operating in an environment where the sight was supplemented by the physical reality of what it was showing him.
The Sight perceived structure. His hands confirmed it. For the first time in his life, the gap between what his divine perception told him and what formal medical knowledge told him was closing in both directions — the Sight finally had formal names for what it had always been showing him, and the formal names finally had a Sight to check them against.
He worked carefully. Not faster than the others — the lab's value was not in speed, and he was careful not to demonstrate the Sight's assistance conspicuously. But his spatial understanding of the three-dimensional relationships between structures was, as it had been in organic chemistry, operating with a tool the other students did not have.
He filed the experience under: this is what it is for. The Apollo legacy as it was always intended. Not just healing people — understanding what healing required. The two thousand years of medicine that had accumulated between Asclepius's earliest practice and the cadaver on this table were, in the moment, collapsing into something coherent. He was a pre-medical student with a divine diagnostic gift studying formal anatomy. The combination was not accidental.
His section partner, a junior named Omar, noticed on the third week that Kael seemed to locate things in the body before he should be able to. He did not ask directly; he asked obliquely, the careful inquiry of someone who notices an anomaly and is choosing how to address it.
'You have good spatial reasoning,' Omar said.
'Yes,' Kael said. 'I have an unusual form of it.' He paused. 'I can feel structure. Literally — there's a tactile and perceptual component that gives me information about spatial relationships before I can see them directly.'
Omar looked at him. 'That's—'
'Unusual,' Kael confirmed. 'I know. I've been using it in a clinical support context for four years. It's a significant advantage for diagnosis. Less so for surgery — surgical technique is still primarily skill and practice regardless of perception.'
'Clinical support context,' Omar repeated. 'How old are you?'
'Seventeen.'
A pause. 'What kind of clinical support context does a seventeen-year-old have?'
'An unusual one,' Kael said. 'I'll tell you about it sometime, when the story makes more sense in context.'
Omar accepted this with the grace of someone who had decided that the anomalous person next to them was a useful one to know and was willing to defer the full explanation. 'Fair enough,' he said. 'Show me how you're reading the hepatic portal arrangement — I can't get the three-dimensional relationship to stabilize in my head.'
Kael showed him. It was good work.