Chương 176: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SIX: THE FIRST HOUR AFTER

The message reached Greyhold four days later, at the ninth hour of the evening, and Sennet did not run it down to the study because Marcus was already at the tower. He had been at the tower every evening for six days. He read it standing at the narrow table under the lamp. ACQUITTED ON THE CAPITAL CHARGE. CONVICTED ON THE RESIDUAL. PENALTY: PERMANENT PROHIBITION ON UNSUPERVISED PRACTICE IN THE TOWNSHIP, RELEASE TO OUR CUSTODY UNDER OKAFOR'S UNDERTAKING. SHE IS OUT. SHE IS SITTING TWO FEET FROM ME AS I WRITE THIS.

C. Marcus read it once and put his hand flat on the table and stood there for a moment with his head down.

"My lord?" Sennet said.

"She's out," he said. Sennet, who had been transmitting and receiving every message in this matter for three weeks and who had read all of them, sat down rather abruptly on the stool by the mirror housing.

"Send back," Marcus said, and stopped, and found that he had to work at the next sentence.

"My lord," Sennet said.

"Send back: Received. Tell her the whole town knows her name." This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Sennet sent it. Marcus went down the three flights and out into the courtyard and stood in the summer dark for a minute or two, and then went to the clinic, because Okafor had asked him to come and tell her personally whatever the news was, at whatever hour it came. She was awake. She had been awake, she admitted later, most nights that week.

He told her in four words. She sat down on the edge of the examination table, which was not a thing she did, and put her hands on her knees and looked at the floor for a while.

"Nine years," she said.

"Nine years," he said.

"And she is thirty-two." Okafor shook her head slowly.

"She was twenty-three when we came through. She has spent more of her adult life alone in that cottage than she spent anywhere else. Do you understand that? This world is the majority of her life now."

"Yes," Marcus said. Okafor was quiet for a moment.

"I want to say something and I want you to hear it as a colleague and not as her advocate," she said.

"She is going to be difficult."

"I know," Marcus said.

"Do you? Because I have seen this in field medics who spent too long in isolated postings and it is not gratitude." Okafor's voice was steady and clinical.

"She has been the only person in nine years who could decide anything. She has been correct about things nobody could confirm and wrong about things nobody could correct. She has made every single call alone and lived with every single one alone. You do not come out of that able to sit in a case review and be told you were wrong."

"What do we do?" Marcus said.

"We are patient for a very long time," Okafor said.

"We do not put her in a review for six months. We let her sit in on other people's reviews first, saying nothing, until she has watched enough of them to see that being corrected in that room does not cost anyone anything." She paused.

"And when she does present, I take the first one myself, and I make sure that the first case she presents is one where I get corrected in front of her." Marcus looked at her.

"You've thought about this in some detail," he said.

"I've thought about it every night for three weeks," Okafor said.

"It was the only part of it I could do anything about."