Shawn POV:
London wore its rain like an old habit; that thin, persistent, a chill that soaked through the collar and into the bones. It wasn't a battlefield's storm. No smoke, no shrapnel, no alarms. Just the steady damp of a city that had outlived empires and would probably outlive us all.
We arrived at Whitehall in a convoy that moved too slow for my nerves. The Thorns sat quiet around me. Virginia kept smoothing the edge of her sleeve like it might wrinkle wrong. Spencer was reading a docket of briefings so fast his eyes had gone hard. Felix kept whisper-counting breaths, a trick he picked up from me without knowing it. Sonya had that look she got before bad surgeries, the one that said she'd do it perfectly and hate every second.
Outside the barricades, people watched. Some waved tiny flags. Some held signs. NO RIGHTS FOR ROBOTS.HUMAN JOBS FIRST. A woman about my mother's age stood in the rain with no umbrella, clutching a photo to her chest. I didn't have to see the face to know what it was.
"Eyes front," I said gently, and the Thorns looked away because they trusted me, not because they didn't care.
Inside the entrance, Adawe met me with a nod sharp enough to cut. "This is not a saber day, Staff Sergeant," she said under her breath. "It's a scalpel day. Clear margins. Precise language. And if you nick an artery, London hemorrhages on live broadcast."
"Understood," I said, though my pulse didn't agree.
She studied me a moment longer, the way a good surgeon checks the instruments before the incision. "Your month wasn't punishment only," she said. "It was training. It ends when you prove you learned something."
We walked into the chamber together.
The hall was a hybrid of old and not-yet. Marble patched with scaffolding. Portraits dark with soot, beside brand-new screens throwing blue light across the benches. On one side: MPs, ministers, staffers in damp wool coats. On the other: omnic representatives standing with hands folded, their optics dimmed as if the room itself might punish brightness.
The Prime Minister stood at the front beneath two flags. Union Jack, Overwatch. She didn't smile when she greeted Adawe. No one smiled. This was not a smiling day.
She opened with the kind of speech I'd heard after too many disasters. Numbers first, to scrub the pain. "Housing losses in the millions. Public works decimated. Food insecurity, inflation, displaced families." She let the list go on until it stopped sounding like people and started sounding like a ledger. Then she pivoted.
"And now," she said, "we are asked, by the international community and by Overwatch, to divert scarce resources to the care and shelter of omnics. Machines."
A single word shouldn't sting, but it did.
She gestured to the omnic delegation. "They do not eat. They do not catch cold. Why must we house them in human neighborhoods, when human children sleep under tarps?"
A rumble of approval rolled through the benches. The cameras turned to catch it.
Adawe stepped forward, crisp. "Overwatch's mandate is to safeguard life and prevent the conditions that breed conflict. We are here to propose an answer that recognizes both your constraints and your obligations."
Then she looked at me. "Staff Sergeant Rose."
My boots sounded too loud crossing the floor. I could feel the Thorns behind me like a second spine. The omnic delegates watched without moving. The human benches leaned forward as if we were about to fight and they couldn't look away.
"Prime Minister," I said, "Ministers. I've carried your wounded. I've carried their wounded." I nodded toward the omnics. "I've watched a human die with an omnic's hands on his chest, trying to keep his heart beating. I've watched an omnic die with a human's hands around his..." I stopped, swallowed. "Shoulders."
I could feel Adawe's warning in my ribs: be precise. Clear margins.
"If we pretend omnics are not in need because their needs don't look like ours, we will repeat the cruelty that let this war be born. They need shelter from weather they don't feel because they need safety from us. They need space to build because the spaces they had are now rubble. The question isn't whether their needs are identical. It's whether we intend to make enemies out of those who don't have a place to stand."
An MP stood so abruptly his chair screeched. "Where, then?" he snapped. "We're to put them in Hackney? In Croydon? Will you house them next to our children?"
He thought he'd cornered me. He'd forgotten I'd been cornered by worse.
"No," I said. "Don't scatter them where fear will chase them out again. Give them a district. Not a pen. A place. Recognized by law. Protected. Let them build it themselves with support. Britain has a city beneath the city. Tunnels, stations, caverns. We've used them to hide from bombs before. Use them to build a future now."
The chamber rustled. I could see minds shifting gears. I could see others slamming them harder, refusing to move at all.
"You want to hand them the Underground?" another MP said incredulously.
"I want you to hand them dignity," I said, heat creeping into my voice despite myself. "Call it what you like. The name can come later. But if you want quiet streets, if you want no more bricks thrown, if you want children not to learn hate at breakfast, give the omnics a home they can point to and say, 'We belong there.'"
