Sweet Romance18 min read
The Doctor Who Wouldn’t Bow: My Life as Berkley Maier in the Cold Court
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I opened my eyes to damp stone, a smell of smoke and old blood, and my own cough that felt like an echo from another life. My hair was heavy and curled in a way I had not arranged. Chains bit my wrists. A brazier spat orange light onto cracked walls.
"Someone—" I croaked, and my voice sounded like someone else's.
"She's breathing." A woman murmured outside the cell with a tone like pity mixed with curiosity.
I tasted metal. My head buzzed with the sharp knowledge of chemistry and anatomy that had been mine before a laboratory glass exploded and the world folded. Then new memories—old barbs of a life I had not lived but had stolen—slid into me like a syringe.
I was Berkley Maier now. I had been a medical grad in another century; now I lived in a body that had been beaten, starved, and deliberately poisoned. The original Berkley had been named after the same as me, taken in by Chancellor Benjamin O'Brien as an adopted daughter, then tossed into a wedding I did not intend to enter. The woman who should have been the prince's wife—Julianne Branch—had schemed and smiled her way into status. Yes, I knew the ledger of insults and the locations where bruises would hide. I felt them all.
"Is she dead?" That voice was syrupy and elegant. I turned my head and saw her: pale silk, painted eyes, and a tray of perfume. Julianne Branch. She peered as if she were inspecting a set of unglazed porcelain.
"Miss," a thin girl with quick hands said. "We waited three days. The smell—"
Julianne sniffed the air like some heirloom dog. "It's ruined the effect. Drag her carcass out when your spine grows new courage."
"Do you think she killed the prince?" the girl whispered, giggling.
I opened my mouth. I was supposed to be dead. I wasn't supposed to have breath left. I wasn't supposed to laugh. But the sound that escaped me was small and dry and very, very spiteful.
"A corpse that chuckles is poor theatre." Julianne stepped forward and reached to put a fan over my face as if to hide a corpse. Her hand brushed the bruised skin on my cheek and paused by the crescent mark of a chain scar.
"Wait." A new voice interrupted—cold and quiet as a drawn sword. "Let me see."
Ryder Aldridge filled the doorway like a shadow stepping into light: tall, a commander in black, hair bound like an officer's crown. He wore exhaustion like armor. His eyes were an unusual gray that cut across people like wind.
"Who dares?" Julianne curtsied, too practised.
"Stand back," he said. He approached and his gaze found mine. He touched my jaw with a professional curiosity, felt the pulse, and frowned. "You're alive."
"Ryder?" I asked with equal parts hope and suspicion. My voice came out brittle.
He stared at me, then straightened, an officer back at parade. "You should be."
The irony in my chest was a live coal. I had always wanted to disappear after the lab collapse—no, I had meant to vanish permanently. But here I was; someone had given me a second life and someone else had tried to make it die.
"Who did this?" Ryder demanded.
Julianne's smile thinned. "The palace has heard rumors—poison. A shame. A real shame."
"I know poisons," I said. "I know symptoms. He isn't... the prince didn't die because of you."
Julianne scoffed. "You were never a real physician. You are fat, a fool, and a liar. We made sure you looked unfit."
I tasted the words "fat" and felt the body I now inhabited: bloated, weak, drug-altered. Someone had given the original Berkley potions to distort her shape so that, when she died, others would say, "At least she was plump and well-fed." That way the side wife would seem better by comparison.
"Who gave them?" Ryder asked.
"Not her," I answered. "Julianne. She had someone spike the wedding wine and the festive food, but the poison was tailored—long-acting, to cause weight, cardiac strain, and a slow, vicious melt."
Ryder's brow knotted. He looked at Julianne like a general scanning an enemy line.
"Take her away," he said to his men, not to me. "She will be questioned properly."
Julianne's face tightened like silk on a drying line. "You cannot—" She bit the words.
He had rescued me from the pit where I had been left to die, and in so doing had opened a ledger of obligations.
"Ryder," I told him when the guards had taken Julianne off to be detained, "I can help you."
He looked at me as though the world had narrowed to a single dangerous coin. "You can cure him?"
"I am a doctor," I said simply. "In my life I studied toxins and their antidotes. I can read pulses, test samples, and create compounds. But I need time and supplies. And I will not be kept here as a pet."
