"What will it feel like?" I said.
"Like something you have been building toward for nine months is beginning," she said. "Not a surprise. More like — recognition."
I thought about that.
"Like the double confirmation," I said.
Okafor considered. "Similar mechanism," she said. "The bloodline communicates through recognition rather than announcement. Yes. Like that."
"All right," I said.
She ran through the rest of it — the specifics of the pack facility, the communication chain when labor began, the bloodline specialist's contact information, the neonatal team's readiness protocol. All of it with the same unhurried precision she brought to everything. When she finished she stood and extended her hand to me — not the clinical handshake of a professional relationship ending a session, bu
