Chapter 66

Halla Sunnsdottir lives on the Reykjanes peninsula in a house with too many windows for the climate, and she opens the door at half past six in the morning already dressed, which tells Veira she has not been to bed.

"You came alone," Sunnsdottir says.

"Yes."

"Croft told me you would."

Veira absorbs that and files it and does not react to it, which takes effort.

"May I come in."

The kitchen faces the sea. There is a chessboard here too, which Veira notes with interest and does not comment on, and a stack of compact protocol documents four inches deep with tabs in six colours.

"I know you weren't in the room in 1989," Veira says.

Sunnsdottir's hands stop on the kettle.

"I know you argued for acknowledgment in writing and the chair read it into the record and a proxy instruction from Elder Rask voted you against it. I know the instruction never expired." Veira stays where she is, by the door, which is deliberate. "I haven't brought the document. I'm not going to show it to anyone, including you, unless you ask me to. I came to tell you that somebody knows, and that I'm not going to do anything with it, and that's the whole reason I'm here."

The kettle boils. Sunnsdottir does not move to it.

"Aldara," she says.

"Yes."

"She has had that register since 1991."

"Yes."

"And she gave it to you three days ago rather than to me at any point in thirty-four years." Sunnsdottir turns the kettle off. "That is not a criticism of Aldara. She was protecting a source and then a reputation and then a habit, in that order, over three decades, and I have done materially the same thing with worse consequences." She finally looks up. "Why aren't you using it?"

"Because it's yours."

"That is a sentiment. I asked for a reason."

"That is the reason." Veira takes one step into the room and no further. "You've been carrying a vote you didn't cast since you were twenty-four. It's the central fact of your professional life and nobody has ever acknowledged it out loud. If I walk in here and hand it to you as leverage, I've made your only piece of moral ground into a transaction, and you'd be right to hate me for it, and I'd deserve it."

Sunnsdottir is quiet for a long moment.

Then she crosses to the table, picks up the top document from the four-inch stack, and puts it in front of Veira.

It is her sealed submission. Unsealed. Sixty pages.

"Read the summary," she says.

Veira reads it.

It takes ninety seconds and by the end of it she has stopped breathing properly, because the submission does not merely disclose the standing-instruction defect. It disclosesut it with a full audit every vote cast under unexpired proxy instruction in the Elder Assembly since 1978. Two hundred and eleven of them. Named, dated, and cross-referenced.

Including nine votes that established the current interpretation of the hybrid persecution clause between 1981 and 1994.

"You've been building this for years," Veira says.

"Eleven years. I began it the week I finally read the clause and understood what had been done to me." Sunnsdottir's voice is entirely level. "I intended to file it on my retirement, in 2027, when it could not be mistaken for self-interest. Then a hybrid conduit stood up in Geneva and said she would not use the Vein as leverage, and I cast the ninth vote, and I went home and understood that I had just cast the most important vote of my life under an instruction from a dead man."

"So you moved."

"I moved when the Vasile documents surfaced, because I knew Croft would go to urgency and I knew he needed an officer's certification, and I would rather this came out inside a session I could shape than in a filing cabinet somebody opened in 2031." She sits down. "I have destroyed my own career on a four-day timetable, Ms Ashcroft, and I would like you to understand that I did it before I knew you would come to my door and decline to blackmail me."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"You filed on the twenty-seventh. Aldara told me about the register on the first." Veira sets the submission down. "You had no idea anyone was coming. You did it in the dark."

Sunnsdottir looks at her for a long moment, and something in the older woman's face gives way very slightly at the edges.

"There is a problem," she says.

"I know. Quorum collapses and the ruling adjourns."

"That is not the problem." Sunnsdottir turns the submission to page forty. "The nine hybrid-clause votes were cast under instruction. Which makes the current interpretation of the persecution clause void. Which means your restructure did not strike a valid law." She taps the page. "It struck a law that had no lawful interpretation to begin with, on the authority of an Assembly whose own quorum was defective, and any first-year compact advocate can now argue that the hybrid persecution clause was never properly repealed."

Veira reads it twice.

"It's still live," she says.

"As of the fourth of March," Sunnsdottir says, "it will be arguable that it never stopped being."