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CHAPTER 02: ANEMONE: THE SWORD THAT WOULD NOT BE HELD

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The anemone opens only in wind and closes again the moment the wind dies, which is why the old books call it the windflower and why the very oldest call it forsaken. It grows best on ground that has been disturbed. Gardeners plant it over graves and then tell themselves that they did it for the colour.

She learned to walk in the winter of her second year, and the household never entirely recovered from the experience.

It began with crawling, which she despised on principle, and progressed through a short and humiliating period of furniture navigation, and concluded one grey morning in the long gallery when she let go of a chair leg out of sheer irritation and discovered that she could simply go places. She managed eleven steps before gravity took an interest. A footman carrying a tray of glassware made a noise like a kettle and set the tray down on the floor rather than risk the alternative.

After that, containing her became a household duty with a rota attached to it, and the rota was ignored by everybody including the people on it.

The manor was enormous in the way that only buildings designed to intimidate other buildings are enormous. There was a west wing that nobody used and an east wing that everybody used at once. There were three principal staircases and a fourth that ran from the kitchens up to the servants' corridor, which the staff used constantly and pretended did not exist. There were rooms full of furniture under dust sheets, and rooms full of ledgers going back two hundred years, and one long narrow room containing nothing at all except the portraits of dead men with red hair and identical expressions, hung in order, so that a person walking its length could watch a single face grow old, die, be replaced, and grow old again, eleven times over.

She hated that room and went into it constantly.

And at the end of a corridor in the west wing where she was absolutely not supposed to be, there was a door with cold air coming out from underneath it.

She could never open it. She tried for a year, on and off, with escalating ingenuity, including one memorable attempt involving a fish knife and a length of ribbon. It never gave. She eventually stopped trying, and then one morning when she was twelve years old somebody opened that door in front of her and put a sword into her hands, and she felt the cold on her ankles again and understood that the house had been keeping it for her the whole time.

But that came later.

In the spring of her second year, she pushed open a door expecting another room of sheeted furniture, and found the garden instead.

She stopped in the doorway with her hand still flat against the frame.

She had seen flowers before. Of course she had. There had been flowers in her old life, in plastic buckets outside convenience stores with their stems wrapped in cellophane, in the hands of people walking toward hospitals, in a vase on a kitchen table for about four days every spring because her mother had liked the idea of flowers considerably more than she had liked their upkeep.

This was not that. This was an argument conducted entirely in colour.

The garden ran for what seemed, to a very small person, roughly a kilometre. It was laid out in beds and borders and low clipped hedges, and every single bed was full to bursting. There were spires of blue that came up well past her head. There were low sprawls of white that had escaped their beds altogether and were making a serious attempt on the gravel. There were roses with heads too heavy for their own stems, and things with petals like torn paper, and one entire corner given over to something purple that hummed, because the bees were living inside it.

The air was thick with scent, and that was the part she had not been prepared for, because photographs have no smell and neither do the flowers in buckets outside convenience stores. It smelled green and sweet and very slightly rotten underneath, which is what a garden actually smells like when there is enough of it gathered in one place.

Theresia Astrea, who had been dead for two years and had not yet found one single thing in this world that belonged to her, walked out into the middle of it and sat down on the gravel path in her good clothes and did not move for an hour and a half.

Three separate members of staff came looking for her, found her, and went away again without saying anything at all, because she was clearly in no danger, and because not one of them wanted to be the person who made her stop.

—=<>=—

After that they could not keep her out of it.

She was found there in the mornings before breakfast. She was found there in the afternoons when she was supposed to be resting. She was found there once at dusk in the rain, soaked entirely through, crouched in front of a bed of something small and yellow with an expression of tremendous concentration, and carried inside by a footman who was too frightened of her mother to laugh about it until the following day.

She learned the names of them. All of them, eventually, from the head gardener, a taciturn old man called Aldous who had hands like roots and a permanent film of soil in the creases of his knuckles, and who discovered to his own private astonishment that he enjoyed being asked questions. Nobody had asked him a question in eleven years. The family liked the garden the way people like weather.