His mouth flattened. "What do you want, Berkley Maier?"
"Freedom," I said. "A week. And a promise: find my brother." I had seen a boy in my sudden dreams—eyes more trusting than the rest of the world, a small body and a name: Case Ellison. He had been brought into the household as a cunning tool; Julianne had secreted him away in shackles to bargain for obedience.
Ryder measured me carefully. There were a thousand men who would have traded for a week of life if it could be purchased; he only had one that mattered to him.
"One week," he said finally. "I don't trust you, but I need a healer."
I swallowed. I had traded my lab life to become a woman in silk and cage; I would not waste the chance.
"Then teach your men to follow instructions," I said. "And do not call me 'pet.'"
We came to a bargain: I would secure medicines and research the toxin, but I would not be a prisoner in idle velvet. He freed me of chains and had my wounds tended while I tasted fever. I sat and extracted notes from the damaged memory the original Berkley had left—labels tucked in a shoe, a scrap of herbal labels under a mattress—and I began to build.
The first days were chaos. I ordered the kitchen to inventory store rooms—what the house had was incredible, the war household's stores stocked for campaigns. When the steward, Adan Arroyo, told me the warehouse rules, I smiled.
"You mean no one took anything without Ryder's seal," I said.
Adan looked puzzled. "It is the custom, my lady."
"Ryder gave me a writ," I said. "I am in charge of medications. From today the pharmacy is mine."
He blinked and then bowed, clearly relieved someone in the house had a plan.
"Good," I said. "Now bring me ginseng, deer antler, and coarse alum."
In the privacy of a small chamber I set a burner and ground herbs with methodical patience. My fingers moved with an expertise I recognized from a life that had not been mine a week ago. I composed powders and a "bridge-pill" I would give to Ryder: something to slow the poisoning's assault enough to keep him functional while I pursued a full antidote.
Ryder watched me do it. "You trust your theory?"
"I trust physiology," I replied. "And I trust the pulse."
He sat, and I took his wrist. He flinched at the intimate gesture, then stilled. His pulse was like in a textbook—tight, rapid, brittle. He didn't trust easily. Neither did I.
"Why did they do this?" he asked suddenly, jaw set.
I tapped my lips with a powder-stained finger. "Politics," I said. "Julianne wanted to discredit you, let your authority die away. Or worse, to take advantage of your vacancy. Your troops are the kingdom's spine, Ryder. They want that spine to be broken."
He did not deny it. He let me give him the temporary medicine. He swallowed with a soldier's composure, and for the first time, he looked at me as someone who might save him rather than someone he needed to save.
Days blurred into formulas and court puzzles. I rebuilt my fitness slowly in the courtyard using a contraption I designed out of wood and gears—a crude treadmill—so I could move in privacy without being seen. I taught my small household rules that were simple and dangerous: respect the person who cooks your meal; do not let a chain of small cruelties slide. The people began to re-align.
The maids, led by Fisher Rizzo who had been gentle with me when I was pinned in a dungeon, began to show loyalty. The side wife's maid, Greta Torres, still watched with venom like a coiled snake.
Julianne, however, could not remain passive. She escalated.
"She is only blustering," Julianne said one morning when I ordered redistributed duties. "You think you can bully my servants into being honest? Little dog."
"I think I can," I said. "And I can make them loyal."
She laughed. "You were everybody's pity project, Berkley. Did you think you could become somebody?"
I only looked at her. "Watch me."
The next morning I stood in the main courtyard and called for all thirty-three servants who worked in my lodge to assemble.
"Today," I announced, "you all will learn order. Those who stay will earn two extra coins. Those who leave will go with their dignity."
The crowd shuffled and muttered. Fisher stepped forward with eyes like polished wood. "We will stay," she said.
The woman behind Julianne—Greta—spat on the ground and sneered. "You'd think a fat woman could spare a coin. She had us scrub her skin until it bled."
"Enough," I said. "To the yard, two by two. Tell me your posts."
By the time I had finished, the servants left the yard murmuring. The rumor mill worked for me. Julianne seethed.
"She has the nerve," she whispered later, plotting out of reach.
I did not fret. I had to think two steps ahead—how to save Ryder fully, how to find Case Ellison, how to keep myself alive.
