If what you're showing me is accurate, she said, setting the phone down, then Dr. Voss has been operating on falsified diagnostic data for over a year. I believe that's correct, Malik said. And you believe the falsification was deliberate? I believe someone with access to Veil Nova's internal systems altered the analysis results before Voss delivered them.
Whether Voss knew the data was compromised or whether he was also being used, that's for the ethics board to determine. What I know is that the results Saraphina Vale received 14 months ago were not accurate. Dr. Mines looked at him with the expression of someone recalibrating a situation. You're a maintenance technician.
I used to work emergency response, he said. Some habits don't go away. They brought Voss in at 10:00. Malik waited in the corridor, the same corridor where he'd stood the night before listening to Voss Point Saraphina toward paliotative care. It took 42 minutes.
When Dr. Mines came out, she said a new diagnostic workup would be ordered immediately, that the ethics board had been formally notified and that Saraphina's current treatment plan was suspended pending review. Then she said, "She has a real diagnosis, Mr. Reading. It's serious. " But it is treatable if she starts soon.
Malik nodded. He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he went in to tell her himself. Saraphina was sitting up the same as the night before. But something about the quality of her stillness was different.
The resigned kind, the kind that had already made its calculations incented the remainder. He sat down before she could tell him again to leave. He put the folder on the bed beside her and let her read it at her own pace. She read it twice. When she looked up, her expression was not relief.
It was something older and more complicated than relief. The look of someone who had been carrying a weight for so long that the removal of it felt less like freedom and more like vertigo. He built you a death sentence, Malik said. Because a dying woman is easier to move out of the way than a healthy one. Saraphina set the folder down.
She looked at the window. Spent 14 months believing I was dying. She said, "I know. I gave things away. I stopped planning. " She pressed her hand flat on the folder.