Even though I was well aware that leaving Seisa did not mean leaving the problem, it crushed me to see the shattered front windows of my parents’ store. The early morning breeze stirred at shredded ribbons of fabric that still clung like the streamers of a dead hope to the broken manikins. I swallowed the knot in my throat like a lump of hot coal. The streets of Helike were largely empty as false dawn crept over the horizon. It was not quite a small town and not quite a city, centered on a bustling market with streets radiating outward like spokes on a wheel.

Despite living in Seisa for three years, I considered Helike to be my home. Now, crossing the threshold of a splintered door, I wondered if that could still be true. Broken glass crunched under my heel, but I stepped around the worst of the damage. I thought I heard a voice, so I tapped the silver bell still on the counter.

“Who the hell—” My mother stepped out of the back room, clearly ready to throw fists for the first time in her life with whoever had come to revisit the scene of their crime. She froze when she saw me, tears welling to life in her eyes. Nowhere was the calm, collected woman I had come to know as my mother: this woman was careworn and frightened. “Karsa!”

Then I was in her arms, as if she’d skipped past all the space and time between us just to hold me. The old familiar smell of dyes and detergents filled my senses and for a moment, the yawning abyss of loneliness that had gnawed away at me on the long drive to Helike was pushed back. Her needle-scarred fingers buried themselves in my hair, holding my head against hers, forehead to forehead.

I wish I could say that I broke down crying in relief, but instead I touched the bruises along my mother’s chin and felt that terrible anger boil up in my chest. “What happened, Umma?”

She shook her head. “All that matters is that you’re safe.” As she spoke, she ran her hands across my shoulders and down my arms, doing her best to convince herself that I was real. “I was so worried that…” The sentence died as a lump in her throat, as if she thought speaking evil would make it come to pass. “Come into the back.”

I followed her like a faithful shadow. She had restored some order to the back, though it was clear how much damage had been done: beautiful patterns destroyed with poured bleach, outfits cut apart, furniture and tools broken. She had spent her morning sorting through what could be salvaged and what could not. Still, she offered me a stool like nothing was wrong and went to start a pot of tea on the small stove in the back, the only thing that seemed completely operational.

I sat down in the ruins of my family’s dream, closing my eyes so I had a brief reprieve from the reminder of how far the world had cracked. “What happened?” I asked again.

Her sigh came from the bone, it was so deep, but her words still had the stubborn pride that runs in our family. “I will take care of it. In a few days, I’m sure we can have this cleaned up.”

“Does Deda know?”

She shook her head, gaze dipping towards the floor. “He’s at home.”

I furrowed my brow at that answer. Normally it was my father who opened the shop. “Why—?”

My mother pulled in a deep breath. “He’s grieving your sister in his own way.” She turned back to the tea, adding honey to my cup and her own. In the uncertainty of our world, even the old familiar rituals could only offer so much comfort. I think she wanted things to feel normal, or at least to be distracted from the horrible truth.

“I’m sorry, Umma.” I took the cup with numb fingers.

Those needle-scarred hands framed my face, warm from the teacups. “This is not your fault,” she said with the heat of a heavenly fire. “Not the shop, not Endeis. Am I understood?”

The lump was back in my throat. I wanted to argue with her, but my mother was stubborn as a rented mule. I knew it was not a fight that would end in anything good. “What happened, Umma? You can talk to me.” I didn’t know how long I would be in Helike, but I would be the best daughter I could be while I was.

Some of the tension in her shoulders relaxed slightly, like she’d been expecting the argument in my heart and was relieved not to hear it. “Ever since the bombing, we’ve had fewer and fewer customers,” she explained. “I’ve been keeping the shop open later and later in case people still wanted clothing without having to be seen buying from us. Things in Helike have been very tense. I suppose it just boiled over last night. I’m surprised Euanthe caught the worst of it instead of us. At least we didn’t go up in smoke.”

Anger flared in the pit of my stomach. “They burned up the florist’s? Why?”

My mother smiled ruefully. “She’s been publishing some very nasty letters to the editor over the cataclysms in Seisa.”

“Oh?”

“She seems to think it’s a crime that the youth of Helike are being outdone by those students fighting the polizí in Seisa, but you know Euanthe. She’s a crotchety old biddy on the best of days.”

It gave me a new appreciation for the elderly woman. “I didn’t think she’d be in support of the riots. Is she alright?”

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“She went to the doctor for some smoke inhalation, but she was alive and kicking last night. That said, I think she’s going to slice some people a new one in the weekend edition.” My mother smiled with a faint, defiant approval. “I don’t think the loss of her precious crocuses is going to endear any of those thugs to her.”

I smiled. “Here I thought we were the revolutionary family bringing trouble to Helike.”

My mother laughed, a short but sweet sound. “I wasn’t expecting it either. I was going to look in on her on my way home, if you want to come.” She checked her wrist, the sigils for time dancing across the silver band she wore. A gift from my father on their last anniversary, since my mother was famous for working into the small hours of the night because she lost track of time.

I nodded and drank my tea quickly. I wasn’t eager to confront my father’s grief, but it would have to happen. A brief visit to Euanthe on the way would probably help the nerves. The old woman’s cantankerous brand of humor had a way of putting people at ease.

