“Was your family there for you?” Rina suspected the answer was ‘no,’ but she wanted to know why.
“My parents had already passed away. My brother was still in the army at that time, deployed to the Borderlands. I didn’t tell him about this health problem until afterward, and he got pretty angry with me for a while.”
“So, the agency paid for your operation?”
“I’d saved up enough money to take care of it,” Vipin said quickly, and Rina understood without him telling her that the agency had refused to pay.
“Did your Oldblood ancestry make the surgery complicated at all?” Rina asked.
He shrugged. “The anesthetics didn’t work quite as well as they should have, I was later told. The actual surgery was a success in that they got the tumor out.”
“But—?”
“It was a failure in that my brain had
