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Pauline swallowed. Her blood was simmering, her system alight with adrenaline, her face flushed despite the frigid temperatures. Protestors swarmed around her, a thousand breaths steaming and mingling into one airy life force. A river of signs proclaimed MELT ICE and JUSTICE FOR RENEE and ALEX and KEITH and SILVERIO and on, and on, and on.
She scanned the crowd, looking for Halt and Crowley, but could no longer see them. Everyone looked the same in masks and nondescript clothing. It’s fine, she told herself. Halt and Crowley were veterans of events like this. They could take care of themselves.
At the end of the avenue stood a line of armored agents holding dark shields. When the line advanced toward them, she didn’t know if the crowd of protestors would hold or run. If the agents would remember a scrap of humanity, or if had all been lost under the seething hatred that had engulfed the American government. If this protest, like so many across the country, would become another site of state violence.
To her left, a girl balanced shakily on a car parked curbside, a megaphone clutched in her hand. “What do we want?” she yelled, her voice trembling, but Pauline could see the raw determination painted in every line of her.
“Justice!” she shouted back.
“When do we want it?” Louder, this time.
“Now!” The crowd roared back at her, a thousand voices in unison. It gave Pauline hope. Maybe, this time, America’s energy would last. Maybe her citizens would rise up and tell the government enough enough enough, send shock waves spiralling through the system, burn the fucking thing down, even.
“And if we don’t get it?”
“SHUT IT DOWN!”
Every business shuttered, every contract terminated, every citizen mobilized against the masked killers unleashed in Minneapolis and LA and Chicago and beyond. The world moved undeniably in the direction of justice. It was the one constant of humankind: the uprising of the oppressed, the overthrowing of the oppressor class. It was not a question of if, but a question of when.
And to make certain, Pauline said, to hell with her quiet life, her career that asked she not make too much trouble, and she showed up with her uprising community. That was the least she could do.
“You have orders to disperse!” barked an agent with a megaphone. “This is an unlawful gathering!”
“Fuck you!” someone yelled back.
“Disperse where?” another protestor asked. “You’ve blocked the streets!”
To her right, Pauline noticed the plywood in the windows of the boarded-up Tim Horton’s were spray-painted with red letters: ACAB. Fitting.
On top of the car, the girl’s eyes flickered toward the cops. Then down again to the crowd of protestors. She took a deep breath. “WHAT DO WE WANT!”
“JUSTICE!”
The tension bubbling under the surface simmered to a boil. There was a crack!—a gunshot, Pauline realized, horrified—and the girl staggered and fell off the car. Someone screamed, and then there was a telltale hissing noise as the cops released tear gas into the crowd.
The world dissolved into chaos. Protestors ran in all directions, and Pauline could only think about the girl who had fallen, even as her eyes started burning. She bent double as her vision blurred and went white. The world around her spun, and the pain in her eyes made her gag up bile, gasping for air with her hands on her knees.
People were screaming, jostling her from all sides, the sound of running feet a constant drumbeat under the deliberate marching steps of the ICE agents as they advanced. There was a series of calculated bangs as flash grenades went off—the sounds of a government turning on its citizens.
And that girl—where was she? Had she been trampled, or had people helped her?
Pauline’s breathing was ragged as she kept staggering away, barely able to walk. She couldn’t breathe. Her eyes burned like hellfire, and it took everything in her to keep from touching her own face.
“Water!” someone shouted. “Over here! Water!”
Gasping, Pauline staggered towards the sound, one hand outstretched. Someone shoved a bottle into it. Though she wanted nothing more than to upend it over her face, soaking herself in this Minnesota winter would be fatal. Pauline forced herself to trickle the water slowly, her hand trembling. She blinked and wiped at her eyes.
“There was a girl,” she said. “On that car—”
“I saw her too,” said the woman handing out water bottles. “I don’t know where she is, but if you find her, Alyss here is a trained medic.” She pointed at another woman—barely more than a girl, Pauline realized—dark hair tied in a no-nonsense ponytail, eyes kind above her N-95 mask.
Alyss nodded. “I’ll help you find her.”
