Page 54 of Legacy Elite

"On its own it's nothing." She squares the papers again. "That's what I need you to understand before I show you the rest, because otherwise you'll get excited about the wrong thing and I'll have to talk you back down."

"I resent that."

"You've been excited about a stone this week."

"It was a nice stone."

She pulls two more sheets out and sets them side by side.

"Here's where he says he's from," she says. "This document. And this one."

They don't match.

"They're different towns," I say.

"Four hundred miles apart. And here—" a third sheet, "—he gives no town at all. Just Europe. Which a clerk would accept, because a clerk did."

"People misremember."

"One different hometown wouldn't bother me. People give the nearest big place. People give where they sailed from instead of where they were born. People say whatever gets the queue moving." Freya taps the stack. "It's the pattern that bothers me. And that's the part I could still argue with you about. This is the part I can't."

She puts down a fourth.

"His marriage record names his father. Here."

"Right."

"His youngest daughter's record, thirty years later, names his father as well. Different name."

I look at the two documents.

I read them twice, because I want to be sure I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at.

"That's not a spelling," I say.

"No."

"That's not — those aren't versions of each other. That's a completely different man."

"Yes," Freya says.

Somewhere down the corridor somebody drops something and swears.

"And the towns?" I say. "The two towns."

"Both exist. Both have surviving records. I've had the archive request back on one and the Council's people have done the other." She looks up at me. "He isn't in either of them. There's no birth. No baptism. No family under any spelling of that name, in either place, in any year that would fit a man who was twenty-three in 1856."

"He's not there."

"He's not anywhere," Freya says. "That's what I've got. Emil exists, completely and coherently, from the moment he steps off that ship. Before it there's nothing that connects to him — no parents I can pin, no parish. Every record after the crossing agrees with every other one. Every record about before the crossing disagrees with something."

I sit down on the edge of the table, which wobbles, because of the index card.

"So he made himself up."

"I didn't say that."

"Freya."