Page 106 of Legacy Elite

"I'll take marginally."

My phone goes at eight minutes past two.

It's an academy notice, forwarded from the Chancellor's office, and the subject line is nine words long.

Notification: Fourth House lineage — confirmation of surviving royal descent.

I read it twice.

And then, across the room, Luke's phone goes.

He takes it out. Looks at the screen. And I watch every single thing drain out of his face.

"That's my father," he says.

Soren's phone goes.

He looks at it and doesn't answer it.

Then Ander's starts, face-up on the windowsill where he put it down, buzzing against the paint.

"Well," I say. "That's probably fine."

Nobody laughs.

Chapter fourteen

Jessica

"—cannot simply be extinct," somebody is saying, "when the descendant is sitting in the room."

"That is precisely the confusion I'm trying to prevent," Hallam says. "The House was not extinguished because the family died. The family dying was the occasion. The extinguishment was an instrument. There is a document. It has a date on it."

"She isn't a document, she's—"

"She is a person," Hallam says, "and the House is a thing, and I would be grateful if this chamber could hold the two apart for ninety consecutive seconds."

I've been here forty minutes.

Yesterday I was Jessica Miller. Today, apparently, I'm a constitutional loophole.

They've got the room set up differently — a long table instead of the benches, twelve people instead of thirty, and me in a chair at the end rather than one in the middle, which somebody has decided is an improvement and which I'm choosing to accept as one.

Wren chairs. Falken's beside me. Faris is three seats down with a folder she keeps closing and reopening. And halfway along on the far side, in a coat that costs more than my education, is Caspian Ardent, who has said almost nothing for half an hour and has been listening to every word.

"Let's take them separately," Wren says. "Descent."

"Established," Faris says. "I'll say that once and then I'd like it left alone. The evidence meets the historical standard. I was the last person in this process to accept it and I accept it."

"Thank you. Institution."

And they're off again.

The argument, as far as I can follow it, comes down to whether the instrument recorded something or created it. One side says the House was ended in fact — everyone died, the lands went, the name went — and the paperwork was only writing that down. Reality's changed; the paperwork no longer describes anything true; the House is dormant, not dead. The other side says that isn't how law works, that a thing formally ended does not un-end itself because a descendant turns up two centuries later with an unusual medical history.

Nobody has said medical history out loud. That's my contribution.

Then standing, which is worse, because the Fourth House held representation and that representation is simply gone — and not one person at this table can tell me whether it was abolished, or lapsed, or was just never re-allocated because there was nobody left to allocate it to.