Chapter 93

The first transfer is not a transfer and it does not happen for eleven months.

What happens in the eleven months is Tuesdays.

Veira teaches by link from the farmhouse down the coast, four hours a day, and the curriculum she builds is the one she assembled backwards out of eight years of a blurred memory and four days in a bedroom in Cults: how to tell your own feeling from somebody else's arriving through the channel. How to attenuate. How to close, and for how long, and what it costs. How to notice the early signs of overload in yourself, which is the thing that killed Morna Croft and which nobody in 1889 was taught at all.

The nineteen-year-old from Cork stops being furious in week seven and becomes, by the following spring, the best teacher in the building.

The boy from Valencia's grandmother learns enough English to argue with the doctor.

The girl from Kraków is the first to attenuate without being talked through it, in October, and does it in front of the whole room by accident and is mortified.

And in February, fourteen months after a woman collapsed on a kitchen floor in Edinburgh, Nell Fraser turns sixteen and asks for a meeting with Croft.

She asks for it formally, in writing, because she has read the consent protocol and knows that is how it is done.

Croft comes up from Perth on the train.

Veira is not in the room, because Veira is never in the room, and afterwards Croft telephones her from the gate at the end of the drive because he does not trust himself to say it inside the building.

"She's applied," he says.

"To receive."

"To receive a further share. Voluntarily, formally, under protocol, at sixteen, with capacity assessed by two independent practitioners." A pause. "She was extremely well prepared. She had a written submission. She cited the 1889 file."

"What did she say."

"She said that she had been carrying an involuntary fragment for fourteen months, that she was the only pupil in the building who had never been asked, and that she wanted the record to show that she had chosen it at least once." Croft's voice does something Veira has never heard it do. "And then she said that she would understand if I refused, and that she had written a second submission for that outcome, and would I like to read it now or later."

Veira sits down on the step of the farmhouse.

"What did you decide."

"I have not decided. I have thirty days under protocol and I intend to use all of them." He clears his throat. "Ms Ashcroft. I want to tell you something and I would like you not to make it into a conversation."

"All right."

"Fourteen months ago you asked me to hold a veto over your life and I agreed, and I have spent every day since then privately certain that when the moment came I would use it." A long pause. "I sat in a room today with a sixteen-year-old who had read the whole file and understood it better than the Assembly does, and who asked me for something I have spent thirty years believing no one should ever be permitted to have."

"And?"

"And I could not find a single argument against her that was not, underneath it, an argument that she should not be allowed to decide," Croft says. "Which is the argument they used on Morna. From the other direction."