Alyss and Pauline ducked low and scrambled towards the car. The last vestiges of tear gas still lingered in the air, turning the world white in a deadly fog. Cops were wading through the crowd, brandishing weapons, and fear tightened Pauline’s chest as she darted around them, ears straining for the sound of potential gunshots.
“Here,” Alyss gasped, kneeling by the prone form of a girl in a bulky black coat. “Help me!” Together, they lifted the girl. Alyss had her shoulders, Pauline the ankles. Her eyelids fluttered as Pauline accidentally jostled against someone.
Alyss screamed, and Pauline whipped around to see that the person she’d bumped into was an ICE agent raising a can of pepper spray.
There was nowhere to run, and especially not if she and Alyss were carrying a third person between them. Pauline’s feet were cemented to the road, frustration and anger pounding through her bloodstream like poison. Fine, then. She lifted her chin, determined not to give any satisfaction by crying out.
Someone dove between Pauline and the officer, an umbrella open in his hand. “Get away from her!” Halt yelled as the pepper spray deflected off the umbrella. He jerked his head at Pauline as the agent turned towards him. “Go!”
“Halt!” she shouted, her heart pounding in her chest. “What—”
“Pauline, move,” he said, darting back down the street. The agent swore and ran after him.
He’s going to get himself killed. The thought threatened to consume her, but if she let the fear in now, she’d sink down in the road and stay there until the rot eating away at the foundations of this country got her too. And that was not acceptable to Pauline.
Shoulders and arms screaming from the weight, she hefted the girl and stepped onto a curb behind the relative shelter of a parked car. “That alleyway,” Alyss gasped. “Set her… set her down there.”
They lowered the girl gently to the ground, where she lay groaning, her eyes half-open. At least there was no blood, and they could see that the gunshot hadn’t struck her: she’d simply fallen from the car. “What can I do to help?” Pauline asked, scanning the alley for ICE. Clear so far.
Alyss was pulling off her mittens and opened her first-aid kit, but she glanced up at the question. There was so much determination in her eyes for someone so young, Pauline thought. “I’ve got her here. You should go find the safety wardens—they’ve started shooting, and we need to get everyone out.”
Pauline nodded at her and raced out of the alleyway, past protestors kneeling, past retirees pulling wagons with free hot chocolate and water; past the upturned Meals not Bombs table that, not fifteen minutes ago, had been distributing cups of chili; past the lingering traces of tear gas in the air.
It wasn’t hard to find the organizers in their yellow safety vests. “What can I do?” she asked again.
“We need to get people out safely, but they’re panicking, and there’s nowhere to go,” was the response. The tear gas had destroyed the illusion of safety in the crowd. People were running pell-mell, crying, yelling, and through it all rang the barked orders of agents in their menacing black. This city block was lined with dense buildings, fencing the crowd in, and she could feel the mass panic reverberating off the surrounding brick.
“There are many more of us than there are of them,” someone else said. “We were taken by surprise—didn’t think they’d turn to force this quick.”
“Would they back off?” Pauline surprised herself by asking. “If everyone stood together, do they have the capacity to arrest us all?”
The first organizer shook their head. “Not today, they don’t. And the thing about ICE? These guys are cowards. They’ll shoot unarmed women through a windshield, but if it’s a hundred of them against ten thousand of us?” They turned and pointed down the road. “If we can advance into that major intersection, people will be able to get out.”
Pauline nodded, swallowing down her terror, calming the beat of her thudding heart. “Okay. So we rally.”
On the ground, the girl groaned and tried to sit up. Alyss helped her into a semi-upright position against the wall. “Can you hear me?”
The only response was another groan. Alyss unscrewed a water bottle and held it to her lips, trickling it gently into the other girl’s mouth. “You’re going to be alright,” she said. “Everything will be okay.”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. Alyss righted the bottle briefly before tilting it to her mouth again. “Better,” the girl muttered. Her eyes were still shut, her head tipped back against the brick wall, the lines of her throat stark even in the fading light.
Keep her talking. Alyss put the cap back on the water bottle. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Cassandra. Or Cass,” the girl said. Her voice was stronger now. “Nice to meet you.”
