The problem really started when more than just the polizí showed up that day. Astera has always had a blood and soil problem. That was what my father called it: blood and soil. He was hardly the one to coin the phrase, not when they chanted it in the streets. It used to send chills down my spine when I heard it. The animal roar of marches intended to put fear into the hearts of every Lathraí who heard it. Only some groups were looking for a fight. Most didn’t dare go into our districts, because nothing stops a bigot quite like being outnumbered by the targets of their slander.
By midsummer, when they tried making a proper move, I had no fear left. I had months of brutal clashes under my belt. Clubbing and columns of gas, the reek of capsaicin, hunger and thirst. That was true of everyone on the barricades, Lathraí or Ieró alike. The longer they ignored peaceful protest, the more they brutalized it, the harder we became.
Markos and Isidoros hardly came to the protests anymore. The conflict had burned them out, beaten them down. I was grateful for their absence, mostly because I hated seeing them collapse with bloody faces or choke on the very punishment of the tainted air itself.
Agathe fought to keep her paper going. You could find it on any street corner, wedged into the little racks hidden behind the regular ones. The polizí would burn them whenever they saw them, but Agathe worked like a fiend to make certain she was never out of print.
“Our blood, our soil!” The chant echoed through the streets as they came, dozens of Ieró First. I wouldn’t call them a movement, just one of many groups who wanted us gone. My parents had always said to ignore them, to let the insults roll off like water, since they were coming from people without souls. It wasn’t right to hit them, wasn’t smart. They’d just look more sympathetic to everyone else.
Agathe clutched the barricade beside me. “Karsa, I know what you’re thinking,” she said cautiously.
I looked down at my bruised and bloody knuckles. Markos had taught me a lot about fighting since everything started and I’d learned as I went what worked best. “That I’m going to punch out the first one who gets in arm’s reach?”
“There are more of us than there are of them. Let numbers scare them off.”
“And if they don’t scare off?” I taped up my hands like a boxer’s, just to support my wrists. “If they start something, I’m going to finish it.”
She looked over at me, evaluating how serious I was. “Karsa, you have things to live for. These guys are seriously bad news.”
I turned to her, anger boiling up in me like a geyser as the chant drew closer and closer. “Then they’ll get a taste of their own medicine. I’m tired of staring at an existential threat and showing my throat for them to tear out.”
“Our blood, our soil!”
They were almost to us. I think around a hundred showed up that day, but we had four times their number between our supply chain and the camp behind the barricades. I drummed on the barricades with my fist, impatient for their approach. Tension wound in me like a wire spring, tighter and tighter.
I saw prybars meant to rip apart our defenses, clubs for beating, and firearms at the back. My world came into absolute focus, every breath steady and even despite the hammering of my heart. “Agathe, get to the back.”
She looked over at me and shook her head, spectacles sliding down her nose. “I’m not leaving.”
“Someone has to watch and write and tell the truth.” I pointed to a fire escape on a nearby building. "That will have a view that’s safe. Just get behind the crates in case they shoot.”
Agathe glared. “And what am I supposed to tell your family? That they have no daughters left?”
Mention of my family stung like salt in my wounds. “Agathe, go!” My voice bit like a vicious dog, leaving no room for more argument. “I will not forgive you otherwise.”
Something in that statement reached her, because she retreated back and hurried up the ladder. I turned to see they were here, a mob of faces contorted in rage. One leaned over the barricade near me and drove a prybar between two of the wood pieces holding the front together.
“This is our country, sandworms!”
I hauled back and hit him as hard as I could. I don’t know if I was the first to strike, but the moment I did, the fight was on. People threw bottles and rocks on both sides. All along the line, they ripped at our defenses and we fought back like demons. One gashed me across the temple with a broken bottle, but he overbalanced and I grabbed him as the bottle dropped from his fingers. With a sharp pull of his collar, I smashed him into the barricade. He dropped, and I did not know or care what happened to him after that. There were more to contend with.
I was bloody and bruised all over by the time Isidoros pulled me back and someone else replaced me on the front. He held gauze to my head, pulling me back towards the barrels of drinking water and impromptu kitchen. “You can’t keep going, Karsa. They’re going to rip you apart.”
Behind us, back towards the front, there was a sudden, explosive crack: a weapon firing. I turned and saw the man who’d taken my place crumple to the ground, a pool of crimson spreading. For a moment, I felt a sickness well in my stomach, thoughts of the first person I’d ever seen die flooding my thoughts.
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If our assailants thought they had just won through intimidation, they were sorely mistaken. A roar went up from our side and a rain of bricks and cocktails of liquid fire soared in their direction.
That was the exact moment that the polizí made their move to break up the fight. After all, a war on two fronts was not something we could sustain long.
Our Ieró comrades moved to the front, about a third of our number. Most were workers down on Seisa’s lower side, the type that banded together against their bosses and felt some solidarity for the Lathraí doing the worst of the labor. There was an unspoken agreement that they would cover retreats, because they could afford to be arrested more than we could.
“Go!” one shouted, giving me a shove as he moved towards the front.
I turned, grabbing Isidoros by his shirt and yanking him along. Agathe scrambled down the fire escape as the police wedge smashed into the barricade, scattering our enemy and our people alike. People kept throwing stones and fire, but the crack of automatic weapons meant that was a short-lived endeavor, whether real shots or rubber ones. We didn’t stay to find out, sprinting down a side alley and skidding around a corner.
