Chapter 85

Joon-Ho takes eleven hours to answer it and the answer changes everything.

"She's right," he says. He has three screens set up on Margaret Fraser's dining table and he has not slept and there is a plate of untouched sandwiches at his elbow that Margaret has replaced twice. "The nine-receiver clause is a legal specification, not a physical one."

"Explain it slowly," Sebastien says.

"The document is a partition contract. It divides an estate among nine named heirs." Joon-Ho turns a screen. "Nine is the number required for the transfer to be lawful under twelfth-century wolf partition law, because that's the quorum for an uncontested division of a bloodline holding. It is a legal threshold. It says nothing whatsoever about how many people the load can physically move to."

"Then what does?"

"Nothing. There is no document that specifies a physical limit, because in seven hundred years nobody has observed the load moving at all, because it has never previously had anywhere to go." He looks up. "The load has moved to Nell Fraser in three weeks with no rite, no circle, no contract and no consent, because she is a hybrid within physical range of a conduit who can no longer carry the whole thing. That is an observation. It outranks every document we have."

Veira sits down.

"So the rite isn't a mechanism," she says. "It's a formality."

"The rite is paperwork for a thing that happens by itself." Joon-Ho's hands are flat on the table. "The nine receivers aren't nine because nine is what the Vein requires. They're nine because a twelfth-century wolf court wouldn't recognise a partition with fewer, and the compact has spent four centuries reading a filing requirement as a law of nature."

Emre has not spoken. He speaks now.

"Then the persecution clause worked even better than we thought," he says. "It didn't just prevent nine. It prevented two. Two hybrids within range of each other, ever, anywhere. That's the actual thing that's been prevented for seven hundred years."

The room absorbs it.

"And it's been prevented so completely," Veira says slowly, "that when it finally happened by accident in a house in Aberdeen, everybody in this room including me interpreted it as a crisis."

Nobody answers, because there is no answer that improves it.

"Right." Veira stands. "Joon-Ho. What's the actual limit, then? If it's not nine, what stops it moving to everybody?"

"Range and capacity. Range appears to be very short it did not move to Emre in five months of proximity in Edinburgh, and he is a hybrid." Joon-Ho pulls up a fourth screen. "Which tells us something important. It didn't move to him because until January you had capacity. It only moves when the current holder is over-loaded."

"So it's not distribution," Sebastien says. "It's overflow."

"It is overflow." Joon-Ho looks at Veira. "Which means it will keep moving, to whoever is nearest, whenever you exceed what you can carry. And it will not stop when you reach a comfortable level, because there is no mechanism for it to stop. It will move until the load is evenly distributed across every hybrid in range, regardless of their age, capacity or consent."

The kitchen is very quiet.

"That's what happened to the nineteen," Emre says.

They all turn.

"Two hundred and eleven entries since 1889. Nineteen since 1990." He is looking at the table. "We have been assuming somebody hid seventeen children to protect them from the compact." He looks up. "What if they were hidden to keep them apart from each other?"