Chapter 274 The Probation Review
POV: Alteroni | Parliament chamber, hybrid status hearing
The five-year probation period ended three weeks ago, which is the specific timing that the summit agreement mandated and which I have been tracking since the agreement was signed the way you track something whose arrival determines everything, and the review that was always coming has arrived earlier than the scheduled date because events produced an emergency session, which is the specific Parliamentary mechanism for responding to things that cannot wait for the scheduled version.
The emergency was Lucia's street transformation, which is documented in seventeen separate witness accounts that arrived through various channels over the forty-eight hours following the event, and the witness accounts have the specific quality that witness accounts of supernatural events have, which is that they are accurate about what happened and wildly varied about what the happening means, the facts consistent and the interpretations covering the full range of possible interpretations between them.
The chamber has been set for a hearing rather than a session, which is the formal adjudicatory arrangement, and the question before the hearing is the one that the probation period was always building toward, which is whether hybrid children in London's supernatural community receive permanent legal recognition or whether the recognition is revoked, and the specific urgency the emergency session adds is that the question must be answered now rather than in the comfortable future that scheduled reviews inhabit.
The evidence presentation takes four hours, which is the time required to do it properly, and doing it properly is the only thing I have been focused on for the past week because the alternative to doing it properly is the specific outcome that doing it improperly produces, which is that the traditionalist faction's evidence lands in the vacuum that insufficient preparation creates and which is more persuasive in that vacuum than it deserves to be.
The evidence for the hybrid children's recognition is Isla's five-year medical record of all fifteen children, which is the most comprehensive documentation of supernatural hybrid development that has ever been compiled because there was no previous subject population to compile it from, and which shows five years of improvement in every metric the review committee specified at the probation's start, the children's physical health improving, their ability management improving, their community integration improving, the specific trajectory of a group of people who were badly damaged and who have been healing.
I present this evidence with the specific attention to sequence that evidence presenting requires, the general trends before the individual cases, the individual cases building from the most straightforward to the most complex, and the most complex is Estella's feral episode three years ago and Lucia's transformation last week, which I present in the full context of what produced them, which is the specific context of a thirteen-year-old who had been in a facility for three years and a five-year-old whose powers had never been documented before and who was responding to a genuine threat to someone she was protecting.
The evidence against is presented by Ravenscroft, which is the choice the traditionalist faction made and which is the choice that tells me they have been preparing this presentation for at least a year, the documentation of every incident involving hybrid children in the past five years compiled and framed in the specific way that incidents are framed when the framing is designed to produce a particular conclusion, which is that hybrid children are unpredictable, ungovernable, and dangerous.
"Abominations," Ravenscroft says, at the conclusion of his presentation, and he says it with the specific flat quality of someone who considers the word accurate rather than inflammatory, the quality of someone who has been using this word in private for five years and who is now using it in the chamber where it can be recorded. "The experiment should end."
"They are children," I say, when the floor is mine. "Give them more time."
The vote is called at the end of the afternoon, when the chamber has heard everything there is to hear and when the twelve members have been sitting with the evidence for three hours and when the positions, which were established before the evidence was presented and which the evidence adjusted only at the margins, are ready to be stated.
Six to six.
The tie sits in the chamber with the specific quality of an outcome that everyone present knew was possible and which has arrived anyway with the weight of something that changes the situation, because a tie is not a decision and the probation period has ended and the children need a decision and the tie means the decision depends on a single vote.
The new Parliament member, who was elected in the fourth succession seat last year after eighteen months of contested process, is Lady Ashford, who accepted Alteroni's backing after a long negotiation that produced specific commitments and who has been, in the year since her election, the specific kind of Parliament member that nine-hundred-year-old neutral Ancients are, which is present and careful and uncommitted on the things that require commitment from a member who has been in institutions long enough to understand what commitment costs.
She is looking at the chamber. The chamber is looking at her.
The deciding vote is hers.