For fourteen hellish days, I clung to my sister’s journal and tried to heal. Isidoros kept my wounds clean and well tended when he was present, but for most of the day, he was out with Agathe, running water to the protestors on the barricades and providing basic medical attention. They would stagger in again at dusk, when Linos and Markos took over.

Every bang of the door sent me diving to a hiding spot still, but Agathe promised me that we were in a safe space.

My little sister’s words cut me deeper than the rubble had. I saw her so perfectly clearly in ink, wounded by the situation they had forced us into, incensed by the injustices stacked on us like millstones, but fueled by a fire of an optimism I could not understand. I turned it over and over in my head, trying the idealism on for size, but it failed.

I know we can be more than what we are. We are proud people beaten down, that is all. We can pick ourselves up and wipe away the blood, we can stand beside any people in the world as equals again. That has to be the end: everyone is equal with equity.

I was jaded to the idea that we could ever be equal. They enshrined our inability to have our own voices in law. Our numbers on the census never translated into representation that meant anything except lectures on ‘pulling our weight’ and dropping ‘a culture of hyper-sensitivity’. Our interactions with the Ieró were rigidly defined by the courts, enforced with the full power of the State.

I will not be silenced by the violence of the State or its polizí. Let them wither on the vine as the people taste free air and support each other. One day, Astera will be a very different place, a home for all, not a home for some and a prison for the rest.

How could Endeis write so gushingly of freedom if she had never experienced it? How could she reach beyond the bare scraps of dignity afforded by some to this divine, all-encompassing virtue. How could she shed the shame like an outgrown shirt? How did she know it was possible?

The world is ever-changing. We see the leaves bloom, the grapes swell, the grey appear in hair. People die, stone erodes, even metal loses its integrity to time. Someday the universe itself will end, with a bang or maybe a whisper. Why should we look at these skeletons around us, these cages, and assume they are eternal?

I pressed my eyes closed as those words, in her familiar sloping handwriting, burned into my brain. Whatever the horrors, I wanted to take her place. If anyone could make a difference, it was Endeis. Now jaded, bitter Karsa was holding the bag, figuratively and literally.

Agathe trudged in with Isidoros at her heels, both exhausted and funereal from the march. “Karsa, I have some news for you.”

“Endeis?”

“There’s going to be a trial, but the news is everywhere. They say she and all the others confessed in writing and signed the confessions.”

“The polizí have had two weeks to beat the words out,” Isidoros went to the sink to wash the residual teargas off his hands. It stuck on sweaty skin, burning for as long as it was there.

“When?”

Agathe chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Tonight. Everyone will be watching. The bar down the street has a vdaní if we want to use it.”

I shut the journal and tucked it away in the hiding spot under a bedroom floorboard. My body still ached and stung as I followed Agathe out onto the street, but no amount of pain would dissuade me from seeing my sister. I covered my hair with a scarf. I could pull the wide fabric to hide my face if we passed near a camera. Not that there were many in this district, particularly so close to a bar. People hurled bricks at them or stole them.

The Referee was our destination, a squat and ugly sports bar. It reeked of alcohol and nicotine smoke when we entered. Never before had I been inside and seen so many people. Everyone in the neighborhood had shuffled in to stand like sardines in a can. Agathe used her sharp elbows and authoritative glare to get us close enough to see well.

I let the incensed news explanation wash over me in a wave. Their outrage about the bombing was reasonable. Latching onto my sister like feral dogs to tear who she was apart? My stomach knotted and churned in revulsion. But that is the story they always tell, no? Righteous anger at the crime, vitriolic hatred for the Laths who are responsible, demands of revenge leaping off their lips. If I were a generous woman, I would say they acted out of fear and ignorance.

I am not a generous woman. They knew better. Yet they stoked evil when they could have killed it with sunlight.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I couldn’t watch the parade of young protestors through the courtroom, dragged into the room in body chains even though the stiffness in every movement meant they were incapable of running after their stay with the polizí. It wasn’t until I heard the first voice that I looked at the screen. A boy of nineteen with hollow eyes and quivering lips perched behind the witness stand, clutching at the edges of the desk.

“I confess…”

I closed my eyes as he explained he had built the device. The prosecutor hounded him mercilessly, browbeating him into continuing as his voice cracked and broke. Every word, no matter how shaky, had the air of something he had rehearsed and repeated a thousand times over.

What did you want to accomplish with this bomb?

To destroy Astera.

