Chương 178: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-EIGHT: ARRIVAL

They came in through the east gate on a Thursday afternoon in the third week of July, twenty-four days after they had ridden out. Marcus had considered, and rejected, a formal reception. Marta had told him to reject it.

"She's been in a cell in front of forty people," Marta had said.

"Do not stand her in front of another crowd." So there was no crowd. There was Marcus at the gate, and Okafor, and Danny, and that was all. Denise Okonkwo dismounted stiffly. She was thirty-two years old, thin, sunburnt from twelve days on the road, wearing clothes that had been bought for her in a market town four days back because what she had owned had been in a cell with her. She looked at Marcus. Marcus had thought for two weeks about what to say and had discarded everything.

What he said was: "Specialist Okonkwo. Sergeant Marcus Cole, 35F." She came to attention. It was not a decision. Calla's account is specific on this point — it happened before any expression reached her face, the automatic response of nine years of buried training surfacing all at once, and then she caught herself and her face did something complicated and she stayed at attention anyway, deliberately, because she had decided to.

"Sergeant," she said.

"At ease," Marcus said.

"Welcome home." Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. She held it another second. Then she let it go, and her shoulders came down, and she looked past him at the town — the walls, the roofs, the smoke, the noise of a market that had not stopped for anything.

"It's big," she said.

"Twelve thousand," Marcus said.

"Twelve—" She stopped.

"In the town?"

"In the town." Okafor stepped forward then.

"Denise," she said.

"Diane Okafor. I was on the other rotation. We met twice."

"You were a captain."

"I was," Okafor said.

"I run a medical establishment now and I have eleven practitioners and I have been waiting nine years for someone with your case volume to walk through that gate." Denise Okonkwo looked at her.

"My case volume," she said.

"Four hundred and eleven documented cases in a resource-poor setting with no support," Okafor said.

"I have read sixty of them. I have questions about forty. I have been making a list." She paused.

"Not today. Not this month. But I want you to know that the reason I want you here is not charity. It is that you know things nobody else in this world knows and I would like very much to learn them." Something moved across Denise Okonkwo's face and did not entirely resolve.

"Okay," she said.

"Go and sleep," Okafor said.

"There's a room. It's yours. It has a door that locks from the inside and nobody will come through it." She paused.

"That last part matters more than it sounds like it does."

"Yeah," Denise said.

"It does." Danny walked her across the courtyard. Marcus watched them go. Danny was fifteen. He said something. Denise said something back. They stopped, and Danny said something else, and Denise Okonkwo stopped walking entirely and turned and looked at him properly for the first time. Marcus asked him about it later.

"I told her I'd been nine years old when I got here," Danny said.

"She asked how old I was now. I said fifteen in the body and twenty-six in the head and I stopped counting which one was real about four years ago." He paused.

"She said: does it stop being strange? I said no. I said it stops being only strange."

"What did she say?"

"She didn't say anything," Danny said.

"She just walked the rest of the way." He paused.

"But she'll come find me. Maybe not for a month. She'll come."