He taught her which things wanted sun and which would die of it. He taught her that you cut some plants back savagely in order to make them grow, and that others will never forgive you for touching them at all, and that telling those two apart is most of the job and all of the skill. He taught her that the soil in the south beds was wrong, had always been wrong, and that four separate lords of the house had refused to pay to have it corrected. He taught her, kneeling in the dirt in a dress that cost more than a farmhand earned in a year, how to take a cutting, which she got wrong nine times in a row and then never got wrong again.

"You have got the patience for it," he said, and went back to his pruning, and that was the largest compliment he paid to any human being in the forty years she knew him.

And she talked to them.

That part she never told a living soul, for obvious reasons, and it went on for years, and it went on long after it had stopped being a childish habit and turned into something considerably stranger and more necessary.

She would sit down in front of a bed and tell it about her day. She told the roses about the tutor who could not do long division without moving his lips. She told a stand of delphiniums, at length and with real feeling, about a television series that had been cancelled after a single season in a country that did not exist. She told the small yellow ones by the south wall about Kenichi and Naoko Natsuki, who had died in a railway concourse in a city called Ohayo, and who had been kind, and who had deserved a great deal better than they got, and whose son had stood eleven metres away with his hands open at his sides and done absolutely nothing at all.

The flowers never answered, which was the entire point of them.

They did not ask whose daughter she was. They did not tell her that she was composed for her age, or remark on how quickly she had taken to her letters, or say that she had her mother's eyes and her father's chin. They did not look at her the way her father sometimes did, with that warm and terrible arithmetic running behind it. They simply grew, and were beautiful, and required her to be nothing in particular, and in a house containing two hundred people she did not have one single other friend in the world of whom the same could be said.

CHAPTER 02: ANEMONE: THE SWORD THAT WOULD NOT BE HELD: Part 02

Her brothers, meanwhile, had swords.

She wanted to be very clear with herself about this, because for the first year or so she had made the mistake of filing it as a hobby, the way a child in her old world might be into football, or trains, or a particular band.

It was not a hobby. It was a religion. The house was its temple and the courtyard was its altar, and not one person inside it had ever seriously entertained the possibility that a human being might believe in something else.

They were at it before breakfast. Thames, who was eleven when she was two, and who would be dead before she was sixteen, got up in the dark to do forms alone in the courtyard in all weathers, and had been doing so since he was seven years old without anybody having instructed him to. Karan trained with a wooden blade in each hand and had, by fourteen, the ugliest hands of any boy in the province. Casiles read about swords when he was too injured to swing them, which was frequently, and held opinions about smiths who had been dead two hundred years. Carlan, who was nearest to her in age and still small enough to be knocked down, was knocked down every single day, and got up every single day, and did not appear to regard this as in any way remarkable or worth mentioning to anyone.

At meals they talked about it. They talked about grips and footwork and guard positions and the relative merits of particular forges with the intensity that other families reserve for money or for God. They quoted their uncle. They quoted the men in the portraits down the long room. They argued so bitterly one evening about the correct name for a specific diagonal cut that their mother sent all four of them out of the dining room, and then sent them out again a week later for the same reason.

And their uncle Fribal would sit at the end of the table with his chin on his hand, listening to them argue, and would correct them perhaps twice in an entire evening, and when he corrected them, they all went quiet.

He was not a large man. That surprised her, the first time she was old enough to notice it properly. He was no taller than her father and a good deal narrower through the shoulders, greying at the temple, with a way of holding himself that suggested a man who had been tired for a very long time and had decided some years ago not to make it anybody else's problem. He wore nothing fine. He ate whatever was put in front of him and never commented on it. He asked after the staff by name, including the men who mucked out the stables, and he remembered the answers they gave him and asked follow up questions about them a month later, which nobody else in that house had ever once done.

And when he walked into a room, every armed man already standing in it adjusted his posture without being aware that he had done so.

"That is your uncle Fribal," her mother said, on one of the nights when she came and sat on the edge of the bed. "He is the Sword Saint."

"What's that?"

Tishua van Astrea had a low voice and a habit of smoothing the blanket flat while she talked, over and over, as though the blanket kept trying to get away from her. She had married into the Astrea name out of a lesser branch of the same tree, and she had the family hair, and she told the family stories in the tone of a woman who had not personally decided whether or not to believe them.

