

Apocalypse Rising

A Novel

Book One

J.T. Marsh
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

APOCALYPSE RISING: BOOK ONE

First Edition. April 2019.

Copyright © J.T. Marsh 2019

Written by J.T. Marsh

Published by Queensborough Books
James 5

1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.

3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

5 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.

6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.

7 Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.

I

1. Before the Fall

Fifteen years ago all Europe was aflame. For three weeks, a few million workers seized the continent and through pure strength of will held the whole world under their sway. It was a time not of heady ideals but intemperate, undisciplined outbursts of the ordinary people made to live a life shackled by poverty, unemployment, and despair. Only a child at the time, Valeri Kovalenko saw his mother and father among the striking workers killed in a hail of bullets. On a bright, unseasonably cold winter's day, Valeri had the chance at a normal life taken from him by the black-clad troops meting out death by the bullet. Forever besotten by this personal wound, Valeri has become a young man given to passions inflamed. But events are conspiring, and soon enough he'll have his chance for revenge. Already there's war in the streets again, and this time war could change the world we live in forever.

As uprisings go, the war fifteen years ago saw much bloodshed, unlike what anyone would've expected in the middle of such countries as France, Germany, Spain, and here in Britain. There were strikes and demonstrations, angry voices and raised fists, workers seizing their factories and mills, students their universities, parishioners their churches, the whole lot of them forging a camaraderie from their common stand. But their newfound camaraderie succeeded in changing very little for men like Valeri right away; once the bloodstains were cleaned from the pavement in London and cities across the country there was much hatred and recrimination vented but little progress made. Like most young working class men in the slums around Britain, Valeri Kovalenko must learn to be better than he is. It's a tall order, made even taller when he arrives every day to work already tired and sore all over. But the tired and sore feeling in his body he can tolerate; it's the loneliness that truly pushes him to imagine something more.

Now, there's war in the offing again, with erratic gunfire rattling into the night and bombs bursting in the streets, here and there the rage of the poor and the very poor alike erupting in impassioned acts like the lashing out of cornered prey at the predator. As Valeri sees a young man on the way out the door, he recognizes the man as none other than Kenneth Rogers, Ken for short. "Did you hear about the disappearances last night?" asks Ken. In the night, last night, the police struck, here and throughout cities and towns across Britain, raiding union halls, churches, and universities, their raids resulting in numerous disappearances, ordinary people taken away only for the crime of expressing support for the rebels in the streets. But there's much, much worse about to come.

"Did they take anyone?" asks Valeri, but Ken only nods grimly. It's been this way far too long. Valeri asks, "who?" In truth, the disappearings were not, are never meant to arrest the perpetrators of dissent; this, the disappearings which take place in waves could never possibly accomplish for the scattershot, haphazard way they're unleashed. But the disappearings are not the only legacy of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago. To this day the halls of Valeri's little flat smell of cigarettes. Still he wears shirts and trousers with holes that grow wider by the day. And still he feels tired and sore all over when he returns home in the evening, where he lives under threat of eviction. Valeri Kovalenko knows this is not the life his mother and father died for. In the morning, most mornings, Valeri rises, still tired and sore from the last day's work, the little flat in Dominion Courts he shares with his roommate filled with the summer's thick, oppressive heat.

She's not there; his only company is the dull roar of the crowds filling the street. In the sweltering heat of an unseasonably warm summer's morning, Valeri makes for the window and mops sweat from his brow, then turns to the day. Although Ken Rogers is only a passing figure, the next time they cross paths he says to Valeri, "any day now, any of us could be next." The two men don't stop working as they talk, having both learned the rhythm of work, reciting each movement from memory as though they're simply machines, working on automatic, their bodies carrying on as their minds are free to wander. And Ken says, "I'm tired of seeing my friends taken off to jail before they've even had the chance to grow old." Although both men grew up in the aftermath of that failed uprising fifteen years ago, even still they recall a time before, in the vague way that they do, when life never seemed so hopeless, when it still seemed as though possibilities lay in their futures neither painful nor disturbing. Now, though, there's little to keep them faithful in the way of things. And this is by design.

But Valeri shakes his head and says, "you may be right, but if you don't—." If only Valeri could listen, then, he might be able to do something, anything at all. If only he could know there're greater forces at work, that he's destined for greater things than the immaturity of lashing-out, then he'd, he'd still be doing exactly the same things he is. "—it's wrong how they can just throw people away like rubbish," Valeri says. Like many young men in Britain's impoverished working class, both Valeri and Ken are given to expressing their support to the rebels in the street, at least in spirit, but Valeri is slowly coming to the realization that opposition in spirit is worthless without opposition in form. His challenge, whether he can see it or not, is to make good on his realization.

"It's not paranoia, it's—" But Ken's cut off by the boss lady, named Judith, who comes around, seemingly popping up out of nowhere, as if materializing out of thin air like an apparition. She eyes them up, as if to pick and choose which of them to keep around. She gives Valeri a quick once-over, but holds her eyes on Ken for a half-second longer, just enough to make her point. "I'm telling you," says Ken, once Judith has left and the two men have resumed their work, "they've had it in for us ever since they'd—" But Valeri knows he's right. It's been too long, some months since the managers last carried out one of their purges, whittling down the workforce, some replaced with cheaper workers, others not replaced at all. "—They don't want us to be here any longer, they're going to fire us all and sell the factory," says Ken. And Valeri, Valeri has heard the rumours of their shop's impending sale to some new, mysterious investors, absentee owners interested only in figures and line-items. It makes sense to him. The current owners will want some of the workers cut, to make the purchase more attractive to the prospective owners. And it'll all go down without men like Kenneth and Valeri ever seeing any of it, with signatures on documents hidden cleverly in plain sight sealing their fates.

"—It shouldn't be this way," says Valeri. "—it wasn't always this way." Fifteen years ago, Valeri was only a child. Now he's a young man, and his heart rebels against any injustice, however slight, whether perceived or real. As a young man he still holds in his heart bitterness for the murder of his parents at the hands of the troops who'd put down the revolt. Today, he arrives at work to find the machines out of order, with the movement of big, heavy pallets to be done by manual labour. Inwardly he steels himself against the soreness and the tiredness already in his muscles, sure to be magnified a thousand times by the end of the day.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?" asks Ken, the last thing Valeri will hear him say on this day. As Valeri is not yet ready to walk the path laid out for him by forces at work, he's on the cusp of readiness, his temperament earning him no favours among the managers and their absentee bosses but his penchant for accomplishing more work in a shift than most of his co-workers accomplish in a week saving him from unemployment. But his work ethic won't save him for long, soon as other considerations are to supersede even that.

At work, Valeri is as a machine, his body moving smoothly, rhythmically, every motion rehearsed ten thousand times until so learned the act of performing his work requires no thought, no input, leaving his mind free to wander. "I won't stand for it," his friend had said, not Ken but the young man the police are about to take, "and the next time there's a strike I say we don't just raise our voices!" At the time, Valeri only nodded, already tired and sore all over from the day's work.

In the city, today, there're angry voices shouting, heaping insults on the policemen surrounding them, and there's unemployed youths throwing stones and empty bottles in all directions, with the distant rattling of gunfire seemingly nowhere at all. In the night, the rising pillars of smoke blend at a height seamlessly with the blackness of the skies. Across all the world and contained within the smallest grain of sand a confused, disjointed tension sets in, a tension that's been there all along yet seems to appear out of nowhere to make its presence suddenly felt. With fires reaching for the sky and with sirens screaming and wailing all the while, Valeri takes in with the workers who can't help but work, death lingering in the shadows. At the shop where Valeri works, there's much sympathy among the workers, Valeri's friend joining with the chorus of all the others to say, "and if we don't join in the coming strike we might lose our chance forever." But another worker, named Larry Roberts, says, "we could lose everything if we go on strike now." This prompts Valeri to say, "when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose." On this point, there's agreement signified by a chorus of growls all around. Although Valeri thinks often about the deaths of his mother and father in the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, he rarely talks about it, with none of his fellow workers at the shop knowing about the anger that's been smouldering in his heart since then.

But Valeri's goal isn't to join the rebellion, not yet, rather simply to survive, to subsist through each and every day, to keep the hunger pangs in his stomach at bay however best he can. Anger is secondary, for the moment, a luxury men like Valeri will only have when everything else is taken from them. But among the ranks of the workers at his shop there's already those who would count themselves in with any revolution, any rebellion, around Valeri a hidden drama playing itself out in plain sight. At the shop another of Valeri's fellow workers, a red-haired woman named Dora, says to Valeri, "I know not everyone wants to take part in the strike, but I'm going to be there." She has two children, for whom she's the sole provider. But Valeri can only admire her courage, even as he nods and tells her he looks forward to seeing her there. Still Valeri's thoughts are consumed in other things.

He remembers the way his mother and father would promise to always provide him a place to call home; now a man, he feels forever left to wander the world aimlessly in search of this home so taken from him. It's in this mindset that he comes to find himself working as a common labourer in a common shop, witnessing, living the exploitation of man by man, not in the wide expanses of the shop's floor but in his heart. No matter how hard Valeri works, it's never enough. Targets are met after strenuous weeks, months even, then new, still higher targets set, again met, then set higher again. This is the life he's been given, but one which Valeri's come to believe with all the passion and intensity of a religious zealot need not have been. Valeri's immediate challenge, therefore, is to see himself through the day, where once he might've had a future now he has only a limitless malaise. He knows of the men in the streets who fight back, with their bare hands if they have to, risking the truncheon and the bullet, but he doesn't know he's soon enough to join them. But today the crowds surge at the troops who guard the streets, in anger at the latest injustice, a barrier of armed troops with rifles pointed right at the crowd are set to mete out death to anyone who might test them. Still standing on the floor at the shop where he works, Valeri looks up at exactly the moment there's the cracking of gunfire and the tumbling of bodies to the pavement outside, not immediately outside but somewhere in the city not far away, a shivering sensation running the length of his spine, burying itself in the base of his neck, Valeri unknowingly set upon by the dark essence which should soon consume us all. But it's all a fraud.

The boss lady, a grey-haired woman named Judith, comes around a few more times that day, each time eyeing Valeri with all the suspicion of a policeman silently interrogating a suspect. It's not been that long since Valeri was at her mercy, dragged into an office and accused of all sorts of salacious misdeeds, from deliberately slowing production to slandering the name of the shop's owners. Many workers in Britain in this day and age are subjected to constant monitoring and lurid accusations, from stealing to sabotage, a reign of terror having instituted itself where the old regime seeks to preserve its power by any means necessary. As Judith comes around for the last time today, inwardly Valeri can only look back and recall each of those accusations as entirely true, salacious or not. You see, Valeri is a dashing figure, prone to outbursts, so confident in the moral superiority of the working class that he brooks no patience for the managerial shenanigans. Only his strong work ethic and his relentless commitment to detail have saved him so far from being fired. Even these habits will soon prove inadequate. He speeds about the floor, dashing madly, hoisting twenty-kilogram boxes onto pallets and shunting pallets into their spaces, the noise of gears whirring and the sound of hydraulics sliding overpowering the senses but never making him feel overwhelmed. Bursting in the distance a wave of sound bounds through the air, seeming to rattle and roll the s hop's frame gently, in the morning light a thunderous explosion booming across the city, a train derailing somewhere sending scores of men running for their lives with only the clothes on their backs and the air in their lungs.

The dashing figure in Valeri imagines himself joining the hopeless fight, making himself one with the ragged, haggard mob, but the better part of him knows he's destined for something more. On this day, a sequence of events transpire which seem at a glance like nothing at all, but that tends to be the way of things. In the midst of a disintegration, even something so simple and ordinary as a sideways glance exchanged by two like-minded workers can be an event unto itself, setting off a chain of events that should bleed into a larger sequence, in turn changing the world we live in, forever. Once the machines have come back to life, the whole shop is abuzz with activity, with Judith barking out orders made redundant by the handful of workers who follow a plan already in the works. Valeri presses himself to work harder and faster, hauling his pallets at a pace that leaves him breathless, as Judith shouts and screams at them all to move faster still. Soon, it becomes evident even to her the workers are working the pace of their work faster than ever before; still she shouts and screams all the same, playing the role she was meant to play. But Valeri knows, in the instinctive, guttural way all of us can know that a larger struggle is underway, and that the coming escalation of their fight for freedom from poverty, indignity, and despair will be different.

In the streets of Britain already the columns of smoke rise from the fires of liberation burning through the night, tempting Valeri to join the fight immediately. It's not for the ragged, haggard mob to know, but theirs is a disorganized, disoriented lashing out that can only end in failure. As the police slam their truncheons against the heads of the unemployed youths, nor can they know the fight should soon disabuse itself with such outbursts, these mobs to evolve into the mightiest fighting force the world has ever seen. The shop where Valeri works is near the junction of three different highways and four different rail lines, not far from the port which permits the steady flow of cargo en route from here to there and from there to here. It produces nothing, but ships essential supplies to many factories, power plants, ports and airports, and more. It's back-breaking work; he's seen many of his fellow workers break their backs in exchange for the pittance they're paid. As he turns in his gear at the end of his twelve-hour shift, he's utterly exhausted from an entire night spent on his feet.

On this, the busiest shift he's worked, he harbours a burgeoning resentment for having worked so hard simply for the sake of another's profit. Still, between Valeri and his replacement there's the unspoken knowledge shared of the coming wave of protests; but for Valeri's tendency to give in to the intemperate passions of rebellion he'd have kept secret his leanings and spared himself much pain and suffering. His struggle is not yet one with they who burst bombs and rattle off gunfire in the night, but soon it will be. At Valeri's shop, the police arrive, guns drawn, in a surprise raid bursting through the bay doors in search of a young man named Sergei, one of Valeri's friends who has said some things he might've later regretted. There's shouting and there's the smashing of glass, in the heat of the moment the true purpose of this raid lost on men like Valeri, men who see only naked aggression in the policeman's truncheon. "Everyone stay where you are!" shouts one of the policemen. "Don't move!" shouts another. "Keep your hands where we can see them!" shouts a third. And Valeri, along with all the others, is only capable of freezing in place, even as the impulse surges in him to lash out some instinct keeping him from wasting his life in such an ill-advised, ill-tempered outburst. Among others, the police are looking for Valeri's young friend and co-worker named Sergei. But they won't find him, not here, not today.

"You criminals," says Valeri, muttering under his breath. And for a moment, it seems to Valeri as though the nearest policeman might've heard his mutterings, the sharp-faced, uniformed constable turning at exactly the right moment to catch Valeri's glimpse. But as the police hold Valeri and the others at gunpoint, going through them man by man, it becomes obvious even to Valeri they must've colluded with the managers in staging this raid, knowing full well they wouldn't find everyone they're looking for even as the officers demand answers on his whereabouts from every worker here. A part of Valeri feels the compulsive urge to strike out at the policemen, as sure as his knees feel the hardness of the floor and his lungs feel the burning of the dust in the air, but while he kneels with his hands flat against the floor with all the others this internal conflict can't resolve itself in time, leaving him paralyzed. Still Valeri holds out some hope that his friend Sergei might be safe, somewhere, even as the better part of him knows there's a good chance, a very good chance, that Sergei might already be dead.

Since his parents were killed in the failed uprising fifteen years ago, Valeri's worked many jobs; dishwasher, cashier, night watchman, now as a labourer earning a few hundred pounds a week. It's a pittance when held up against the sums on the ledgers of the company whose profits he advances every day, but it's a pittance which, in this day and age of transient work and disposable workers, neither Valeri nor any of his brothers and sisters in union can afford to risk. Valeri has worked there for more than three-and-a-half years, and by now his fiery temperament would've had him out the door were it not for his work ethic. There are shifts when he accomplishes more work than half his co-workers put together, leaving himself so utterly spent he can hardly move when he goes home. After Valeri's parents were killed, murdered, a family friend took him under his wing and offered him guidance, a man now known to him and to many other workers as their brother, Murray. But today, even after the police have failed to turn up Valeri's friend and colleague Sergei, still they keep the workers kneeling on the flood with their hands cuffed behind their backs. They don't shoot anyone, nor do they strike Valeri or any of the others with their truncheons, but they put their hands roughly on the backs of necks and forcibly push some to the ground. It's when Valeri sees this that he realizes the true purpose of these raids, in the vague, instinctive way men like him can. After Sergei was taken in by another raid, not here from the shop's floor but at a church yesterday, it became an inevitability that his disappearance should inspire men like Valeri in at least some small way. The fact that the police are looking for someone who's already been taken in, even if no one here realizes it, is proof on the haphazard and inept way the raids are carried out.

But he's never resentful of his tendency to outwork the rest of them, not at all. He simply knows how to do nothing else but work at the same pace, day in, day out, as if there's something in him that compels him to throw himself into the work. As Valeri mechanically acts out this day, he thinks on the noxious, quixotic fantasy of the war fifteen years ago, as he's come to fill his own thoughts with these fantasies, the days blending into one another as he willingly drowns them beneath the half-drunken haze so offered in escape to the realm of the imagined. During the frenzy of the busiest shifts of the week, Valeri has no time for himself, the frenetic pace of the work demanding his full attention, he along with all the other workers on the floor seeming to fit around one another, acknowledging each other with a nod and a nudge but always speeding through their task; they never finish on time, they can never finish on time, the managers berating them at random intervals, the whole floor overwhelmed with action. And on this day, Valeri's work stops only long enough for the raid to visit on him and the other workers a momentary terror, as he kneels on the cold, hard floor the thought occurring to him that this might be the day when he's forced to confront the possibility of his own disappearance, from the way Judith the boss-lady looks at him. But far from intimidating him, this possibility only grows the feeling inside him that urges him to do something, anything at all to stop this. In time, when Sergei fails to turn up, Valeri may very well wish he'd taken the opportunity to act on his feelings and done something, anything at all, even if it meant only the crashing of a policeman's truncheon against the back of his head. But the course of history has much greater plans in store for him, for men like him, his ability to keep himself from lashing out today actually a sign of some small progress.

When the policemen have made their point, they leave, this only one of the many raids taking place at shops, halls, and apartment blocks throughout the country on this day. If men like Valeri and Kenneth thought the raids from the day before were the end of it, then they've failed to anticipate the intensifying campaign against their ranks. The managers here, Judith among them, order Valeri and the rest of the workers back to work immediately, as though nothing had happened. Still Valeri feels a burning regret in his heart for having failed to seize this opportunity to confront evil, even while under the watchful eye of the managers his thoughts drifting. Already the workers here talk of fighting back, trading glances and exchanging profanities, even when the managers come around openly displaying their anger.

But Valeri's thoughts drift back to that decisive moment when he felt the urge of rebellion tugging at his heart, the creeping sensation lingering that he should've done something at that very moment he chose not to. At home, there's always someone fighting; some nights the couple in the unit next to Valeri's keep him awake with shouting and screaming and thumping on the walls. There's always someone fucking, too; some nights the couple in the suite on the other side of Valeri's keep him awake with over-exaggerated panting and moaning and the rapid, rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. Outside, there's the sound of buses stopping, of bottles smashing against the pavement and of police sirens wailing day and night. Sometimes Valeri lies in bed, awake, watching the flashing red and blue lights that slant in through his bedroom window's blinds and make for a show like a caricature of the northern lights.

This is so unlike him, to be kept quiet by his lingering feelings, given as he customarily is to the passions of futile rebellion. He can't know it, none of us can know it, but this is a critical moment in his ascension, even as he's always been given to rebellion whether futile or consequential. As he cleans the smashed glass and splintered wood left strewn about by the policemen's raid, the dark essence which guides all rebellion comes to inhabit him, even if he doesn't, can't know it yet. It's not their fault. They're employed as an apparatus, as a mechanism, nothing more. They work to tear apart a community and install another in its place, to eject the ordinary, working-class people who live by the values of honesty, integrity, thrift, chastity, and in so ejecting they clear the way for the extraordinary, wealthy-class people who live by the values of duplicity, deceit, indulgence, corruption. Living in an older building, decrepit, decaying, Valeri looks to the future that's being built in the form of so many sleek, gleaming, glass-and-steel towers clustering around the city like an overgrown forest and realizes, in some instinctive, almost primal way, that it's not his people's future, that it's for those who would be our betters.

He realizes, later than he should've, his is no future, not under the way of things, that he are to be ejected from his own home without concern for where he might go. That day, at work it might've looked outwardly as though nothing happened, but at the moment when Valeri and Judith crossed paths for the last time she gave him an evil look amounting to that last little nudge over the edge. Although Valeri feels the urge, now, to lash out at her for whatever role she might've played in terrorizing the workers with the policemen's raid, the dark essence which has chosen him compels him to keep quiet, to bide his time, to wait for the right moment to strike. But it's not something he feels, not something he's consciously aware of, instead the dark essence reserving that for later. Now, as he exchanges a forced, perfunctory greeting with Judith, he feels a burning anger at the world who's left him alone and vulnerable, just as surely as the floor beneath his feet is hard and the air pumping in and out of his lungs is thick and noxious. Soon his time will come, but not yet.

Only the streets themselves break up endless slabs of concrete and glass, like rivers cutting canyons through rock. There's rarely anything interesting to look at. There's plenty of colourful neon signs, billboards, even some lively banners advertising an upcoming festival. The woman Valeri has fallen in love with, a fellow worker named Sydney Harrington, she's been there as long as he has, it's only recently he's come to take an interest in her. For all the political upheaval in the world at large, it should seem a strange thing for love to strike at this time, given as Valeri still is at nearly thirty to the impetuousness of youth. When the managers announce wage cuts, he protests. When the managers announce longer working hours, he objects vociferously. When the managers announce a new round of firings, the shrinking workforce meaning more work for the rest of them, he declares it an act of pure, unvarnished greed. And still, some small part of him clings to the ideal of romantic love even as he's about to embark on a path that will turn him against his growing love for her.

Through Valeri's objections, he's kept hold of his livelihood, but when he's deprived of his pittance he'll be liberated, made free to fight back without fear of loss. When he'll have nothing, he'll have nothing to lose. Across the country, the police stage their raids just like this one, Valeri and the others at his shop soon trading stories in the pubs, in the halls, in the pews. This offensive, meant to intimidate and terrorize, in fact has the opposite effect, hardening the hearts of men like Valeri. As he returns in the evening to his leaky, decrepit flat, there's nothing more to be done in the moment, even as images of his own self cuffed and forced to kneel awakening in him a new anger. It's a sign of our times, the disconnect between the power of the police raids and the workers' ability to discuss them openly; if the raids, here and throughout Britain, are meant to terrorize, to intimidate the workers into silence, then they fail, as proven by the workers and their continued dissent, whether dissent takes the form of thousands of demonstrators shouting in the streets or a pair of workers at work whispering in hushed tones whenever a spare moment presents itself. But these raids are not meant to eliminate opposition, even if there might've been a time some years back when this was the case. No, although neither Valeri nor any of his fellow workers realize it, these raids are merely an attempt to buy time, to forestall the inevitable, to allow the managers and the absentee owners some precious weeks, months, even years to carry out a last campaign to wring what wealth, what profits they can from the bodies of working men before the end comes. And the end is almost come. Although Sergei's not dead, not yet, it seems to Valeri as though his young co-worker may as well be dead. But this is only half the point of these disappearances, so long as men like Valeri remain given to the impetuousness of rebellion, whether futile or consequential, the disappearances sure only to provoke another uprising.

In the middle of the night, as the rest of his world sleeps, the Valeri sometimes sits alone on the windowsill in his little flat's bedroom and smokes a cigarette, looking out into the darkness of the night and allowing himself the subversive pleasure of imagining a near-future where not all is for nought. In the streets there`s a nascent consciousness, perceptible only as a series of random events, of happenings in the shadows soon to be moved out into the light. Men like Valeri don`t yet realize it, but the salvation of the worker lies not in the intellect of the learned but in the pain and suffering of the lowest, the most pathetic among him. To lead the way to the future, painted as it should be with the blood of they who would seek to oppress, to humiliate, to degrade us all. After the failed rising fifteen years ago, left-wing parties, once temporarily unified, all fragmented in defeat, leaving only sporadic acts of resistance by men here and there, acts like the brief, hardly perceptible slowing of work by Valeri and a few of his fellow workers. Not far from the shop where he works Valeri lives in one of the simple, functional blocks left over from another time. Inside, there's leaky roofs, mice living in the walls, threadbare carpets and the faint after-smell of cigarette smoke filling every available space. For men like Valeri, it's home, oddly comforting in its familiarity even as he dreams for himself something more. Murray's the union representative at the shop, a man of quiet action, always working behind the scenes, managing connections ever so carefully. Although Valeri's grateful for Murray's having guided him through the tumultuous years of his youth, still he sneers at Murray's aversion to confrontation. Stand tall, Valeri thinks, and boldly confront evil no matter the cost. The war in the streets will offer Valeri the chance to do exactly this.

Soon, soon enough the police will return to terrorize the streets, just as the workers at Valeri's shop have been so terrorized. For now, though, Valeri listens to the street, although he can't know it the dark essence having chosen to recede from his heart, leaving him dazed and confused. It's still that formative time when the essence has not yet completed its ascendancy, when the form it seeks is in the world somewhere but not ready to resume its work. This is why men like Valeri must wait, and this is why they wait, in obedience to a cause they unknowingly serve. This near-future has been gathering strength for much longer than he's been alive, for so long as there's been history to advance. As all will come to see, these sorts of things have a way of finding an outlet for expression, and in so finding make use of what they have been given to change the course of all our histories forever. Here in London, not altogether far from the exact spot where the industrial age was born, such a small thing as a group of dedicated workers can foment the rise of the apocalypse. From the hopelessness and from the despair that'd consumed Valeri's mother and father fifteen years ago there will soon come the advent of the next stage, the birthplace of this stage also the birthplace of the next.

It should just so happen that Valeri will come to join this dedicated group of workers, the few soon to become the many and emerge from out of their individual weakness form a collective strength. In the meanwhile, men like Valeri will experience an awakening, already the ground sown by experience, to be reaped when the time is right by forces set into motion on a night not unlike the night after Valeri had turned from one state of mind to the next. In his little flat, Valeri has taken in with a woman from the shop, a lovely young woman with a thin figure and a sweet, shy demeanour. But she, like Valeri, holds a secret, a secret she'll soon reveal to him no matter the consequences. Turning against one another, Valeri and Sydney look through the window in his little flat, together taking in the sight of the darkened night's sky turns a dull, faded amber by the fires in the streets, sharing an embrace before parting ways. If what Sydney has told Valeri is true, then she will prove to be a righteous ally in the war for dignity and compassion, for liberation and intimidation. For, you see, when they were sitting on that little nook behind the window overlooking the alley, she had turned to him and, in the kind of hushed voice that indicated she was unsure not of him but of herself, said, "I love you." It had been such an innocent turn of phrase, but one which Valeri's still not sure how to take, even as the days pass after the raid which'd claimed Valeri's young friend Sergei among so many others, here in London and across Britain.

And he, almost reflexively, in bed with Sydney turned back and said, "I love you." At that moment she'd crossed over and fully embraced his way of life, in spirit if not in form. This brief exchange takes place in the days following that raid which claimed Valeri's young friend Sergei, when such an innocent turn of phrase could still tempt Valeri. Still in the twilight of his youth, Valeri has the advantage of recalling the idealistic passion of his younger years yet able to look ahead with pragmatism to see the way through to a future better for all. As it is written in the forbidden gospel written by the rebel whose name we'll soon learn, the time for vengeance is close at hand. Men like Valeri should soon count themselves among those who would be chosen to repay vengeance for so many years of hardship and death. You see, the rebel is already known, his name whispered quietly, even as his day has nearly dawned. Valeri is not the rebel we seek, but he will, soon enough, be among those who pledge loyalty to serve him. But not yet. As much pain and suffering as we've endured until now, the future will entail pain and suffering on a scale scarcely seen before; if we're to build a future for our children and our children's children then we'll rely on young and intemperate men like Valeri to become better than they are. In truth, Valeri isn't yet ready to embrace history's plan for him, for men like him, for all of us, as he is an emblem of so many men un these times. But he's almost there.

In the morning, Valeri visits the cemetery where his parents were buried after dying in the failed uprising fifteen years ago. Not far from the apartment block where Valeri lives, they're buried in a small plot with a simple cross, the cross marked with a Bible verse chosen by Valeri himself. Every year for the past ten years he's visited, but only on this very day in the early summer. This time, he kneels on the ground before their headstone, then places a lily upright against it. Many different kinds of people died on the day they died, mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, all cut from the same cloth as his parents. Valeri stands, and before he leaves he says, "I'll make you proud."

2. In Union

Life in London's working class districts is never easy, and since the failed rising fifteen years ago it's only become harder for all. Like all working men, Valeri is consumed in surviving from day to day; but like all working men, he dreams himself close to the day when he'll have his chance to strike back. Too consumed he is with his own day to day survival to see his chance is sooner than he thinks. The policeman's raid on his shop continues to dominate Valeri's thoughts, even as he feels pangs of hunger in his stomach and strains of fatigue in his muscles, throughout his body at the end of the day. It's a struggle on Valeri's part, not to survive through these feelings but to embrace them, to discard his own self-preservation and embrace the higher purpose for which he has been unknowingly chosen. Life in London's working class districts is never easy, and in the days after that most recent wave of police raids there's much hardship provoked, much wailing and gnashing of teeth, even fathers left unable to provide for their families, mothers left unable to tend to the needs of their sons and daughters, this effect by design. "I don't like the way things are headed," says another of Valeri's co-workers, an older man named Chris Clark. He's old enough to have seen his children take part in the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, and it remains the source of much anguish in his life that one of them didn't survive when the police attacked the university she was studying at. But as he doesn't talk about the loss of his daughter with anyone at the shop, Valeri can't know it. Chris Clark says, "too many people are going to get hurt."

But Valeri scoffs, telling him, "too many people are already getting hurt." He pauses, before continuing. "Are you going to let yourself be the next one dragged off?" asks Valeri, pointedly looking in Chris Clark's direction. "Aren't you tired of working so hard only to take home enough pounds so you can be kept alive to work even more?" In pushing the working class to the brink of despair, the enemy who commands the way of things should seek to keep them malleable, pliable, easily manipulated for his own benefit. But as Valeri struggles through the day after, he must confront challenges anew. And while Valeri confronts the challenges of life in the hopeless poverty of London's working class blocks, the war that started fifteen years ago simmers, threatening to explode into open war at any moment.

But Chris Clark himself didn't take part in the failed uprising that killed his daughter. "If there's more killing then things will only get worse for everyone," he says. "If we take part then a lot of men could lose sons and daughters." They're speaking about the coming general strike, which the police raids were intended, in part, to forestall, as a pre-emptive strike against the coming offensive of labour against capital. Despite the unrest and all the hardships that've come about since the failed rising fifteen years ago, London and all the other cities in Britain have seen much change. Finding work here, finding work there, Valeri sees only the way from one day through to the next fraught with peril, with broken bodies and with broken minds. Sometimes, as he's working through the day, each muscle smoothly contracting and expanding a thousand times over like the hydraulics of the machines he operates, he wonders if it's all been worth it, an insidious, corrosive line of thought, he knows, that can only take him into a place of deeper, darker suffering than ever before.

No, as Valeri finds just enough work to keep a roof over his head and food on his table, he comes to realize he owes it not only to himself but to his dead parents and now his disappeared friend Sergei to push through this hardship, this poverty of values and of vice so as to provide for them in the future what he could never provide for them now: a new beginning, a better tomorrow, a world in which they will never have to fear eviction from their own homes, a world in which they will claim as theirs a dignity never before afforded to them, a world in which the last vestiges of the wealthy man's excess will have been long ago purged. It recalls the raids on churches, universities, and union halls that've been intensifying for many, many years, in the fifteen years since that failed uprising which claimed the lives of Valeri's mother and father so many seeing fit to declare themselves as inheriting their legacy but none so deserving. In surviving for so long as he has, Valeri has learned men like him must earn everything they have, must fight for every scrap of meat and for every thread of clothing on his back. But even this is no longer enough, in a time when rising global temperatures and a rapidly shifting climate has produced chronic food shortages even here in Britain. The seemingly longer and hotter summers contrast with the shorter and more violent winters. Agricultural failure has left governments scrambling to secure food supplies while the slowly rising seas threaten coastal areas.

But the only empty cupboards are found in the working class districts, just kilometres away the wealthy men hoarding their own food even as children go hungry and retired pensioners wither away and die. It's widely known there're warehouses filled with all kinds of foodstuffs while half of Britain subsists on stale bread and thin soup. Still the ultimate insult in Valeri's mind lies in the talking heads on the screens lecturing them on his own excess, everywhere he goes Valeri acutely reminded by the pangs in his stomach on the disconnect between what's real and what's made to be real by fiat. In this day and age, it seems to men like Valeri as though there is no joy, only anger.

Though Valeri doesn't know it, not yet, the police have stepped up their disappearings, seeking to head off the coming uprising even as they unwittingly yet actively work to foment it. "Don't upset your father," his mother would say when he was a small child before sending him off to school for the day, "be good." But he never would, always finding some trouble to get himself in, on returning home his father there to tell him, "you must learn to be better than anyone else. It's the only way people like us can survive." It's only in this time of radical ideas and violent upheavals that Valeri will come to learn what his father meant. For weeks after Sydney began working alongside him, Valeri had been certain she was there to pick and choose the workers who were to be terminated in the company's latest bid to make more from less.

As he arrives that day and takes to the shop's floor, he arrives to find the machines out of order again, but this time with one of his fellow workers having been among the disappeared that morning. He's a younger man named Jack Kingston, and Valeri doesn't learn right away he's been disappeared; it comes out later, the company having informed on the activities of one of its workers to the police. He was taken in the raid. The sudden realization fills Valeri with guilt, the kind of guilt that gnaws at his innards every moment he's awake. In the afterward of the failed rising, this became the new norm. Whenever some worker fails to turn up for his shift, it's assumed he's been disappeared. The assumption is right more often than it's wrong.

Yet, after having been chosen by the dark essence, Valeri and many others can feel only guilt at having failed to act, this feeling part of the laying of groundwork for the essence to inhabit them fully when the time's right. Another worker, named Drew, sees Valeri from across the way, and between cycles on the floor he says to Valeri, "no time to talk, but you'd better watch yourself or you're going to wind up in the same place as Sergei. Word is the boss's out to get someone else, too. And you're the one who's been getting in trouble." Valeri hardly knows Drew, not even in the vague and impersonal way most workers these days know each other, the most recent spate of disappearances having created the need for so many workers that there aren't enough to fill each position created. It seems odd, how there can be so much work and so few workers; in time, we'll see how the disappearances fulfill a role beyond merely instilling terror and suppressing opposition outside the sanctioned and therefore ineffectual dissent offered by His Majesty's Loyal Opposition in Westminster.

But Valeri only says, "I don't care what they threaten me with. If they were out to get me then they would've taken me by now." Valeri has never been the sort of young man to be reined in by empty threats, even when they're proven to be not so empty. Although Valeri's always assumed his work ethic would earn him some keep, he's fast approaching the point where no amount of hard work can save him. In point of fact, the managers have always considered political reliability more important than productivity; productivity is but a subset of reliability to them. And from the looks the boss-lady Judith shoots him now and then it's evident Valeri must either work even harder or fall in line, evident to everyone but him. It's some small wonder he's not been cut loose already. In mid-twenty-first century Britain, the managers and the owners of companies are in the midst of a frantic campaign to wring every last pound they can from the bodies of working men, which means the realities of life and work enable some men to survive longer than they ought to while others are cast out much sooner than anyone could've anticipated.

And Drew says, "suit yourself," looking Valeri over before saying again, "if you don't know what's happened to Sergei, then—" But Valeri cuts him off, saying, "we all know what's happened to Sergei. If we're lucky then we'll get him back." It seems like the sort of thing you'd only hear about in a tyrannical regime, and perhaps it is. It's not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. The police who drive about in their lorries looking for trouble and making it wherever it's not found are neither all-knowing nor all-powerful even as they seem to leap on trouble before it can begin. But as he and Sydney lie in bed after their first night together, she turns onto her side and says, "do you know I've been planning my route around the floor to get a look at you?" Valeri thinks for a moment and then says, "well, I do now." It's a small moment, one which promises something much more. But events in the world around them are about to overtake their budding affair and turn it on its head. In the morning, Valeri comes to realize what a fool he's been all along, and after Sydney has bid him farewell for the day he regrets the wages he's spent pursuing this affair; fulfilling and exhilarating though it may be, the adult in him knows emotional fulfillment and exhilaration mean little when his stomach growls and when his clothes are threadbare.

But Valeri sees the diversion of a tryst with a virtual stranger as an outlet in times of need. Like all working men in Britain and across Europe, he's learned to start fast with his love, lest any given woman be disappeared suddenly in the night like all the others. But love is such a simple thing, its power so feeble when held against the dark essence lurking in the shadows, watching, waiting. As Valeri and Sydney pursue their budding affair they know full well it can't last, yet they pursue it anyways, given as they are like most young men and women to passions inflamed. But still concerns of hardship and poverty dominate their day-to-day lives, in ways only the hungry, the sick, and the tired could understand.

In the morning, Valeri searches through his kitchen for something to eat, reaching for the top cupboards and feeling around the bottom, finding them bare. He looks through his wardrobe and picks out the shirt not with the fewest holes but the shirt with the most, pulling it on and straightening it as best he can. He downs a mug of coffee thick and black as toxic sludge. His is a routine overshadowed by the strain of a night's sleep spent unslept. But Valeri's is hardly a unique situation, around London and across Britain facing the kind of privation and hunger that coexists alongside the abundance and the luxury of his nemesis who lives not far away but whose presence is felt in everything he does, everything he sees. Sometimes Valeri stops and wonders what his parents would think of his life now, even worse than the lives which prompted them to join the millions in their failed rising. More and more, lately this wondering has made him feel shame gnawing at the back of his mind, stronger still, soon enough to compel him to do things he'd never thought he'd do. But it's not his thoughts that have slowly pushed this wondering to the forefront of his concerns, instead the dark essence lurking around him at all times. The dark essence doesn't choose him specifically, but rather him among millions of workers, silently, instinctively calling them.

After the war fifteen years ago, still there are many working men who work themselves tired and sore every day and who return home to bare cupboards, broken windows, and faulty switches, as if his rising has only prompted a new wave of anger and discord in the hearts of they who would deign to fight back. This, Valeri knows; as the hot and sticky early-summer's morning makes him sweat, he goes to his apartment building's shared washroom and turns on the shower's tap only to find nothing comes out. On the door, on his way out, he notices a sign declaring the building's water out for an indeterminate length of time. Valeri sighs and returns to his unit to give himself a sponge bath using jugs of water kept in the kitchen cupboard for exactly these occasions. "Save some of that for washing the clothes," says a woman, "if you ever plan on washing them, that is." She thinks nothing of approaching Valeri even as he's nude. And he thinks nothing of being nude in front of her, not even bothering to turn to face her much less conceal himself behind his towel. Life in Britain's crowded working class flats has become too hard for embarrassment over such things. All are brothers and sisters anyways, among the working class flats in Britain, the dark essence binding them in ways blood never could.

Valeri's roommate is a young woman named Hannah, her hair as red and fiery as her temper. She walks into the main room and approaches Valeri, intending to ask him where he'd been. He can hardly believe all the years that'd passed since the two were children, playing in the yard of her childhood home in the north of England. All those years ago, before the rising that took his parents, she would've never imagined they'd be in want of running water. She says, "you must be tired by now." But Valeri says, "you'd think so." They exchange knowing looks, not unlike the knowing looks Valeri exchanges, from time to time, with Sydney. Though Valeri doesn't share the details of his romantic interludes with his roommate, and although he's careful to only invite Sydney around whenever his roommate's not around, it seems to him as though Hannah can intuitively tell he's been having someone over.

With Hannah, though, the moment is entirely absent any romantic or sexual overtones, rather than of one member of close-knit friends concerned for the other. He tells her what he saw on the screens, but she doesn't seem bothered by it. "I've seen it too," she says, reaching into the cabinet for a brush, "and it only means more work for me." He doesn't tell her of the taking of his friend and fellow worker, Sergei, knowing as he does that these raids always produce a fresh surge of casualties for her to tend to at the hospital. Instead, he tosses a look over his shoulder and says, "but you enjoy that, don't you?" But she's gone. In truth, not all brothers and sisters among the working class believe themselves united under the same banner, and it should be the work of the dark essence to infuse itself into the hearts of even the most hardened and resistant. Hannah isn't among those most hardened and resistant, but still she may yet come to embrace the cause of liberation, if only she could be shown the futility of struggle within the boundaries laid out for her by the way of things.

Even today, Valeri is not what he seems to be, with a mop of unruly hair, black as oil and twice as dirty. His boots are held together by the glue he'd applied himself, the glue he keeps on applying whenever his boots start to come apart at the seams again. Nearly everything he owns, he owns second-hand, given by a friend or family, or outright bought at one of the charity shops doing brisk business in his part of town. His little flat overlooks a gravel lot where, late at night he can often spot illicit drugs, cash changing hands, in smaller quantities each time. In the little flat he shares with his roommate, they live on the edge of the working class district, almost within sight of the glass and steel towers reaching for the sky. Earlier in the month, Valeri spotted a sign, erected, he thinks, during his day, though he also thinks it might've been there for a long time and this is just the first time he's noticed it. The sign boasts of a coming development, in big, bold letters marking the future site of luxury flats, right on the edge of the working class part of town, right at the boundary separating one world from the next. It's an open secret this luxury development is not meant to house people; scarcely anyone in Britain could afford the million or so pounds to buy in, save a few who already have everything they need, and even those few would never want to live among the restless rabble. Amid constant shortages of the essentials of life, the livelihoods of men like Valeri are traded like cattle by men wearing suits that cost more than he makes in a year. As the night is always darkest just before dawn, the lives of working men like Valeri are so filled with despair at the moment before their liberation is at hand.

While Valeri lives in the working-class part of London, Sydney lives somewhere else, not quite in the wealthy part but in what another time might've called the middle-class part, back when there was such a thing. "Are you always so..." she starts, seeming to search for the right word. "...Pensive?" she asks, once, as he sits on the edge of his bed after they've had each other. She seems naively unaware of the fight in the streets threatening to explode into war at any moment. "I like to think before I speak," he says, thinking of the gravestone he visits every month, once a month, noting himself the steward of his family's future. "Too many people speak before they think," she says. There's no love in this day and age. The love between Valeri and Sydney is not love, but a particular expression of anger. Their love is a defiant act, which makes it an act of anger against a power neither of them can readily define but which both can acutely feel influencing, permeating every aspect of their lives, every sensory experience and every subconscious impulse coursing through the backs of their minds.He turns back to face her, finding her sitting propped up against the bed's headboard, and as he leans in for a kiss he chooses to imagine she believes everything he believes, even as she doesn't. Then, he says, "let them," and pulls back from her before saying, "the value of truth doesn't change only because everyone else is lying." She nods. It's a lesson Valeri's come to learn in life, but at some personal cost.

Struggling to control his urge to lash out at any authority is Valeri's day-to-day task, a routine well-rehearsed from his boyhood days when he'd turn against every teacher and thumb his nose at every after-school nanny, only to come home and find his mother and father tired. Personal rebellion is futile and always has been, a lesson which Valeri has learned at some personal cost. But this lesson has readied him to embrace the larger truth, that personal rebellion ought to be subordinated to a higher calling. After night has fallen the dogs come out, sirens wailing as the troopers speed by in their lorries, chasing the latest hotspot. Across the city the sounds of explosions booming can be heard, here and there, intermittent like the summer's rain. A crisis looms in the night. As the workers, the students, and the parishioners have yielded the streets for the night, the streetlights flickering on, one by one. But while crisis looms in the streets, across the city there're meetings in boardrooms on the top floors of sleek, stylish, glass and steel towers situated almost exactly at the city's centre.

After Valeri and Sydney part ways again, each carrying the implicit threat of a permanent separation, he barely has time to throw on his tattered old clothes and bound out the door himself before there's the sound of a booming explosion, rolling in across the city like a smoothly undulating wave. Still a ways off from the rising of our apocalypse, and already all of Britain seems at war with itself, caught in an orgy of hatred and recrimination fuelled by the ghosts of yesteryear. Still there're burnt-out shells of blocks set ablaze fifteen years ago, still there're collapsed ruins of roadblocks bulldozed by police, and still there's the lingering threat of the next rising in all. The meetings that've just taken place amounted to a scheme to change nothing real, not at first, but to rearrange fictional entities, entities that exist only on paper, creating distance where there's none, instituting a complicated legal framework wherein relationships are obscured, mangled, creatively redefined until it's all just right. Once given the ministry's seal of approval, a rubber stamp, it's expected to be sprung on the unsuspecting public; by then, it'll be too late to stop.

There'll be squabbling in parliament among the self-interested members, even among the so-called Labour Party, but nothing will come of it. It'll prove to be one of history's most perverse ironies when this scheme, the grandest of all, turns against him. This time, though, it's different. This time, while waiting for their rubber stamp, the architects of this new arrangement realize belatedly what's happened, that news will break over the coming days on their collusion with one another to parcel off the property of others and sell what doesn't belong to them so as to enrich themselves. This is the news that's broken on the screens of Valeri and his fellow workers at the shop, this is the news that seems not to bother Hannah, and this is the news that's compelled Sydney to act in her capacity to rid the shop of a tenth of its workers. Amid the light rattling of distant gunfire, the day's work rushes on. It's hardly the first time they've been found to so scheme; they've been so scheming since the advent of our way of life. And although a few of them might pay some small price for their collusion, this is not but the latest proof on the insidious way the wealthy man can, writ large, not only survive but thrive in his duplicity and in his conspiracy. In handing to the wealthy man a slap on the wrist, the way of things implicitly endorses and condones his thievery, channelling it through an apparatus that recognizes his place and enshrines in law his ownership of that which isn't his.

In the street on the way to the bus stop that day, there're more troopers speeding about, taking the homeless, the prostitutes, and even the odd worker into their lorries to be tossed into a jail somewhere in the Welsh highlands. It's become a routine of sorts. The police step up their disappearings, targeting only those whom no one can particularly care that much about. It's not part of some well-planned strategy but a well-rehearsed act played out from instinct. The police and their managerial apparatchiks might dress up their acting out in the air of some master plan, but in truth they lash out all the same as the crowds of workers, students, and parishioners who fill the streets so often. For Valeri, the news breaks that day not to a muted ambivalence among his fellow workers in union but to a rousing anger, the whole lot of them gathering around their screens to mutter expletives and trade thinly-veiled threats against their enemy. For a time, it seems a wildcat strike might break out right on the floor. But it's not to be. The threat of losing their pittance is enough, for now, to keep them in line, as with all the other workers in all the other shops across Britain. But it won't be that way for much longer. Valeri looks forward to the coming gathering at the union hall, where it's expected they'll raise the votes needed to take part in the planned general strike. This, he thinks, is the fighting back he finds his element in. He's only half-right. This is a moment of peace amid a wretched, writhing war, the horrors of poverty having wrought itself upon their lives, even as they are made to submit to the indignities of the police raids and the wealthy man's scheming still the gunfire rattling off into the night and the bombs bursting here and there in the streets serving as a reminder on the budding war that's in the offing again.

In truth, since the failed rising that claimed Valeri's mother and father the violence never truly stopped. Rather, it continued at a low but slowly intensifying pace, the dark essence having called many while its chosen one has yet to make his triumphant reappearance. We won't mention the chosen one's name, not yet, even as whispers of his name can be heard wherever there's violence and humiliation meted out on men like Valeri and his now-disappeared friends Jack and Sergei, whose absence haunts Valeri every moment he spends at the shop. But not all is as it seems. When Sydney takes Valeri by the hand and leads him into her bed, she says, "I love you," before pushing him down and falling on top of him. He wants to tell her something, anything at all, but he can't bring himself to say anything. She kisses him, then breaks the kiss to say, "I've been in love with you from the moment I first saw you." It's an odd thing, for Valeri to be so unsure of himself even as he's confronted with an irrefutable proof of love. Still as he has trouble grasping the notion that someone could reach across the vast divide between them, he doesn't quite know how to react. The sexual relationship they've shared is physical, but it's a kind of private passion which is at odds with the public dispassion shared between them. And for most of his life, Valeri has only known hostility from those who would deem themselves his better. Now, for a young woman from a higher stature than him to be declaring her love for him, it seems to him as something more confusing and disorienting than reassuring or comforting. As Valeri is coming to slowly realize, love is anger, and anger is love; this sounds absurd because it is absurd. But it's an absurdity we're all going to be forced to confront as the world around us spirals out of control.

He thinks to kiss her, but instead chooses to say, "I know," as a response to her profession of love something half-hearted and altogether inappropriate. It's still so early, but in this day and age the twenty- and thirty-somethings like them have learned to move quickly with their relationships, lest events overtake them and tear them apart before they've even had the chance to say the words. He's used to affairs with women from working class backgrounds; but he's had so few of them, in his short life, that he can hardly generalize, even as he does exactly that. What has been accomplished now, in this confused, early period when no one can tell the revolution has, in fact, begun in earnest is that a sequence of events have been set in motion. A general strike is coming. The police raids, at workplaces and elsewhere, are but a part of a long brewing campaign, a reaction by the way of things against a striving for justice, equality, and dignity. When so many disparate interests can put aside their differences and overthrow their common oppressors, the revolution can be born. But we're not there yet.

It's hard, when men like Valeri have so little, to cling to such things as love for the almost-spiritual sustenance they crave. But the truth is that Valeri looks on love as something of a weakness, a misgiving, something reserved for people other than him. Even this little affair of theirs seems, to a part of him, like something to be turned away from while there're larger struggles at play, chief among them the union's participation in the coming strike. Amid the cracked, graffiti-covered façade of his apartment building and the sidewalks littered with cigarette butts, used needles, and persons sleeping in whatever little alcove can offer shelter for the night, there's a spark waiting to be struck, a spark which might grow to a towering inferno that would consume all. A general strike must be coming. It's the only way the working class in Britain can respond to the campaign against them. But they aren't capable of organizing a response, even if they believe fully that they are. It's precisely this discrepancy that is behind the vague but certain compulsion the various and disparate interests have in attempting something they aren't capable of.

The recent police attacks will be discussed at the coming meeting, but already men like Valeri look past it to something more. Freedom, you see, is not what it seems to be, not what it's been promised to us, rather what's been denied to us all along. Freedom is not slavery, and slavery is not freedom, but within the inherent tension between these there lies some hidden, higher truth. The major point to be made in this tentative, early period, when all seems to transpire under the influence of a listless, miscellaneous pace, that the steadily smoldering fires of liberation across the country should soon erupt. And this round of attacks in the countryside and among the post-industrial wastelands in Britain only produces a mounting tension which should surely consume us all. As the collusion between police and managers comes to light, as it inevitably must, what's lost on the simple perceptions of men like Valeri is their policemen and managers colluding against them is, in turn, only indicative of a larger collusion between even greater forces than any men could ever understand.

In the local hospital's A&E room, Hannah tends to an overdose, struggling to take a blood pressure reading while the overdose writhes in place. He goes into cardiac arrest; they can't save him. They don't often save them. A new drug's ripped through the working class neighbourhoods. This nameless young man isn't the first Hannah's seen lose his life to the drug right in front of her. At the end of her shift, she passes by the reception at the hospital's main entrance, too tired to offer her usual wave to the guard at the door. Arriving home, she finds Valeri absent, wondering if he's gone to the hall like he'd said. Exhausted, she soon falls asleep. Sidling along the streets, Valeri steps gingerly around every crack in the pavement, every loosened slab of concrete left to slowly disintegrate as the seasons bring new challenges to bear, the rain, the heat, the snow and the sleet. Though Hannah's role in these events is minor as yet, in time her role will become greater, even as events dictating the roles of ordinary men and women like her spiral out of control. In the local hospital's A&E, Hannah works by night to save the casualties of the war in the streets, casualties sometimes inflicted by the police and sometimes by the various and sundry factions which make up the demonstrators, sometimes still by the bullet fired and the bomb set off by the yet-unnamed rebels in the countryside who carry out a war without any regard for their own survival. But when news breaks of the collusion by managers and police, their war's justification seems self-evident.

It's not that this latest collusion hasn't meant anything; in fact, it's the current example of the effort hundreds of years in the making, of the wealthy man to take from the men like Valeri and, through acts of the imagination turn what's been taken into so much more than it is. At the union hall in an industrial district, Valeri flashes his card to get through the door. Once inside, he joins the crowd watching a man standing on the auditorium's stage giving an impassioned speech to the mass of workers. The dark essence is here, but it does not act, instead watching as the workers whip themselves into a frenzy in anger at the disappearing of their brothers and sisters in the latest wave of police attacks. "...Relentlessly attack our enemy and keep alive the spirit of the revolution fifteen years ago," the man says, holding a little red book out as he speaks with the passion and intensity of a firebrand preacher. "...And in so keeping remember always that our enemy is still yet determined to win through, to beat us back like cattle, and to shepherd each of us to our slaughter." These always strike Valeri as more entertainment than education, given as he is to looking on the street with the kind of forced bemusement and apathy that's come to be altogether too common among the working men in his generation. As the police raids have precipitated the coming strike, so will the coming strike precipitate more police raids, a sequence of events set in motion by forces more basic and more powerful than any conscious act by men.

