Chapter 67

Croft is waiting for her at Keflavík.

He is alone, in the departures hall, at a coffee stand at half past nine in the morning, and he has clearly been there some time. He does not stand when she approaches. He gestures at the seat opposite and she takes it because refusing would be a performance and neither of them has the energy.

"You went to Halla," he says.

"You told her I would."

"I told her you would come alone and without the register. She thought I was flattering you." He turns his cup. "I've read your file, Ms Ashcroft. Not the Folklore's. The other one. Sixteen fraud investigations, four jurisdictions, and in every single one of them there is a point where you had enough to convict and you went back for the thing that made it understandable. You are not a person who wins with the smallest sufficient weapon."

"That's a very generous reading of a professional habit."

"It is an accurate reading of a moral one." He looks up. "Which is why I'm going to tell you something before the fourth, and you are going to find it very difficult to hear from me."

She waits.

"Halla's submission does not adjourn my petition," he says. "It accelerates it."

"Quorum drops below six."

"Quorum drops below six for a structural determination." He sets the cup down. "My petition is not a structural determination. I refiled it on Tuesday under emergency protocol as a compact-security question, which requires four voting members and cannot be adjourned once the urgency certification stands." A pause. "The certification Halla signed."

Veira sits with it.

"She's aware," Croft says, "before you ask. I told her on Wednesday. She said, and I am quoting because it was the worst thing anyone has ever said to me, that she had spent eleven years building a document to end the use of people as instruments, and had been used as one on the last day of its construction."

"And you did it anyway."

"I did it anyway." He does not look away. "My sister spent ten years being consumed by something nobody would name. I have four days and a chamber that will convene whatever else happens, and I am not going to lose the only session in my lifetime where the question can be asked, because of a procedural fault that will still be there in September when you are eleven per cent further gone."

Her hands go very still on the table.

"How do you know about the eleven per cent."

"Because I have been where you are standing." Croft's voice does not change. "I sat in a consultant's office in Aberdeen in 1993 and was told my sister's decline was idiopathic, and I have spent thirty years learning to recognise the shape of it in other people. You have lost weight since Geneva. Your left hand shook twice in the last four minutes, which you have not noticed, which is the part that matters." He leans back. "It began, if I had to guess, after Iceland. After you carried six frequencies for three days."

She does not confirm it. She does not need to. He watches her not confirm it and nods once, and it is somehow worse than triumph.

"I'm not your enemy, Ms Ashcroft."

"You've filed a petition that will kill me."

"I have filed a petition that will unload you, and I have handed you every document that argues my method is wrong, including two I have never shown a living soul, and if you find the flaw in them I will withdraw the lethal construction on the floor of the Assembly." He stands. "You have four days. You have a three-hundred-year-old archivist and a Kin analyst who is better than anyone I have ever employed. Use them."

He puts money on the counter.

"One more thing," he says. "Halla told me you declined to blackmail her. I want you to understand that this was not a kindness that will be repaid. On the fourth I will argue that a woman who cannot be compelled, cannot be reviewed, and cannot be replaced is a danger to the compact regardless of her character, and I will use your restraint as evidence that you are the best possible version of an intolerable arrangement." He picks up his coat. "That is what a good case looks like. I am sorry it is mine."