The chamber sat with Halloran's assessment for a while. Nobody was eager to be the next to speak. It was the Austrian delegate who finally chose to say the quiet thing.
He was a young man with a very old name, rising from the heart of the isolation benches, and he had clearly been waiting all morning for this moment.
"Then let us be honest about what we keep refusing," he said. "This chamber calls war a calamity. Some of us were raised to call it an inheritance. Our great-grandfathers postponed it because hiding was comfortable. Well, the mask is off now. The Muggles tore it off themselves. Which leaves the one question the Statute let us avoid for three centuries." He paused. "Is the wizard the Muggle's neighbor? Or his ruler?"
He sat to a scatter of approval from his own benches, and to silence everywhere else.
And then to a dry, papery sound that took the chamber a moment to identify as laughter.
It came from the Ethiopian delegate, a witch so old that three Supreme Mugwumps had tried to retire her and failed. She did not stand. At her age, standing was a favor, and she granted it rarely.
"Ruler," she repeated, tasting the word. "Young man. My family has held the same valley for nineteen generations. In all that time, we have never wanted one thing a Muggle had. Not their food. We grow better. Not their labor. The house-elves would be insulted. Not their gold, their land, their machines, or their endless armies of little clerks." She shook her head slowly. "So tell me, boy, what the throne of the Muggle world pays. Seven billion subjects who cannot brew so much as a headache draught. A hundred thousand cities to run. Their sewage. Their quarrels. Their endless, endless paperwork."
The young man opened his mouth. She was not finished.
"Our ancestors did not hide from the Muggles out of fear, whatever the Muggles tell themselves. They walked away the way you walk away from a market stall that sells nothing you want. That is the oldest secret in this chamber. Older than the Statute. We never ruled them because ruling them is a chore." Her sharp old eyes found the Austrian. "And you want to burn the world to win it. To inherit the chore, minus the world." She picked her needlework back up. "My family will definitely not be attending your coronation."
Nobody laughed on the Austrian's benches. On all the others, it was quietly noted that the oldest voice in the room had just called empire what it was, housework, and gone back to her needlework.
So that was the shape of it, and the whole chamber could finally see it. A war they were certain to win, and a world that would not survive the winning. A prize their own elders had looked at centuries ago and put back on the shelf. A champion for the battles nobody feared, and for the fire everybody did, only a rumor of a man both worlds had given every reason to stay home. And on the dais, the Muggle petition. Still sitting there. Still waiting.
Morena let the silence do its work. Then the Supreme Mugwump did something she had not done all session.
She spoke for herself.
"The chair will add one item to the record, under an old woman's privilege. We have spent the morning arguing about a war between two worlds. We have argued it well. But five months ago, an army fell out of the sky. It did not land on the magical side of the Statute or the Muggle side, because from up there, delegates, there are no sides. From up there, this is one small blue house. Everything we argued about today is just arranging the furniture."
She folded her hands.
"Our people burned that alien fleet beside the Muggles' people. Over London. In the open. It was the finest hour either world has had in a century. So the chair will only observe this. The sky has recently shown an interest in this address. Whatever calls next will not check our blood first. And a house at war with itself is a house with its door standing open."
She let that settle into the pale stone. Then she nodded to the American bench.
"Deputy Halloran. You have told us what will not save us. The chair suspects you came with more than a knife."
Halloran rose, and Vulchanov, who had one last stand left in him, rose faster.
"Forgive me," he said. "Before this assembly takes instruction in openness from MACUSA, of all delegations. Your Rappaport's Law made our Statute look sociable, Madam Deputy. No marriage. No friendship. No contact beyond the wand permit. For two centuries your country built the highest wall in the wizarding world and lectured the rest of us on our recklessness. And now you stand at our dais preaching cooperation. What changed?"
"Everything," Halloran said. "That's the honest answer, Delegate, so let me give it properly. Yes. We built the highest wall on Earth, and we were more certain than anyone in this room that it would hold forever. Then a man flew over Manhattan in a metal suit on live television. Then a Norse god appeared in Times Square. Then an army descended from the sky above our largest city. Creatures that had never heard of the Statute of Secrecy, and could not have cared less if they had."
She stepped away from the podium and began walking toward the dais.
"The world changed whether we approved of it or not. The distance between the magical and Muggle worlds shrank in a single afternoon more than it had in the previous three centuries."
Her heels echoed through the chamber.
"We are not standing here advocating cooperation because we suddenly discovered virtue. We are preaching it because we were standing where the future landed first. The rest of you are welcome to wait your turn."
Vulchanov sat. Halloran drew a single folded page from her robes and set it beside the Muggle petition.
