Chapter 130 The Fall
ERIC
I've been Tom's friend for years, since long before the Rookeries and the resistance and all of it. That friendship is one of the few things I've had that felt solid and real.
The other thing I had was money, and now I don't have that anymore.
The battle took everything. My income, my savings, whatever fragile sense of financial security I'd managed to build. I'm surviving on community charity now, on handouts, on the particular kind of quiet pity that people give you when they feel bad for you but don't want to make it awkward. It's humiliating in a way that gets under your skin and sits there, festering.
That's when the offer comes, passed through an intermediary, from an anonymous contact with very generous terms.
"We need information about Callum's crew. Activities, plans, decisions. Nothing dangerous, just observation. And we pay well."
"How well?"
"Five thousand pounds upfront, plus five hundred a month for ongoing reports. More if the information proves particularly valuable."
Five thousand pounds. I sit with that number for a moment. That's six months of survival, six months of not relying on other people's generosity, six months of being a person instead of a charity case.
"What kind of information?"
"Financial status. Decision-making processes. Internal conflicts. Resource allocation. Leadership vulnerabilities. Everyday details that help inform a broader understanding of the group."
"You want me to spy on my friends."
"We want you to observe your community. That's a different concept entirely. You're not betraying anyone. You're just reporting on activities that happen regardless of whether you're watching. You might as well profit from it."
I should refuse. I should tell them exactly where they can put their offer and then go straight to Callum and report the whole conversation. I know that's what I should do.
I don't do it.
"I need to think about it," I say instead.
"You have twenty-four hours. After that we find a different source, a different friend, a different person willing to do what you won't."
That last part lands harder than it should. Because they're right, aren't they? If I say no, someone else says yes. Someone else gets the money. Someone else observes the same things I would have observed. The information flows either way, so it might as well flow from me, and the money might as well be mine.
I accept. I take the money and I start reporting.
The first report is easy to justify: Callum rejected the dragon's offer initially, and the crew is financially vulnerable. Everyone knows Callum rejected the dragon's offer. It's practically public knowledge. I'm just writing down what anyone paying attention could already see.
The second report feels the same way: Isla manages the finances, she's meticulous about it, she controls all the accounts and would be very difficult to bribe. Common knowledge. Observable by anyone.
The third report is where things start to shift. Tom is still recovering from magic overuse, his powers sitting at roughly seventy percent, his defensive capabilities reduced. That's going to be true for another three weeks or so. I tell myself it's still factual, still observable, still not really a secret. But I know that's not quite true anymore.
The fourth report takes me somewhere I can't pretend my way out of. Valentina is struggling with the vampire transformation, the blood hunger causing real problems, and she's refusing support from vampire society and isolating herself. That's personal. That's private. That's something she hasn't chosen to share with people outside her closest circle. But they're paying me five hundred pounds for this report, and five hundred pounds is rent and food and the ability to look people in the eye for another month.
The fifth report is the one I can't justify at all, not even to myself in the dark at three in the morning. Callum has been meeting with Cormac privately, discussing some kind of tentative reconciliation, and the crew doesn't know the details. Callum is keeping secrets, and internal trust issues are developing because of it. This information could genuinely get him killed. I know that. I send it anyway.
By then I'm too deep to stop, and I know I'm too deep to stop, and so I keep going because what else is there to do. I keep reporting and I keep betraying and I keep telling myself the stories that make it survivable.
The money is necessary. I'm not responsible for what they do with information I provide. I'm just surviving, and everyone does what they have to do to survive. If I wasn't doing this, someone else would be. I'm not a traitor, I'm an observer, and observation isn't treason.
The excuses pile up easily once you start making them. The justifications multiply. Rationalization, it turns out, is one of those skills that gets stronger the more you use it.
The money keeps coming too. Five hundred pounds monthly, sometimes bonuses, sometimes special requests worth much more. And I am absolutely a traitor. I know that. I've known it since at least the third report, probably earlier if I'm being honest with myself. But knowing it and stopping it are two entirely different things, and I seem to be capable of the first without being capable of the second.
Sixth report: Callum is taking Vermithrax's ultimatum seriously, the crew is divided, the financial pressure is becoming overwhelming, and a decision is expected within the week. High-value intelligence, I note, because I've apparently started categorizing my betrayals by their market value.
I send it to Mordaunt through intermediaries and encrypted channels, and I tell myself the anonymity means something. It doesn't. Mordaunt knows exactly who I am. He's always known. That's how these arrangements work, and somewhere in the back of my mind I understood that from the beginning.
"Excellent work," the response comes back. "Your next payment: two thousand pounds. Keep reporting."
Two thousand pounds. I deposit it and I spend it and I live on it, and every single day I hate myself with a thoroughness and consistency that I almost have to admire. But not enough to stop. Never quite enough to stop, because stopping means going back to poverty and hunger and being the person everyone feels quietly sorry for, and I have decided, apparently, that I cannot afford my own integrity.
That is the thing about this kind of fall. It doesn't happen all at once. There's no single moment where you choose to become a traitor and cross some clear, visible line. It happens one small compromise at a time, one payment at a time, one report at a time, each one a little worse than the last, until you look back and realize you can't see where you started from anymore. You're just here, in this, and the way out requires losing everything you sold yourself to keep.
So I keep reporting. Because stopping means poverty. Because I've told myself that survival is the only thing that matters, and I've been telling myself that long enough that I've started to believe it.
Even when survival is the only thing I have left.