"There is only ever one," she said. "In every generation, the world chooses a single person. It hands them a sword and it makes them the strongest living thing there is. Not the most skilled, although they are always that as well. Not the bravest, although they usually are. The strongest. And that is not a comparison, sweetheart, it is a fact about the world, like the tide."

"Why us?"

"It has been an Astrea almost every time for four hundred years. Nobody has ever been able to say why. It is not inherited, because it has skipped the eldest far more often than not. It is not earned, because a great many better men have wanted it badly and been passed over. It simply chooses." She smoothed the blanket. "And when it chooses, it takes."

She said the last part quietly, and then seemed to hear herself saying it, and smiled, and smoothed the blanket again.

"But it is the greatest honour there is," she said. "Sleep now."

Theresia lay in the dark long after the door had closed and thought: fantasy world confirmed. Blessings. Chosen ones. A legendary bloodline, and somewhere in this building there is a sword with a name on it.

And then she thought, with a small cold flicker that she did not examine at the time and would spend years wishing she had:

Mother said takes.

She saw what the word meant the following summer, entirely by accident.

—=<>=—

She had been in the garden, and she had gone back the long way in order to avoid a tutor, and the long way went past the upper colonnade that overlooked the courtyard. There was shouting from below. Not angry shouting. The other kind.

She went to the balustrade and looked down between the pillars.

There were fourteen men in the courtyard. She recognised most of them. They were the household guard, men who had been in service at the manor for years, men who had carried her on their shoulders and who let her steal candied nuts out of the guardroom when they thought nobody was looking. They were in full harness, which was unusual, and they were carrying live steel, which was so unusual that she gripped the stone rail and forgot to breathe.

Her uncle stood in the middle of them holding a practice blade of plain wood.

She did not understand what happened next. That is the honest account of it, and she never improved on it, not in forty years. She had watched her brothers fight a hundred times and could follow that perfectly well. She could see the openings and the errors. She could tell when Karan was going to overcommit three full seconds before he did it.

This was not that. This was not faster than her brothers in the way that a ground dragon is faster than a man.

It was faster in the way that an answer is faster than a question.

The courtyard held fourteen armoured men, and then the courtyard held fourteen armoured men on the ground, and the space between those two conditions did not appear to contain any events at all. She saw him move perhaps twice. The rest of it was simply noise: a rolling clatter of harness on flagstone, the dust coming up in a wave, and one man laughing helplessly from flat on his back.

Fribal stood in the middle of them with the wooden blade held loosely down at his side. He was not breathing hard. His face had nothing on it at all.

Then he put out a hand and hauled the nearest man upright, and said something that made them both laugh, and it was over, and it had taken less time than it takes to fill a cup.

Theresia stayed at the balustrade for a long while after they had all gone inside.

She had come into this world assuming that it was a story, and stories have a grammar that she knew backward. Power levels. Escalation. The hero who trains and improves and eventually stands at the top. She had been thinking of the Sword Saint as the top of a ladder, which meant that the ladder had rungs, which meant that the whole thing was a question of effort and time.

What she had just watched was not the top of a ladder. There was no ladder. There was the world, and then there was one middle aged man standing very slightly outside it, holding a piece of wood.

That is going to be somebody, she thought. One day that is going to stop being him, and the world is going to choose again, and it has been choosing out of this family for four hundred years.

She looked at the empty courtyard and the dust settling in it, and she thought about four sons.

Four, she thought. There are four of them. They are all better than me at every single thing that matters in this house, and the odds are very good.

It never once occurred to her, standing there at eleven in the morning on a summer day with her chin on a stone rail, that the odds were not how it worked.

CHAPTER 02: ANEMONE: THE SWORD THAT WOULD NOT BE HELD: Part 03

She was four when her uncle offered her the sword.

It was not a ceremony. That was the part that made it so difficult to be properly angry about afterward, when she went looking for somebody to blame and found only a sequence of kind people behaving reasonably.

It was an ordinary afternoon in the courtyard, gold and dusty, with the boys sprawled in the shade in various stages of complaint about their blisters. She had come out to sit on the mounting block and watch, because the garden was being turned over and she had been banished from it for a fortnight, and there was nowhere else in the world she wanted to be.

Fribal had been walking the line of practice weapons, putting them away one at a time in the rack, which he always did himself rather than leaving it to anybody else. He stopped with one of the small wooden ones still in his hand and looked over at her with his head very slightly on one side.

