Agathe’s eyes flashed with anger behind wire-rimmed spectacles. “You have a lot of nerve coming here, Karsa,” she said sharply. I knew Agathe well enough to know this anger was mostly bluster, for the sake of our audience more than intimidating me. The other protestors who worked on her paper were watching with anxious eyes.

Behind me, Isidoros was breaking apart the bread with his hands. It was a large loaf, but there were twenty people in the room not including myself. The pieces had to be small, more a good taste for a moment than actual nourishment.

I frowned at her. “What happened to solidarity, Agathe? It used to be every other word out of your mouth.”

Agathe summoned her highest haughtiness. “It doesn’t extend to would-be terrorists.”

“No one is a terrorist. You sound like the government.”

“Sostrate said she would take her fight to the extreme.” Agathe straightened her spectacles. “I don’t believe her for a second if she means anything short of violence anywhere and everywhere she pleases.”

I sighed deeply. “So when the military comes, what are you going to do?” I waved a hand towards our audience. “What are they going to do? Get shot for the cause and die? Hasn’t that happened enough already?”

“You think you’re bulletproof?”

“At least we’re willing to make it a fight. At least we have the nerve to force a flinch before they pull the trigger.” Tension almost locked my jaw in place, but I could work through it. “Better the lion that dies to a spear having mauled its hunter than the lambs slaughtered by the thousands with barely a bleat.”

Agathe was no fool. She could see the unease in her people. “They’re not going to send the military to deal with a peaceful protest.”

I let loose a sharpened point. “We are rioters and traitors every night and every day in the news. Tell me they won’t send their best exterminators to deal with a bunch of cockroaches.”

The last word I’d chosen very deliberately, parroting it from the last newsman I’d heard over the truck’s radio as I was smuggled back to Seisa from my hometown.

Agathe shuddered when she heard it. To my surprise, the bite back didn’t come. Instead, her eyes filled with tears and I remembered how young Agathe was, barely twenty and now faced with a chilling reality. She was smart as a whip, smart enough to know that when language changed, so did the rules of engagement.

I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her in a hug, the closest thing to a little sister I still had. “It’s okay to be afraid, Agathe,” I whispered. “We want to protect you, but you have to let us.”

Agathe struggled against her tears, but months of brutality and deprivation left their mark on everyone. Suddenly the floodgates opened as all that trauma overwhelmed her. She sobbed into my shoulder, squeezing me as tightly as she could. There were no words in such pain.

I rocked her slightly from side to side, smoothing a hand over her hair. “Let us keep you safe,” I urged, this time at a normal volume so the others would know I meant them too. “I am not your enemy, nor is Sostrate. We want to fight to protect you, but you have to let us.”

Agathe sucked in a harsh breath, still pressing her face against my shoulder, clinging to my stained field jacket. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered.

I knew the truth, that when the military took over, there was a good chance that we would all die. Even if we fought, there were so many more of them. And if it became a war, it would not be of great battles pitched and won with glorious ease: it would be miserable and impossible against vastly overwhelming odds, but doing it was the only way to find any future.

“I’ll take care of you,” I promised all the same. Maybe Agathe understood already, but the tears overpowered it. Maybe she hadn’t realized how ugly our world was about to become. Either way, she was my sister’s best friend and without Endeis or her family, I was the dearest thing she had.

Agathe nodded. She didn’t pull back for at least another minute, leaving a damp spot on my collar. She had to use one of the cleaning rags for the printer to clean up her nose, leaving smudges of black ink on her cheeks. “What do we do?”

I kept my hands on her shoulders to steady her. "We will go to Sostrate and find a place where we can hide you safely. She has more know-how and connections than I do. Then we’re going to spread that paper of yours to every corner of Astera.”

The others relaxed as Agathe recovered her composure. “You think that will work?”

I offered her a faint smile. “It will at least present a challenge to the words of power.” Then I turned to the group assembled, including Isidoros. “We’ll be able to hide all of you. If there is anyone who wants to join the defense, give me your name tomorrow and I will connect you with Sostrate.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“We can stay the night here,” Agathe said softly. “It’s safe enough. We haven’t even seen a polizí patrol this deep into the district.”

“Are you sure?” There was a strange, unsettling familiarity to this moment, like I had lived it before.

Agathe nodded. “Positive. We’d be stumbling around in the dark.”

I wanted to immediately yank them to a better location, but they all looked so exhausted. “Alright,” I said reluctantly. “I’ll be back first thing in the morning. Just promise me you’ll be safe.”

“We will,” Agathe said.

I pulled her into another hug. “Have a good night, Agathe. I’ll be back before you know it.”

