The Fourth To Say This

It grieves her, which is different, and worse in a quieter way.

"Then I need to talk to them," she says. "Before it goes. Properly, not a report."

"About what?"

"About what happens to a channel nobody can hold." She stands. "They've been in the Vein since before the compact. They waited seven hundred years for a conduit who could hear them. And in about a year there won't be one, and I'd like them to hear that from me rather than have it stop."

Croft says, "You'll need a boat."

"I'll need a boat," Veira agrees. "And I'd like Nell to come."

Nell looks up sharply.

"You can't hear them," Veira says. "I know. But you're going to be doing this for sixty years after I stop and I'd rather you'd been in the room once."

The Friðargeir is eleven years older and so is Brynja, who greets them at the Reykjavik dock with the expression of a woman who has been waiting five years to be asked again and would rather die than say so.

"You brought more people," she says.

"Six."

"Last time it was seven." She looks at Nell. "This one is new."

"This one is twenty-one and standing right here," Nell says.

Brynja looks at her for a moment and then, unmistakably, approves.

They sail on the fourth of October. It takes eleven hours to reach the position, which Joon-Ho has plotted from five-year-old readings and which turns out to be accurate to within four hundred metres.

Veira opens the channel at first light with Nell beside her at the rail and everything she has left.

It comes hard and immediately, the way it did in January five years ago, and it does not overshoot this time, which she understands within a second is deliberate. They have been waiting. They have been paying attention to what she can carry.

You are much diminished, comes the sense of it.

Yes, she sends. On purpose. There are nine of us now.

There is something in the response that has no equivalent she can translate, and she sits with it for a while and eventually renders it, in her own head, as astonishment.

Nine, they send back.

Nine. Trained. Consenting. None of them can hear you.

We know.

She holds that.

Then you know what happens.

Yes.

She stands at the rail of a boat in the north Atlantic with a twenty-one-year-old beside her who cannot hear any of it, and she sends the thing she has come eleven hours to send.

I'm sorry. There won't be another one for a long time. Possibly a very long time.

The response takes what feels like a full minute.

When it comes it is not what she expects at all.

You are the fourth to say this to us.

Veira's hands tighten on the rail.

Say that again.

The fourth. Before you, three others reached us and told us the channel would close and apologised. A pause that has, somehow, patience in it. The first was very long ago. The last was in the time you would call the nineteenth century of your reckoning.

Halldórsdóttir, Veira sends.

The name is not carried. The apology is carried.

She has to stop for a moment.

What happened after they closed?

It opened again. Each time. Not soon. Something moves through the channel that she cannot name and will spend years trying to. You measure in the length of one life. We do not. The channel has closed and opened four times and you have understood each closure as an ending because each time it was the end of the person.

Veira breathes out.

How long, she sends.

Not soon. But this closure is unlike the others.

Why?

Because the others closed in ignorance and were not chosen, the Djúpr send. This one, you built.