Alyss’s mouth quirked upwards. “I’m Alyss. Would say it’s a pleasure, but...”
A blossom of steam as Cassandra huffed out a breath. “It’s fucked up, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Alyss glanced over her shoulder. Chants had begun again on the main street, and she hoped that meant people were safe, that ICE was backing off. She turned her attention back to Cass. “You took a pretty bad fall off that car—feel any acute pain?”
Cassandra moved her limbs experimentally and turned her head both ways with a grimace. “No, just cold. And hurting all over.” There was a no-nonsense attitude about her that made Alyss like her immediately.
“And concussed, probably.” She considered the situation for a moment. It would be best for Cass to get out of the cold. Better still for someone to take a proper assessment for head injuries. “Can you walk?”
“Let me try.” Cass began to push herself to her feet. Alyss held out a hand, and she took it.
“There you go,” Alyss said. “Let’s get to the next road.” Her car wasn’t parked too far away, and she could drive back to get Cassandra. She put Cass’s arm around her shoulders, and together, their bulky winter coats brushing together, they hobbled out of the alley.
Halt picked up the tear gas canister and hurled it away from the medic station. He felt the heat of it through his heavy-duty gloves, saw it describe a hissing arc through the air before coming to rest near a cluster of agents holding shields. A grim satisfaction rose in him as the cops yelled and took cover.
“A taste of your own medicine!” Crowley yelled at them.
“Shut up and stop drawing attention,” Halt hissed back. He’d spent his entire life melting into the back of crowds, and he was putting all those skills to use on the streets. Nondescript black clothing; shoes so worn that they could be any color and brand, really; beard shaved; plain black mask. His iPhone was at home, and Halt was carrying a temporary cell with just three numbers in it: his attorney friend George Carter, Pauline, and Crowley. He also had a video recorder that had become obsolete about twenty years ago.
Crowley’s only concessions had been to tuck his red hair under a cap and wear a camouflage-patterned mask, the idiot.
Individual ICE agents were still knocking people to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a protestor pinned against the hood of a car and wrestled into handcuffs. Halt grabbed his plywood sign—he’d lost his umbrella defending Pauline—and said, “I think the time for non-violence has ended.”
“Was there ever such a time? Pigs at three o’clock, by the way.” Crowley jerked his head at the medic station, where two agents were yelling at EMTs to get back. As he watched, they began ripping apart first-aid kits, trampling hundreds of dollars of equipment into the ground. Halt tossed Crowley the video recorder, and they ran towards the station.
“Hey!” he yelled as Crowley recorded. “Use of unprovoked excessive force against unarmed protestors—have you heard of the First Amendment? Are you proud of yourselves for destroying medical supplies? Do you sleep well at night?” These days, Halt knew the Constitution was worth as much as toilet paper, but it was the distraction that counted.
The other agent turned towards Crowley, lunging for the recording device. Crowley sidestepped smartly, and the agent, expecting some form of resistance to his momentum but, receiving none, blundered into a telephone pole with a dull thud.
“Hey!” his partner yelled, but they were already running, using the brief distraction to slip away. The other agent followed him, away from the medic station. Good. Crowley ducked left around a parked car, and Halt went right, shaking the agents off easily. He lost track of his friend in the crowd, but that was fine; they would just reunite at a rendezvous point.
“Get away from her!” A shout drew his attention. Two young men had their phones out, yelling at an ICE agent that was kicking at someone on the ground. As Halt ran towards them, he could see the girl curled up, her forearms over her face.
A quick glance around told him that there were no other agents in the near vicinity. He pulled his hood more securely over his face. Then, Halt did something extremely stupid. Running full tilt, he barreled into the agent with all his might, sending him sprawling. His fist closed like iron around the man’s collar.
There might be retaliation for this, but in the moment, he didn’t care. These enforcers took children from their families every day and ripped the beating hearts out of communities whose only crime had been to live. Someone should let them know how it felt. Someone should remind them a mask and a badge didn’t protect them from answering for bloodshed.
If that someone was him, Halt would gladly do it.
A minute later, he arrived at the rendezvous point to find Crowley leaning against a lamppost. “You’re la-ate,” his friend sing-songed.