A minister across the aisle raised a finger. "And when they congregate there and decide to rise up?"
The room changed temperature. That word. Rise. It set blood to simmer.
I breathed once. Twice. Third time for luck. "They won't," I said, and I hated the certainty in my mouth because certainty is for fools. "They won't, if we build it right. If the law recognizes their citizenship where appropriate, their rights of movement, their right to work. If the enclave isn't a cage but a neighborhood. If we put clinics there, and schools, and..."
"Schools," someone repeated, half appalled.
"...education stations," I corrected smoothly. "Technical academies. Certification pathways so they can take up reconstruction jobs without becoming the black market's next commodity. My medics will set up triage centers immediately. Overwatch engineers can draw the first grid tonight."
An omnic elder stepped forward, slow from age or damage. Her plating had been patched with three different alloys. The effect should have been ugly; it looked like a history as honest as any scar. When she spoke, her voice rasped like a record played too often.
"We do not ask to be near your children," she said. "Only not to be stoned by them. Give us a place and we will build it, we will keep it, we will pay for the light we use. We will mend the tunnels you have abandoned. We will fix the pumps you cannot staff. Let us help you. The world has broken both our backs."
Silence let itself in and took a seat.
The Prime Minister's eyes went from me to Adawe, then to the cameras, calculating. Leadership is math in public. "We will not starve our citizens to shelter machines," she said at last, firm for posterity. Then: "But we also will not plant the next war. Overwatch's proposal has merit. I will authorize a limited pilot: redevelopment of specific Underground segments into a regulated enclave, with governance to be determined, and security oversight shared. Construction to begin at once."
"Name it," someone shouted from the benches, and I couldn't tell if they were mocking or moved.
"Names come later," the Prime Minister said. "Hammers first."
Adawe inclined her head. "Overwatch will coordinate a joint taskforce with engineering, medical, and legal."
She didn't look at me, but I could feel her approval like a small, measured warmth. The kind she gave out only when it mattered. My month had taught me that much.
We descended before nightfall.
The air of the tunnels tasted like damp brick, old iron, and electricity that had remembered once being young. Our lights made cones in the dark, cutting through to abandoned platforms sprayed with faded ads for shows that never reopened. The Thorns moved like they always did, fast, competent, part of me without being me.
"Power bus here," Spencer called, tapping a conduit with his knuckles. "Could be live if we backfeed from the surface."
"Mark it," Virginia said, already chalking a line for an eventual clinic that only existed in her head and on her hands. "Triage along this wall. I want a med station per twenty cots. No...per fifteen."
Marco set a laser level and grinned up at the emptiness. "She's a crooked old thing, but she'll stand." He looked at me. "You naming it or is that above our pay grade?"
"Way above," I said. "But you can start a list."
Felix and Sonya hauled crates. Steve and Dwayne unspooled cabling and argued about endpoints as if the cable would listen. Leslie moved like a ghost between them, placing small signs with symbols that weren't words yet but would be soon: a stylized circle for chargers, a square for rest, a cross for clinic, a triangle for water.
Omnics joined us in a trickle that became a stream. Some came shyly, hands tucked close, optics dimmed. Others moved straight to work without greeting, as if conversation were a luxury we couldn't afford yet. A few carried tools from the old world, spanners and soldering irons, and one carried a children's lunchbox repurposed into a toolkit, pink and dented, stickers half-scraped. Hope sees the stupidest things and believes them.
I moved, as always, to the pain.
An omnic sat by a column with one leg severed below the knee, balance algorithm fighting a losing war. "Permission," I said, kneeling. "I can try."
"Permission granted," they said, voice clipped, polite.
I pressed my palm to the cold edge where plating became air. The electricity came up through me like a second pulse, blue, bright, familiar as fear and twice as useful. While omnics were believed to not feel pain, there were times where they would look, and you would swear they could. You could see the relief that flashed through their optics as I bandaged their leg back into one piece.
"You are in distress," they said, reading nothing but my stupid body.
"I'm always in distress," I said, and they made a soft sound that wasn't quite a laugh but wasn't not.
By midnight we had lights, not pretty but sure. By one we had a water line that groaned when we tested it and then, like an old man embarrassed to be seen, ran steadily. By two we had our first "street", chalk lines that mapped where walls might rise. A child, human, wandered in from the surface with a pack of biscuits and solemnly handed one to every omnic who would take it. "You can't eat those," Felix told her, and she shrugged like he'd missed the point.
Near three a small crowd gathered at the tunnel mouth. Not curious. Angry. Protest signs, a drum, a dozen phones to film anything that could be spun into a clip. Security had established a perimeter, but perimeters had been ideas I bled on for too long to trust them now.