"One sentence for the record first, so nobody mistakes what I'm proposing or why. This chamber does not fear losing a war with the Muggles." She let the phrase sit there, this chamber, and did not replace it with we. "My department has its own assessment of that confidence. I will not be reading it into the record today, because it changes nothing. Whether you are right or wrong, every version of that war ends the same way: with both sides standing in the ashes of what they were trying to protect. War buys nothing and costs everything. That much we have all just agreed on, even if we agreed on it for different reasons. Which means the treaty stops being a question of survival, and becomes a question of price." She glanced down at the page. "Price is my department. I've done the ledger. You'll want to be sitting down for this. It's embarrassing."
She clasped her hands behind her back, and for a moment she looked less like a diplomat and more like what she actually was, a departmental deputy who had spent twenty years making budgets balance.
"Everything I'm about to say is on this page. Copies to every delegation tonight. But numbers read better out loud, so bear with me. The Muggles want a new treaty. So the question this chamber is politely not asking is, what does it cost us? My department went through their requests line by line. It took us three weeks to believe our own finding." She looked up. "Nothing. It costs us nothing. And it hands us more than winning a war would. Watch."
She raised one finger.
"Start with money. Ask your budget offices what your Ministries actually spend keeping a secret that no longer exists. Obliviator corps on standby in every district. Detection webs over every Muggle city. Memory-modification academies. False-story bureaus feeding gas-leak explanations to Muggle newspapers. MACUSA spends twenty-nine percent of its entire budget on concealment. Some of you spend more."
An ugly, involuntary murmur ran the benches.
"Exactly," Halloran said. "Twenty-nine percent, to guard a wall around a city that has already burned down. The treaty doesn't take that apparatus away from us. It releases us from it. Sign the page, and every Ministry in this room gets a third of its budget back."
A second finger.
"And that's only the gold. Consider what the Statute costs us that never shows up in a ledger. Charming your own house to look derelict and ruined. Warding your own quiet life like a crime scene. Forbidden to fly here, trade there, exist in nine-tenths of your own world. Delegates, we talk about the Statute as if it were our shield. Look at it honestly for one minute and you will see what it always was. A leash. And we are the ones who have been wearing it. The wall did not only keep them out. It kept us in. A superior people, hiding in the attic of its own house for many hundred years. The treaty opens the door, and we walk out on our own terms, as sovereigns, with our wards intact and not one mundane inspector past our gates."
That landed differently than the gloom had. The gloom had made the chamber quiet. This made it lean forward.
A third finger, and her voice flattened.
"Now the part that isn't about gold. The Muggle-borns. The children we educated, gagged, and discarded. Thousands of them, in every country in this room." She tapped the dais once. "We manufactured their grievance. We mass-produced it for centuries, and then we acted surprised when somebody found the warehouse. The gag law dies with the Statute. Muggle-borns get to explain their own lives. Hold jobs in both worlds. Stop being a standing army of guides and grievances waiting for the next muggle leader to come recruiting. We can't undo the wound we made, delegates. But we can stop arming it."
Nobody laughed at that one. On several benches, delegates were looking at their hands.
She gave them a moment. Then the last finger.
"The final thing, and I want you to hear it from me before you read it tonight. The Muggles' central demand, the heart of their whole treaty, is a moratorium on memory charms. Muggle minds inviolate, forever, no exceptions. Their negotiators have been instructed to die on that clause." She turned her folded page over in her fingers. "It sounds enormous. So think carefully about what we are actually being asked to give up. Memory charms existed for one purpose. Protecting a secret. The secret is gone. We are being asked to surrender a tool we no longer have a use for, and in exchange they will call it the greatest concession in diplomatic history, and give us peace, trade, and a third of our budgets back."
On the upper benches, in the heart of the isolation bloc, an old Prussian hardliner forgot, for one fatal moment, the first rule of the chamber he had sat in for forty years. He leaned toward his neighbor and murmured behind his hand, and the acoustic charm, indifferent as ever to the careers it ended, carried the murmur to every seat.
"And who verifies it? A memory charm leaves no trace their instruments can find. We would be promising them the one thing they can never check."
His neighbor did not answer. His neighbor simply looked at him, and then, slowly, the corner of the neighbor's mouth curled upward. Around the chamber, on a dozen benches, wizards who had spent the whole morning being frightened arrived at the same arithmetic at the same moment, and the room's temperature changed. Not warmth, exactly.
Appetite.
Halloran heard it. Everyone heard it. For one telling instant she went very still at the dais, a woman watching a crack appear in a floor she had just finished laying. She had spent an hour proving the treaty cost them nothing, and one old man's whisper had just taught the room the same lesson from the other side. A promise that could never be checked was also a promise that never had to be kept.
Then the moment passed, because it had to, because the vote was in reach and nobody calls a recess to argue with a whisper.
She folded the page back into her robes.
"Supreme Mugwump. MACUSA moves that this Confederation accept the invitation to Geneva and negotiate in good faith. My government is walking to that table either way. We would rather not walk alone."
Morena let the motion hang in the pale chamber for three full seconds. Then she reached for the ancient bronze bell beside her chair, and rang it once, and the sound went through the room like a verdict.
"The Confederation will vote."