Page 36 of Legacy Elite

Well. Fuck.

Chapter five

Jessica

The room is round, and I hate that immediately.

Square rooms have a back. You can put yourself against a wall in a square room. This is a ring of tiered benches in dark wood going most of the way up, a gap at the front where the doors are, and one chair on the floor in the middle of it.

Guess whose chair.

"Breathe," Falken says beside me.

"I'm breathing."

"You're holding it."

I let it out. It shakes on the way. I would appreciate it if nobody noticed.

Maybe thirty people up in the benches. About a third are staff — laptops, and the faces of people who have sat through nine hundred of these and would like a sandwich. The rest are older, better dressed, and looking at me the way you look at a delivery you didn't order.

Three sections. Three Houses. Nobody has to tell me which is which.

There's a woman on the Draeven bench who listens with her head tipped exactly the way Luke does, and it takes about four seconds off my life.

The Soren bench has a man on it built like a mountain.

The Ardent bench all looks way too serious.

"Miss Miller." A woman near the front stands. Sixties, grey suit, a folder she doesn't open. "I'm Councillor Wren. I chair. Please sit."

I sit. Falken sits behind me.

"Before we start. You're not here to prove anything. Nothing said in this room creates a legal fact. We're clarifying the record." She looks at me over the folder. "Questions?"

"About forty."

Somebody laughs. Wren doesn't, but she looks close.

"Hold them," she says.

Then they start on my grandparents.

It takes about an hour.

A man with a laptop reads questions off a list. I answer. Somebody types. Every so often Wren says for the record and repeats what I've already said in better grammar.

Where was I born. Which hospital. My parents' full names. Where they grew up. Where their parents grew up.

What do I know about my great-grandparents.

Almost nothing. Two names and a photograph.

Did either of my parents show unusual strength. Unusual healing. Unusual senses.

No. My dad couldn't find his own glasses on his own head.

"Did anyone in your family ever shift?"