The voice on the medical channel asked Eli to describe what he had lost before she asked what he wanted to do next.
He sat beside the clinic’s public table, away from the medicine shelves and the patients waiting behind the partition. Tessa held the speaking connection where he could reach it. The local healer had brought the observations she had made herself. Nobody had sent the whole of his private ledger to the surface.
“The view through the kitchen window,” he said. “I remember the room. I remember my mother laughing. There was something outside that I used to see when I remembered it. I can’t see that now.”
“Does reading your earlier description bring it back?”
“No.”
“Any change since the last assessment?”
“No return. No new gap that I’ve found.”
The independent adviser let him finish. She was working through the established medical channel, with his earlier restrictions and Tessa’s account of the Quiet Field interval before her. Her distance from the settlement did not make the examination complete. She said what she could assess through speech and the observations of the two people beside him, and what would require a direct examination if his condition changed.