At the union hall, things have not always been this way. At the union hall, where once there was little to be done but keep the lights on and hold the occasional, perfunctory vote, now there are men and women, Valeri's brothers and sisters languishing in unemployment. More than a few have taken to sleeping on cots put out some years ago, with small piles of crates holding everything they own alongside. On this evening, the violence in the cities has abated, but the fires of liberation still burn. Sometimes Valeri counts himself lucky not to be among them, to still have his little box of an apartment and his weekly pittance to subsist on, but as he stands among his brothers and sisters and listens with them to the speaker on stage, he can't help but feel an arrogance about himself at thinking these poor souls unlucky, for their hopeless lives have not come about by accident but by deliberate campaign to make them so. "Fear not, brothers and sisters," the man on stage with the little red book says, "for our future is won, but only so long as we diligently and faithfully apply ourselves to the task of working towards it. Read, my brothers and sisters, read and so train yourselves for the imminent arrival of the future." And the crowd seems receptive to this man's ideas, the tone of the evening's energy restless and agitated even before he took the stage. It's readily apparent they'll be taking part in the coming general strike, to whatever end it'll see.

The troopers never much come around here, but for their watchings of the regular demonstrations more or less leaving the crowds to their misery. Men like Valeri know this means their women disappear from the streets at night, some turning up dead months or years later but most never turning up at all, as if the streets themselves swallow each woman whole. "It's good to see you," says a voice, Valeri turning to see an old friend and one-time colleague by the name of Mark Murray. He'd been among the workers at the plant, working right alongside Valeri some days, only to be selected from among their ranks to serve the union higher up. Seeing him again, for Valeri, is bittersweet, for it reminds him how little leverage they have in these trying times even as Murray comes to deliver news usually good. They discuss Sergei's disappearance, in passing. It's mutually understood there's nothing they can do to bring him back, nor to find out where he's been disappeared to. His Majesty's Prisons in the Welsh Highlands have seen many people disappeared into their overcrowded cells, with few emerging alive. But Murray agrees this is a crime without parallel.

For Murray, you see, is the commensurate politician; he'll meet with company officials and strike a friendly, conciliatory tone, laughing, telling jokes, shaking hands, only to, when the meetings are over and the sides separate to plot their next moves, denounce fraud, deception, lies. "And yourself," Valeri says, shaking Murray's hand. Keeping quiet has always felt a betrayal to Valeri. In so participating in the act, men like Murray draw boundaries, creating a safe space for themselves in which they can act out a theatre, surrendering in the wider struggle. But Valeri and Murray have a history that goes back further than most of the workers assembled here. Left unspoken is the fact that the speaker here is from one of the two political parties banned by act of parliament. We won't discuss the names of those parties, but their names will be disclosed in time, when the time's right.

Men like Valeri long for change, and men like Murray seem to have found their niche in demanding change. The vote is held; it's unanimously in favour of joining the general strike. But the vote is irrelevant in determining a course of action. Like all votes held in this day and age, it`s important only as an expression of a unity already decided on. This is the essence of democracy, not the democracy they have but the democracy they ought to have. Later that night, Valeri comes home to an empty and dark apartment. With a spare piece of poster paper and a felt pen he draws up a sign and posts it to the window facing the street. The sign reads: "NO SURRENDER" It's a small act, but one which'll come to have great significance in the years ahead. This is the struggle of men like Valeri, and it is in this struggle they should find a final deliverance from oppression.

"...Our final victory is foretold not only by the Heavens but by the natural, inevitable course of our common history, thrumming like the beating of a common heart. But still it must be won!" The man on stage back at the union hall continues to speak, holding a clenched fist in the air to emphasize his last point. There are talks of taking part in the next general strike; this speaker is urging the whole lot of them on. The speaker is never identified to the crowd by name. It's unsettling to a man like Valeri, someone who would prefer loneliness to a single spot of company, and amid the hushed voices and the muttered agreements he begins to feel his pulse quicken slightly and his breathing shallow a bit, forcing him to turn and make for the edge of the hall's floor. "...And we must never turn away from our destiny!" The words strike Valeri with the slightest of touches, sending a shiver running the length of his spine. Of all the persons present, the dark essence looks on Valeri with approval, knowing him further along his chosen path than ever.

3. A Divergent Verse

A knock on the door. "You didn't get caught up in any of that business, did you?" asks Valeri's landlord, a much older man named Graham with trouble standing up straight and spots all over his skin from aging. "Not yet," Valeri replies. Graham had come of age in a more liberal time, when drugs were seen as bold experiments rather than the scourge of the streets we know them as today. "You've always paid your rent on time," Graham says, "I don't want you getting mixed up in that kind of stuff and making me have to find someone else to pay rent on your suite. God knows it's hard enough to find a decent tenant these days." "I'll be careful," Valeri says. "Who's that girl you've been bringing home?" Graham asks. "A friend," Valeri says. "This isn't a whore house," Graham says, then quickly adds, "anymore." Valeri, without skipping a beat, says, "I'll try to keep that in mind," then politely closes the door and returns to his reading. Valeri tries to overlook the implication of Graham's statement; although he's not sure of his relationship with Sydney, he knows her well enough that she's nothing like the whores who still come around and who sometime turn up dead in the streets. But this is even his folly, his arrogance in considering even the prostitutes who ply the streets at night beneath him. In fact, the prostitutes are his better, as they are beneath him in the way of things so they will soon enough come to be above him in the future bearing down on us all. By the time war broke out in the streets fifteen years ago, Graham was already too old and too enfeebled to take part in the way Valeri's parents had. Consigned to the sidelines he watched as the younger generation lashed out at the wealthy man's oppression, every now and then pausing to mutter to himself, "it's all happening again." As the crowds of people like Valeri's parents seized the streets, it seemed to Graham and all the other survivors of a lost generation that, for a moment, this war might see them succeed. Managing to pull himself out of his depression, he found his way into the streets just in time to see it all come crashing down. But all Valeri or anyone else can see in him is a gruff and bitter old man.

But Graham is a different sort of man. Graham was born abroad and spent his youth in the drug-addled counter-culture movement that'd seized a whole generation. Fleeing a drunken father who beat him whenever on the drink, he came to see his own salvation in the warmed-over haze of his drugs. After getting caught up in a police raid on a drug den and later arrested at some demonstration against the then-current war raging abroad he fell into a deep depression. After losing many years to his fight with the insidious illness, he moved from the United States and tried to escape what he'd been through. He might've succeeded, if only he could've forgotten the things he'd seen growing up in times almost as radical as the times we live in today. Beaten, humiliated, thrown in prison for want of a relief, he scraped together the wherewithal to survive on what little money he could make. Through it all, Graham had filled his life with prostitutes and addicts and common criminals, each in his life just long enough to take what they wanted from him, leaving him bitter. But Graham won't have long to wait until the war that's in the offing explodes on these very streets once more. As Valeri is coming to the slow realization that love is anger and anger is love, the old man's not-altogether misplaced irritability doesn't yet register to him as the product of so much love left to fester in an act of defiance against the world indifferent to his pain.

At the shop where Valeri works, things are different. Although there is much anger among the workers, they have yet to bind together into a single force, despite the solidarity bred by the failed uprising fifteen years ago there existing so many factions obedient to so many interests. Within each faction a hundred more bicker. "You always were the quiet one," says a man named Ruslan Kuznetsov, one of Valeri's fellow workers at the shop. They're rivals, of sorts, having been at each other's throats since Valeri began working here. But these are the petty concerns which dominate before the true struggle begins, as Valeri is not yet the soldier he's born to be. For now, though, Valeri leaves it quietly unspoken that his basic familiarity with firearms is to serve him well in the future, a basic familiarity earned in the proliferation of firearms in the streets of British cities and towns since the failed uprising which killed his mother and father. Although Valeri has a basic familiarity with firearms, he's not yet a full-fledged rebel, and he doesn't have immediate access to any firearms at home. (Though firearms are far more common in Britain than they'd been, there's still only a small fraction per capita than in the United States). "It doesn't concern you what I do," Valeri replies. Ruslan always was one of those workers who likes to try and play manager's favourite, informing on the other workers over the most trivial of offences. He's informed on Valeri before, his informing never resulting in Valeri's termination but earning him Valeri's scorn nevertheless. All this talk of firearms ought to be tabled, for now, even as the workers at this very shop can sometimes here the subdued rattling of distant gunfire from the shop's docks. For now, the petty concerns of ordinary men like Valeri and Ruslan is a passing episode in the larger struggle, a starting point amid all our rising along the path laid for us through the coming apocalypse.

Part of Ruslan likes to think he's earning himself a position as a middle manager by currying favour with them, while another part of him simply revels in reporting on the other workers' misdeeds, however trivial or harmless. But the better part of Ruslan honestly believes. When a new policy decision comes down, Ruslan not only embraces it but brings himself to honestly believe in it. He's a complex figure, more complex than he likes to let on, and in troubled times it's exactly this complexity that'll ultimately doom him to the same fate as all the others. For now, though, he reduces himself to a managerial sycophant to inoculate himself against the possibility of losing his job and thus the pittance that keeps him barely alive. Ruslan wasn't present on the day when Sergei was taken and when Valeri received his epiphany; this fact is noted by Valeri, who fumes. Even as Valeri has at it with Ruslan, there're larger concerns at work, in the countryside and in the even-more impoverished cities in the north of England the war that began fifteen years ago still simmering through the rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs, only intermittently, studding the days and sometimes even the nights. All are aware of the lingering war in the streets and in the hills; although the men on the screens try their best to conceal the attacks on police stations, on railyards, even on empty warehouses, they can only try. Inevitably, word seeps through the filter. Imagine Valeri as any other soldier, employing the implements of work, his machinery and the tools he wields by hand as weapons, each day attacked as an enemy position, each pile of work conquered as territory to be seized. But for now he does this, all his brothers and sisters in union do this in service of enriching their companies' owners.

Still it bothers Valeri when Graham intrudes like that; as a private person, Valeri doesn't like questions, even questions neither intrusive nor inappropriate. "You never have any women over," Graham said once, and it struck Valeri as a pointed question, implying an accusation of homosexuality. But when Valeri had Sydney over, once or twice, he'd thought it, then, something to be concealed should his personal life become exposed, in some small way, to people like Graham or the little old lady across the hall. But don't imagine Valeri as any other soldier, as he is an ordinary worker still. His armaments are the tools of his trade, mustered by threat of starvation in service of enriching his wealthy paymasters. But the time is coming, and it's coming very soon, when Valeri should join the others who've already discarded the implements of work and taken up arms against those whose enrichment he currently advances at his own expense and at the expense of all his brothers and sisters in union. "In a hurry?" Sydney had asked him once as he led her through the halls and up the stairwell, with Valeri only replying with a half-knowing wink. On this day, as Valeri mulls over his landlord's latest interjection in the back of his mind, he can't know but could likely divine the landlord's role as only an apparatchik of sorts, there to carry out the absentee owner's will in exchange for his own personal pittance. In his own way, Graham had continued to suffer all those years in silence, tortured not by the beatings or by the transient relationships that'd characterized every period of his life, but by the loneliness in being made to feel as though there was something wrong with him. But Valeri knows this old man only enjoys eliciting discomfort in him, and it works, every time. In the moment it takes Graham to give him one last look over, Valeri can't help himself, not from lashing out at the landlord but from imagining himself lashing out, as if the rebel in him, in each of us, could've yet grown into a full-fledged insurrectionist. For now, Sydney is a passing episode in Valeri's life, the growing tension in him between love as anger and anger as love consigning her to a strange position on the margins of his mind.

Still Valeri is in that very early stage in his journey, when the urge to engage in such primitive and juvenile rebellion, like the gangs of youths in the streets who throw rocks at shops and harangue the police with insults whenever they come around. Valeri is destined for greater things. Although he can't see the path laid out for him by a higher power, he must find the courage and the faith to walk it, all the same. At the shop, Valeri and Ruslan are still at it. "Why aren't you working harder?" asks Ruslan. "I'm working as hard as I can," says Valeri. "What's wrong with you today?" asks Ruslan. "Nothing's wrong with me," says Valeri, "it's just hard for me here." A pause. Ruslan shifts his stance slightly. For a moment it seems he might offer sympathy to Valeri. But it's not to be. "What's come over you today?" asks Ruslan. Although Ruslan is from the same stock as Valeri, the former man is a considerably more complex figure than the latter can appreciate. As Valeri is in the midst of a hard day's work, as this exchange takes place, he's seen Ruslan perform hardly any work at all. Even as there's a burst of distant gunfire rattling out in the background, muffled, brief, but surely there, Valeri can't help but give in to the impulse tugging on his instincts. If love is anger, then the basic, imperceptible instinct in Valeri is not yet ready to grasp that anger is love. It's a pathetic and impossible situation, for either man to be at each other's throats, but as they are both soldiers in a greater war already exploding in the very streets on which they live there's no possible way for either of them to act when confronted with the vulgarities of life in mid-twenty-first century Britain. In time, when Ruslan meets his fate, Valeri will be in the midst of rising into the soldier he's to become. But for now, they must table their true roles in favour of the roles assigned to them by their bosses.

"Today?" Valeri asks, "I'll tell you what's come over me today. Just look at this place. We work ourselves tired and all we get besides this pathetic wage is heaps of abuse and intimidation. Even you! You run yourself ragged but you never make enough to do anything more than keep yourself alive." It's not the first time he's let out some pent-up anger, and it won't be the last. Soon enough Valeri will learn to see him for the frightened man he is, though by the time this personal enlightenment occurs to Valeri it'll be far too late for any of them to extend much empathy for one another. This particular run-in, though, is but the latest in a string of run-ins between them breeding resentment and mutual distrust. But at home, Valeri is already given in spirit if not in form to the budding struggle of the streets, seeing in himself a soldier, not a civilian, imagining himself taking to the streets not with the other workers in demonstration or in occupation but in attack. As Valeri is in the midst of his own rise into the role of disciplined soldier of the burgeoning revolution, still he must overcome his present role as ill-mannered, undisciplined young malcontent.

It's a noxious fantasy, one which could invariably lead to his own death if he should give in to the intemperate passions of rebellion rather than bide his time and see himself through to his proper place in the way of things. It's too hard for him to imagine, but his time will soon come. The higher power which has greater things in store for Valeri is not one any of his soon-to-be revolutionary brothers and sisters yet know, even if they're convinced they do. Even Valeri can't see it, not yet, and he'll have to live through more hardship before he'll see it.

After sleeping through most of the day, Hannah rises and spots Valeri on his way out the door, thinking to call out to him but choosing against it. Instead, she turns to her own affairs in the few hours until she must return to the A&E. "You don't understand," she says to her mother, a hundred kilometres apart and linked only by the screen in each woman's hand. "If anything happens I've got lots of friends here I can take in with. Besides, I'm too overworked at the hospital to get caught up in all the street fighting." And it's true, as the new drugs ravaging the working class district leave hospitals in working class districts across Britain chronically undermanned and overworked. Some weeks Hannah works every day. Most weeks she sees deaths from overdoses at least once a day. The new drugs that've been circulating for nearly fifty years have only recently become so lethal, seemingly since the failed uprising fifteen years ago a supply surging onto the streets. From where this supply comes from, no one knows, although all can see that it's the working class districts in Britain that're allowed to suffer. If these thousands of deaths every year in Britain alone were ravaging the wealthy instead, Hannah knows, the full resources of all Britain would've been massed against finding a solution long ago.

Sometimes Hannah imagines herself falling victim to the same drugs, the very same drugs she's administered to patients under orders from the medical authority. There're so many deaths, so many bodies cast aside that morgues have had to be expanded to keep pace. Entire warehouses have been built for the bodies that no one will claim for burial, as no one is made to care about the most pathetic and wretched among Britons. Hannah knows she's safe, or at least she thinks she knows. But her mother isn't so easily reassured. In any case, both know there's nowhere for her to go, the burden of her wages keeping her stuck in place; with simmering tensions and life stagnant in working class districts of major cities and small towns across the country, anyplace she could go would see her in much the same danger. After the war fifteen years ago, Hannah's mother, like all mothers, worries on the safety of her daughter living in the city. After seeing ordinary workers cut down in the streets of Britain's cities and towns, her mother worries Hannah might be caught up in the next war. Only too late will Hannah realize events about to occur aren't the new normal, that all our lives will be so radically changed.

Still Valeri thinks on the forced disappearance of Sergei, still wishing he could've, would've taken a stand then and there. Among his ranks live elderly widowers left to subsist on fixed incomes, single mothers, addicts and prostitutes, yet also families, children, couples who've lived here all their lives and others who've only just arrived. As the fires of liberation burn Valeri clenches his fist and grinds his jaw reflexively, sleeping through the night, tossing and turning all the while, imagining in his dreams a personal vengeance against an impersonal force, a struggle against the forces of nature that's closer to paying off than you might think. The wealthy man would have the men like Valeri believe that this is the envy of the world, that this little cube of air held three stories up off the street, filled with second-hand furniture and cigarette butts and cockroaches hiding in the cracks in the kitchen walls, when Valeri comes home in the evening and flips on the lights the whole swarm of them scurrying for cover.

Messages bombard men like Valeri through the airwaves and through the data line, messages proclaiming the endless abundance in this day and age, messages declaring skyrocketing prices to be a sure sign of progress even as the Valeri has cut back on eating meat for the cost of it all. This, as explosions and intermittent gunfire tear holes in the silence of the not-infrequent night-time power outages that plunge London's working-class districts into total darkness. In the darkness of the night-time power outages, the dark essence which should soon guide the revolution finds fertile ground. His neighbours, he hardly knows them, only a few of them by name, but that's all to change in the time it takes the whole lot of them, to realize their calling.

It matters little that half of all Britain can't afford the essentials of life, that half of us all wear clothes three or four wearers from the factory and with little rips and holes in the seams strategically hidden so as not to give away the our shame. It's all an elaborate fraud, and it's always been an elaborate fraud, a fraud perpetuated against the self, eagerly so. But not much longer. When Valeri works his way through another day, he stamps across the same, familiar ground, the soles of his boots brought down into the same holes made from the same stamps of boots a thousand and one times before, this time, though, his boots falling a hair's width aside, in some small act of defiance Valeri staking out a spot in his own mind for they who would seek a better way of life to claim.

After Hannah arrives to work her next shift at the hospital, there happens the one thing she would've never expected: an empty bed in the A&E. It's empty only for a brief time, perhaps a half-hour or two, then filled with another poor young man dying a quick but painful death. Still, Hannah wonders if this is to be an isolated case, or a regular occurrence, as she takes up her station and looks over the master chart on the wall of all patients, a storm of red and blue streaks and smudges loosely arranged into words on a whiteboard. "Did you get any gauze?" asks another nurse, a younger woman named Whitney. "They were out before I even got there," says Hannah, "if they had any to begin with." In times of chronic shortages of even the essential supplies, rumours of stock are plentiful, with only the most believable tempting a try. But even these are beginning to prove illusory. "I'm thankful the water's running here," says Hannah, thinking to take a shower at the end of her shift before heading home. Short-staffed and overworked, this is the life they chose, even as young men wearing suits and ties speed along the streets in sports cars outside. In the night, they'll lose a patient, a young man who's been dying for some weeks now. He'll die not of an incurable disease or some traumatic injury but for want of a medicine kept in short supply by the company that holds the rights to it. This, as the hospital's power fails intermittently, plunging the A&E into darkness for only a moment before diesel generators kick in. But nobody flinches, neither at the death nor the darkness, carrying on.

"Nothing is certain," said the man standing in front of Victory Monument that day, "even as it is inevitable!" Still Valeri doesn't quite know what that means, even as he swears to himself that he does. "Don't love me," Sydney had said once, in a way that'd seemed, then, to be less melodramatic than it seems, now, as Valeri recalls the look in her eye as she'd said it. As he falls asleep this night with the little red book falling gently onto his chest, the last thing he recalls is the image of his mother and father, standing over him as he kneels at their grave, looking down on him, his father turning and saying to his mother, "it's almost his time." Although his mother and father are dead, they are always with him, looking over him in spirit until he could begin to stand for himself. It's beginning to slowly dawn on Valeri, not in the way of a series of conscious thoughts reaching inexorably towards a logical conclusion—no, his revelation will necessarily come as an ongoing experience that began even before he was born. Astride a wave of enthusiasm and atop a mountain of riches and power built up beneath him over hundreds of years, the wealthy man looks across the urban sprawl and sees nothing but opportunity laid before him, opportunity reaching for the horizon and beyond. The wealthy man wears his suit and tie which cost more than Valeri earns in a year's wages. The wealthy man cruises the public streets in his armoured cars with blackened windows and with a paid driver who sympathizes not with his master but with the men who live outside his master's safe and sequestered in a little bubble. Astride a wave of enthusiasm the wealthy man can hardly contain his exuberance, leaping whenever a string of numbers scroll across his screen, the odd red mark drowning in a sea of green. In truth, every green mark signifies the loss of a hundred livelihoods and the thinning out of a hundred more. It's been this way for a long time, for as long as anyone can remember. But it needn't be this way much longer. As I lead you through the beginning of the end, we take stock of all sins, so that we may settle accounts when the time is right, not with pounds but with blood. But then, sometime in the future, there should inevitably come the morning which sees no dawn, where the darkness lingers into the day as if we'll all be living in a permanent night. In the A&E this night it's another wave of admissions from the streets, Hannah keeping up but only barely, fourteen hours of tending to overdoses, failed suicides, and breakdowns leaving her with pain behind her eyes and strain in her muscles, worst of all a lump in her stomach.

Arriving home to find Valeri already asleep, she walks into their shared bedroom and without taking off her scrubs she collapses into bed, asleep herself before hitting the sheets. "Well, what came of it?" Whitney had asked, two-thirds through their shift. She'd been speaking of the invite Valeri had given her to come to the hall, a thread they'd talked about between drawing blood from one man and injecting a sedative into another. "I have no time to get involved with the rabble," she'd said. At that moment, for only a moment, the hospital's power cut out, the lights falling dark and alarms sounding for a brief period before generators kick in. "Well, thank God somebody does," said Whitney. When Hannah wakes up in the evening, she has the apartment to herself, and at once thinks of her own promise, not to her distant mother but to herself, the promise not to lose herself in the romantic radicalism of youth. Now in her thirties, she feels much older than she is, the temptation towards romance seeming to grow with each year that passes, through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia for youth the radicalism seeming much more romantic than she knows it to be.

In the night, the city comes alive, brimming with a restless energy that seems to emanate from every open window and from every darkened alley. The working class apartment blocks sit spaced close enough for residents to link hands and form a human chain dangling from building to building like power lines. Loose debris litters the sidewalk, swept aside by the overworked crews that run through this place perhaps once a week, at best. Cigarette butts are found scattered everywhere but the ashtrays left out by the city for public use. Used syringes line the gutters. Blood splotches hide in the trash. This, we would be led to believe, this is the envy of the rest of the world, this is the ideal all aspire to. Left to fester, the looming spectre of so much pent up despair, frustration, resentment can but slowly take shape, its form rising from the formless. Still in the night you can see the spaces where working people used to work; the ghostly outlines of their figures reaching into the sky, astride a boxed-in feeling more powerful than the highest of drug-induced highs. It's foolish to wonder what might've been, but never is it so foolish to imagine what might yet be. In this spirit, Valeri sometimes spares a thought for all that he would've been working for all his life had but the force of law not subordinated him to his master. His would've counted history's greatest achievements, the weight of the greatest victories, the tallest towers, the longest spans and the widest roads all made by the hands of men like Valeri.

But it's the littlest achievements, too, the modest house built in the countryside, the carefully-sculpted garden tended in the narrow space on an apartment's balcony, the small potholes filled in on the highway that make up the proudest achievements of men like Valeri, those mundane acts that make day-to-day life possible. In this early moment, we've accomplished much, even as it seems we've accomplished nothing at all. The dark essence knows this is the place where the struggle should soon find expression, but still the essence waits for exactly the right moment to infuse itself into the streets. In Britain, today, they who would seek to oppress and to impoverish are, in truth, they who would resist the will of the dark essence and the rebel who should soon command it, and men like Valeri are becoming the means by which the oppressor is to receive damnation. In this, Valeri serves as a living rejection of the call to pacifism, instead answering a higher calling to serve among others as the means by which the most wretched and pathetic among us should receive salvation from the enemy of us all.

Already there are those who would deign to fight the way of things; but they are the few, the proud, the many lost in a sea of even more, in the night a burst of gunfire rattling off somewhere in that maze of densely-packed apartment blocks, in the morning a concrete wall riddled with bullet holes standing a macabre backdrop for the children who walk to school along those very streets and step over the weeds sprouting from between cracks in the sidewalk's concrete slabs. Spent shell casings sit in the gutter and splotches of crimson dry out slowly on the road, their colour hardly noticeable against the oil stains dotting the asphalt. 'NO SURRENDER' scrawls across a wall behind a dumpster, scrawled not in the night that's just passed but some months, perhaps years earlier and left to slowly fade in the harsh glare of the summer's sun.

This, now, is the current expression of our state of war, of the undeclared war we've been fighting for so long as any of us have been. It's a crime, that some old man should suffer the indignity of dying alone, in his little box of an apartment, and then in death to be subjected to the continued indignity of being left to rot like human trash, only disposed of when his odour grew too noxious and disgusting to be ignored. As Valeri continues his awakening, events will transpire that should force him to stand before he's ready, whether he wants to or not.

4. Ensemble

At the polytechnic in Brentford, Sean Morrison studies the social sciences. Born and raised in Derry, Northern Ireland, he came of age in the time after the failed revolution fifteen years ago. His parents had found themselves in the midst of a pogrom when the chaos of the revolution unleashed long-simmering tensions. They survived, but their home was burnt. Fleeing the province, they moved into a working class block and found just enough work to raise their son. Now in his second year of undergraduate studies, he marches in the streets with the thousands of others, always out of control, but never out of hand. "Never in our name!" he shouts, marching in lockstep with a thousand other students. Alongside crowds of students there're a few workers and parishioners mixed in, the beginnings of a coalition which should become something more. Sean is a considerably more complex character than even he likes to let on, having long ago learned to persist in a role assigned to him by forces even he can't comprehend. But the slogans he shouts in the streets are the product of frustration and anger pent up for so many years, with even the uprising fifteen years ago having failed to relieve their rage.

His feet strike the pavement in strong, confident motions, and he hurls his voice as far as he can. They protest the raising of fees on services and the government's continued use of slave labour to produce things, or so they think; truthfully, they protest only to strike out at the vague but certain perception of injustice, wherever it might be. "Never in our name!" shouts another student. "Never in our name!" shout the thousand others, all at once. And while they march, Sean and another student trade knowing glances. She's Maya, and she's a year younger than him, from a working class background herself but the daughter of a mother dead and a father languishing in one of His Majesty's Prisons in the Welsh Highlands like so many others. What they share in common, besides their station in life, is the classes they take in pursuit of degrees and diplomas increasingly meaningless. Somehow, the universities and the technical schools across Britain keep on admitting students. Somehow, the young people across Britain keep on enrolling in the universities and technical schools, despite graduating to mass unemployment among youths. In this, though, there's real value, the university students earning a valuable experience in itself, the intellectual character of the burgeoning revolution in the streets gathering strength as the students here gain knowledge, whether from the textbooks they study or from the study of their march in the streets. At this protest the police watch, but don't intervene. Sean Morrison and the others from the polytechnic are emblematic of the intellectual character of the working class, and they're courageous in asserting the superiority of their collective knowledge. They revolt against the hierarchical knowledge of the wealthy class as dispensed by the wealthy man's apparatchik, the teacher.

At the Anglican Church there're more parishioners than ever, the war fifteen years ago having made many believers. Darren Wright's been coming to this church all his life; still the same meals are served to the needy, though the soup's thinner than it's ever been. He serves the food, hands out blankets in the colder months, and bottles of water in the warmer months. This particular church is somewhere near the boundary between a working class district and the wealthy enclaves that dot the cityscape. They're the sites of regular gatherings of men and women out of work, of single mothers who struggle to feed their children and of crowds of men out of work for longer than some of the younger among them have been alive. Darren Wright returns to the kitchen for more soup, when he finds another among the church's volunteers watering the soup down further. Darren doesn't sample the soup, not even a drop. He's eaten already today, and he doesn't need his conscience burdened by the knowledge of his having taken even one drop from some hungry mother's children. "More converts than ever," says the volunteer, a middle-aged woman named Amelia, who's been with the church only the last few years. "Yes," says Darren, nodding as he fills his pot for another trip along the cafeteria. But Amelia, unlike Darren, has been coming only for the soup herself, volunteers given a small amount to sustain themselves on. He's seen her take more than allowed, but he ignores it, knowing as he does the pain of acute hunger. Besides, he doesn't want to report on anyone simply for not having the strength to resist the urge.

Though the priest, Father Bennett, purports to teach compassion for the poor, but his is a church steeped in a tradition of closeness with the way of things. Darren thinks it wrong the church amasses wealth and power for itself, but he hasn't yet come to take it on himself to change the church's course. Still, the act of challenging the wayward church's dominion over his own faith is but a critical step in the parishioner's revolt against the hierarchical faith of the wealthy class dispensed by their apparatchik, the priest. But whenever Darren sees the Father come by, he can't help but feel a sense of resentment, so vague and visceral that even he can't articulate it as such. Father Bennett doesn't come around much, except to deliver sermons on Sunday, appearing in his perfectly clean and ostentatious robes, in stark contrast to the hungry people who dress in little more than threads and rags. For Darren Wright, the lifetime he's spent in service of men is beginning to grow stale even as his spirit hungers.

A gruff, older man named Garrett Walker used to work in a factory somewhere in the North of England, a factory that stayed open by all rights far longer than it should've. When the factory closed and its new owners moved operations to a city in Bangladesh and another in Poland, Garrett and all the others were thrown out of work. Left to fend for themselves, some took up work at much lower wages as servants, others turned to drugs or alcohol, and at least a few committed suicide out of despair. Garrett, though, moved with his wife and two young daughters into London. Now, with the government continuing to import slaves, concentrating them in specially-reserved blocks and using them to perform all kinds of labour, even going so far as to supply them for a small fee to private companies. As he returns home from a hard day's work, his wife greets him. They live in a working class block with so many others, a block designed for three dozen families but housing, now, over a hundred. His wife's unemployed, but she cares for their daughters. She says to him, "we'll have rice tonight," offering an embrace as he walks in the door. "It's too hot out," says Garrett, as he walks past his wife and falls onto their sofa. As tired as he is, Garrett will keep on working until there's no more work to be done, and then he'll keep on working, or so he thinks. "I'll get you a drink," his wife says, returning from the kitchen with a beer. Their daughters will be home soon, and they'll still have much to do by then.

But in the streets along his way to work Garrett sometimes sees slaves at work, the migrant workers brought in to do everything from roadwork to cooking and cleaning. Garrett's old enough to remember clearly the original impetus given for importing these slaves. It was in the early time before the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, in the midst of a fevered pitch to wring every last pound from the bodies of men like Garrett. There were too many jobs left unfilled, the men on the screens used to say, and there was a dire need to import more workers from wherever they could find them, as quickly as possible, lest the economy collapse. Now, even as there's rampant unemployment and grinding poverty filling the working class districts of cities across Britain, governments continue to proclaim a dire shortage of workers, sometimes going so far as to pointedly declare Britons unwilling to lower themselves to performing such work. Now, they work night and day to provide for daughters who will soon have their chance taken away for good. As he languishes in unemployment and despair, in Garrett's mind there's already flipped a switch from open to closed, his mind hardening against the wealthy man's dominion. The act of his mind hardening and his heart rendering itself immune to the lies of the managerial apparatchiks is the decisive, critical step in the worker's revolt against the hierarchical control the wealthy man exerts over all our wealth.

In the British Army serves a young private named Craig Thompson, who joined only a year ago. Stationed at a base not far outside the boundaries of Greater London, he spends his days cleaning the guns and scrubbing floors, on his rare days off spending what little money he earns on booze. It's a miserable life. But Craig is like so many others in the Army, drawing his pittance on the expectation he'll never be sent to war. The Army, these days, is a pathetic imitation of its former self, its weapons out-dated, its soldiers poorly trained, its officers spending most of their time imagining themselves as inheriting some grand legacy from an empire that no longer exists. And whenever Craig looks down the hall he sees something vaguely resembling order, looking as he does towards the officer's club. Another soldier, a young man named Hank says to Craig, "can't imagine them getting their hands dirty." And Craig says to Hank, "it's always been that way," before letting out a half-resigned sigh. It's incomprehensible, how they could be called out at any time to respond to the disorder in the streets; in the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the British Army deployed to the streets. Recalling the decades-long operation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the government sought to keep the Army's involvement in suppressing this uprising as short as possible. As soon as the strikers and rioters and the armed gunmen were suppressed, the Army returned to its bases, and since then they've rarely left for the near-constant state of disrepair of their equipment.

On this day, Craig and Hank are cleaning the barrel of an artillery piece older than any of them, winding up dirty, tired, sore, only to look on the officers in their clean, finely-pressed uniforms; he feels the slight tinge of revulsion towards them, but most of all towards his commanding officer, a colonel named Charles Cooke. The act of recognizing this, of turning his mind against the allure of tradition is that all-important choice the soldier is made in turning against the hierarchical authority the officer exercises over the vast crowd of men. Colonel Cooke is a firm believer in the power of tradition, something he makes clear to the men here and elsewhere under his command. Despite this, he's not much for the essentials of administration, believing the men as part of a gallant mission to protect so much tradition. While the men are paid so poorly that they can't afford the outrageous rents charged to working class men these days, the officers, at least those of Colonel Cooke's stature, are paid well enough. There's a rumour going around the men that Cooke is among those pampered by the owner of the local armaments factory which supplies their unit, the implication being that Cooke arranges for the purchase of more expensive, less reliable munitions made with the very same imported slave labour that's put so many Britons out of work. Although it's only a rumour, Craig intuitively knows it must be true.

Elsewhere in Greater London, a middle-aged man named Stanislaw Czerkawski works for wages not all that much higher than those dispensed to the slaves. When he was a younger man, Stanislaw emigrated from his native Poland to Britain, and found work among many others in shops cleaning floors. By day he cleans, and by night he cleans, always tired but never angry. Sometimes his employer cheats him out of wages, taking off sums for taxes and fees Stanislaw is sure don't exist. But whomever he and the others complain to, they're met with racist insults, mocked as dirty Polacks who aren't worth the wages they're paid. Sometimes, when he returns home at the end of the days seeming to grow longer and longer, his wife is yet to return from her own work, and he arrives to a flat cold and empty, seemingly cold and empty even at the peak of these increasingly long and hot summers. At work, he sometimes works alongside others but mostly works alone, left to his own thoughts. After a particularly long and hard day, one day, his feet are in pain and his hands are dirty, with the manager looking him in the eye on his way out and saying to him, "it's a wonder you're all still around considering you can't even read," seeming to muscle disdain into his voice. Although the managers have had an antagonistic relationship with men like Stanislaw for so long as Stanislaw has been around, it's seemed to intensify into outright derision and harassment recently, since the failed uprising fifteen years ago. The lot of many men has only worsened since then, but Stanislaw doesn't for a moment think the workers should regret their uprising. He'd only recently migrated to Britain when that uprising began, and didn't take part for fear of having to return to Poland. Now, after having endured fifteen more years of increasingly open abuse, he thinks he should join in the next uprising. Little does he know he'll get the chance soon enough, if not in the way he expects.

This, while he cleans human waste off the floor for his wages and lives in a little, one-room flat infested with bedbugs and mice. Too late has Stanislaw realized there's no place for him in this present-day England. In the meanwhile, like so many other working men mired in poverty and despair he'll survive despite the indignities meted out on him, and in surviving he'll learn at some great cost to place his faith in the certainty of the working class struggle. Each of these five men will find their place in the burgeoning resistance, still carrying itself out in the shadows but sooner than any man thinks to step out into the light. At the general strike that's about to unfold, coordinated not by months of careful, deliberate planning but by the passions of the moment, memories of the failed uprising fifteen years ago will rule the day. Still Valeri will be there, there to witness history in the making. But among the crumbling walls and the rusting metal beams surrounding him whenever he walks the floor, there's the spirit of no surrender, the instinctive need to act against the way of things, before this current chance is lost.

At night, one night, while Hannah and Valeri sleep, in the alley behind their little apartment there's a rusty, old pipe, one of many, this pipe springing a leak in just the wrong place. In the morning, Hannah wakes up first, discovering the water shut off. There's a note slid under the door. 'A pipe burst. Going to be 2 weeks until the parts get in. No hot water until then. – Graham.' Hannah swears, then leaves the note on the counter. Valeri finds it, swears again, then leaves it on the counter. The next time they see each other, a few days later, with still the water shut off Hannah has already decided to fix the water herself, heading down into the basement with little more than a few pieces of rubber tubing and a toolbox half-filled with old tools. At the end of the day, Hannah wipes the muck and grime from her hands and heads back to the apartment, turning the tap on and running her hand under the stream of water, warm, then hot, feeling satisfied. Even as this minor victory is won, there's a thousand defeats handed down on people like her, in secret, in offices and in boardrooms men in suits and ties cutting deals to trade off entire city blocks at a time. These acts of war are interspersed with the attacks of the policemen on the streets here in London, all over England, too, though the policemen's attack can no longer succeed in terrorizing into submission the policemen carrying their attacks out anyways. As the dark essence acts, so must its opponents react, compelled as all are by greater forces to play their roles to the end.

But on the streets at night there's an odd peace. Amid the gradual disintegration of the current order, things seem to have a permanence that grows stronger and stouter with each passing day. As one factory shuts down, another opens somewhere else in the world; it's a pattern that repeats itself a hundred times over with the passing of each and every year. After closing his shift at the plant in the industrial district, Valeri leaves as he always does, walking the same street, he comes across a young woman he's never seen before, no one's ever seen before. She's sitting in the dark, her whole body seeming to crumple in on itself, her hair a mess, her face bruised, blood trailing from cuts on her cheek. He stops, just close enough for her to see him, and after a moment or two she says, "please." Valeri wants to keep walking, but his instincts overpower his good sense, and he approaches her and offers a hand. Outside, the troopers circle round the block, prowling the city's streets at night, looking for trouble. There's the usual riffraff milling about, the odd homeless person sifting through a dumpster, bored youths sitting on the steps of apartments while smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer. In the distance, the sound of sporadic gunfire pops like a firecracker, while sirens wail high and low. Already the fighting has started; still the order prevails against the random, disjointed outbursts directed against it, in the middle of the night Valeri suddenly emboldened to take his own personal crusade and make it into something vastly more than what it is. Risking a beating and arrest at the hands of the police, Valeri seizes on the boldness inside him and shelters the woman for the night, the working class slums all around them burning tonight brighter still than ever before. Under the cover not of darkness but of the fire's light, they leave.

At night, tonight, Hannah tires quickly, but keeps a smile on for the overdoses and the gunshot victims, through the night keeping on her feet thanks not to caffeine but to a well-practiced gumption. As she works, the pipe she'd fixed holds but some of the water leaked pools and drops onto an electrical circuit, shorting the circuit and cutting power to the whole building. She'll come home that night, tired, and she'll fall into bed without thinking much of the darkness, across the city trouble brewing in the streets. At night, tonight, the homeless, the prostitutes, the usual flotsam and jetsam of the city take up their usual spots around Victory Monument deep in one of the working class districts. At night, tonight, there's no crowd of demonstrators, and the only troopers are a pair of junior officers who come around every once in a while to walk the beat. At night, tonight, when no one's looking and when the passions of the restless have taken respite to lick their wounds, it's almost time for Valeri to live up to his promise. At war almost continuously since the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the streets in the working class neighbourhoods are dangerous at night, in the darkness lurking the impending dawn.

All the way down the street, the sound of sirens seems to chase Valeri and the woman (her name's Maria), even as it's just the background noise that's come to fill the nights like a subdued soundtrack. In his apartment, Valeri says to the woman, "you'll be safe here." Quickly he adds, "for now." She looks up and says, "thank you." He gives her food and water, some rice and beans is all he can manage so close to payday, which she gratefully accepts. Once the adrenaline wears off, though, he's confronted with the fact that there's a strange woman in his little box of an apartment, and he hasn't the slightest idea what to do next. But in death, there's the promise of rebirth, the imminent war to clear the way through the future. By now the military nature of this coming war, of the war already raging in the streets has made itself clear, still the forces of evil not yet mustered fully against the forces of good. Although we've yet only concerned ourselves with the lives of the individual workers who exemplify the whole, know that the armies of men muster already in anticipation of the coming war, soon to erupt.

In his apartment sometime later in the night, Valeri offers to take the woman to the hospital or to the police, but she insists against it. Naturally his first instinct is to suspect she's a drug addict or a prostitute beaten up by some john, but even this suspicion makes him feel guilty. He supposes she's an attractive woman, with deep blue eyes, long blonde hair, and a gently sloping face that seems sculpted rather than grown. He suddenly realizes he's been staring when he notices her staring right back, halfway through a mouthful of rice with a single grain sticking to the edge of her lip. "I'm sorry," he says, before standing and starting towards his bedroom. "Wait," she says. He turns back. "You don't know what you've done for me," she says. "No," he replies, "I don't," and then turns in for the night, half-expecting her to still be there when he wakes up, but half-expecting her still to be gone with what little he has gone with her, she, on the other hand, half-worrying through the night that he might, at any time, have himself at her. In time, both he and she will come to realize the folly of their mutual distrust, even as they've already come to rely on one another in ways still yet they can't begin to fathom. "Oh, well he always spends much of his time at the hall," Hannah says, later, describing an encounter with her roommate to Whitney, "but I think he shouldn't waste so much time on the rabble rousers. There are more important things to worry about, he said. In times like these we need to help ourselves."

In the hospital moments later, they receive the first of a new batch of casualties from the latest takings to the street, Hannah half-wondering in the back of her mind if her roommate might be among them. Working frantically, she can hardly spare the thought to glance at every bloodied and bruised body brought in to check and see which one could be him. As for the poor and the distraught, well, from the colours of the shirts they're wearing she can tell they're agitating for change, and from the broken bones and gunshot wounds she can tell they've not made much progress. In this, the working class part of town, sometimes it seems we're all dying a little bit each day. No, as the buses trundle along the pockmarked streets flanked by shuttered shops and burnt-out apartments, we look to the skies and we see pillars of smoke rising, not from a mob of angry workers but from the burning of a chemical plant's tanks and the expulsion of toxic gas into the air mixing. In the darkness of the night war does not stop, breaking only for a few hours; the bodies will be left until dawn.

In the morning, Valeri rises to find the woman still asleep on his little couch, clutching a pillow tight against her stomach. "What were you doing out there last night?" he asks later, after she's woken up. "I was..." she starts, but can't finish. "Yes?" "You don't have to interrogate me, you know." "Seeing as you're in my flat I think I've got the right to know why." "You know why." "I suppose I do. Should I be regretting it?" "That's for you to decide." It's a futile exchange, but one which will, in its futility soon prove to make all the difference in the world for them. But when the policemen come around again, there'll be sporadic bursts of gunfire and the bursting of bombs, sending Valeri and the woman searching for cover even as their mouths water at the violence in the streets. Although we don't yet talk of rebels, of gunmen in the streets, know they're here, all around us, and soon enough we should have the chance to join them in the greatest war any of us will have ever known.

One of the other residents in the building Valeri lives in, a black man around his age named Jeremy Washington, came from a background of lies, deceit, and betrayal, all help denied him by the way of things which deems him of no value. But he's survived this long by way of the instinctive will to live which powers us all through even the darkest times of our lives. But events are afoot. Men like Jeremy Washington, though, learn to carefully navigate through their lives, dodging drug addiction, muggings, but most fearfully of all the troopers who stop them for the most frivolous reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. It's one night, many years before Jeremy came to work at that plant with Valeri, when he was stopped by troopers outside a convenience store and beaten to within an inch of his life. The troopers take him and dump him on the side of the road a few city blocks away, an old, white lady waiting until the troopers had driven off before she helps Jeremy into her home and tends to his wounds as best she can. In the morning, she offers to take him to the local hospital, but he declines. For Jeremy Washington, the brutal beating at the hands of the troopers had a lasting effect on him. His family, his live-in girlfriend and their two young daughters, watched as he fell deeper and deeper into despair. The beating left him with a limp, making it hard for him to work. He used drugs, partly to cope with the pain, but also because they were cheap and readily available on the streets where he lived. He lost his job. He lost his family. The courts, an adjunct of the troopers who'd beat him, took them from him and made him pay for it all. When he couldn't pay, they put him back in jail. This time, he emerged toughened by the experience, in the confusion his family scattering while he found his way into the building he now lives in.

Still through the first years Jeremy Washington lived in this apartment block he kept on using drugs, eventually resorting to selling them to help make ends meet while still he can't afford the medication he needs. Strange men came to visit him at all hours of the night, cash in hand, no questions asked, the troopers who patrolled the streets keeping an eye out but never seeming interested. All this had happened before Jeremy had even turned thirty years old. But now, for men like Jeremy, the promise of a new uprising offers him redemption and with it rebirth. After the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the union is full of mainly ill-tempered but otherwise harmless layabouts. But like everyone else, the war fifteen years ago struck Jeremy at exactly the wrong time in his life, not when he was capable of taking part. It might seem men like Jeremy are the flotsam and jetsam of life, the degenerate criminals living on the margins.

But while Jeremy Washington may well be a degenerate criminal, his whole life having come to revolve around drugs, but it's in exactly his sort of person the future lies. The way men like Valeri will achieve their own liberation is not by the learned wisdom of the academic, nor by the charity of the sympathetic elite, but by the hopeless causes, the most pathetic and degenerate among the vast ranks of the deprived. Although Jeremy had not taken to the streets in the war fifteen years ago, men like him were rounded up and sent back to prison again, randomly selected in the wave of terror that swept across the country once the war had ended. He was taken in not because he'd committed a crime, though he'd done that; the troopers took advantage of an opportunity to purge the streets of men like him. He's only just been released from prison when the current wave of unrest begins in earnest. He doesn't think much of it, as the smoke rises from the fires burning in the streets, but while he falls in with his old habits he secretly hopes the troopers who beat him within an inch of his life all those years ago are out there again to be killed in the unrest.

But not all is lost.

5. Adrift and Powerless

Soon Valeri and Murray march in the streets along with the thousands and thousands of their brothers and sisters, singing songs, holding signs, denouncing the attacks on them. "All power to the people!" shouts Valeri. "All power to the people!" shouts the crowd. It's times like these Valeri feels his boldest, times when he feels utterly confident that each step taken forward is the decisive step, a confidence that should only prove altogether tragic when he finally sees what the future must hold. The troopers are there, but they do not attack, under orders only to look on; they know what's afoot. "This is only the beginning," Murray leans in and says, his normal speaking voice barely audible against the din. "And what a beginning it is!" Valeri replies. As we have begun to see, love is anger and anger is love, love's defiance against power making it anger, and anger's righteous indignation against impoverishment deriving from a fraternal love among the impoverished. For now, Valeri and Murray among the many others can put aside their differences and embraced this particular episode in their common struggle, even as those differences remain hidden just beneath the surface.

"Are you satisfied now?" asks another worker named Stefan, who marches alongside Valeri. He was employed at a railyard nearby the shop Valeri works at, but was among those cast out when the managers closed a whole line only to open the line under a new name and crewed it entirely with imported slaves. "I can never be satisfied," says Valeri, "not until everything has changed!" Left unsaid is the mutual understanding that the change they seek may not be the change they receive, as their ragged and disorganized mob is only beginning to seek alliances with the other ragged and disorganized mobs that sometimes fill the streets like this. The demonstration was called to protest rising prices of food, fuel, rents, but right now all that matters is the rage vented in the streets. As the burgeoning resistance forms into the next uprising, working men realize on their isolation; but the revolution itself may yet acquire a bloodlust that could drive it to do things it might've never thought possible. At the shop, not the day after their demonstration but some day in the weeks thereafter, Valeri's nemesis Ruslan works, having refused to take part in this demonstration for fear of provoking the managers to get rid of him. Valeri can hardly conceal his anger at Ruslan for the latter having reported on their friend Sergei, but in truth it matters little.

The police raided Sergei's flat, of course, and found all kinds of forbidden literature and communications with the rebels who'd once taken part in the failed rising fifteen years ago, adding to their case against him. Actually, it's impossible for anyone among the workers at the shop to tell which of the statements regarding evidence recovered is true and which is false. It wouldn't be the first time the police in mid-twenty-first century Britain had planted evidence to frame a worker, or even completely fabricated claims of evidence found. But even as they'd acted to instil terror among working men, their actions had failed to prevent the demonstrations. At the shop, Valeri takes his nemesis Ruslan to task, and the two nearly come to blows. Later, Valeri's alone with another worker named Albert Nelson. "You shouldn't talk like that around him," says Albert, "you know he'll report you." "Let him," says Valeri, "I can't hold my tongue. Whether I'm punished for it or not, the truth is plain and obvious. What kind of cowards can see the way of things but choose to speak as if the opposite is true?" This is Valeri's personal philosophy, one which has landed him in trouble before and should soon enough land him in trouble again. But eventually he will put it to good use.

The next time Valeri and Ruslan cross paths that day, Ruslan is chattering with Judith after having done little work, and the three of them exchange a look. Judith looks at Valeri with a slight grin. Already Valeri's tired and sore all over from the day of work, and in his tired state he can't keep up pretences. He says, "I see you've decided your dignity is worth whatever little extra they pay you." Ruslan says, "at least I'm not the one about to lose his job." The better part of Valeri knows Ruslan is only toying with him. Still he can't help but let the notion of impending unemployment nagging at the back of his mind. In the streets hidden under the venting of rage there're whispers of what's to come. "It's not yet time," says one man to another. "It's exactly the time," insists the other. "And if we fail we'll lose everything," says the first. "We have nothing to lose but our selves," declares the second. The men talk of war, confident in the righteousness of their cause; this is the fertile ground in which the current rebellion could soon escalate into revolution. In Britain, the current order which has lasted for hundreds of years teeters on the brink of a spectacular collapse, needing only the gentlest of nudges to send it tumbling over.

But with war in the offing, not all is as it seems. Secretly, Valeri and a few of the others are already in contact with they who would seek to upset the current order, and in memory not only of his dead mother and father but his surely-dead friend Sergei he is already committed. They know of the political parties that see fit to carry on the promise of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, not in parliament but in the streets and the alleys, not by the passage of laws but by the armed struggle. They know of the unions and the churches and the civic groups that oppose the government and its impoverishment of the British people, but they know only in the way that the ordinary workers they are can know. They don't know of the struggle going on behind the scenes; but this will be revealed to them in time. They know the names of the parties that carry on the legacy of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, the larger parties at least, but they don't know the efforts at work, in the shadows, to combine these parties into a single whole. In time, they will, all will know. But not yet.

In the night, the police move. In cities across Britain, they raid randomly-selected apartment blocks in working class districts, breaking down doors and barging into bedrooms, rousing families from their sleep. Stanislaw's left out of these raids, but he turns up for work the next day to find some of his fellow workers absent. Immediately it occurs to Stanislaw that the ones who've disappeared were the ones who'd complained most vociferously about their stolen wages in the months before. "Did you enjoy yourself last night?" he asks the manager. "Why yes," the manager says, "I did." But the manager has a sneaky, almost impish grin as he speaks, and Stanislaw thinks not to press the matter. Later, he recalls the faces and the voices of the disappeared migrant workers and he feels pangs of regret at his failure to learn more about them than he did; but the police may yet come for him. As the consequences of this current round of police raids continues to bear itself across the country, it doesn't yet occur to men like Stanislaw Czerkawski these are among the first, restrained gasps of a regime in its death throes. The manager has already seen fit to report many of the workers to the authorities for acts of dissidence, and in truth the workers have committed exactly the crimes they're accused of. Don't think, don't stop to think, the essence which flows through our bodies and lives in the indescribable spot at the centre of our chests, silently imploring men like Stanislaw to work forward at the future when they'll all have the chance to join in their own personal rising.

Although Stanislaw is a Pole, he considers himself as having no home other than the streets of Britain, so much time having passed since his family came to this country. "Dirty Polack," the manager is fond of calling him, whenever he steps out of line and whenever he doesn't. A cruel and sadistic man who takes joy in the misfortune of those under him, the manager is only a pawn for a greater evil, an evil which, like the parties fighting for good, will remain unknown to the ordinary workers, for now. But the time will come when the evil will step out of the shadows and into the light, revealing even the leaders who conspire against the steadily intensifying insurrection to be the pawns they are.

