Chapter 65

"She can't do it," Adaeze says. "Not on the fourth."

It is eleven at night in the Greymantle council room and there are four laptops open and the coffee has been remade twice and Sebastien has not sat down since eight.

"She can," Joon-Ho says. "Procedurally she can. The question is what she thinks it buys her."

"It buys her nothing." Adaeze taps the compact protocol document. "If she challenges proxy instruction in open session, the Assembly suspends all proxy-held votes pending review. That's six representatives. The chamber drops to six voting members, which is below quorum for a structural determination." She looks up. "The ruling doesn't fail. It adjourns. Six months minimum."

"Then that's her play," Sebastien says. "She kills the petition by starving it."

"No." Veira has not spoken in eleven minutes. She is at the far end of the table with the attendance register in front of her and Croft's folder beside it and she has been reading them alternately for most of an hour. "Six months doesn't help her. Six months helps me, and she has no reason to want that, and she knows Croft will simply refile with clean proxies in September."

She turns the register around.

"Look at the proxy line again," she says. "Attending by proxy instruction, Elder Rask. Not proxy vote. Proxy instruction. Those are different mechanisms."

Joon-Ho pulls the protocol document toward him and finds it in forty seconds. When he looks up his face has changed.

"Proxy instruction is a standing directive," he says. "It doesn't expire with the session. It expires with the instructing Elder's seat."

"Rask died in 2004."

"Rask died in 2004 and the seat passed." Joon-Ho is already scrolling. "Which means the instruction transferred with it, unless Sunnsdottir formally repudiated within ninety days, which nobody does because nobody knows the clause exists."

Adaeze understands it first.

"She's still under instruction," she says quietly. "Right now. Today."

"For thirty-six years," Veira says. "By four successive Tide Elders, only one of whom she ever met." She sets both hands flat on the table. "Her vote in Geneva. The ninth vote. The one that carried my restructure."

Nobody speaks.

"It wasn't hers," Sebastien says.

"It was cast under a standing instruction she has been carrying since she was twenty-four." Veira's voice does not rise. "Which means the restructure passed nine to three with one vote that will be void the moment anybody looks at it properly, and the compact restructure that struck the hybrid persecution clause is currently sitting on a procedural fault line that Croft's people will find within a week of the fourth of March."

The room goes very quiet.

"That's what's in the sealed submission," Adaeze says.

"That's what's in the sealed submission." Veira looks at the register. "She's not attacking me and she's not defending me. She's disclosing a defect she has been personally living inside for thirty-six years, four days before a session that will otherwise build a determination on top of it. She's doing the responsible thing." A pause. "And the responsible thing detonates the only legal protection hybrids have had in seven hundred years."

Sebastien crosses to the table.

"Then we get to her before the fourth."

"With what? An attendance register Aldara wasn't entitled to and a theory?" Veira shakes her head. "She's been carrying this alone since 1989 and the one thing she has never had is anybody who knew. If I turn up at her door with a document proving I've been reading her personnel history, I am the Folklore, arriving late, to tell her what she is." She stops.

Everyone waits.

"Which is the exact thing my mother spent one sentence warning me about," she says.

She stands.

"I'm going to Reykjavik," she says. "Tonight. And I'm going with nothing no register, no folder, no counsel. I'm going to knock on her door and tell her I know she wasn't in the room in 1989, and then I'm going to shut up and let her decide what she wants to do about it."

"That's not a strategy," Adaeze says.

"No," Veira agrees. "It's the opposite of one. That's why it might work."