We ran for almost a mile to reach the areas of Lathraí districts that polizí only raided with special response teams.
I collapsed to my knees, panting hard.
“This can’t keep going.” Isidoros looked to Agathe and me with tired eyes, fishing out a cigarette from a crumpled package. Some of the contents dribbled out, it was so poorly made. “It’s only going to get worse. Every time, every fight, the temperature goes up another degree.”
I knew what he meant. A terrible fever brewed in Seisa and no amount of lambasting by the news or government could keep it under control. We were rapidly reaching a breaking point and everyone felt it. Hell, you could taste it in the air.
“What are we going to do?” Agathe asked, running her fingers through her hair.
I squared my shoulders. “We’re going to get everyone together tonight.” I looked at Agathe. “If anyone can do that, it’s you.”
She nodded. It was the only way to do things, since we were all in this together. “Let’s get some food and then I’ll put the word out.”
Isidoros offered me the crumpled packet. I had never been much for smoking, but it kept me alert during the early morning hours when it was my shift. I pulled out one of the badly rolled cylinders and lit it with the pocket lighter he’d given me. It tasted terrible, like black tar and a burning wet dog, but it soothed at the same time. “This is only going to get worse.” He repeated it like a dirge.
I shrugged, knowing better than to say I didn’t care. We trailed after Agathe towards another impromptu kitchen set up between slanting buildings, the old tenement housing that we’d made our home away from home. With a bowl of stew in hand, warm and spicy, the world seemed a little less terrible. Tea thick with honey from a local beekeeper who had joined the mutual aid society washed the sting of gas out of our throats.
The murmurs were already going as people sat around on rickety picnic tables. Even if I couldn’t hear them, I knew what they were talking about: what was coming down the pipe. It crackled in the air like an electric charge.
I pulled the crumpled picture out of my back pocket. It was of Endeis and me on some sunny day, dark glasses over our eyes as we beamed like nothing in the world could ever be wrong, her hands splayed behind my head to make it seem like my ears were of a ridiculous size. It was the day she’d passed her exam for university.
Now she was in a cold cell, alone. My parents had tried to visit her, but the government refused to afford ‘terrorists’ visitors due to ‘threats to state security’. We didn’t even know where she was being held or what was happening to her, nor when her sentence would be carried out. No calls, no visits, nothing except a void where my sister had been.
The anger knotted in my stomach until I could barely breathe and I tucked the picture into my jacket pocket. My eyes burned, but no tears came. No time for tears, I told myself. There’s too much to do.
Someone drummed on an upended bucket to get everyone’s attention. Agathe hopped up on an empty vegetable crate, clearing her throat. “Alright everybody, huddle in.”
We crowded around, weary and beaten. Markos and a dozen others left to go set up watch on every access point, so we would know if anyone came looking for us. There were about a hundred people here, clustered together.
“I know how much everyone is hurting,” Agathe said. I could see the slight sway in her body, fatigue settling into her every muscle. “How angry we all are.” Her eyes seemed to glance my way for a moment. “We have to rethink how we’re going about this. We have to get the rest of the people on our side, or at least enough to make things change. Violence only helps the oppressor.”
A bitter answer came back, shouted out of the crowd. “If they’re going to shoot us, we might as well shoot back!”
Ugly agreement from certain parts of the assembled spilled out as muttering. Someone else spoke up. “We need to split,” a woman said, stepping forward. I recognized her from the barricades: Sostrate. She had been with the movement longer than Agathe and suffered more at police hands than most. She was a tall, proud Lathraí woman with a red tint to her hair and bright red pepper mace still clinging to the handkerchief around her neck, the only thing that had protected her face.
“We can’t afford to be divided against this.” Agathe tried to look stern, but mostly she looked defeated.
“You misunderstand,” Sostrate said patiently. “Some of us will fight to draw the worst away from you, but if we are separate, we can be disavowed. Working in tandem.”
“They have no trouble tarring all of us with the same brush,” Isidoros pointed out. “This is dangerous, Sostrate. It could go too far.”
“How far is too far?” Sostrate lifted her chin. “I will go as far as is necessary to see our people free.”
“This accelerationist nonsense again?” Agathe sputtered.
The tall woman shrugged, almost indifferently. “I do not expect most here to agree, but you are right: what we have been doing, what we have endured, this is not enough. I will not argue the point, I have done so a thousand times. If anyone here is ready to really fight, find me tonight at the Wayshrine.” With that said, Sostrate strode out of the crowd like a queen. A few followed her immediately, their faces hard as flint.
“Sostrate!” Agathe’s shout did nothing to alter the woman’s course.
I went after her, not for Agathe’s sake, but for my own. I caught her by the arm. “They’ll kill you.”
Sostrate’s hawkish eyes stared directly into my soul. “I am not afraid, Karsa. If the price of a future for us is losing my life, it will be worth it a thousand times over.”
I thought of the photograph, burning a hole in my pocket. “I’m coming with you.”
“This is a course that cannot be turned back,” Sostrate said, ignoring Agathe’s pleas. “I do not want you unless you are committed to see this to the bitter end.”
I didn’t let my gaze waver for an instant. “I am.”
Sostrate pulled me into a tight hug. “I’m glad you are coming, sister. Tonight, the Wayshrine. We will pray and plan.”