Still Valeri can't escape the hollow feeling whenever he marches with his brothers and sisters in union. It's a feeling of intense loneliness; but there's an essence lurking, far above the crowd Valeri marches in. This essence watches as men like Valeri walk along the path laid out for them, through this darkness nearing the light with every step. The immigration raids have no effect on Private Craig Thompson's life, none that he's immediately aware of, confined as his concerns are to the narrow cone immediately around him.. "Don't tire yourself," says Colonel Cooke, "I want to be able to make good use of you tomorrow, and the day after that." Craig says, "understood, sir," but wonders why a colonel would come around to inspect the troops. It's still the early morning, and the armoury's silence is deafening. The colonel's uniform is impeccable, and his gait is smooth and well-rehearsed. Even so early in the morning Craig is already dirty from cleaning the battery's guns. Still Craig must consider the raids, as they've become a fact of life for us all, the disappearings of among the poorest and most vulnerable in the night discussed by the men in the mess hall but never fully understood. For Private Thompson, the primary concern which governs life is the meagre sums he can sock away for himself, with no family to care for his pay spent on him alone. A private's pittance isn't enough to save anything for the future, not in mid-twenty-first century Britain. "If things keep going the way they are then we'll surely be sent into the streets again," says another Private named Maurice, when they're in their bunks. Maurice says, "I don't want my girl to get caught up in these protests, because there's no telling who could wind up getting killed."

But Craig says, "if the rebels in the countryside ever get serious then we may not have a choice." They're both thinking of the crowds in the street, each day seeming to bring a new throng of angry demonstrators, this current wave of protests seeming to possess a character, an essence of spirit that hasn't been seen since the failed uprising of fifteen years ago. And this fact weighs on Thompson, knowing as he does all the others among his fellow soldiers who have families, wives and children, even sick, elderly parents to provide for on the very same meagre pay as him. But in this army, pomp and circumstance are common, as are empty celebrations of a long-dead tradition, with a vast array of medals and plaques on the wall in the base's main hall, and the promise of more to come. All this is known, in a visceral sort of way, to the men, and soon'll come the day when the men are pushed one medal too far.

Random conversations intersperse the days. "I don't know much about these parties," says one man. "But if there's help needed," replies another, "can we count on you?" The first man says, "you can." These workers are but a small part of the ferment. Valeri and Maria soon meet again, like the first time in the streets but unlike the first time in more amicable circumstances. Holed up in a one-room pad (not much smaller than the little apartment Valeri shares with his roommate), she sits on the edge of the bed while stands, afraid to sit down. "It usually dies down pretty quick," she says. "I know," he replies, before quickly adding, "thank you."

But she says nothing more, only nodding, herself apprehensive about letting him into the one space where she can feel something at least vaguely resembling the feeling of being safe. Outside, there's screaming and shouting, noise flooding in through the broken windows in the little apartment Maria calls a home. In the night, news breaks, news that'll embolden the Valeri even as it's meant to scare men like him into giving up on their cause. Not long into the current crisis and Garrett Walker sees his work interrupted by the raids, at the warehouse where he works no one taken in the night but several workers connected to someone taken. At his station on the dock, he says to another worker, "all this business about catching criminals has got to be a sham." And the other worker, the son of a pair of migrants who came to England from India decades ago, only nods his agreement. "If I knew someone who's caught up in this business, I'd shield them from the police," says Garrett. Again his fellow worker only nods. His fellow worker isn't among the slaves imported to do the work of Britons, but was among the last wave of immigrants before imported slaves came to comprise the bulk of those admitted to the country. He's become a British citizen and speaks fluent English, and he shares Garrett's concerns, and the concerns of every working class man, even if so many of the gangs don't want him. They're walked in on by a manager who shoots them a sharp glare but says nothing, a sharp glare enough to compel them back to work, harder than ever. On this day, Garrett works himself tired and sore, only to go home and find his young daughters tending to themselves, his wife still working herself tired and sore. But he finds a notice posted to the door of their flat announcing their impending eviction, the notice with no date. There're notices posted on the door of every flat in the building. They've only got a few days to leave.

Whenever Darren Wright looks to the pulpit for guidance, he finds only a vague and empty devotion to tradition and ritual. The priest, after Sunday's sermon, stays behind as always to counsel the faithful. "We should open the church as a sanctuary to those fleeing arrest," Darren says, sitting across from Father Bennett in his small office. "We must minister to the needy," says Father Bennett, "but we must also remember the powers that be were put in place by God. We must never endeavour to upset the law." The conversation leaves a bitter taste in Darren's mouth. It's not the first time Darren has questioned the church's teachings, but it is the first time his questions have come out. The episode doesn't shake his faith but reaffirms it, for Darren's spirit is governed not by tradition but by his smoldering, yet burning belief in righteousness amid a world listless and corrupt. In the meantime, conversations abound. Although the many unemployed and hopelessly poor have come to be a permanent fixture at this particular church, still the Father and the leaders of the Anglican Church won't shelter the targets of political persecution, seeking to maintain a concordat with the government in these times of strife. But as Darren knows, as they all know, the Church of England owes its allegiance to the King, even in the mid-twenty-first century the power of symbolism still strong enough to hold some sway. Still, with men like Darren already beginning to drift away, the church is beginning to falter in the face of its increasingly obvious collaboration with the way of things. In time, this will drive millions like Darren not away from God but towards Him, a new church to rise from the obsolescence of the old.

"I can't afford my child's medication," says one woman. "I haven't bought new clothes for my children in three years," says another. "I feed my child instead of myself sometimes," admits a third. Each works, cleaning clothes, washing dishes, waiting tables, sorting through bottles and cans at the recycling depot, and more. But shortages are common, highly localized, sometimes confined to a single household, a single cupboard, a family left to hunger. A family left to hunger multiplied a million times over makes for shortages unlike those the world has ever seen, shortages in a land of limitless plenty, all while the screens are filled with cheerful advertisements for jewellery, luxury apartments, expensive vehicles, vacations to tropical islands, mocking the hungry with the sight of an unlimited feast. Valeri says, "don't you think of what could be?" Still he's sitting in Maria's little flat, waiting out that last demonstration even as Valeri thinks he should be in the streets right now. The walls seem to rattle slightly and the noise doesn't muffle at all through the broken windows. "You sound like a child when you speak like that," says Maria. He still hasn't asked her what she was doing out at night, that night, when they'd first met. He'd assumed she was walking the streets as she would've any other night. His assumption is wrong.

"Better to be a child who can imagine than a grown man who can't," says Valeri. Although their time, for now, is almost over, they look ahead to their next meeting. "You don't want to get involved with the worst of it," says Maria. She hides her true path from him. "I've got a role to play in the streets," says Valeri, "and I'm doing nothing with my life anyways, working at that shop. If they sack me I might just go and join the rebels in the North." As Maria rises to show him out, she says, "I'm not quite what you think I am." Even to Valeri, evident from the look on her face and the tone of her voice is the growing confusion in her. Valeri's not the only one to think of joining the rebels who've continued their insurrection in the post-industrial wastelands of England's north, but even as he considers it in passing there's a part of him that knows his fight should always be here, in the city where he was born and raised. But no one can see an end to the steadily warming planet on which we all must live, forcing us all to confront the prospect of food shortages even more acute than what men like Valeri have become all but accustomed to. At times, Valeri can see the talking heads on the screens demanding even greater humility and sacrifice from men like him, as mothers struggle to feed their daughters and sons and wealthy men keep on hoarding. In the thick, swampy heat of yet another early summer, all Valeri can do is steel himself against the pangs of hunger and push onwards, putting one foot in front of the other and pulling himself through the days. Although Valeri knows the chronic food shortages owing to the steadily warming planet are worldwide, he doesn't know the hoarding by the wealthy is also worldwide, soon enough to take us all to a place we could never have thought possible just twenty years ago, before even the failed rising that took Valeri's mother and father.

Among the students at the polytechnic there's a broad consensus in opposition to the police raids, but too many diverging ideas on how to proceed. "We learn much theory in the classroom," says Sean Morrison, "but what good is theory if we choose not to put it to work?" He's not in class but outside the polytechnic's main hall, discussing the raids with concerned students. They stand in the thick, humid outdoors and pause only to mop the sweat from their brows. Another student, a young woman from Wales agrees, saying, "we can't allow ourselves to become another generation who failed in aspiring to their ideals. We must be the generation that finally turns the page." They hatch a plan, one of many, to march in the streets, with the support of faculty. Although they may be united in spirit, they are a ragged, disjointed mess, acting out not on ideas but on feelings ill-conceived. And they are one small group of many, the totality of them a huge group of people in dire need of coherent form. Already Valeri has come to see through these lies, and he looks on his screen with the kind of hard-fought and scarcely-won sense of disdain. As this current demonstration has its way with the streets, Valeri waits. Maria would offer him food, but her cupboards are bare. Her bedspread is worn, dotted with little holes along its edges, its colour faded, yet neatly and carefully laid.

A stuffed bear sits on her pillow, missing an eye and patches of fur. Conspicuously absent are any needles, drugs, or empty liquor bottles. As this current demonstration dies down, its screaming and shouting slowly dulls to a distant murmur, but Valeri doesn't leave right away. He sits with Maria, and they talk for a while, each in the middle of their own personal experience with the rest of all our lives. Not unlike the world's impending descent into chaos and open war, each of them lies in their own misery, left dazed and confused, but not without a certain clarity allowing either to see in the other a fraternity that will soon grow into something neither could've ever expected. The rebels in the North, they're more phantom than real, resembling hapless bands left over from the more radical among those who fought in the uprising fifteen years ago. It's actually rare that Valeri should talk about the rebels and his secret thoughts of joining them, rare enough with a near-total stranger he's only met twice. In the moment, though, there's an unbearable lightness, which forces them apart, each on their respective journey towards future participation in the coming uprising, one which should turn to men like Valeri and women like Maria to ensure it doesn't fail.

But this moment is invaded by the essence which should come to guide the next rising, the next rising already underway in the streets. As bombs burst and as intermittent gunfire rattles off into the night, compelling in Valeri a guilt for his being safe and secure in this small and decrepit flat. If only he could know that his future is filled with blood and pain on a scale inconceivable to his narrow, simple mind, then he might flee in terror. This is the dark essence at work, slowly immersing him and those like him in their war. Neither Maria nor Valeri realize what lies in their immediate future; in fact, no one does, whether they're willing to accept uncertainty as a fact of life or to dismiss it as an obstacle to be overcome. The rebels in the countryside, in the North, they're almost ghosts, seeming to defy any attempt to seek them out yet surely there in great abundance. Although the rebels are remnants of the forces loyal to the failed uprising and its still-unknown leader, their consolidation into a single force is close at hand. Once this is accomplished, they will be in a position to absorb so many of the dissident factions that have split the working class struggle into a vast and disparate array of groups. But before even this can occur, the leader to whom the rebels are loyal must be returned to them. This is closer than even the rebels themselves could possibly know.

In the streets, there's talk. "This is serious business," says one man, "it seems like yesterday we could expect our children to grow up in a better world than we'd grown up in." Another man nods, and says, "but now they will grow up to have their wages stolen from them even more than we've had ours stolen." A third says, "and if we steal them back then we become the criminals." This discourse winds its way through the streets, emanating from the alleys, the pubs, and the train stations, all the places where working men gather to trade subversive thoughts. For Maria and Valeri, and all the others like them in mid-twenty-first century Britain, this talk is more common than ever, the little idle conversations that make up daily life turned increasingly to the revolt no one knows is coming but which all can intuitively sense like a storm just over the horizon. For Valeri and Maria, the notion of a quiet subversion would be quaint, even antiquated, if it should've ever occurred to them. Even with all the screaming and the shouting, with all the clenched fists thrust into the air and the slogans emblazoned on placards and banners carried over the crowds, their struggle could never be enough, could never succeed the legacy of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago. For Valeri and Maria, the struggle of the working class here in Britain to realize its own destiny is more of an abstract concept than a fact of life, even as they each find themselves immersed in a revolutionary struggle escalating with each passing day. Although Valeri must keep on paying his rent, earning his pittance by day, by night he absconds into the depths of his own personal rebellion. He turns slowly, very slowly from his current station in life, that of the ill-mannered malcontent, to something much more. As Valeri is an avatar for the working class in mid-twenty-first century Britain, he's in a constant struggle between the man he is and the man he ought to be, a struggle even he's not altogether aware of. Even though Valeri can't fathom the true depth of his own personal struggle, still there are forces much greater than him engaged in a pitched battle all around him, within him, everywhere there's ground to be fought over, to be won, wherever there's the essence of victory in submission to defeat.

"This keeps happening to us," Valeri says to Maria not long after they'd come across one another a third time in the street, surrounded as they are by the impending rise of the next way of life. He doesn't tell her of his labour, and she doesn't tell him of her past. "Strange how that happens," she'd said that third time before walking past him and on down the street. They both see themselves as fighting a hopeless cause, but for different reasons. They both avoid the demonstrations running wild through the streets even as they both secretly long to see those very demonstrations amount to something more. Suddenly, it's as though Valeri and Maria see each other everywhere they go, imagining in the faces of strangers the look of one another, not unlike the hallucinations of a drug-induced stupor, the quixotic and ill-advised chance encounter on the street late that night proving to have connected them in ways neither could've ever hoped for, neither could've ever imagined. Although Valeri is only one man, in him forces wage a pitched battle for territory small enough to fit a thousand times over into a grain of sand. In seeing Maria through this formative time, he's not forming a lifelong friendship, not finding some ill-defined camaraderie with a street-walker, but ensconcing himself within the ranks of the most pathetic and wretched among his people.

In time, as she continues to work the streets of the city at night and as he continues to work the floor of the factory in the day, theirs will be a friendship sorely tested but never broken. But elsewhere, there's examples of the essence making itself felt, called in by a higher power we've not yet known but whose name can be heard whispered among the working class blocks across the country and around the world. For Valeri, this struggle is becoming one with a larger campaign to move mountains and rearrange the stars in the night's sky, even if he doesn't yet know it, can't yet know it, won't yet know it, not until he's not merely given up but willingly and enthusiastically relinquished everything he's afraid to lose, his meagre wage coming from his employment, the flat he lives in, his lover Sydney, his best friend Hannah, and his new not-friend Maria, and all the others. As Valeri is an avatar for the working class in mid-twenty-first century Britain, so must he abandon the intemperate passions of youth and the slim hope that the way of things should bestow upon him favour. You see, for all his talk, for all his posturing, for all the disagreements, sometimes spirited with his co-workers, with his brothers and sisters in union, still there's some small part of Valeri that clings to the notion that his fate might lie elsewhere, in ways even he can't begin to articulate. Before he can make good on his quixotic fantasy of joining the rebels in the northern countryside, he must win the rebellion for control of his own heart.

But Valeri's not alone in his struggle. A young woman, perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties, named Isabella Bennett works the floor of a shop not altogether unlike the shop Valeri works. Every day she pushes herself just as Valeri does, straining her body until her muscles burn, in the midst of a crippling nationwide shortage of spare parts for their machines people like her forced to haul their weight in cases that come here from around the world. Every day she earns her own pittance, supplemented with what meagre extra she can scrounge in electronics from a nearby scrapyards and sold for their rare metals. Every month, she sends a sum to relatives living in Scotland, keeping for herself only the minimum she needs to survive. But the sum she sends has been shrinking for a while, each month the remittance a little less than the last. In the streets, she sees anger, and in the moment of weakness she gives in to her anger, stealing from a lorry in the yard of her shop. It doesn't matter what she stole, except to say she intends to sell it and pass on the pounds to her children's caretakers.

In an age where hardship is made to be experienced alongside abundance, women like Isabella do what they must to make ends meet. Every day Isabella Bennett works herself ragged and raw for the wealthy owners of her shop who think nothing of spending on a night's entertainment more than she makes in a month. She comes to work in clothes with holes and frayed threads, skin pockmarked from years of hard living, and hair that seems a hundred different colours, all slightly more or less faded from her natural brown. One night, near the end of her shift when she's already turning her thoughts to what she might find in the scrapyard, she finds herself on the way out of the shop, making it as far as the sidewalk before she comes face-to-face with a pair of policemen. Rare metals are a dwindling asset, you see, and someone as her is only allowed to scavenge for them because she's trusted. All it took was one young man catching a glimpse of her stealing and that one young man deciding to turn her in for his own small reward. "We know you stole from the scrapyard," one of the policemen says. They step towards her. It's over quickly, but for Isabella it seems to last an agonizingly long time. When it's over, she leaves the police station and makes her way home, pausing to sit in her apartment block's fire escape's stairwell, letting the door shut before sitting on the steps and crying softly into her hands.

The night, for her, has ended. Even as she's been punished for her act of theft, hers has not been an act of theft but an act of return, this small piece made of the exploitation of labour and now made whole by its return. And so is visited on her punishment for her act of liberation. It's a small act, one lost in the disorder slowly extending through the streets, but in smallness lies the essence of our times. The next night, Isabella heads to the shop as if nothing had happened the night before, there telling another worker what's been done. Nothing comes of it. Of course nothing comes of it. She returns to work, able to compose herself by forcing a friendly look onto her face and by working her way through the day by reciting from memory a series of motions as is the way of people like her. But inside she's changed. Although she's not dead, she has died, the act of her having endured this pain converting her into another person, entirely unlike the person she'd been, identical on the outside, but given on the inside to an entirely different outlook on life.

When she next comes across the young man who'd reported her, she can't look him in the eye, walking past in the hall quickly and quietly. All through the next few months she continues to wire her wages back to her family abroad, seeming to find the wherewithal to keep sending the same sums by cutting back on her own, sewing up torn clothes in strategic places. But she'll get even. Maybe not her personally; in fact, she'll die soon enough when the war in the streets sees fit to take her. Although she'll never be the same, although she'll always have the memories of being so violated, she'll never lose the will not only to live but to survive through it. As she is of working stock, she doesn't know how to do anything else but survive whether through herself or through the essence which guides us all.

Like all working men and women, Isabella Bennett is infinitely strong, in her resiliency lying the future. Although we focus on the lives of individual workers now and leave the larger war to linger in the background, know that the gunfire rattling and the bombs bursting in the streets intermittently signal the presence of a vast armed force, disorganized and leaderless, but there nevertheless. Soon enough men like Valeri will have their chance to become soldiers, not only in spirit but in form as well. As gunfire rattles and the distant thud of bombs bursting in the streets echoes over the city, now we can take to the real work beginning anew.

6. A Dangerous Element

Already the thin wisps of smoke have begun to emanate from the little cracks in the sidewalks, from the storm drains lining the gutters, feeding into a dark cloud that will soon engulf us all. The dark essence that's watching from above, it slowly gathers strength as it's been slowly gathering strength for so long as there's been men like Valeri to bear witness to the pit of despair men find themselves living in. Soon enough there'll be a pivotal moment when this dark essence will descend on us, exactly the moment when men like Valeri should rise, the two to meet high above the surface of the earth in a cataclysmic display. It won't look anything like any of us could've ever conceived of, and in fact most of us won't know it when we see it. Only some of the rebels in the northern countryside know what it looks like, even among them only the oldest who'd survived the failed uprising fifteen years ago having real knowledge of what lies in their futures. There're figures, still in the shadows, whose names can be heard whispered in the wind, whose names we won't reveal yet but which are known to all the working men in Britain. It's forbidden even to talk about them, forbidden not by force of law but by something far more sinister, far more invasive. For now, we see falling wages as the main culprit behind the current crisis, in this narrow, specific fashion; but falling wages across Britain are only a small part of the misery meted out on the working class, a specific expression of the general malaise gripping the blocks throughout working class districts in cities across the country.

But what we think we see won't mean a thing when it finally arrives. At the polytechnic, classes are underway, Sean Morrison and his classmates studying through crippling shortages and not-infrequent power failures. But meanwhile, they plan. After the immigration raids have disappeared scores of men from the streets, if only for a short period of time, the students declare their solidarity with the migrants and prepare their counterattack. It's while they plan that their first, critical error is made. Sean and the others in the students' union openly declare their intentions, going so far as to publish bold declarations on the screens of the world that the end of the current order is at hand. Meeting in a classroom at the polytechnic with some of his fellow students, he says, "theory urges us to take direct action. We strike to take direct action by seizing the streets and holding them." They speak of the knowledge they've gained through their studies, from reading their textbooks and from listening to the lectures given by their professors. But the true knowledge they are yet to gain can come only from the experience they've yet to gain by taking part in the greater struggle in the streets, and by joining in the revolution which has yet to break out but which has been in the making since even before the failed uprising fifteen years ago. That uprising, which many of the students' parents took part in, occurred largely in protest to the very falling wages that continue to enslave and impoverish the working class today.

Although the students are continually engaged in their studies, they know as well as anyone that their futures hold no promise of a decent livelihood, a decent wage, all the work having been sent to poor countries to be done on the cheap or having been given over to the slaves brought into Britain who are seen throughout every city but who are seldom heard from. For now, the notion of unemployment and hardship is an impossible cause, an irrepressible fact of life, but one which is belied by the knowledge they possess in the permanence of their struggle. But it wasn't always this way. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that the students would graduate with their degrees, diplomas, and certificates, and would find employment somewhere, anywhere at all, Another student, Julia Hall, says, "every moment we can hold the streets is a moment we deny them to the wealthy who control them." But not all are sympathetic to their cause; though they don't know it, one among the students is a spy. Amid the police raids, their mistake is to leave themselves open. Amid the ongoing campaign by the rebels in the northern countryside, the students here at the polytechnic and at universities and colleges across Britain see the rebels in the northern countryside as sympathetic, not yet ready to join them but drawing closer with every bomb bursting and every string of gunfire rattling in the distance almost every day.

In the midst of this crisis, the true work begins. As news breaks of a treaty unlike any before signed between countries, it becomes widely known this'll surely put even more men out of work. At the church, there's an undercurrent running through the pews, a spirit parishioners like Darren Wright can sense but never see. It's this spirit which compels Darren to pray for guidance in troubled times. He comes to church more often, one weeknight praying silently in the pews when there appears at his side a younger woman. She says, "I hope you've found more inspiration lately than I have." She says her name's Sheila Roberts, and for a moment Darren thinks she might be a vision in answer to his prayers. "I'm afraid I have to disappoint you," he says. But she invites him to a meeting of concerned parishioners, the laymen organizing in the face of the church's inaction. "It's

The church may be a house of God but Darren and Sheila find themselves among they who have come to believe the house has strayed too far. This is a truth all too evident to men like Darren and women like Sheila as their brothers and sisters among the parishioners have come to see wickedness in the halls of power. Already evictions have forced many parishioners to take up residence at the church, while Darren and Sheila continue to shelter the men and women arriving daily, the wretched and pathetic among them who seek refuge from the mark of the fountain pen left on a paper none will ever see. Although the church, like all others, preaches a gospel of non-violence, Darren and Sheila each secretly harbour sympathies for the rebels in the northern countryside, and a vague but very real guilt whenever the bombs bursting and the gunfire rattling in the distance produces in each a surge of excitement. As the nascent revolution edges occasionally into Greater London, it should soon become clear to all that this revolution is but a continuation of the old one fifteen years ago, a revolution that never truly ended.

Elsewhere, as their friendship deepens through a series of unlikely coincidences, Valeri and Maria find common ground where neither would've before expected it. Over the days that turn quickly into weeks, theirs is a shared cause, which they realize in a mutual struggle against a common enemy. There's no moment when this takes place; he seeks her out, and at first she rebuffs him, but he persists. Finally, he offers to pay for her time, and she reluctantly, half-suspiciously agrees. Again they sit in her little one-room apartment, alone but for the rage of the streets filtering in through that same broken window, and she looks uncomfortably at the clock every so often. Still she sits on the edge of the bed while he sits on her one chair, the two exchanging small talk until, near the end of his time with her that afternoon he says, "you must join the fight for a new tomorrow." But the words seem to fall on deaf ears.

She's not ready to commit herself irrevocably to the struggle. Although he can't see it, nor is Valeri, but he's drawing closer to commitment with each passing day. Hidden among the criminals, the prostitutes, and the mentally ill addicts there's an element that lives off the enterprise of the most pathetic and wretched among us. It's a hopeless feeling, to be made unwelcome in your own home, to be made to feel an outcast on the very streets that'd raised you, to be made to seek refuge from deprivation in a world where an abundance exists.

After Garrett Walker and his family have found eviction notices posted to their front doors, everything changes. It's illegal to evict the tenants with so little warning, but in mid-twenty-first century Britain the law s that say what the landlords can do and the reality of what they can do are very different. At the dinner table the next time all four gather, Garrett says, "we'll live with my mother in Surrey for a while." His wife objects, saying, "she lives in a one-bedroom flat. There's not enough room for us all." The flat is further afield, in a county largely spared the unrest and violence that periodically grips even the safest parts of Greater London. It's for this reason that there're already many families living there who've fled Greater London as well, creating a vast army of unemployed men, crowding into flats exactly like the flat Garrett and his wife are about to crowd their whole family into. And whenever Garrett hears of the latest attack by the rebels in the northern countryside, he feels in his heart a sympathy for them which even he can't explain. Still concerned for the welfare of his family, his daughters first and foremost, Garrett doesn't think of joining the fighters as so many others do.

But Garret says, "it'll only be for a little while. Once I've found work again, we'll get our own place, somewhere." The dining room is silent but for the ticking and rattling of the refrigerator on the fritz. Left unsaid is the understanding there's little work to be found, none of it paying well enough. It makes Garrett feel helpless and emasculated, powerless to protect and provide for his family in the face of the overwhelming despair of unemployment. At the union hall, out-of-work workers talk. "A skilled worker won't go under in the villages these days," says one worker. "There's as much work to be had as you might want," says another. Garrett has been overhearing these conversations for some time. Both know it was never for want of work that they're made to languish at the hall along with many others. Garrett knows this too. There's plenty of work and there's plenty of workers; this is the question of our time.

After that hour together, Valeri hasn't the money to pay for another hour, having worked to save such a sum for more than two months. Only later does he realize she has not paid her rent in a long while, the money he gave her being instead put to use paying for a new winter coat in anticipation of the coming season on the street. Never left in the open, we all look like her at one point in our lives, she being the strongest in her weakness, the bravest in her fear, the wisest in her narrow, short-term outlook on life. The next time Valeri sees her, not walking the street but in a shop buying food, he dares not approach her, instead exchanging with her a knowing glance from across the grocery store's aisle as they pass one another, that little light behind her eyes suggesting she has begun to feel something for him, if not love then something that might well yet blossom into love. But it's all a fraud. It's a false narrative, framed within the confines of the human heart, made to seem more than what it is.

At the armoury, Colonel Cooke puts Craig Thompson and the rest of the brigade through a series of drills and musters, while imposing a strict curfew on the men. Naturally, no reason for the change, leaving the men to come up with their own. "We might be deployed abroad," says Craig in the bunks after hours. "Where?" asks another. "Who knows? Ukraine maybe," says Craig. "They're going to want us to fight the Russians," says the other. "I won't go to die for some imperial ambition," says Craig. And the rest of the brigade share his feelings. But these are young men serving in want of a paycheque. In times of crisis, the war in the streets of their own homes is the war of real concern for ordinary troopers like them. After the latest protests and the latest gun and bomb attacks throughout the country, it might seem prudent for Craig and the others to consider they might be deployed to the streets to fight against the nascent revolutionary struggle, but it's not to be, not yet, not while something even vaguely resembling peace still seems possible to the current government, composed as it is of an array of nameless, faceless political types from an array of parties.

While Stanislaw Czerkawski's ruthless boss never hesitates to fire anyone who looks at him the wrong way, Stanislaw has come to tire of holding his tongue. "I need to stay put," he says, sharing views with one of the workers on their break, "but sometime my turn will come." His fellow worker, another Pole, agrees. "It seems so hopeless," says Stanislaw, "for I have so little. Why do we act as though those with the least to lose are the most afraid to stand?" But soon their break is over and they're all back cleaning floors and scrubbing toilets. His mind wanders, and he stands tall in a clear picture he has for the future, and once he's finished cleaning one room but before he moves onto another he looks abroad for his troubles. If he's afraid of losing his meagre living, then soon he will have no longer any reason to fear. But Stanislaw is aware, as are all the others, of the imported slaves that work openly on the streets, different from Stanislaw in that they're kept under armed guard at all times and have their wages withheld for so long as they remain in the country. At any moment, Stanislaw and his fellow migrants from Poland could find themselves cast out of work and replaced by these imported slaves, slaves imported from farther afield, from places like Pakistan, Paraguay, and Papua New Guinea. At times, Stanislaw takes note of the lack of any migrants coming from Poland as he once had, suspecting as he does that these imported slaves are much cheaper. Little does he know the real reason for their import is their malleability.

Among the Poles who form this permanent underclass, there's a grim certainty, and Stanislaw's wife shares with him a sad, sad perception of gloom. But within their despair nests a glimmer of hope which the dark essence, watching from its place on high, sees fit to infuse into the character of the struggle. None of the Polish migrant workers, neither Stanislaw nor any of his fellow men can see it, nor can they perceive it in the instinctive, guttural way that the former leader of the struggle could and will still again, but it's there.

Over the past several months, Valeri's been meeting with his neighbours, never sitting down with them and talking at length but running into them in the halls on his way to work or in the laundry room. It's the little moments that add up over time, the traded glances and the half-serious exchanges that began to tend Valeri towards action. In these radical times, men like Valeri are soon to find themselves at the head of a burgeoning movement which the dark essence may yet choose to use to give itself expression, and with expression, life. But we're not there yet. After emotions have run high, we may be forgiven for expecting this ad-hoc assembly to explode into violence at any moment, but it never comes. Men like Valeri must focus on their next meal, this recent strike having succeeded, it seems, only in proving on the ability of the way of things to weather this current storm. But in this interlude, this in-between period when we all keep on working, Valeri keeps these things in the back of his mind even as he tends to affairs closer to the heart. Valeri and Maria don't see each other for a while after that chance encounter in the market; he stays away from anyplace he's seen her and she, well, she tends to the simple task of surviving in these increasingly hostile times. Despite it all, there are others, they who would disseminate a forbidden knowledge, forbidden not by force of law and the threat of violence that gives law its force, but by the lifetime each of us has spent being taught on the taboo character this knowledge possesses.

Books circulate around the edges of view, in used bookstores barely taking in enough money to pay their rent, and on computer networks that reach around the globe from obscure party web sites disseminating this knowledge for free. As the current spree of evictions and demolitions run their course, Valeri sees in the propaganda outlets proclamations of jobs added, of monthly, sometimes weekly increases in the prices of this and that, and daily reports wherein the talking heads gleefully announce the value of their own imagined holdings reaching new heights.

Valeri sees as none of them stop to spare a word of concern for his own, as he's always seen, and it inspires in him an instinctive, visceral revulsion he's become intimately familiar with through his lifetime and which he will never, can never forget. Although he can't know it, this is the very same revulsion which compel his mother and father to join the failed rising fifteen years ago and which will soon enough compel him to follow in their footsteps. Hidden among the criminals, the prostitutes, and the mentally ill addicts lives a man, neither young nor old, who may yet come to lead us all through the future, through a future wherein we'll all be made to share in whatever prosperity and poverty should be meted out to the whole lot of us. Clutched tight against this man's chest is neither a book nor a pad but pieces of crumpled-up paper with the day's last ramblings written on them in ragged handwriting.

As men like Valeri work, they all share, whether they realizes it or not, an unspoken connection with those of his own lying in the streets soaking in a pool of their own urine and sweat, the long summer's days never so long as to take from either of them that last ounce of dignity either of them possess. In time, when these men learn to put aside their petty differences and unite against their common enemy, the crowds around Victory Monument will assume a new character, surrounding the monument with a single mass.

On this early-summer's evening, the sun sets lazily, leisurely, at just the right moment casting a long shadow from the base of the Victory Monument's spire, its tip reaching down a street towards some miscellaneous point in front of the nondescript apartment block where Valeri entertains the notion that a woman with a pedigree like Sydney's might well yet come to sympathize with his budding revolution. As he returns to work with all the others, he looks for her, hoping she'll have made the choice to do the right thing. But she's not there. Only there's the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the distance, intermittently, marking fewer strikes than ever before. It'd seem to Valeri, he thinks as he spends his days lost, that this'd be the right moment to join the unknown soldiers who've already taken up the fight. But he doesn't. He can't. Though he doesn't know it, the dark essence that watches from above has seen fit to prevent the rising of his own spirit, waiting as the dark essence still is for the right moment.

But Valeri is hardly unique in this respect; across Britain, throughout Europe, even all around the world there're millions so chosen by the dark essence. And their time is drawing nearer with each passing day. Although the current wave of strikes and demonstrations seems to have failed, in fact it has succeeded. Although Valeri doesn't know it, the value in applying pressure, a steady, consistent pressure is infinite. But against whom this pressure is applied we don't yet know, seemingly faceless and nameless as the enemy is. They're not to be so nameless and faceless forever.

In finding friendship, Valeri and Maria come to see one another not as compared to those around them but in not yet the same. "Are you going to be free for yourself?" he asks her, almost as an afterthought while they force their way through a lonely night in a burning city. "No one will ever be free," she replies, turning away from him to lead him down the street. It's too hot to be wearing jeans and a jacket, too hot to be wearing a mask, in the sweat and the dirt a shared truth emerging. "We still should fight them anyways," he says. "We should all just stay alive," she says, "for as long as we can, let the fight run its course." They see the anger in each other's eyes, the pain in each other's breath. Still in these long summer's days the crowds around Victory Monument never seem to thin, with the crowds of angry workers, students, and parishioners only occasionally occupying this public space. Most days, you see the usual assortment of homeless people sitting quietly, back from the streets with their hats upturned, the odd one standing on a plastic crate while declaring the surely imminent end of the world.

(A delicious irony that we should ignore these men who prove to be right in the end, albeit in a way none of them could've known). There's the merchants who never seem to have any customers but still make good with whatever they have. Sometimes Valeri thinks these evictions seem to displace the same families from the same blocks over and over, as though afflicted by a cruel and sadistic loop. Never does Valeri mention this to Sydney, still thinking her too given to her upbringing in the wealthy, gated communities forever left untouched by the evictions which seem to permanently threaten the working class blocks.

It's a deeply confusing time, a time when each of us is fully aware of what's happening to us, what's being done to us, but when none of us seem able to seize the moment and fight back. These evictions sweep across the working class districts seemingly at random, the lack of any apparent pattern making clear their true purpose. These evictions aren't meant to clear the working class apartment blocks of their residents so as to, in turn, clear the land for something more, but to terrorize those who would contemplate resistance.

But Valeri is never alone. "You're not the man you think you are," Maria says. "What does that even mean?" Valeri asks, "we work all our lives for this meagre sum and when we become all used up we're discarded like some broken tool. And they kick us out of our homes to tear them down and build their palaces, their great monuments to nothing at all. It's not right! It's not fair!" But once set alight, passions cannot be contained, the current wave of demonstrations seeming to encompass all grievances in the aspirations of one man to realize his own destiny.

In times like these, with the wealthy man and his managerial apparatchiks seem invincible, but men like Valeri can instinctively sense weakness in the strong and strength in the weak. Led by his instincts, Valeri already thinks to the future when he'll become part of something more. In the world there's a mounting tension, between countries and among them.

All working men know it, but few have the wherewithal to talk about it, not in ways that might help reveal the critical truth. You see, Britain is a fallen power, and like so many other fallen powers she still dreams herself strong. As countries build up their military strength while beset by internal strife, they willingly set on a path towards a collision of powers. But the war in the offing will be unlike any the world has ever seen.

Still Maria persists in her scepticism. "When the war comes, what will you do?" asks Maria. "I won't give my support to the war effort," says Valeri. "You may not have a choice." "No one can force me to war." "You'll be arrested for sedition."

A pause. "Why all this talk of war?" asks Valeri. And Maria doesn't reply, not right away, letting a silence settle in the room. This meeting, this conversation is a forbidden act, forbidden not by law but by something far more sinister and far more powerful, the power of a taboo handed down from generation to generation long enough to become almost as instinct.

But, Valeri knows, each such conversation, each word uttered amounts to an attack on the power of this taboo, in this and in every other conversation held across the country and around the world. Some months have passed since we've started following Valeri's role in the burgeoning unrest, with only the few bursting bombs and the rattling of gunfire into the night marking the exact spots where men who don't seem to exist at all have been chosen to fulfill their purpose, chosen by the very same dark essence which should see fit to choose Valeri among a new generation to carry the banner forward into a new future.

7. An Eye For an Eye

People die, sometimes, killed in industrial accidents, and nothing changes. A few fines are levied and at the last possible moment duly paid. Valeri has watched all his life as his own are killed, to the wealthy man each death an expense to be paid, an item in a ledger to be accounted for. A young man, crippled in his pursuit of his pittance, taken away in the back of an ambulance, never to be seen at work again. An older man, killed in the sale of his labour for his own pittance, never to be seen or heard from again. As there'll be wrangling, back and forth, letters sent and calls exchanged, but nothing ever changes. Men like Valeri lose friends, brothers, all for want of a few more pounds to ward off the looming threat of starvation. But when Valeri turns up at the shop one day, on a day not altogether long after Sergei's disappearance, he half-expects, half-hopes to find the shop closed after their latest strike, instead finding it open and running smoothly, or at least as smoothly as could be expected in these times of immense hardship. He thinks to rally the workers on a new, wildcat strike, as if he could spontaneously inspire the whole lot of them. And it's almost to be.

In the meanwhile, events in the world at large have begun to overtake the deaths of men, a factory's closure somewhere halfway across the country met, this time, not with muted ambivalence but with anger, defiant workers seizing control of their shut-down factory and refusing to leave until their demands for compensation are met. Fear of death keeps men like Stanislaw Czerkawski under the thumb of their paymasters, enslaved to their pittance. It's times like these that Stanislaw looks on the imported slaves in the streets with a kind of muted sympathy, recognizing as he does that they're only a step below even him. But with the current demonstrations gripping the streets of cities across Britain, at any moment affairs could spiral out of control and force him into league with the imported slaves. It's this fact that gives Stanislaw pause.

Now, Stanislaw cleans a floor at the shopping centre when his ruthless boss calls him back into the office and says, "you're only a Polack, and I can find a hundred more like you in a day." The sudden assault stuns Stanislaw. "Now keep in line," says his boss, "or you'll be out on the street picking through trash for food." Though Stanislaw doesn't know this, the boss is fully aware of the conversations had by the workers among themselves. It seems paradoxical that the bosses should be nearly-omnipresent but should also choose not to act to snuff out any potential rebellion among the workers even before it could begin. In truth, we've all been here before, every round of protests and every burst of violent terrorism withstood by the very apparatus that now chooses not to vigorously and ruthlessly suppress the burgeoning revolutionary struggle.

Mocked and belittled by racists as simple, dirty Polacks, Stanislaw and his family have little choice but to struggle for whatever little wages they can. But even as they struggle, still there are the nameless and the faceless men in the distance, bursting bombs and rattling gunfire in the streets, seeming at once to draw nearer to Stanislaw and the others even as those very men seem to remain a world away. But still when the demonstrations in the street surge like a tsunami cresting moments before striking the shore, Stanislaw begins to understand the ebb and flow of the near-constant protests, even as he can only watch from a distance. It's not anything in particular, not anything he can articulate, but a feeling, an instinctive urge, something that overtakes him only briefly as he cleans the floor at the shopping centre right through the end of the day.

At the armoury, rumours abound of the brigade's surely impending deployment abroad. Gunnery exercises are rare, interspersed with endless cleaning and polishing of the guns. But still the Colonel comes to inspect the troops wearing his finely-pressed, perfectly-creased uniform. It gives Private Thompson the impression the prospect of war excites rather than troubles the Colonel. The more radical among the occupiers of factories about to be closed and apartment blocks about to be torn down talk of fighting; but theirs is a small voice, the few among the many, and as the police surround their factory and wait for nightfall before turning on powerful lights. Then, they wait, the darkness lingering outside as they cut the factory's power, in the hot summer's night the thick, humid air soon invading, straining will and faltering discipline, over the next few days the standoff lingering like the odour of dead flesh left to rot. Later, in the barracks with the others Thompson says, "he thinks it the chance to make a name for himself." Another trooper says, "he comes from a long line of officers. He traces his lineage back to the War of the Roses. He sees war as a gentleman's endeavour." The men agree this is abhorrent, but their chance to act on this agreement is not yet at hand. As to why the British Army has not yet been marshalled into the streets to confront the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire that seems a constant companion to life in the cities, well, it's because their strength is weak and their numbers few following so many decades of decline. What limited strength they have must be reserved to face an enemy beyond the British Isles, an enemy we have not yet met.

Meanwhile, the stench of decay infuses every breath Valeri draws in, his nemesis Ruslan having been promoted to some modest level of power. Every day, the shop could shut down; amid the chaos outside Ruslan stops Valeri and says, "it's high time a good-for-nothing like you was sent packing." Valeri says, "I support them and I don't hide my support," before looking Ruslan right in the eye. But Ruslan only says, "and if your attitude could cost you your livelihood?" Valeri says, "you have nothing to threaten me with. You can take away my job, but I've been through worse." Then, Valeri turns and walks away. As the current strike grinds on, many return to work here and there, Valeri and the others at this shop given permission from their union to be back on the job as needed. It's a hard thing, for Valeri to work through the day alongside so many of his brothers and sisters, whether friends or enemies, knowing still there're thousands of Britons in the streets, off the job. It makes little sense on the face of it, for a general strike to be considered as ongoing even as many of the workers return to work, but the people who orchestrate these strikes tend to take a longer view of things, each strike bringing them closer to a final victory, each hour of labour withheld, each clenched fist held aloft, each foot brought down on the pavement in the streets advancing their cause. And although Valeri is aware of these notions, of these speeches given by the unknown speakers at union halls, churches, and universities across Britain, it all still seems an abstract notion, something esoteric, building towards a future that could never come.

As if on cue, the power suddenly fails and plunges them all into darkness, while across London the family of Garrett Walker is plunged into the very same darkness in the midst of their own descent into madness. The move to Surrey takes Garrett and his family some weeks, and they make it out of their old home on the very last day. The morning after they've moved in with his wife's mother, Garrett wakes in the flat surrounded by boxes and crates, having only slept a little that night. "I'm not much of a man," he says, "if I have no work and no home. Look at my family, kept up in this tiny flat. I should have the chance to do better." But even his wife's mother lives in fear of eviction. And the other workers, whether out of work or working far too hard, are all beset by the same humiliation of being unable to provide for their families.

As Garrett Walker finds himself dreaming of an escape from this current depression, whether he realizes it or not his future waiting not in the shining spires where he looks but in the stout, squat apartment blocks where he lives, in those cramped little cubes already the first meetings taking place for what will become the most powerful force the world has ever seen. Still in its embryonic stage of development, the movement under the sway of the dark essence has been in the making for so long as there's been work for men to do, this time, though, a deadly sequence of events set into motion by something as simple as a few disaffected young men getting together and agreeing change must take place, and that the change that must take place can never happen without it all being set on fire and burned to the ground.

Assent, we'll learn, is a powerful thing, but only when it can come about naturally, rather than by fraud, a universal truth realized still only by those few who will soon form the core of something so much more than themselves, so much more than any of us could've ever imagined. But too late will Garrett realize the truth. Garrett has always imagined a conspiracy of sorts between the various landlords who, through their complicated network of intermediaries and apparatchiks control virtually all apartment blocks throughout the working class districts in every British city. In truth, his imaginings are not all that far from the truth. The law is on their side, not Garrett's, all the imaginary rights assigned to men like him torn to shreds by the complicated network of intermediaries and apparatchiks who find every loophole, exploit every textual ambiguity, more often than not in league with the very politicians from local government all the way up to Westminster itself. Soon enough Garrett, like many others, will throw their lot in with the rebels in the countryside and in the North of England, the rebels whose campaign of bombings and gun attacks sometimes reach into the very heart of Greater London. But we're not quite there yet.

In truth, there have been many demonstrations since the failed rising fifteen years ago, many haphazard strikes scattered here and there. Even some of them have seen raids like the one that's burned the union hall to the ground, though such raids have taken place far less often than the strikes that precipitate them. Men like Valeri are still young enough to muster passions not yet dulled and worn by the passage of so much time, and it's for this reason the future of our rising lies in the hearts of men like him, if only they could see it. Still we're in that uncertain early period, with the demonstrations of one kind or another so regular an occurrence that they've come to blend in with the cityscape, as though inserted by some skilled painter then subtly disguised by the blending of colours around the edges.

At a meeting of concerned parishioners, Darren Wright and Sheila Roberts hear myriad views. It's in a basement beneath a disused shop, dim, with leaky pipes and a smell Darren can't quite place. "The church has no authority when it consents to war on the working class," says the speaker, an older man. "Where Christ lives," says the speaker, "so is there the working class liberation. Our church has no grand palaces, no ostentatious vestments on its priests, no obsession with ritual, no empty shrines. This church must remain as it is, and our church not only lives but thrives wherever hearts yearn in his heart for freedom."

All present, perhaps thirty, shout their agreement. Darren notices, as the meeting runs its course, there're Catholics and Protestants alike at this underground church, the rogue priest assuring his new congregants, "all are welcome in a House of God." The experience sends a shiver running the length of Darren's spine, and he becomes convinced in an instant this is where he is meant to be. Darren returns to his church but does not tell the priest nor anyone else what he's heard, keeping to himself the burgeoning spirit that will soon come to commit him irrevocably to the coming war. Not condoning of war, the rogue priest is declaring to his newfound flock they must be ready at all times for no man can know when all will be called to account for themselves in the coming war.

At the polytechnic, word has spread of the coming protest, with Sean Morrison and his fellow students breathlessly declaring the impending occupation of the streets like a religious zealot confidently predicting the imminent apocalypse. "Our fight is to stop the government from increasing our fees," says Sean, "but it's more than that. What use is our degrees and diplomas if we become part of the apparatus used by the rich to expropriate wealthy from the poor?" Sean's helming a gathering in the polytechnic's main square, with some dozens of students and the odd member of faculty listening in at any given moment. "There have been many demonstrations over the years," says Sean, "but ours will be something more!"

Already the demonstrations in the streets of London, Manchester, Liverpool, and all the other cities in Britain have reached a fever pitch, the loose alliance of students from across the country standing as one. It's exactly this moment the traitor in their midst should choose to turn his trust in. This traitor doesn't come from a background any of the students would find suspicious, rather from among the ranks of the ordinary workers whose children fill the halls of the polytechnic every day. It's this fact that enables him to spy, in so spying teaching the students a painful but invaluable lesson on the folly of their ways. But while they learn, men like Valeri struggle simply to survive in spite of themselves.

Although Valeri longs to be in with the rebels who fight sporadically in the North, here he must remain, for now. Every week, when his meagre pay is given to him, it seems to him as though he's paid less and less each time even as the numbers on the scrap of paper he receives never fall. But this is by design. A critical juncture has been reached with this latest round of demonstrations, Valeri's own personal views developing even though he doesn't realize it. But even as Valeri takes part in the growing uprising, he must grapple with the utter banalities of daily life, seeking as he does like all other working class men to survive through this current crisis by means of his own hands.

At the shop Valeri and his nemesis Ruslan nearly come to blows over the way of things. "I've had enough of your provocations," Valeri says, "I can't stand one more word from your tongue." But Ruslan lets Valeri have at it, seeming to enjoy watching Valeri dig his own grave. A couple of other workers watch, Albert Nelson one of them. "I've always worked harder than you," Valeri says, "and I won't be much good to anyone if I can barely stand on my feet." Ruslan studies Valeri's face with a look somewhere between contempt and pity. Finally, Ruslan says, "you don't look so good. It's all their fault. They ought to have let you go long before now. They've been too busy with all these difficulties to notice. But I notice. I've had my eye on you for some time." With the threat of unemployment and thus starvation hanging over their heads at all times, most working men in this day and age would be fearful of such a threat. But Valeri's lacking in an instinct for self-preservation combined with his intense passion against injustice lead him to only to give himself over to rebellion.

Still Valeri doesn't yet join the rebels in the street, still he doesn't yet take part in the military conflict steadily tightening its grip on Britain, in the cities and towns life carrying on. Despite the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire intermittently in the streets, still some measure of normalcy prevails. For Valeri, we must look to the critical endeavours, the little mundane events that make up day to day life, seeing in him a codified loss with every day that passes. Valeri is not some grand leader, but among a group of ordinary workers whose passions are in search of something, anything at all to centre themselves around. The sudden disappearing of Sergei was not, it seems, the event which should flip the switch inside Valeri and give him over to armed revolt even if it was the event which should open him to the influence of the dark essence. In fact, it's precisely because Valeri is no grand leader but among a group of ordinary workers

Valeri is an emblem, and as he goes, so will all his brothers and sisters. Although Valeri was an only child, he's always felt, in the instinctive, visceral sort of way he can, a certain camaraderie with his fellow workers, before he began working a certain camaraderie with the others in the working class, even as he, as a youth, was made by teachers, boss men, even the talking heads on the screens to be ashamed of his own roots. But it wasn't enough to feel a camaraderie; it's never enough simply to feel.

One man looks at another and says, "they're clearing out." Elsewhere, another man looks down the street and says, "it's all right for them to leave." Still elsewhere in the city another man looks out his window on the busy street and says, "they're sure to kick us all out of our own homes and tell us it's our business to find a place to live. But they've already taken the other places from us!" It's written, somewhere, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In it, we sometimes see murderers put to death under the guise of this fairness. As this current strike peters out, Valeri is given much to think about in his state of mind, with his job at the shop seemingly in a perpetual state of risk. Yet, as some worker is killed at work, he is killed by the choices his wealthy paymasters have made in the name of their own profit, his killing accounted for, marked as another line-item drawn against another expense, the persons who made those choices still free to return to their mansions in their gated communities while a family across town faces a bleak future without their pittance to see them through. Meanwhile, Valeri continues to work for the same basic wage, returning every day as he had. Not yet broken, only battered and bruised he comes home exhausted as ever, still there to see his roommate Hannah come home in bloodstained scrubs from another hard day's night.

At the shop, Valeri's latest run-in with Ruslan has had some effect. "Stop your noise," says Ruslan, "or you'll get more than you bargained for." But Valeri's insistent, saying, "I'll speak my piece no matter what. If the truth earns me a target on my back, then I say let there be a target on my back all the same." Valeri takes a half-step toward his tormentor and nearly lashes out at him with both fists when the fear of losing his job stops him. But the point is made. This is among Valeri's glimpse of the bottommost depths of life, the very ugliest of its poverty. It's like the musty, mouldy stench of swamp rot wafting up to him from some unseen point below, and he reaches so eagerly for it. As he leaves the shop at the end of a twelve-hour shift, he thinks ahead to the next time he'll run into Ruslan, perhaps not the next day's shift but the shift after that, or the shift after that, or even the shift after that, and Valeri's not quite sure he'll be able to hold himself back should Ruslan choose again to provoke him. It's his own responsibility, he knows, to restrain himself in the face of such provocations, even as, he knows, it's perfectly natural, normal, and healthy to feel the urge to lash out. As he arrives home to an empty flat, with Hannah hard at work saving lives, Valeri feels the heat and humidity of the evening concentrated into such a small space, turning their little flat into a veritable sauna. All the windows are open, and the power is out, failed again as the city is in the midst of the ongoing strike. It might seem appropriate for Valeri to sleep, but with the unseasonable hot night he can only sit near the opened window and wait for the power to come back on, all the while so many competing thoughts swirling around him.

Among the men Valeri works with, there's chatter. "There's been nobody in authority for two weeks," says one. "If you know too much you'll get old too soon," says another. "Sooner or later we ought to make a stand," says a third. Whether one man or one thousand men, it makes no difference. All are valued; in the death of one, all die, as the smallest grain of sand may contain all creation. Halfway across the country, the workers who've seized their shut-down factory don't know what to expect; they leave doors unlocked and windows open, daring the police to come in and arrest them, expecting to make their point that way. But the police are more cunning than this. The police sit and wait, manning their post outside the factory's doors, while the local politicians make a show for the cameras out of negotiating, talking, always talking, drawing out the moment just long enough to let passions cool, once cooled his passions allowing in a shade of doubt. If Valeri should lose his job at the shop, then he'd lose his ability to feed himself, to pay rent on the little flat he shares with Hannah, and he'd find himself caught up in the same endless misery meted out on so many in this day and age. But if Valeri should lose his job, then he'll lose the only real attachment he has to the way of things, the last dependence. Of course, it's not that simple, as it's never so simple, with the unrest in streets threatening to spiral out of control and consume the lives of all. As the strike carries on, it takes the shape of a rotating series of strikes, Valeri and his fellow workers at the shop allowed to return to work while others go on strike for the first time. And in this the accomplishment in this current strike is revealed; the organizers of these strikes are obedient to the ebb and flow of the struggle, confident as they are that each strike advances their cause, even as they are so fractured, a thousand different factions under a thousand different flags, all yearning for a unity that can only come when their leader is returned to them. But even above these organizers is a power higher still, loyal not to any flag or creed but to a force we've not yet met.

