Chapter 265 Finn Arrives in London
POV: Finn | London, Rookeries
London is louder than I expected, which is the first thing I notice when we come off the train at King's Cross and which is the first piece of information I add to the London I have been building in my head from Papa's letters, because the London in Papa's letters is a place of specific people and specific events and specific feelings and none of those things have a sound, and the actual London has sound in a way that Scotland's hills do not, the specific compressed quality of very many people in a small space all making noise simultaneously.
Mama has my hand and I have my bag and Papa is on my other side and the three of us are walking through King's Cross with the quality that my parents have when they are in a complicated situation, which is the quality of adults managing something that they have decided I do not need to manage with them, and I have been noticing this quality in them for two days and I have decided that asking about it is less useful than watching, because watching usually tells me more than asking does when adults are in complicated situations.
I am seven years old and I have been in Scotland my whole life and I know hills and I know the community there and I know the specific weight of the transformations that started when I was six, which was the thing that changed the quality of my body's relationship with itself, the specific recognition of something that had been there all along but which was now available rather than just present.
Papa says London is where I come from, which is true in the way that places you were born in are where you come from even if you did not stay there, and I have been thinking about London the way I think about things I know from letters, which is as a collection of true facts that have not yet become real.
The Rookeries is where the collection of true facts starts becoming real.
I know the Rookeries from Papa's letters the way I know everything in those letters, which is thoroughly and in detail and in the specific order that things were told to me, and the Rookeries in person has the quality of a place that is exactly what you expected and also different in all the ways that in-person always differs from description, the scale and the smell and the specific quality of the people in the streets, who have the quality of people who are busy with things that matter to them, which is a different quality from people who are going through motions.
Uncle Callum is in the operational building when we arrive.
He is taller than I expected from the letters, which tells me that the letter version of people and the in-person version are not identical even when you have been reading the letters very carefully, and he looks at me with the expression that I did not expect and which I did not have a word for until I saw it, which is the expression of someone who has been waiting for something for a long time and who is now receiving it and who does not know exactly what to do with the receiving.
"Papa says you're the strongest wolf in London," I say, because this is true and it seems relevant and I want him to know that I know it.
He laughs, which is not a response I expected, and the laugh is real in the way that surprised laughs are real, and something about the laugh makes the room feel like a room where normal things happen rather than a room where complicated adult things happen, and I find that I like it.
"Papa says a lot of things," he says.
"Most of them are true," I say, which is also true.
Lucia comes through the door seventeen seconds after I arrive in the building, which I know because I counted, which I do when I am in new places, because counting things gives me something to do with the part of my mind that processes information while the rest of it is doing something else.
She is five and she has dark hair and she looks at me with the assessment of a five-year-old who has decided that assessment is required before anything else happens, and the assessment lasts approximately four seconds before she says: "You want to see the shelter?"
"Yes," I say, because I do.
We spend the next two hours in the shelter, which has fifteen hybrid children in it and which is Isla's domain and which has the quality of a place that has been made safe by someone who understands what safe requires and who provided it, and Lucia moves through it with the quality of someone who has always been here, which she has, which makes it the first place in London where the in-person version matches the letter version exactly.
The elder MacCorr finds me in the shelter courtyard at the end of the afternoon, when Lucia has gone inside and I am sitting on the wall watching the London sky, which is a different colour from the Scotland sky in a way I cannot fully describe but which is real.
He sits beside me and he has the quality that the Scottish elders have, which is the quality of someone who is about to tell you something important in the way that adults tell children things they have decided the child needs to know.
"You're going to be Alpha," he says. "Just like your grandfather."
I look at the London sky and I think about Alpha, which is a word I know and which contains things I do not fully know yet, the things underneath the word that Papa never fully explained in the letters.
"Really?" I say, because the idea is new in this specific form and because I want to understand it. "Like Papa was?"
MacCorr smiles.