Chapter 95

The rehearsal is on a Tuesday in March, and it is the most anticlimactic thing anybody in the building has ever witnessed.

Nell sits in an armchair in the front room at Braehead with a doctor on one side and Croft on the other and Joon-Ho's monitoring array on a card table, and for four minutes nothing happens, and then she says: "Oh."

"Oh what," Croft says.

"It's just it's a bit more." She frowns. "Like when you're carrying shopping and someone puts another tin in."

"Are you in any discomfort."

"No. It's fine." She shifts in the chair. "Can I go? Aoife's teaching attenuation at four and she gets annoyed if I'm late."

Joon-Ho does not let her go for two hours. The array shows what he later describes as the least dramatic dataset of his professional life: a fifth of a fragment, moved, held, stable.

Veira watches it on a laptop from eleven miles away with Adaeze beside her and finds she cannot see the screen properly.

"It worked," Adaeze says.

"It worked."

"Say it like you believe it."

"I do believe it. That's the problem." Veira wipes her face with the back of her hand, briskly, annoyed at herself. "I've spent fourteen months building something on the assumption that it probably wouldn't, because if I assumed it would I'd have had to think about what happens to me when it does."

Adaeze does not say anything for a while.

"Croft asked you," she says.

"Croft asked me on Thursday and I've been not answering it since."

"Then answer it now, to me, badly, and I won't hold you to it." Adaeze turns her chair. "What do you want, Veira? Not what's required. Not what the programme needs. What do you actually want."

Veira looks at the frozen frame of a sixteen-year-old in an armchair asking to be allowed to go to a lesson.

"I want to go back to work," she says.

Adaeze blinks.

"Not the programme. Work." Veira's voice is unsteady in a way she does not attempt to hide. "I want a case. I want a shell company structure in four jurisdictions and a client who's been robbed and eleven weeks to prove it, and I want to be extremely good at something ordinary again, and I have not said that out loud to anybody because it sounds so small next to all of this."

"It doesn't sound small."

"It sounds like a woman who's been the biological keystone of the supernatural world asking to go back to forensic accountancy."

"It sounds," Adaeze says, "like the only thing you have wanted for yourself in fourteen months." She closes the laptop gently. "Gideon still asks after you, you know. Every time I'm in Edinburgh. He tells me the Luxembourg work has never been the same and then he pretends he was making conversation."

Veira laughs, wetly, once.

Her phone goes.

It is Roman, and he does not begin with a greeting, which after fifteen months she has learned to read as a specific category of news.

"The Assembly's review committee reports on Friday," he says. "I have the draft."

"And?"

"They have found the proxy defect, the convener's chained seat, the 1889 instruction and the register." A pause. "And they have found the answer to ordinal restoration, because Vassenheim went and looked, exactly as you predicted he would."

Veira sits up.

"They're restoring the zero."

"They are proposing to. It is in the recommendations." Roman's voice does something she has never heard from him. "Veira. The compact is going to formally recognise the hybrid line as the originating bloodline, above the four, in the position Halldórsdóttir tried to restore in 1888 and was chained for."

"That's"

"There is a second recommendation," Roman says, "and I need you to hear it from me before Friday."