The first breakthrough came when I saw a subtly bitter smell on a platter of sweets in the imperial garden. I palmed one and, in a quiet corner, pricked it with a silver hairpin.
"These are toxic," I told Diaz Mikhaylov when he asked me in the Emperor's court how the night's sickness had happened.
"How can you be certain?" he asked, irritated and curious in equal measure.
"Because I tested it," I said. "And because I am not afraid to prick or taste or listen. The food had a stimulant to provoke labor—an induction agent—then a slow, flaring poison. Someone meant the mother to suffer."
Diaz, the Emperor, shifted. "Whom do you accuse?"
I looked at Emiliana Martinez, the Empress, who had been watching me closely. Her smile was thin, like paper cut to fit a face. She was dangerous because everyone bowed and called her "mother of the realm." But she had allies and eyes in places I did not.
"Find the kitchen records and test every sample," I said. "If you want to know who did this, start with the people who had the access and the motive."
"Do this, and I will reward you," Diaz said.
"Do this, and I will drink for the living and for the dead," I replied. I meant it.
Then the palace collapsed into a small storm: tests, needles, questions, and a dizzying atmosphere of accusation. I tasted the tang of fear when they tested the pastries and found the chemical marker. The message was clear.
"They used a champignon from the Empress's own stores," I told the Emperor when he stood behind the screens and waited. "Only two people handle such stocks: the personal steward and the Empress's most trusted maid."
The investigation drew thin threads to Emiliana. It drew thicker threads to those who stood to gain from a quiet death in the harem.
"What of the concubine?" Emiliana asked, voice soft as silk. "Li Meiren—she was beloved. Who would sabotage her?"
"Someone who needed her gone," I said. "Someone who feared her favor."
No one expects the truth. They expect stories; they expect neat endings. I gave them a messy one: the pastry was poisoned and the poisoning points at the Empress's cooking chamber. There was immediate denial, gasps, a fainting woman dragged out of the room, and a court that divided between "she's too high to suspect" and "we must punish whoever dared."
Then autumn came to a head, and the palace demanded a show of authority. The Emperor summoned us all to the great courtyard. It was the center of attention: nobility, ministers, soldiers, merchants, and servants. The long benches were filled; the crowd's breath fogged in that open space like a damp cloak.
Julianne had a face alight with ecstatic malignancy. She had been playing a waiting game, offering smiles to the Emperor and muttered reports to Benjamin O'Brien. She had been certain the small woman who once lived as Berkley had died in her cell. She had not accounted for a Berkley who could sew needles into bundles and turn a wooden treadmill into a personal gym.
The day the truth was pulled from Julianne's mouth into the sunlight was a day of taste and texture in the world: sweat on brows, the clackcloth of armor, whispers like leaves.
"Julianne Branch," Diaz declared, his voice carrying the weight of law and the suspicion of consequence. "You are accused of conspiring, of murder, of the crafting of a charm puppet used to curse another's life and of the attempted elimination of the prince."
Julianne's face went from honey to iron. "Accused? By whom?" she said, too loudly, like a woman who had rehearsed objection.
"By evidence," the Emperor said. "By a doll made of cloth found in your chamber, pierced with needles and bound with a talisman listing the birth dates of the prince's house. By the testimony of servants. By the words of the woman you left for dead."
She brightened with scorn. "This is preposterous. Who benefits? I—"
"You held authority and motive," I said, and the entire courtyard turned like a camera at my words. "You hated that Berkley might be useful to the prince. You had a boy in your care—Case Ellison—and you used him as leverage."
Julianne laughed with a brittle sound. "You are deluded. You play at courts with a country doctor’s confidence and you think you can unpick politics?"
"Stand down," Ryder said, and his voice dropped like a well-aimed blade. "Julianne Branch, I will have truth."
Julianne's composure cracked the way some lacquered pots splinter. She went from smirk to suffocating blush to incredulous waggle.
"This is a lie!" she cried. "You—how dare you—"
"Guards," Diaz ordered.
They brought her forward. I had warned myself not to enjoy it, that justice must be sober and measured; the world had no shortage of petty victories. But the sight of her colliding into the reality she had tried to control felt like the right measure of consequence.
They stripped her of her silk finery piece by piece into a coarse robe fit for confinement. She stood trembling and defiant in front of the court. I could see, at last, that she was very small under the robes.