Soon, the workers agree to a pittance, in the heat of the moment their pittance seeming like a fortune. It's been but a few days, perhaps a week since these workers took control of their yet-shuttered factory, in that time much having happened in the world, treaties signed, laws written on scraps of paper and passed, only to be evaded by those who passed them, loopholes sought, terms creatively interpreted, the essence of law building into itself the very mechanisms used to undermine it. Valeri learns of the settlement when he and the others at the shop are about to go on strike again, their place in the rotation having come again. When the workers return to their homes, pittance in hand, they resign themselves to the reality of life after death, and after a night or two of drinking and dancing each of them sets themselves about the task of finding their next sustenance, from wherever it may come. As Valeri and the others at the shop talk about the settlement, they express their disappointment but not their surprise, this strike having accomplished little from their point of view. In the future, this sort of action will take place on a grander scale, but as it's already come to be. But the point of view of men like Valeri is limited; they don't see, can't see that this strike has added to steadily mounting pressure the various factions have put on the government here in Britain, a pressure which must soon erupt in an orgy of violence the country hasn't seen before. While these workers have ended their occupation and returned to their homes, fires burn across the country and around the world. The wealthy man continues his campaign to cram men like Valeri into steadily shrinking plots of land, in the urban landscape so many made to live in steadily fewer neighbourhoods, no new homes in these forcing the, into ghettoes, driving them not by force of arms but by force of politics.

An explosion, sudden, lights up the night in a burst of orange and golden flame, the imminent arrival of troopers met with rifle fire, scattering blood and bone across the city's street. It lasts only a moment, but in that moment another life's taken, another young man cut down in the prime of his life. Sirens wail, ambulances speed here and there, the local hospital is overwhelmed with casualties, with broken bones and shattered backs and gunshot wounds piercing right through shoulders and arms and necks, tiled floors and gloved hands soon drenched in blood as nurses work frantically to save lives. Amid the chaos a stale smell rises into the air, from the burnt-out storefronts and from the charred remains of upturned trucks and buses the acrid stench lingering like the memory of a still-fading nightmare in the early hours of a long afternoon. "I don't know if I can answer that," Sydney says. Valeri had asked her if she'd stay with him until the end. She's been here all along; in fact, it's she who brought Valeri to this church and introduced him personally to the pastor. Valeri's not been a religious man much in his life, but still he clings in his heart to the hope offered in a spiritual awakening. An essential moment has been reached, if only men like Valeri could know it. Amid the exploding of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the night, there's hope, there's always hope.

In the ranks of the striking workers there's a young woman named Andrea Newman, and she works not because she needs to earn an income but because she needs to sell her labour to feed her family. But as she's become lost in a hopeless depression, she can only muster the energy to force herself through each day at her thankless job waiting tables at a restaurant attached to a casino. Sometimes, she sees the columns of black smoke rising from fires halfway across the city, juxtaposed against a screen somewhere nearby broadcasting news of the latest factory's closure, the smiling, perfectly-groomed talking heads briefly mentioning the workers to be put out of work.

Sometimes, she sees the news which makes her reflect on where she's been, on all that's led up to this moment, to what would turn out to be a seminal moment not only in our shared history but in her own life as well. Soon, Andrea loses her livelihood-no, it's taken from her, in the act of one wealthy man meeting with another and conspiring to rearrange imaginary lines on a sheet somewhere. It makes no sense to Andrea; she's always taken to her work with the same careful touch and with the same diligence. Now, cast aside like some old piece of machinery deemed not worth fixing, she pauses to think on what to do next. It's an impossible torture to be made to feel like an object, a tool manipulated by your betters for their own benefit only to be discarded when no longer needed. For Andrea, through no fault of her own she now must contemplate a near-future littered with dreams broken and fires smouldering still into the night.

Not far away, Andrea leaves her home with her daughters, taking refuge in with an aunt she's not seen in years. With no other means to provide for her daughters, she takes to selling her body on the street at night when no one will see her. At the best of times it's dangerous work, but during these troubled times to walk the streets at night in search of cash it's an invitation for every predator to take by force. Some nights Andrea sees no work wander her way; these nights come to be common. But worse are the nights when she's taken by some thug who then refuses to pay her and strikes her with his fist. She learns quickly not to press them, but still she can't avoid the men who would beat her black and blue. Pushed to life on the margins, she hides in the darkness of the night's shadows, able to shroud herself in the shadows only a shade darker than the night.

It's in the shadows the future lies, Andrea among that class of people who count among the most pathetic and hated among us. In this time, we've seen a critical development in the current sequence of events, after arrests and imprisonments, after strikes and demonstrations it seems against nothing at all. A grand conspiracy is afoot, and soon enough the campaign between opposing forces must coalesce into something more. For Andrea Newman, though she feels a void in her brought on by years of hard living and utter loneliness still she feels the call of the rebel, that tugging on her heart we all feel whenever instinct rises against education. For Andrea, the walk home at night, one night, sees her looking not at her feet in despair but into the sky behind the apartment blocks flanking the street, at the dull, orange haze created by the fires of liberation burning in the distance.

She steps gingerly along the cracked, cratered sidewalk, her body having learned to recite the movements of the walk home each night from memory, and she leans on memories to push her through this current crisis. Her father, her mother, ordinary workers them, each working wherever some small pittance could be meted out to them every other week. They've been made to lose their jobs, deprived of their livelihoods in the time it's taken one of the wealthy man's many apparatchiks to dash a line across a form on a screen somewhere no one's ever heard of. But it's the pain she feels in her heart, radiating out along her nerves to every point in her body that makes her feel alive, like every point in her body has been doused in gas and set alight. She has two young daughters as well, having fled with them only a few years earlier from a man who beat her whenever he took too much to the bottle. There are so many threads needling through our lives, and in these times of disorder and distrust we can only realize our destiny in embracing the horror. Next, we strike.

8. An Icy Heat

A crowd forms around Victory Monument, angry like all the others, chanting slogans and holding signs that accuse the wealthy man of various crimes. A crowd forms, made up of people who are afraid whenever they're singled out but who become emboldened whenever they combine into a single mass. A crowd forms, giving us a taste of what's to come, but only a taste, like the first drop of water falling on a thirsty man's tongue after years of wandering the desert. Although the general strike has been called off by the union leaders, by the churches, and even by the student groups, it lingers in the streets like a fallen tide's waters trapped on the shore. For Valeri, his return to work is disheartening, the sudden cancellation of their second turn in the rolling strikes seeming to him as an ill-timed truce. But even Valeri must earn his pittance and keep on feeding himself, which helps him to understand the need of the others, the fathers and mothers to provide for their children. At work, Valeri is like a machine, ordered by Judith and the other managers to work faster, his body reciting a series of rhythmic motions from memory, even as the better part of him longs to go back on strike right away still the tamed, cowed person in him allowing him to work through this uncertain, early period.

As the crowd gathers, so gather the troopers, a handful of them standing around the edges of the crowd, strategically positioning themselves at the entrances to alleys, on steps in front of apartment blocks, at the intersections of streets feeding into the square, only waiting until the crowd has mostly assembled to move in. The troopers rely on experience to steady their nerves when confronted by an overwhelming number of angry people. As Valeri must keep on working for his pittance, he can't understand, can't fathom the forces at work, not yet. Although his impulses may urge him to break with the order to end the strike and hurl himself into the struggle, there's a dark essence infusing itself into his body, keeping him in place, for now. It's this dark essence which seeks to guide Valeri, knowing as it does that it's not yet his time to rise, that he has much left to experience before he can join in the coming revolution, that he has longer to fall, more to lose before he should realize his destiny. As Valeri goes to the union hall to listen to the speeches, he sees the lone figure delivering a fiery sermon with all the passion and intensity of a preacher speaking truth to power.

"It's impossible for any of us to imagine the end to a relentless campaign of tyranny and violence," says a lone figure standing on the Victory Monument's pedestal, above the others, "and it's precisely because it's impossible for us to imagine such a thing that we must believe in it!" The speaker holds a clenched fist aloft as he speaks. A rhythmic cadence characterizes his voice. The veins in his neck and along the side of his face bulge. His cheeks, his throat are coloured a deep crimson. But still the speaker never seems to pause for breath, never seems to need a glass of water. And sometimes Valeri sees the crowds, hears the speakers; if not for the fact that he is consumed in his own life, in slaving for his own pitiful wages he might be in there with the flotsam and jetsam of urban life who fill the square so regularly.

And Valeri says, sometimes, things like, "this is impossible for anyone to stand," even as he keeps on working for his pittance. Still the voices of working men speak in hushed tones, exchanging subversive thoughts, saying things like, "our strike may be broken but our spirit never will be," "the fire has been kindled and it can't be put out anymore," and "may the dead not have died in vain!" At the union hall Valeri doesn't find much solace nowadays, seeking as he does a reaffirmation of the path he's on, even if he doesn't know the path he's on, can't see more than a half-second into the future at any given time. It's not unlike him to be this way; he wears clothes with holes along the seams, with faded threads and fabric. On this night, when he returns home he's to apply a little glue to the soles of his work boots, hoping to make the boots last another year before having to purchase another pair, another used pair from one of the charity shops doing brisk business in London's working class districts. But this speaker! Although Valeri considers himself something of a cynic, he finds himself enamoured of this speaker. But the speaker seems to disappear as quickly as he'd appeared, leaving the workers packing the union hall to ponder his words. (Valeri doesn't know it, but the speaker is an apparatchik from one of the illegal parties soon to surge to the forefront of the nascent revolution here in mid-twenty-first century Britain).

As Valeri lives among them, he looks up sometimes and sees flying overhead jets belonging to the air force, in formation, it suddenly occurring to him these are times of intimidation. Still in this early period open sedition is confined to the apartment blocks and the sprawling shantytowns wherein the working class live, in the distance the wealthy man's gleaming, glass-and-steel towers looming as a stark reminder of the invasion drawing nearer with each day. The rebel gunmen are unseen, but there, unarmed, concealed so cleverly as ordinary demonstrators that even they don't know they're gunmen, the war in the streets yet to enlighten them with knowledge on the truth of their own struggle. It occurs to the casual observer that these protests might be proof on the fallacy of dictatorship, but this is a fraud. Although Valeri doesn't know it, as an ordinary worker can't know it yet, in this advanced stage of our history's future the great poverty and misery meted out upon us is but a fevered push to extract every last drop of blood, every last chip of gold from our minds and our bodies before the inevitable should happen and the future revolution should begin in earnest.

This is why nothing will happen, not this time, nothing besides a few broken bones and a few scraped knees. As the crowd thins out, the troopers linger just long enough to see the last of the troublemakers leave, once satisfied the day has passed and the threat has faded returning to their barracks as they'd started out the day. Most of the troopers felt no anxiety, no fear at being confronted with such a crowd, but there's one young trooper among them who through he'd never make it through the day. It's nightfall by the time the last protestors clear the public square, ceding the ground around Victory Monument to its usual flotsam and jetsam, the drug-addled, the homeless, the mentally ill, the prostitutes. If Valeri should venture into the streets now, he'd find his new friend Maria among those walking the street, but he'd be wrong in assuming she's selling her body. She may be prostituting herself tonight, but only in the way all prostitute themselves, selling their bodies for a few pounds. At least now she's offering herself to those who carry out the struggle of the failed uprising fifteen years ago, donating her body and mind to a noble struggle. But it's not time for that, yet.

There's always at least one. Before Sean Morrison and the other students from the polytechnic can join in, the police move in. With military precision they arrest the leaders of all the student groups, Sean in the hall when the police break in and push him to the ground. There's a lot of screaming and shouting but no blood is spilled, Sean soon cuffed in the back of a lorry along with the other student leaders. Speeding for the station, the police put him in a cell and leave him without having said a word to him through this whole affair. But Sean'll be back out soon enough. Most of the students taken in by the raids will be, too. When Sean arrives at the police station, he screams and shouts, saying, "you're all cowards!" But the police seem to pay him no mind, leaving him to his infantile outbursts, as if to pointedly suggest to him on the futility of his adolescent rebellion.

The police don't have much evidence against any of the students, and they've broken too many laws themselves in bringing the students in. But the damage is done. The police have waited until the students and their consciousness reached its apex, then moved in, throwing the student groups into chaos. Sitting in his cell with the others, Sean thinks himself a fool for having traded in dissent so openly. But when he walks out of jail the next day to the embrace of friends and family, he's learned a valuable lesson that he'll soon put to good use.

This time, Hannah can't make it in to the hospital, the trains having been shut down and the streets closed to all traffic, leaving her no way to get to work. "Well, now we'll see what comes next," she says to herself, "but what is there to talk about?" A young man named Lawrence Jackson accompanies her, having met her only some weeks earlier in the middle of a power outage on one of those long summer nights. "Who's room is that?" he asks, pointing at Valeri's. "My roommate's," she says, "but he's out all the time. Working. Taking part in these rallies. He likes to think of himself as a rebel. But so far all he's rebelled against is good housekeeping." It's her poor attempt at humour. In the darkness of the night, left dark owing to another power outage, she sits waiting patiently for the power to come back on. Little does she know this power outage is not due to aged infrastructure nor to the unrest sweeping the country, as the local government claims; no, this outage was planned, part of a series of rolling outages targeting the working class districts, meant to disrupt their campaign of strikes and protests. She turns back towards Lawrence. "But enough of that," she says, "we'll leave as soon as the power comes back on or dawn breaks. Whichever comes first." "Am I interfering?" he asks. But she doesn't answer.

In the basement of that disused shop, Darren Wright listens intently to the impassioned sermons delivered by the rogue priest. The police raids and the mass unemployment have driven the faithful in increasing numbers to these underground ministries; once only some dozens, now hundreds visit this particular priest to hear the gospel of revolution. Tonight, the priest declares, "and in the book of Acts, chapter five, verse twenty nine, the apostle Peter declared 'we ought to obey God rather than men.' Brothers and sisters, we have seen the police evict the working class from our homes, and we have seen the police arrest they who would deign to take to the streets in outcry."

All are taking in every word, amid the leaky pipes and the damp, mildew-laden air the fire and fury reaching the hearts of every man and woman. The priest continues, "in the Bible we are taught to 'heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.' Brothers and sisters, I tell you this: if we are to answer this call to ministry, we must cast out the demons who have lived in our government, who seize the fruits of our labour from us, and who use force against us should we dare oppose them. In service of a higher power we must willingly enslave ourselves to the cause!" Again Darren feels the electric sensation running the length of his spine, compelling him to shout out, "amen!" Soon enough this rogue ministry will surge to the forefront and make its own war for our salvation. If only any among them could know where their struggle must lead, to the utter destruction of everything all around them, to the burning of their homes and to the littering of the streets with broken bodies, we might be tempted to imagine they'd choose another course. But that would be to underestimate them and the dark essence which guides their actions, even as they don't know yet that the essence exists at all.

At Hannah's flat there's Lawrence, who had been with his share of women since he was a teenager, thinks of this woman as different, the experience of having taken in with her making him feel so much younger than he was. He sees her eyes in the darkness. "I love you, Hannah," he says. "Don't say that," she says. "Why not?" he asks. "It doesn't lead to good things when men say that to me," she says. "Then why am I here?" he asks. She doesn't have an answer. Theirs is a secret romance, secret even to either of them. As if to punctuate the silence, a distant explosion rattles walls and shakes glass like a rolling thunder, the night guaranteed to be dark. It's only a gas tank at some industrial estate bursting into flames, but neither Hannah nor Lawrence know it. Hiding out, they make it through the night, fearing to fall asleep in each other's arms they sleep in either room. The power will come back on soon enough, when the waning summer's sun begins to rise, but for now the darkness grips their little flat like a snake slowly tightening around its prey, as if to squeeze the life out of it. It won't last much longer, not altogether much longer, but in the time it takes the local authorities to turn the power back on Hannah and her friend Lawrence will make good on the little time they have together, speeding through a relationship both know can't last, won't last, accustomed as they are, as all young people are in pre-revolutionary Britain to having so little time to consummate their relationships. In the working class districts, the failed uprising of fifteen years ago and the unrest ever since has produced so many unconventional living arrangements, so many children born out of wedlock, so many men raising other men's children, so many children raising themselves. Although Lawrence and Hannah won't have long enough to pursue anything beyond their affair before the coming war in the streets escalates, each will look back on their brief time together with a fondness as if they'd been together all their lives.

In the streets outside Garrett Walker's new residence, there's the noise of sirens wailing and the cracking thunder of gunfire in the distance. Since taking up residence with his mother-in-law, Garrett's found work, here and there, odd jobs fixing leaky pipes and broken-down cars, never enough to support a family. But when his daughter doesn't come home one afternoon, he takes to the streets in search of her. Though only sixteen, she'd taken to spending time at a local college in Surrey, and it was at this college when she was caught up in the police raids. It mattered little that she was only a casual observer. The police took in anyone who looked at them cross. After some hours, while he's in the middle of searching through a back alley his phone rings in his back pocket, inspiring in him a creeping dread. It's his wife. Although Garrett is himself distressed he manages to keep his voice calm and steady, even as his heart slams against his chest. He hears his wife's sobs, her voice nearly incomprehensible, while he tries to calm her down. It takes a few moments, the longest moments in Garrett's life, moments when he feels a creeping dread, a paralyzing fear he'll never forget. He says, "tell me what happened," and when she tells him, his heart seems to stop.

She says, "they've got her." Immediately he turns back, through the twilight's shadows a desperation welling up in him, as though some part of him fears by the time he makes it to the station his daughter will already be dead. Although it might seem, to us and to men like Garrett, that the streets are filled with lifeless bodies, the sewers with the dull, metallic redness of stale blood, it's not so, not yet. We're coming to the brink of revolution, in that last moment before the end of the beginning the landlords and the businessmen consumed in their mad rush to extract every last pound they can from the bodies of men like Garrett before the revolution should begin in earnest. But we're not quite there yet. In the night, a blackout strikes, this not one of sabotage but still enacted deliberately. The signs are already mounting of the impending collapse, not of the way of things but of the current boom, brought about not by the mounting resistance from men like Valeri but by the wealthy man's repeating cycle of greed. Looking out across the city, already the skeletal towers are reaching higher for the sky than ever before, the wealthy man in a frenzy to wring every last ounce of wealth from the way of things before it all goes up in smoke.

After Valeri's spent the night in the streets, shouting and screaming and hurling abuse at the officers who stand them down, he returns to the mill and finds posted to the front door a notice of closure. Looking back, he sees the short, stocky figure of Murray beside the taller, lankier figure of a man named Arthur Bennington. "What is this?" Valeri asks. "The boss came around twice," Murray says, "he's been looking high and low for someone to take his place but couldn't find anyone. He's afraid to let the plant run with only his subordinates in charge--he thinks they'll be too weak and the workers will just do whatever they want." Valeri laughs. "He's right! If the managers all quit and we ran this place ourselves it would be in much better shape. Safer, too!" Murray nods, and says, "yes, I know that. And so does Brother Bennington." It's left unsaid but acutely understood by all three that it's not only the company that would do better if the managers all went away and the workers took control of everything there's to control in mid-twenty-first century Britain. But Murray, ever the shepherd to Valeri's flock, can only hold the intemperate nature of Valeri's outbursts with the knowledge of a higher calling that lies in wait for them all.

It's in times like these that Murray invokes the name of a man whose name it's forbidden to invoke, forbidden not by force of law but by something far more insidious. We deliberately avoid his name, for now, because it's important to weave a narrative within which his presence can be established over time. But at the shop, already whispers of the name that should sear itself into our memories, if only the moment should arrive when the dark essence chooses to make use of him. In truth, his name is already known among the workers, and they wait for him to return and resume his work, something that'll happen far sooner than any of us could ever know. But when there's the sound of rattling gunfire and bursting bombs fading in from the distant countryside, all are served a stark reminder on the revolution about to erupt, only waiting, as it does, for the return of its leader. It's only a short time until their leader should come back to them, and in that time there's to be much bloodshed, much anger, much venting of rage in the streets. But once their leader returns, even all the blood that's been shed will come to seem like a drop in the ocean.

At the armoury, the Colonel arrives to inspect the troops, looking entirely out of place in his finely-pressed uniform. Standing at a podium before the assembled brigade, he says, "you men are the finest in this army. Though we are at peace now, the time may come when you are called to war. You may even be called to bring peace to the streets of your own country. Whatever the task required, know that in all things we shall all remain steadfastly committed to God, Country, and King." Private Thompson stifles a chuckle. But others can't help themselves. The Colonel looks equally mortified and betrayed. The whole brigade, after the inspection ends, is made to stand in formation for eight hours straight, then retires to immediate lights out. Still Craig Thompson whispers along with the rest of the troops, already thinking of the day when they'll serve their own. But this seditious line of thinking must end, Craig's nagging self-doubt seems to say, before it takes them all to a place where none of them can go. As the British Army, along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air force, have become given to spending their pounds on expensive and technologically expensive weapons that'll prove to be of no value in a real war, it escapes Private Thompson and the others that this is by design, expensive but useless weapons built for the same reason that London's cityscape sees expensive but useless towers erected at breakneck speeds.

Murray's companion hasn't said anything, but looks Valeri in the eye with a steely gaze that seems to pierce through to his soul and bring out his innermost thoughts. "This one's a good one," says Arthur Bennington, his eyes never wavering from Valeri's, "but he's got much to learn." It's a small encounter in the grand scheme of things, and when the plant reopens a few days later Arthur Bennington's nowhere to be found. No one's heard of him, either. It's as though he's a ghost. But Valeri knows he exists. Imperceptibly, a friendship springs up between them, such a small thing in this day and age, but as the world burns in an icy heat Valeri must carefully consider who he takes among his friends. As men like him struggle to make ends meet, the wealthy continue to encroach on their neighbourhoods, the sleek, glass-and-steel towers seeming to draw nearer every day. It's only a matter of time, Valeri thinks, until they'll be forced to stand and fight for the right to stay in their own homes. Valeri, for one, can only look forward to it like the starving man salivating at the thought of a feast. And when his mentor, Murray, invokes the name of a man whose name is forbidden to invoke, Valeri feels inexplicably drawn to it, memories of his mother and father surging to the forefront of his thoughts even as he's forced to confront the immediate failure of their filling of the streets.

"Come on, put your back into it!" shouts the boss at Stanislaw and the rest of the workers. Halfway through the night perhaps ten migrant workers, Stanislaw among them, have been mustered to put up fortifications around a police station not far from Victory Monument. "We're already four days behind! Work faster or you're all fired!" shouts the boss. Though it's dark, floodlights mounted on tripods make the street outside the station bright as day. Stanislaw erects fencing topped with barbed wire while others assemble walls from cement panels. But when he stops to mop his brow he thinks of his wife and children here in England and the rest of his family still living in a small town outside Krakow, Poland. "You there!" shouts the boss, "I'm not going to tell you again!" His rebellious instinct stifled for a moment, he turns back to the fence, fumbling with it while looking out of the corner of his eye at the boss, unsure how much longer he could stand the man.

In the morning Hannah ventures into the street, finding the crowds dispersed and a sense of normalcy returned. For all the screaming and the shouting, still the way of things remains firmly lodged in place. Factories close, then reopen, the closed and the open occupying the same time and space. Hannah is an oddity, a woman who sees the best outcome among a sea of equally unpalatable possibilities. "We'll be all right," she says, "as long as we stay together." She's talking to Whitney, each smoking a cigarette while on break. They lean against a brick wall and look into the dimly-lit haze of the late-summer's night. "We've spent our whole lives preparing for a future that can never be," says Whitney, "and now we have a choice to make." Hannah draws the last drag off her cigarette and then flicks it away. "I'm very tired," she admits, to herself as much as to Whitney. Hannah thinks to tell Whitney of her affair with the stranger named Lawrence, but decides against it. With power failures common, bombs exploding and gunfire rattling in the streets, and the smashing of windows and the shouting of angry voices, practical concerns demand full attention.

In the middle of the night, the women see in themselves what they want to see, if only for this rare moment of honesty. But events are mounting, quickly, quietly in the background yet soon to surge forth. In the meanwhile, always in the meanwhile we wait, Hannah and Whitney tending back to that rare slow night in the A&E, like everywhere else in the world today a place where crisis could erupt at any moment. This is what always happens after the demonstrations have died down, the surge in casualties flooding the A&E slows to a trickle and allows the nurses and doctors a chance to gather their thoughts. In the wake of this latest filling of the streets, though, the silence seems eerily frantic and unsettling to Hannah. She wonders, in between tending to the patients, whether her cousin Valeri might not come home tonight, unsettling her further.

After this latest demonstration work resumes, in the morning the streets cleared of debris, the few patches of dried blood mopped up to make way for the trucks and buses that trundle along these roads every day and every night. At work, this day, Valeri and the others work a little slower than usual, not enough to be noticeable at a moment's glance but still enough to be measurable by the programs used to maintain a steady watch over him. Nerves rattled, many of Valeri's friends and colleagues talk. "Not so far as you think," says Murray, talking to Valeri in the aftermath of this latest strike. "How can you say that?" Valeri asks. "Things can only get so much worse," says Murray. Having returned to work, Valeri finds himself dispirited. The days seem slower and longer, more tiring. Even the noise and the bright lights of the floor seem to have dulled. It might seem Valeri's too tired to give much of himself, and it's true. Even as he's too tired to move, he moves. He knows how to do nothing else. Still he wishes only to return to the street for one more chance at venting his anger.

"Are you sure you can see through this?" asks Murray, looking Valeri in the eye. "I may not know much," Valeri says, "but I know silence will help no one but the rich." And Valeri is not alone. In truth, he knows in the instinctive way he can that he must work harder than he does, not for his own benefit nor for the benefit of his wealthy paymaster but for the benefit of us all. Every day he works advances him towards his fate. Every day he fails to work delays the advent of his fate. In times like these, Valeri finds the fight to push forward and reach for the new day. From the floor, he sometimes looks up and catches the eye of the company's owner, a bald, fat man wearing spectacles. His name's Noel, but most refer to him as Mr. Kennedy. Although Valeri has been working diligently and quietly through the day, the momentary glimpse exchanged between them from this distance makes clear the burning animosity between them. Mr. Kennedy doesn't know Valeri, probably doesn't even know Valeri's name, but that's not important. As Valeri has come around to realizing his place in a rising consciousness, he sees in Mr. Kennedy something he's never seen before even as he's seen it all along. The boss is still here. The boss rarely comes around, but when he does his presence is felt by the pair of eyes looking down from that office high above the floor. In the raids that are to come, Valeri will be among those subjected to only a taste of the terror meted out so often on the working class in mid-twenty-first century Britain, protected from the worst by something so simple as random chance. His time is coming, but it's not yet come.

Though Valeri doesn't know it, can't know it yet, even now the dark essence watches over him, occupying the space between him and the owner, and all other spaces everywhere around them, even though they two will never come into open conflict still filling the space between them with a silent tension that can never be named but can always be felt. The boss doesn't know Valeri took part in the demonstrations, but soon enough such trivialities will fade as the rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs filling the streets make it seem as though none of this had ever happened at all. In the raids that are to come, Valeri will lose even more neighbours, co-workers, and friends among those dragged into the night, to be thrown into one of His Majesty's many overcrowded Prisons, but still it's not to be the moment that pushes him over the edge.

After this latest demonstration the streets are reclaimed by the way of things, the current order seizing them anew from the temporary occupation by the angry crowd. Still war rages that we can't see, lying beyond the sight of men like Valeri. Every minute of every day we are immersed in a sea of grey from top to bottom, the firm, steady scrutiny of a tight fit strained across his broad, powerful back. In some visceral way it's never seemed right, the fit and the strong working men like him answering to the authority of a balding man who grows fat off the work of others even as he's never done a day of honest work in his life. In the raids that are to come, Valeri will think himself lucky to have survived even the threat, even though he'll only survive in spite of himself. You see, the dark essence that guides the coming revolution has plans for men like Valeri, plans beyond the fate of an ill-mannered malcontent dying in an act of futile rebellion.

But Valeri doesn't know the bosses like Mr. Kennedy have been nursing a bitter hatred for the men and women who took part in the failed rising fifteen years ago. It's only Mr. Kennedy's ignorance of Valeri's mother and father having taken part in the failed rising that keeps Valeri employed. This is not because Mr. Kennedy lost much of anything; a few profits can't compare to the loss of loved ones. But hatred and recrimination are the way of the wealthy, something Valeri has come to learn at some great cost. Whether Mr. Kennedy has his way or not, the sort of person he is will have their way with the future. See these events mount, slowly and deliberately as they do, and in so seeing look ahead to the next filling of the streets for the chance to see Valeri fall willingly under the influence of the man with the forbidden name, in the grand scheme of things his name not to be forbidden much longer.
\

9. An Intemperate Nature

A knock on the door in the middle of the night wakes Valeri suddenly, and he leaps out of bed at the sound. Another knock, then another, then another, while Valeri pulls on clothes and makes good his escape through his bedroom's window. This is not what's happened here today, but in another time, another place, leaving Valeri alone and confused as troopers sift through his things in search of something that isn't there. After a traumatic day, Valeri ought to have a peaceful night, his peace interrupted by the braying of horns and by the wailing of sirens pouring in through his open window. There's angry voices, there's the smashing of glass, in the time it takes Valeri to make his way through the darkness and stop up against the door, it seems to him a whole night has passed. But when Valeri feels the floor beneath his feet and the door against his shoulder quiver in time with the cracking of gunfire, he knows this is not what it is to be. He begins to feel the fear rising from a pit at the bottom of his stomach, and in the moment he's nearly overwhelmed by the urge to run. But in his little flat there's nowhere to run.

Not entirely unaware of what's going on in the streets below, he thinks to fight back with whatever means he has; it's in this mindset that men like Valeri find themselves longing to lash out. In Valeri's little apartment block, the troopers move, barging through doors, knocking down old men and frightening little children in search of something that isn't there. There's the thumping of boots against the floor of the hall just outside the door Valeri's crouched against, heavy footsteps drawing louder and louder, too many for Valeri to tell the number of troopers coming his way. Although Valeri is acutely aware of the urge to run, still there's an instinct in him to fight, slight, hardly palpable, but surely there. It's a small moment, the moment when Valeri realizes the beginnings of something better, something more, something akin to the awakening of a little piece of his spirit. But while he listens to the sound of the troopers drawing nearer and nearer, still he can't help but allow the creeping dread to seize his thoughts and his mind, holding him until he can push it out. He keeps forgetting, his loneliness letting his thoughts turn to home like a tome.

Moving floor by floor, flat by flat, the troopers soon make their way closer to Valeri's. Roused from bed, he crouches half-naked, Sydney at his side. They realize this is another round of attacks by the police, aimed at instituting more terror, a sure sign the end is coming much sooner than anyone had expected. After the latest round of demonstrations, this is the response, not part of a planned strategy but a reaction instinctive and visceral as there can be. Valeri doesn't know why he's not among those whose flats are to be barged into before this night is through, but the point is made succinctly, a sinking feeling putting him out of sight, out of mind. He's quietly tracing a path across the hall and out through a window he's seen left broken for so many months; but he doesn't dare move for the paralysis setting into his nerves. So long as he's kept acutely aware of his own limitations by these moments of terror, Valeri is not yet ready to take the next step from ill-mannered malcontent to soldier of the revolution. But he's closer than ever, as the night draws past and he hides out in his little flat with Sydney at his side the police leave their block still the sound of sirens wailing and glass breaking drifting in from the street.

At the police station it's to take weeks for Stanislaw and the rest of the crew to fortify the place. In that time Stanislaw sees the police lorries go out empty and come back full of prisoners many times. The nights are long and made longer by the gnawing guilt in the back of his mind. At home, he tells his wife, "I feel guilty for working to help the police become stronger while they keep going out and arresting ordinary people." As Stanislaw and his wife recount the things that they've learned, he keeps recounting his mounting believing in amounting to something more than he's been. But it's not for him to live with the sin of a whim given to, and so he keeps on talking about his troubles through the night, his wife listening, always listening, keeping him grounded even as she lives through every one of his life's struggles right alongside him. As they talk through their troubles, still they hear the wailing of sirens and the breaking of glass in the distance. Stanislaw's wife has always been the sort to stand by him, even in this day and age when most men have relationships that come even quicker than they go. But this is different. This is different. They've been arguing, off and on, for years, always taking care to keep their arguments in the privacy of their little flat. They present a united front to the world. In this they're a small but perfect example of the larger struggle, a harbinger of the grander, united front soon to lead the larger struggle, a united front already taking shape even in this early, in-between time, when all could still be lost.

In the dining room, she passes him a cup of coffee before pouring her own. He says, "I know we have to make ends meet and we can't afford to upset our pay. But how I'd like to put that ruthless boss in his place." His wife sits next to him, and reassures him simply by resting her hand on his and giving a warm but firm touch. Even still there's the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the streets, while men like Stanislaw concern themselves with the banalities of day to day life left in the background fading like the light from a quick-setting sun. It'll take some but looking to crime will help men like him find the divine in all that there is to design in the world. But while they talk the raids across Britain evade an unwritten attack on the future resistance to a regime yet to be. If Stanislaw should fall out of favour with the enslavers in the manager's office then he'd find himself right in with the people dragged off in the night. But it's not Stanislaw's time yet to be taken away in the night.

Across London, Valeri and Sydney wait out the night, she clutching him by the arm while he steadies himself. Valeri is used to these raids. Sydney, from better stock, is not. But the police pass them by, and he looks out only when the morning has come and the last of the police have left. In their wake they leave shattered glass, holes punched in walls, and broken bones. "Valeri," says Sydney, whispering, "are they looking for you? I know you're mixed up with some of this." But it's a foolish question, one which, Valeri knows, betrays her naiveté on life in London's working class blocks. "No," he says, even as he thinks on the forbidden texts he's got stashed away in his flat, hidden in plain sight on the bookshelf, there for anyone, for Hannah, for Sydney to find, even Graham on one of his many unannounced searches through some of the units in the building. The police aren't to enter Valeri's flat on this night's attacks, as he's not on their lists. Even if he was, though, they'd still probably not barge in through his front door, given as they are to listing their targets but persisting in taking in any resisting men and women they find.

This attack, this current wave of invasions into the working class blocks in an attempt to root out subversive elements is but the instinctive reaction of the wealthy man and his political apparatchiks against the burgeoning movement which should one day seize what's rightfully his. It never occurs to Valeri this attack was meant as a response to the latest wave of demonstrations and strikes, used as he is to the application of such terror. It takes the fresh perspective of a naïve young woman from another world to enlighten him. "You're going to get yourself killed sooner or later," Sydney says to him, "if you don't keep yourself from acting out." Although she means this in a helpful way, voicing her opinions out of concern for his well-being, he keeps on seeing a free-floating image in the back of his mind's eye. In the morning, the police have made off with whoever they've gotten their hands on, leaving Valeri and Sydney to emerge from his little flat. They find dried blood on the floors of the block's halls, wooden splinters and doors off their hinges, even crumpled-in holes in the walls here and there. Although neither of them can know it, at Dominion Courts the raids were among the most violent, with a half-dozen dragged off, more knocked down with a blow to the head, most of those dragged off to be killed in the coming months. Sydney says, "is this typical?" Even as she seems to immediately regret her choice of words, Valeri replies, saying, "too typical."

After the inspection, Private Thompson and the rest were punished for their show of insubordination further by confinement to their barracks and a stricter than ever regime of marching and mustering in formation. But it does little to quell the tensions. "Tell you what," says one of the soldiers to Craig Thompson at night, "if that Colonel thinks we're going to be his playthings so he can get some glory he's sadly mistaken." But Craig only murmurs something in response. In the early morning the whole brigade musters, then piles into the backs of their lorries, guns in tow, and makes for the range. Although the raids have been taking place regularly since the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, it's only in recent months that they've been reaching a new level of violence and terror. For Craig Thompson and the others among the men here, the raids threaten their homes, the police attacking the working class districts where most of these men come from. A few of them have lost relatives to this recent wave of raids, brothers and sisters mostly, but they won't learn of their loss for a while. Whenever the police take people away in the night, they never leave any word on where the people are taken. But neither do they make any effort to keep their raids a secret, barging in loudly and violently, then taking away their victims, sometimes taking those they came looking for, sometimes taking whoever they can find. This fact weighs heavily on Craig's mind as the brigade trundles down the road in the backs of their lorries, slowly pushing him further to the edge.

But hardly a hundred yards out of the motor pool the first lorry breaks down. A few hundred yards later, the second breaks down. Less than a mile from the range and two more break down seemingly at once. These lorries haven't been taken out of the motor pool in several months. The truck Craig's in suffers mechanical trouble but doesn't break down, the driver able to get back on the road and limp along in first gear, painfully rolling into the range's garage two hours later. Although the Ministry of Defence has spent considerable sums on stealth fighters for the Royal Air Force, giant aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, and sleek-looking tanks for the Army, the bulk of the troops are like Private Thompson, forced to make do with poorly-maintained, unreliable equipment. And after the raids have taken even more from among the working class blocks, the men among Thompson's brigade will experience a deeper decline in morale as they come to learn which of them had relatives taken in the night. It's deeply degrading for some of the men to stand at the side of the road while the mechanic tinkers about in the engine, the scene playing itself out in the shadow of the small but still looming threat of war. But the real war which is soon to break out won't take place on a distant battlefield, rather on the very streets they now stand on.

In the midst of all these strikes, the shop where Valeri works can hardly stay open. Still petty concerns dominate at the shop where Valeri works. "If you keep on talking then everyone will hear," says Ruslan, taunting Valeri with a wry, sly grin. "Let them hear, I'm going to wind up leaving this place anyways," Valeri says, "I'd rather take my chances in the street than hang around this den of jackals. They spy on us, they threaten us, they treat us like dirt. And it's always been this way. What good is staying around to earn enough to keep on starving for one more day." By now, the most recent raids have passed, with the days turning into weeks. Although none of the workers at Valeri's shop were taken in these recent raids, some have lost friends. Some more have friends who've lost friends. If it seems as though Valeri should've been taken, with his conflicts with management and their sycophants like Ruslan so well known among the workers here, then his survival can only be explained by good fortune. It's been, by now, some days since the raids, and already Valeri is coming to grips with the harsh truth of what must be done, even if he doesn't, can't realize it, won't realize it for some time.

By now, a few others are listening. "Keep talking," Ruslan says, "and you're going to get exactly what you want." It's a tense moment, and Valeri can hardly feel his face for the rage surging in him. But Ruslan knows Valeri took part in the marches; Valeri's nemesis has only declined to report him to the managers owing to a desire to use this threat as leverage over him, to what end even Ruslan doesn't know. After the raids have finally ended, there're to be a few more among the shop's workers taken in, a few caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, others running towards trouble where, in their place, most would run from it. But all that Valeri can think of, can feel is the presence of his friend Sergei's enforced disappearance. Valeri knows Sergei had disappeared to one of the same prisons which the recent raids have taken men to. After this, Valeri realizes, as he leaves the shop at the end of the day, there can be no more compromise, there can be no more bargaining. And Valeri, Valeri's among a growing faction of young workers who would seek to take over the legacy of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago. With events in Britain, across Europe, all around the world coming to a head, they'll soon have their time. But first Valeri must realize his own personal fall.

At the police station, Garrett Walker's young daughter is already out of the cells by the time he arrives. It's an outrage, and Garrett feels his anger rising with every step that he takes forward into the future. "It's enough that we spend all our lives working to put up the palaces these parasites live in," says Garrett, "they live off our backs for so many years while they let us keep only just enough to ward off starvation. And then they put us in jail! Not only us but our children, too! It's all a criminal act." Although Garrett can't know it, the only reason his daughter is being released is the raids having taken in too many people, with the already overcrowded jails quickly packed until they resemble human cattle cars. Even some of the more sadistic and cruel among the police became sickened at the sight of so many people crammed into such small cells. And after Garrett took his young daughter home, they spent the night in their little flat, the next night Garrett heading to the hall with the other unemployed workers, many, most of them having sons or daughters, brothers or sisters taken in the raids, some like Garrett fortunate enough to get their loved ones back so quickly.

But some will never get their loved ones back. The other unemployed workers shout their agreement. A strange man near the back of the room looks on, silently measuring the mood of the workers. In the darkness of the night the passions of working men are roused, in ways they've not been since the failed rising fifteen years ago. And the rolling hills of Surrey have seen much bloodshed in that time, along with wailing and the gnashing of teeth. In the night, tonight, the unemployed workers assembled accomplish little but to vent their rage, each of them returning home to find their families in full agreement with the emerging consensus, soon their moment to be at hand.

As an interim measure, the wealthy man arranges his holdings through a series of complicated measures meant only to conceal his crimes. But it's more than something so simple as the concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people. At the shop where Valeri works, little has changed. "Valeri," says Judith, the two running into each other when next he arrives at the plant, "I hope you've learned your lesson. I expect you to be here every day." The act of the plant's resuming operations and taking back what workers who will come is meant not as an act of reconciliation but as an act of humiliation, clearly signalling to Valeri and the others on the futility of their struggle. Strike all you want, Judith seems to be saying, but you'll still wind up working here, enriching us. In the long view, there's not altogether much time left until Valeri's to become a soldier, not just a soldier in the war for freedom but something at least vaguely resembling a leader, chosen as he is from among the most ordinary, the most unremarkable for something more. But first Valeri must experience his own personal reckoning.

And so it is; with every smooth, rhythmic contraction and expansion of his muscles, that first day back and every day thereafter, Valeri surrenders a piece of himself to the day's labour and in so surrendering allow his flesh and his spirit to be torn asunder. At the shop, Valeri says, "I go home tired and sore every night and still I get threats every day. I won't sit still. We won't live like this forever." "You might," says Ruslan, "however long forever might be for people like you, if you're not careful." It's clear to both Valeri and Ruslan they're talking about much more than the job in front of them. But then Ruslan strikes a nerve, saying, "you're going to wind up just like your parents." But this is said with deliberate intent, although Valeri can't see it for the anger that seizes control of him and compels him to lash out. If you were to look closely, you'll see the dark essence reaching down from its place all around them to enlighten Valeri's spirit once more.

At the Anglican church which Darren Wright still attends, Father Bennett is acutely aware of the secret sermons held by the rogue church, though he knows not how many of his flock have been drawn to them. He stands at the pulpit and declares, "and in the Book of Matthew, chapter five, verse seventeen, Christ said 'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' And in the Book of Romans, the epistle Paul wrote 'the powers that be are ordained of God.' My children, this is why we must turn away, even in these trying times, from the temptation to disobedience and rebellion." In this church, though, there are fewer true believers than there used to be, each of them still craving a spiritual sustenance but increasingly coming to terms with the fact that they're not going to get it from this church. It's a strange sensation, Darren thinks, to be in the presence of such a spiritual awakening even as he sits calmly and remains perfectly still.

There's more, but Darren, Sheila, and the others hear little of it, after the sermon is over confusedly making for the across the vestibule and out into the street. But on his way out Darren spots the Father looking downcast, almost lonely. He does not feel sympathy for the priest, except as the minimum that he feels for all who would suffer. In these trying times, men like Darren and women like Sheila have come to see Father Bennett as in service not of a higher power but as a false apostle whose works are made of fraud. Father Bennett is among they who would serve the corrupt kingdom that now seeks to repress the burgeoning working class movement. It's a troubling sight, with the tapping of the thousands of boots against the asphalt lending the scene a surreal mood. The true path forward for men like Darren Wright doesn't lie in rejecting their faith but in embracing it, not in turning away from a path towards their own salvation but in taking to it with a renewed vigour. Father Bennett can speak as though he still lives in the past, but in the time it takes him to turn from one page of his sermon to the next, it becomes abundantly clear, even to him, that he's losing the faithful, perhaps forever.

But at the shop where Valeri works, larger concerns give way to the pettiness of a personal grudge. After Ruslan invoked the memory of Valeri's dead parents, it was a step too far. Before he knows it, Valeri's clenched fist shoots for Ruslan's jaw, Valeri stopping himself with his knuckles just centimetres away. But Ruslan doesn't flinch. It's a seminal moment in Valeri's life, one of many, but one which will only gain some significance in his own mind with the passage of so much time. Already it occurs to Valeri he's lost his job, but he can't simply walk away. He must make the managers take every painstaking step in forcing the inevitable, as the managers must resist every step forward for the workers against them. In the morning when next he turns up at the shop, Valeri's hauled in for an interrogation, with Mr. Kennedy himself present.

While Mr. Kennedy watches silently, the managers recall Valeri's every sin, whether real or imagined, reaching back as long as he's been working at the shop. He's made to confess to them all; he refuses, then storms off, his intemperate nature giving him to an open display of melodramatic fury. In this authoritarian atmosphere, even the threat of losing his livelihood isn't enough to cow men like Valeri into submission. In storming off, Valeri half-expects them to submit his name to the police, to be taken in the next wave of raids and arrests, but it's not to be, not yet.

After the arrests, it seems to Sean Morrison there's nowhere safe from the police raids. In truth, the failing of the student groups is their uncertainty over why they must strike. At the student hall, the room buzzes with the chatter of the polytechnic's students who've assembled in response to the mass arrests. All eyes turn to a short, slender man who takes the stage and gives his speech. He uses terms they've heard before and know of in only the vaguest of ways, terms like 'class warfare' and 'industrial democracy,' Sean listening intently with all the others. In the wake of the arrests, they are more receptive than they'd have been. It's as though a dark cloud, a noxious gas has seeped into the hall and expanded to fill every space within, lending a surreal sense to the scene. Men like Sean are caught in a trance, enraptured by this new speaker, from within the shadows emerging a presence that compels them all to this way of thinking they've all heard of before yet which seems so new and exciting nevertheless. It doesn't take long.

After Valeri storms off, he's found by the managers, with a pair of muscular guards. "This is serious," says Judith. "I'm aware of that," Valeri says. "I hope you are," says Judith, before making past him and down the floor towards the next returnee. She stops at every one. But she's only discharging her duties, carried out on behalf and under the orders of men vastly more powerful and important than her. Valeri returns home that afternoon, the power of a pittance to sustain and to restrain him lost. "It's not over," says Murray the next time they see each other at the hall, approaching from behind to rest a hand on Valeri's shoulder. "Of course not," says Valeri. "We must be relentless if we're to succeed," says Murray. They exchange nods, then part ways, for the rest of the day this exchange leading only to the next, and then the next, and the next. Murray speaks, from time to time, with a knowing look in his eyes assuring Valeri he must know more. It seems everyone knows, in some instinctive way, every person has their role to play and must play it through to its logical end in search of a meaning that was never there. But herein lies the problem.

Any search for meaning inevitably leads to a confused and disoriented understanding of our difficult and tumultuous times, which only induces every player to keep on playing their roles. In the streets and on the factory floors across the country an increasingly desperate energy takes root, infusing itself into the teeming masses who act out impulsively, sometimes dangerously, not provoked but elicited nonetheless. In the morning the smoking, burnt-out remains of a working class apartment block collapses of its own accord into a pile of debris, the wreckage left to smoulder while the fires of liberation burn. But the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the distance seems to draw nearer and nearer to the centre of London and the annals of power with each passing day, sure to provoke only more of the intensifying violence we've seen. For Valeri, the loss of his job means the end of one episode in his life and the beginning of another. As Valeri is an avatar for the workers of Britain, he's edging closer to realizing his calling, even as he has far longer to fall and far more serious hardships to suffer before he can achieve his full potential as a soldier of the impending revolution.

Not long after, news breaks of the impending closure of a factory not altogether far from the shop Valeri was recently fired from, a brief note made on the screens of the hundreds of men put out of work. Left unannounced but widely understood is the factory's new home half a world away, to be manned not by men but by children, as so many factories already moved are manned, paid a fraction the wages British workers were paid. Even the slaves imported to Britain are paid more than what the children abroad will be paid. But the game's afoot. In the morning a new gathering takes place, occupying the square around Victory Monument as all the others have, only this time the gathering fills the air with singing and shouting of slogans in one voice. It's as though someone has begun to manipulate these people like a skilled conductor slowly teasing a symphony from his orchestra. And he's almost got it. In this advanced stage of historical development, the way of things seems strong as ever, the wealthy man's power so firmly entrenched that it seems as though it's always been. As the troopers take their positions it becomes lost in the moment that they're wearing the insignia of a forbidden army, one thought lost to the pages of a long-dead history.

10. Days of Rage

There's trouble in the streets. The sound of horns braying and of men angrily shouting slogans fills the air among the crowd gathered not far from the square surrounding Victory Monument. There's always trouble in the streets, but today those troubles have surged to the forefront, if only for a short time. The face of our common enemy appears calm, dispassionate as he methodically contains the anger venting in the streets. He's done this before, many, many times. Standing in front of the crowd, he adopts a wide stance and readies his truncheon and shield. But it's more for show than anything else. His is a routine well-rehearsed, his nerves steady and his motions smooth, rhythmic, his work a ritual requiring him only to allow his body to re-enact from memory. As Valeri is coming to the vague but altogether real understanding, love is anger and anger is love. Love is defiant, which makes it anger against power. Anger is rooted in outrage against injustice, which makes it love. As Valeri confronts unemployment, he comes to the realization that not all is as it seems. As he stands among the crowd surrounding Victory Monument, Valeri feels an electric sensation run the length of his spine, raising goosebumps on his every patch of exposed skin, the speaker's words seeming to have an effect on him in this way. So soon after being fired from his job at the shop, Valeri might be given to depression and alienation, but like all working class Britons he's got to think fast and move faster if he's to keep on his feet.

After the speaker at the hall filled the polytechnic's students with old ways of thinking, Sean Morrison has joined the crowd. To him, this is their occupation, a moment when they have seized control of the streets and deprived the enemy of the control they've had for too long. But when the end comes, they will yield control back to the enemy, having won little for their cause. It's a frustrating cycle, and in the streets Sean can't foresee an end to it, looking into the future revealing only still more occupations to end in yielding control all the same. Little does he know the mysterious speaker at the hall has this in mind; it's important the pressure is kept unrelenting in the mounting struggle against the way of things. Even as the traitor in their midst has informed on their plans to the police, still Sean and the others press forward, in their impulsiveness lying the inflamed passions of youth. "I can't go home," says one of Sean's fellow students, as they march in the streets together. "You are home," says Sean, walking alongside the other student. When the surging of the crowd presents them with a pause, as the ebb and flow of any crowd's energy must, Sean says again, "I can't go back to my home either," thinking of his mother and father who are unhappily divorced and each living in a separate slum not altogether unlike the working class blocks in London. Like the other students in mid-twenty-first century Britain, Sean and his friends have been coaxed into the polytechnic with promises of a better life, only to learn they've been used. As what, they've yet to discover, but all that will come.

"Let's charge them!" says Sean, as they advance slowly on the line of police ahead. "Give it all you've got!" says the student alongside him. They hurl missiles, then trade blows with the lead policemen. It might seem like this is destined to be the moment when the struggle could escalate into full-blown revolution, but we're not quite there yet. This time, at first, it's no different from the other marches. This time, the crowd of some thousands gathers, then disperses, in the aftermath the smoke-filled streets to be cleared in the days to come, the police withdrawing to their stations and the usual troublemakers who'd made up this particular crowd returning to the universities, the pubs, the union halls and the churches, to return when next the occasion calls for it. For Valeri, the loss of his job doesn't permit him much time to ruminate on the finer points of theory, the work there for him to do, the rent needing to be paid and the challenges of youth demanding the occupation of his idle hands.

But Valeri doesn't take part in this mass action, having taken in with the crowds of day labourers who turn up at every construction site, every factory, every shop left open looking for a day's wages, most turned away. Today he's among those chosen, working with a burly, bearded man named Michael on one side and a short, thin, red-head named Samantha on the other. Between the three of them, the ninety-pound girl works the hardest and the fastest. It's some small miracle that Valeri's been able to find work, any work at all so quickly after having been unceremoniously fired. But he has some advantages many working class Britons in this day and age don't; he's in his twenties, able-bodied, in good physical condition, and without children or a wife. Despite the chronic high unemployment there're many jobs to be found in British cities, and the wealthy owners of companies can't import slaves fast enough. Although now might seem like the perfect time for Valeri to have in with the rebels in the northern countryside, his path demands a more cautious, roundabout path. "...But I'm so hungry," says Valeri, talking as he does on the production line at a large factory, "and I'll be hungry for as long as I live!" There's a subdued agreement from his fellow workers, the whole lot of them too concerned with each of their own short term livelihoods to make any trouble. But among them there's one or two who agree with him.

"Do you ever think we should just stop doing this?" asks Michael. "All the time," Valeri says, "every day, in fact." But Samantha says, "we should never stop. This is the only thing that's made the years bearable." She speaks of her work with a passion admirable if misguided. Although Valeri has come to know his labour is sold for the benefit of his bosses, he can still only articulate his knowledge in the sort-of basic, instinctive way he can. He's taken out that day, told not to come back, blacklisted from this work site and from dozens more worksites owned by the same company, and for a time he thinks he might be reported to the police to be disappeared into one of His Majesty's Prisons in the Welsh highlands. But it's not to be, not yet. Even as Valeri hops from job to job, never lasting more than a few days here or there for his intemperate nature, he's on the path through to becoming a disciplined soldier of the coming revolution, even as he, like the coming revolution, is still in the early stages of its long and difficult ascent. But first Valeri must confront the task of surviving in London's working class districts without work, something many have already learned but which is about to become even more difficult. For Valeri, salvation will come not from without but from within.

