Chapter 57

Croft chooses a hotel bar in Perth, which she reads immediately as a decision: neutral ground, no bloodline seat, halfway between Edinburgh and nothing.

He is already there when she arrives, at a corner table with a pot of tea and no bodyguard and a battered leather folder that has clearly travelled a long way over many years. Up close he is smaller than he was in the Assembly room, sixty and looking it, with the specific fatigue of a man who has been holding one position so long that holding it has become his posture.

"Thank you for coming," he says. "I'll be direct, because I think you prefer it."

"I do."

"I filed the petition and I'm going to win it." He pours her tea without asking. "I'm telling you that so we can skip the part where I pretend the outcome is uncertain. Nine Elders will vote with me in March. I've spent thirty years building to a room in which nine Elders would vote with me on this specific question."

"You've spent thirty years building to Morna."

He stops with the pot in his hand.

She watches him decide whether to be angry, and watches him not be, and increases her assessment of him by a considerable margin.

"Aldara," he says.

"Aldara."

"She voted against acknowledgment." He sets the pot down. "Did she tell you that, or did she leave it out?"

"She told me first. Before your sister's name."

Croft looks at the table for a moment. When he lifts his head something in him has changed register.

"Then you know the case," he says. "I don't have to make it."

"I'd like you to make it anyway."

"Why."

"Because I've read your filing four times and paragraph eleven is four lines long, and a man who spends thirty years on something does not give it four lines unless he's afraid of what happens when people read it properly."

He is silent for a long moment.

Then he opens the folder and takes out a photograph and puts it face-up on the table between them, and does not slide it toward her, which she notes.

A woman on a beach in a bad anorak, mid-twenties, laughing at whoever is holding the camera. Dark hair whipped sideways. Something in the set of the shoulders that Veira recognises with an unpleasant immediacy, because she has seen it in a mirror.

"Cruden Bay, 1986," Croft says. "Eight months before it came to her." He does not touch the photograph. "By 1993 she couldn't hold a conversation for more than four minutes. By 1995 she was in permanent care. She died at thirty-six of an organ failure cascade that four separate consultants called idiopathic, and I sat in that room and I knew exactly what had caused it and there was no living person I could tell."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to understand what I am actually asking for." He turns the photograph face-down, deliberately, the way you close a door you intend to open again. "Everyone in this argument thinks I want to take something from you. I want to take something off you. There is a load that no single body should carry and it is currently sitting on yours and it will kill you, Ms Ashcroft, and it will take twenty or thirty years to do it, and you will not notice the early stages, because Morna didn't."

"You're proposing distribution."

"I'm proposing that the function be divisible. Held by nine, or twelve, or thirty. No individual bearing more than a fraction. No individual irreplaceable. No individual able to withdraw the whole and end the world in an afternoon." He looks at her. "It solves your accountability problem and my sister at the same time. That is not a coincidence. Good solutions usually aren't."

She turns her cup a quarter-turn on the saucer, which is a thing she has picked up from Aldara in the space of two days and will not notice for another week.

"What's the mechanism," she says.

He does not answer.

"Elder Croft. If distribution were theoretically possible and practically unknown, your petition would ask the Assembly to fund research. It doesn't. It asks for a determination, which is what you file when you already have a procedure and you need it made lawful." She sets the cup down. "What's the mechanism."

He is quiet for eleven seconds. She counts.

"There's a rite in the pre-compact material," he says. "Kin-authored. It requires the current holder's living resonance and a receiving circle of at least nine."

"And the current holder."

"Does not survive it."

He says it flatly, without evasion, and then he does the thing she has spent four days failing to predict: he pushes the folder across the table toward her.

"That's every document I have on it," he says. "Including the two that argue it can be done without a death, which I do not believe, and which I have never shown to anyone, because if I am wrong about that then I have been asking the Assembly to sanction a killing." He stands. "I would very much like to be wrong. Read them and tell me."

He puts money on the table for the tea and walks out, and leaves her sitting in a hotel bar in Perth holding the case against her own life, handed over by the man building it.