“I was held up,” Halt said in a long-suffering tone of voice. He shook out his bruised right hand. “Someone’s face was asking for it.”
Crowley raised an eyebrow. “Another Dumpster, Halt?”
“Trash belongs in the trash. Did you manage to find the organizers?”
“I did, in fact. We had a very important conversation while you were off throwing militant fascists into garbage cans. The plan is to rally folks and get them marching together again. ICE’ll back off if we can get the numbers, and if we can get out of this bottleneck and into the next intersection, the situation will get a lot more manageable.”
“They want to rally, not disperse?” Halt asked. He glanced at their position in the street again. There were still many more protestors than ICE agents, but mass arrests could begin at any moment. “That’s risky.”
“People have already died,” Crowley pointed out. “This is a city with nothing more to lose.”
“Okay.” He let out a breath. “We’ll stay for now, but as soon as we can get to that intersection—”
“We’ll skedaddle,” Crowley confirmed.
“Skedaddle isn’t the word I’d choose.”
“We’ll make a getaway to avoid being shot, gassed, detained, and deprived of our rights for trying to protest fascism.”
Halt opened his mouth to say something, but then he saw a figure heave herself onto the roof of a car on the near side of the intersection. A very familiar figure.
“Pauline,” he whispered, scared in spite of himself.
Crowley followed his gaze. “Pauline?”
“Whose streets are these?” Pauline demanded. She was holding a megaphone—where the fuck had she gotten a megaphone?
“Our streets,” said both Halt and Crowley reflexively.
“Whose streets?”
“Our streets!” Halt yelled. He stepped out onto the street, looking up at his wife and the megaphone she held aloft with something close to awe. After all those years of marriage, she still found ways to surprise him.
Crowley scrambled to follow him. “If you die, can I marry her?”
“Whose streets?”
“Our streets!” the protestors yelled back.
The beat had started back up again. Someone’s drumsticks rattled against the neon orange of a five-gallon bucket, rallying to the sound of Pauline’s chanting. As the agents directed their attention towards Pauline, the reprieve allowed protestors to regroup. People snatched fallen signs from the road and closed ranks. An organizer switched on a megaphone.
“No justice—”
“—No peace!”
A trio of brave college students reclaimed the fallen banner trampled by agents’ boots in the violence. It read STEP ON ICE and was covered in shoe prints the color of dirty snow. More protestors stepped up to join them, standing shoulder to shoulder, locking signs and umbrellas like a shield wall. Like an army reclaiming ranks, individuals formed a mass, indivisible and uncowering.
Halt linked his arm with Crowley’s. Pauline climbed down from the car. Their voices melded with the thousands around them. His heartbeat roared in his ears. This was a moment that could define this city—would define his life—could define history. It was the living proof of their collective belief in one another, in the fact that this broken world did not have to keep turning.
The cops fell back. They took the intersection.
A line of cars was already waiting, ready to move injured protestors. At Halt’s side, Pauline let out a shaky sigh. “Do we have a ride home?” she asked. Her hands were trembling as Halt took her fingers and squeezed. Like him, Pauline hated attention, and he couldn’t imagine what it must’ve taken for her to climb up onto that car and start yelling.
Crowley nodded. “I got it covered. Ran into these nice young ladies who just happened to have three seats—oh, there they are now.”
“Alyss!” Pauline shouted as a black Honda pulled up in the intersection.
“Good to see you, ma’am,” said the girl behind the wheel. “You really showed them, huh?”
“She really did,” Crowley said as they piled into the backseat. “Now, get us out of here.”
“You got it.” Alyss peeled away from the curb, taking them south, towards the nearest Urgent Care for Cassandra.
Would it matter in the end, what they’d done today? People were being gassed, shot at, dragged from their homes. They were just five individuals swallowing down their terror to shout chants towards the sky in one protest, on one street, in one city. But it had to matter. One voice raised meant that injustice could still be named. Still be fought against, changed, turned back. It meant that empire wasn’t inevitable.
The whole world was watching this movement, and they were determined not to let it down. The whole world was watching, and the whole world would demand justice.