Four Minuites

The programme runs for four years.

That is the sentence Veira will use afterwards, when people ask, and it is accurate and it conceals everything, because what four years actually consists of is Tuesdays.

Nell takes a full share at seventeen and a second at nineteen and by twenty is carrying more than any of them, and it does not kill her, and by then Joon-Ho has eleven hundred days of monitoring data proving why: gradual, consensual, taught, and above all known the thing that killed the eleven in Utrecht was not the load but the fact that not one of them was ever told what they were holding.

Aoife from Cork takes a share at twenty-two and immediately becomes insufferable about it.

The girl from Kraków, whose name is Zofia and who did not speak for eleven days in her first month, takes hers at eighteen and then does something none of them anticipated, which is enrol in a medicine degree in Warsaw on the grounds that somebody is going to have to be able to treat this properly in thirty years and it is not going to be a compact doctor.

The Manchester siblings do not take shares. They are asked at fourteen and sixteen and both refuse, and they are not asked again, and Croft records both refusals in the permanent file in language so protective that Veira reads it twice.

The boy from Valencia takes a share at nineteen with his grandmother in the room.

By the fourth spring there are nine of them carrying, which is a number nobody plans and everybody notices, and which Croft refuses to allow anyone to remark upon in an official document.

And Veira comes down.

Slowly. Over four years, in stages, monitored to a degree that she finds intrusive and does not contest. Sixty per cent. Forty. Twenty-two.

At twenty-two per cent she can close the channel for the first time in her life.

She does it in the farmhouse kitchen on an ordinary Thursday in her thirty-second year, sitting at the table with a cup of tea, and the Vein goes quiet not attenuated, not muffled, quiet and she sits in the silence for four minutes and finds she does not know what to do with her hands.

She telephones Nell.

"How long can you hold it," she says.

"Closed? About four hours now." Nell sounds like she is walking somewhere. "Why, what've you got?"

"Four minutes."

"That's brilliant." A pause, and the sound of a door. "Are you all right? You sound weird."

"I'm fine. I'm sitting in a kitchen and it's quiet." Veira looks at the window. "Nell. I've never had four minutes before. Not once, my whole life."

"Yeah," Nell says. "I know. That's why I said brilliant."

The last of it does not go smoothly, because of course it does not.

At eighteen per cent, in the fifth autumn, Veira has the first bad episode since Aberdeen.

It happens at Braehead, which she is by then permitted to enter, and it happens in a corridor, and what puts her on the floor is not overload but the opposite: a sudden drop, fast, as three of the older students working in the same room inadvertently pull more than the channel can pass at once.

She is unconscious for eleven seconds and confused for four minutes and by the time Croft reaches her from the office she is sitting up against a radiator being furious.

"I'm fine."

"You were not fine."

"I'm fine now, which is a different claim, and you know I'm precise about that." She lets Nell haul her up. "What was the drop."

Joon-Ho tells her that evening: eleven per cent in under a minute.

"Which is the rate of the entire first five weeks after Iceland," he says. "Compressed into fifty seconds."

"So it can go fast."

"It can go fast in either direction and we have never had a reason to look at the downward rate because until this year nobody had ever gone down." He puts the tablet on the table. "Veira. The remaining eighteen per cent could come off in an afternoon."

The room, which contains Croft and Sebastien and Emre and Nell, who has appointed herself to these meetings and whom nobody has yet successfully removed, does not react.

"And?" Veira says.

"And nobody has ever gone to zero." Joon-Ho holds her eyes. "The channel is not a quantity. It is a connection, and every model I have says the last fraction is not like the others, because at some point it stops being a share and becomes the thing that makes you a conduit at all."

"The Djúpr channel," Emre says.

"The Djúpr channel." Joon-Ho nods once. "Nine hybrids are carrying load. Not one of them can open the sixth channel. Nell has forty per cent and cannot hear the Djúpr at all."

"I've tried," Nell says. "About nine hundred times."

"So the load distributes and the channel doesn't," Croft says slowly.

"The channel doesn't. It is not part of the load." Joon-Ho's voice has gone very careful. "Which means the last eighteen per cent is not eighteen per cent of a burden. It is the entire remainder of Veira's connection to the oldest living thing in the Vein, and when it goes, it will go all at once, and there is no evidence whatsoever that it can be given to anybody."

Nobody speaks.

"So it isn't distributed," Veira says. "It just ends."

"That is my reading."

She sits with it.

Five years ago it would have frightened her in a way she could not have articulated. She notices, sitting in a room in Sutherland with nine people carrying what she used to carry alone, that it does not frighten her the way it would have.