"Julianne Branch," Diaz intoned, addressing the gathered courtyard, "you engineered the poisoning of the prince's household to elevate your own position. You confined a child, you made charms to harm a rival, and you sought to ruin a life by slow, ugly measures. You will be judged by the law of Northhuai."
Her face went through the stages as required: smug, then shock, then denial, then collapse.
"You're mad!" she shouted. "This is slander! My father—" She tried to invoke Benjamin O'Brien. He sat beside the Emperor like a wolf hemmed in, and his face did not give her the comfort she craved.
"Benjamin?" she cried. "Hold—"
He lifted his hand and declined.
Julianne's mouth formed a thin O of disbelief, then desperation.
"This is a trick!" she sobbed, the veil of cultivated composure dissolving into rawness. "You cannot—my father—call him! He will see—"
The courtyard, filled with courtiers, servants, soldiers, and ordinary people, buzzed. Phones did not exist in our age, but similes in twenty-first century terms would have said the crowd was filming with their eyes. They witnessed everything: the tearing of silk, the flattening of her pillow-protections, the rolling of her cheeks as color bled out like stormwater.
"No," she said, and the first tremor in her voice came like the tremor before glass breaks.
The guard produced for the crowd a small, crude doll. It was patched and primed, with pins sticking out and a paper talisman scorched in segments. A servant named Fisher Rizzo stepped forward and held it out so everyone could examine.
"Does that belong to you?" Diaz asked.
"I didn't—" Julianne's denial came animal-quick. "I never—"
Her defenses fell away, one by one. Someone in the crowd gasped. One noblewoman put her hands up to her mouth. A soldier who had seen too many of the world’s cruelties simply looked down, displeased.
Then a voice—thick, trembling, impossibly childlike—called out: "Mistress Julianne, that's mine."
Case Ellison stepped into the light. He looked small and frightened but the truth had given him courage. "You used me," he said. "You locked me. You made me watch."
Julianne lurched as if the child had struck her with a cane. She clutched at the court's edge and then bent forward, the kind of double movement that says, I am not longer above you.
"She—" Julianne stammered, grasping at every straw. "She stole my things! She framed me—"
"Enough." Diaz's voice was iron. "You will kneel and admit your guilt."
She fell to her knees. Her face contorted—smugness now gone, replaced with a panic like a drowning animal.
"Please!" she cried, a sound that gouged. "I had to do it! I wanted—no—no!"
The crowd reacted exactly as the law and humiliation expect: whispers, then louder whisperings, then the soft percussion of fabrics, then claps—some of them maddeningly relieved, others merciless. A nobleman took from his sleeve a scroll and read aloud the findings: the testimony of Greta Torres, the inventory notes, the confession of her steward when questioned.
Julianne’s eyes widened like a trapped animal now seeing the trap set shut. She went from defiant to pleading, to bargaining, to begging. "Benjamin—father—tell them—"
Benjamin O'Brien's face had hardened like old leather. He said nothing. The man who had asked for a daughter to be used as a lever would not pull her out now.
People in the crowd recorded what they could with their eyes and voices; they repeated the story to themselves. A boy in the third row snapped a ribbon as if to mark the day. Some laughed. Some cried. Many swore, under their breath, that their own quiet grievances would be vindicated. The courtyard became a theater and Julianne its failing star.
"Ask for mercy," Diaz said finally, coldly instructive. "You asked the palace to be an accomplice. Now the palace witnesses your confession."
She looked at those watching—servants, soldiers, lords—and her gaze slid to me. "Please," she whimpered. "Spare me. I can give anything."
I had no taste for vengeance beyond the facts. I wanted justice, not revenge. But the law required restitution.
"Julianne Branch," Diaz intoned, "for your crimes of poisoning, confinement, and conspiracy, your privileges are stripped. You will be confined to Cloud-Rest Pavilion under house arrest for a year. You will be publicly rebuked now, and you will restore those you wronged."
Her face drained of color until it looked like old wax. She tried to smile. It came out like a severed thing.
"Please—" She fell to the dirt and buried her face in her hands. "Please—"
No one rushed to help. A few kicked the dust. A woman clapped a hand to her mouth and cried. A soldier laughed, then covered his mouth and looked ashamed.
