Page 100 of Legacy Elite

"I think it's Emil."

"But you can't prove it."

"I can prove a young man was born into that household. I can prove he disappears. I can prove a man with the same given name, age and place of birth appears on a passenger record shortly afterward under a surname close enough that I would normally blame the clerk and move on with my life."

"And then?"

"Then he crosses an ocean." She taps the next sheet. "And eventually we get Miller."

I sit back.

"Is that it? Is that the whole thing? Is that finished?"

"No," Faris says.

Everyone looks at her.

"There are two links in that chain I would not defend in front of a hostile audience."

Hess nods once.

"The first is at the top," Faris says. "That registration proves a seven-year-old girl was moved, hidden and raised under a false name by someone attached to the household. It does not prove she is the missing daughter from the inventory. The age fits. The timing fits. The circumstances fit. That is not the same thing as a document naming her."

"Okay."

"The second is Emil. Professor Hess has built an excellent argument that the young man who disappears from that household is the same man who appears in the passenger record and ultimately becomes part of the Miller line. But there is no single document connecting those identities."

"So we've got a hole at each end."

"Not holes." Hess sounds offended.

Faris glances at her. "Soft joints."

"I'll accept soft joints."

"Everything between them," Faris continues, "is remarkably well documented. More importantly, Professor Hess has not simply established a path from the child to you. She has accounted for the other branches created along the way. None produces a surviving line that we can identify beyond the nineteenth century."

"Meaning I'm the only one."

"The only living descendant we've found," Hess says. "I will not tell you there is no undocumented child, no missing marriage, no person who crossed a border and changed a name two hundred years ago. Records do not permit that kind of certainty."

Of course they don't.

"But," she says, "we followed every documented branch. Yours is the only one that survives."

"Right."

Faris takes her glasses off.

"I said essentially the same thing in this office the day you shifted. I've been saying it ever since, and I've been correct every time. It has not made me popular, and I did not expect it to."

She sets her glasses on the table.

"So I want to be extremely clear about what changes my position."

"Which is what?"

"You."