Chapter 263 Callum's Dilemma
POV: Callum | Rookeries, operational building
The message arrives through Jack's network at two in the afternoon and I read it with the specific quality of someone who has been expecting a version of this for five years and who is discovering that expecting a version of something does not prepare you for the actual version when it arrives, which is always different from the expected one in the specific details that matter.
I have been Alpha for five years. The Rookeries has been autonomous for five years, which is the probation period ending in six weeks with the review coming and which has been the organizing frame of the past half-decade, every decision made with the review in mind, every incident documented and managed and addressed with the specific awareness that the review is the bar and that everything we are is on trial.
Losing the Alpha position six weeks before the probation review is the specific sequence that ends the Rookeries' autonomy, because the probation agreement was with Callum Brennan and the London coalition under his leadership, and a legitimacy hearing that removes Callum Brennan from the Alpha position does not automatically transfer the agreement to his successor, it creates a gap in the agreement's continuity that Parliament will use, which I know because I have read the agreement language sixteen times in the past five years and the gap is real.
If Finn becomes Alpha, which is the outcome the traditionalist faction is building toward, the Rookeries does not continue as autonomous under a seven-year-old child's nominal leadership with traditionalist elders managing his position. The Rookeries continues under those elders' actual management, which is the management that reverses everything the past five years built, the Omega status returning, the hybrid children's legal recognition revoked, the community I have been building for eight years dismantled by the people who opposed it from the beginning and who have now found a mechanism that does not require them to win a fight.
Lucia is in the shelter when I get back, which is where she is most afternoons, with Isla and the children she has grown up alongside, fifteen hybrid children who are between five and seventeen now and who are Lucia's family in the specific sense that children who grow up in the same community are each other's family, and Lucia at five has the quality she has been developing since she was born, which is the quality of something that has not yet fully understood what it is and which is therefore not limited by the understanding.
She sees my face when I come in, which is the specific perception of a five-year-old who has grown up around adults managing things and who has developed the ability to read adult faces accurately, and she crosses the room to me in the specific way she moves, which is directly and without detour.
"Papa, why are people saying you're not supposed to be Alpha?"
I look at her. She is five years old and she has Valentina's eyes and she is asking me a question that does not have a simple answer and which she deserves an honest version of, and I am working out what the honest version looks like in a form that a five-year-old can hold.
"There are some people," I say carefully, "who think that who leads should be decided by who you were born to rather than by what you've done. And they are using an old law to make that argument."
"Is the old law right?"
"I think what you do matters more than who you were born to," I say. "But not everyone agrees."
She looks at me with the expression that is entirely Valentina, the flat assessing quality of someone deciding whether the answer they have received is complete. "Are you going to lose?"
"I don't know yet," I say.
This satisfies her in the way that honest answers satisfy children who have been around enough honesty to recognize it, which is more fully than comfortable answers do, and she goes back to Isla and the children, and I stand in the doorway of the shelter for a moment watching my daughter move through the room and thinking about what the legitimacy hearing means for her specifically, which is that it means the thing Parliament gave her on probation can be taken away by the same institution if the person who built the conditions for it loses his position.
Isla appears at my shoulder in the way she appears at shoulders, which is without announcement. "Talk to Cormac," she says. "Figure this out together."
I know she is right. I am also doing the calculation that I have been doing since the message arrived, which is whether talking to Cormac produces the outcome I need it to produce or whether the traditionalists have already built the mechanism to proceed without Cormac's participation, which is the thing I asked five years ago and which I did not fully understand the answer to until now.
Cormac arrives at the Rookeries at six in the evening, which is four hours after Isla's advice and which means he received the same information I received and which means he came immediately in the way he comes to things that matter now, which is directly.
He comes through the operational building door with the expression that tells me he is managing several things simultaneously and that one of them is something that looks like guilt, which I did not expect and which tells me more than the expression itself.
"I didn't know they were doing this," he says. He says it before he is fully in the room, which is the version of a thing said when the person saying it has been holding it since they found out and needed to release it at the first available moment. "I swear to you. I didn't authorize it and I didn't know it was coming. When I found out I came straight here."
I look at my brother. I look at five years of different choices and the man who refused power when it was offered and who married Moira eleven minutes before a battle and who has been Callum's Beta for five years and who is here, in this room, at six in the evening on the day the summons arrived.
"I'll withdraw Finn's claim," he says. "I'll go to Parliament tomorrow and I'll withdraw it formally and on the record."
I think about what Cormac can do and what the traditionalists can do and what the mechanism looks like when a parent withdraws a claim on behalf of a seven-year-old child who has not yet reached the age of legal self-determination under pack law, and I think about whether withdrawal closes the mechanism or simply removes Cormac from it.
"Can you?" I say. "Or will they use him anyway?"
The room holds the question in the specific way rooms hold questions that do not have clean answers, and Cormac looks at me with the expression of someone who has been thinking about this since six in the morning and who has not yet arrived at an answer that satisfies him.