Chapter 294 Desperate Measures
POV: Callum | London, various locations
The forty-eight hours begins at midnight on Monday and ends at midnight on Wednesday and I spend the daylight hours of Tuesday exhausting every option I can identify in the specific order that a person works through options when they know the options are insufficient but which require attempting anyway, because not attempting them produces the specific outcome of accepting Mordaunt's terms without having demonstrated that they could not be avoided, and I am not willing to accept that without the demonstration.
Parliament first, which is the option that has the most institutional legitimacy and which has the least practical likelihood, and I know this before I make the call to Alteroni but I make it anyway because Alteroni's attempt is worth something even when the attempt fails.
Alteroni reaches out to three undecided Parliament members and to Ashford and to Elena within the hour, the speed of a person who understood the urgency when I explained it and who has been managing financial crises in political spaces long enough to know how to move. The responses come in over the next two hours and they have in common the specific quality of people who are genuinely sympathetic and who are also blocked by the specific mechanism that the traditionalist faction has been using effectively for years, which is the blocking of any financial mechanism that would benefit the Rookeries directly and which is fast enough on this occasion that the block is in place before the proposal is fully formed.
Denied. Two hours, the fastest the loan process has ever been resolved in either direction.
Community fundraising is the second attempt, which I approach through the Rookeries network and through True Pack's network simultaneously, which is the first financial request that has crossed the truce and which produces in both communities the specific response of people who want to help and who have the resources that a community of three hundred and twenty wolves and one hundred and twenty traditional wolves has, which is the resources that the community has been building from and which are not nothing and which are not two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
Thirty thousand pounds in the specific four hours that I give to the fundraising effort before the hour-count of the forty-eight makes the fundraising no longer the most useful use of the remaining hours, which is the specific math of thirty thousand against two hundred and fifty thousand telling me that the fundraising's contribution is real and insufficient.
Selling territory is the third option and I spend ninety minutes on it, which is the time it takes to contact three parties who have expressed interest in acquiring territory and to hear the specific terms that those parties offer, which in each case involve the full control provision that makes the sale a loss of the community rather than a financial transaction, the land going and the community's presence in it going with it because land without the ability to determine its use is not the kind of land that sustains a community.
The dragon heist is not a formal option and I dismiss it in the time it takes to assess it, which is thirty seconds and which produces the assessment that going against Vermithrax's hoard with whatever force the Rookeries could assemble in the remaining hours would produce a body count and a foreclosure rather than a solution.
The American pack loan arrives as an option through a contact in Jax's network who has been aware of the dragon debt situation and who reaches out with the timing of someone who has been waiting for this specific moment, and the terms when I receive them are worse than Mordaunt's in the specific way that foreign pack terms have always been worse, which is that the price is territorial rather than political, South London rather than a non-hostile statement, and territorial prices have a different kind of permanence from political ones.
I spend the night of Tuesday in the operational building going through everything else I can think of and arriving at the end of it at three in the morning with the specific quality of someone who has reached the end of the options and who knows what reaching the end means.
Thirty thousand of the two hundred and fifty thousand. Twenty-four hours left of the forty-eight. The sanctuary has the quality it always has in the early morning, the children beginning to move through their morning routines with the specific ordinary quality of people who do not know what the adults are managing on their behalf.
The youngest Manchester child, Pip, comes into the operational building where I am sitting at four in the morning with the quality of a child who woke up and found the person she trusts not in the expected location and who has come to find them.
She looks at me with the four-year-old assessment of a child who has learned to read adults accurately because reading them accurately was once a survival skill.
"Are we moving?" she says. "Where will we go?"
I look at her in the early morning of the operational building and I think about Mordaunt in the Bermondsey pub and about twenty-four hours and two hundred and twenty thousand pounds that I do not have.