Chapter 58

CJoon-Ho reads the Croft folder in four hours and comes out of it looking like a man who has been argued into something against his will.

"The rite is real," he says. "The two dissenting documents are also real, and they're better sourced than the ones supporting the lethal version, and Croft has had both for at least a decade based on the annotation dates."

"So he's been sitting on evidence that his own method might not require a death," Adaeze says.

"He's been sitting on evidence he doesn't believe." Joon-Ho spreads the pages across the council room table in an order that means something to him. "And I think I understand why. Look at the dissent's core claim."

Veira leans in.

"It argues the rite doesn't kill the holder," Joon-Ho says. "It argues the rite empties the holder. The death in the recorded cases is a secondary effect every documented subject died within eighteen months, but the deaths are inconsistent in cause. Two of them weren't physiological at all."

"Then what killed them."

"The withdrawal." He looks up. "The rite strips the resonance out. It doesn't distribute it it severs it, and the receiving circle picks up what's released. And a conduit whose resonance has been severed doesn't degrade like Morna degraded. She degrades the other way. She stops being able to feel the Vein at all."

Adaeze understands it a half-second before Veira says it aloud.

"They didn't die of the rite," Veira says. "They died of the aftermath."

"Two out of five is a small sample and I won't overstate it. But yes. Two of the five recorded subjects survived the rite intact and died within a year by their own hand, and the compact's records list both as complications." Joon-Ho's voice has gone very flat, which is what happens when he is trying not to be affected by his own analysis. "Croft doesn't believe it can be done without a death because functionally, historically, it has never once been done without one. He's not wrong about the outcome. He's wrong about the mechanism, and the difference between those two things is the only opening we have."

Veira is looking at the pages and not seeing them.

She is thinking about three days on a boat in January and the specific exhaustion afterward. About the way the six frequencies had felt when they resolved, and how she had said, out loud, on a dock in Reykjavik, that learning to carry it well would take years.

About the fact that she has never once considered what it would be like to have it taken away.

"Get me Roman," she says. "And Aldara, if she'll come."

"What are you going to do," Adaeze says.

"I'm going to find out whether the rite can be reversed, refused, partialled, or consented to." She stands. "Because Croft is going to win in March, and I've read his filing, and there's a version of this where I stop

treating it as an attack and start treating it as a negotiation."

"Veira."

"I'm not agreeing to die, Adaeze."

"No," Adaeze says. "You're considering agreeing to be emptied, which is worse, because you'd survive it, and I have watched you for four months and I do not think you know what you would be without this."

Veira stops in the doorway.

She wants to say that she managed twenty-seven years without knowing what she was and did perfectly well, and the sentence gets as far as her mouth before she recognises it as untrue in a way she has not previously examined.

She did not manage without it. She had it the entire time. Every instinct she has ever trusted, every pattern she has ever found, every moment of being unaccountably, inexplicably right about where money wanted to go that was the Vein. It has never not been running. There is no earlier version of her to return to.

"No," she says. "I don't know."

Her phone goes at that moment, and it is Roman, and he does not begin with a greeting.

"The renumbering," he says. "I've found when it happened."

"When."

"1291. Four years after Isadora's compact." A pause, and she can hear him turning a page three hundred miles away. "And I've found what the original count looked like. Veira, the five bloodlines aren't numbered one to five in the pre-compact material. They're numbered one to five below something. There's a line above wolf in the original hierarchy, and it holds the zero."

"The hybrid line."

"Not as an outcast," Roman says. "As the source. Every genealogical document I have decoded in the last six hours describes the five as derivations. Wolf, vampire, Kin and Tide are not four separate peoples who occasionally produce hybrids." He stops. "They are four fragments of a bloodline that came first."