Variable and the Sixth

Clara arrives on the Sunday evening with an overnight bag, a laptop, and four days' worth of marking she has no intention of doing, and she has clearly decided on the train that she is going to treat the entire situation as a practical problem, because that is what Clara does with things too large to feel about immediately.

"Right," she says, in the hall, before her coat is off. "House rules. What am I allowed to know, what am I not allowed to know, and what happens if a vampire turns up."

"Nothing's going to turn up."

"Veira."

"Nothing is going to turn up because nobody knows you're here except the six people going to Iceland, and of those six, three are terrified of you." Veira takes the bag off her. "Roman asked me last week what you do. I said secondary school geography. He said, and I'm quoting, ah, that explains the questions."

"What questions?"

"You asked him whether the Vein has a measurable magnetic component."

"It was a reasonable question."

"It was a good question. He's been thinking about it for eleven days." Veira puts the bag at the foot of the stairs. "He's genuinely put out that nobody else asked it."

Clara looks briefly, unmistakably pleased.

The flat is warmer than the old one and has a garden the size of a large tablecloth, and Variable has spent three weeks conducting a survey of it with the thoroughness of a man contesting a boundary. He performs a perimeter check now kitchen, hall, the specific doorway he distrusts tail up, while Clara watches from the table with the professional attention of someone who spends her working life observing systems.

"So he might actually be supernatural," she says.

"I don't know what he is."

"That's extraordinary."

"He's a cat."

"He might be a cat who is connected to an undiscovered bloodline in the north Atlantic."

"That sounds absurd."

"Everything about this sounds absurd. I've been recalibrating my threshold for absurdity since October and I've stopped bothering to reset it." Clara opens the laptop, closes it again. "I've written down every time he's done the north thing since I got here in December. Did you know that?"

Veira stops with her hand on the kettle.

"No."

"Forty-one times. I've got dates, approximate durations, what was happening in the room." Clara turns the laptop round and it is a spreadsheet, colour-coded, with a notes column. "I'm not saying it means anything. I'm saying somebody should be writing it down and nobody was, so I did."

Veira looks at it for a long moment.

"Send this to Joon-Ho," she says.

"Is that the probability one or the vampire one."

"Probability. He'll want the raw file, not a summary, and he'll ask you about your recording methodology and he won't be being rude, that's just how he talks."

"I have a methodology."

"I know you do. That's why he'll ask."

Veira finishes packing while the kettle goes. Two bags: the practical one, and the one with the notebook and the things she needs in transit. It has been the same configuration since October, since a train south with a cat carrier and no forwarding address, and she has never once packed differently since and has never examined why.

"I need to know who I call if something happens," Clara says, from the table.

"Nothing's going to happen to you."

"I know. I mean if something happens in Iceland and I need someone who isn't in the Folklore to be a sensible external check on whatever I'm being told."

Veira turns. It is not a question she expected, and it is a better one than most of the questions she has been asked in the last four months by people whose job it is to ask them.

"Sebastien," she says. "His phone is on at all times. Genuinely all times I've tested it at four in the morning."

"That's the mountain man."

"Don't call him that to his face."

"Would he mind?"

Veira considers this properly, which she finds she has to.

"I don't actually know," she says. "Probably not. He'd want to know where it came from and then he'd think about it for a week."

"I'll call him the mountain man, then."

They eat at nine because neither of them has done anything about dinner, and it is the first ordinary evening Veira has had since Geneva: the small table, the bad wine Clara brought because the good wine was eleven pounds more, the specific comfort of a friend who has known her since before any of this and who is not, at any point in the evening, assessing her.

Clara talks about work. The department is being restructured for the third time in four years and she is being offered a head of faculty post that she does not want and cannot afford to refuse, and she talks about it for twenty minutes and Veira listens, properly, and asks three questions.

"You don't have to do this," Clara says eventually.

"Do what?"

"Be interested in the timetabling arrangements of a comprehensive in south Edinburgh the night before you sail into the north Atlantic to meet a bloodline that predates recorded history."

"I'm not being polite." Veira tops up both glasses. "Clara, I have spent four months in rooms where every single conversation is about me. Every one. Where I'm going, what I can carry, what I owe, who failed me, what happens if I stop." She sets the bottle down. "You've been telling me about Michaela in Year Ten for twenty minutes and it is the best time I've had since November."

Clara looks at her for a moment.

"Take the head of faculty job," Veira says. "You'll hate it for a year and then you'll rebuild the whole curriculum and be insufferable about it."

"That's what my mother said."

"Your mother's right about most things."

She leaves at half past six the next morning, before it's light. Clara comes down in a dressing gown to see her off, which she did not ask for and finds she needs.

"Feeding at seven and nine," Veira says, at the door. "He'll tell you when it's seven and nine regardless of whether you have a clock. Trust the cat over the clock."

"I know, you've told me twice. Go to Iceland."

She goes to the door. Stops. Turns.

"Clara."

"What."

"Thank you. For all of it. Since October."

"October was excellent for me personally. I learned that my best friend is the biological keystone of the supernatural world, my threshold for absurdity expanded significantly, and Variable has potential."

"That's not why I'm thanking you."

"I know." Clara looks at her, and for one second the practical thing she has been doing since the train slips. "Go. Come back. Tell me everything."

The taxi takes her down toward Bruntsfield. Clara stands in the doorway until it turns the corner, which Veira sees in the wing mirror and does not comment on to anybody, ever.

Inside, Variable sits in the middle of the kitchen floor, watching the door after it closes.

Clara watches Variable.

His head turns north-northwest with the slow, specific deliberateness of a compass needle finding its setting, and he holds it, and he does not move for eleven seconds.

Clara reaches for the laptop and opens the spreadsheet and types the date, the time, and: departure, 06:34. Duration 11s. Longest yet.

Then she sits back and looks at the cat, and then at the window, and at the black January morning behind it.

"What is north-northwest of here," she says, and the question is meant to be rhetorical, and stops being rhetorical somewhere in the middle of the sentence.

She picks up her phone and adds a number to her contacts under Mountain Man (Veira's).

Then she adds a second one, under Joon-Ho spreadsheet, and attaches the file, and sends it before she can decide it's a stupid thing to do at twenty to seven in the morning.