Chapter 88

Aldara does not run and does not deny it and is waiting for them on the terrace of a house on Skye with tea for four, which Veira finds more disturbing than anything else about the afternoon.

"You brought the wolf," the old woman says. "And the vampire. And the other one. That is the correct composition and I am glad you did not come alone, because you would have, in February."

"Where are the children."

"In the house. Both of them are well, both of them are with a carer they have known for six days, and neither of them has any idea why they are here." Aldara pours. "Sit down, Ms Ashcroft. You are going to want to be sitting."

Veira does not sit. Sebastien stays at the top of the steps. Roman remains by the terrace door and Emre has not moved from beside the car.

"You maintained the register," Veira says.

"I have maintained the register since 1974, when Absalom Lieth recruited me to it, as he was recruited in 1951 by a Tide Elder named Corvo, who was recruited in 1919 by a Foundation conservator." Aldara sets the pot down. "It has been continuous since 1889. There have been nine of us. I am the ninth and I am the last, because I recruited nobody, because by 2011 I had come to believe the entire project was a mistake."

"What project."

"The separation." Aldara looks up. "Ingibjörg Halldórsdóttir went to Vienna in 1888 and restored the ordinal, and she was caught, and her seat was chained. What the Assembly never learned is what she did on the seventeenth of October, the day after, which was to persuade a Foundation conservator that the compact's persecution of hybrids had the wrong target and the right instinct."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning she worked out what you worked out last week." Aldara's voice does not change. "The load moves by overflow. Two hybrids in proximity and it begins to spread. She understood that a conduit whose load is spreading across an uncontrolled population of children is not a distribution — it is a contamination, unbounded, moving to whoever is nearest, with no floor and no consent. She calculated what happens if it reaches a dozen people who do not know what they are holding."

"What happens," Roman says.

"Nothing dramatic. That is the difficulty." Aldara looks at him. "They each carry a fragment they cannot identify. It degrades them slowly across a lifetime. They die at fifty of something idiopathic and their doctors write it down and nobody ever connects one case to another, because they are in eleven countries and they have never met." She turns her cup a quarter-turn. "She could not stop the compact hunting hybrids. She could not restore the ordinal. So she did the only thing left, which was to make certain that no two of them were ever within range of each other, and to keep a count so that the next one would know."

"You've been hiding children," Veira says.

"I have been hiding children from each other, for fifty-one years, using the compact's own persecution as cover, and I have destroyed a great many families to do it." Aldara sets the cup down. "And in 2011 a woman in Aberdeen died and left an eleven-month-old and I looked at the map and I understood that I was maintaining a system whose entire logic was that these children must never be permitted to help one another, and that I had become the thing I had spent forty years telling myself I was preventing."

"So you stopped."

"I stopped filing. I did not stop watching." Aldara looks up at Veira with an expression that is not apology. "And then in January a conduit went to the north Atlantic and opened a sixth channel and came back eleven per cent down, and I understood that the overflow was about to begin whether I approved of it or not."

"So you moved two children towards it."

"I moved two children to a house on an island with a carer and a doctor and no other hybrid within four hundred kilometres," Aldara says. "Because you are going to have to make a decision in the next fortnight, Ms Ashcroft, and I have spent fifty-one years being the only person alive who knows what the options actually cost, and I was not going to let you make it in ignorance the way Morna Croft was never allowed to make it at all."

She finally stands.

"You want to distribute the load," she says. "You have wanted it since the boat. I have watched you want it since February." Her eyes do not leave Veira's. "So I am going to tell you the thing that has never been written down in a hundred and thirty-six years, and then I am going to go into that house and sit with two children while you decide what to do with it."

"Say it."

"It has been tried," Aldara says. "In 1889. That is why the ordinal was erased and the seat was chained and the register was begun." She walks to the terrace door. "Ingibjörg Halldórsdóttir did not theorise the contamination, Ms Ashcroft. She watched it. There was a conduit before Mireille that the Assembly has never acknowledged, and eleven receivers, and it did not work, and every one of them died."