At the underground church, the rogue priest urges his new flock to join in, his gospel of sedition taking a new turn. Darren remembers his dead family, those cast out of work like disposable tools, and his heart hardens against the way of things. He feels his pulse quicken and his fist clench whenever the rogue priest calls forth the faithful to take to the streets; his friend Sheila stands with him, one look into her eyes proving she's as committed as he is. But their time is not yet come. It's precisely because men like Darren and women like Sheila are capable of envisioning a faith outside the dominion of the old church that they're among the future leaders of a new church, a new fulfilment of a covenant given to them many, many years ago, before they or any of their brothers and sisters in the pews were born. Even in the underground church they can feel the gentle rattling and rumbling of the ground beneath their feet, the distant bursting of bombs seeming to draw nearer with each passing Sunday they spend here. It's dark, it's damp, it's got cracks in the walls and mice visible running along the floor, but it's a new home for all those who would crave a new spirit. Although Darren doesn't know it, the forbidden gospel and the underground church aren't new but old, as the rogue priest continues to sermonize not only on Sunday but on every day when there're people coming to him thirsty and tired. "...We're not here to destroy the law, but to uphold it," says the rogue priest, "as the way of things is wicked and given to the impoverishment of millions, it must be opposed. In our opposition, we do not destroy, but restore." After this night's sermon is through, Darren feels odd, as though he's satisfied, yet still hungry for more.

"I don't know what will come of this," he says to her as they sit in the pews together, "but I will never forget what's been done. This is not the Britain I've ever wanted to live in, and it's not the Britain I want to leave for the next generation to live in. it's a certainty that God is on our side." They sit not in the underground church but in the pews of the Anglican church, surrounded by opulence and ritualism, their surroundings dead but either of them alive once more. "I place my faith in the liberation of Christ," says Sheila, "and we will be delivered from the evils of poverty and deprivation only through him." But theirs is belief sincere and steadfast, as is the beliefs of the rogue priest, he one of many rogue priests across Britain preaching this new gospel. This is not merely the product of worsening poverty but a spiritual awakening, the essence of liberation making itself felt like the warmth of a tired man coming in from the bitter cold. Men like Darren intend to fulfill their commandment to minister to the needs of the most wretched and pathetic among them, and in so filling will play their role in the coming war in the streets. Still there's the whispering of the forbidden name, even Darren and Sheila knowing the forbidden name but still afraid to speak it. The priest of this underground church follows the edicts of the man whose name is forbidden, seeing in him a particular manifestation of a long-promised return.

As yet, the war in the streets is a young child, still learning to walk and talk, but surely destined for greatness. They leave behind broken windows, smashed-in storefronts, and burnt-out cars. But there's one thing that's made a difference, one little change, a young woman, a young mother struck in the face by a canister of gas fired haphazardly into the crowd, her death so sudden, so violent, leaving behind a young child with no father to be raised by a rotating cast of characters and in so leaving a young child alone setting off a chain of events rooted in the common history we all share. In the midst of a simmering crisis, a calm emerges. At times, it may seem like there's no greater purpose at play, no higher cause to ennoble the weakest and most pathetic among us, but it's not true. In the night, an agreement is struck, in the morning news breaking across the screens of a new pact signed between countries, a corollary to the agreements already in place. Not a military alliance, this pact commits all parties involved to the removal of all impediments on the flow of capital across their borders, making it easier than ever for the wealthy criminals to abscond with their ill-gotten gains. Valeri reads this, and it inspires in him a quixotic mix of fatalism and rage.

From his mother-in-law's flat in Surrey, Garrett Walker reads this news as well, inspiring in him that same mix of emotions. "This can't stand," he says, soon assembling with a small crowd of angry, out-of-work men at the office of their member of parliament. The MP isn't a member of the ruling conservative coalition but a member of the so-called Labour Party. "This won't stand," says another man. In the moment there's that dark essence coursing through Garrett's veins, nestling in the hearts of every unemployed worker there and in the hearts of every unemployed worker not there, the announcement of this new treaty ill-timed. Although the police arrest in waves, the government in Westminster is considerably less fearsome, made up as it is by bureaucrats and careerists at the mercy of interests much more powerful than they. In time, this will become their downfall. But for now, they persist. After Garrett returns home to his little flat, overcrowded as it is with three generations in one room, he finds himself not repulsed by but drawn to the forbidden gospel which he's heard of but which he's never personally read or heard, the name of the soon-to-be released rebel leader to inspire men like him just as they'd been inspired fifteen years ago.

But with his step through this time, men like Valeri seem preoccupied with their own selves; but there are times when, in the midst of all this struggle, he sees beauty in the arms and in the heart of his former co-worker and current lover, the half-Asian woman named Sydney. "There's a rumour going around," she says to him over the phone, "a rumour there's something big about to go down." Though Valeri can only imagine what this means, he still looks out his window while half-listening to her. Having stayed away from the day's mass action, Valeri sees at the end of the day only the same walls that've towered over him for so many years. Still he's in his little apartment, lying wide awake in bed and staring at the darkened ceiling when the arrests begin. Although Sydney and Valeri have come to be lovers, still a vast chasm separates them, his mannerisms, his tastes, his selections of threadbare clothes contrasting strongly with her well-heeled habits, her clean clothes, her eyes fresh and bright. Even after they'd come to be, still Valeri thinks her unable to see things from his point of view. Soon enough, though, she'll prove him wrong.

Meanwhile, a man named Neal Clarke works every day not in the streets but alongside them, putting up the beams and trusses that are to make up the skeletons of the next set of glass and steel towers. Neal's not caught up in these arrests simply because he's not at home when the troopers go from door to door. Valeri escapes by virtue of not being targeted. But Samantha's taken. In truth, this wave of arrests are random, little more than names drawn from a pool. The point isn't to arrest the troublemakers but to sow fear.

At the range, Private Craig Thompson hears of the new trade deal. "How is it parliament signs treaties to put our own people out of work?" he asks. The troops stand at their stations, a moment of calm amid the frenetic, unending drills. "All this will do is close more factories and mills," says another trooper. "And they'll send our livelihoods elsewhere leaving us with nothing but more poverty," says a third. All the men seem to have arrived at an unspoken agreement, the dark essence coursing through them like a drug through their veins. The act of voicing their agreement is a formality, not the means by which consensus is arrived at but the manner in which their consensus is expressed. Theirs is a consensus hundreds of years in the making, still lurking in the shadows but edging closer every day to moving into the light. And while these army men search for meaning where none is to be found, still they can hear the rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs in the streets, distant, but seemingly drawing nearer and nearer with each passing day. But what Private Thompson and the others there don't know, can't know, is the vast sums diverted by a handful of companies, enabled by their complicated network of apparatchiks and intermediaries, the whole lot of them conspiring to inflate prices. And these treaties signed in parliament amount to the active conspiracy of men, with Private Thompson and the others to pay the ultimate price so that these handful of companies can abscond with their takings before the end comes.

But for every one of Valeri's brothers and sisters who're disappeared in the night, there's ten more to take their place on the front lines of the war for work. Every day Neal is acutely aware the fruits of his labour are to be sold off by foreign investors, the wealthy men of the world for profit, each tower erected a monument to the boundless greed and exploitation that've come to mark the current order. Every day he arrives at some work site and every evening he returns home, cash in hand, paid under the table by a foreman who doesn't know where the money comes from. Neal's been nursing a broken hand for a week, lucky as he thinks himself to have broken it without the foreman seeing it, allowing him to keep working through the pain. When his partner, an older man named Artem notices him wincing slightly as the two pick up a fifty-kilo bag of cement together, the two exchange a half-nervous glance, Neal's colleague nodding slightly in a silent understanding. They work in the day after the mass arrests, a few of the workers at their site having been disappeared in the night only to be replaced by new faces. Some are old, some are young, all are hungry. "You were meant to be watching him!" says the foreman, a man named Max Kelly. He's berating a subordinate for inattentiveness when one of the temporary workers made off with some power tools.

Across the way, Stanislaw Czerkawski watches the exchange. He's working at another police station, putting up the same fortifications as at the first. The foreman's voice can be heard clearly despite the distance. "I've warned you before," says a voice, belonging to the boss, "and I won't warn you again. Get back to work!" This time, Stanislaw considers, for a moment, standing up to the boss, his jaw instinctively clenching and his fist tightening, only for a moment before the urge passes. The sound of gears whirring and hydraulics smoothly contracting and expanding like muscles overpowers the scene, making it hard for Stanislaw to think. But he manages all the same, years of hard labour having taught him how to practice the art of seditious thought while still working steadfastly at his task. He'll be among the last of the working men to give in to their seditious fantasies, but when the time comes he'll make himself counted among the righteous the same as anyone else. With bombs bursting and gunfire rattling in the streets and mass disappearances taking men and women in the night, Stanislaw may yet realize his chance.

And then, the outcry will fade, bleeding into silence, the world writ large carrying on as it should without concern for all the lives destroyed and the families torn apart by the need of a few at the top to grow themselves fatter off the sweat of the rest of us. Sydney brings news. "Are you caught up in all this?" she asks. "You must already know the answer to that," Valeri says. "You still have a job to lose," she says, "you shouldn't risk it by joining the gangs." He winces at hearing her use the word 'gangs' to describe the rebels, be they real or imagined. But he can't dispute her reasoning, much as he'd like to. Although Valeri, now unemployed and all but unemployable, has much time to ruminate on the finer points of depression and alienation, still he chooses not to, instead confronting the increasing possibility of joining the violence in the streets and in the northern countryside as though he were considering a change in livelihoods, like hopping from job to job. The truth is that his path will require he experience a reckoning of sorts, his own personal revolution to be far more brutal and far less glamorous than even he could've ever imagined.

Elsewhere, Neal is something of an oddity in this day and age, like Valeri unmarried, childless, but unlike Valeri has not yet given up on all hope for his own personal future. At the end of the day, one day, Neal leaves his work behind and makes down the road for an old pub, its owner's stubborn refusal to sell to the wealthy developers leaving at least one spot for working men to feel at home. He steps inside and muscles his way to the bar, the bartender handing him a pint and shooting him a look that seems to half-ask, half-tell there isn't to be any trouble tonight. It's only been a few weeks since the owner of the place had that window near the door fixed, and a few days since Neal paid for it in full. "I want to be there when you get what's coming to you," says his neighbour, Hugh Turner, "for all the good it's going to do me." But Neal says, "learn your place, old man," and muscles a scowl onto his face.

It's summertime, it's that early-summer time when the heat's thick and oppressive, when the heat comes in waves and when the air's filled with a swampy musk. This summer, after so many years of stagnation, the stench of so much lavishness and opulence has become overpowering. Down the streets of yesteryear, we look on the spaces once left open, now filled with empty shells, with monuments built to a way of life that'd never been, that we'd only ever convinced ourselves had been.

For one day, the working men of this city have ceased their work and have taken to the streets, the latest measure enacted by law having been aimed at enslaving them further to their wages but in fact having served only to enrage them further. "What's in that bag and why are you hiding it here?" asks Graham Russell, the old man who manages the building Valeri lives in. It's only been a week, maybe two since that latest wave of arrests, and the old man's suspicion seems to overpower his good sense. "What could I possibly be hiding?" Valeri asks. Of course Valeri has some of the forbidden literature he'd picked up on his last visit to the union hall, the literature forbidden not by fiat but by the sinister force behind his knowledge that the forbidden literature begets forbidden ideas. But Valeri isn't frightened by this knowledge. In fact, he embraces it. "Don't be frightened," says Graham, "I just need to be sure." "Then be sure," Valeri says, refusing to show Graham the contents of his bag before walking away, walking down the hall and leaving the old man to his business. Though Valeri doesn't know Neal, and Neal has never heard of Valeri, they will share their fate. Valeri may have been blacklisted from employment at many of the area's shops and factories, but in truth the local police have too many troublemakers on their hands with all the disorder in the streets to bother much with someone like him. The next time Valeri has into the hall, he'll learn of the death of an old friend, an event which'll set off an entirely new chain of events in his life. Although Valeri's had many friends come and go over the years, he sees in many of them a series of lost causes and hopeless wretches. As soon as he can summon the courage to stand up for what's right, as soon as he's been pushed to the edge of tomorrow he'll throw his lot in with those already waging war for his own liberation.

But this night at the pub, Neal has one drink too many, his tongue loosening just enough. "No!" he says to Max Kelly, "I'm tired of doing what you say." Not much comes of it, not right away, but the next day when he shows up at his construction site there's no work there for him, even as the foreman hasn't enough workers there to accomplish the day's work. Distraught, Neal goes to the union hall, the very same union hall where Valeri still calls home, asking for work, any work, to sustain himself for at least some time more. But the clerk on the other side of the desk shakes her head, already their ranks swelling with others in need of work. Some of them have children, wives, elderly parents to provide for; there's no work for someone like Neal, a man responsible for no one but himself. Even as the talking heads on the screens proclaim a dire labour shortage, still there are thousands left idle, to rot until such time as they are deemed worthy of receiving their own pittance. Neal argues with the clerk, as many others have, but the square-jawed look on her face never wavers, having been practiced many times over the past few years. And Neal is only one man, like the thousands of others, pleading the same case, appealing to the same sense of decency, asking for the same favours from they who've learned not to care. "You must be mad, coming here like this," says Max. "You're damn right I'm mad," says Neal. "You stand there and accuse me, but where were you at the time?" Max asks. "I was--" "You were still in primary school when I was almost killed in the street," Max says. "I'm not--" "You're not what?" Max asks. There's more, but they can't have at it all day.

Punches are thrown, dust's kicked up, some scrapes and bruises but nothing worse. At the end of the day, Max gets to keep his job, while Neal's tossed out with all the other surplus workers. His spot's filled instantly. He winds up in a church, receiving his rations from the overworked clergy, with no knowledge of when next he'll be able to have at a pittance to sustain him. Thin soup is his meal, and he forces down this watery soup from a spot at the end of a long table which permits him a look through a window and out across the city. The distant glass-and-steel towers going up on the edge of the working class districts taunt him, their opulence and their garishness contrasting against the sight of him wearing still the boots and vest he had worn when working every day to put those very towers up. These developments in the lives of ordinary men and women serve only to grant the dark essence its increasing power, choosing as it does these very people to use as vessels through which it could give itself expression. But still events are to unfold which must linger in the daylight a while longer, not much longer until war erupts.

Our enemies, soon to be known by another name, have left us only unemployment and addiction, and in turn they declare us lazy and shiftless, lacking in the virtues of hard work and ingenuity they themselves lack; these stampeding marches, these impassioned riots are but a symptom of the disease that has come to infect the way of things. The revolution has not yet begun, yet still it has begun gathering strength, conserving its power even as opposing forces themselves begin to muster, these opposing forces having not yet coalesced into something real, something capable of striking back except in ways brutish and instinctive. Although Valeri fancies himself one of them, he's not yet reached the point where his destiny can truly take shape; he, like all the other would-be heroes of the working class, requires a central figure who's been following our saga since even before our saga was born. This figure's name is whispered in the working class blocks, in the streets and in the alleys. Although he's known to many, his legend having grown larger than life, we wait to reveal his identity, the time drawing nearer even as it still seems so far away.

We all pay the price, together, for our foolishness, for our impetuousness, and in so paying we earn our place in the future we've yet to build. In the morning, news breaks of the signing of another, newer treaty among a group of countries, including this one. It's left unsaid but widely understood this'll put many more men out of work, left to fend for themselves. The wealthy men of this country can foresee the impending revolt and are seeking to evacuate their holdings beyond the reach of the working class alliance, this turn of events met still with a muted ambivalence from the country's workers.

Too long betrayed, the whole lot of them are in a state of mind where outrage and ambivalence can occupy the same time and space in their collective consciousness. There's a sporadic outbreak of protests, of disenchanted youths tossing rocks at troopers mustered. But for Valeri, it's different. For Valeri, it's personal. In Valeri's dreams, memories of his mother and father nourish his own personal flame, soon to blend with the fires of liberation already smoldering around the world. If the wealthy men of this country expect a revolt, then Valeri will count himself among those who oblige them.

11. No More a Chance

In the night, one night, there's a meeting in the basement of one of the churches in the working class districts in a city not altogether far from the city where the failed rising of fifteen years ago broke out. It's a meeting between two working class parties, one called the Worker's Party, the other called the People's Party. Both are illegal, banned as extremist. Both pledge their loyalty to a leader in one of His Majesty's Prisons in the Welsh Highlands, a leader whose name can be heard in the halls of the working class blocks across Britain, a name we haven't yet learned but which we soon will. Between them, they have perhaps ten thousand members nationwide. Although these parties have been around for many years—in fact, both had played a leading role in the failed uprising fifteen years ago—it's only in recent months that they've taken to putting aside their differences and forming a united force. While this is transpiring, Valeri is increasingly given to his ruminating on depression and alienation, even as he's got to keep on working to survive. His roommate, Hannah, she's still working, but she's taken so many pay cuts that she can't afford their rent by herself. Although Valeri is like so many other workers in mid-twenty-first century Britain, penniless and ill-mannered, he doesn't have the kinds of obligations to keep him in check that so many other members of the working class have, whether they're employed or unemployed, and it's precisely this fact that'll help him to make good on this union of parties.

At this meeting, they sign a secret protocol pledging themselves to a union of parties in pursuit of a common goal. They call this union the 'Popular Front.' But this secret protocol and the act of signing it is a formality; the true agreement has been reached through months of careful negotiations and consensus building. They've been preaching their gospel for decades; it's only been in the wake of the failed rising fifteen years ago working men have been given to this gospel. Since the death of his parents, Valeri has become exactly the sort of person this gospel is meant for. Although he's read through some of the materials he's taken home from the union hall, he's got only a passing familiarity with the forbidden gospel, able to describe it in the vaguest of terms, to articulate it crudely, as he reads in his flat while Hannah's away still terms like 'industrial democracy' and 'democratic centralism' seeming like such obscure and abstract things to him even as he comes to understand them in the abstract. Lacking as he does in personal experience, he can't yet see them as real, even as the path forward is laid out for him clearly still he must make the choice to walk it. Events will soon overtake him, just as they'll overtake us all, and force him to take a leap of faith even before he's ready.

As it's summertime, we wade through the crowds and make our way to the leading edge of history, once there finding ourselves trapped in a little cone of silence even as we've immersed ourselves in a sea of people, each of them there for a different reason yet all of them united behind one cause, for at least one day. "Sergei is dead," says Sydney. "What?! When?!" Valeri asks. "Today," she says, "not long ago. He was killed in one of the protests. He was struck in the head by one of the canisters of gas the police fire. He died on the way to the hospital." Although months have passed since Sergei was dragged off in broad daylight, to Valeri the raid which took him might as well have taken place in the night. It's a sudden shock, to hear of his old friend dying, Valeri taking the moment to consider the full implications of what's transpired, all the while the bombs bursting and the gunfire rattling in the distant streets, marking the sounds of the coming revolution almost having arrived. For Valeri, he contemplates the inner dialogue which permeates his thoughts. He contemplates not in the manner of the learned scholar, but the confused and disoriented young man standing on the cusp of becoming something more, as though he's standing on the edge of a seaside cliff and looking through the night for a light he's convinced he can see even though he can't. After the raids which took Sergei and the raids since then which've taken so many more, many are in Valeri's situation, beginning to look ahead to a revolution that has yet to be born even as it's been living through them all along.

Valeri sits in silence for a moment, Sydney, for a second or two, letting the silence hang. "Valeri? Valeri?" she asks. "I'm here," he says. "Please don't run out and get yourself hurt," she says. And he says, "I don't think that's up to me..." Actually, this isn't how Valeri learns of Sergei's death, nor is it the truth of how Sergei died. But let's imagine this is the truth for the actual truth of Sergei's death is too undignified, killed as he was by another prisoner over rations while rotting in one of His Majesty's Prisons somewhere in the Welsh highlands. As if Sergei could become something more, something better in death than he was in life, Valeri feels inspired by the sudden news of Sergei's death to begin his ascent from ill-mannered malcontent to disciplined soldier of the still-coming revolution. Whatever the truth might be, Sergei's death—no, Sergei's murder can serve only to inspire a mounting rage, with every person Valeri knows or has ever known to succumb to war in the street inducing the dark essence to surge in him. But still Sergei's death and Sydney's sympathies can't bring Valeri to overcome his instinctive suspicion of her. In time, when he moves beyond the role of simple malcontent and onto soldier, he'll come to learn the true value of instinct, just as he'll learn which instincts to embrace and which to reject.

As if to punctuate the arrival of the two outlawed parties at this union, in the night a new round of riots begins, the darkness lit up by the fires of liberation burning at the behest of this new holy alliance. Still thinking of Sergei's death, Valeri can't sleep, instead lying in bed with the window wide open and his bedroom flooding with the distant emanations of the unruly masses seizing control, for the night at least, of the shantytowns in which they live. In the morning, Valeri rises to a world seeming identical in form to the world of the night before but radically different in essence. He says to Hannah, "you're paying a small price compared to what she's going through." He speaks of Maria, comparing the dangers of life on the streets to the frenetic pace of action in the A&E where Hannah works. But Hannah shakes her head and says, "she's just a prostitute, you can see her in any jail." And Valeri looks her right in the eye, then says, "she's got more courage in her than the two of us combined." Although Valeri doesn't yet know it, he can tell, in the vague, instinctive way he can that Maria's in service of a higher cause, a higher cause which Valeri will soon enough dedicate himself in service to, albeit in a way unlike Maria's. As Valeri and Hannah argue, there's the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the distance, hardly audible, but surely there, reminding them on the coming revolution edging closer with each passing day.

In the night, meanwhile, Stanislaw reads through the daily reports on escalating prices of homes, of food, of fuel and of clothes, and he, like the others, feels a mounting gloom. It's been this way for so long as he can remember. But as he's put to work in the days preparing fortifications for the police, he thinks of his family in the city and he wonders if they might yet see through the day. Stanislaw means well, but when he turns in his gear after another long day of putting up barbed-wire fencing and armoured walls, he comes home too tired to think straight. And this time, this time is no different. He's late to the party, so to speak, for this very reason, but when his wages can no longer suffice to pay for food, he still hasn't come to think of doing away with this whole way of life. But while the angry crowds fill the streets again, venting their anger over the unsubtle touch of the police raids having taken so many of theirs in the night, Stanislaw feels the call of the dark essence, in the way he can, determined as he is to work through each and every day until he can work no more. Even as the government in Westminster is aware of the union of illegal parties, all it can do is pass an act banning this new union again, the power of words printer on paper and agreed to be law meaningless against the rising passions in the street. For now, we must remain fixated on the streets, as it's there we'll find the essence of our times lying in the shadows, in the shadows seeking light. The government in Westminster, like all governments in capitals across Europe and around the world, is powerless to arrest the rising apocalypse, even as each government seems to be cracking down on simmering disorder.

Although Valeri is not a member of either forbidden party, he learns of this new union from Mark Murray, with the implied understand Murray's learned of it from his friend Arthur Bennington whom Valeri hasn't seen since their first meeting. Soon, the news finds its way onto the screens of millions, not from official sources but on the dark corners of illicit networks reaching around the world. What Valeri doesn't know is this new union of parties has pledged itself to follow the path not laid out for it in full view. "I don't think I could live alone again," Hannah says in a moment of clarity. "This isn't just about you," says Valeri, "it's about what's best for all of us." And Valeri says this as he looks wistfully into the night. "I miss moments like this more than anything," he says. "Me too," she says. Although the power's gone out in the night, the fires of liberation burning in the streets cast a flickering, orange glow through the windows, shadows dancing against the far wall. "Are you going to bring her back into this place?" asks Hannah, speaking of Maria. "I don't think so," says Valeri. They artfully evade the subject of unpaid rents, with so many rents going unpaid in this block and in blocks around the country nowadays. But still there's the question of what Valeri will do, in this tentative, early time when the revolution has yet to emerge his path devoting itself to study and to taking part in the protests steadily mounting in both intensity and frequency. But there's more.

At the armoury after a week's exercises, Private Craig Thompson has not seen the Colonel since that inspection of the troops. The sergeant squelches any dissent, leaving still the only forum for discussion the bunks after lights-out. They don't know of the secret protocol, only of the still burning fires of liberation across the country. "It can't be we're going to war," says one private. "I heard they'll send us to Northern Ireland," says another. "Have you seen the riots there?" asks the first. "There's riots everywhere now," says the second. Thompson interrupts, saying, "they'll send us somewhere. We'll find out soon enough." Lurking in the shadows there's that very same essence which guides all revolutionary men, looking on these dispirited troopers, watching, waiting for the perfect moment to descend on them and make them whole with it. But they are young men, too young, given as young men are to flights of fancy, already Private Thompson filling his mind with fantasies of rebellion entirely of his own accord. He's almost ready. In the barracks there's agreement; the men won't go to war against their own people. But as this secret agreement is reached, the men can't know it's not at home they'll soon enough be ordered but abroad, to some foreign battlefield in service of their masters. The war at home has yet to acquire the character of a military conflict the leaders of men might be familiar with, still consigned as the dark essence is to expressing itself in the irrational and ill-conceived lashings out of the ordinary and the unorganized. But sooner than anyone could expect it'll become unlike any war we've ever seen.

In an alley behind an apartment block nearly identical to the one Valeri lives in but some kilometres away, an older woman named Miriam Doyle stands in the shadows and says, "do you ever think we should just stop doing this?" Her companion, a younger woman named Monica Dawson says, "you make me feel like I'm not good enough." Miriam says, "I don't often get the chance to talk to someone like you," then reaches into the gym bag she's brought and draws out a gun. "Don't leave this lying anywhere," Miriam says, "keep it hidden until the time comes." Monica quickly takes the gun and stashes it in her bag, then asks, "how will I know when the time's come?" Miriam says, "you'll know." After the power comes back on, they've disappeared into the night. After standing outside their member of parliament's office for hours and venting their rage, the unemployed workers they hear nothing but further platitudes from the member who won't come out and confront the lot of them. They seek to fight back against the raids, the raids which've been going on for more than fifteen years, but in truth this is only the nominal reason they're fighting. Although women like Monica and even Miriam may not yet be able to articulate their thoughts as such, they fight for something men have been fighting for ever since the advent of our whole way of life.

Someone throws a bottle, then another, soon a full-fledged riot has broken out, with Garrett Walker retreating at the first sign of trouble. He's too old to go down this road, but taking his place the younger men who hurl bottles so well. It's a deeply confusing mess. Nevermore assured of himself, Garrett returns to his little flat and sinks into a deep depression, tempting him with the tantalizing possibility of a new tomorrow but always keeping it out of reach. He has two daughters and a wife, and he can provide for none of them. His is a deep-seated shame. But when his older daughter's caught up in the police raids, he wonders where he'd gone wrong. Before this crisis is ended, his daughters will be killed, gunned down in the streets in an exchange of fire between the rebels and the troops. It's all spinning out of control, careening towards an impossibly violent cataclysm which will burn everything we know. Men like Garrett can't even fathom what's to come, but when it comes an instinct will seize them and compel them to join in. That time is coming much sooner than any of them think. The union of parties dedicated to following the banner of rebellion will make sure of it. Elsewhere in England, there's scattered gunfire and the bursting of bombs to sound out through the night, erratic, but surely there. While protests fill the streets and demand the full attention of the talking heads on the screens of millions, the newly-established Popular Front quietly works behind the scenes to build its strength in anticipation of the burgeoning revolution's impending escalation into all-out war.

As the world burns, so too do we burn, not in our essence but in the very components that when put together make up who we are. In the aftermath of this fire having claimed another victim out of the fabric of the unreal, it seems sometimes there's a low cry, a silent song lamenting the plight of the children who once lived inside. In the streets Valeri sees poverty, hopeless causes, the wretched lying in pools of their own blood and tears. After he's seen enough, he turns to Sydney and says, "whatever you're going to ask, the answer is no." Sydney says, "you must be mad, coming here like this." But Valeri asks, "you've done a bad thing for a good reason before, haven't you?" Sydney shrugs and says, "bad or good there's nothing that can be done to bring Sergei back." They speak not of the union of two parties but of something far more personal, something intimately known between them but left unsaid too long. "Could you be happy here with me?" he asks. But she can't answer, not right away. "We could be arrested for this," he says. "That wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen," she says. "Don't even joke," he says. She only flashes the briefest smile before turning away. As if to say something more, Valeri steps a half-step towards her and opens his mouth, but nothing escapes his throat. Soon he's alone again, and he turns to the forbidden literature, reading through it, ensconcing himself in a little nook of his flat to pour over his books. Terms like 'alienation' and 'labour-power' litter the pages, terms which Valeri doesn't really understand even as he convinces himself he does. But these books aren't the core of the forbidden gospel which'll soon enough emerge into the light, rather, they are the groundwork for what's still to come. Although these books constitute a gospel forbidden, they'll help him understand the terror and the horror soon to emerge.

After seeing Father Bennett looking so downcast after the last week's sermon, at the church Darren Wright feels in him a gnawing guilt for having turned his back on the church that'd been good to him for so many years. Before the next Sunday's sermon, he approaches Father Bennett's open door, announcing his presence with a subdued knock on the doorframe. "It's good to see you," says Father Bennett, his voice sounding sincere. "It's been a while since I've come to meet with you," says Darren, sitting across from Father Bennett, the two looking each other over quickly. From within the confines of the Father's office, they can hear the distant sounds of the streets burning, and Darren struggles to control his enthusiasm for the men fighting and dying even before their war has begun in earnest. Darren and the Father talk not about the faith, for either of them is, despite their struggles, committed as ever. Instead, they talk on the coming rebellion, on the discontent brewing in the streets, with Father Bennett voicing concerns that lead Darren to consider, for at least a little while, the Father might be more given to the rogue priest's cause than he'd thought. He won't know it until it's too late, but he's wrong. Though Darren won't take up arms against the hopeless oppression and poverty surrounding him, not in the way others might, he'll come to learn at some great personal cost the true power to which the old church owes its loyalty.

Then, Monica receives a call. "Midnight, under the bridge," says an unknown voice, "come alone." An hour later, he's there, under one end of the bridge looking towards the other. Monica meets Miguel Figueroa. He's one of the few who yet count themselves among the members of the newly-formed Popular Front. This meeting, carried out in secret, marks the beginning of a new step in our struggle. He passes her instructions; this has to be done in person because of the need for secrecy which no electronic communications can provide. For now, this is all the people of the new front task themselves with, ordinary men like Valeri concerning themselves by contrast with the minutiae of their own lives. While Monica will end up sacrificing herself for something much greater than herself, Valeri struggles against the little indignities that've come to characterize every day of his life. In the nights after the Worker's Party and the People's Party join forces, a simmering tension takes hold in the streets, imperceptible, but surely there. It's as though the physical vessel of our world has become inhabited by some new essence, the secret act of two working class parties joining in union silently marking the moment our histories turn from one epoch to the next. Soon, when the war in the streets escalates into outright revolution, the union of parties will assume a much greater role.

In taking to the streets, Sean Morrison and the other students vent their rage, knowing as they do that their future is filled only with the unemployment and despair already dominating the lives of millions. But soon there will be a place for them in the Popular Front, training as they are to join its ranks whether they realize it or not. In the student hall at the polytechnic classes have been called off for the crisis gripping the streets, leaving Sean and Julia free to commit themselves to their own growing radicalism. They meet in secret, or so they think, speaking of the union of parties. "Will they help us?" Julia asks. "No one knows," Sean says. "What will they do?" Julia asks. "They're the only parties that want to free us from the wealthy man's grip," Sean says, "and that's good enough for me." The existence of the illegal parties is widely known in the working class blocks and has been since the failed uprising fifteen years ago, but still it gives students like Sean and Julia a thrill to talk about them. Soon the name of the illegal parties will not thrill but will embolden them while striking fear into the hearts of the enemy. For now, though, Sean and Julia know the Popular Front will remain small, with few soldiers and fewer weapons. But in these troubled times, it's the spirit, the essence of the illegal parties and their Popular Front that's important. They've been working behind the scenes since the failed revolution fifteen years ago to make sure the next revolution won't fail, and their time is almost at hand.

But while the apparatchiks of the forbidden parties and their Popular Front continue to work behind the scenes, Valeri spends much of his time at the old union hall. Although he's unemployed, still he congregates there with so many others, the union halls having become gathering places for many who don't have union cards. Some look out on those streets and see only a cobbled-together assortment of the same ragged and haggard men who must wander along each and every day as though in a trance, but that's not what I see, not what you should see, only what the wealthy man would have us all see. At some point, there passes a moment when, like a switch, the whole lot of us come to realize we've been lied to, not in the basic, sort-of factual way we've always known we've been lied to but in a primitive, almost instinctive way that lends itself readily to the changing course of our shared future. At some point, there passes a moment when something in all of us changes, drastically and irrevocably, reconfiguring the way we look at the world but reshaping the way each of us thinks so we come to honestly believe this mew way of thinking has been our way all along.

In his little bedroom with Sydney, Valeri feels a wave of relief wash over him as he considers his next move, the next move in his quest to become more than he is, whether to try and find another pittance to sustain himself or to join whoever there is to join in fighting against the way of things. It's a strange sensation, to be so caught up in the passions of a revolutionary fervour that even the love of a woman can't compare to the burning desire he has in him for justice and freedom. Even as Valeri thinks on this feeling, he knows it to be trite and adolescent to give himself over to self-denial, even as he fully understands it to be enlightening. Now's the time, or at least as good a time as will come. Reaching into his pocket, Valeri draws out a small box, handing it unopened to her. "Valeri," she says, opening the box, a small gasp escaping her lips as she sees what he's given her. But the only jewellery Valeri owns is a small pin given to him by his union in recognition of his years of service. It's a small thing, but it means so much to him. It marks him as one of his own. He believes this is something someone like Sydney could never understand, not without having lived his life and felt all the things he's felt in being made to feel shame for who he is.

In the night, it starts to rain, a drop here, a drop there, soon the air crackling with the thousands and thousands of raindrops striking the pavement all at once. But in London's working class districts men like Valeri have little time for indulgences like love. Even as they stand together, an unspoken understanding invades the moment, the grim knowledge they must not see each other again as lovers for all the need they have to commit themselves to their own respective struggles. Self-denial, Valeri's come to believe, is the path forward, and he's about to cast himself irrevocably into a place where she can't follow. In the grinding poverty that's gripped London's working class districts since even before the failed rising fifteen years ago, love is a luxury that must be cast by the wayside, and in our struggle for justice and freedom Valeri casts love by the wayside in the time it takes him and his lover to bid each other farewell. Soon enough, Valeri returns to his life as a day labourer, the thought lingering in the back of his mind that one day he'll see Sydney again, a thought subversive, yet tempting.

Through this time, Valeri sometimes finds work as a day labourer, here and there, earning enough of a pittance to keep himself alive. As a day labourer, Valeri sees new people every day, some days exactly the last sort of people he should come to expect. At a work site, Valeri finds in line to use the portable bathroom none other than his former nemesis, Ruslan Kuznetsov. They exchange bewildered looks. Valeri says, "what are you doing here?" Ruslan says, "they fired me." A pause. "They got rid of me," Ruslan says, "after they'd gotten rid of enough of you scoundrels they had no more need for people like me. But they said once things pick up they'll take me back. That's what happens when you don't make yourself into an enemy of the owners. You get a second chance." Valeri says nothing more, and avoids Ruslan the rest of the day. It's a pathetic thing, for someone's mind to be so enslaved to the way of things that they can do nothing but continue to place their faith in those who've so enslaved them. But from across the worksite Valeri catches a glimpse of Ruslan working, the look in Ruslan's eye making clear his steadfast and earnest faith in the way of things.

Even after having been deemed surplus and then cast aside like some old piece of disused machinery, Ruslan still can't summon the strength to turn his back on a lifetime of subservience. In the aftermath of having bid his love farewell, Valeri can't summon the emotion needed to tell his former nemesis he got what he'd deserved. In truth, it's for the growling in their stomachs that the men called to work for the day must ignore the call to action, the rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs periodically tugging on their hearts, making each of them feel the growing urge to rebellion every day.

Though Valeri and Ruslan will never again cross each other's paths, it's a perfect absurdity that Ruslan should live out the rest of his days kept imprisoned so willingly. After night has fallen and the dogs of war are freed from their chains we look to each other for comfort amid these trying times. It's almost time. Though our war has not yet begun in earnest, there's hints, here and there, of what's to come, whether the faint glimmer of hope in the eyes of young men like Valeri or the ashen look of the old men around them who've given up.

12. Alter Ego

A burst of gunfire rattles out into the night, erratic, light, from a distance sounding like the popping of bottles. Teetering on the edge, about to collapse at any moment, leaving little but for the frantic and confused motions of the wealthy man's efforts to extract every last drop of blood from men like Valeri that can be extracted. It's a sudden shift, jarring, yet it's a shift so smooth, so seamless it hardly dawns on the men like Valeri there's anything out of the ordinary going on at all. This is the work of Miguel Figueroa, but if you should ask him he would insist he's only an agent of change. "Hold on for as long as you can," says Miguel, speaking with another man. "And when the time comes you'll know what to do," says Miguel, looking the man right in the eye, speaking with a smooth but firm cadence in his voice. Even with all the turmoil in the streets and all the poverty gripping the working class districts across Britain men like Miguel must carry out their work in secret. As the legacy of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago lives on in men like Valeri, it's men like Miguel who will quietly ensure the gap between past and future will be bridged. Men like Miguel and the man he's meeting with are at work in dark alleys and in basements of disused apartment blocks across the country, working to bring about the inevitable.

In the alley between two working class apartment blocks Miguel says, "you must find it before they do," to an older man named Scott Grey who says nothing but nods in response. Instructions received, Scott turns away and makes into the night, arriving across at a disused warehouse halfway across the city to complete his task. "In the garage," an unarmed man says, his body half-obscured in the shadows. He points Scott in the right direction, then withdraws back into the shadows. Men like Miguel and Scott, they're only a small part of the burgeoning revolutionary movement that's been amassing its strength for a long time. Although the revolutionary struggle never truly abated in the wake of the failed uprising more than fifteen years ago, it's taken the Worker's Party and the People's Party, now joined in the Popular Front, a very long time to reach the point where they're capable of becoming something more. As most of their work takes place behind the scenes, the long and arduous building of alliances and forging of forging of bonds between chapters, councils, and committees, all forbidden by law and committed to under the cover of darkness.

In the garage, Scott finds a crate of rifles, the rifles older than any of them, looking like they haven't been handled in years. It's not much of an arsenal, but it's what they have. There're others out there who are far better armed, or who will become far better armed, but Miguel can only secure what he can, each of them kept isolated from the other in this early period when yet the rising has not begun in earnest. Scott looks the rifles over for only half a moment, then takes them and conceals them in the cab of his pickup truck under some blankets, crumpled-up papers, and empty beer cans. In time, these rifles will be put to use.

At the polytechnic, classes remain cancelled. Some among the faculty and student body have come to believe the polytechnic will be liquidated by act of Parliament, but it's only a rumour, one of many to make the rounds in times like these. Still among the students, though, there's hope they can return to their studies soon, and that this'll all quiet down just as every other wave of protests has since anyone can remember. For Sean Morrison, he realizes the truth of the matter when calling his parents who still live in Manchester. They have little time to speak; Sean says, "I hope you won't worry about me." His mother says, "of course we worry about you. But we also trust you." Sean says, "I'll come up to see you as soon as I can. But it might be awhile." He doesn't dare tell her of the pitched street battles, concealing from his own mother his slowly but steadily deepening involvement in a cause even he can't yet understand.

Elsewhere, after Scott's picked up his crate of rifles he doesn't distribute them right away. Instead, he returns to work at a construction site, along with his co-workers Randall Reed and Ralph Hughes. "Just give me my cut of the money and I'll be out of here," says Randall. "There's no money," Scott says. "There's not?" Ralph asks. "There never was," Scott says. As they work, hastily assembling the next glass and steel high-rise to be put up, it becomes apparent to the enemy what's afoot. When Randall calls a friend named Dennis Moore, it never occurs to him that his friend's calls could be monitored not by the troopers themselves but by a member of the working class turned against his own. Information, names and dates and places soon follow a complex network of intermediaries, too complex to have been deliberately engineered, from Dennis Moore to a clerk named Clarence Lewis who works in an office next to a warehouse, from Clarence Lewis to a dockworker named Eric Roberts, the latter among them electronically filing a false report under a false name with the troopers. It's a seemingly random sequence of events but it leads the troopers to engage in a series of raids which we'll get to later. In the meantime, Scott, Dennis, and Randall work, Scott thinking back to that crate of old rifles he's stowed in a safe place, looking forward to the time when they'd have the chance to put them to good use.

After Darren Wright disclosed, in the way that he did, the existence of the underground church, Father Bennett passed on this disclosure to the diocese. Father Bennett isn't the first and he won't be the last to do so. But at the next sermon delivered by the rogue priest in the underground church, the gathered faithful are delivered not empowerment but warning. "Do not expect the struggle to be over soon," says the rogue priest, "for no man can promise you this. Your reward for struggle is not pleasure but pain. Our struggle shall deliver us only unto hardship. Your reward for your faith, your service, your chastity will be in Heaven, and not in Earth. Know that the righteous who stand will always provoke hostility and violence from the wicked. Know that the hostility and violence you are met with is only proof on the righteousness of your struggle." Still men like Darren Wright aren't fully committed to the path laid out for them, though soon they will be.

For Valeri, each day that passes means absorbing still more knowledge, real, useful knowledge of the world around him, some instinctive part of his mind keeping a silent tally of every wrong to be righted when the opportunity arises. "Be safe," pleads Sydney, as he's about to leave her apartment for the union hall, as though she knows, as though she's learned to know he's up to something. He nods, then turns away, heading to try at nothing but survival, for now. For some people, for most people, life is made up of the public and the private, of the side of ourselves we're compelled to present to one another and the side we keep to ourselves. A woman named Nicole Foster operates a toll booth on a highway leading into the Scottish highlands. She fears for her livelihood, as there's always news in the works that she will be replaced by automatic sensors, with no concern given to her future. With all the factories and mills either shuttering or long ago shuttered there's little hope for women like her. Nicole knows Monica, but only in passing. Monica drives through the booth Nicole operates one day, stopping to pay the toll. But before driving away, Monica takes a small parcel from Nicole, at exactly the right moment so as to make it look like nothing at all. It's a small moment, but one which'll amount to much more when the dust settles.

Arduous though unemployment may be for Garrett Walker, frightening is the darkness staring at him when he looks through to the future and sees only despair. His bed is a crumpled mess, lost until the pale moonlight pierces the thick, rolling clouds at night and casts a sickly glow on the flat's far wall. So early in this struggle and already he thinks himself losing his family and with them all he has left to lose. His wife pledges to stand by him, and she does, faithfully discharging her duties in the home even as she works to earn some small income at a restaurant. Soon, she convinces the manager to hire on her husband as a dishwasher, working a few hours a day for a pathetic wage. It's hard for men like Garrett to swallow their pride and subject themselves to the indignities of this work, but he takes the job out of the will to provide for his family. Still, as he's trapped in the noisy, steamy kitchen hosing off plates and glasses, he can't help but let his mind wander to the tempting and salacious thoughts of revolution. He's known of the working class parties, but never before this moment has he thought of himself as fit to join. There's violence and there's mayhem in the streets, and it'll only take the gentlest of nudges to send men like Garrett over the edge and compel them to fully commit themselves to the war.

For a young thief named Simon Perez, the moment he steps out of the light and into the shadows marks the moment in his life when he finds his true calling, if only he could realize himself for what he truly is. Tonight he goes to work, crowbar in hand as he looks inside parked cars, glancing into one, then the next, then the next, at each just long enough to look in the seat for something, anything of value. There. In the front seat of a white sedan, a screen left in plain sight. He strikes the window with his crowbar, shattering glass, then reaches in and quickly takes the screen, putting it in his coat's inside pocket before turning and making back for the alley.

A day later he sells the stolen screen for his own pittance, a pittance he spends on his drug of choice. For years this drug has eaten away at the streets, killing, consuming, corroding like a potent acid. No one knows where it came from, no one on these streets knows the complicated, roundabout way each of the countless chemicals blended into each drop finds their way from some obscure corner of the world to here. To men like Simon, all that matters is the pain that goes away whenever he takes this drug into his veins, relief washing over him in a dull warmth. But the relief always fades, and the pain always comes back. Trapped, Simon is like so many others, once a worker discarded like some piece of old, disused machinery, now corrupted beyond repair by an insidious poison.

Not far from where the last man died in the night, Private Craig Thompson and the rest of the artillery brigade bed down for the night, thinking themselves suspicious, but not yet suspect. More than a few copies of banned texts circulate in the barracks, subject to occasional searches which reveal nothing. Private Thompson sometimes hears the rattling of distant gunfire in the night, something unthinkable even a few years earlier yet so common now. Over six weeks their lives seem to normalize, the drudgery of routine offering some small comfort in these trying times. They march, they muster, they travel to the range and fire off the guns in rehearsal for the war always seeming to be in the offing. "No force could ever suppress the human desire for dignity," says Private Thompson, speaking as much to himself as to the others. "You may count your place in the stockade if you keep talking like that," says another.

"You're not wrong," says Thompson, "but there are people in the streets and all they're fighting for is the right to live in their own homes." The other soldier says, "I don't disagree with that, but you must look out for yourself. If the Colonel has you brought up on sedition charges then you'll be no good to anyone when you're hanged." An exchange of gunfire rattles through the night, waking Thompson at exactly the wrong time, rousing him from his restless sleep just long enough to listen for a time. But for Thompson and all the other men like him in the British Army, the threat of hanging only just enough to keep him in line.

When he's certain the exchange is taking place at least a few kilometres away, he returns to bed, closing his eyes and falling asleep as the gunfire stops, the exchange never really ending so much as subsiding, like an outbreak of influenza. For Simon Perez, his descent into the madness of addiction and crime marks an impossible tragedy all too common in this day and age. He sits, one morning, in his cell, the first of his cellmates to wake up, and eyes the guard. He's memorized the guards' patrols, and once he's sure this morning's patrol takes the guard out of sight he reaches under his mattress and draws out his drugs, quickly and quietly injecting into his veins, a wave of relief, warm and soothing, washes over him. Meanwhile, the real criminals, they who grow fat off their theft of wages from the working men of the world not only escape punishment but receive exaltation in the annals of power. The real criminals remain anonymous, but not for long. Their alter ego can only conceal them for so long.

For men like Stanislaw Czerkawski, the act of working to fortify the police stations may be considered an act of self-harm, but in fact it's a demonstration of the irrepressible working class spirit. By day Stanislaw works, but by night he harbours the same subversive thoughts as his brothers and sisters of the working class, each thought sending the same surge of energy through his body like the common thrumming of a universal pulse. Still he works, on this day his crew putting into place the last piece of fencing to complete one particular fortification, with just enough time left in the day to string razor wire along the tops of the fences. Stanislaw is not like the others, just as any one person is not like the rest; Polish by birth, he remains skeptical of the burgeoning working class movement in Britain, remembering as he does the stories his grandfather would tell of life under the old Polish People's Republic. In time, he will learn to embrace the new character which the working class movement has come to embody.

This'll be time when the tables are turned and men like Simon are empowered to dispense their own justice, handing out the harshest of penalties to those guilty of looting and plundering the wealth of the world. As matches to kindling, all will be called to account for their crimes, for their dispensation of misery and poverty on ordinary men who've sought only to sustain themselves. It's not unlike us all to realize our place in the scheme of things. Men like Simon Perez, the most pathetic and reviled among us will come to be exalted into the annals of power, and in so receiving exaltation will usher in a new era of the people's rule. Simon Perez, locked in an overcrowded, decrepit prison, may not live to see it. Many young men will rot in this prison, consigned to never realizing their full potential, and many will die here. But theirs will be a vengeance meted out by the hand of another. Against the power of the dark essence's alter ego, there can be no prison strong enough to contain them, even if men like Simon must die to see the rising of the alter ego to save us all. But while Simon dies, men like Valeri are only beginning to live, slowly realizing their true calling in standing for themselves.

Still Valeri ventures beyond his own quarters, leaving the simple, staid, stout apartment blocks lined along the road and entering those quarters where once his kind had lived. After all that's happened it might seem men like Valeri lead lives filled with terror and lawlessness, but it's not so. There are those little moments of peace even in a violent world. Overhead, a plane traces a white slash across the deep azure sky, a plane full of people headed somewhere, anywhere in the world but here. Even in this day and age, with grinding poverty and interminable unemployment having seized the lives of millions for decades, still there's the sight of so many gleaming, glass-and-steel towers in the distance to taunt them with the promise of a future that's never to be. Sometimes, now, Valeri's got more time than he knows what to do with, even his readings leaving him unable to fill every moment of every day. He goes to the union hall, attends lectures and rallies, but can't escape the vague but altogether real suspicion that he's being led on. All the while, a new round of firings from the mills, factories, shipyards, and shops are announced, putting another hundred thousand working class Britons out of work, even as those very men are assured they'll find work again.

Still men like Valeri venture beyond their own quarters, the search for wages leading places none never thought they'd go. This isn't the life they were promised. This isn't the life they were sold on. As men like Valeri return home after another fruitless day, they withdraws into an isolation, a bottle of cheap liquor dulling his senses and fogging his mind. These thoughts, they know, are subversive, even criminal. They should be pushed from their minds, but so long as they keeps them to himself then they can't be implicated by them. It's been some time since Valeri had begun reading the forbidden literature, and in his fog he couldn't possibly understand the true meaning of terms like 'commodification' or 'surplus value,' no matter how he convinces himself that he can. In truth, these very terms are abstractions, entirely unconnected to the harsh realities, the palpable sensations experienced by men like Valeri every time they look on the screens and hear announcements of the latest closure of one mill, factory, shipyard, or shop. What's accomplished in this period, this tentative, in-between time, is the gradual but very real growth of Valeri into the man he's sure to be.

For Valeri, what's been accomplished in the time since he's lost his job and taken in with the day labourers is only part of his long transformation from ill-mannered malcontent to disciplined soldier of the revolution. His journey won't be finished for a very long time; he may never become what he instinctively but not consciously aspires to be. As he shuts off the light and goes to bed, he spares himself the trauma of contemplating the consequences of these subversive thoughts, choosing instead to joy in surrender to the thought of a new tomorrow. Meanwhile, across the way an unemployed youth spray paints on the side of a bus, 'NO SURRENDER,' in black lettering, an act of defiance unchallenged in the night. You see, the dark essence is the alter ego, rendered dark only by the corruption of the world in which it works.

After what's transpired here tonight, none of us will ever be able to forget the courses of our disparate histories joining together like all the little tributaries merging into a single river. But then none of us should ever want to forget, even as we all know we someday will. This might be the only reason I'm writing this, to give an account of these events so that, wherever this leads, we'll have some way of thatching together some kind of narrative, even if all this turns out to be wrong. And when there's a pause in the flow of events towards their inevitable conclusion, men like Valeri look to their screens. On this day, only some months after Valeri's friend Sergei was disappeared, a live transmission interrupts all the screens across Britain, the King himself appearing to denounce terror and lawlessness, and to call for restraint. Although the King may only be a figurehead in this day and age, the power of symbolism and its appeal to tradition is still strong enough to command the loyalties of many men. Valeri isn't one of them. As he watches the King's speech from the crowded floor of the union hall, he sees this only as a further attempt by the old regime to impose itself on the new.

With the decaying hulks of industry long abandoned still littering the country like tombstones and with long lines for welfare cheques like a funeral procession reaching down crowded sidewalks along the city's streets, we have seen what has happened to the lifeblood of men, in this wondrous age of unprecedented freedoms and ever-fading lines on the map how yet Valeri may find his deliverance in a new tomorrow.

13. Nor the Traveller to the Path

If not building fortifications at police stations then it's hastily assembling ad hoc jails on empty plots of land across England that Stanislaw Czerkawski's been mustered into service for. In the hot and humid early summertime, he sweats to excess, returning home tired and sore. Though he's never told the purpose given to his labour it becomes evident to him by way of his working class intuition, the instinctive sense he has that the fruits of his labour shall be used against people exactly like him. "It's late," says one of Stanislaw's fellow workers, "it's too late to keep on working." Though men like Stanislaw don't know it, the wealthy man has learned the lessons of the failed revolution fifteen years ago, and puts those learnings to use not to ward off the next rising but to prepare himself to withstand it. "I'm tired and I'm hungry," says one of Stanislaw's co-workers. "You're always going to be tired and hungry," says Stanislaw. "I know," says his co-worker, "that's what I'm talking about." Although as yet there's only hunger gutting the innards of the working class blocks throughout Britain, the threat of outright starvation lingers amid constant and chronic shortages of all but the most essential foodstuffs. Somehow, men like Stanislaw and his co-worker manage to work harder than ever before, even as it occurs to them that they shouldn't be working at all. This is their instinct; they keep on working because it's what they do. As Stanislaw pauses for only a moment to mop the sweat from his brow, he catches the eye of the boss.

"Quitting time," says his co-worker, after a few more hours have passed. Stanislaw's whole body seems to pulsate in time with an aching pain. Still Stanislaw sees it when ordered home at the end of the day, his wife there to welcome him back into the little sanctuary they call a home. For the migrant, Stanislaw, his is a place caught between two worlds, two identities, learning, over time, to bleed himself into the space between them, subsuming himself within the greater struggle, and in so subsuming making peace with the greater good. For Stanislaw, the last few months between now and the first real escalation in the burgeoning revolutionary struggle will only mean greater hardship, but a greater hardship unlike any he's ever known. If his grandfather ever spoke derisively of the old Polish People's Republic, then Stanislaw will come to see life in mid-twenty-first century Britain as vastly worse. He doesn't have much long left, in the grand scheme of things, until he'll see horror, the likes of which he's never before seen.

