Semua Bab BLOODLINE ZERO: Bab 91 - Bab 97

They call it Braehead.Nell suggests it, in the way that fourteen-year-olds suggest things, which is by saying it once, flatly, in the middle of a conversation about something else, and then refusing to elaborate."That's the name of the place she died," Veira says."I know. That's why.""Nell""You told me the whole thing about Morna. About nobody sitting with her and nobody telling her what she was and her brother going eleven times to an Assembly that wouldn't see him." Nell shrugs, a fourteen-year-old shrug, defensive and absolute. "So call it that. Then nobody gets to forget why we're doing it."Croft, when he is told, goes out of the room for four minutes.The school opens on the eleventh of May in a shooting lodge on the west coast of Sutherland with eleven pupils, four staff, a doctor, and a compact charter that runs to sixty pages, forty of which are consent protocol.It is not a school. It is a farmhouse with too many bedrooms and a wing of bad plumbing, and the first three

The first transfer is not a transfer and it does not happen for eleven months.What happens in the eleven months is Tuesdays.Veira teaches by link from the farmhouse down the coast, four hours a day, and the curriculum she builds is the one she assembled backwards out of eight years of a blurred memory and four days in a bedroom in Cults: how to tell your own feeling from somebody else's arriving through the channel. How to attenuate. How to close, and for how long, and what it costs. How to notice the early signs of overload in yourself, which is the thing that killed Morna Croft and which nobody in 1889 was taught at all.The nineteen-year-old from Cork stops being furious in week seven and becomes, by the following spring, the best teacher in the building.The boy from Valencia's grandmother learns enough English to argue with the doctor.The girl from Kraków is the first to attenuate without being talked through it, in October, and does it in front of the whole room by accident a

The rehearsal is on a Tuesday in March, and it is the most anticlimactic thing anybody in the building has ever witnessed.Nell sits in an armchair in the front room at Braehead with a doctor on one side and Croft on the other and Joon-Ho's monitoring array on a card table, and for four minutes nothing happens, and then she says: "Oh.""Oh what," Croft says."It's just it's a bit more." She frowns. "Like when you're carrying shopping and someone puts another tin in.""Are you in any discomfort.""No. It's fine." She shifts in the chair. "Can I go? Aoife's teaching attenuation at four and she gets annoyed if I'm late."Joon-Ho does not let her go for two hours. The array shows what he later describes as the least dramatic dataset of his professional life: a fifth of a fragment, moved, held, stable.Veira watches it on a laptop from eleven miles away with Adaeze beside her and finds she cannot see the screen properly."It worked," Adaeze says."It worked.""Say it like you believe it."

The committee reports on the Friday and the Assembly convenes on the sixth of April, and Veira is not there.She watches it from the farmhouse on a link Sunnsdottir arranges through a procedural clause nobody has used since 1974, and Sebastien sits beside her for eleven hours and does not once say anything unless she asks him something.Croft opposes the conduit holding the seat. He does it in seven minutes and it is the best speech anybody makes all day and he loses the vote nine to four.Then Veira's written submission is read into the record by the convener, and Solvieg reads all of it, including the last paragraph, which several Elders have plainly not been shown in advance.I decline the seat. I ask the Assembly to create it and leave it vacant until a member of the restored bloodline is of age and willing to hold it. If that takes fifteen years, the vacancy is the accurate record of what was done, and I would ask the Assembly to look at it.There is a silence of about four secon