Chapter 272 The Missing Heir
POV: Finn | London streets, Rookeries
I run until the townhouse is not visible anymore, which takes three turns and approximately two minutes at the speed I run, which is fast because running fast is one of the things my body has always done easily in the way that some things are easy before you have been taught them and which just are, and then I slow to the pace of someone who has stopped running from something and who is now simply walking in a direction.
The direction is not specific. This is the first time I have been in London without a specific direction and the first time I have been in London without an adult, and the two things together produce a quality in the streets that the streets did not have before, which is the quality of somewhere that is very large and which does not particularly care that I am in it, the specific quality of a city's indifference to any individual person moving through it.
I know the Rookeries because I have been in it for ten days and I have been paying attention in the specific way that I pay attention to new places, which is comprehensively and with the specific tracking of a person who expects to need the information later, and the tracking has given me a reasonable map of the streets in the section I have been staying in.
The rest of London I do not know.
The streets I am in now are not the Rookeries streets, which I understand from the quality of them rather than from any specific marker, the quality of streets that do not have the specific organization that the Rookeries produces in its streets and which have instead the quality of ordinary London streets at night, which is the quality of a city that is very large and which is operating at the scale of itself rather than at the scale of any person in it.
The seven-year-old logic that produced the decision to run is simple and I am not going to pretend it is not simple, which is that if I am not there then they cannot fight about me, which is the specific logic of someone who has identified themselves as the cause of a problem and who has decided that removing the cause removes the problem.
The problem with this logic, which I am beginning to understand from inside the streets where it has deposited me, is that it requires a destination, and I do not have one, and London at night without a destination and without an adult is a different quality of problem from the one I was trying to solve.
I am hungry, which is the first practical fact, and I am cold, which is the second, and I am in a part of London I do not know, which is the third, and the three practical facts together produce in me the specific quality that I identify as scared, which is different from the adjacent-to-scared quality in Parliament because this one does not have an end point I can see from inside it.
The street wolves find me in the way that I think they have been following me for a while before I notice them, which is the specific quality of being found by people who are good at finding things and who have not announced themselves until they are ready to announce themselves.
There are three of them, packless in the quality that packless wolves have when the packless quality has been long and hard rather than short and manageable, the specific worn quality of people who have been outside the community structures for long enough that the outside is what they know, and they look at me with the assessment of people who have identified something unexpected and who are working out what the unexpected thing means for them.
"That's the heir everyone's fighting over," one of them says. He says it to the other two rather than to me, which is the specific behavior of people who have decided that the subject of a discussion is not a party to the discussion.
I look at them. I am seven years old and I am cold and hungry and I am standing in a street in London that I do not know and I have enough experience with the quality of situations to understand that this one has become something different from the situation I was in ten minutes ago.
The three of them look at each other with the look that passes between people when they are deciding something in the presence of the person the decision concerns, the look that means they are not worried about me hearing them because they have assessed that I am not a party whose hearing changes anything.
"Ransom him," one says.
"Too complicated," another says. "Kill him and the claim dies with him."
"Use him," the third says. "Leverage. Both packs want him. Someone will pay."
I am standing in the street listening to three people discuss what to do with me in the specific calm way that I manage things that are too large for the immediate reaction, which is a quality I have from my father that I did not know I had until this moment, and I am thinking about Ash and Lucia and what comes next.