Julianne begged. She crawled on hands and knees toward the throne and then flinched as a guard grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her back.
"I—" She looked at me, and the lines of her face, once smooth and composed, were now carved with fear. "Berkley—"
I did not look at her. I had no appetite for vengeance and no joy in seeing another human reduced. But I also could not pretend that justice did not matter. I spoke only once.
"Julianne Branch," I said, voice low but clear, "you took what you could. You hurt a child. You poisoned a mother. You almost broke a man who fought for this country. Remember that whatever you have left is because laws have more reach than malice."
She reached for my boot as I turned to go, but the guards pulled her away.
The crowd dispersed, some sobered, many whispering. The palace had seen a spectacle: the bad person, so sure of herself, stripped and dragged through public shame. Julianne's final wail echoed a long time.
In the days that followed, the palace tapestry had a new pattern: people stepped carefully around the edges of favors. Julianne was confined, her household stripped. Case Ellison returned to my care slowly, bewildered but alive. I fed him simple broths and taught him how to play again. The house settled into a new rhythm: work, study, healing. My pills tightened Ryder's pulse and eased the blackness in his limbs. He improved.
"Why are you so stubborn?" he asked one evening when I was bandaging a finger he'd nicked in the field.
"Because I was given a second chance," I said. "Because no child should be used as a tool."
He watched me sitting cross-legged on my wooden treadmill, powdered herbs stuck in my hair, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
"You are not like anyone I expected to meet," he said. "No one I have ever met manages both knife and needle with the same hands."
"I used to work in a lab," I said. "Microscopes don't lie."
"You say things as if they are small miracles," he said softly. "And yet you do not believe you are one."
I laughed. "Do not make me feel vain. It upsets my muscles."
We fell into an uneasy tenderness that was neither forced nor entirely mutual at first. He was blunt, a man who read the world in order and commanded his small kingdom with iron. I was a surgeon's hands with a student's heart that wanted to run away. But survival is a teacher; we learned the other's language.
One night, Diaz summoned us for a dark council. Soldiers were nervous outside the palace walls; foreign emissaries chafed in the court like caged tigers. An envoy—Ezio Wagner—had come with a swagger and a challenge, implying that the kingdom could be pressed for tribute. Diaz asked Ryder to negotiate.
"You should not engage," the Emperor told Ryder. "There are suspicions about your strength."
"Then I will do what I can," Ryder said.
But the envoy sneered, and the court goaded him into competition: an archery contest. I carried a small vial of powder to Ryder's hand, the "bridge" to steady him. He shot true and made the envoy's anger burn hotter.
That night, in the afterglow of him piercing target after target, the envoy's refusal to be humiliated set a plot in motion. He was to be appeased with gifts, and the Emperor's fear of war made him too soft. I watched the politics circling like flies.
"Do not trust him," I said to Ryder. "He came hungry. He will take more."
He only grunted. "I know."
The days that followed were filled with small victories and quiet wars. I discovered the Emperor's kitchen had more strings to pull—poisoned pastries, tattered letters, the way a man’s reputation is a house of fine glass.
It all came to a boil when the Empress's favorite concubine, Jessica Barry, suffered a labor she should have survived. I insisted on performing a difficult delivery in a palace room with too few instruments and much suspicion.
"Do you think you can save her?" the Empress asked me faintly.
"Yes," I lied, and then I worked like a woman who had stitched up her whole life with threads of hope. I performed a crude but necessary incision and delivery with no anesthesia. The baby cried a clear, angry cry. People sighed.
"She's alive," I told Diaz. They both looked as if they had seen a ghost.
Soon after, Jessica's bleeding began. There were accusations murmured into the gravest of ear's folds. The Empress's face turned an interesting color: faint pity edged with something sharp. Jessica's last breath included a name pressed through thin lips: "It was her."
"Her?" the Emperor asked.
"She said the Empress wanted the child gone," the dying woman whispered. "It's the Empress."
Everyone looked at Emiliana Martinez. She, the Empress, did not drop her smile. But legal threads began to twist. I tested the food; there it was: a laboring agent mingled with a poison.
"Who benefits?" I asked out loud. "Who will be stronger if a rival is gone?"
When the court turned, it found a labyrinth: injectables, talismans, a child's puppet. The law had to act, and what law could not do by evidence, the people's eyes did. The Empress stood on the edge of disaster and instead fashioned a softer net: she pointed fingers at others to save herself.