"Do you want to try?"

That was all of it. No speech. No expectation in it whatsoever. He asked her in the tone a man uses to offer a second pastry.

And here is the part she would hold against herself for the next eight years, and take out and look at on bad nights the way other people look at photographs:

She wanted to.

She had spent two and a half years reading the situation she was in, and she had arrived at a set of conclusions that had felt, at four years old, enormously sophisticated. She was inside a story. Stories have shapes. In a house full of swordsmen, the daughter who picks up the blade is not an accident, she is the entire point, and Natsuki Subaru had read quite enough of them to know precisely how that scene ran. The girl takes the wooden sword. Everybody laughs at her. The girl does something impossible. Nobody ever laughs again.

She had thought about it a great deal, alone, in a garden, with nobody at all to tell it to.

So she slid down off the mounting block and walked out across the courtyard with her heart going like a bird against a window, and she put out both hands, and her uncle laid the wooden sword flat across them.

It weighed almost nothing.

She remembered that with total clarity for the rest of her life. It was a child's practice blade, planed smooth and worn pale at the grip by four brothers in succession, and it weighed about as much as a loaf of bread.

She closed her fingers around it.

And her body, without consulting her about it in any way whatsoever, began to come apart.

It started in the hands. Her fingers went cold from the tips inward, and the cold ran up through her forearms and into her shoulders and struck her chest like a thrown bucket of water, and her stomach turned over hard enough to make her gag. The sword, which weighed nothing, became abruptly and absolutely unliftable. Her wrists shook. Her knees sent word up that they would no longer be participating in the afternoon.

Her vision narrowed, and then it filled.

There was a concourse. There was tile, grey and glossy, and the particular pale flat light that comes off a great deal of glass all at once, and there was a noise that she had never once been able to describe to anybody, because the noise had not gone through her ears at all. It had gone through the soles of her feet and the front of her ribs.

There was smoke that smelled of burning plastic, and underneath the burning plastic something sweeter, which she had thought about every single day for the remainder of her first life and never said out loud to a living person.

There was her father's face. Her real father. Kenichi Natsuki, with his eyes open and absolutely nothing behind them, and his mouth slightly apart as though he had been about to say something entirely ordinary, as though the sentence were still in there somewhere, half finished.

There was her mother, four metres further on, and the coat was wrong. The coat was not the right colour any more.

There was blood on the tile and blood up a pillar and blood, still warm and already cooling, on the side of a fourteen year old boy's face, and the boy was standing with his hands open at his sides and he was not moving, and he was not going to move, and he never had, not once, not for anyone, not even far enough to kneel down.

The wooden sword hit the flagstones.

The sound of it brought her back. She was on her knees in the courtyard dust with both arms wrapped tight around her own middle, breathing in a way that was not working, taking in more than she was letting out, so that her chest kept filling and never emptied, and there were spots swimming at the edges of everything.

"Theresia."

Her uncle's voice, very close and very calm. He had gone down onto his heels to be at her level. He did not touch her, which she understood only years afterward to have been a decision, and a kind one, and possibly the kindest thing anybody in that family ever did for her.

"Theresia. Look at the wall behind me. Look at the top of it, where the ivy is coming over."

She looked at the ivy. It was green. It was moving very slightly in the air. It was five metres away and entirely real and it had never in its life been inside a railway concourse.

Her breathing came down. It took a long time. Somewhere behind her, four boys had gone completely silent.

When she could stand, she stood. Her uncle rose with her. Nobody said anything at all for what felt like a full minute and was almost certainly four seconds.

Then Fribal bent, and picked the wooden sword up off the ground, and turned, and put it back on the rack, and said, in precisely the tone he might have used about the weather:

"Well. That is that. Thames, you are pulling your left shoulder again and I have told you twice."

And Thames said, "Yes, uncle," and got up off the ground, and that was the end of it.

—=<>=—

Nobody ever mentioned it again. That was the thing.

She had braced herself for weeks. She had lain awake at night composing defences for the conversation she was certain was coming: the one where her father called her into the study and asked her what had happened, or where her mother sat on the edge of the bed with the blanket under her hands and gently suggested that she might try again when she felt stronger. She had prepared for disappointment. She had prepared for pressure. She had prepared for the entire enormous machinery of a warrior family bearing down on a daughter who had failed at the one thing the family was for.

