Chapter 213 The Examination at the Home Office
POV: Alteroni | Parliament interior, emergency chamber
I have been in this building for two hundred years and in those two hundred years I have argued in every chamber it contains and I have won most of those arguments and I have lost some of them and I have learned, over two hundred years, the specific difference between an argument that is about persuasion and an argument that is about record, which is the difference between trying to change the outcome and trying to document that you tried.
Today I am trying both and I am going to fail at the first one and I already know it and I am arguing anyway because the record matters even when the outcome does not change, because the record is what remains when everything else is over, and I intend the record to be unambiguous about where I stood.
The chamber is the secondary session room, smaller than the main hall, which is where emergency appeals are heard before full Parliament votes. Mordaunt is across the table with four of his bloc and I have Isolde's empty chair beside me, because Isolde is not here, because Isolde has done the thing she told me she was sorry about and I have accepted it and put it where I put things that are true and that I cannot change.
I lay the legal precedents on the table one by one.
Parliament vs. Ashford, 1887, in which a vampire sentenced to execution had the execution stayed pending review of evidence quality. The evidence in Valentina's case is documented but contextual, acts committed during flight from lawful enforcement, which is a mitigating circumstance the 1887 precedent specifically addresses.
Parliament vs. Hargrove, 1923, in which species mixing was found to be insufficient grounds for treason charges without evidence of active harm to the vampire community, which Valentina's alliances do not constitute under the standard the 1923 ruling established.
Parliament's own mercy protocol from 1956, which allows for commutation of execution to exile in cases where the condemned demonstrates community contribution of sufficient weight, which thirty-one hybrid children alive and receiving care in a Rookeries shelter would appear to constitute.
Mordaunt looks at the precedents with the specific quality of attention he gives to things he has already addressed. He has addressed them. I know this because the counterarguments arrive with the precision of someone who prepared them before the meeting, which means he expected exactly this and prepared for it, which means my surprise was the variable he was counting on not being a variable.
"The 1887 stay applied to disputed evidence," he says. "The evidence here is not disputed. Callum Brennan's own people documented the hunter deaths during the first year of the conflict. The species treason charge requires no additional evidence. Parliament's own records show the alliances."
"Survival," I say. "Every item in that record is survival."
"The law does not accommodate survival as a defense for killing enforcement officers," he says. "We have had this conversation."
"This is murder disguised as justice," I say, and I say it clearly and without softening because the record is the point and I want the record to be clear. "This institution is using legal mechanisms to execute a person whose crime is refusing to be destroyed by us. I am stating that for the record. I want every word of this session documented."
"It will be documented," Mordaunt says. "Including your position. Which is noted."
The vote is nine to three. Two of my usual four have found reasons not to attend, which are reasons I can guess at and which are reasons I cannot address from inside this session.
I have one card left and I know what playing it will cost and I play it because the alternative is letting this proceed without trying everything, and I cannot do that.
"I will release the blackmail files," I say. "All of them. Every piece of leverage you have used to control this institution for thirty years. Names, dates, correspondence, payments. All of it, publicly, through every channel I have access to."
The room is very quiet for a moment.
Mordaunt looks at me with the expression he has when something is landing differently than the person delivering it expects, and I realize in the moment of his looking that he knows I do not actually have the files, that Violette took them to Jack, that I have the threat but not the instrument, and he knows this and I know he knows this and the bluff has a lifespan of approximately ten seconds.
"Then you die too," he says, quietly, in the tone of someone who is not performing a threat but stating a fact. "I have what I need on you as well. Choose."
I sit with the choice for the time it takes to understand that there is not actually a choice, that the choice I am being offered is between doing nothing and destroying myself while also doing nothing, and that the record, the record I am making right now in this room, is the only thing that will survive this session intact.
I keep the files. The execution proceeds. I hate myself in the specific clean way that comes from having made the right calculation and knowing that the right calculation was also the wrong thing.