Chapter 90

The petition to establish it takes nine days and nearly does not happen at all, because on the second day Croft reads the 1889 file and telephones her at six in the morning.

"No."

"Elder Croft"

"Eleven children, Ms Ashcroft. The youngest was nine." His voice is not raised and it is worse for it. "I have spent thirty years arguing that this compact must stop consuming people who did not consent, and you are proposing to hand fragments of the Vein to seventeen minors, and you are going to tell me that this time it will be different because you have a pedagogical method."

"Yes," Veira says. "That's exactly what I'm going to tell you."

"On what evidence."

"On four weeks of a fourteen-year-old in Aberdeen who can close a channel I have never once been able to close." She is standing at her kitchen window in the dark. "And on the fact that the alternative is that the load keeps overflowing to whoever is nearest, without consent, without teaching, exactly the way it did in 1889 because the overflow is happening anyway, and has been since January, and the only decision available is whether it happens by accident or on purpose."

Croft does not answer for a long moment.

"That is the first argument anyone has made that I cannot immediately dismantle," he says.

"I know. I built it for you."

"Do not be clever with me at six in the morning."

"I'm not being clever. I've had four days and I know exactly who has to be convinced, and it isn't Solvieg." She sits down. "You've watched this kill someone. Nobody else in the compact has. If you tell the Assembly this is a repeat of 1889 they will believe you, and they should, because you'd be half right."

"And the other half?"

"The other half is that in 1889 nobody asked the eleven anything. There's no record of consent, no record of explanation, no record that any of them were told what they were receiving." Veira turns the page in front of her. "Four of them were under sixteen. It was done to them, in a house in Utrecht, in one afternoon, by adults who had decided."

The line is silent.

"You are going to ask them," Croft says.

"I'm going to spend two years teaching them, and then I'm going to ask them, and any of them who says no keeps saying no forever and nobody ever asks again." She keeps her voice level. "And the seventeenth is Nell Fraser, who is already carrying, who did not consent to any of it, and who worked out the third option before any of us because she was the only one in the house who hadn't decided what she could carry on her own behalf."

Croft breathes out.

"The Assembly will require a named authority," he says.

"I know."

"It cannot be you. You are the transferring party. No compact body will authorise a programme in which the person being unloaded also holds the safeguarding authority over the children receiving it." A pause. "That is not politics. That is the correct rule and you would write it yourself."

"I would," Veira says. "That's why I'm asking you."

The silence this time is different.

"Say that again," Croft says.

"I want you to hold it." She keeps going, because if she stops she will lose her nerve. "Named authority for the whole programme. Safeguarding, admissions, consent protocols, the lot. Absolute veto on any transfer, including mine, including on the day, including if I'm in the room."

"Ms Ashcroft. I have spent five months trying to take this off you by force."

"Yes," she says. "And you handed me the two documents that proved your own method wrong, and you filed a medical exclusion for a fourteen-year-old on my word, and you have never once in five months lied to me." She closes her eyes briefly. "There isn't a second person in the compact I'd trust with a veto over my own life, and I've thought about it for four days, and it's you, and I resent it enormously."

Croft is quiet for a long time.

"Morna would have found this extremely funny," he says.