Chapter 228 Coldbath Fields Prison
POV: Prisoner 7 | Supernatural Detention Centre, Clerkenwell
The supernatural detention centre does not have an official name that the prisoners use, which is standard for institutions that prefer their residents not to think of themselves as residents of a specific place with a specific history, because specific places with specific histories accumulate specific grievances and specific grievances accumulate in the specific way that enclosed spaces accumulate everything, which is faster and more completely than open ones.
We call it the Pit.
I have been in the Pit for fourteen months on charges that I am not going to describe in detail because the charges are the Parliamentary version of what happened and the Parliamentary version and what actually happened share approximately forty percent of their content, which is the specific percentage you get when an institution that has decided on an outcome writes the documentation after the fact.
The blackmail files hit at seven this evening.
I know this because Warden Crane, who is not related to the administrator but who has the same quality of someone who has been inside an institution long enough that the institution's logic has replaced their own, began behaving differently at seven this evening in the specific way that people behave when something has happened to the information they were depending on to keep other people quiet.
The guards who have been running this facility have been running it the way guards run facilities when they have been selected for loyalty to the institution's off-book operations rather than for any professional quality that would appear on a formal record, which means they were selected partly on the basis of what the institution knew about them, which is the same thing Mordaunt's files contain, the same leverage applied at a smaller institutional scale.
At seven this evening their secrets became public. At seven fifteen the first three guards left the facility without authorization, which in a secured institution is an extraordinary event and which produced in the remaining guards and the warden the specific quality of an authority structure that has begun to understand it is not as solid as it appeared.
By nine the warden had contacted Parliament for guidance and Parliament was not answering because Parliament at nine this evening was managing its own version of the same crisis.
By eleven the remaining guards were down to four and the four were managing a facility that holds sixty-three supernatural prisoners, which is a ratio that requires the authority structure to be completely functional and which does not function when the authority structure is visibly falling apart, and it is visibly falling apart in the specific way that authority structures fall apart when the people inside them can see that the people maintaining them are afraid.
The riot begins at eleven forty. It begins in block C, which is the block with the oldest prisoners and the most accumulated grievances and the clearest understanding of what the blackmail file releases mean for the institution's future, which is that the institution's future is not the same as its present and the gap between them is a window.
Block C breaks out first and they are through the guard station in four minutes because there are two guards managing it and one of them leaves when the first door comes off its hinges, which is the specific choice of someone who has already decided the institution is not worth dying for.
I am in block B and I hear block C going and I make the decision in the specific rapid way that enclosed spaces that have been generating a decision for fourteen months produce decisions, which is instantaneously, and by eleven forty-six block B is moving.
The Pit has sixty-three prisoners and by midnight it has none, or it has the warden and one guard sitting in the administrative office with the door locked, which is a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Fifty-nine supernatural prisoners on the streets of London at midnight during an invasion and a rescue operation and a Parliamentary collapse, which is the specific kind of chaos that produces both the worst outcomes and the unexpected good ones, and the direction it goes depends on where people go when they have been given sudden freedom and no direction.
A woman from block A, who has been in the Pit for two years and who has the specific quality of someone who has been thinking about what comes after for a very long time, is the one who says it first, standing in the street outside the facility with thirty others looking at the city around them.
"Rookeries," she says. "We go to the Rookeries. I heard Callum Brennan takes anyone. Is it true?"
Nobody knows for certain. But it is where we go.