"I'll go," I told Spencer before he could volunteer, because this was mine.
I went up the steps into the mist and faced the kind of storm that never needed clouds. There were slogans ready on tongues. Some I'd heard. Some had new sharp edges honed by grief. A man near the front jabbed a finger at me so close I could have bitten it.
"My brother died at Tower Bridge," he said. "Tell me why I should lose my taxes so a toaster has a bedroom."
Under other circumstances I might have kept my temper like a delicate instrument. Tonight I let him see the crack and hoped he'd respect it more. "Because your brother died for a world that doesn't keep making new enemies," I said. "Because the fastest way to ensure your kids keep fighting is to make sure someone else's can never live. Because if you want me to tell you your pain matters, you have to say theirs does too. That's how grown-ups end wars."
"Grown-ups," he repeated, like he hadn't been one in months and it sounded far away.
A woman beside him lifted the photo I'd glimpsed earlier. Her daughter, maybe. She didn't shout. Her voice was worse. "If you build this," she said, "does she get a home too?"
"Yes," I said, because this time certainty was duty. "Aboveground. And faster if you let us use omnic labor to rebuild yours."
"That's slave labor," someone snapped behind her.
"No," I said, and I put steel in it. "It's a contract and a paycheck. And a say. Or I walk."
That got them. The word paycheck is older than parliaments. The word say is older than kings.
It didn't melt the crowd. But the drum got quieter. The phones lowered.
"Come see," I said, and the security man at my shoulder made a strangled sound, and I added, "Ten at a time, escorted." I looked back down into the tunnel where Adawe was definitely counting her scalpel trays and not appreciating my improvisation. "Supervised," I said toward her, as if sound could travel that far, and somehow it did.
The first ten came down with me. They didn't speak. They watched. They watched Virginia wrap an omnic's cracked chassis with the same careful hands she'd used on human ribs in Cairo. They watched Spencer show a group of omnics how to splice a line safely and then make them do it themselves while he observed, because competence is respect. They watched a human child give away the last biscuit, and an omnic tuck it into a pocket like a relic. The woman with the photo watched the chargers blink online and blinked with them. Not a conversion. Nothing so cheap. But something that unknotted a little.
When they went back up, the drum didn't start again. The rain did. London has its own stubbornness.
Near dawn I found Adawe sitting on an upside-down crate like any tired medic at the end of a shift. She'd loosened her collar and her posture. That alone felt like history.
"You opened the site to civilians," she said without looking at me.
"I opened the site to citizens," I said.
She made a small sound that might have been a warning or a laugh. "You bargained unpaid labor into a unionized city," she added. "We will be negotiating for weeks."
"They'll be paid," I said. "Or I walk."
She did laugh then, brief. "You won't walk."
"You condemned me to a desk for a month. I could learn to love walking."
She stood. "When the reports are filed, this enclave will be called a pilot program. The press will call it an experiment. The people will call it dangerous. You should know what the omnics are calling it already."
"What?"
"Home."
The word sat in my chest like a weight and a buoy at once.
We checked the grid one more time. We marked a line of chargers with chalk that would be bolts tomorrow. We staked out a clinic that would be real in a week. We printed the first little signs with little icons for those who couldn't read the language yet but could read the intent.
On my way out, I passed the elder who'd spoken in the chamber. She touched her patched chest in greeting.
"What will you call this place?" she asked.
"Not my call," I said.
"It is," she said. "Names begin with the living, not the law."
I looked up the tunnel. It rose toward the city like a throat toward dawn. King's Row wasn't a plan yet, not a policy brief, not a headline. It was lines of chalk and tired bodies and a woman's photo and a child's last biscuit. It was a place made by hands that had lifted too much death and wanted to carry something else.
"King's Row," I said quietly, testing it against the brick. The wall seemed to keep it. "Because it's under the crown and under the city and—because every king should be reminded who he stands on."
Her optics brightened, just a shade. "King's Row," she echoed, and the name belonged to more than me.
We surfaced into morning. The rain had become mist that caught on everyone's hair and didn't commit to falling. Aboveground, the city was itself again. Impatient, grim, unstoppable. Belowground, lights we'd strung flickered and steadied.
I looked past the palace, past the wet roofs, toward a future that was always smaller than the promises we made to it. "For you," I said under my breath, and my hand found the ghost of a name carved in Geneva stone. S3bastian. "For all of you."
Behind me, the Thorns argued about where to put the first canteen. A security drone hummed like a sleepy bee. Someone started a kettle because that's how civilization proves it's still trying.
Peace was not a dove or a speech. It was a habit. It was a neighborhood. It was the work of putting walls up so you could take other walls down.
We had started.