Chapter 81

They stay four days.

Veira does it because leaving is not an option and she has no procedure, and because the alternative is a fourteen-year-old holding a load she cannot name in a house where the only other person who can hear it is three hundred miles south.

What she does instead is the thing nobody did for Morna Croft.

She sits in the room and she names it.

"It's called the Vein," she says, on the first morning. "It's not in your head and you're not ill. It's a real thing that real people have felt for at least a thousand years and there are about six of us in the world right now who can feel it the way you're feeling it."

"Six."

"Two properly. Four who get pieces." Veira has a mug of tea she is not drinking. "You and me are the two."

Nell absorbs this with the flat practicality of a fourteen-year-old who has spent three weeks constructing far worse explanations.

"Is it going to kill me," she says.

Margaret, in the chair by the door, makes a small sound.

"I don't know," Veira says. "That's the honest answer and you're going to get honest answers from me the entire time, including the ones I don't like. It killed the last person who held it alone. It's been taking pieces off me since January. But she had nobody who could tell her what it was and I've got you, and you've got me, and that's already different from anything that's happened before."

"How different."

"Different enough that I'm not going to lie to you about the odds and I'm also not going to pretend they're fixed."

Nell thinks about it.

"Okay," she says.

By the second day Veira has taught her the thing Emre taught Veira on a bench outside the Anatomy building eight years ago: how to tell the difference between her own feeling and somebody else's arriving through the channel. Nell gets it in four hours. It took Veira three days.

By the third day Nell can close the channel for eleven minutes at a time.

"That's not possible," Joon-Ho says, on the phone from Edinburgh. "You cannot close the channel. I have measured you closing the channel and what you actually do is attenuate it by about sixty per cent."

"She's closing it."

"Then either she is doing something you cannot do, or" He stops.

"Or she's not holding as much," Veira says.

"Yes."

"How much am I down."

"Since Sunday? Another four per cent."

Veira sits on the stairs in a house in Cults with a phone against her ear.

"It's still shedding," she says.

"It is still shedding, and the rate has accelerated since you arrived, and I have a hypothesis I do not like." Joon-Ho's voice is careful. "Proximity. The load is not moving randomly. It is moving to the nearest available receiver, and you have spent four days sitting eighteen inches from her."

Veira closes her eyes.

"If I stay," she says, "I take the weight off myself by putting it on a fourteen-year-old."

"That is my reading."

"And if I go, she holds what she already has, with nobody in the country who can teach her anything, and I've spent four days telling her she isn't alone."

Joon-Ho does not answer, which is his way of confirming that there is no third option he can see.

That evening Veira sits in the garden in the cold until Sebastien comes out and puts a coat round her shoulders and sits down without speaking, and she says, after a long time:

"I know what I'm going to do and I'm not going to like it, and I want to say it out loud to somebody before I say it to her."

"Go on."

"I'm going to teach her everything I know in ten days," Veira says. "And then I'm going to leave, and I'm going to go somewhere far enough that the shedding stops, and I'm going to hold everything that's left until the compact builds something better or it kills me."

Sebastien does not argue.

That is the thing she will remember afterwards: that he sat in a garden in Aberdeen and did not argue, and put his hand over hers, and said only:

"Ten days is not enough time to teach anybody anything."

"No," she says. "But it's what she's got."