The unravelling that had brought Julianne to public shame had ripples. It exposed how shallow loyalty could be in a court, and how many had warmed their hands by lying.
We consolidated victories. I earned the authority to run the house's pharmacy, to import herbs under Ryder's seal and to treat soldiers when they returned from skirmish. I built small contraptions and a practice that moved from a courtyard to a wandering dispensary. Word spread, and in secret I began to make small fortunes.
"You're becoming rich," Ryder said one evening, his voice a soft complaint.
"I am making coins enough to buy a cart," I said. "And a new set of scales."
He laughed, a sound I was beginning to love.
But I never forgot the boy who had headed the chain of cruelty: Case Ellison. He slept in my room under a faded blanket. He learned to use spoons without shaking.
"Will she come after us again?" he asked one night.
"No one comes for you while I breathe," I said, and he believed it with the childish trust he had regained.
When Julianne's confinement ended, the court watched her keel over under the burden of public knowledge. She apologized and begged. She admitted things, then denied others, and finally fell to pleading. That day stayed in people's tongues for months. It was a warning: cruelty would not go unrecorded.
When the day came that I walked with Ryder out to the gates to see the flow of refugees and to arrange grain, I felt something I had not planned on: belonging. We distributed coin and grain because it was right, not because it was politic. The Emperor's treasury was stingy, and we used what was in the house to feed the hungry.
"A good ruler is not counted by his trophies," Ryder said as he watched people lift rations. "He is measured by how he receives the wounded."
"What of you?" I asked.
He looked at me, his face softening. "I am learning."
Later, in the quiet of the night, he reached across the table and took my hand as if it would be the first and last time a man ever did that without ordering.
"You saved me," he said, "and then you fixed everything else."
"I am still fixing things," I correct him softly. "You are getting better. So is the house."
He smiled, small and private.
"Will you go with me?" he asked after a pause. "If I ask you to stay by my side, will you stay?"
I thought of the wooden treadmill and the small pharmacy, of Case Ellison sleeping with the spoon not curling under a white-knuckled fist, of Julianne's pleading voice in the dust and of Emiliana's quiet power. I thought of the strange justice that had been handed out and the hard days ahead. I thought of my old life, the sterile glass and the bright fluorescents, and of the life I had been granted with hands that were not mine until last month.
"I will," I said simply.
Ryder's expression didn't bloom so much as it softened, as if some armor had been gently filed away.
And so we built a life that had strange rhythms: medicine by day, politics at court, compassion for those outside our walls, and a very careful watch over the men who came to bargain with greed. I made salves and sheens and occasionally a fragrant beauty cream that had nothing to do with war but everything to do with making a woman feel herself again.
"Keep the wooden treadmill," I told Fisher Rizzo one afternoon. "Let Case play by it. Let it be a reminder that movement helps a body forgive itself."
Years later, when I walked through the palace gardens and listened to the rustle of the king's robes and the whispers of courtiers, I still heard the echo of that first night: the clang of chain, the sting of iron, and the small, fierce heartbeat that would not go away. I tightened my fingers around Ryder's and knew I had become more than a ghost. I had become a woman who could stitch a life from old cloth and new threads.
At the very end of one long day, as I held a small sealed bottle of the first clean antidote I had made for Ryder—a black pill that once had been just a theory—I set it on the little wooden shelf above the running machine I had built in Warm-Maple Courtyard.
"It is a charm now," I told him.
He raised an eyebrow. "A charm?"
"A little battery," I said. "A thing to remember by. If anything happens—and it will happen—I will take the wheel and run."
He took the pill from the shelf and tapped it against the wood, as if it were a coin. "And if you need me to run, I'll follow."
I smiled and leaned against him. The courtyard's wooden slats creaked lazily in the dark.
"Then run," I said. "Run and do not look back at those who would put a chain on you. Run until you cannot run no more. Then come home."
He did not move. The night wrapped around us like a cloak.
We did not know what the future would hold—more plots, more embassies, more poison in the corners of silk—but we had each other, a wooden treadmill, a pill on a shelf, a boy who could sleep, and a quiet pharmacy that promised little miracles every day.
And that was enough for the moment.
The End
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