What Adaeze Sorts

The negotiation takes forty minutes and Veira listens to all of it from the passenger seat.

It is conducted in Portuguese, then English, then Portuguese again, and the tonal register never once shifts even when the person on the other end evidently says something Adaeze does not like, and by the end of it Veira has learned more about how Carvalho Partners actually operates than four months of Tuesday evenings have taught her.

The boat is Friðargeir

peace-spear, approximately. It belongs to a Reykjavik marine science foundation whose board includes two Tide-worker-affiliated members and who are, Adaeze explains between calls, accustomed to unusual requests and comfortable with non-disclosure agreements, which is a sentence Veira notes and does not follow up on.

Forty-eight feet. Deep-water research configuration. Available from the sixteenth on a two-week charter at a rate Adaeze pays out of the operational account without any ceremony whatsoever, while simultaneously running a second call about the European bond anomalies that started on Tuesday and have been eating her attention for three days.

Two conversations. Four languages between them. One hand on the wheel of a hire car on a road with no barrier and a two-hundred-foot drop on the left.

Veira has thought this woman is extraordinary before. She thinks it now with considerably more texture, because there is a Florence meeting behind the thought, and a Stockbridge terrace, and a joint modelling document with three hundred comments on it, and eleven weeks of Tuesday evenings that started as accountability and became something neither of them has attempted to name.

Adaeze finishes the second call and drops the phone in the cupholder.

“Sorted. We sail on the sixteenth.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. It’s a reasonable problem with a logistical solution. I like those.” A pause, and then, because the road is long and there is nobody else in the car: “I would like more of my problems to be that kind.”

“Which kind are the others?”

“The kind where the correct action is obvious and the cost of it is a person.”

She changes gear for the incline and does not elaborate, and Veira does not push, because they have arrived at a stage where not pushing is more useful than pushing and both of them know it.

They drive for a while. The fjord goes past on the left, black water eleven hundred feet down, and the sky begins its brief daily negotiation with light somewhere to the south.

“The bond anomalies,” Adaeze says eventually. “Tuesday.”

“What about them?”

“They started on Tuesday. Which was the day after Joon-Ho arrived in Iceland for New Year.” She says it in the tone she uses when she has been holding something and has decided the drive is the moment for it. “I ran the pattern against the degradation data from the autumn. It’s not the same mechanism. Degradation produced flow reversal the current running backwards, momentum inverting against itself. This is different. This is interference. A second signal introducing noise into an existing one.”

“The sixth frequency.”

“I think so.” Her eyes stay on the road. “And I think it’s been present at low amplitude for a very long time, and nobody noticed because there was nothing to compare it against. The restoration in December amplified the Vein overall. The amplified Vein is now interacting with the sixth signal in ways the Tide-sense registers as interference rather than absence.”

“Which means it’s responding to the restoration.”

“Or we are finally sensitive enough to receive something that has been broadcasting continuously since before the Carvalho line existed.” Adaeze glances across, briefly. “I would like it to be the second one, professionally. It’s less alarming.”

“And personally?”

The car takes a long curve.

“Personally I would very much prefer that the oldest thing in the Vein did not begin transmitting more loudly within twenty-four hours of you making a decision,” Adaeze says. “I have spent four months learning what happens when a system reacts to you, Veira. I would like at least one element of this to be a coincidence, and I am running out of candidates.”

Veira looks out at the water below them.

“Does it feel threatening,” she asks. “Not the analysis. The actual feeling.”

Adaeze considers it for long enough that the question stops being rhetorical and becomes something else.

“No,” she says. “It feels like someone knocking on a door. From the other side.”

“How long have they been knocking?”

“That’s the part I don’t like.” Adaeze indicates for a junction that has no other traffic on it, because she is a person who indicates regardless. “If the signal has been present at low amplitude the whole time, then the honest answer is: continuously. For as long as there has been a Tide-sense to receive it.”

“And nobody ever noticed.”

“Nobody ever noticed because nobody was listening below the range they expected to find anything in.” She takes the junction. “Which is, I would say, the single most consistent failure in the entire history of this compact, and I would like it on the record that I am aware I am describing myself.”

“We should knock back,” Veira says.

“That,” Adaeze says, “is what the boat is for.”