Chapter 79

Her name is Nell Fraser and she is fourteen years old.

They find her in eleven hours, which is not because of the Vein. It is because Veira sits in the back of Sebastien's car on the A90 with a laptop on her knees and does the thing she has been doing professionally for four years, which is follow the resistance.

"A hybrid manifestation in Aberdeen means a family who moved there or a family who's been hidden there," she says. "Hidden costs money and money leaves a shape. Look for a household with no Folklore registration, no bloodline affiliation on record, and a level of privacy that doesn't match its income."

She finds it at half past six in the morning: a property purchased in 2010 through a Jersey structure for four hundred and thirty thousand pounds, held ever since, with utility accounts in a name that appears nowhere else in any database she can reach.

"That's not hidden by a family," Emre says, from the front. "That's hidden by an institution. Families use their cousin's name and a cash deposit."

"Then somebody's been protecting her since before she was born," Veira says.

The house is in Cults, on a road with beech trees and long drives, and the woman who opens the door is in her fifties and looks at the four of them and does not ask who they are.

She says: "Is it happening because of you?"

"No," Veira says. "But it's happening because of something I did. May we come in?"

Her name is Margaret Fraser and she is Nell's aunt, and she has been raising her since 2011, and she does not know what a conduit is. What she knows is this: her sister died when Nell was eleven months old; a man came to the funeral who nobody could account for; and four weeks later a letter arrived from a solicitor in Jersey settling a house on her, with one condition, which was that the child was never to be registered with anybody.

"What did the letter say," Veira asks.

Margaret goes upstairs and comes back with it, and it is two paragraphs on unheaded paper, and the condition is written in the third line.

The child is not to be entered on any register of bloodline, congregation, or affiliation, for any purpose, at any age, by any authority.

Emre reads it and goes very still, and Veira sees it happen and does not ask, because Margaret Fraser is standing in her own hall waiting to be told what is wrong with her niece.

"Where is she," Veira says.

"In bed. She's been in bed since Thursday." Margaret's hands are steady in the way that means practice. "The GP says it's viral. She can't hold a conversation for more than a few minutes. She keeps asking me which direction the sea is."

Veira closes her eyes.

She keeps asking me which direction the sea is.

"Margaret," she says. "I need to sit with her for a while, and I need you in the room the entire time, and I'm going to tell you the truth about what's happening even though it's going to sound like a symptom of something. Is that all right?"

Nell Fraser is small for fourteen and awake, and when Veira comes in she turns her head on the pillow and says, before anyone has spoken:

"You're the loud one."

"I'm the loud one," Veira agrees, and sits down on the chair by the bed.

"It's been getting louder for three weeks." The girl's eyes track her and lose her and find her again. "It doesn't hurt. It's just very big and it won't be quiet and nobody else can hear it."

"I can hear it."

Nell looks at her properly then.

"Say what it sounds like," she says. "So I know you're not lying."

Veira thinks about it.

"Like standing at the top of a stairwell in a building where everyone's talking at once, four floors down," she says. "And you can't hear the words but you can hear how many of them there are."

Nell starts to cry, without noise, the way children cry when they have been holding something alone for a long time.

"Nobody's talked to me since it started," she says.