The Night Before Geneva

She does not sleep well the night before Geneva, and having examined it carefully, she's confident it isn't anxiety. It's the wakefulness of a mind with a lot to do, rehearsing the doing of it a different condition, and one she recognises from fraud hearings and at least one academic exam she probably should have prepared for better.

She lies in the Edinburgh flat she moved into ten days ago, larger than the old one, ground floor with a small garden Variable has been investigating with the focused attention of a researcher in a new archive, and she looks at the ceiling at two in the morning and thinks about tomorrow.

The Assembly convenes at ten. Twelve Elder representatives, one neutral convener, and her. The first item is the formal acknowledgment of the conduit's presence, which hasn't happened in three hundred years and which is going to produce a specific quality of room-temperature the moment she walks in.

She's prepared for the room-temperature. What she hasn't been prepared for, until about forty-five minutes ago, is the phone call from Sebastien.

He called to ask if she was sleeping. She said no. He said neither was he. She said it wasn't anxiety. He said for him it might be. She said that's fair. He said the pack was unusually calm tonight. She asked if they were usually not. He said usually they run at whatever frequency the week's concerns have set somewhere between mild worry and active low-level stress. Tonight they're different. Like they know something good is happening tomorrow and have decided to rest for it.

She said: they can't know about Geneva.

He said: they can feel what I feel. And I feel like something is about to be different.

She'd lain there with the phone warm against her ear, thinking about thirty-one people across Scotland she's never met, sleeping tonight at a frequency set by a man who is the living architecture of their collective awareness, lying in his office at half past one, feeling like something was about to change.

She'd said: go to sleep, Sebastien.

He'd said: I know. Good luck tomorrow.

She'd said: it's not luck. We built the case.

I know that too, he'd said. I still wanted to say it.

She hangs up in memory now, and Variable arrives on the bed from the garden at a quarter to two, cold-pawed and smelling of frost, and settles against her side with the specific quality of an animal who has finished whatever business the night required and returned to the matter of warmth.

She lies with the ceiling and the Edinburgh quiet and Variable's weight against her ribs, and she thinks about Isadora. About the diary. The last entry: I hope the one who comes after is given better choices than mine. I hope the world she inherits is one that has learned to ask.

She thinks about whether tomorrow is the answer to that.

Not a complete answer. Not a clean one. A beginning of one.

At three she gives up on sleep and goes to the kitchen, makes coffee properly, the way the cottage taught her, sits with the notebook that has the Florence minutes photograph tucked inside the back cover and Isadora's first entry transcribed at the front.

She opens to a clean page.

Things that are true as of the night before Geneva, she writes, and fills two pages. The Vein is running. The compact's legal foundation is historically incorrect. Vassenheim has read the diary Roman confirmed at nine last night. Sunnsdottir has been talking to Adaeze for a week. The Isadora record reclassification petition already has six Elder signatures, which means it has sufficient support to pass regardless of what the Ascendancy does tomorrow.

She hadn't known that last one until dinner tonight, when Emre told her, quietly, after everyone else had gone, that he'd spent the last week making targeted calls to the neutral representatives using the Folklore intelligence access his neutral status gives him.

She'd looked at him.

Not managing, he'd said. Informing. There's a difference. I gave them the documentation and the case and answered their questions and let them decide.

You're sure.

I'm sure.

Thank you.

Don't thank me yet, he'd said. Geneva is still Geneva.

She closes the notebook. She drinks her coffee. Variable comes into the kitchen at ten past three and sits on the table and looks at her and then turns his head north, which he's been doing periodically since the restoration and which she has stopped dismissing as random feline behaviour.

"I know," she says.

He says nothing. He keeps looking north.

"January," she tells him. "We'll deal with it in January."

He turns back to her. He blinks once.

She finishes her coffee. She goes back to bed. She lies down. She closes her eyes.

This time, she sleeps.