Chapter 94

Croft approves it on the twenty-ninth day.

He does not telephone. He drives to the farmhouse eleven miles down the coast and knocks on the door at seven in the evening with a folder under his arm and rain on his shoulders and says, before Veira has finished opening it:

"I want you to read the refusal first."

He has written both. Thirty-one pages approving and twenty-six refusing, and he has brought both, and he makes her read the refusal at the kitchen table while he stands at the window with his back to her.

It is a good document. It is the best argument against the transfer she has ever seen, better than anything the Assembly produced, better than anything she constructed for herself at three in the morning in February. It cites the eleven names from Utrecht and the four who died before twenty and the fact that no child at Braehead has yet passed the two-year adaptation threshold anybody can point to, because nobody has ever measured one.

She finishes it. She sets it down.

"You could have filed this," she says.

"I could have filed it and it would have held for four years and by then she would be twenty and I would have to argue it again against an adult." He turns round. "That is the honest reason. Not that she convinced me. That I could see the shape of the argument I would still be making in 2030, and I could see myself making it, and I did not want to be that man."

"That's not nothing."

"It is considerably less than the case deserves." He puts the approval on the table. "There are conditions. Nine of them. The first is that she receives a fifth of what she is already carrying, not a share of yours — an internal rebalance, nothing new from you. Nothing from you at all."

Veira looks up.

"That's not a transfer."

"It is a rehearsal." Croft sits down opposite her, finally. "She has carried an involuntary fragment for fourteen months. This asks her to consciously take a fraction more of what is already in the room, under supervision, with monitoring, with a doctor present and with the entire thing reversible for nine days. It is the smallest step that can be called a step."

"And if it works?"

"If it works we will have the first documented instance in Folklore history of a consenting, trained hybrid voluntarily increasing her load without harm." He does not soften it. "And we will have proved nothing about seventeen, or about you, or about what happens when a fifty-per-cent share moves to a person who has never held one. We will have proved that one girl of sixteen managed a fifth of a fragment on a Tuesday."

"That's still more than anyone has ever had."

"Yes." Croft's hands are flat on the folder. "That is why I signed it."

He does not stay. He drives back down the coast in the rain, and Veira stands in the doorway watching the tail lights, and thinks about the two documents on her kitchen table and the fact that he wrote both properly, which almost nobody would.

At half past nine Sebastien comes out with a coat and does not put it on her, which he learned not to do some time last autumn, but holds it out.

"How was he," he says.

"He wrote the refusal first." She takes the coat. "Twenty-six pages, better than anything I've produced. Then he brought both to my kitchen and made me read the one he didn't use."

"Why?"

"Because he wanted somebody to know what it cost." She pulls it on. "That's what he's actually like. Everybody in the compact thinks he's an ideologue and he's the most scrupulous man I've ever worked with, and he's spent thirty years being read as the opposite by people who never read his filings properly."

Sebastien leans against the doorframe.

"You like him," he says.

"I like him enormously. It's extremely inconvenient." She looks out at the dark. "He asked me something before he left."

"What."

"Whether I'd worked out what I'll do when it's finished." She wraps her arms round herself. "The programme. Two years, five years, whenever it ends. He asked what I'd do afterwards and I didn't have an answer and I've been standing here since he drove off finding out that I don't have one."