It never came. Not once. Not from any of them, not that year and not ever.

Instead the subject simply closed, the way a door closes in a house with good hinges, without a sound.

Her father stopped bringing her out to watch the drills, and he did it so smoothly that it took her three months to notice that it had happened at all. Her brothers, who could not keep a secret to save their own lives and had proved it repeatedly on every other subject, developed about this one thing an absolute and wordless discipline. When talk at dinner turned toward a skirmish on the northern road, or a particular wound, or the state of a blade after a hard fight, somebody would redirect it within two sentences, and would go on redirecting it, every single time, for the next eight years.

They had decided, collectively and without ever having held a meeting about it, that Theresia would never be made to hold a weapon.

They had four sons. The kingdom had thousands of knights and a Sword Saint of its own. Nobody on earth needed her to fight.

And she should have been relieved, and she was relieved, and underneath the relief there was something else, something she could not name for a long time and eventually learned to call by its correct name, which was shame.

Because they had not concluded that she was unsuited to it. That she would have been able to live with. Unsuited is a thing you can argue with.

They had concluded that she was fragile. They had looked at her once, on her knees in the dust with her arms wrapped round her own middle, and quietly reclassified her from a person into a thing that had to be protected, and the very worst part of the whole business was that they had been entirely correct.

She had frozen. Again.

In a courtyard, in the sunshine, with nothing in front of her but a shaped piece of wood and her own memory, and she had frozen in exactly the manner she had frozen on the tile in Ohayo, and it turned out that dying had not fixed it. Nothing had fixed it. She had been given a new body and a new name and an entire new world with different physics in it, and she had brought across with her the one single thing that she would have paid any price at all to leave behind.

She went out to the garden that evening and sat down in front of a bed of white anemones until the light had gone out of the sky, and told them about it, and they did not say anything, which was the only mercy on offer that day.

CHAPTER 02: ANEMONE: THE SWORD THAT WOULD NOT BE HELD: Part 04

She was educated instead.

That was how the house resolved the problem, and in fairness it was a genuinely enlightened resolution, because Lugunica was a kingdom in which a woman could hold land, sit on a council and run a house of business, and in which a noble daughter who was not going to be a soldier did not therefore become a bargaining chip by default. Her father was clear on that point, loudly and frequently, generally after wine. No daughter of his was going to be handed to a duke like a signed page. She would be useful. She would have a mind and the training required to operate it. After that she could do whatever she liked with it, within reason, and Veltol van Astrea's definition of within reason had a great deal of room inside it.

So the tutors came.

The first of them lasted six weeks.

He was a thin nervous man from the capital with a leather roll of coloured counting stones, engaged to teach a four year old her numbers. He laid the stones out in rows on the table and explained, slowly and very kindly, that if one were to take two stones, and then take two further stones, one would discover oneself to be in possession of four stones.

Theresia, who had sat through eleven years of Japanese mathematics education and been personally bullied by quadratic functions, looked at the stones for a while.

She should have played along. She understood that afterward. She understood it roughly ninety seconds too late, which turned out to be a recurring structural feature of both of her lives.

What she actually did was ask him whether he happened to know a quick way of establishing if a large number could be divided by three.

The tutor said that one simply attempted the division and observed the outcome.

Theresia said that you could add up the digits, and that if the total could be divided by three then so could the original number, and that it worked every time without exception, and that she would be glad to demonstrate with any number he cared to name.

There was a pause of a quality that she would come to know extremely well over the following decade.

The tutor asked her to demonstrate. She demonstrated. He gave her a number with five digits in it and she answered before he had finished writing it down. He gave her another and she answered that one too, and then explained why it worked, which took her some time because she had to invent the necessary vocabulary as she went along. He stopped using the stones entirely. Twenty minutes later he was teaching her long division standing up with his hands moving, and at the end of the hour he went out to find her father in the hall and spoke to him in a voice that went up at the end of every sentence.

After that they came in a steady stream, and she made exactly the same mistake with every single one of them, because she could not help it, because being bored had always been physically painful to her and it had not improved as a consequence of having died.