Despite an excess the wealthy men continue to order production, then withhold the things produced from us by way of elaborate schemes to drive prices higher still. Valeri is confronted every day with the wealthy man's apparatchiks on the screens gleefully declaring the rise in prices of fuel, food, and homes; a sea of green arrows pointing up represent, to Valeri, an act of thievery long escalating. "If I'd only gone over when she'd called," he says, half-mindedly thinking of Sydney. It's been some weeks since they've last seen each other, and even in these times of great strife. "You're making a mistake," says Mark Murray. They're at the union hall, which is oddly quiet. There're still many people around, families and unemployed youths lingering, but not nearly so many as Valeri's become accustomed to seeing. Those that are present are making very little noise. "I wish I had some other choice," says Valeri. "You've always got a choice," says Murray. They're talking of his attempt to get back in touch with Sydney after having not seen her for so long, even as there's important work for him to do. In between sporadic shifts as a day labourer, Valeri's been working here, with Murray, and across the neighbourhood. Here, with Murray, they prepare themselves for the next round of protests, with Valeri's charge being the calling of leaders and protestors to muster at the hall. It's tedious work. Valeri wonders why he's made to sit in the hall while the real fight's to be had in the streets. And it's this line of thought that's led, over the past few weeks, to him seriously contemplating walking out and reuniting with his one-time lover, Sydney Harrington. When he first brought this up with Murray, he'd expected the elder unionist to advise him warmly, but received instead quite a shock.

"If you do this, you'll be dead to me," says Murray, the man responsible for organizing their shop's role in the coming general strike. His voice had never sounded so cold and forbidding. But cloaked within Murray's sudden distance, Valeri detects the slightest hint of concern. He stares hard at the table as he tries to recall his attacker, but can recall only the lifting of his head and the darkness of the alley in the dead of night. "Now," says Murray, "it's time to go to work." Valeri relents. They head out. Although Valeri's new to this work, he takes to it with much vigour and enthusiasm, even as he doesn't fully understand what they're doing. The union has called for an immediate dissolution of parliament and the institution of various measures to curb poverty that's endemic in Britain's working class blocks. But Valeri knows only a vague, simmering anger. For all his reading, for all the filling of his head with strange and abstract concepts, all he can feel is the overwhelming desire to make good on a life of hopelessness and despair. With Murray, Valeri and a group of others head from the union hall to a nearby church, there to meet with more sympathizers, where Valeri's sure there'll be only talk, more talk, interminable talk. What he wants is action. He'll get it, eventually, but not in the way he'd ever expected.

Despite this excess in production, morale among the troops at Private Craig Thompson's brigade is something of a valley, gently sloping downwards but forever on the verge of plummeting into an abyss. But whenever the troops muster on the armoury's parade grounds the guns can be seen, barrels stabbing at the sky proudly. No longer have they been standing in formation for an hour when the officers arrive, Colonel Cooke not among them. In the address to the troops, the mounting unrest in the streets isn't mentioned, instead much time devoted to praising loyalty and faithfulness to the rich and illustrious tradition which these troops are said to have inherited when once they enlisted.

The thought offers Private Thompson no comfort, and he succeeds only in forcing a blank, straight-faced look. But no prepared speech can obscure the fires of liberation burning in the distance, the columns of still-invisible smoke rising from the city in the distance. These streets, they're engulfed in chaos, but they have yet to see through their purpose. In the life of the soldier, we've yet to broach his true purpose, his reason for being, but the time is almost at hand when men like Private Craig Thompson will be called upon to make the choice to serve a higher purpose or to live down to the ideals of men laid out before them. The guns arrayed on the parade ground, they're old, they're obsolete, and they're worth nothing on the battlefields of some distant nation against the guns of a foreign power. But this is not their true purpose. And that night, as Private Thompson lies in his bunk and thinks on all that's happened not only on this day but on all the days since he can remember he accomplishes with the passing of the day at least some small part of his own personal journey towards joining the working class struggle. His day is almost come.

But until there rises something that can harness this essence of resistance and channel it into an effective fighting force, men like Valeri must stockpile their energies for the coming war, not by their conscious actions but by some vague yet powerful instinct coming from a place somewhere near the centre of each of his chests. As foreign travellers come to be an increasingly common sight, so, too, does the foreign visitor come to spend increasingly more time in those glass and steel towers built where once men like Valeri had lived, the foreign visitor in his suit and tie and with his sleek luxury car so unlike the impoverished workers in their dirty, ratty clothes and in their buses running the same route every day for years. Men like Valeri have become unwelcome in their own homes. As Valeri's own personal journey through the apocalypse rising escalates in time with the burgeoning revolution in Britain, he must come to grips with the immediate task facing him. "Are you glad you came?" asks Murray, as they're leaving the nearby church, having secured the pledges of the parishioners to join in the coming general strike. "Of course," says Valeri, "but I won't be satisfied until our demands are met." But Valeri knows their demands, for better wages, changes to the law, and a basket of measures to halt the worsening of poverty in Britain's working class blocks are unimportant in the long run. What matters to him is the fight.

And so it is that Garrett Walker is among those evicted in waves, not by force of arms but by fiat of law, prices raised beyond what he can afford with the pittance meted out to him by his wealthy paymasters. His wife, his two daughters are steadfast in their commitment to him, just as he is steadfast in his commitment to them. They recognize theirs as values alien, hostile to the wealthy man, who seeks to manipulate them with unemployment, hunger, and fear, but they recognize this only in the basic, primal way they can. Nevermore can we look back and declare ourselves as having left for the next generation more than what we've had; this is Garrett's shame. But as he looks ahead to the future he sees the promise of the coming revolution, at the dining table with his family only half-listening to his wife's voice, half-listening still to the sounds of simmering disorder fading in through the open window. Although he's unemployed, Garrett is among the great bulk of the British working class who survive by making extensive use of family and friends, the whole lot of them surviving by their wits. It's hard to gather, exactly, as whenever Garrett pauses to gather himself he's confronted with the distant rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs, providing him an acute reminder on the revolution already underway in parts of the country, simmering at a low-level, but threatening to explode at any moment, at any provocation.

As sirens wail to mark the latest round of protests rapidly spiralling out of control, we look ahead to the coming storm with a mounting anticipation, some part of him surely wise to the vengeance soon to be meted out on his behalf. While Valeri follows Murray back to the union hall after meeting with some church leaders, there're others taking to work as well. Three people, Eve Hanley, Amanda Conners, and Peter Tanaka arrive at the nearest shelter, taking refuge from the coming attack. "Are you here to spend the night?" asks the lady at the counter. "I don't know," says Peter, the others nodding their assent. They've only arrived by coincidence at the same time; they don't know each other. "We're over-capacity as it is," says the woman, "but if you can find a space to sit then you're welcome to stay as long as you like." The three enter the shelter's assembly, only to find a sea of people with hardly any open floor space anywhere. It's a wretched, dishevelled mass of humanity, and now Eve, Amanda, and Peter are among them. At the underground church there is not a dark essence but the essence of the light, in the shadows a hidden spirit thriving on the collective consciousness of the awakening parishioners gathered here. After Valeri and Murray bid farewell for the evening, Valeri leaves the union hall and makes for home, quickly and quietly, arriving to an empty flat. He's tired not from a full day of working, but from a full day of restlessness, knowing as he does in the vague, instinctive way he can that his true work must lie in breaking free.

For Darren Wright this hidden spirit manifests itself not only in the shiver running the length of his spine whenever he receives the forbidden gospel but in his own gradual awakening to the gospel's truth. At his side, Sheila Roberts looks on, herself growing into a spiritual accommodation with the path laid out for them. But not all is as it seems. In the night, as the rogue priest disseminates this forbidden gospel, there invades the secret presence of the dark essence expanding to fill all available space like a noxious gas. Though Darren and his young friend Sheila have come to see this place as the home of their renewed faith, Darren can't help but feel doubt lingering in the back of his mind. He feels all the more guilty for this doubt when looking at Sheila, seeing in the light behind her eyes not the slightest doubt at all. They have hardly begun their studies of the forbidden gospel and soon enough they will be made by act of God to put what they've learned to good use. "Are you going home tonight?" asks Sheila, when she and Darren have a moment alone together. "I have no home left to go to," says Darren, pausing to look away for a moment before looking back at her and saying, "the police evicted us all from our block. The owner wants to tear down the old building and put up luxury flats. We've got nowhere to go." It's nighttime, on an unusually calm and clear night, with a blackout having put on display an array of stars a thousand times more brilliant than either of them can usually see. "I've got nowhere to go either," says Sheila, explaining her eviction from her flat. It's a common experience, a shared trauma that joins ordinary people together. And in the middle of the night they can both hear the distant bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire, intermittent, sparse, but there.

In the midsummer's sweltering heat, sometimes Valeri imagines himself among a small but growing number of rebels brave enough to stand for something more than their own selves, as the cracks in the façade of the way of things begin to widen each of their number learning to provide for each other a cover for their own other way forward into the dawning of each and every new day. For Valeri, at the union hall this day there's a rousing call to action, Murray taking to the stage with all the passion and intensity of a firebrand. "...and still they demand more," he says, "still the wealthy demand more cuts to our wages, more of our funds diverted to fill their coffers, still higher prices at which they will sell our homes and our lives to their investors so they may fill their coffers until overflowing with their ill-gotten wealth." The weeks have turned into months, and the months have taken their toll on Valeri. As he's followed Murray from place to place, from churches to universities and from universities to homeless shelters, he's grown increasingly restless. This work is unsatisfying to him. Sometimes he thinks of quitting altogether, if only to focus on earning a greater pittance through obtaining more work as a day labourer. "Don't stray from me now," says Murray, after he's finished speaking. "Why me?" asks Valeri, "I'm no special talent." And Murray, without skipping a beat, firmly replies, "that's why." But after Valeri and Murray have gone back more than fifteen years, Valeri should know better than to even ask. Still, he needs to ask, unsure of himself as he is despite all the things he's seen, all the things he's been through. At the union hall, again, always at the union hall Valeri joins in with his brothers and sisters, knowing as he does how to do nothing else.

At the front of the crowd, Valeri cheers and roars with every pause in Murray's speech. When Murray fires up the crowd, Valeri can't help but let his doubts evaporate and his confidence surge like electricity coursing through his veins. After Murray's spoken, Valeri seizes the moment and shouts at the top of his lungs, "all power to the people!" It's enough to make them all forget who they are and where they live, the momentary passion obscuring the harsh realities of the life waiting for them as soon as they should leave the hall. At the shelter, Eve, Amanda, and Peter sit together, afraid as they are of venturing too far from what little they know to be true. Each finishes a bowl of thin, watery stew quickly, then avoids each other's eyes. But once Peter dares to look Eve in the eye, he sees a sadness in her face, the loose, tattered clothes she wears and the bruises on her face betray the life she's fleeing. But Amanda has only a blank look. It's the way of things; even as men like Valeri are under eviction, never should he be so evicted. The wealthy man will forever force him from his own home, and so shall he forever resist, in the way that he does, but never should he be so forced. It's like a dream you can only half-remember, like a rebirth that allows only the vaguest memories of the past to return, each successive rebirth allowing a little more, still yet a little more until men like Valeri can cobble together enough knowledge to rise above and break the cycle once and for all. Still Valeri faces the challenge imposed on him by artificial means. "I will stand with you," says Valeri. "I know you will," says Murray. Always the consummate politician, Murray is among a group of union leaders quietly building bridges between many of the dissident factions that make up the whole of the working class. Although Murray isn't a member of the slowly-growing Popular Front, he's a fellow traveler, a sympathizer who would cast his lot in with they seeking something better, something more.

Still Valeri forges ahead, pressing through this latest hardship the only way he knows how, by putting his head down and turning into the wind. Still Valeri returns to his little box of an apartment in the evening, his hands dirty, his clothes tattered and worn, his shoes falling apart and his back sore, with no relief in sight Valeri falling asleep to the sound of thunder cracking across the darkness of the night. In the morning, he rouses, sore and still-tired, overcoming his lingering fear as he takes to the streets and makes his way quickly and quietly through this latest crisis, the anthems of the working class running shivers the length of his spine whenever a spare moment presents itself for him to wonder on where his loyalties should lie. "If you remember the war fifteen years ago—" some, like Murray, have taken to calling the uprising a war unto itself "—then you know we've got to form a coherent whole before we rise, not after." After Murray says this to him, Valeri takes it to mean his elder, the closest thing he's had to a father is endorsing the bloodlust in his heart. But Valeri's hearing what he wants to hear.

And still the tourist, the investor is there, looking over him, conspiring with his enemies as part of the current order to take what rightfully belongs to him. Elsewhere, at the union hall, much transpires but all of it behind closed doors. "We will strike," Murray says, "all at once." Seated next to him is a woman named Rose Powell, a counterpart of Miguel Figueroa's from the Popular Front so recently formed. "And we shall support you," says Rose, "in the weeks ahead we will mount our attacks with every available man and woman. We will march alongside you in full support for all our brothers and sisters in union." And so it comes to be. But not everyone in the room's loyal to their cause. Outside, Valeri's still caught up in the passion of the crowd, unaware of the subterfuge unfolding in the building. "All power to the people!" he shouts. "All power to the people!" His voice blends in with a hundred others', and all anyone can hear is noise. While Valeri's role, for now, is to be among the hundreds gathered on the union hall's floor hurling their voices and raising their fists, Murray works quietly but determinedly to achieve what he sees as the ultimate in alliances. Already having established the first, tentative bonds between some of the various working class factions, men like Murray now work to establish one last bond. Murray is only an example; there are dozens, even hundreds such meetings across Britain, on this night and on nights like this, contacts formed and made use of, favours called in, a long and slow-building coalition forming, unknown to men like Murray this coalition to be broken in a fraction of the time it took to form.

At the union hall, there's a palpable tension in the air. "We'll have them right where they need to be," says one of Rose's colleagues from the Popular Front, a man named Kim Dae-Jung. The Popular Front attracts many among the "Perhaps," says Rose, "but we still have much work to do." It's later now, and the small contingent from the Popular Front have completed their subterfuge, Murray having left the room to inform the crowd on their agreement. But Rose and Kim are only one contingent, others making contact with unionists, students, and parishioners, the same agreement reached a hundred times over. Although the rebels in the Popular Front will not take part in the demonstration, it's critical that all involved believe they will. To this end, Rose and Kim leave the union hall that evening having made a firm commitment neither have any intention of making good on. Not far from the union hall there's a factory, one of the last to be closed before the war should begin, and it's in this factory that we should look to find some kind of hidden meaning, meaning which is always hidden in plain sight. Although the union, here, counts among its members a few of the factory's workers, there's little to be done, here, to save their jobs. In fact, the union has become something more than merely a trade union lobbying for itself; the unemployed workers will continue to count themselves among its members as their struggle escalates towards an outright war.

After ending its last shift ever, this factory is to be shut down, like the factory on the other side of the street to fall dark, some of the workers to return tomorrow to put up the fences and the razor wire that'll guard the factory's empty shell. It's a final indignity, that these men should be put to work one last time caging in the remains of his livelihood, at the behest of his former paymaster ensuring that no one will ever return to work here again. The men, men just like Valeri, will find something to do, somewhere to go during the days to earn some modest wage; resourcefulness and resiliency are the values of his class. Still, as Valeri returns from the union hall that night he knows this to be a seminal moment in his life, as history runs its course all around him the aggrieved injustice of it all striking him in a way instinctive, almost guttural. Should he be so inclined, this would make for a perfect moment to fight back; at the moment, though, he's not so inclined, thinking as he is of ways to feed himself. "...And I think we're going to be okay," says Hannah, not to Valeri but on the line with her mother. She talks loudly enough to be heard clearly from across their little flat, perhaps a habit learned from having to shout across an overcrowded A&E. Valeri tries not to listen in, but can't help himself.

He's returned home to his small, hollow apartment, sparsely furnished, with dishes piled in the kitchen sink and clothes in a laundry basket square in the middle of the living room's floor. Though he's tired, Valeri sleeps little that night, in a hundred other such apartments the same scenario playing itself out a hundred times, little flats across Britain never real places but instead places imagined, unreal, even esoteric in their unreality, the war against men like Valeri having visited upon him hopelessness and poverty. But Valeri isn't like all the others; he never loses hope. After the meeting at the union hall, Valeri can't suppress a mounting optimism, some vague instinct in him compelling him to place his faith in the coming strike even as he knows in his heart the strike can't succeed in its stated aims. He sleeps, on this night, as he's slept every night since Murray began taking him to union halls, to churches, to universities across London, in fits and bursts, restlessly, to wake as tired as when he went to bed.

He realizes that so long as there's air in his lungs and blood in his heart, there's hope for a better tomorrow. At least, this is what he convinces himself on as he struggles to come to grips with what's happening to him. With the world wallowing in crisis and with conditions there to breed a smouldering discontent, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be governed wholly by the passions of the moment. Our struggle, you see, demands of us a focus on an ultimate end, one which can only be reached should each of us conserve our strength for decisive action. But sometimes Valeri, tired, can only yield to the banalities of life, to the hard work for little pay, to the small, run-down box of an apartment, to the small but widening holes in his jeans and to the ever-present threat of losing that which is the envy of no man but which is better than having none at all. In this state of mind he is trapped, needing as he does his own to take on the burden of shaping these vague impulses and these subversive urges into something more.

In the world at large, there's trouble afoot, in the other empires men just like Valeri agitating for their own future. While the screens fill with news of foreign armies moving this way and that, never fighting but posturing for a fight, it may yet take only the slightest provocation for all of these troubled empires, filled with restlessness and agitation, to set themselves on one another in a bid to relieve themselves of their own troubles. At night, it's still too hot out for Valeri to bear, these heady summer days concealing a frustration and an antipathy from within which there can be drawn the steely determination and the straight-faced strength needed to win through this most difficult time, this tentative early stage where nothing seems certain but continuous defeat. At night, the streets become shrouded in darkness, the sickly, pale orange light of the streetlamps casting an eerie glow on the road. Though we're in the midst of a mounting crisis, a burgeoning revolutionary struggle, I hope you'll join me in admiring the beauty of these streets, these rivers of amber and golden light coursing through the dark, its life-giving brightness an anaemic imitation, a caricature of the brilliant radiance of the sun's natural light. It's in these troubled times that we learn to find that kind of small beauty wherever it can be found, for without it we might be tricked into thinking the world we live in to be black as the darkest night.

If we don't take advantage of these last opportunities to savour what few pleasures are reserved for men like Valeri, then our history's future may yet take them away from us forever. But as the fires of history burn, men like Valeri still live their lives, working in the day, tossing and turning at night, all the while recalling the sight of so many columns of smoke rising from the city's streets, imagining himself drawn to the fight for history's future. Nevermore lacking in spirit, we take what's happened so far and we look at it in sum. As Valeri finds work here and there, he makes his meagre wages stretch further than ever before. But the wealthy man continues to parcel off the land and sell it to the travellers from halfway around the world, the whole lot of them conspiring against him whether they realize it or not. Then, Valeri adapts, as he is so accustomed to adapting, to making life work with a steadily shrinking wealth, space, energy, life. Each time, this sequence of events repeats itself, each taking less time than the last, each forcing the men like Valeri to subsist on less than he'd subsisted on before, the vicious cycle reducing itself until there'll come a time when it can reduce no more.

What happens then will leave all of our lives changed forever, in ways we'd never thought it possible for them to be changed, in the darkness of the night all bearing witness to the deception in all our histories combined. Although Valeri is now unemployed but for the odd shift as a day labourer, he seems to live two lives, as two wholly incompatible personalities. One Valeri seeks to give in to the passions of sedition, while the other Valeri still holds out hope that each day to come might bring relief. Both are wrong.

14. In the Trenches

Although classes are suspended at the polytechnic, Sean Morrison and some of the more committed students continue to spend much of their days on campus. For the student, the battleground has always been in the study halls, fighting not over territory but the consciousness of men, his weapons not guns but ideas, words marshalled in their service like a rifle's bullets. Still in his formative years, Sean must learn to temper the lofty expectations of youth for short term gain in order to harness the passion burning with the fire of a desert's sun. After he's given a speech to the small crowd of gathered students, he yields the steps outside the polytechnic's main hall to another, then listens all the same. "...And our memories of the war fifteen years ago shall never be forgotten," the speaker declares, "for so long as we keep the fires of liberation burning the light they provide shall never be extinguished." It's in this spirit that the students at the polytechnic, and students across Britain have agreed to join in the coming strike, to march in the streets in lockstep with the workers, the parishioners, and all the others. Although classes are still suspended at the polytechnic, and at many of the other colleges and universities across Britain, Sean and the others will go on strike anyways, throwing their lot in with the loose coalition about to form.

In the time left before this current crisis escalates dramatically, the students have much to learn. For men like Valeri, work has become like warfare, a constant struggle with an overwhelming force for the right to what's his. As his world crumbles all around him, Valeri drives over the same ground rhythmically, compulsively, in a ritual familiar to him from hundreds of years of experience. For men like Valeri, work is like warfare, every day his struggle one for a steadily shrinking sustenance. Even before Valeri joins in with the rebels and fashions for himself a means of finally seizing that which is rightfully his, his is a constant war, in the act of going to work and submitting himself for exploitation at the hands of his wealthy paymasters he commits an act of war, just as his wealthy paymasters themselves commit an act war in taking from him his labour and giving him, in exchange, his pittance, this sort of mundane struggle over the expropriation of wealth at the centre of daily life for all. After Valeri leaves the union hall for the last time before the coming strike, he meets with Sydney, taking into his little flat in the middle of the afternoon, one afternoon. She seems, to him, a bit more hesitant than usual, as her flowing locks of jet-black hair and her skin smooth and light accentuate her figure, slender and petite though she may be. She says to him, "you could come back to work at the shop." But Valeri says, "I don't want to work at that shop anymore." And Sydney says, "are you glad they got rid of you?" But Valeri says, "not exactly." In truth, his cupboards are no barer than they were before, and his clothes are no more or less tattered. As a day labourer Valeri can only survive; but he craves something more.

A bomb bursts, blowing out a storefront, mangling bodies and spilling blood. When the police arrive, gunmen attack, the tell-tale rattling of gunfire chattering across the street while the policemen take cover. It's all a confused and disoriented mess, men shooting at nothing, nothing shooting back, stray rounds burying in concrete while voices shout. When it's over, two rebel gunmen are dead, one policeman wounded. With nothing gained from the attack, it seems the rebels have sacrificed two men for nothing. But not all is as it seems. In his flat, Valeri and Sydney can feel the bursting of bombs, barely, through the rattling of the floor beneath them. But Sydney persists in her questioning, saying to him, "I could ask them to take you back on. They're having real trouble finding good workers." And Valeri reacts derisively, saying, "that's only because all the workers are too fed up to give them good work." In the moment it strikes Valeri as jarring, almost absurd, the way they can discuss such things even as their bodies are bared to one another, her youthful, supple body contrasting with his muscular bulk. They've made love already tonight, and they'll make love again, after they've finished not-arguing. And in the meanwhile, they'll listen to the distant rattling of gunfire, the muffled bursting of bombs, each seeming to stud the darkness of the night, until neither Sydney nor Valeri can listen to it or to each other any longer, their making love seemingly a last, futile way to reconcile their differences in the last days before everything changes. But they both know, Valeri knows she'll go back to her part of the city and take in with her family, as she should. He'll say he loves her, and she'll say she loves him. They don't, but they think they do, and that's what's important to them. It's not to be the last time they'll see one another, nor the last time they'll make love, but between now and the then it'll be remembered a different way, an odd way, a curious, roundabout sort of way.

Across the city, there's action. "Nobody move!" It comes without warning, the doors to the underground church broken down, following it a series of troopers rushing inside. There's no gunfire, only the sound of voices shouting at the troopers, men and women clutching their Bibles. The troopers go round, demanding the identities of every parishioner, frisking them for weapons, finding none. It's a fruitless search, these troopers acting on an exaggerated report of illegal firearms stored somewhere on the premises. Darren Wright's there, but his younger friend Sheila has found herself work for the night, sparing her the experience. In the heat of the moment Darren loses sight of himself, looking for something that isn't there, the sanctuary that is his underground church violated like the rough and coarse action of a man having his way unwanted with a woman half his size. This is only one of many ill-timed raids the police stage, on this night, on many nights past, on many nights to come, but it's this night that brings the raid Darren will remember much longer than he should. "I'm going to stand up to them from now on," he says. "And I'll be right there with you," says Sheila, the next time she's come to the underground church. There's a chorus of full-throated agreement, even as their priest warns them on the path ahead as fraught with danger.

Days pass. Perhaps a week or two. After Valeri has last seen his lover, Sydney, he doesn't take in with the rioters in the streets but returns to his reading. Terms present themselves to him, terms like 'political economy' and 'superstructure,' terms with little real meaning to him but immense value in the abstract. After having given up on his reading for a few weeks, it takes some effort to get back into it, and right now this is an effort he can't quite muster. He gives up on his reading, in the night, one night, not to take it up again for a long time. In the night, on this night, he's not alone in his little flat, Hannah released from the hospital for a rare night off. She's not been given the night off by her employer; the tube is shut down and the buses aren't running, leaving her no way to get to work. "Some people might die because of it," she'd said to him, before she'd gone to bed. "People are dying anyways," Valeri had said, "the harder you work to try and stop it, the more rope you give them to hang us with." Of course Hannah hadn't wanted to hear that, but she'd been too exhausted to put up much of an argument, leaving Valeri to a flat silent but for the sounds of sirens emanating in from the distant city. In truth, it's been a hard day for everyone, but by nightfall only two have died, with the hundred injured drawing the care and the concern of the world's screens. Meanwhile, elsewhere in London a pair of rebel gunmen happen across a convoy of police armoured cars, in the night a confused exchange of gunfire burying bullets in the pavement, shattering glass, and puncturing tyres. But most rounds fire at shadows, at flickers of light in the night, at something imagined where there's nothing at all. The rebel gunmen are shot dead. A couple of policemen are injured, but both recover in hospital. Although this is not the first of the rebel attacks—in fact, those have been ongoing intermittently ever since the failed uprising fifteen years ago—they represent a new escalation, among the first of many.

It's not fair, it's never been fair for men like Garrett Walker to languish in the misery and shiftlessness of unemployment while half a city away the wealthy live in luxury despite having never broken a sweat. Still he senses the impending disaster, in the primal, instinctive sort of way all such men can, in the street telling a neighbour, "I'm sick of the way they talk about us." His neighbour agrees, as have many in England since the failed rising fifteen years ago, and many more in the years before. "They close all our mills and shut down all our factories then pin the blame on us for not being able to find work," he says, "and then they raise the rent!" This, as news breaks of the latest rise in rates, in charges and surcharges which'll send prices climbing ever higher. Soon he learns the lesson generations of working men have each had to learn for themselves. But while Garrett and his neighbour agree on their state of affairs, in the background events continue to mount. As the wealthy man's campaign of construction reaches its fevered pitch, Valeri must keep on working as a day labourer, his aching and sore muscles becoming used to the unending exertion even as his mind, free to wander as his body moves rhythmically like a machine, tempts him with fantasies of joining the scattered, disparate crowds gathering in the streets.

At work, his muscles contract and expand, the same routine performed on command a thousand times over to make a day, working himself tired, earning himself his daily pittance while enriching the wealthy man many times over. But as Valeri looks aside and casts his silent sympathies in with the rabble rousing trouble in the streets he allows his mind's eye to fill with quixotic fantasies of raising his fists in anger right alongside they who would have nothing left to lose. In the night, another pair of gunmen ready themselves for action, this time not lying in wait but striking out. Staking out positions near a police station, the gunmen open fire, cracking holes in the station's red-brick façade, shattering glass, sending policemen diving for cover. There's screaming and shouting, the light, erratic gunfire of the rebels soon met with the chattering of the policemen's rifles. The gunmen die. Three policemen are wounded, and one later dies of wounds in hospital. Between these three attacks, six rebel gunmen dead for one trooper dead and another wounded. Other attacks take place throughout Britain, the rebel sacrificing what few men he has in these tentative, early attacks. These seem a fool's exchange, but the rebel leaders are no fools.

A black sky hides all motives. A dark room bares all thoughts. At the armoury, things have taken a turn for the worse. All the days spent cleaning the guns can't make up for the steadily growing dread that's invaded every moment of every day. For Private Craig Thompson, this means little changes but for the imposing sentence of confinement to the barracks. With the rest of the troops he learns of the unrest despite the strict controls on the flow of information into and out of their base. When Colonel Cooke learns of their subterfuge, he has the base thoroughly searched and every unauthorized screen destroyed. No one knows yet what's happening, why it's happening, and as Private Thompson looks over the guns just after the day's inspection it occurs to him something must be coming, the instinct in him taking over even in the presence of a suffocating information blackout. "Don't feel too bad for yourself," says the Colonel, suddenly standing above and behind him, "it's not for men like you to worry about the grand scheme of things. It's not even for men like me, to be frank." Private Thompson snaps to, but takes a half-second too long. Soon, he's in the stockade. Over the next several weeks, these attacks occur sporadically, leaving the troopers confused and disoriented.

On the face of it, there seems to be no motive, no coherent organization to these attacks. Naturally, men like Miguel Figueroa and women like Rose Powell understand; word spreads through the working class apartment blocks and the shantytowns that a resistance is afoot, years of neglect and abuse rendering them a sympathetic caste to the lashing out against the symbols of power. At a meeting of concerned citizens, held in a church not long after these street attacks have begun, Valeri takes the pulpit. He comes here not as a union representative, but as an ordinary worker, even one who's out of work. You see, Valeri is in that tentative, early time in his quest, when he's begun to grow into the role his future would have to offer him but when he's still paralyzed with rage and insecurity. "Brothers and sisters," he says, "we have stood by and watched the theft of our homes for too long. Some of you might still believe in the power of compromise, but I tell you this: any compromise between right and wrong is a moral fraud. We want only dignity, and they want only to take away our dignity. Do we compromise and offer to surrender to them only half our dignity? No!" A raised fist prompts shouts of agreement from the audience, in turn a smile on Valeri's face. "We are not animals," he continues, "and we are not objects of theirs to be manipulated, to be traded for the profit of another." It's a rousing speech, but one which fails to command even Valeri's full attention, thoughts lingering in the back of his mind of the things he's done to Maria, these thoughts struggling with themselves in a confusing mess of guilt and pride, arrogant pride. You see, Valeri's a much more complicated figure than our history has chosen to remember, and he's yet to reach his destiny.

After finishing one set of fortifications Stanislaw Czerkawski can have only one night's rest before made to head out for the next. He hardly sees his wife. In the night he sleeps patiently, dreaming of the day when he'll become master of his own destiny. For so long as his half-second of peace endures Stanislaw's he can count himself among no master's slave, no bossman's plaything. In the morning he sees through the brightened darkness of the dawn and into the next day over, imagining only peace where there's war. But imaginings aren't enough. Arriving at his worksite, he finds there's no work for the day, the foreman telling him to beat it. But then the foreman says something that pushes Stanislaw the wrong way; the foreman yells, "you dirty Polacks can find someone else to bother today!" By the time he's collected himself, Stanislaw's in cuffs, piled into the back of a police lorry along with the rest of the ne'er-do-wells, trundling along the streets of the working class neighbourhoods heading for a police station to sit in a cell. They don't know the true purpose of their labour, but soon enough they will find out.

The raids were meant, in part, to gather labourers to perform forced labour in Britain's many prisons, their forced labour masquerading as rehabilitation. But Stanislaw, like all the others, is forced to surrender his labour for the profit of his former paymasters, among others. In time, it'll occur to Stanislaw that it matters little what he's done, little what he's to be convicted of in court, as his fate is meant only as part of the feverish campaign by the wealthy to wring every last pound they can before the real revolution begins. After things have begun to fall into place, Valeri steps up his efforts, meeting with his fellow workers at the hall, one at a time, gathering pledges and signing men, in his dreams building a grand coalition that could topple even the mightiest tyrant. But it's not that simple. It's never that simple. In the union hall that night, no agreement is reached, the skeptics still outnumbering the hawks, for the moment Valeri bitterly accepting their work must continue.

A vote is taken. The union narrowly votes against participating in the coming marches. Though the vote has turned against action, Valeri knows not to accept this vote, for he has come to appreciate, in the way that he has, that consensus is not measured; it must be forged. "Don't worry," says Murray, "we'll be there." In the night, it's always in the night, Valeri arrives home to find Hannah asleep, still in her scrubs, dried blood stains and all. He thinks not to disturb her, and toes gently past the door to her bedroom. But just when he thinks he's made it, he hears her voice. "Water's out again," Hannah says. "You would be better to tell me when it's on," Valeri says. "You can't be serious," Hannah says. "Why can't I?" Valeri asks. Hannah sighs. "I wish you would become more cheerful in my company," she says, "what's the point of fighting if you don't ever stop?" And Valeri doesn't reply to that last remark, simply reaching for a bottle of flat beer on a shelf and taking a swig. It's dark, with only the hall's dull light to cast a half-illumination on the scene, making it look like they live in a world where up might be down, where right might be wrong, where black might be brighter than the brightest of whites. And what is Valeri to do? And what is any of them to do? Despite his minimal involvement in the union's affairs, he's no activist, no leader, only a young man on the cusp of becoming something more than what he is. But for now, Hannah must accept that Valeri is becoming his own man. She says to him, "it's been a few years since we became roommates," then pauses before continuing, "I think for now you should work!" But she doesn't realize Valeri's weakness is his strength, his lack of a family, of a wife make him free to join the coming rising. But first he's got a lot left to lose.

As war goes, this is a war as yet lacking in decisive battles, in daring offensives marked by bold, red arrows striking across a map. This is a war familiar to men like Valeri only in some basic, visceral way, the kind of familiarity bred by years of hard living, by scrounging and saving for so many years just to buy a simple jacket, a pair of boots, an ordinary desk fashioned out of ordinary wood. This while Valeri is fluctuating along with the long, slow passage of time. He's confused, he's always confused, even as he's made up his mind that he's got it all figured out. Days pass. Whenever Valeri and Hannah are in their flat at the same time, they continue arguing. "You never tried to do anything with your life," says Hannah. "That's not true," says Valeri. "What have you done?" Hannah asks. If it seems Hannah's around more often than she'd used to be, it's because a slowing of the violence in the streets has afforded her the rare night off, the A&E demanding a little less of her time. "What've you done?" asks Hannah. But Valeri doesn't respond, can't respond for his being paralyzed with rage.

He is confronted every day with made-up images of actors pretending to enjoy the wonders of the modern world, but he has not yet become desensitized to them. Every time Valeri's screen fills with these propaganda advertisements for luxury and opulence he can never have, he is filled with a simmering anger, his thoughts again drifting to the romanticism of the war fifteen years ago, where once men like Valeri had dared to dream. In the days that follow, Valeri looks tired, working to struggle forward, never looking back. For a little while, at least, Valeri stops going to the union hall, stops seeing his mentor Mark Murray, instead choosing to spend his time in the streets. Days pass. The next time they catch each other in the flat at the same time, Valeri and Hannah have at it again. "I don't fight for nothing," Valeri says, "I always fight for what's right and fair." Hannah shrugs and says, "if you don't stop saying such things I'll get really annoyed with you." Valeri laughs. "If you haven't gotten annoyed with me already then I'll just have to try harder." "I'm serious," she says. "Me too," he says. But Valeri relishes, in a perverse way, this kind of antagonism; he likes seeing her frustrated at his attitude. Although Valeri's had some minimal participation in the union's campaign, in truth, he is only one man, an ill-mannered malcontent looking to lash out at anything he should. Although Valeri doesn't know it, Hannah briefly contemplates the idea of asking him to marry her. Days pass again. For the first time, they can't pay their rent. Valeri's not making enough as a day labourer. The NHS is faced with such drastic funding shortfalls that Hannah's owed thousands of pounds in back-pay, which she knows she'll never get. But Graham doesn't even flinch, too many tenants too far behind on their rents for their delinquency to register much.

Keeping an even keel becomes difficult in these trying times. At night, the noise in the street rises and seems to come from all places at once, making it impossible for Valeri to rest. But then he's used to the sleepless nights, just as he's used to that tired feeling, that aching sensation that twists from the backs of his eyes at all hours of the day and which makes it harder than ever to function. Men like Valeri are paid their pittance, and then is made to hand over their pittance again in exchange for the necessities of life sold at vastly inflated prices, the whole of the work made to be surrendered to his wealthy paymasters, his person becoming a mechanism for the wealthy to use for their own profit and then unceremoniously discarded when he's too old, frail, or broken to be of further use. At their flat, Valeri runs into Graham, once, the elderly landlord making a terse comment on the unpaid rents. It strikes Valeri that Graham is himself mired in hopeless poverty but still can't think to do anything but keep on trying to gather rents, even from tenants who no longer live at Dominion Courts. One day, Valeri was in the halls at the right time to see Graham interrogating a family in one of the suites for six months of owed rents, the old man not realizing they'd been in their one-room flat for only a month. Later, Graham angrily tells Valeri he's raising their rent, seeming to forget Valeri and Hannah haven't paid their rent for the last month. Valeri swears he can smell rum on the old man's breath, but doesn't mention it.

But while Valeri wanders the streets during the day in search of increasingly scarce work, he spends less and less time at their flat, wanting as he does to avoid Hannah. Little does Valeri know how close Hannah has come to the breaking point. So consumed he's become in the coming apocalypse he can hardly see the unraveling of her life even as she unravels right in front of him. Days pass again. Whenever Valeri and Hannah are in the flat at the same time, they continue arguing. "Valeri," says Hannah, "I love you. I don't love you as a lover. You're like a cousin to me, like a brother. Do you hear me? You're so stubborn. Why did you go away that time? Now you're coming to us, to me. I can't go for anything. I can't let you go. You're all I need in the world." Valeri shakes his head. "What if they find me here?" he asks. "Don't go," she says. "I have to," he says. "You have that man, Lawrence, to keep you company," he says. "He's not here anymore," she says. "Where is he?" Valeri asks. She doesn't answer, and Valeri thinks her one-time partner might've been killed in the streets. With the bombs bursting and the gunfire rattling in the distance, it seems only a matter of time before the insurgency in the North of England comes here.

And in the time it takes them to have this conversation, Valeri's personal life goes up in smoke. But with the strike in the offing, he can devote no further energies to such things, even as he knows full well this isn't the last he's heard of his roommate and her love for him. But Valeri doesn't take in with Hannah's outpouring of emotion, in his changing state of mind such thoughts seeming, to him, to be a weakness, an indulgence which people like him don't have time for. He's wrong on that thought, even as he's completely right. Still there's a part of him that wants to respond in kind, to take in with the love she's offered. The tension between these parts causes him great discomfort. It's a tension that'll take him many, many years, and many experiences to resolve, by which time Hannah may be dead. After his latest argument with Hannah, Valeri leaves their flat, the tension unresolved.

Still there continues a campaign aimed at wringing every last ounce of wealth from the country and its people, like stripping the last flesh right off bone. Announcing the closure of another mill, the talking heads on the screens declare so many livelihoods liquidated, condemning those who'd held them to another lifetime of poverty and neglect. As the workers leave at the end of what would be their last day, they pass alongside banners, electronic banners announcing the limited availability of as-yet unbuilt luxury towers. As the workers make good across the city and into their neighbourhood of working class apartment blocks there's still that image of gleaming, glass and steel towers put up in place of industry, in place of industriousness to threaten their insecurities and to mock them in their moment of weakness, a mockery that'll be remembered when once their places switch and their fates inverse. "I know," says Maria, "but you've got to think of what kind of risk you're taking." Valeri sucked in his lips and looked out the window. "As I see it," he says, finally, "I'm sick and tired of running. If it was up to me, I'd be up in there with them, attacking rather than waiting for the signal to march without arms." Valeri's met with Hannah, not by design but by coincidence running into her in the streets not altogether far from Victory Monument in the middle of the night. But Maria knows things Valeri doesn't, runs in circles Valeri doesn't. Although her influence in these circles is small, she knows just enough to caution him.

"Be patient," Maria says, "everyone has their role to play. You can't throw your life away now, because you haven't realized your true purpose yet. It's not your time." "Bah!" Valeri won't hear it. He can't hear it. Too caught up in the passion of rebellion, his emotions render him short-sighted and naïve. His mother and father were the same way, just before they died. No sooner have the streets of Britain left one crisis do the men who live on them find themselves immersed in another, this new crisis seeing men like Valeri put their newfound knowledge to the test. Outside, somewhere across the city not altogether far, Valeri makes his way home for the night, his feet sore, his hands dirty, his clothes looking respectable at a distance but up close looking slightly ragged and worn, with small holes in key locations around his waist and sleeves marking the exact places where his body had learned to work through the day without any input from his mind. The sky, still light in a mid-summer's swoon, is thick and hazy, smoke from fires burning hundreds of kilometres away obscuring much of the sun's light, the city itself shrouded behind a dense smog which makes it all seem to Valeri more than a little surreal. A stormy discharge of orange bolts could loose fire under his little rented apartment at any time, and this thought strikes him gently as he climbs the stairs towards his little box of a home waiting for him at the end of a long, hard day. Across the city, the hours had passed, and in those hours the streets had become all but deserted. The streetlights flicker, the trees rustle in a light wind, and every so often an ambulance comes wheeling through, sirens screaming, lights flashing. And meanwhile, the newly-formed Popular Front gathers its strength, continuing to work behind the scenes to unite the dissident factions in the name of a leader about to be returned to them after a long absence.

But with the world careening through its crisis, Valeri may yet, will yet join with the others, the student, the artist, the pastor, and many more in looking past these meagre attentions and concerns, every mass protest, every strike, every walkout contributing its little bit towards escalating tensions, the inflamed passions to rise until the barriers meant to contain them can contain them no longer, unleashing, then, a violent cataclysm that'll destroy the old and build in its place a new unlike anything that's ever been. Meanwhile, the nascent Popular Front reserves its strength, for now, waiting for the right moment to assert itself in the form of attacks.

A small act of defiance takes place. Some jobless young man spray paints 'NO SURRENDER' in black across a wall inside a construction site, deftly stepping out through that same narrow hole in the fence he'd used to step in. No one sees him. They only see his handiwork, when construction crews arrive in the morning to continue their work. And Valeri's among them, having taken in with the labourers and earned himself a pittance for this one day. It won't last, though, as his temper will soon get the better of him, someway, somehow, and will cost him this job. Meanwhile, the general strike is coming, to be centred on a massive march on London, with hundreds of thousands to flood the streets. The bombs bursting and the gunfire rattling seem to abate, slightly, just enough to be perceptible as a few extra moments of silence, here and there.

Little does Valeri know he'll soon be in a situation where his passions will serve him well, too well. As Valeri looks on this slogan, he takes a liking to it, even though he's seen it before at marches and in the crowd at the hall it seems, now, a little more real to him. It's a subversive act, to store the memory in some hidden part of the mind out of the hope that someday it might become expedient to take it out and expose it to the light. No one but they who found it will ever know what it means, and yet so long as the essence of the act remains carried forward in the spirit of men like Valeri Kovalenko it will always have a way to break free.

15. Apocalypse Rising

During a lull in the action, it seems as though a peaceful interlude has set in. As tends to be the way of things in the time immediately before a crisis explodes, in the streets a tension is felt like the bone-dry underbrush of a forest in the midst of an unusually hot summer, with only a spark needed to set it all aflame. It'll come. It's not far off. But there's still that before-period, when the drama of it all has yet to play itself out and which leaves us all looking ahead in anticipation of what we're sure should've already come. In a world filled with countries, kingdoms, empires beset by internal tensions just like ours, it might seem entirely out of place to look ahead and remark on how quickly things are to fall apart. As we've come to learn, love is anger, and anger is love. As love is spiritual, it seeks to defy the harsh realities of life, here in the working class blocks of mid-twenty-first century Britain and across the world. This defiance makes it angry. But then anger is spiritual as well, seeking to challenge the way of things for dreaming of a better future for all. This dreaming makes it love. For Valeri Kovalenko, this early, confusing time sees him slowly tiring of the constant struggle, even if he can't admit it to anyone, not even himself.

But for Stanislaw Czerkawski, the next days he spends in jail is time spent off the street, the darkness of his cell shared by the others caught for one crime or another. He looks across the dimly-lit room and he sees not hardened criminals nor dangerous psychopaths but the out-of-work or the soon-to-be, holes in their jeans, dirt and muck on their faces, their hair ragged and tangled. For want of a piece of bread and a roof over their heads, these men have been made to lead lives of addiction, criminality, and despair. This is something all working men know, in the basic, instinctive way they can, but which each must learn for himself. It's taken Stanislaw longer than most, but here he is. Stanislaw and the others arrested in the raids are here to perform manual labour, in one of His Majesty's Prisons a factory set up to supply the wealthy men with free labour. With the free labour of men like Stanislaw, they can produce anything they want, anything they need, in their fevered bid to extract every last pound from the faltering British way of life through increasingly desperate measures.

"Lights out!" shouts one of the guards, moments before the whole prison plunges into darkness. "My wife," says Stanislaw, speaking to no one in particular. His cellmates murmur something in response. There's eight of them in a cell with only two bunks. As Stanislaw is clearly the oldest, the others agreed to give him one of the bunks, which he gratefully accepts. The others rotate the remaining bunk. But it's not to be this way much longer. As he works through one day and onto the next, Stanislaw's whole body aches, his muscles are tired and sore, and there's a part of him that longs for it to be over. More than anything else, though, he thinks of his wife, the thought of seeing her again giving him the strength and the courage to keep on working until there's no more work left to be done.

In the stockade Private Craig Thompson isn't alone, with a handful of others awaiting their punishments for their minor crimes. It seems someone up the chain of command has decided the time is now to institute a new crackdown on even the most trivial of offences. They're not bound to be in the stockade for long, not with crisis in the streets about to explode into war. At the barracks there's a lingering sympathy for the crowds in the streets, soldiers like Private Craig Thompson already counted among them in spirit if not in fact. Sequestered on base owing to the current troubles, they have little to do but sleep and sit. The troopers in the street have yet to call on the army for help, and when the time comes the won't use raw recruits like these men, not at first. That'll come later. Craig will be among those men needed to bring order to chaos and to introduce chaos to order.

When once Colonel Cooke comes around, nowadays he seems more involved, looking over the men with a sharper eye and walking among them with a leaner, more purposeful gait. No one dares laugh when now the Colonel exhorts the men to God, country, and King; the Colonel says, "if called upon to make war on his majesty's enemies, then all you men will give all that you have to give, even your lives if deemed necessary." And Private Thompson can only look on with a mounting uncertainty, the experience of living under threat of war only succeeding in keeping him awake at night, staring at the underside of the bunk above, wondering what the day will bring. He won't have to wait long to find out. Eventually, men like Private Thompson will become masters of their own destinies, if only they could find the courage to reach out and grasp it with both hands. Their future lies not in service of the British Army, but in service of that army which all working men are a part of, which all working men the world over look to for liberation.

Yet, it seems only yesterday when we were in the midst of a frantic, frenzied boom. Screens are dominated by talking heads breathlessly proclaiming the release of numbers heralding some impressive new gains in wealth even as half the population patches holes in their jeans and cuts back on the meat in their diet for the doubling, tripling in prices. In front of another block of working class apartments there appears mysteriously in the night a sign boldly proclaiming the coming of a new luxury tower that no one in this neighbourhood will ever be able to afford, while in the night not-homeless men and women pick through dumpsters looking for anything that can be pawned. Still languishing in the prison of listlessness and discontent, Garrett Walker has taken to drowning under a storm of red ink for all the debt notices he's posted in the mail.

It's a criminal offence, for able-bodied men like Garrett to be cast out of work, discarded like some old, disused piece of machinery, then come after to be torn into pieces and then sold for scrap. Though his wife pledges to stay at his side, Garrett knows his daughters can't make the same pledge, nor should they. As he listlessly and methodically looks for work where there is no work to be found, Garrett sees on his screen the same news break as everyone else, bold declarations of an impossible feature, the rising in value of the wealthy man's holdings heralded as progress, prosperity, the talking heads breathlessly announcing the hoarding of wealth as though it were the dawning of a golden age for all. In it Garrett sees only cruel mockery, a celebration of excess while millions try only to fight off hunger for one more day. At some point, and no one, not even Garrett can know when, he gives up hope, some switch inside him flips even as outwardly nothing in his life changes, not immediately. As he looks into the distance and sees the fires of liberation burning deep in the heart of London, he commits himself to breaking out of this prison of the mind called impoverishment. But as Garrett has now come to turn against the way of things so inexorably, so completely, he doesn't yet realize it, in the time it takes one night's sky to so gradually give way to the next morning's light the moment arriving when he begins to harbour sympathies for the rebels in the north, as some have already come to sympathize, as some have yet to sympathize. Garrett can't look his wife in the eye, even as she stands by him. "We'll get through this," she says to him, one evening. But she's out of work, too. "I wish I shared your optimism," says Garrett. "It's not optimism," says his wife, "it's what I believe." Garrett can't think of anything else to say.

If you stop at just the right time of day in just the right part of town and listen, just listen, you'll hear the voices of the thousands and thousands of workers, students, and parishioners cheering in the streets, their faces and their voices reaching from a future we can only dream of to encourage us, here, in their past, our present. In the night, with this city unusually calm, it seems the dark essence which guides the struggle waits. When Valeri next meets Maria, she hardly looks at him. "I don't often get the chance to talk to someone like you," he says, finding her where first they'd met in the street. "You've shown no concern for me," she says, tightening her jacket. He says, "I want to turn back the clock to before..." She finally looks him in the eye and says, "I can't believe that." He looks aside. In the street there's ragged, haggard men walking quickly, trucks and buses rolling past belching smoke and grinding gears. But when Valeri looks at Maria she's starting to turn, as if to make down the sidewalk away from him.

Unwilling to let it be, Valeri starts after Maria, but stops a half-step on. "Don't leave," he says, "I just need you to come with me for a minute. We must talk." But Maria doesn't stop, and Valeri doesn't pursue her. He watches as she disappears down the sidewalk and into a crowd. "You there!" a Police officer shouts at Valeri, "keep moving along! This is no place for loitering!" The officer advances, but Valeri stands his ground. "This is a public street," he says, "I can go anywhere I please." He thinks to pick a fight with the officer, but the better judgement in him wins out. He can see the officer himself is looking for a fight, and he withdraws, muttering something under his breath. "You trash should learn your place," the officer says, "you're the wretched scum who'll all rot in jail." It's as though Valeri exudes an energy that attracts all the wrong kind of attention. But still he withdraws from the scene. Soon Valeri's alone, again. He doesn't know why Maria's seemingly in and out of his life, sometimes walking the street at night, sometimes gone for weeks at a time. But she's secretly an informant, not for the Popular Front but for a small group of fellow travellers who meet infrequently in an old railyard somewhere nearby. Valeri still doesn't know what she was doing when he'd rescued her from the street on that night. She wasn't in with the fellow travellers then, not yet. But it'd been his show of kindness, uncharacteristic even for him, that'd compelled her to take in with them.

At the underground church, the rogue priest has nearly finished preparing the congregation for the next step in their salvation by the time he's taken into the back of a police lorry. Though the congregants, including Darren Wright and his young friend Sheila Roberts have yet to learn all they need about the forbidden gospel, and it's in their ignorance they've become ready to stand. Studying the Bible, the Word of God, Darren happens upon an epiphany which can only come from study. For now, he waits, along with all the others gathering here and in underground churches across England and around the world, waiting for an unmistakable sign from God that their moment is at hand. They won't have long to wait. This is the moment in which all doubt is passed, when Darren is committed irrevocably to the way forward and is turned away from evil. As Darren closes his Bible and leaves for the night, he casts a look down the street and imagines the fires of liberation burning through the night and long into the coming day. "...And remember," says the rogue priest, during one of his many sermons, "when you hear of wars and uprisings, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away. Much hardship lies in your future. You must not only endure it, but embrace it!"

"Amen!" says Darren, in unison with the others in the rogue priest's congregation. Although Darren Wright is among the faithful who would see themselves as guardians of the new spiritual brotherhood, as representing them spiritual character of the burgeoning struggle waged by the working class in the streets, still he, like all the others, doesn't yet recognize the true essence of the struggle before him. He doesn't know the larger forces at work, the angels and demons hiding in the shadows, about to step into the light.

But the streets are eerily quiet, the air free from the chattering tension that should be thriving. In his little flat, Valeri's taken to avoiding study, as he once might've immersed himself in it. As Valeri steels himself against the coming day one morning, he scarcely notices Hannah on her way in after a frantic night at the A&E. They talk for a little while, before quickly resorting to argument. "Are you a heroic figure?" she asks. "Hardly," he says. "Then what are you?" she asks. "I'm nothing more than a man. And I do only what good men do. Anyone in my place who is good would do what I'm doing." He stops. "And do you know what's going on in the world?" he asks, turning to face her. "Who can think of the world? We have to look out for ourselves," she says. "If everyone only looks out for themselves," he declares, "then we'll all have so much pain and suffering, without any hope of relief." No longer talking just about Valeri's deepening involvement in the struggle, it seems they're both determined to have this conversation in the privacy of their own home. "Since we're both here," she says, "I want to tell you one thing." He says nothing, instead letting the weight of the moment invade the space between them. "Valeri," she says, "this is no time for heroics. You should stay here with me. I need you." She pauses, then steps at him and rests her hands on his broad shoulders. She says, "I love you." She embraces him. He doesn't respond. His hands stay at his sides.