It wasn’t until later, as I followed the high boardwalks, that the cold feeling in my stomach finally reached my full consciousness. Everything snapped into place when I thought back to the day of the bombing.

Promise me you’ll be careful, End.

I always am, my sister had answered me.

Then I had seen her condemned to death, separated by a screen and so much distance. There had not even been a goodbye.

A horrible feeling welled up in me just as I reached the roof to Sostrate’s building. I had to go back and get them. Deep in my bones, I knew something wasn’t right, even without knowing how. My father had always told me to let my intuition be my guide. It answered to things that weren’t obvious or even consciously noticed.

I turned and ran back as fast as I could, slowing only for the boardwalks so I didn’t end up slipping and falling several stories. By the time I was six city blocks away, I could see a hellish orange glow casting shadows of large armored vehicles.

I ducked down almost into a crawl and kept moving forward, just close enough to see what was happening.

The closed restaurant was in flames, hotter than any I had seen in a long time. It illuminated the uniforms of the men around it. Then I saw the bodies lying in the street in a neat row, their arms tied behind their backs. The firelight gleamed on the pools around their heads, like halos spattered across the cement.

The men standing there were not polizí.

I bit down hard on my lip as I counted the bodies, to stop any sound from coming out. There were ten. The rest had either fled or perhaps burned.

Agathe and Isidoros could still be alive, I told myself. They’ve run away before.

The troops finished their discussion and moved, picking up bodies to fling into the fire. I crept closer as they worked, slipping down a fire escape to its lower level and hiding behind a few cardboard boxes.

My heart froze in my chest when they picked up the last body. Something fell from the face as the head lolled, a brief flash of brightness in the firelight. It crunched under a boot as the soldiers moved. They swung the corpse into the flames, letting go at the apex of their arc so it would fall as far into the fire as possible.

Once everything was burning, they left, clambering into their armored vehicles and rumbling off, towards the opposite end of the districts from Sostrate’s home.

Search and destroy.

I waited four hours before I moved, hugging the dark just before dawn to approach the smoldering ruin. I paid the building little mind, watching for any rearguard left behind that might take issue with someone returning. Instead, I stepped over to the area where the bodies were once laid out.

A copper stench filled the air here, pools of bone speckled blood congealed into clumps that followed the cracks of the street. I retraced the soldier’s steps and found the source of the falling flicker, lying crushed on the ground: Agathe’s glasses.

Sometimes, a feeling comes so strongly that no words can express it deeply enough. It is just a gnawing beast in your chest, rending everything it can reach with its claws until you have only shreds of lungs to breathe, tatters of heart to beat.

That was my guilt.

I folded the damaged glasses carefully and tucked them in my pocket before returning to the rooftops. I took a long and weaving pattern well into the hours of the day, ducking down into hiding places every time I heard the roar of engines above.

Sostrate’s instructions clear in my mind, I made certain that I was not followed before I even thought of returning. There was a numbness to everything, even the workings of my muscles.

Agathe the firebrand, Agathe the lover of words, Agathe the girl who had cried into my shoulder, how could she be gone?

I saw other armored vehicles on the street as I moved, soldiers stopping people in the narrow alleys below. Few looked up and those who did caught only a slight movement of the board. I was fast and knew to stay low, to rob them of a silhouette they could attack.

The glasses in my pocket grew heavier with every step. I did not cry, could not cry, as if there was some stone wall between my heart and my face. By the time I reached Sostrate’s front door, I had finally grasped what had happened.

Agathe was dead. Isidoros could have been any one of those bodies. If there were survivors who had not been burned in the building, they would go to ground, and hopefully we could find them before the soldiers did.

Sostrate opened the door at my knock, eyes widening at my expression. “What happened, Karsa?”

I held out the spectacles to Agathe. “The soldiers came.”

Sostrate took them with a gentle reverence, sorrow softening her features as she pulled me inside. “Tell me everything.”

In front of the others, I spewed the story like dragon’s fire. My anger and pain boiled out of me like bitter flames, but no tears fell. There was no time for tears, no place for tears, there was too much to be done.

Endeis and Agathe would never see their revolution come to pass, but I could do everything in my power and beyond to make it happen. If they could not dream the dream, I would.

I saw my certainty reflected in the eyes of my comrades. I saw the etched lines of pain in their brows as a mirrored reflection of my own.

This is the work now, Agathe had told me when she first pulled me into the movement. Her work was undone, but we would finish it.

The soldiers brought the war to our home, but I do not think even they were prepared for the backlash. Remember this moment as I have, wreathed in flame and sharp as the broken glass of Agathe’s spectacles.

It will explain what came next. Then you can tell me if you would do any differently, had you stood in our position.