Chapter 193 The Mint
POV: Callum | Vermithrax's territory, Canary Wharf
Vermithrax does not meet in places that belong to other people and the building in Canary Wharf where I am sitting reflects this, which is to say it is enormous and permanent and has the quality of something that was built to outlast whatever temporary arrangements human beings made around it, which is the quality of everything the dragons build.
The meeting was requested two days after the forged scrip crisis began and I accepted because refusing to meet with someone who currently owns forty percent of the land under the Rookeries is a position that requires leverage I do not have.
Vermithrax is not what most people picture when they picture dragons, which is to say the human form he maintains is middle-aged and unremarkable and has the patient quality of someone who has been in the same room as a crisis many times and who has noticed that the crisis always ends and the person who waited longest is usually the one who comes out of it in the best position.
"The counterfeiting is addressed," he says. He says it the way you say something is addressed when you mean you have already addressed it and are reporting a completed action rather than a proposed one. "New scrip is minted, backed by the consolidated hoard, verifiable through three independent authentication methods. Distribution begins tomorrow."
He sets a document on the table between us. It is dense and legal and the relevant clause is on page four, which I find because I have been reading legal documents for three years and I know where the cost lives in documents like this.
The cost is authority. Accepting the new scrip means accepting the dragon syndicate's economic oversight of the supernatural market, transaction records maintained by Vermithrax Consolidated, dispute resolution through dragon arbitration rather than supernatural community process. It is not ownership in the legal sense of the word. It is the thing that makes ownership technical.
"The alternative," Vermithrax says, and he says it with the specific patience of someone who knows the answer but is going to let you arrive at it yourself because arriving at it yourself produces a different kind of acceptance than being told, "is that the supernatural economy continues without a functioning currency for the period it takes another solution to be identified, agreed upon, and implemented."
He lets me do the calculation, which I do, which takes approximately forty seconds and which arrives at the conclusion that the other Alphas in this room with me have already arrived at, because they are all sitting with the expressions of people who have accepted something unpleasant and who are processing what that acceptance means for everything else.
"The stability isn't free," I say.
"Stability is never free," Vermithrax says. "The question is always who pays and in what currency. This currency is oversight. It is not especially expensive in the context of the alternatives."
He is correct. This is the thing about Vermithrax that makes him more difficult than Mordaunt and more difficult than the Covenant, which is that he is usually correct, and being correct from inside an enormous building you own is a position that is very hard to argue against from outside it.
I sign the document. The other Alphas sign. It takes eleven minutes and at the end of it the supernatural economy has a functioning currency again and the dragons have formal economic authority over the market and I am sitting across the table from Vermithrax understanding something that I should have understood before the crisis made it impossible to avoid.
We escaped Parliament control. We spent three years fighting it and dismantling it and building alternatives to it and we escaped it. And then we fell into dragon control, not through violence or coercion or any of the mechanisms the Order used, but through the accumulated logic of a thousand reasonable economic decisions that each made sense in isolation and which led, cumulatively, to this room and this signature and this understanding.
The shape of the trap is always the same. Only the walls change.
I drive back to the Rookeries with the document in my bag and the specific weight of it sitting alongside Tom's dying and the invasion timeline and the thirty-one children in Isla's shelter and the embryo in Fell's facility, and I add it to the list of things I am carrying and I keep moving, because stopping is not an option and hasn't been for three years and I am not sure anymore what stopping would even feel like.