At the polytechnic, the students continue to gather despite the continued cancellation of classes. In the central courtyard Sean Morrison has taken up residence, occupying the open space with tents. Amid the steadily mounting crisis gripping Britain's streets the occupation of the polytechnic is only a minor episode, but like the other minor episodes it's emblematic of a larger struggle to wrest control of the public space from private hands. "I won't go back home without what I've been promised," says one student. "They can come and attack us but I won't leave," says another. Sean says to them both, "after all that's happened, I hope you can stand your ground when the worst comes. I've got a feeling somethings coming that'll make Bloody Sunday look like a happy time." They agree on this point.

The police watch, standing in a loose circle, waiting for the students to act out. In the distance the fires of liberation burn, their thick columns of smoke reaching for the sky, threatening to blot out the sun and cast darkness over the cityscape. It's not Sean's time to speak; with Julia he listens to the student body president declare their occupation as a strike against the criminal order, in seizing and holding this space for so long as they must the students are depriving the criminal order of the control it needs. But there's more to it than that. While the polytechnic has all but shut down, the students keep on studying, assembling knowledge by their collective experience in asserting their own identity. Now, Sean realizes their true purpose. Now, he sees clearly. Although Sean has much to learn about the intellectual character of the revolutionary struggle, still he failed to give himself over completely, enthusiastically to the things hidden from him, to the angels in the midst of an unseen but titanic battle with demons. He's a small part of a much larger struggle, one which his eventual death will make impossible for him to see.

At their apartment, Valeri and Hannah still argue. "Don't go," she says. "I have to," he says. "If you didn't have to, would you still go?" she asks. "I would," he says. "Then go," she says. As she takes a half-step back and begins to withdraw the embrace, he reaches for her and pulls her back in, kissing her, savouring the taste of her mouth. Finally, he says, "this has been a long time coming." She says, "it has." He says, "but it'll have to end here." They don't speak of the kiss, of their shared feelings for one another in the meanwhile, awkwardly dancing around the subject as has come to be their way. Neither can forget, though, the confession of love, and both feel an almost-regret at the knowing perversion of a love that can never be. Somehow, the next time Valeri turns to the streets, he can see anew how many crushed and mangled lives are left behind by the day's business. In the night, it's always in the night, it's easier to destroy men and women; even the jackal prefers the dark hours of gloom. Still Valeri has himself a glimpse of the bottommost depths of life, the very sump of its ugly pit. At a younger age, he might've taken the musty, mouldy stench, the smell of swamp rot wafting up to him as a chance to reach for something new and unexplored. The biggest demonstration Britain's ever seen is about to take place, and Valeri will be right in the thick of it. Although he's been in and out of the union hall, not altogether involved in his mentor Mark Murray's work but there, sometimes, he'll be among the people who march on Westminster. Hannah will be at the A&E.

Indifferent to all this in the narrow alleys lie the lacerated, tormented, broken bodies of young girls with arms thrown back in convulsive gestures of agony. Only at the very riverfront, in the black, ugly night does Valeri find a respite from the gloom, watching the water's ripples lap against the hull of a passing container ship under armed escort from a Royal Navy gunboat. He thinks back to his mother and father, to their heroic deaths in the failed war fifteen years ago, and he feels a gnawing shame at having come to see as sexual and romantic a woman like his roommate, as though the temptation exists in him to concede that men and women must develop these attractions to one another when confined to such spaces together for so long. But even in the late-autumn's night, it's unseasonably hot, the sun beating down on all London, turning the city into a sauna, making Valeri's shirt stick to his back, drenching him in sweat. The coming demonstrations will be unlike those that've become a common feature of life in British cities since the failed uprising fifteen years ago; it'll be bigger, bolder, more aggressive, and in league with the rebels in the Popular Front. At least, that's what the demonstration's organizers have been assured.

Even as he's about to take to the streets with hundreds of thousands, still the steadily warming planet forces him into shelter wherever he can find it; still there's the knowledge of bare cupboards and empty store shelves facing him wherever he goes. But this is only true while some kilometres away the wealthy men hoard their food so they may dispense it in precisely-measured portions, the portions seeming to grow smaller by the day. If the warming planet should starve men like Valeri much longer, then the only choice they'll have is between death by the trooper's bullets or by a slow, excruciating starvation. Tomorrow, Valeri will join Murray and hundreds of thousands of workers, students, and parishioners in the streets of lawyers across Britain and throughout Europe, from Barcelona to Bonn, from Liverpool to Lviv, from Paris to Ploesti. In union, each will look to one another for a spiritual support, in solidarity providing one another with that critical part of what it means to be. In the night, the fires of liberation still burn, only now the flames have been hidden behind the rising clouds of smoke billowing from a thousand and one smokestacks like burning embers lodged at the base of a still-smoldering home.

Even as this night sees the fires of liberation burning in the distance, colouring the sky a crisp, burnt-orange gold, Valeri's already tired but somehow also filled with an electric energy coursing through his veins and seeping into every movement he makes, every smooth, rhythmic contraction of his muscles as he works through the night. Right now, men like Valeri are leaderless, like a ship without a rudder, cast adrift, at the mercy of the currents. Right now, Valeri is decided on throwing his lot in with the rising tides of history, but without a steady hand to guide him he may find himself hurled against the rocky shores at the base of an imposing cliff. In the night, the sirens in the distance never stop wailing, instead fading in and out, warbling and whooping while the city lurches and lumbers through another night of disarray. At last, dawn breaks. A new day promises the arrival of a new era, one in which all accounts shall be settled and all debts shall be forgiven. A future lays itself out before us like a road reaching across the desert landscape towards the horizon, offering itself as the way forward. But it's not for the faint of heart.

16. The Die is Cast

After so many years of neglect, it's all come to this. In the streets, the day has come, across the United Kingdom ordinary workers, students, and parishioners take to the streets of cities large and small, among them Valeri Kovalenko in with a crowd on a street somewhere not far from the Palace of Westminster itself. Although their stated reason for gathering is to protest the government's austerity measures, events soon degenerate into the venting of rage. The crowd advances towards a line of troopers standing across the street with their arms at the ready. We'll never know the reason why it happened, what happens next. A thrown rock or bottle, someone trooper's jostled elbow, or just plain panic. A gunshot cracks through the air, then silence. Another gunshot cracks, then another, then another, soon the rattling of indiscriminate gunfire chattering in the air, tearing holes in the sound of so many people screaming, this time screams of raw terror. Valeri doesn't see the shots; very few people do. But he hears the chattering, the sharp, erratic chattering of gunfire seeming to punctuate every scream . "What's happening?!" asks a young woman alongside Valeri, seeming to freeze in place while the horror dawns on her. "They're killing us!" says Valeri, himself stunned, his legs seeming to give way as he struggles to keep his balance. Others cry out. "What's going on?" "I've been shot!" "Oh God!" "Somebody help me!" But soon above the voices rises a terrible cacophony of screams, blood-curdling screams, drowning out all other sounds but the cracking of rifle fire, which doesn't relent as more people are gunned down but only intensifies.

The black-clad troopers move forward in a ragged, jagged line, shepherding the crowd down the street with a wave of death, leaving behind blood-soaked asphalt and a scattering of broken, lifeless bodies. It's a sight that recalls memories of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry more than fifty years ago, for those old enough to remember such acts of cold-blooded murder, only this seeing ten times as many killed. A few of the troops pause, but don't stop, their guns silent only for the time it takes them to reload. As Valeri doesn't know what to do, he can't move, can't think, everything in him suddenly blotted out by an overwhelming terror. A momentary pause in the gunfire allows voices to be heard. "Stop this!" "Don't shoot!" "I don't want to die!" "You're killing us!" But these voices don't affect the troopers, who keep on shooting into the crowds. The rebels in the North of England has finally achieved the breakthrough it's long sought after, a critical moment which should permit the long-simmering unrest to finally escalate into war.

At the polytechnic, news breaks of the massacre moments after the first bodies hit the pavement, and the students riot. "It can't be," says Sean Morrison, standing among a small group of students looking at a screen on the wall, on the screen images of the massacre. "It's impossible!" says another student. "How could this have happened?" asks another. No one knows what to do. But the images of murder, cold-blooded murder in the streets played over and over, from every conceivable angle, slowed until picked apart frame by frame soon inspire in the students a bloodlust none of them have ever known. Sean's one of the first to pick up a stone and hurl it through a nearby window, soon the whole crowd seemingly ten times larger as they rampage across the polytechnic's grounds, setting fires, overturning cars, and smashing glass. It's the work of Irish republican terrorists, of Scottish nationalists, of right wing extremists, of communists and socialists, everyone seems to have a different opinion of what's happened, why it's happened, and all we can do is remind ourselves that none of us are above the laws which govern us all. It's none of these; it's the inevitable for resistance to provoke murder.

Hearing the crack of gunfire and the screaming of voices in terror, Valeri makes for the side of the street, seeking cover. But he trips over the curb and finds himself set upon by a young trooper, shielding his face with his hands as the trooper rains blows on him with a nightstick. In the chaos, this exchange becomes lost, the two men struggling against one another drawing the attention of Valeri's friend Murray. In two strides, Murray's alongside them, his iron fist describing an arc in the air and landing on the trooper's head; a second later Murray tosses the trooper aside, the trooper's body sagging under the impact of two leaden blows to the face. Murray reaches for Valeri, grabs him by the shoulders, and sets him on his feet. "Let's go," Murray says, "we should leave." Valeri nods. They make off down an alley. At the underground church, the parishioners cut off from their rogue priest emerge into the street, clutching Bibles, chanting in time with one another, demanding justice for the fallen. As Darren Wright is among them, he feels not afraid of the policeman's bullets but emboldened by their use in massacring the demonstrators, at the centre of his chest an anger rising that should guide his steps along the street and never lead him astray.

In the working class blocks, the mood strikes immediately. "They're murderers," says one man. In the days to come, everything changes. "You don't know two hundred were killed fighting for our homes!" insists another. "They gave up their lives gladly for our happiness," still another says. "And for our cause!" says one more. At the union halls, in the classrooms, in the pews these views are angrily shared among men. Workers will soon stage massive wildcat strikes. Students will walk out of classes. Churches will hold sermons where pastors and preachers alike deliver moving eulogies for the dead and call the faithful to action. Not yet safe but out of the street, Valeri pauses to catch his breath, doubled over as he gulps for air. "Don't stop moving," says Murray, speaking not only to Valeri but to a group of the workers fleeing through an alley. "I'm going to kill them," says Valeri, not thinking, only feeling the fear for his life gradually blend into a seething rage. "I'm going to kill them all," says Valeri. "No," says Murray, "you're not going to kill anyone. We have to get out of here. We have to leave." At times, the cracking of gunfire seems to sharpen, to stiffen, then to fade, in the span of a few seconds every kind of terror bursting in and out of the air.

Video screens continue to replay the carnage from every conceivable angle, slowing down the footage, breaking the furious action into a series of lifeless stills, at once seeming to magnify the gravity of what's happened even as they transform it into a caricature of itself. But for men like Garrett Walker this massacre strikes home, Garrett sees the carnage played over and over on his screens, shown slowed until one can see the blood spilled frame-by-frame. He imagines his daughters among those killed, not by choice, as if the dark essence has seized his thoughts and taken them places he'd never go on his own. Soon he's in the streets with all the other unemployed men, so emasculated by their forcible unemployment, mobbing the nearest police station, hurling stones and voices over the fortifications until nothing seems as it was. "Put the real criminals away!" he shouts. "Hang them all!" says another. "You can't kill all of us!" says a third. For a moment, it seems the police in the station might emerge to open fire on them, but this possibility doesn't frighten Garrett and the others. Soon, the police abandon the station, Garrett and the others breaking in, setting fire to the building, looting it of everything of value before absconding into the night.

The furious and confusing turn of events isn't lost on Valeri, who feels in his blood a heat rising with his heart's every beat. With each breath he gulps down air. It's an impossible moment, but necessary and transformative. It's as though a switch has flipped and the common interest given rise anew like a surge of raw electricity through a long-dead circuit. Still, he thinks of Hannah. Still he wishes for her safety. Meanwhile, amid the bloodshed across the city and around the country people like Rose Powell and Miguel Figueroa wait with their fingers on the trigger, sensing their moment is almost at hand. It's an incredible time, with war in the offing and for more men and women than not it will see us through our destiny. "We must not waver in our commitment to law and order," says a uniformed man in on the screens, "we must not give in to terror and lawlessness." But he says these things even as his voice is drowned out by a chorus of voices all crying out in anger, fear, and sorrow, his words emanating under the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, seeping through the streets while people like Valeri draw every breath as though it's their last. As Valeri flees through the back alleys and down side-streets, some small part of him, obscured by the blinding terror and rage filling his mind but there nevertheless, already looks ahead to revenge.

After his release from the stockade, Private Craig Thompson hears of the massacre, the whole barracks waiting for news of their loved ones in the area. Though they know the odds anyone they know is killed are minimal, still they fear. For a little while Craig considers this might be the worst, that the next day will see order arise out of the chaos. But it's not to be. They're given orders, the Colonel says, to be ready to deploy immediately, and the troops assume this must mean to the streets of Britain. In time, their future mission will lead each of them to do things they never thought they'd do.

In the streets, Valeri and Murray become separated; for Valeri, the day is ended by limping back to his apartment to find Hannah gone. But outside, word has already spread of the massacre, leaving more questions than answers. "You've wasted your time talking," says one woman in the working class slums that reach across the countryside. "There can be no more talk," agrees another. "It's time for action!" insists a third. The fourth, a younger woman, on the cusp of realizing her place, says, "surely the answer to killing doesn't lie in more killing." At Valeri's apartment, the halls are abuzz with energy, and the wailing of distant sirens invades through every open window. Still Hannah has not returned; he'll later learn she's at the hospital tending to the dead and dying, working twenty hours and sleeping four. He fears she's died in the violence. And he knows she fears he's died in the violence. "You must be crazy," says Graham Russell, Valeri running into him in the stairwell on the way back out, "going out in a time like this." "No, I'm not crazy," says Valeri, growling as he steps past the old man, "I'm mad." But in the heat of the moment all they can hear is the distant sound of gunfire rattling interspersed with the bursting of bombs, the massacre in the streets having touched off an angry, violent response.

Still in jail when the massacre shocks the world, Stanislaw Czerkawski pushes with the other prisoners right up against the bars of their cells, banging, rattling, all at once shouting for the loved ones in the streets who could be fighting and dying at this very moment. Somehow, one of the cells is burst open, then another, then another, soon Stanislaw running with a mob down a corridor, each of them wielding a makeshift club as they charge the jail's guards. There's the cracking of gunshots and the spilling of blood, but the guards are too few and the prisoners too many, too angry. Soon the inmates have seized control, ejected the guards, and set fire to parts of the building, none of them guided by anything other than the passions of the degraded so released. "Free us!" shouts one prisoner. "Don't let us stay in here!" shouts another. "Let us go or you'll be the next to die!" shouts a third. "I want to see my wife before I die in here!" shouts Stanislaw. His plea catches the ear of a sympathetic guard, the two glancing at each other before the guard moves on.

But there are others, yet unknown, who will soon step into the light. At a Royal Navy base not far from the city of Westminster there's homeported His Majesty's Ship Borealis, an Aurora class cruiser. Her sister ship, the Australis, is also homeported here. Sleek, modern vessels armed to the teeth with missile batteries and gun turrets, they were originally built to match the latest American, Chinese, even Russian designs entering into service around the same time. On board the Borealis serves a sailor named Dmitri Malinin, under the command of Captain Abramovich. In his bunk when news breaks among the crew of the massacre, Dmitri feels the same simmering anger as the others, leaping out of his bunk and making for the mess hall where many of the sailors on board have already gathered. "It's outrageous," says one. "They're murderers," says another. "They gun down innocent people in the streets," says a third. As Dmitri's about to add his piece, the loudspeaker crackles, the Captain's voice announcing, "all crew are confined to quarters until further notice." The non-coms arrive and start shepherding sailors out of the mess, Dmitri among the last to leave. "I must contact my wife," he says, later, back in his bunk with the others. "Are you worried she's caught up in this?" a bunkmate asks. "No," Dmitri says, "but there's no telling how this will end. She might get caught up in this whether she wants to or not." His bunkmate nods, then says, "we all might." Dmitri agrees. But Dmitri has family, a young wife and daughter to think of, and it's their safety that's to weigh on him more than anything in the coming months.

But work eventually resumes, the workers across Britain needing to feed their families after the massacre just as they had before. But none are as they were. All have experienced some slight change, imperceptible at a glance, yet surely there. As outrage spreads, this slight change manifests itself in disparate bursts of anger, a thrown stone here, a homemade bomb there, the sound of gunfire chattering off and on through the night. It's the little differences that catch your mind's eye. A light, erratic pop of an armed attack followed by the heavy thumping of the police responding, not in kind but with an overwhelming force. It's over quickly. It's always over quickly. Already the gunmen, Ian Coleman and Kate Higgins along with a few others disappear into the night. "Have at them!" declares Ian, as they're on their way back. "We follow our orders," says Kate. It leaves behind no bodies; as with all the other armed clashes that've broken out in the time since that dark, dark day, a few rounds have been exchanged and a few holes put into the windows of the shops lining the street, but little else has happened. Again and again this same scenario plays itself out in the streets over the weeks and the months that follow, interspersed against the impassioned dramas of the working men in the street and the students in their lecture halls angrily denouncing the powers that be and plotting their next moves.

It's a deeply confusing time, a time made all the more confusing by the roused passions of each of these disparate interests, each pursuing their own agency, each struggling against the limitations of themselves. None can know where it all must lead, where it all must eventually end, even as all believe they know and that their knowledge is to the exclusion of all others'. Valeri's used to invasions of his quarters by the policeman's truncheon, but not like this, never like this, in full view of the whole world innocent men and women gunned down by straight-faced police. But in the early afterwards following the massacre, questions remain. Meanwhile, as Valeri searches the streets for any sign of Maria or Sydney, at the union hall Murray tries to piece together an explanation for why the promised support from the Popular Front's gunmen never came, why they never showed. "They weren't there," says Murray, a few days later while talking to Valeri, "they weren't there." He speaks of the Popular Front and their failure to show.

By now, a state of emergency has been declared, public gatherings banned, a curfew imposed, and troopers patrol the streets looking for trouble. With nowhere else to go, Valeri has returned to his little box of an apartment where he speaks with Murray on the phone while chafing and chomping at the bit to take back to the streets. Only some hours have passed since his brothers and sisters in union were murdered in cold blood, and the young man in him given to irrational acts of futile rebellion resents being made to seek shelter from the storm. Let's take a step back, for a moment, and consider all that's at stake, all that's in play. "You must calm down," Murray says, "or you'll get yourself killed." Years earlier, we were all so caught up in the petty minutiae of our own lives that we couldn't see the sinister forces at work in the background, lurking in the shadows as they'd always lurked. "I'd rather risk death than sit cooped up in my apartment waiting for something to happen," Valeri says, "they have to pay for their murder." "They'll pay," Murray says, "but you're no good to anyone if you're bled out on the street." Elaborate conspiracies are the domain of those with views limited by their own ignorance. "What happens to me is unimportant," Valeri says, "so long as I can be of use to the cause." No, these forces I speak of are as forces of nature, as the wind blows and as the tides rise and fall, so too do these forces of men act by vague compulsions and confused motivations, not as self-aware but as self-assured. "You're a noble man," says Murray, "and you should serve a higher purpose than sacrificing your life in a street battle." "You speak of the men in the streets as if they're mere rabble," Valeri says. "I know they're not," Murray says, "and neither are you."

Days pass. Unusually, a rhythm returns to the streets, amid the heavy handed presence of the troopers and the martial law that's been imposed. Working men like Valeri have been an afterthought in this city for some time, chewed up and then spit out when he's no longer of use to those in power. For his whole life, he's watched as his world has been transformed, as this city he's called home for so long as he's lived now seeks to expel him in a frantic, fevered campaign to eat themselves whole. It's a disgusting sight, made all the more wretched by the thick stench of a foul winter's night and the noxious smoke emanating from still-spewing stacks across the river. He leaves his simple, working class apartment, and although he knows it's an absurd thought he can't help but entertain the notion that he'll come home after his shift to find his simple, working class apartment gone, the whole building demolished and replaced by elegance and luxury reserved for those of a higher pedigree than him. He sees in this time the memory of his parents and their failed rising, and chafes for his chance to avenge them anew. The noxious smell of industrial smoke still lingers in the air, mixed with the foul stench of cigarette smoke. A former co-worker of Valeri's, Kyle Bridges, was among those killed in the street. He was a passionate young man, young enough not to know a passion ruined by the creeping cynicism that occurs in all men on the cusp of middle age. It's a deeply personal crisis, one that strikes a chord with a thousand and one people all at once, but each in a different way.

In a deeply personal crisis, one can't help but isolate one's self from all those around. It's a futile effort. In those months, those years before that fateful day when people died in the streets, well, so many had already died in those very streets, so many die every day, some falling prey to a sexual predator, some choking on their own vomit in the midst of an overdose, still some in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides death, the common thread that runs through their lives is privation; none have enough to be deemed worthy of life. In these, men like Valeri will, in time, find an ally natural and indispensible. A mounting frenzy sets in as each of them frantically works to wring every last pound from the world. Another of Valeri's former co-workers, a still-younger man named Stuart James, is soon forced out of his home, among the first in a new round of evictions aimed at clearing out the under-class. The wealthy man is compulsively exchanging the real for the imagined, trading land for money, when the bottom falls out the people who acquired the imagined finding themselves still living in luxury while the people who'd acquired the real finding themselves losing everything. There's a great amount of shouting and screaming but in the meanwhile nothing seems to change; the few continue to grow fat and lazy from the suffering of the many. But it's not true that nothing changes. That's just what they want you to believe. As they grow complacent, we grow learned in the art of war, each ordinary man pushed out of his home and made to lose his livelihood gaining us a knowledge we'll soon put to good use.

But progress looms. A woman named Lillian Wolfe, widowed on the day of the massacre, cries softly as she prays in church, she one of many to take refuge in a house of God in times like these. Though it may not be immediately obvious in the aftermath of this latest breakdown in the current order, we've reached an epiphany, a transformative moment marking the start of a transition from one era to the next, each step brought down on the ground in front of us, each breath drawn in and pushed out moving us inexorably closer to that historical inevitability waiting for us on the other side of the horizon, just out of view. Even as it dawns on us, though, that the future is ours, we must never regard it as predestined, predetermined, for each day that passes brings us a day closer to our victory only so long as we use each day to work tirelessly and relentlessly towards that goal. In the meanwhile, as we ease ourselves out of this latest crisis, it's instructive to look on these early, tentative days as an awkward step, one of many on our long and difficult path through to the future.

In the years before massacre in the city's centre provokes the rise of a revolution, an urgency begins to settle in the streets, nerves rattled and passions become roused. A third young person, a man named Dominic Hayes, is one of the many to lose their livelihoods in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Now, like so many of his brothers and sisters Dominic seethes with anger. In the working class tenements that've begun to vanish, demolished as the wealthy class sell them in a confusing array of transactions all aimed at increasing their profits, men like Dominic have come to realize they've been deceived for too long. These companies, impersonal, agreed-upon can hide behind a confusing network of deals only for so long; sooner or later, they all blur into a bureaucratic morass that can no longer confuse or conceal. An apartment block disappears, then another, then another, the very people who work to demolish the old and put up the new the same as those who would find themselves evicted from their own homes.

In the immediate aftermath of that massacre in the city's streets, a series of rolling strikes cripple the means of production, leaving towers half-finished, leaving them empty concrete shells with jagged beams sticking out like broken bones. Columns of smoke rise from fires burning out of control, along the streets coursing a white hot rage so bright it seems to light up the night's sky. This vision, this image of our shared future, I ask that you look upon that very moment and see if you can remain forever damned by a past you never wanted, by a future you've never deserved. Still this is all disorganized, the whole lot of them acting without thought, without objective, as history has chosen this moment to assert itself, not yet fully formed but in its embryonic stage still showing the early signs of its coming maturity. In the months leading up to that massacre in the city's streets, desperation had become the way of things. Stunning glass and steel monuments had come to occupy the spaces where once simple, functional, working-class apartments had stood, cracks in the pavement sprouting weeds and gathering pulverized dust. Men like Valeri become pitied, mocked for their values, for values like thrift, charity, generosity, selflessness and honesty. They becomes mocked by those who would value duplicity, avarice, idolatry and lies. In the midst of his hometown's rotting away, he does not arrive at the realization but instead makes the decision that this time is different. Already lost, our future's end is won, in defeat our victory sees itself through the darkest of nights to the dawning of a new day.

When we come to the right moment, in the lingering aftermath of that first massacre in the streets, Valeri will look to his future and see for the first time hope from despair like the rising sun's first light breaking over the horizon to mark the dawn of a new day. The instruments of oppression are ubiquitous in their presence and steadfast in their resiliency, yet still they resort to the same methods as before the current crisis; the talking heads take to the broadcasts and denounce the lawlessness and the violence in the streets, discovering, to their horror, their methods are no longer effective, the loud-mouths on the screens bellowing their lies ever louder, screaming themselves hoarse only to rouse the anger of men like Valeri towards not themselves but to the wealthy man. It's in a moment of uncertainty that the wealthy man and his allies and his colleagues make that first, critical error, unleashing the one force that would do them in.

A small plane lands, from inside a hooded figure escorted by four armed guards walking along a narrow path reaching into an empty hangar. Perhaps he's lucky just not to be in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, as he's a wanted figure not only by the counter-revolution but by the revolution itself. He thinks to pay attention to his surroundings; he refuses to simply put his head down in defeat and walk as fast as he can through this current challenge. His faith in the turning of history in his favour, in favour of his people is like that of a religious zealot assured in an impending apocalypse. For men like Valeri, death awaits. For the hooded man, whose name is Elijah, simply Elijah, victory will come at a high price in blood, to be paid by the sons of daughters. You see, Elijah is a man born of a legend, foretold by many learned scholars but anticipated by few. After having spent the last several years in prison for having committed the grave sin of rallying the most pathetic and the most wretched among us around his cause, it is now, at last, Elijah's time to rise. Although we've only begun to mention him now, at this seemingly advanced stage in our apocalypse rising, know that the working men of Britain have already come to know him as central to their liberation. His legend is come. His legend is always been.

In this conflict between such contradictions as mortal and immortal, there should arise a truth which will encompass all. This is the man who's already known, whose name is whispered in the dark alleys and the halls of the working class blocks, who is become a hero to the nascent rising of the apocalypse today. The government has chosen to release Elijah in a futile and ill-thought out bid to mollify his supporters, fellow travelers of the newly-formed Popular Front; it won't work. Still he is just a man, and our apocalypse will not be risen by a man but by men. In fact, he's not a man, even as he is only a man. As our future history belongs to they who are least, it's inevitable that from among their ranks we should find the next generation of leaders. His is a pedigree that comes from a long line of workers, of farmers, of thieves, of prostitutes, of the very people who are so maligned in a world where evil would denounce good, where ignorance would denounce knowledge, where lies would denounce honesty and where cowardice would denounce courage.

Remember him. Remember his face, scarred and disfigured as it is by so many beatings at the hands of the police. Remember his words, spoken as they are with a gun to his head and with his skin battered and bruised. At the moment, he's one of many, nameless, faceless, nothing more than another malcontent caught in the sweeps of the streets by the counter-revolution's uniformed troopers. Although Elijah is only a man, he is also only a leader of men. These two mutually exclusive wholes encompass the same person. Once locked away for the crime of daring to preach a forbidden gospel and in so preaching leading a new generation of working men into their own, now the rebel Elijah is free. He doesn't live in London, but in the decrepit, impoverished industrial heartlands of the North, calling home a small, unnamed city once thriving but which was destroyed by deindustrialization even before the failed rising fifteen years ago. Now, his time is come. Now that the rebel Elijah is once again among his disciples, the moment for the dark essence to realize itself in men like Valeri is at hand.

And not long after his impending release, he'll be given that gift in the form of so many lifeless bodies strewn across the blood-soaked streets, a gift he and his brothers will put to good use. Though he signs a pledge forbidding him from any rabble rousing, he signs with a wink and a nod, both he and his former captors silently acknowledging the next time they'd meet on the battlefield of the streets where men like Valeri live.

As soon as he walks through the prison's front doors, he meets with the very people who would compel him to ascend his throne, with the self-selected leaders among the alliance of parties in the Popular Front, in so meeting the whole lot of them only following the blueprint laid out for them by Elijah years ago. These, his old disciples, come to welcome him into the newly-formed Popular Front, out of the most pathetic and reviled among the working men finding his most loyal and devoted followers, they who would receive the gospel of liberation and put it to good use.

But in the meanwhile, mounting anger at the wanton massacre of innocents in the streets fuels the fires of liberation into inferno the likes of which none in Britain have ever seen.

17. A Time to Stand

Soon, the world burns. Word spreads quickly about what's happened. Screens flash with footage from the massacre not only throughout Britain but around the world, images of broken bodies and bloodied pavement, these images seeming to be frozen in place even as they click forward with the push of a button and the swipe of a pad. All seem in a state of shock, as if time has slowed and all are watching from a distance. "For our children," one man, a worker, urges action. "For our children's children," one woman, another worker, urges action. "Not for ourselves," urges another, an unemployed youth, "but for all those who have died and have yet to die!"

At the union hall the mood is one of anger mixed with despair. After fruitless messages left for his contacts in the Popular Front, Murray comes to realize the truth of why his allies never showed on that fateful day. They were never meant to show. But Murray doesn't yet realize the traitor in his ranks feeding the troopers information, and it's his ignorance that will enable further betrayal. Meanwhile, after Stanislaw Czerkawski and the other prisoners have taken over their prison, many of the prisoners flee, some going home to be with their families while others are simply on the run from the law. Although the guards and staff have all fled, before fleeing a few sympathizers among them had left weapons lockers open, Stanislaw and a group of the others finding firearms with which to defend themselves. Standing with a rifle in his hands, Stanislaw says to the others, "now we can give some back to them!" And in the moment it seems as though some of the prisoners might flee, even with Stanislaw pledging to stay.

But Stanislaw and the bulk of them stay, forming a provisional committee not to govern the prison but to organize a defence. They expect the police to strike back at any time, with lethal force. In the heat of the moment there's little time for meetings, though, and the committee's time is consumed in fortifying their positions, Stanislaw charged with building a makeshift roadblock along the prison's access road. In the night, the police have already begun massing in the distance, armoured cars parked strategically, policemen with their guns drawn and pointed right down the way. But the way they seem to shift slightly in their stance, the way their grip on their guns seems to waver slightly makes clear their uncertainty, and it's in this uncertainty that Stanislaw and the others come to believe they can win even as they know they can't.

For Valeri, the massacre inspires in him a seething rage, of the kind he's known only once before: fifteen years ago when the last generation's failed uprising took them from him. After hurrying into the streets he emerges, exhausted and sore all over, looking for Maria somewhere around where usually she waits. In the streets she's nowhere to be found. He fears she's dead; but this is no time to let fear govern one's actions. In his apartment block's stairwell, he sees not Maria but Hannah for the first time in days, her scrubs bloodied from the day's work. They're both tired. "You've come at last," she tries, "I would've thought you'd gotten yourself killed in all this." She speaks with an almost-dismissive tone which can only just conceal her concern. "You must promise me you'll stay out of harm's way," he says. But she only looks on him with a look of surrender, so exhausted as she is that she can hardly keep her eyes open. He knows it's not that simple, even as he wishes it was.

At the barracks, Private Craig Thompson is made to prepare for war. After they finish accounting for all their guns, ammunition, and the other equipment, they muster on the parade grounds and ready themselves to receive their orders. When Colonel Cooke announces their impending deployment to eastern Estonia, right on the Russian border, a murmur sweeps across the mustered troops, Private Thompson among those muttering under their breaths, Thompson saying, "I can't believe it." But a sharp glare from the non-coms silences the men. With people dying on the streets of their own country, the men are to be deployed to defend the territory of another. Already edging towards sedition Private Thompson and the rest of the men haven't long until it's their time to rise.

Overnight, a calm emerges. An eerie silence settles over the streets, with those brave few outside putting their heads down as they quickly and quietly scurry along. Even the troopers step out with apprehension, looking into every shadow, glancing quickly into every side street and every alley before moving on, half their minds on their firearms, half on the safety and the security of the station waiting for them at the end of their patrols. If you stand in the right place, at the intersection of once-busy streets, you can hear the wind whistling as it rushes between buildings emptied overnight. Still, attention tends to be dominated by concerns closer to home. A young man passes a few names and a few places to his unknown contact; at times he thinks himself sending information into a void. This time, the names and the places he sends make their way through a network of contacts and find the right hands. But after Valeri returns to the union hall, unsure whether to go there or anywhere else at all, he finds Murray missing. No one knows where the union leader is. After Valeri steps out onto the hall's main floor, he encounters another worker, another unemployed from the old shop. "It's been shut down," says the worker, "they fired everyone. They sold all the machines to another company. It's all gone." And the irony doesn't escape Valeri. Loyal or disloyal, subordinate or insubordinate, it makes no difference, all the workers have wound up in the same situation. But they needn't be forever.

In the streets, the unemployed and the unemployable keep on hurling stones, Garrett Walker in with the rest of the rabble voicing their discontent. He returns home after days away, only to learn his daughters have spirited away into the service of the mob rampaging through those very streets, and he determines to take action. Soon the whole family flees, in taking to the streets Garrett's daughters killed by a police lorry barging into their crowd. As their broken bodies lie on the pavement, he kneels in a pool of crimson blood and says, "I can't believe it." It's a seminal moment in Garret's life, and under the influence of a blinding rage he turns away from the path of retreat in favour of giving himself over to the dark essence. It matters little that he can't even see, can't even know the dark essence, because he can feel its effects like the blood pumping through his veins. It's a chaotic, deeply confused time, when Garrett could wind up dead at any moment through sheer coincidence, in being caught on the street at the wrong time, in being happened upon by a policeman who's already lost someone in the violence. But Garrett, Garrett's been meekly accepting his fate for so long that he's got so much pent-up anger searching for an outlet, so much he can hardly keep himself from lashing out at any given moment. Though in his forties, Garrett comes to feel the impassioned anger of a much younger man, giving him a renewed strength.

A strike's risky in this trouble. Though many are underway already, each has been disorganized, erratic, lacking in the discipline needed to make something out of nothing. Valeri takes to the street and makes his way with the others to the union hall, this new strike arising like the sudden intensification of an already-burning firestorm. With the other day labourers Valeri marches, at exactly the moment he's in the midst of a halting, disjointed rhythm between one step and the next an explosion tears through the street, sending Valeri to the pavement. It's the first attack, the first of many. In the din, Valeri soon picks himself up, his whole body a blurry, pulsating mass of pain. But he musters the strength to make for cover, only stopping in the relative safety of a blown-out storefront to look back on the carnage. After the massacre, each day becomes a confusing, disorienting blur, with Valeri's withdrawal from the union's struggle coming suddenly, prompting him to attempt another march with a gaggle of other young men. As Valeri has so little, no job, no money, no family to speak of, he hurls stones along with all the others. But on this day, he's been handed another personal setback, brought closer to death than he's ever been.

Marching with Bibles in hand, Darren Wright and the other parishioners put down in the middle of the street not far from the place where unarmed demonstrators were shot dead. One by one, they take turns preaching the forbidden gospel to one another. Around them, the police are erratic, withdrawing when they can no longer control the situation. When Darren's turn to preach comes, he stands at the head of the congregation, about to deliver the forbidden gospel in his own way when he sees down the road the last of the police lorries turn and drive away. "I can't believe it." Though the deliverance of the revolution from evil is not yet fully formed, a redemption of blood is offered to all who would take it; men like Darren don't hesitate, in this moment of truth. Although the rogue preacher has cautioned them against expecting their lot to improve, Darren imagines struggle in the streets leading to something great, some victory that should justify every moment of pain and suffering they've experienced. Too late will Darren realize their futures will be filled only with intensifying suffering and death.

As disorder spreads and people die in the streets, men rush home to be with their loved ones. The urban landscape spreads itself below them, sprawling as far as can be seen, a thick smog concealing the horizon, bleeding into the sky. As it draws nearer, the smog seems to fade into a dull haze, obscuring behind every building in a sea of translucent grey. In the working class districts, among row after drab row of tasteless, prefabricated apartment blocks and narrow, potholed streets, there's a respite, however fleeting, from the deafening silence of the streets. At the polytechnic, Sean Morrison and the other students have stopped rioting and taken control, their school a shambles but theirs nevertheless. The student council has asserted control, but once the police come for them there'll be little any of them will be able to do to hold what they've seized. From the rooftop of the polytechnic's main building Sean and the others fly the flag of the failed rising fifteen years ago, then look out across the city and view the columns of smoke rising in the distance as the fires of liberation burn. When Sean sees the police lorries withdraw, leaving the students in firm control of the polytechnic. "I can't believe it." In their quest to assert a revolutionary knowledge, still Sean and the other students are not yet fully awaken, but given to the fight they're almost there.

But among endless rows of ramshackle buildings stabbing at the sky like the serrated edge of a blade, the rebel Elijah, only so recently freed, waits and watches with a mounting anticipation as his world, seemingly frozen in place, in fact spirals out of control so rapidly it's always been. At the hospital, Hannah, Whitney, and the others are inundated with casualties, the dead and dying lying alongside one another in the halls, the A&E floor painted with streaks and pools of blood both drying and dried. A man dies in front of Hannah; she turns and tends to another's wounds, only to watch him die, too. There's screaming and shouting and crying, mixed in with the wailing of sirens and the rattling of distant thunder. Hannah can't take a breath; she takes a pill to keep herself alert. A woman comes in carrying the limp body of a small child. Hannah turns her away. Hannah's turned many away. Hannah's still to turn many away.

Still confined to quarters, the crew of the cruiser Borealis come up with their own stories of what's happening, each slightly different from the next. Some think the crew will be deployed as marines to the streets directly, to assist the army in pacifying the unrest. Others believe the crew will be kept confined to quarters for months, even put in the brig if necessary, the officers fearing desertion. Still others believe the ship will be deployed away, to Canada or the United States on a visit, just to keep His Majesty's Ship safe and out of the crisis. But Dmitri doesn't think on what might happen; he plans, in the way he does. "We have to be prepared for the possibility of war," he says, one night after lights out. He's in his bunk, the other five in his room listening intently. "We've been watching as the country gets poorer and poorer. We can't watch much longer. We shouldn't follow the orders of the men who are killing our own people." Another sailor pipes in, saying, "are you proposing mutiny?" Dmitri says, "no," then pauses thoughtfully before adding, "not yet." There's more, but this exchange is what's important, the first step in the crew making the transition from serving one banner to serving another. Their future holds much more than just mutiny; all they should need is to step forward.

After these early attacks, the rebel Elijah stops, having administered the slightest touch to introduce a new chaos. Across the city, the rebel plots his next move. It's only been a short while since his release; like an addict released from treatment, his first act is to link up with the others, the small group of them forming the core of what would come to be an all-powerful force. In a small, dark basement they meet, and quickly consensus emerges from the fusion of divergent opinions. Some want to take to the streets immediately, to join the rabble with whatever arms they can muster and attack, no matter the outcome. Some want to discard armaments and embrace the peaceful struggle, sure as they are that their enemies will give in when confronted with an overwhelming show of popular strength. All are wrong. The rebel knows force must be applied with deliberate intent, methodically, precisely, at the right time and in the right place. If Valeri is to see himself through, he'll have to wait for his time to rise. Until his time is come, he'll have to resist the compulsive, overwhelming urge to attack, now.

But so too does the rebel Elijah know the importance of applying a constant, steady pressure from all corners, reaching into the night to draw from within its darkness a mass action, mobilizing the students and the clergymen and the trade unionists into a single mass of humanity against they who would seek to preserve the way of things. The rebel's goal has always been to make the current order untenable, the current state ungovernable. And so the rebel waits, continuing to gather his strength, adding to his forces, stockpiling his armaments, disseminating his seditious knowledge to those who would seek to conspire with him against the way of things, through a convoluted network of agents and actors, of sympathizers and supporters, eventually finding its way into the receptive mind of men like Valeri. Over time, this receptiveness will turn into sympathy, some time later into wholehearted embrace. Deftly, the rebel dances a delicate dance, astride the markers of history in the making, with only a force powerful enough to lay waste to the streets needed to make way for the future.

As the workers seek shelter from the chaos in his own quarters, each thatches together the means to survive this crisis spiralling rapidly towards war. Many of them are arrested, but comparatively few have yet died, the chaos gripping the city, the country, the entire world seeing the troopers here in London stretched too far and too wide to bother much with him. With the stores looted of food, supplies, things like soap and bread have disappeared in the time it's taken the first bodies to hit the ground. So too are Valeri's cupboards bare, and he survives through this early time not by his wits but by the pooling of what little he has with his neighbours, their meagre resources enough to provide sustenance in the meanwhile.

Still the crowds vacate the streets, looking to the skies for guidance, seeking the patience that can only come from the almost-spiritual release in surrender to the forces moving around him like the fast-moving waters of a river around the rock stuck stubbornly in the middle. But not all is lost. Life, what's left of it, goes on, and in so going adapts to the changing circumstances all find themselves immersed in, Valeri like all the others finding a way to survive through this early period when no one seems concerned for his immediate welfare but him. A sudden explosion erupts from within a school in the wealthy man's part of town, once the dust settles the death toll standing at almost two hundred adolescents and their teachers. The rebel Elijah avoids the limelight, his apparatchiks making a point to avoid taking responsibility for this attack. Hearing a sudden bang snap across the darkness followed by the sound of concrete crumbling, he knows this is another attack by the rebel, and for a moment he entertains the notion that this time the rebel might've deigned to take decisive action.

In the midst of a confusing, chaotic time, thunderous explosions go off here and there, randomly interrupting daily life as women and children search for cover, life interrupted in the time it's taken those first drops of blood to hit the pavement. At the end of one shift but before the start of another, power cuts in and out randomly, sometimes out for days, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for just long enough to fit the dark in the blink of an eye. Anger spills into the streets even as those very streets remain deserted, like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with scraps of paper fluttering across the pavement in the summer's light wind. But when Valeri stands for only a moment a stream of letters scrolling across his screen, messages overpowering his screen's settings to display the requisite stories from the talking heads, denouncing lawlessness, preaching devotion to law and order, infusing every breath, every word with a forced anger and a strained intimidation. Men like Valeri may not know this in the way you and I do, but on some instinctive level he realizes the wealthy man is improvising things too.

All the world's burning with the fires of liberation still yet in their infant state, with only the slightest wind needed to catch them and send them rising into the highest, the towering inferno. But the old order remains. This is why, men like Valeri know instinctively, this early period where there's disorder in the streets and sporadic battles erupting all over town and across the country the way of things is still strong, still firmly entrenched, these first acts, these protests and these gun battles and these bombings only like the first and lightest of raindrops to build, slowly, into a typhoon-like storm. Little do men like Valeri know that the troopers are already plotting their next move, scraping together a force to venture into enemy territory in the hopes of taking to the offensive, after events have so rapidly turned against them. They lash out not because they believe it will work, though they may very well believe it will work, but because they must. It's their role to play. If Valeri is to be the man that he's destined to be, then he has much pain and suffering left to experience, much bloodshed to witness, much despair to endure. As Valeri is an avatar for all working men in mid-twenty-first century Britain, he'll persist through it all, he'll persist not because he must but because it's what he does.

As the rebel Elijah plots and as men like Valeri struggle through these dangerous times, the wealthy man considers his options, deploying his considerable holdings from their safe havens to furnish the troopers with new weapons, new shields, believing as he does that such things will save him. But the surge had crested at exactly the moment those angry young men had been shot and killed in the street before, in a crack of thunder and smoke, coming down in a crash. Many projects stall. Many new buildings fall dark and silent, with crews leaving their tools in place after the sudden end of their last shift. Cranes stand over the empty, half-finished concrete shells, cables left to dangle in the wind. It's all so surreal. After we've come this far, I lead you down an empty street and point out the sights here and there, the cracks in the pavement and the weeds sprouting from between them, the faded paint and the still-smoldering fires of liberation having long since burned out. The laughter of children who have never lived here rings out, echoing off the hardened concrete, lending the streets an eerie, ghostly atmosphere made all the more eerie and ghostly by the smog and the dust of a late-summer's heat wave surging over the city, inflaming tensions, enflaming passions, all at once the wreckage of the old crumbling in an impossible yet familiar falling-apart of all that we've come to know.

It's only been some weeks since dozens of innocents were cut down in a hail of rifle fire right in these very streets, and already we've reached the point where the wealthy man has come to feel so pressured, but not yet threatened that his will compels the troopers to strike. As the young men and women who form the detritus of society linger in the shadows, in open doorways and behind broken windows, a confused tension sets into the air like the burning of muscles after too long an exercise. Factories shutter, then reopen as if they'd never shuttered at all. A construction crane topples, the next day seeing a brand new crane in exactly the same place. It's all so confusing and disorienting, how this can be happening, how the wealthy man can preserve his place in the way of things even as this wave of violence sweeps over the city and across the country, already extending, in spots here and there, around the world. At night, one night, Valeri's called into work at a nearby railyard, only for the one night, sent home clutching tight in his pocket a pittance smaller than ever before.

Still yet Valeri looks ahead, watching the fires of liberation burn long into the night, their bright, red-and-gold flames licking into the bluish-black skies, their colour blending to turn the night a sickly, obscene, offensive shade of crimson, as though confused, disoriented as Valeri's come to be. But it's a fraud.Young men are led at gunpoint out into the street, then made to kneel with their hands behind their backs. These, Valeri's unknown colleagues, his brothers in spirit are not the first casualties in a war gone wrong, and they will not be the last. Overhead, a black figure sweeps through the darkness, from within his mass loosing bolts of flame on the street, new fires bursting into existence.

Despite all that's happened, the wealthy man still sees himself as fully in control of the crisis playing itself out before him, still confident of the vast wealth he's hoarded, still self-assured of the righteousness of his own cause. The wealthy man continues to plot his next moves, hurriedly scurrying the last of his ill-gotten wealth in whatever safe haven he can think of, through accounts held under pseudonym upon pseudonym around the world in banks no one's ever heard of. But he makes a mistake. He always makes a mistake. Little does the wealthy man realize that his vast wealth will mean nothing when, in the future, he finds himself wearing a black hood over his head and a noose around his neck, taking his last breaths before the inevitable justice is visited upon him. In the meanwhile, his mistake isn't his frantic efforts to store his theft somewhere it can't be found. In fact, the exact moment he made his critical mistake can never be found, not by you or me, not by the show trials to be set up to press the wealthy man's guilt and deliver unto him the ultimate justice.

In a flash, fires break out across London, across every city, from the base of towers smoke rising. The sound of glass breaking rings out along the pounding of feet against the pavement and the crying out of anguished voices. The rebel Elijah lies in wait, deliberately avoiding the action, watching as the enemy steps over himself to make every possible mistake. Screens across the world flash with images of troopers pointing rifles at angry mothers, unarmed, venting rage at them. Screens across the world flash with images of searchlights sweeping across buildings in the middle of the night, of loose rounds of gunfire ringing in the darkness, of sirens wailing and of passions inflaming as the consequences of a lifetime and a half of passions so suppressed erupt in an orgy of violence. It never ends. It can never end.

After unleashing a pent-up rage onto the streets, there can be no turning back. In the midst of this rapid collapse of the old order, the rebel Elijah takes care to consolidate his forces, pausing only to mount the lightest of attacks. His gunmen open fire on the troopers, only to withdraw before these troopers can respond. He takes no life, not yet, succeeding only in his as-yet limited aim. Disappearing into the city, he evades pursuit, blending in with his surroundings, in his plain clothes indistinguishable from men like Valeri once he discards his weapons. Still the troopers fire at anything that moves, at shadows and at flickers of light glinting off scattered shards of glass in the street.

Then, a crashing sound, the ground shaking slightly as a bomb goes off somewhere down the street, hurting no one but rattling nerves. Moments later, another, somewhere across the city. It's a staggering moment, one of many strewn across the collective consciousness like so much useless confetti. Still there are few injuries and no deaths, the rebel Elijah's plot to strain resources and to fray nerves unfolding slowly over weeks, months. Soon, barricades go up around every public office, every port whether air or sea, across the streets in every city across Britain, around the stock exchange downtown and around the network centres where the propaganda continues to stream from with ever increasing intensity.

Not protected, not yet, are the targets of value to the rebel, those targets which his enemies would never suspect and those who would never blame him for his own crimes. As the rebel preserves his forces and consolidates his gains, he prepares for a decisive attack.

18. In the Cards

It comes suddenly, in the middle of the night, an unusual time for such men to be up. "Valeri!" shouts Hannah, calling him over to her screen, "Valeri you have to see this!" The powers that be have convened an emergency session for their self-important government, but they cannot sort out the way forward. "It's happening," Valeri says. There's hatred and recrimination, as there is among the workers who surround them every minute of every day, but this hatred and recrimination is different. "At last we will have our chance," Valeri says. "I hope you're right," says Hannah, "roommate." It's been many weeks, months even since they'd taken to arguing, and in that time so much hardship and so much shock has made their arguing seem to not be worth the energy. She puts her hand over his and gives a firm but slight squeeze. But Valeri has already made in with the rebels of the Popular Front, in the weeks since the massacre working under the guidance of Murray and others to avenge every last drop of blood his brothers and sisters have been made to shed in the streets. Night falls.

On board the cruiser Borealis, Captain Abramovich addresses the men on a daily basis, through the ship's loudspeakers urging the same discipline and calm every time. When Dmitri and the others first hear of the collapse in parliament, though, it's not from the captain but from one enterprising young sailor who'd kept a screen he'd smuggled on board. "The criminals will be brought to justice," says one sailor. "Maybe the new government will put them on trial," says another. But Dmitri remains skeptical, saying, "they're all a pack of jackals. It doesn't matter who forms the next government, they'll all keep on killing our own people in the streets." This exchange is had in the mess hall, and most of the sailors around them agree with Dmitri. This is not a happy crew. For many years the Navy has squandered much money on expensive boondoggles, on new aircraft carriers with no aircraft, on submarines that can't submerge for all the leaks in their hulls, on missiles guided by software with so many bugs they might as well be great rocks. Meanwhile, their pay has been cut repeatedly, leaving these men to make less than a common street whore. If news of parliament's collapse is meant to assuage them, it fails.

By the time the sun rises on a new day, this government has fallen, leaving the state's apparatus in place but adrift, rudderless, in search of a new authority to take the place of the old. An election's called, thirty days from now, and much will happen in so short a time. Now, we look to the shadows where men like Valeri withstand the mounting unrest, his anger at those who would seek to govern him balanced by the uncertainty obscuring his personal road through the future. "I will not wait for the time to come," Valeri insists, speaking with neither Hannah nor Murray but his one-time lover Sydney Harrington. She's found Valeri after a long absence, and she knows, in the intuitive way she does, that he's caught up in this somehow. "I don't ask you to wait," says Sydney, "but I would ask you to come with my family and take refuge in our home in the country. It's near a small town in the highlands. We'll be safe there, together."

But by now, Valeri has come to reject private life altogether, going so far as to turn against so natural and so fulfilling an experience as love. And he finds in his self-denial a lofty ideal which gives him something he's never known before, a vital urge to take part in something that could change everything. After speaking with Sydney, not immediately after but some days, perhaps a week or two later, he finds Maria in the street. "There's no place for me here anymore," says Maria, the last time she and Valeri are to see one another for the current crisis. "There's never been much of a place for you here," Valeri says. "So you finally understand me," says Maria. "I'm beginning to," Valeri says, "good luck." As Valeri tries in vain to make sense of all that's happening, still yet he's distracted from the wealthy man's mad rush to extract every last bit of wealth he can in the wake of this turmoil that threatens to consume all.

As Valeri tries, so, too, tries the wealthy man, Valeri's slow but steady turn to the rebel giving rise to the wealthy man's reactionary, each provoking the other, neither coming about but in response to one another. It means little now, the whole lot of them still in their confused, primordial state, but as you and I watch this elaborate theatre play itself out, you must know, perhaps on instinct by now, it's all the same crazy, deranged mess repeating with a slightly different flavour each and every time. Something will happen, something must happen to interrupt the pulsating rhythm of day to day life. As the gunmen from the Popular Front stage their attacks across the country, no longer confined as they are to the decrepit, post-industrial north, a new wave of violence is unleashed. Bombs burst in the streets, and gunfire rattles through the air. Amid the ongoing strikes, this new offensive is aimed at bringing down the current government, but also at demonstrating to the people that the Popular Front so recently formed is able and willing to assume the legacy of the failed uprising of more than fifteen years ago. So many people have been out of work for so long, and so many more have been paid such pathetic wages for just as long that the decrepit and rotten character of the mid-twenty-first century Britain is revealed in these strikes. Although the rebels have been engaged in a low-level insurgency in the north of England ever since the failed uprising more than fifteen years ago, now is the time for them to take advantage of all the anger in the streets.

