Chapter 80

Emre waits until they are in the garden before he says it.

"The letter is mine."

Veira turns.

"Not the letter. The clause." He has his hands in his coat pockets and he is looking at the beech trees at the end of the lawn. "Not to be entered on any register of bloodline, congregation, or affiliation, for any purpose, at any age, by any authority. That is verbatim from a protective instrument I drafted in 2009 for a Kin family in Lyon. There were four copies. I wrote all of them."

"Then who used it in 2011."

"Whoever I gave the fourth copy to." He turns. "I gave one to the family. I kept one. I gave one to the Foundation's protective registry, which is standard. The fourth I gave to my mentor."

Veira has never heard him use that word.

"Who was your mentor," she says.

"His name was Absalom Lieth. He was Kin, he was the Folklore's neutral investigator before me, and he took me at nineteen because a hybrid child who cannot be registered anywhere is either useful or dead and he thought I might be the first." Emre's voice is very level. "He died in 2014. Or he was recorded as having died in 2014, which after the last month I am no longer willing to state as a fact."

"You think he protected Nell."

"I think somebody with my drafting, my registry access and my professional habits moved a hybrid infant off every record in the world four weeks after her mother's funeral, and there is exactly one man alive or dead who fits all three." He looks back at the house. "And I never knew. That's what I want on the record before anybody else says it. He did this in 2011 and I saw him eleven times between then and 2014 and he never told me."

"Why wouldn't he?"

"Because I was twenty-two and unstable and I would have gone to see her." He says it flatly. "He'd have been right."

Veira sits down on the low wall.

She thinks about a man who found a nineteen-year-old in a library and taught her to manage a resonance and then blurred her memory to keep her invisible. She thinks about the shape of that decision, and the shape of a letter from a Jersey solicitor, and how the two of them fit together like a hand into an old glove.

"He taught you the habit," she says.

Emre does not answer for a moment.

"Yes."

"That's not an excuse and I'm not offering it as one."

"I know. It's worse than an excuse. It's a lineage." He sits down on the wall beside her, which he has never done. "There have been two of us for as long as I've been alive, and everything I know about how to keep a hybrid alive I learned from a man who kept one alive by putting her in a house with beech trees and telling nobody, including me. And it worked. She's fourteen. She's the first hybrid in seven hundred years to reach fourteen without the compact knowing her name."

"And she's been alone with the Vein for three weeks."

"Yes."

Veira looks at the house. Upstairs, in a bedroom, a fourteen-year-old is holding a portion of the load that took Morna Croft ten years to die of.

"Then the method is wrong," she says, "and it kept her alive, and both of those are true, and I am extremely tired of things being true in pairs."

Emre almost laughs.

"There's something else," he says. "And I've run the fifteen minutes and I'm telling you now rather than at three in the morning."

"Go on."

"If Lieth protected Nell in 2011, he did it because he knew what she was. A hybrid infant does not present. There is no scan, no manifestation, no marker until adolescence at the earliest." Emre turns to look at her. "The only way anyone knew what Nell Fraser was in 2011 is if somebody was tracking hybrid births directly."

Veira feels it arrive.

"There's a register," she says.

"There is a register," Emre says, "of the one thing the compact spent seven hundred years insisting must never be counted. And whoever holds it has known about her for fourteen years, and about me for thirty-one, and about you since 1997."