Chapter 63

The Assembly does not wait twenty-one days.

The notification arrives on the twenty-eighth of February at seven in the morning, and Sebastien reads it standing in his kitchen with his coat still on from the run, and then reads it again because the first reading produced something in his chest that he needs to verify before he acts on it.

Pursuant to compact protocol 4.2(c), the ruling session convened under petition of the fifth of February is advanced to the fourth of March, Geneva, on grounds of demonstrated urgency.

He calls Veira. She picks up on the second ring and he can hear that she is already awake and already reading it.

"Demonstrated urgency," she says.

"That clause exists for imminent exposure events. Compact security. It's been invoked four times since 1900."

"Four days, Sebastien."

"I know."

"He didn't do this because he's confident. He did it because something changed and he thinks the change favours him if it happens fast." He can hear her moving, drawers, a laptop opening. "What's the urgency."

He is already scrolling to the annex.

He finds it, and he stops.

"There's an evidentiary submission," he says. "Filed yesterday. Under seal, disclosed to the Assembly only." He reads the header three times. "Filed by Elder Sunnsdottir."

The line is quiet.

"She's crossed," Veira says.

"We don't know what she filed."

"We know she filed it under seal four days after we found out she was in the room in 1989." Something in her voice has gone extremely level, which he has learned is not calm. "She's been waiting for someone to find that minute for thirty-six years, and the week it surfaces she moves. She's not crossing to Croft. She's getting ahead of it."

"Ahead of what."

"Of being the person in this story who failed a conduit and then hid it." He hears her stop moving. "If she discloses the 1989 vote herself, on her own terms, before I can use it, then she isn't a woman exposed. She's a woman who came forward. And she buys the right to be believed on whatever else is in that submission."

"Which is what."

"I don't know." A pause, and then, differently: "Sebastien. When did the Kin Assembly's standing flag on Roman's four documents fire?"

He goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the kitchen.

"Aldara said eleven days ago," he says. "That was the twelfth of February."

"Which is nine days after Roman told a room in Edinburgh that he'd found the null mark, and eight days after I flew to Reykjavik at the invitation of a Kin Elder who knew what I was reading before I told her." He hears her sit down. "Aldara told me she wanted to put something down before March. She never said she wanted me to be the one carrying it."

"You think she gave the archive to Sunnsdottir."

"I think two Kin Elders who both voted against Morna Croft in 1989 have been in the same building since the twelfth of February," Veira says, "and I have been treating one of them as a source and the other as an ally, and I did not once check whether they were talking to each other."