Chapter 87

The safeguarding petition passes at eleven minutes past nine on the fourteenth of March, four votes to nil, with no proxy-held seats in the chamber.

It takes eleven minutes. Croft argues it in six and Solvieg does not adjourn it, which Veira understands afterwards was itself a decision by a woman chairing under a directive she has just learned exists and has decided, without saying so, to test.

By noon there are two hundred people.

By the sixteenth they have located eleven of the seventeen.

Veira runs it from a room in Edinburgh with four screens and Adaeze beside her, and it is the most straightforwardly good thing she has ever done and she notes, distantly, that she is enjoying it, which is the first time she has enjoyed anything since January.

The eleven are in Lisbon, Cork, Marseille, Tallinn, Toronto, two in Wales, one outside Kraków, one in Bergen, and two in a single foster placement in Manchester who are siblings and who nobody in the Folklore has ever registered as anything at all.

None of them are manifesting. All of them are between four and nineteen years old. Every single one has a protective instrument on file drafted in Absalom Lieth's hand.

"He kept them apart," Adaeze says, on the second evening, looking at the map. "Look at the distribution. Eleven jurisdictions, and the closest two are eight hundred kilometres apart, except the Manchester siblings, and they're"

"Both hybrids," Veira says. "Siblings. He couldn't separate them without taking a child out of a family."

"So he put them together and accepted the risk."

"Which tells us he understood the range problem in at least 2009." Veira leans back. "He wasn't hiding them from the compact. Or not only. He was maintaining a minimum separation."

On the seventeenth they find the twelfth in Valencia.

On the eighteenth, at four in the afternoon, Sebastien comes into the room and closes the door behind him, which he does not do.

"Two of the eleven have moved," he says.

Veira turns.

"The Bergen child and the Tallinn child. Both relocated within the last nine days. Both by parties presenting valid Folklore protective authority." He puts a page on the desk. "Both to the same address."

"Where."

"An estate on the Isle of Skye. Purchased in 2019 through a Jersey structure." He does not soften it. "The same structure that bought Margaret Fraser's house in 2011."

Adaeze is already at a keyboard.

"Somebody is collecting them," Veira says.

"Somebody with Lieth's instruments, Lieth's structures and enough standing to present protective authority in two jurisdictions in nine days." Sebastien's voice is very level. "Which is a short list."

"How short."

"Six people. I've had Niall on it since Tuesday." He puts a second page down. "Four are accounted for. The fifth is Absalom Lieth, who is in Ghent and cannot dress himself."

Veira looks at the sixth name.

She reads it twice, and the room goes very quiet around her, and she understands with a horrible retrospective clarity exactly why a Kin Elder telephoned her at two in the morning in February and told her she would ask the wrong people, and why the standing flag on four pre-compact documents fired eleven days before anybody else knew they mattered, and why a woman who had voted against Morna Croft in 1989 had wanted so badly to put something down before March.

"Aldara," she says.