Chapter 62

The Djúpr channel opens on the twenty-fourth of February, on a fishing boat forty minutes out of Ullapool in weather that Brynja, on the phone from Reykjavik, described as acceptable if you are not sentimental.

Sebastien comes because she asked. Joon-Ho comes because he built the resonance monitoring and refuses to trust anyone else with it. Emre comes because he is the only other person alive whose biology can register the sixth frequency directly, and because Veira has decided that including him in things is now a policy rather than a series of individual decisions.

The channel is harder to open than it was in January.

She notices it at the first attempt and says nothing. She notices it again at the second and looks at Joon-Ho, who is watching a display and has gone the specific colour of a man reading a number he does not want.

"Say it," she says.

"Your amplitude is down eleven per cent from the January baseline."

"In five weeks."

"In five weeks." He does not soften it, which she appreciates and which costs him something. "It could be seasonal. It could be an artefact of measuring in different conditions. I don't have enough data to claim a trend from two points."

"But you think it's a trend."

"I think," Joon-Ho says, "that Morna Croft held five frequencies for ten years with no support and it emptied her, and you have been holding six for six weeks."

The boat rides up and comes down. Nobody says anything.

She opens the channel a third time, properly, and it comes.

You are diminished.

Not a voice. The sense of one, arriving through the Vein in the register she has been learning to translate, and she understands within a second that they have noticed before she did.

I know, she sends. How much time.

The response is not a number. The Djúpr do not think in numbers, or they do and their numbers are not translatable, and what comes back instead is a sensation she can only render as the current holder of a channel is not designed to hold it alone.

She goes very still.

Say that again, she sends.

It comes again, and this time she reaches into it the way she reaches into a transaction pattern, feeling for the direction the meaning wants to move rather than the shape it has been given, and it opens.

Not designed to hold it alone.

Not: this is too much for you. Not: you are failing.

Alone.

"Veira." Sebastien's hand is on her shoulder. She has no idea how long it has been there.

She opens her eyes. The boat. The grey. Joon-Ho's display. Emre at the rail with an expression she cannot read and does not need to.

"Croft is right," she says.

"What?"

"Not about the rite. About the load." She is already moving toward the cabin, toward paper. "The conduit function was never designed to sit on one person. That's not a limit of the human body, it's a specification. The Djúpr have just told me the channel expects to be shared."

"By whom," Emre says.

"That's the question, and it's the wrong one to ask them, because they don't distinguish between a person and a lineage." She finds a pen. "Roman said the pre-compact material numbers the five as derivations of the zero. Fragments. What if that isn't a genealogical claim?"

Joon-Ho gets there a half-second before she says it.

"It's an engineering claim," he says.

"The five bloodlines are the load-bearing structure," Veira says. "Zero holds the channel. One through four hold zero. And at some point between 1287 and 1291 somebody removed the zero from the count, and the entire architecture has been running with its foundation classified as a threat for seven hundred years."

She stops writing.

"That's why every conduit dies of it," she says. "Not because the function is lethal. Because we've been running it in a configuration it was never built for, since before anyone alive was born."

Sebastien says, very quietly: "Then Croft's rite"

"Croft's rite distributes the load, which is correct, and severs the holder, which is a mistake he inherited from people who didn't understand what they were writing down." She looks up. "It's not a killing. It's a repair, performed for seven centuries by people who had the diagram upside down."

Nobody speaks. The boat rides up and comes down.

"I can prove that in the Assembly," she says. "But not from the Djúpr's testimony, because they can't be called and I can't be independently corroborated." She sets the pen down. "The only documentary evidence of the original configuration is in the four pre-compact texts, and Roman has decoded four documents in four months, and I have twenty-one days."