The defence attorney cross-examined for two hours. When he challenged the legitimacy of her file access, she acknowledged it directly: yes, she had used a colleague's access card, yes, that was a breach of protocol, and she had done it because the alternative was allowing a man to be killed and she would do it again. When he tried to characterise her as a disgruntled employee, she said: "I was recruited specifically for my skills and professional reputation, which would have been used to legitimise the programme's continued operation. I am not disgruntled. I am a doctor who found out what was being done in the name of medicine and reported it. Those are different things."
The judge made a note.
After the testimony, in the corridor, Nalini handed her coffee and said: "The defence ran out of road on the tissue question. Their expert witness has been discredited in two previous cases."
"What's the timeline?"
"Verdict by the end of the year. Rao is going to make a deal — testify against the Paritosh Group's involvement for a reduced sentence. Paritosh himself is in a different court. That one is slower. The money makes it slower."
"The Paritosh case will take years," Priya said.
"Yes. But the programme is over. Every one of the two hundred and forty-seven active participants was formally notified and referred to independent healthcare within seventy-two hours of the raid." Nalini paused. "It's not enough. The Paritosh case needs to finish. The hundred and nine need justice. But the immediate harm is stopped."
"The immediate harm is stopped," Priya said.
She thought about the career she was rebuilding at Sion Hospital — public sector, no sea-view flat, the specific and satisfying difficulty of a public hospital that was chronically under-resourced and did remarkable things anyway. She thought about Sunita, who had arrived at the courthouse with her absolute calm and had looked at the courtroom with the expression of someone who had waited a long time for this room.
"What are you thinking?" Nalini said.
"The synthetics question. The thing Rao said — BioForge livers reject at three percent higher rates. That's real. The demand for authentic organs exists partly because of a genuine medical gap. Someone needs to close that gap through legitimate research. Better synthetic tissue, better vascular replication. Close the clinical gap and the luxury preference loses its medical cover." She paused. "There's a research programme at AIIMS that is three years from a breakthrough on the vascular branching problem. They're underfunded. I've been corresponding with the lead researcher. I'm going to write a grant application."
Nalini looked at her. "You're not done."