My mother locked the door to our shattered shop despite the fact that the windows were broken in, operating off a habit that had started before I was born. As we walked towards home, she put an arm around my shoulders. “You smell like you’ve been smoking, Karsa.”

I shrugged. “You used to.”

She huffed at that, smoothing a hand across my hair. “It’s a filthy habit.”

I was suddenly very conscious of the packet of cigarettes tucked in the inside pocket of my jacket. The weight felt conspicuous and guilty. “If it makes you happy, I’ll stop.”

“I just want you to be healthy and happy, Karsa.” She sombered slightly, as if shadows crossed her mind. “I wished a better world for you when you were born. Now it seems so much worse.”

“It is what it is.”

“Sometimes I think I’ve failed you terribly.” When I looked over, her eyes were focused on the distant horizon. “I think that I should have fought harder, like your father wanted to.”

I shook my head sharply. “You worked your fingers to the bone to make sure End and I could go to school, and eat every night, and have clothes to wear.” Our family was always tightly budgeted, with no room for frivolous expenses or new toys, but those hand-me-downs and careful scrimping were part of the desperate saving that my parents had done to give us access to education.

My mother turned to face me, a pain beyond description in her jade eyes. “I wanted to make certain you would always have a chance. Now it seems very foolish to have ever thought the world would change for my children any more than it had for me. We struggle and struggle and it always ends the same.”

“Umma—”

“There is not a single Lathraí family in this country who does not have a story like ours somewhere in its roots. That is what Euanthe said to me the night they showed your sister’s trial.” Tears welled in her eyes again, bright like quicksilver. “Five million gaping holes where our loved ones used to be.”

I gripped my mother’s hand tightly enough that she realized the bandages across my knuckles were there. Nothing I could do would change the grief, but for the moment I could reassure her.

She looked down at my hands. “Karsa, what happened?”

“I fought back.” I didn’t need to elaborate for my mother to understand. For so long I had sat, burying my head in the sand grain by grain, day by day. Now everything had ripped me out of my comfortable little hole. There would be no going back.

The lines around my mother’s eyes deepened even as she just looked at me in that moment. “Karsa, I don’t want to lose you too.”

I thought of the barricades then, the roars of the crowd, the burn of pepper mace in my lungs, the electric energy before every clash. “I would rather be locked in a cell forever or put up against a wall than do nothing.” I gave her hand a squeeze. “I am not End. I am not going to ask Astera to change. Either it will or it will break.”

I knew in that moment, even without seeing my father, that there was no place for me in the world where I would be content except in Seisa, fighting for air in the middle of a battle. Every clash had chiseled off a piece of my soul, changed my shape, until I could not fit in Helike any more than a broken key in the lock of my parents’ shop.

My mother hugged me tightly, burying her face against my shoulder and inhaling deeply. I knew what she was doing: fixing this memory of me in her mind, so that she would have something when I was gone. “I don’t want you to go down that road, Karsa,” she said quietly when she stepped back, holding me at arm’s length. Before I could argue, she continued, “I don't want you to be hurt, but I know you’re not just my little girl anymore. Whatever you do, I am proud of you and I love you.”

“I love you too.”

She linked her arm through mine and steered me away from Euanthe’s, towards our house. “Are you going back to Seisa, then?”

I nodded.

“Then your father needs to say goodbye, whatever his condition.” My mother’s voice creaked under the weight of her heartache as she pulled me down the narrow street. “He’s been so angry since the sentencing. I’m afraid he will try to put the blame on you, but if you are going to do this…he should have the chance to see you.”

My childhood home was a squat, weathered house crammed up against two others on a corner, surrounded by a low grey fence of weathered wood. When we stepped inside, it was to a dimly lit hall that smelled of alcohol. My mother took the lead, holding my hand tightly as we stepped into the kitchen. “Phocas, Karsa is home.”

I barely recognized my father, slumped forward onto the table. Normally he was a clean man in a well-pressed suit, with a cheerful smile backed by determination that could chip a diamond. Here, a rumpled wreckage, his grief had unmade him. His gaze passed through us as if we were smoke. Hours ago he had been drunk, but now I saw a man sober enough to recognize his reality.

I took a deep breath. “Deda—”

He shook his head. “I want to be alone,” he said bluntly, words like hammer blows.

My mother’s lips thinned with anger. “Is that all you have to say to your daughter?”

“My daughter is in prison!”

I don’t think he meant it to hit the way it did, like the crack of a polizí club. I flinched back, my worst thoughts springing to the surface.

You are the oldest. You should have protected her. You promised you would keep her safe when she came to live with you.

My father reached out to me, almost falling out of his chair. I knew from the wide whites of his eyes that he knew he’d made a mistake. “Karsa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

I don’t know how my eyes stayed dry. “It’s fine, Deda,” I said, still reeling behind my frozen expression. It was such a little phrase he’d used, but it opened my wound to the quick. “I should go.”

“Please stay, Karsa,” my father said again, swaying as he stood up. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “You don’t need me in Helike,” I said quietly. “They need me in Seisa. I love you, Deda.”

I don’t remember what he said as I left.