Chapter 84

Croft telephones on the seventh day and does not begin with a greeting.

"Nineteen," he says. "You have the protective registry index."

Veira takes the phone out into the hall.

"How do you know that."

"Because I have had the same number since 2019 and I have never been able to source it, and this morning Roman Vasile filed an emergency access disclosure with the Assembly's review committee, which is the correct and honourable thing to do and which told forty people at once." A pause. "He fell on his own sword in a published document. I have been in this system for thirty years and I have never seen anyone do that."

"He's like that."

"So I gather." Croft's voice shifts. "Ms Ashcroft. Seventeen missing hybrid children is not a mystery. It is a rescue, and it is bigger than any of us, and it cannot be run out of a bedroom in Aberdeen by a woman who is losing four per cent a week."

"I'm aware."

"Then let me file it."

She stops in the hall.

"My motion," Croft says. "The restoration programme. It is void on proxy grounds and the review will not report for months, but a safeguarding petition under emergency protocol needs four voting members and no proxy-held seats, and I have counted, and I can get four clean." He does not push. "It would give the compact a lawful obligation to locate them. It would give you resources, standing, and about two hundred people. And it would put you back in the position I have spent five months trying to take you out of, which is the named authority holding the entire thing."

"Why offer it, then."

"Because a fourteen-year-old is holding part of the Vein in Aberdeen and I would rather you were exhausted than she was dead, and because those seventeen children are the nine receivers, in fifteen years, if any of them live that long." He pauses. "And because I read a visitor log on Saturday and I have not been the same since, and I do not intend to become a man who let children die to be proved right."

Veira leans against the wall.

"There's a condition," she says.

"Name it."

"Nell isn't in the programme. She's not a resource and she's not a future receiver and nobody counts her towards nine. She's a child who's ill and she stays that way in the paperwork until she's old enough to decide otherwise."

Croft is silent for a moment.

"That is going to make the arithmetic harder," he says.

"Yes."

"Agreed," he says. "File it as a medical exclusion under my authority and nobody will query it for years."

She closes her eyes briefly. "Thank you."

"Don't. I want something in return and you are not going to like it." His voice has gone very careful. "When you leave Aberdeen and you will leave, because you have worked out the proximity problem and you are not a person who lets a child carry her load I want to know where you go."

"Why."

"Because you intend to go somewhere far enough that the shedding stops, and the only place in Europe far enough is a location you already know, and I have read the Iceland reports." He pauses. "You are going to go and sit on the Djúpr's channel alone in the north Atlantic, Ms Ashcroft, and you are going to call it a solution, and it is not a solution. It is Morna in a better coat."

Veira does not answer.

"Say something," Croft says.

"I'm going to file the safeguarding petition with you," she says. "I'm going to give you the nineteen entries and every scrap of the registry index and Roman's decoding and Emre's contract analysis. And then I'm going to do the thing you just described, and you're not going to stop me, because there isn't a mechanism and we've spent five months establishing that."

The line is quiet.

"No," Croft says. "There isn't."

She hears him breathe out.

"I have spent thirty years trying to build the mechanism that would stop exactly this," he says, "and I have failed, and the consequence is that a woman I have come to respect is going to walk into the sea because there is nobody with the standing to tell her not to." A pause. "I hope you understand that this is the argument. This has always been the argument."