The history tutor got as far as the founding of the kingdom before she began asking him about grain prices, because she had read in another life about the way empires actually die and it is almost never the army. He did not have the answers. He went away and found them, which she had not expected, and came back the following week with a sheaf of notes and an entirely different attitude, and they got along famously for four years after that.

The natural philosopher was an elderly man with a magnificent beard and no patience for children whatsoever, who set her a puzzle involving a river, a wolf, a goat and a cabbage purely in order to be rid of her for an afternoon. She solved it in under a minute, and then informed him that it was badly designed, and explained precisely why. He did not speak to her for a week. He came back with a harder one. She solved that as well. He began, entirely against his own better judgement, to enjoy himself, and within the year he was bringing her problems that he had not solved and passing them off as coming out of a book.

Word travelled, as word does in a house with two hundred people in it and no other entertainment available.

"Lord Astrea, your daughter is remarkable," she overheard through a door, in the pitched excitement of a man who has found something he can take credit for. "Her grasp of arithmetic exceeds that of most grown men at court. I do not say that lightly, my lord. I have taught at court."

"She read the trade ledger," said another man on a different occasion, sounding considerably less delighted about it. "The trade ledger, my lord. She is six years old. She asked me why we are buying wool at that price when the price at Farsend has fallen, and I did not have an answer for her, and I have since gone and looked, and there is not one."

"She comprehends texts written for scholars. At this rate she will be drafting treaties before she is ten."

And her father would laugh that enormous rolling laugh and say something expansive about his clever girl, and the house would settle, by degrees, into a new and extremely comfortable understanding of what she was for.

She was not the daughter who could not hold a sword.

She was the daughter who did not need to. She was the family's other kind of weapon. Everybody got to feel a great deal better about the courtyard, and nobody ever had to mention it again, and the silence around it grew a floor and walls and a roof and became a room that people lived in.

Theresia allowed it.

She encouraged it, in fact. She let them build the entire comfortable edifice brick by brick, and she handed them the bricks, because it kept her hands empty and her days full, and because she had discovered something about herself in this second life that she had never had the opportunity to learn in the first.

She could not stop.

If she was moving, if she was learning something or fixing something or arguing with an old man about a goat and a cabbage, she was fine. She was better than fine. She was happy in a bright hard way that felt very nearly like the old happiness of a good game at two in the morning with the curtains shut.

But if she stopped, if she sat still too long in a quiet room with nothing in her hands, then the quiet came in from the edges. And in the quiet there was a tiled floor, and the smell of burning plastic with something sweeter underneath it, and two faces with nothing behind the eyes, and a boy standing eleven metres away with his hands open at his sides.

It happened once in the middle of a lesson. She had finished the exercise early and the tutor had gone out to fetch a book, and she sat in the empty schoolroom for perhaps ninety seconds with nothing to do and no sound in the room at all, and when the man came back she was under the table with her arms locked around her knees and could not explain why. She told him she had been looking for a dropped pen. He believed her, because there is no other available explanation for a duke's daughter being under a table.

She did not let it happen again. She simply made certain that there were no more empty ninety seconds left available anywhere in her life.

So she worked until the tutors ran out of material and had to write to the capital for more. She read the ledgers. She read the histories, and the agricultural surveys, and a profoundly dull technical book about the drainage of the eastern marsh that turned out to be the most useful thing she read that year and possibly that decade. She went out into the garden at first light and came back in at dusk with dirt past her elbows and more of it in her hair.

And in the winter of her sixth year, sitting at the long table in the kitchens because the kitchens were warm and because nobody down there made her behave properly, she watched the cooks lay out flat rounds of dough for the morning bread, and a thought arrived in her head fully assembled, in the way that her best and worst ideas always arrived.

She put down her cup.

"Bram," she said to the head cook, who was approximately the size of a door and who had never once been frightened of her, "what would happen if you put things on top of that?"

Bram looked at the dough. Then he looked at the six year old.

"On top of it, my lady?"

"On top of it. Sauce. Cheese. Meat, if you like. And then into the oven all together, as hot as the oven will go, and out again very quickly."

There was a pause of a quality she was, by then, extremely familiar with.

"That would ruin the bread," said Bram.

Theresia smiled at him, and it was not a child's smile at all, and the head cook of the Astrea household would go on telling that story for the rest of his life and never once tell it the same way twice.

"Humour me," she said.

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