When he finished, he collapsed, sobbing. They pulled him away, rough hands on scrunched shoulders. So it went, one after the other. I confess...I confess...I confess...I confess....I confess…

The words, the lurid details of the plot, meant nothing to me. Their motives, too, meant nothing. How could they, when they were so different than Endeis’s hopes? I stared, transfixed, an iciness building in my stomach.

Endeis was the seventh they pulled out through the crowd, chained hand and foot like the rest, corralled and contained like a dangerous beast. She was pale as a ghost, poisoned by that same terrible knowledge of what might await. She sat in that dreadful chair, so small beside the looming judge. Tears dripped from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks. Then she took a deep breath and our Endeis unfolded inside her. Serenity crossed my sister’s face. Not an absence of terror, but an acceptance of what she was about to do.

They placed her written confession in front of her, ready to ravage her through it as they had with all the others. Suddenly, a fury welled through my sister. She seized her confession in both hands and ripped it in half, crumpling the pieces in her fists. When her words came, they came in our language.

“It is a lie!”

The declaration hit the room around me, watching from so far away, like a tidal crash.

Endeis switched languages back to Ieróssa, speaking to everyone this time. “It is a lie. This story is a lie!” She ignored the banging of the judge’s gavel, the stern hawk cries of the lawyers, the furious shouts of the jury and the crowd. “My crime was believing we could be better. You are proof that we are worse!” She stood up, still forced to bow slightly by the body chains they had not bothered to lock. “The pits of every hell are empty and I see all their devils here! I go to the next world with only the truth on my lips!”

They shouted her down then with a roar of fury. It took eight full minutes before they brought the scene under control. They dragged Endeis away, back to the crowded table at the center of the courtroom. A warden stood behind her to stop her from speaking. Every time she tried, he dug cruel fingers into the pressure points of her shoulders until she wept.

I could barely see them through the blur. Those who followed Endeis either crumpled immediately or tried to make a stand as well, but the crowd shouted every one of them down. It no longer mattered what they were saying, for the anger of a mob has an inertia of their own.

It took them five minutes to deliberate on the punishment that noble Astera would drop upon their shoulder.

Those who confessed would spend the rest of their lives in prison. But for those who had taken their moment at the center of Astera’s world to do anything but comply?

Death.

The breath that everyone held was released at once, a terrible churning rage forming in its wake. An anger so powerful that it almost made me vomit gripped me in its claws. All the helplessness I had felt, not for fourteen days, but for a lifetime, collapsed upon my shoulders. It was more than I could bear.

“Karsa,” Agathe whispered softly, gripping my arm. Her tearful plea did nothing to stop me. I jerked away from her, forcing my way out of the bar. Others did the same, spilling out into the street. They swept my sister’s friend away from me like a white-water river’s current.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew it would be evil. Only streetlights illuminated the moonless night. Anger and grief howled and echoed through the Lathraí districts, the voices of the people torn between weeping and screaming.

I picked up a brick as I walked. It was heavy, but not too heavy. I wished I could crumble it in my hands, rip it into the very atoms that made it up. I wanted to destroy as I had never wanted to before. The anger dried my tears like dragon’s fire in my cheeks.

The polizí were quick to respond to the growing riot in the streets, as the windows shattered and doors broke under the brutal assault of the vengeful. Students squealed past me in a stolen city truck scarred by the pry-bars they had used to get it open, a heavy tow rope tied in a loop to tear down any statue they could find. Market District was ahead, between the grieving and the courthouse. I could already see lines of shields and batons forming. I kept moving anyway, towards the front of the crawling, spreading chaos.

Canisters of tear gas streaked overhead, landing behind me. Some man behind me hit one back with a piece of rebar, straight into the shields. I waited until I saw a shield drop in answer and hurled my brick as hard as I could. It connected, and a body dropped.

It wasn’t enough. Soon I was with dozens of others, throwing anything I could get my hands on. Rocks, bricks, bottles, tear gas canisters fired at us, anything. Others went toe-to-toe with the riot police behind their own shields. Some of the smaller students, experienced in these things, knew how to catch the bottom of the shields and knock the polizí onto their backs. They were so armored that it rendered them like tortoises, easily stomped on. People dropped things on the riot lines from rooftops and screamed obscenities.

I broke contact only when the heavy polizí vehicles rolled in, running down twisting alleys with my stolen riot baton and shield carried with vicious pride, like prizes taken in an ancient war.

That was the first night I truly understood hate.