Lahat ng Kabanata ng BLOODLINE ZERO: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

Emre goes to Ghent in June and sits with Absalom Lieth for four days.He does not expect anything. He says so on the phone to Veira on the first evening, in the flat voice of a man managing an expectation downward before it can damage him."He doesn't know me. He hasn't known anybody since 2013.""Then why four days.""Because he taught me everything and I read something out at his memorial while he was alive and eleven years is a long time." A pause. "And because if there is one lucid hour in a year I would like to be in the chair when it happens."There is no lucid hour.What there is, on the third afternoon, is a photograph album that a nurse brings out because a visitor is the first Absalom Lieth has had in nine years and the staff have decided to be kind.Emre goes through it slowly.Ghent. Lyon. A dog. A conference in the 1980s. And then, on the fourth page from the end, a photograph taken in a garden that Emre recognises immediately because he has walked in it, with a man in hi

Croft approves it on the twenty-ninth day.He does not telephone. He drives to the farmhouse eleven miles down the coast and knocks on the door at seven in the evening with a folder under his arm and rain on his shoulders and says, before Veira has finished opening it:"I want you to read the refusal first."He has written both. Thirty-one pages approving and twenty-six refusing, and he has brought both, and he makes her read the refusal at the kitchen table while he stands at the window with his back to her.It is a good document. It is the best argument against the transfer she has ever seen, better than anything the Assembly produced, better than anything she constructed for herself at three in the morning in February. It cites the eleven names from Utrecht and the four who died before twenty and the fact that no child at Braehead has yet passed the two-year adaptation threshold anybody can point to, because nobody has ever measured one.She finishes it. She sets it down."You coul

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

The programme runs for four years.That is the sentence Veira will use afterwards, when people ask, and it is accurate and it conceals everything, because what four years actually consists of is Tuesdays.Nell takes a full share at seventeen and a second at nineteen and by twenty is carrying more than any of them, and it does not kill her, and by then Joon-Ho has eleven hundred days of monitoring data proving why: gradual, consensual, taught, and above all known the thing that killed the eleven in Utrecht was not the load but the fact that not one of them was ever told what they were holding.Aoife from Cork takes a share at twenty-two and immediately becomes insufferable about it.The girl from Kraków, whose name is Zofia and who did not speak for eleven days in her first month, takes hers at eighteen and then does something none of them anticipated, which is enrol in a medicine degree in Warsaw on the grounds that somebody is going to have to be able to treat this properly in thirty

She tells Nell on the deck as they come back into the fjord, because the boat is loud and the wind takes half of it and it is easier to say difficult things when the weather is doing some of the work."It's happened before," she says. "Three times. Same conversation. Somebody at the end of a channel apologising for closing it.""And it came back.""Every time. Not soon they were very clear about not soon, and their not-soon is not our not-soon." Veira watches the black cliffs go past. "But it's not an ending. I've been carrying it as an ending for a year."Nell is quiet for a while."Can I say something you won't like," she says."You will anyway.""You've been treating this whole thing like you're the last one. Since Aberdeen." Nell has her hands in her pockets and is not looking at her. "Every time you talk about the channel closing you say it like the door's shutting behind you. And there's nine of us and there's a school and there's an empty chair in Geneva that Zofia's going to s