Once you come to realize that all these actors have a role to play and so must play their role no matter what's transpired, as I've long since realized, you may yet gain the ability to sense the flow of history as it reaches for its next phase. Three men gather and make for a church. "They'll gun us down if they see us," says one man. "We'll keep out of sight," says another. "We can't miss this sermon," says a third. Like most working men, they've thrown their sympathies in with the gunmen already staging raids on police stations, government houses, and freight train yards. Like most working men, they've not yet brought themselves to terms with what must be done. They haven't decided whether to vote in the coming elections, and it's up to the gunmen of the Popular Front to dissuade them. The same flag flutters from atop the same government buildings, from spires atop domes and from poles on tall buildings; in the time it takes the caretaker government to arrange for its own replacement, events will transpire here and around the world that'll make everything we do and everything we say in the meanwhile assume a new meaning few could've ever seen coming. But the task facing Valeri and Hannah and all the others like them is to survive through this period, with stores out of food and petrol stations out of petrol. "I'm not sure what to do," Valeri says, admitting in a moment of weakness to Hannah his uncertainty. "Nobody is," says Hannah, choosing not to press her advantage.

Having come this far, we've already cast ourselves off the precipice and can only hope we survive the plummet. But it matters little who's in power. In the streets, men like Valeri and his allies the student and the parishioner form a single mob, braving the troopers' guns to march on Victory Monument as once they had so often. As the decades of importing slaves from all corners of the Earth have finally caught up to their enemies, there's now that mass of people, pathetic and lacking in dignity as they are, unencumbered by fear of loss and free to hurl themselves once more at the black-clad men who man the barricade up ahead. "We strike against our enemies!" declares one man. "We stand up for the dead!" screams another. "We fight for ourselves!" yells a third. These are the names and the voices of the neglected, maligned working men, and this is their time. At their flat, Valeri and Hannah talk. "It's surprising to see you here," says Valeri. "It's surprising to see you here, too," says Hannah. "I'd have thought you'd be at the hospital," says Valeri. "They're shutting down the A&E there," says Hannah, "and moving it to a triage centre a few blocks away. I'll be heading there tomorrow. I've got a few hours to get some sleep." Although neither of them know it, this'll be the last time Hannah comes back to their flat. From now on, she'll be kept at her post, tending to the wounded as the war in the streets careens out of control.

"All power to the people!" shouts one woman. "All power to the people!" shouts another woman. "All power to the people!" shouts a third woman. Even before the massacre these were times when radicalism had long gained an alluring appeal, memories of the failed rising of fifteen years ago inhabiting these streets like ghostly visages, there, yet not there. Confused and leaderless, the police who only a short time earlier had patrolled the streets with confidence, almost arrogance are now reduced to a dishevelled mess, some firing their arms at anything that moves, at the shadows in the night, others locking themselves in their stations, still others abandoning their uniforms altogether and melting into the crowd as men like Valeri take to the streets. At their little flat, Valeri feels alone when Hannah has left, the nights he spends there seeming so much emptier. But nights at the flat have come to be marked not by loneliness but by a frenetic energy. At this time, Valeri begins to come to know the other tenants, the many flats in Dominion Courts home to many new people. Each of them has their own story on how they came to be in this dingy, decrepit old block, and each will have to make a choice to make on whether to stand and fight or flee.

At the polytechnic, news of the government's collapse is met with disbelief mixed with despair. Sean Morrison and the other students in occupation emphatically reject the call for elections, agreeing to stand on principle alone. But principles cannot feed the hungry nor heal the sick, and with food supplies running low and medical care needed for some the students have no choice but to end their occupation, for now, and head home to try and make good on their own survival. Sean's one of the last to leave, taking one last stand on the roof of the main hall. He wants one last moment with the makeshift flag they've flown, a flag of the old Soviet Union they'd taken from a wall display in the polytechnic's history department. He says, "we'll be back," while looking up at the flag fluttering in the summer's breeze, "and next time it'll be for good." He leaves the flag fluttering in the wind. A small part of him is left behind when he leaves with the most ardent supporters of the occupation. Their occupation has lasted only some weeks, but in those weeks they've all learned a valuable lesson in taking action.

But here, now, the police point their guns down the road at the steadily advancing mob, their grip quivering, wavering, finally withdrawing, surrendering the moment to that very mob. No longer can they confidently, even arrogantly enter the homes of men like Valeri and remove whoever they might find inside, as the wealthy man's profiteering has come to a screeching halt. In the midst of all this disorder, I'd invite you to look on the smoldering fires of liberation, after they've burned themselves out the charred husks of men blackened as the shadows of history come to life. "In the name of the dead!" shouts one man. "We rise in anger!" shouts another. "All power to the people!" shouts still another. This is the rallying cry against which the forces at work shall assail themselves, the moment of crisis again reaching for the skies like a tsunami cresting at exactly the moment it strikes the shore. But Valeri is not there. His is thrown in with the rebels of the Popular Front, in spirit if not yet in fact, and with the rebels biding their time, he waits for the inevitable opportunity to present itself. But he chomps at the bit, hardly fighting the urge to take to the streets and go out in a blaze of glory. Through a complicated and entirely ad hoc network, instructions of sorts have filtered down, changing with each set of ears they pass through until hardly resembling the original order. By the time Valeri hears what's needed to be done, he hears not instructions issued by authority but the call of the moment resounding through the streets and the alleys here, across the country, and around the world. A young woman named Tonya lives in Dominion Courts, in a second-floor flat on the opposite side of the building as Valeri's. When they meet, in the halls, they exchange only a glance and a nod, a small gesture compared with what's to come.

After their ministry in the streets, parishioners who follow the forbidden gospel yield to the police. They hear news of the government's collapse and the impending election, and for a time it seems their efforts might've finally born fruit. Nevermore assured, they return to their homes, Darren Wright among they who look suspiciously on the coming day. All the wealthy men who live in opulent luxury seem to have absconded with their wealth; but for the screens filled with talking heads delivering their screeds against disorder and banditry, there's little evidence the wealthy men remain in Britain at all. For the parishioner, the path forward has become more uncertain than ever, obscured as it is behind a rapidly-darkening cloud gathering on the horizon. Still, when he carries on with his life, Darren feels the calling of the revolution, as though it were near to him. He says to his friend Julia, the day after they've vacated their occupation of the streets, "I can't help but feel the worst is yet to come." She nods, and says, "we'll be ready when we're called on to receive the Holy Spirit, and we'll survive through any troubles." Amid the burnt-out shopfronts and upturned cars, the broken glass and the shattered dreams, there's hope. There's always hope. The rogue priest isn't there. The parishioners don't know it yet, but the rogue priest is dead, having been killed in the streets, shot dead while at the head of a crowd of demonstrators.

Lingering in the shadows, the spirit of the old way, too, conserves its strength, looking to the future for the time when the new will rise and present itself as a target. This is the way of things, and has always been. As history forms, so too does anti-history, locked as they are in a mortal struggle for the hearts and minds of the people of our time. Look, please look into the eyes of the people who've been killed, their faces and their voices seared into your memory as each cries out, frozen in a moment of terror before their lives are taken from them in an instant, in the time it takes for the bullet to cross that thin barrier between the heart and the soul. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is events confined to the city in which Valeri lives; though we fixate on this city, know these events are occurring, in one way or another, around the world. In time, we shall come to see the greater stage on which we all perform our roles. For now, we are lost in the minutiae even as we ascend to the greatest stage of all. After running into Tonya, the woman he doesn't know but'll come to know well, things at Dominion Courts don't seem to change. After Graham seems to disappear, the tenants are more or less left to fend for themselves. But then Graham returns, knocking on Valeri's door to demand unpaid rent, then on one door down, then another, then another. It's pathetic.

In the days following the deaths of Garrett Walker's daughters, his life becomes a swirling vortex of pain and anger. Though he wants only to have his vengeance on those who killed his daughters, practical matters intervene. Tending to his wife and her mother, he doesn't know circumstances will soon thrust him into even greater hardships, death waiting not for him but for nearly everything he loves. Although Garrett is alive, he feels in his heart as though he's dead. In fact, he's both, living as he does, as we all do in a place where life and death have blended to become a seamless continuum. He doesn't think, he doesn't even think of the possibility of life after death. But as he makes his way along the street in with a crowd of people made homeless by the violence spiralling out of control in the wake of that massacre, he walks without his wife, having lost her, too. She's not dead, not yet, but she's missing. Actually, she's gone to be with the crowds in the streets the same as Garrett, and fate has conspired to separate them. In the end, they'll be together again, united as we all will whenever fate so conspires against us all. But in the middle of a march, Garrett says to the marcher next to him, "I hate those murderers, I hate them more than I thought I could hate anything." And the marcher next to him agrees. They'll both die soon.

It's all happened so fast. It seems only yesterday that we were in the midst of rapid, breakneck growth, in a forest of concrete and glass reaching for the skies as quickly as men like Valeri could be made to work. Quickly, quietly, the sudden resignation of an entire government sets off a chain of events that could but change the world forever. All at once, the workers walk out, joined soon after by their natural allies, the students and the parishioners, the millions of them taking to the streets. Leaderless and paralyzed, the government can't react fast enough, those few days of chaos prompting an eventual response so heavy handed it promises to inflame passions further and weaken the government's own hand. Though Colonel Cooke hasn't said when the brigade will deploy to eastern Europe to poster against the Russians, Private Craig Thompson and the others know it must be near. Despite being confined to their barracks, the whole lot of them quickly form a plan by exchanging notes and whispering under the cover of darkness. "When the order comes down," Craig says, "we'll seize control of this barracks and we won't give in until they promise not to send us abroad." He's speaking at night with a pair of other troopers, not the first time someone has suggested it but neither the last. The two troopers nod their agreement. Sitting on the edge of his bunk, it's almost lights out, and the sergeant will be coming around soon to shut the lights off. It's precisely because the sergeant is about to arrive that they know this is the time, those precious few minutes a night when they can be assured there's no one watching.

Amid the carnage on the streets, the men of the brigade will be shocked and confused when the order finally comes down not to deploy to a foreign country but to the working class neighbourhoods right here in England, the one place they thought they'd never have to go. When an unknown person rises to the podium at the capitol and announces the imposition of a new martial law, it seems even he knows the folly of the path laid out for him, just as he knows full well there's no choice but for him to take that next step. This is the sign of our times. When all have their role to play, all must play their role, all must recite their lines, compelled as they are by the invisible forces that govern their impulses. Still, in the background, the reactionary himself waits for the government to fall. Although Elijah is aware of the presence of his opposite in the reactionary, he doesn't know the identity of the reactionary. But this is only because the dark essence which guides the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front chooses not to disclose the identity, the identities of the reactionary to Elijah. That'll come, but not altogether soon.

As confident as the rebel Elijah in the certainty of his ultimate victory, so too is his yet-unnamed adversary, his name to be revealed even to him in the future, their mutual assurance setting them on a collision course. Though it may seem we're on the cusp of a radical new beginning, it's not so. We're only at the start of a long and difficult journey, one which has been in the making since any of us can remember. Still in control of the prison when the announcement of martial law is heard, the inmates know what this will mean for them. Some choose this moment to abandon their positions, leaving the makeshift garrison without enough men to hold every part of the grounds. Stanislaw Czerkawski mans the barriers at the front gate with four others, clutching pipes and bottles ready to throw should the police reappear. Food and water are in ample supply, but still the committee formed to govern the prison rations both on the fear they may be surrounded at any time. "If they attack us, we should fight," Stanislaw says at the night's meeting in the open space of their cell block, "and if we go down fighting then at least we'll know that we chose our own fate for once." Gone is the mild-mannered Polish migrant who'd swept the floors for years, replaced by the roused anger of a man insulted and demeaned one too many times. But neither he nor we are close to the end of our struggles; ready to die, the inmates will be forced to live under not a regime of brutal violence but one of uncertainty and dismay.

But after Valeri sees Tonya in the halls, still having not yet introduced himself to her he sees a determined scowl on the younger woman's face. It's without context; Valeri doesn't know what Tonya's going through, beyond the basic hardships that've come to characterize life in Britain. He sees, though, a young woman who'll come to be a key ally of his, of all theirs, in the war that's still to come.

19. Seeds of Deception

At the helm of the armed forces are a group of men loyal to the flag, or so they seem at a moment's glance; in truth, they are of a stock unlike any other, their allegiance owed to ideals found in no constitution, represented in no colours worn on the sleeve but those they've made up for themselves. Like the rebel Elijah, these men choose not to take immediate action, knowing as they do to wait for the perfect moment to strike. With the election weeks away, already the Popular Front has called for it to be boycotted; after the massacre, recruitment into the Worker's Party and the People's Party has skyrocketed, with other, minor parties joining the front and pledging themselves to its cause. For Stanislaw, his work is not yet done. The task of governing the prison is a difficult one, made all the more difficult by the fact that the police don't immediately counterattack as the inmates had expected. Still they keep on manning their improvised fortifications. They couldn't withstand a serious assault, but their preparations are more about reassuring themselves while they awaits the coming strike. Stanislaw's asleep when the army arrives to take over for the police, but his fellow prisoners wake him hurriedly. He makes it to the front just in time to see the army troops take up position halfway up the road. When he sees they've brought artillery, he's certain they're going to attack, but they don't, not yet. Instead, he watches through binoculars as the army troops position their artillery at the front of their roadblock, aiming right down the road at the prison's front gates, then stop and wait. "Why don't they just attack and get it over with?" he asks. "They want to make us sweat it out for a while," says another. Stanislaw and the rest of the prisoners know they can only wait for the inevitable, and so they wait. In the meanwhile, though, an unexpected help arrives.

"You must let me know what's the strange thing you've got hiding," Graham says one night, "I've got nothing but trouble now. And you were always such a good tenant." They're in the halls, and Graham has heard much rumour and hearsay of what Valeri's been up to. "It's going to hear itself out, old man," says Valeri, "you'll not hear from me again, when the time comes." The owners have been giving Graham trouble for all the missed rents, so many tenants in the building now out of work or unable to get to work that there's little point in enforcing the rules. It's absurd that they should be concerned about such things in these times, but without the gathering of rents the owners have nothing to do, no useful function to serve, no role to play. Now that the tenants, whether registered or not, are refusing to pay rent, there's no reason for the owners to be here at all. Still they come, by way of their proxy, Graham. All the tenants haven't banded together in a coordinated refusal to pay rent, but all have come to this action by coincidence. But there's more to it than that. For now, the rebel Elijah reserves the bulk of his forces, gathering strength, forming alliances, negotiating a complex political landscape behind the scenes with all the precision of a surgeon cutting out the smallest of malignant tumours. Still the old order persists, as it will for a long time, resilient as it is.

Led by an officer in the army named Douglas Schlager and a one-time minister in government named Nathan Williams, they will rise in time with and in opposition to the budding Popular Front which seeks a democratic way of life. These men, they're content to work behind the scenes for now, but soon enough they'll step onto the stage and make themselves known to all. Early in the morning, the brigade has left the armoury under tight security, Private Craig Thompson in the back of the last lorry towing one of their artillery pieces. He wonders why they'd need artillery against a civilian uprising; it seems a criminal affair from the start. On arriving at the prison, they take up positions along the access road, then wait for further orders. It's an eerie thing, with the troopers manning the roadblock once vacated by the police and the skies clear but for the odd cloud tracing a lazy path across the crystal, azure expanse. It's a moment of confusion and disillusion for all involved, with Private Thompson thinking back to the troops' agreement to mutiny should they ever be deployed abroad. Now, deployed to English streets to oppose they who would only seek their own measure of justice, the Private and the other men are left uncertain what to do next. "I won't kill those men," says Thompson. "Neither will I," says one of his fellow troopers. An officer overhears them, but makes nothing of it.

Not at Dominion Courts but neither at the union hall, Valeri's among a group of working men. "We should destroy everything," Valeri says, "we should burn it all down. We should go into the streets, drag the wealthy from their mansions and make them watch as we set fire to everything they own. We should have done all these things many years ago. If we had done so then we would be in a better place now." This is the discussion had in a basement somewhere in one of the working class districts, organized secretly by Arthur Bennington. Above them, a pub sits with hardly a few men not of the Popular Front but of yet another group of fellow travelers. The identity of the Popular Front and its union of two illegal parties hasn't been reported on widely on the screens across the country, but like all things not reported on it becomes widely known among the working class blocks. And Valeri says these things amid prices of basic foods like bread skyrocketing, daily reaching new heights. While men like Valeri are hungry, hungrier than they've ever been, still they see advertisements for luxurious and expensive items, cars, flats, clothes, all on their screens. Though Valeri doesn't know it, the screens flood with these advertisements not because there remains huge demand to purchase them, no, but because the men who control what goes on those screens are compelled by empty ritual of habit to keep on trying to sell the unsalable.

Still in this early period, those sympathetic to the forbidden Popular Front can't meet openly; large, disorganized protests with no specific aim or plan aren't stopped by police despite the imposition of martial law, but smaller gatherings would be trivial to sniff out and shut down. Valeri has angered after deaths, and Arthur Bennington is recruiting people like him into the Popular Front. Arthur Bennington sits not at the front of the room but stands against the back wall, watching as men like Valeri vent their frustrations. But events are afoot. As the violence in the streets slowly but steadily escalates into open warfare, life for men like Valeri has changed little. "I'm going to do something," says Valeri, "I've got to do something. I'll find the nearest rebel even if it takes the rest of my life and I'll join him." But Valeri doesn't know this is not yet his path; he still has a critical in-between step before he can realize his true role in the playing out of our apocalypse, rising. "You can't waste your life in a blaze of hatred," says Arthur Bennington, "you can be much more." There's a lot more said, and it makes Valeri come away from this meeting unsure of himself. Even as he sees the bombs bursting and hears the gunfire rattling in the streets with a steadily increasing frequency, he's not ready. Even as he joins in with the mobs in the streets hurling abuse on the police and marching on the offices of their members of parliament, he's not ready. As Valeri is an avatar for the struggle of many, he must be denied his chance for rising until it's the right time.

For Garrett Walker, one of many unemployed and unemployable men to lose all they've had, this is a time not of great uncertainty but of great certainty. In the morning he sees the opulent palaces built for the criminal wealthy class, the investors who have so long ago seized everything in this country he'd held dear. In the streets of his own hometown there's shouting, hurling of bricks and stones, even sporadic gunfire rattling off into the night, but still nothing infuriates him as the knowledge these corrupt investors, the yet-nameless and -faceless criminals should abscond with their ill-gotten gains, escaping punishment for their crimes. After his daughters were killed, Garrett is listless and confused as anyone, but out of his listlessness and confusion there arises in the night a clarity he now knows was surely there all along. "I want to live," says Garrett, speaking with another unemployed worker in the street outside a grocer's. "Me too," says the other worker. They're both in a queue, waiting to be allowed into the grocer's; the owners have called on the local police for protection, and the police let only a few customers in at a time. "But I can't think of any way to live without my daughters," says Garrett. They've been standing next to each other long enough to exchange this talk. "I've got a family to feed," says the other worker. It's not that Garrett willingly shares his feelings with anyone who would listen, but that he, like all working class men in mid-twenty-first century Britain have learned to be a little more open with one another on their lives. "I hate them all," says Garrett, "they've gotten rid of us, treated us like garbage. Now we line up like orphans to receive our bread and water. I can't tolerate it." Although his stomach groans and growls in protest, Garrett steps out of the queue and walks away, deciding on the spot that he won't submit any longer. His whole world aflame, he turns to the next day and stands.

After Valeri has spoken, a few more men and women take their turn, most of them even younger than he. "Are you not ready for the coming storm?" asks Arthur Bennington, taking the chair only to deliver a closing address. There are no stenographers, no cameras, nothing to create any record of this meeting. "Are you not willing to surrender your lives in service of the cause?" asks Arthur Bennington. All have been made to agree this meeting is not happening, but have as well been committed to following the decisions it lays out. "Are you not ready to die so that your deaths may be used by our cause to advance itself?" Arthur Bennington asks. "None of you are, not yet, no matter how you many insist you are. But with time, you will be ready. Many of our brothers and sisters have given their lives, and many more are still to give. But all will be lost if not the full commitment of all working men is not given over to the cause for which we fight. Remember this fact as you return to the community and ready yourselves." No one knows why this meeting is called, except to air grievances, as grievances have been so aired for many, many years. For all the assemblies held at union halls, at churches, even at universities, sometimes daily life continues unabated. However, there's a faction within the burgeoning working class revolution that should seek to sabotage their revolution before it even begins. But that'll come, with time. This meeting, this informal, ad hoc meeting is only one of many, all across the country men like Valeri Kovalenko gathering each and every night to share their rage. Sometimes sympathisers or even members of the Popular Front are present; most of the time they're not. It's only been a few months since the Popular Front was formed. They're not everywhere, not yet.

As the crisis steadily worsens, the wealthy investors who have so driven prices sky-high and plunged wages belatedly realize their time is come. In the night they concoct the latest of their schemes, then enact it the following morning. By the time news breaks on the screens of the working men across the country and around the world, the bottom has already fallen out, just as the rebel Elijah had predicted it would. As Elijah's word has come to be proven true, the inevitable turn of events has come to mean life for the working men of the world will get worse before it gets better. When people learn of Elijah's return to the streets, their reactions vary based on their outlook. Those given to hoping for a new revolution cheer his return. Those given to preserving the way of things anger. As the war in the streets seems to escalate every day, Valeri keeps on meeting with like-minded young men, in places where they're still welcome. These meetings take place in between the worsening daily lives of men like Valeri, when he returns one evening to his empty little flat the door wedged open and the place trashed by thieves looking for anything of value to steal. Although Hannah is gone, Valeri can almost convince himself she's still there. As he closes the door and moves into their flat, surveying the damage, he wishes he hadn't let her go. In this day and age it wouldn't be hard to contact her, if he had any inclination to do so. He misses her, so long had they been roommates, friends that to be suddenly without her more unpleasant than he'd have thought. But it's not contact with her that he wants. It`s simply to be in her presence, and her in his.

In the underground church the congregants mourn the loss of their rogue priest, confident as they are in the coming of the new way of things. For Darren Wright, the eliciting of constriction means little in the here and now, the darkness of the underground church concealing everything that doesn't matter while revealing all that does. Bibles open, the faithful studying intently in preparing for their spiritual war's next offensive. They hear of the government's collapse, of the impending election, but what they hear means little to them. In the darkness of their underground church they put their heads down and pray for guidance, the sounds of distant gunfire rattling against the silence of their prayer. Darren hasn't seen his young friend Sheila, not since their street occupation had turned the tide of their spiritual war, but he harbours no worry for her. Only some months earlier Darren had his doubts. Now he has none. As the wealthy man realizes there's no further profit to be had in exploiting these particular people in this particular part of the world, they have absconded with their ill-gotten wealth, in the time between sundown and sunup squirrelling it all away in havens on the other side of the world. Materially, nothing has changed in the night; all the same factories, most already shuttered, operate, all the same workers still possess them same capacity for work, all the same knowledge still lies in the backs of the minds of working men here and around the world.

Yet Valeri wakes, one morning, all has changed, the construction cranes which once erected the wealthy man's apparatus now falling motionless, the prices for a loaf of bread in the grocery stores increasing fivefold, the petrol stations running out of petrol in the time it takes the desperate to line up and empty their pockets for fuel so expensive the signs on the side of the road don't have the space to display the price. "What thievery is this?" asks one man. "I need to feed my family," says another. "Why are we allowing this to happen?" asks a third. In the streets, Valeri steps over the bodies of the dead and dying, in the last of the day's hours clutching at his shoulder, pain from a stray round having numbed to a dull soreness. Of course Hannah`s still gone; but Valeri realizes this quickly when he wakes up, then pushes the thought from his mind as he confronts another day. His stomach growls. The pain of hunger is a persistent fact of life. Although he goes to meetings, whether at the union hall among concerned workers or at the pub among young men given to drink, in truth he spends the bulk of his days in this confusing, disorienting time trying to survive. He searches for food, sometimes finding it at a nearby church, sometimes having to turn up at the hall along with many other unemployed young men. But it's never enough. His clothes are little more than rags. His hands, his arms are constantly dirty. And he never cleans his flat from the ransacking it was given.

After ending their occupation of the polytechnic, the students disperse, among them Sean Morrison taking refuge in a nearby apartment block built decades ago for student housing. On the roof, Sean looks through binoculars at the red flag still flying from the polytechnic's roof, in the morning the sight enough to inspire him to have at each and every day. But then, one morning, he sees nothing, only a bare rooftop; the police have reasserted control of the area, moving in the night to occupy strategic positions in securing the country for the coming election. In meeting with Julia Hall and the other students, the declaration is made to keep on resisting, no matter the cost. "But where can we go," asks Sean, "now that the polytechnic's under police control?" And Julia answers, saying, "we can retake the polytechnic." It's not the first time one of the student's suggested to the others the idea. In fact, the idea's been under constant discussion since they'd left. But as they meet in a library, the idea seems to gain new currency after some time has passed. Murmurs of agreement sound across their meeting space, perhaps twenty to twenty-five students there. It's only a momentary agreement, as the police soon arrive to break up their 'illegal gathering.' (Under martial law gatherings of more than five people in public are prohibited, although this law isn't often enforced). As the police force their way into the library, Sean, Julia, and the others all prepare to defend themselves, using objects as weapons. But it's not to be.

In the morning after this latest clash in the streets, the rebel Elijah deploys his disciples, from secret bases hidden in the maze of apartment blocks and shantytowns striking out at the policemen. Unlike before, these attacks are carried out in force, with shots fired not only to provoke but to kill. The rebel's disciples, his gunmen happen upon an army patrol, waiting in the alleys and on the rooftops until exactly the right moment, then pop out shooting, the crack of gunfire followed by the dropping of bodies to the pavement. Valeri sometimes hears the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire, as he always has, but in this confusing, early period he doesn't know what to make of it. In the darkness of the night, each night, he puts to bed without knowledge of where the coming day will take him. Still he turns up with many others at various worksites in the morning, many mornings, rarely selected for work, rarely wanting to work anymore. Valeri's no rebel, not yet, even if he's given to joining in the protests in the streets. But his time is soon to come.

This scene plays itself out here and in cities and towns across the country, so fast no one can make any sense of it all. Even the army's troops in the street can't deter the attacks, nor can they stop them, the rebel gunmen's hit and run tactics causing the army's infantry to shoot confusedly at shadows and noise. Each of them, each man on any given side has his own story, his own friends and family, his own aspirations in life denied. A soldier who joined the army to find his own way forward. A young woman who taught primary school until the school was shut down in the current crisis. Although we fixate on Valeri, as he is an avatar for the struggle of the working class, there are millions like him. After he turns up for work at one of the few still-open shops in the area one day, he's among the huge bulk of workers not selected. As he leaves, he notices on the other side of a fence a group of imported slaves, working diligently. Even as the current crisis threatens to escalate into open warfare at any moment, the wealthy men keep on importing slaves from faraway countries. For Valeri, this realization serves as a critical moment, as he returns to his empty flat a rage in him building unlike any before.

With each day seeming to bring a new escalation of the war in the streets, no one can imagine it getting any worse. Yet, the rebel Elijah looks ahead and sees only deliverance in death, declaring to his disciples as he always has that he does not promise peace, but war, meeting with them in the homeless camps, in the decrepit factories, even in the sewers to say, "worry not for what the future may hold, for our future will see only untold suffering for us all. We must ensure our suffering is not all for nought." In this, Elijah speaks not only for himself and his disciples, but for all working men, in Britain and around the world. When he speaks to assemblies of striking workers, he urges them on, saying, "in your moment of struggle you must realize the inevitability not of your victory but that of your defeat. Your desire for revolution is irrepressible, but you must never waver in your desire to see it through at all costs. The future you seek, most of you will not live to see it. But you must embrace this if you are to win through!" And the workers cheer him, knowing him as the leader of the last revolution, now the leader of this one. They're sure Elijah will lead them through the end of the current way of life and onto the next.

But the end is not yet come. Elsewhere, the crew of the cruiser Borealis worry they'll be caught up in the war at home. This, after he's had the crew spend the weeks on endless drills, even rousing the men from their sleep in the middle of the night to practice loading munitions by hand again and again. Then, in one late night drill a young sailor mishandles a torpedo, slipping with the torpedo falling on him, knocking him on the back of the head and killing him instantly. Still Captain Abramovich orders more drills. It makes little sense to the men to be so drilled when the carnage in the streets ought to demand full attention. The rumours they'll be deployed as marines to the streets gain credibility when Abramovich has a supply of small arms brought on board. Among those selected to secure the extra stores, Dmitri sees the crates of assault rifles and shotguns. No longer do the crew worry they'll be deployed abroad; when Dmitri tells the others what he's seen, they don't know what to make of it. All keep worrying about their loved ones. For his part, Dmitri thinks of the young wife he'd left behind in Liverpool when he joined the Navy and was assigned to the Borealis. Inwardly he's already committed himself to the cause of the rebel and the Popular Front, even if he doesn't realize it. "We're soon to find out," Dmitri surmises, "one way or another."

20. August Skies

It's August again, and in the last year or so Britain and all Europe have seen much violence, the carnage spiralling out of control but in the most carefully dictated, scripted way. The rebel's campaign has intensified, but remarkably little has changed. The slowly but steadily worsening state of life pushes men like Valeri closer to the edge with every day that passes. As the rebel Elijah has come to realize, love is anger and anger is love. Anger, righteous anger is rooted in the need to correct an injustice, which makes it love. Love, fraternal love is rooted in a distinction between our own and those not our own, which makes it anger. The rebel Elijah knows this, and he incorporates this knowledge into his renewed campaign aimed at bringing about the end of one age and the advent of the next. In the meanwhile, though, Valeri is in the midst of a struggle simply to survive. Although it might sometimes seem like Valeri is already given to the rebel's cause, with all the meetings he's been to and all the impassioned pleas he's made to those in his life, he's only a confused young man caught up in this, our apocalypse, rising. But even Valeri is not quite what he seems, not yet.

It's become normal for men like Valeri to live every day under threat of eviction, but new to him is this daily threat of death. He becomes subject to the terror and the lawlessness of random outbursts, never sure that around the next corner there isn't a bomb waiting to go off in the back of some car, or some trooper looking for an excuse or even just tired after too many hours spent on the street looking for something that can't be found. After Sydney has left London, perhaps for good, Valeri can't help but wish, despite all the differences between them, that she might live through this crisis where so many have lost their lives. But Valeri, through this time, manages to survive in spite of the great hardships gripping the streets of Britain's working class blocks, greater still than the hardships of old. The stakes in Valeri's own life are high, high as they've ever been. If he makes even the slightest misstep, he will die. But he doesn't know what makes a path, doesn't know how to delicately place each step forward, even if he thinks he does. As he spends his days struggling to find enough food to silence his hunger pangs, he joins in with the crowds of dispirited young men in the streets, each of them just like him. Some are a little older, some a little younger. A few are taller, many are shorter. But all have come from the same background, having been made to waste the prime of their youths trapped in hopeless poverty, in pursuit of their own pittances.

"It's an indulgence," Valeri says, talking with Sydney on a secret phone call made from the lobby of a local gymnasium, "but it's an indulgence I'd rather have than not." Each know the other can't promise to keep in touch, that every word exchanged on any call might be the last between them. In the country, there's no war, not yet, as the urban rising has yet to reach that far. She's safe, but Valeri hangs up knowing, in the instinctive way he does, that she won't be safe forever. Every time they speak could be the last, each time a new chance to achieve closure with her by confessing his true feelings for her. And still Valeri must end the call reluctantly, only to turn back to the task of quieting his growling, aching stomach. He finds a group of friends, some former workers at the shop he'd gotten sacked from, others random persons he's met in the time since. Still he thinks of Sydney, sometimes wishing he'd convinced her to stay with him. But then he reminds himself that she wouldn't have survived so long as he has, that she was born of a better stock than he. As he takes in with his friends, Sydney's last words echo in the back of his mind. She'd said, "don't forget about me. I'll never forget about you." Even as his stomach growls and aches, he can't help but recall those words over and over, until it's as though he can hear her voice again.

After the death of a sailor several more have been seriously hurt or killed in accidents, the crew of the cruiser Borealis fall deeper into despondency. Captain Abramovich sees this when inspecting the troops daily, able to sense these things in the men even as every last one remains silent and stone-faced. Soon, non-coms are posted in the mess hall, there to squelch any dissent before it even happens. But they can't police the little half-conversations that take place every night in the bunks, in hushed tones when they ought to be sleeping. "I won't be the next to die," says one of Dmitri's bunkmates. "I'm already convinced we might not have the choice," says Dmitri, "unless we do something about it first." Their chance will come sooner than they think. Already the election from a year ago has produced a new caretaker government, this next election featuring the same parties and the same politicians posturing. It's inevitable, perhaps, for this climate of fear and unrest to produce action which should, somehow, someway set it all on fire. Three or four weeks pass between killings in the streets, a gun laid down after deaths, too many deaths, more broken, lifeless bodies in the street, their blood draining into the sewers a copper, maroon sort of colour. But in each of those three or four weeks the hearts of Dmitri and the other men aboard the Borealis harden further. They know election's coming; the ship will be in port, the men ordered ashore to cast their ballots. Unlike the civilians, Dmitri and the others aboard are required by regulation to vote, under penalty of court martial. Dmitri and many of the men are secretly agreeing to refuse, no matter the penalty. It won't be that simple.

It's in this environment that election day arrives; as he's always known these to be a fraud, Valeri has long determined not to participate, and he enthusiastically declares this intention in the basement where Arthur Bennington meets with them next. "In refusing to participate, we withdraw our consent to be governed," Valeri declares, "and we deprive the enemy of their moral authority over us." But he's still only an intemperate young man, on the cusp of beginning his growth into something more but still yet It's what he's learned, as he's been hurling stones and throwing his voice, and as he stands he winces in pain slightly at the place where a bullet was removed from his shoulder. Arthur Bennington watches from the back, but doesn't speak. "We oppose the enemy in all things," says one young woman. "They're all criminals," says a young man. "The only good that can come from parliament is to burn it to the ground," says another young woman. None of them will vote in the election, just as most of them have been refusing to vote for some time now. In the wake of the failed uprising of fifteen years ago, the rebel Elijah developed his doctrine of unilateral disengagement, in resisting the temptation to engage, as those who engage by virtue of their participation grant legitimacy to their own rulers. We'll not explore this doctrine much more, not right now; that'll come.

These are Valeri's unemployed compatriots, among those most radicalized against the current order but not part of the armed struggle. In this basement, they agree, but beyond these walls there are still those among them who might be tempted to place their faith in the way of things, hoping their lives, wretched as they are, can be salvaged. It's a fool's endeavour, and Valeri knows this even as there's some small part of him still holding hope otherwise. He doesn't know it, but all can see in him the doubt; his is emblematic of Britain's, all Europe's malaise, his aversion to act. This is why Arthur Bennington does not yet take them into the ranks of the Popular Front's gunmen. Later, a day or two later, and Valeri's "It's frightening how far we've come," says one of the other unemployed workers, speaking to Valeri. "We've still got a long way to go," says Valeri. They're in the street not far from Victory Monument, the police presence heavier than usual owing to the impending election. "They'll come after us," says the other man, "sooner or later." As if on cue, a police lorry turns onto the street and comes to a stop a few metres away. Black-clad policemen carrying submachine guns pile out. It's over quickly. There's no shooting, not this time. Valeri and the other man watch as the police enter a shop and drag out a man, throwing him in the back of the lorry before turning away. But Valeri feels tempted, the rebellious, intemperate youth in him yearning to reach out and do something, anything at all to help the young man. He thinks of Sydney, thinks of the last words she'd spoken to him, and it's his recollections that give him strength. But with the

Election day arrives, only the second election since we've begun following Valeri and his path, on a cold and rainy Thursday in the middle of November. The election last year produced a loose coalition from five different parties. In these, the strongest moments of our not-winter's discontent, the ashes of fires of liberation long burnt out now coat the surface of the streets like a very fine, powdered snow. As the election had been called only recently, parliament dissolved only weeks before election day, there's little time for all actors involved to consider the finer points of their politicking, making their advertisements and their election pledges to the unenthusiastic masses cruder and more forceful than would've been customary. But this election is the focus of the current sequence of events, seeming at the same time to be a climactic event and only another escalation in the burgeoning revolution gripping the streets of British cities. As Valeri has no family left in Britain, he's alone but for his friends and the few brothers left in the union he's close to. "You know I can say this to you because I care about you," says Murray, in a rare private moment at the union hall, one of the last times Valeri's to be there, "but if you can find it in yourself to stand together, then you'll see what I've been talking about all along." Although Valeri had been dutifully voting in the union's internal elections for as long as he'd been a member, now he has no vote, no formal membership. Still the election for parliament is one which he refuses to participate in, obeying the call from the union which he's no longer a member of. And still he thinks of his lover, Sydney, half-hoping, half-expecting to see her again even as the better part of him knows she's never coming back. She's got better sense than that, he thinks, he knows, better sense than him.

In the distance, gunfire rattles off like a lit firecracker, the thud of a bomb exploding followed by more rattling, the light gunfire of the rebel's attacks soon meeting with the heavier cracking of the trooper's fire. But by then the rebel has withdrawn and the troopers are shooting at shadows and dust. It's part of this latest provocation, this latest attack, the troopers no longer sure of what they're doing or why they're doing it, the moment having become lost amid their forays into the working class districts by way of habit. Valeri stands his ground, refusing to vote. Most of the workers he calls his friends refuse to vote, too. It's this way across Britain, though in some parts more than others. But then, in the middle of the afternoon on election day, a pivotal event happens, a decisive action which should've been anticipated by all but which was anticipated by none. The union which he was a member of and which he still has a place in his heart for has joined those calling for the election to be boycotted. But Valeri isn't obliged to follow the edicts of this union anymore, having lost his formal membership. In truth, even without the union's call for a boycott he's beginning to come around to the rebel's forbidden gospel, the notion that men like Valeri ought to refuse their consent to be governed by the enemy within. At the union hall, Murray speaks to him among a group, saying, "stand fast and we will make our demands heard. If no one votes, then this sham of an election will be revealed for what it is." Although there's a chorus of agreement, in truth there're at least a few among them who will vote anyways, or who will at least try, revealing the division in the union, reflecting the disarray in the wider working class struggle. It's a disarray guided by the dark essence, a guidance that can only be harnessed by the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front. But first, the act must play itself out. Soon, election day arrives.

On election day, there are many attacks the Popular Front's gunmen stage not on police stations or army bases but on voting places, here and there going so far as to break in and set fire to boxes stuffed with ballots. The new government forms shortly thereafter, another loose coalition cobbled together this time from fifteen different parties granted their mandate from fewer than twenty percent of permitted voters. Hobbled by their greed and their petty concerns, this new government cannot act. "I know of nothing that can be done for you," says Murray, "it's impossible to find anyone work in this climate. But I think you don't want to do work right now, not paid wage labour work that is." Valeri's speaking with him at the union hall, the first time he's been back there in months. "It's hard to say how much time has passed," Valeri says. "You're telling me?" asks Murray, incredulous. "But this is all a confusing time," Valeri says, "for all of us." "You speak as if you know something the rest of us don't," says Murray. "I know nothing," Valeri says, "except what's wrong, when I see it." Both know this is already beyond what happened fifteen years ago. Valeri counts himself lucky to be alive. They discuss the election only briefly, Valeri leaving to brave the streets on his way home. On his way back to his little flat he used to share with Hannah, he's almost calmed by his growing certainty of what he's long been sure of. Only now, only now is he becoming given to the path laid out for him.

On election day, the polytechnic's students demonstrate against the proceedings, staging their protest too close to a polling place. Amid the carnage of the Popular Front's campaign, the police stage a counterattack, moving on the students assembled with clubs in hand and guns at the ready. Sean takes a blow, tumbling to the ground, only to rise again and have at the black-clad troopers. But he doesn't take the worst of it. There's gunshots; no one knows who shoots first as bodies fall dead in the street. By the time Sean finds his feet, he's staggering in a daze, the blood spilled again marring the election and dashing the government's hopes for a fresh mandate to see Britain through this still-escalating crisis. For all the screaming and all the raising of fists in defiance, the student seizes the chance to put theory into practice, Sean among those who would seek to burn it all down. By the time it's over, the street is littered with broken bodies, the worst yet to come. Many of Sean's fellow students are among the dead. In the streets, after having beaten a retreat from the police attack, Sean says to one student, "do we attack again?" But his fellow student only says, "with what?" Later, when Sean meets Julia for the first time following the street battle, they share a firm embrace, he saying to her, "I'm glad you're still alive," she saying to him, "me too," before they part ways for the night agreeing to make one more stand, without agreeing where.

At the hospital, Hannah has seen deaths and blood like she'd never imagined. Her hospital lacks basic medicines; women and children die on the waiting room's floor. "You're not what you think," says Whitney, as they watch another patient die helplessly for wont of a common medicine. "You think that's news to me?" Hannah asks. But it's not the rebel's fault; this is a time of crisis in which shortages abound from the wealthy man's greed. "Don't talk about obligations then," says Whitney. "I'll talk about what I please," Hannah says. Another attack, the rebel's gunmen opening fire on a crowded street, in a hail of lead some innocent bystanders cut down along with the few troopers who'd braved the challenge of the day. Though she's left the flat she'd used to share with Valeri, she remains in London, shuttled from one hospital to the next. The course of the burgeoning revolution has necessitated numerous attacks on her old hospital, by the groups of demonstrators braving the state of emergency, by the police and by the army searching for rebels and other insurrectionists, even by the gunmen of the Popular Front who make their presence felt by searching out the softest, most vulnerable targets they can find. Through it all, Hannah's not lost her sense of pride in her work, nor her warped sense of humour, joking as she does with her fellow hospital workers. But now she works at a makeshift hospital set up on the grounds of an old secondary school, with the medicine and equipment of a first aid station but the number of patients of the largest hospitals in all Britain. She'll not see Valeri again, not for a long time at least, but even as she devotes herself to the futile task of trying to save one young man from massive blood loss she finds him, almost. Exactly as the young man dies, it occurs to her how strong a resemblance he bears to Valeri, but for the colour of his eyes a spitting image of her old roommate. But then she's forced onto the next patient, then the next, then the next, the deluge of casualties offering her no respite.

All those caught in the open flee, scrambling over one another to escape the carnage, leaving the bodies of the dead where they've fallen. But before even the last of the people have hit the ground running, the rebel's gunmen themselves withdraw, fleeing the scene hardly some seconds after they've struck. By the time the troopers have gathered their reinforcements and ready their arms to return fire, the rebel's attack having accomplished its aim. The parishioners of the underground church again mass, Bibles in hand, holding prayers in the street. Darren Wright stands and calls for justice, proclaiming loudly the infinite power and love of God for His people, the hopelessly poor and the irredeemable among us. This time, though, the police don't let them be, instead advancing on the parishioners with clubs drawn. "Stand firm," says Darren, "and never relent!" They don't know the police have come to suspect gunmen in every crowd, even church-goers armed only with the Word of God. Blood spills and bones fracture, but the parishioner never breaks, the moment won by his resolve. No more than a few days pass before the rebel mounts another attack, a group of gunmen taking refuge from within a church so offered to them by their sympathizer the parishioner, firing onto a crowd, striking down several bystanders while the rest flee in terror. But this time, there's no policemen on the scene, and the rebel's gunmen never stop to make themselves known, but for the cracking of their gunfire and the falling of bodies to the ground leaving no evidence of their presence, no record of their deeds. Later, not very much later Darren and the others take refuge from the street battle in a disused shop, Darren pausing to say to the others, "if we let ourselves be done in by this defeat then we'll never persevere." Although Sheila's here, she's too spent to offer much in the way of spirit. "We'll be back," she says, managing a square look onto her face, "no matter what." A few of their fellow parishioners at the underground church have been killed in recent weeks, but in their hearts they know many more are to die before their ministry is finished.

As with the others, by the time the troopers can muster in strength for a counter-attack, the rebel's gunmen are gone, vanishing into the day. At the makeshift hospital where Hannah and Whitney are made to work they find no respite. "But what will we do?" asks Hannah. "Just keep working, always keep working," Whitney says. "We can't keep working forever," says Hannah. "Why can't you?" Whitney asks. "I'm going to go crazy, I'm exhausted, I don't know how much longer I can keep this up," says Hannah. "You're needed here," Whitney says, as they move from one patient to the next, then onto the next. "How many more people can we see die?" Hannah asks, before saying, "at some point this is just a morgue." They tend to the casualties of the latest street battles, police raids, and rebel attacks, soon swamped in bodies dead and dying. It almost seems quaint, now, to have been through the emergencies over the past years, for Hannah and Whitney to look back on the casualties they'd used to have to tend to as a drop in the ocean, the blood they've seen spilled in the past year or so seemingly enough to fill the world's oceans again and again. But they're ready, they're always ready, in possession of a near-limitless energy, the kind of stamina that can only come from a grim-faced determination to see things through. Even as Hannah complains of exhaustion, still she taps another unknown reserve of energy, able to persevere through pure strength of will. Part of her knows, though, that she's bound to run out of energy sooner or later, as a new stream of casualties begins to trickle into the waiting room each moment seeming to edge her closer to the end.

Little does she know that Valeri has, in fact, been in jail already, broken out in the time it took one day to give way to the next. But it's not all so simple. In the working-class slums the fires of liberation burn with every stone thrown and every burst of violence. For Garrett Walker, the loss of his two daughters to the rampaging police has meant the eruption of an intensely bright flame that can never be extinguished. After having lost his daughters to the war in the street, to the burgeoning revolution, he loses his way, staggering from place to place, winding up feeding from the churches and the storehouses like the common lout he's become. At one of the churches, he sits between two other middle-aged men, both of them hailing from similar backgrounds as him. "There's work in Sheffield," says the one on his left. "There's work everywhere," says the one on his right. "If only you could find it," says Garrett. There's work everywhere, in truth, but by the time any of them make it to the work sites there'll be no work left for them, if there ever was any. But the slaves imported from all corners of the Earth seem to be everywhere, their numbers multiplying even as Britain descends into the anarchy of revolution. Garrett's journey won't be complete for a long time, but when it is he will finally realize his potential. There may be that temptation to look back on the way things were just some years ago, before even that revolution which failed not only to overthrow the way of things but which failed also to prompt in the way of things any lasting change. But whatever happens, whatever the cost of pushing through to our shared future, we must always remember there was never a time of peace, never a time of hope and change, the insidious power of the wealthy man's order lying in its ability to reach through the pages of history to convince us it was ever something besides what it's always been. Even amid the hopeless poverty, unemployment, and carnage in the streets, still the wealthy men in Britain, the nameless, the faceless seem comfortable as ever. But it won't be this way for much longer. It'll become much, much worse.

A bang, a snap, a scream, then sirens wailing into the night, the fires casting a sickly orange and red glow onto the undersides of the clouds. The sirens aren't the sharp, piercing shrieks of the troopers rushing to put down an impassioned outburst but the thick, full howls of the fireman on their way to douse another flame. They head for a spot on the street almost exactly where the working class part of town bleeds into the wealthy, as they draw nearer and nearer to their target an apprehension setting into their nerves. This isn't the first time firemen have been called to this part of town recently, nor is it the second or the third. "I can't believe this is happening," says a young mother living a floor down from Valeri. "All it took is some faulty wiring," says another tenant. But then a third tenant, Tonya Goodall, says, "I bet this is set deliberately," before turning to Valeri and saying, "and we're next." Valeri only nods. Although he doesn't expect their block will necessarily be burnt, he believes something is coming, something they'd better prepare for. But it'll take much longer than any of them could imagine.

At the prison, Private Craig Thompson and the rest of the troops manning the blockade look on with a muted uncertainty, the summer's heat pooling sweat on their brows and backs. Looking down the road at the criminals opposing them, it occurs to Craig these men ought to have given in by now. "These are no ordinary criminals," he says, the troops silently realizing the truth. After election day has come and gone, the troops remain, their orders to starve the rebellious inmates out. But Craig and the others have already begun to come up with another plan, one to replace their previous agreements to mutiny in case of deployment abroad. Forced by circumstance, they'll get the chance to put their plan into practice sooner than they think. "I don't want to shoot anyone," says one of Thompson's fellow soldiers. "Neither do I," says Thompson. But they can't tell whether they should obey the order they're sure will come. They're all a group of young men from among the very same working class blocks that these prisoners were taken from. They see their own. But with a rising tension setting into their nerves, each of them can't bear the impossible weight of the moment. For his part, Private Thompson feels acutely aware of himself, as if there's some small part of him that could leave his body and look down on the rest of him. He sees the wind tugging on his collar, the strain of his jaw grinding shut. But above all he can feel the unbearable lightness of it all, a shivering sensation running the length of his spine, setting his hair on end. It's this lightness, this appearing of the dark essence that convinces him what must be done.

And when the firemen arrive at the working class block that's caught fire, the sight greets them of an apartment block set alight, flames pouring from its windows and doors, outside its residents gathered on the sidewalk across the street, some looking on their burning homes while others hold phones to the sides of their faces and call out to someone, anyone at all. The firemen work to put out the fire, but can't save the building, in the morning the wreckage still smoldering even after the last flames have been fully extinguished. But Valeri is now completely unemployed, even the minimal earnings of a day labourer no longer available to him. It's a perverse irony that as he's lost his livelihood so have many others, the apartment blocks in the working class part of town now so filled with the unemployed and the rent-delinquent that the police can't but evict them all. In their desperation, they have found their salvation in solidarity and in unity. But their salvation through unity and solidarity won't come soon, not after their impending uprising has been thoroughly crushed. There's little exchanged between the residents of this working class district, between Valeri, Tonya, and all the others, the whole lot of them returning to their homes to see themselves through another sleepless night. For Valeri, this is a time of great introspection, even as the attentions and concerns of a world tumbling into anarchy and war draw him out of himself and into a role he was always meant for.

Stanislaw Czerkawski mans the prison's defences with the rest, looking down the road. In the meanwhile, Stanislaw has heard from his wife; she's safe, living in the basement shelter of a church repurposed to house the many who've lost their homes in the war spiralling out of control. For the migrant, his is a life made of being forced to endure as the other, deprived of the solidarity with the rest of the working class which he is rightfully entitled to. In rising, his is assuming his place, denied him for so long. When the troops opposing Stanislaw and the rest of the inmates move in, all will be lost. In losing all they have to lose, Stanislaw and the inmates will earn their place in the rebel Elijah's long-promised future. After having ended the call with his wife, Stanislaw returns to the barricades, looking down at the army troops massed against them. "Are they going to attack or what?" asks one of the prisoners. "They'll attack," says Stanislaw, "and we'll have to get ready to fight them." Although there's only a few of the original prisoners remaining, they each experience the same grim determination to see their rising through. Only the most dedicated remain. There's a part of Stanislaw who wants to flee, to try and be with his wife again, but after so many years of enduring abuse at the hands of one boss or another only to be thrown in prison and left to die, he can't leave, not now. And he won't. With the few loyal stalwarts left he remains, their numbers too low to successfully repel an assault, but those who remain realizing even one man's resistance will continue the struggle.

But in the north of England where Elijah directs the war and guides his disciples through these trying times, always on the lookout for the policeman's next move. In standing atop a lorry turned over on its side, the Elijah ministers to the faithful, overseeing the dispensing of food and water to the hungry crowds. It matters little where the food and water came from, even in a time of acute shortages of even these essentials. Each hungry and thirsty man, woman, and child who receives their sustenance looks to Elijah, his legend already more than his life. And Elijah says to them, "we dispense favour only to our own brother and sister and mother. But whoever does the good of the working man is my brother and sister and mother, and should receive our favour. All are made from the same dust, and all shall be returned to the same dust. While your enemy dispenses his favour to whomever can prove him the greatest benefactor, know that I dispense my favour with discrimination only for the purity of the essence of the working man's struggle." And this message resonates with all, now as it did more than fifteen years ago when Elijah began to administer the concerns of the most wretched and pathetic among us. Now, with the ranks of the most pathetic and wretched among us having swelled into the millions, his is an army greater than any the world has ever seen. But his is an army without ranks, without uniforms, without even guns for most, their armaments the implements of work being turned against their former masters.

In losing all they have to lose, these crowds of hungry, angry workers, their wives, even their children will point the way to the future. Even as the government in Westminster is consumed in their petty bickering and squabbling, with so many alliances forged and webs of influence infinitely complex negotiated over so many years, the rebel Elijah is here, among his people, among the most wretched and pathetic, among the most dispossessed and forgotten. It happens in the night; such things always happen in the night. In the midst of an all-night session, members of recently-formed parliamentary coalition find themselves caught in the midst of an orgy of hatred and self-recrimination when one lone member votes one way when he's expected to vote another, sending the whole thing collapsing in on itself. Fractures form, individual members turning on one another, one petty squabble in an instant becoming a hundred, the parties breaking with each other, then each party breaking within itself. It's not to be the first time a recently-formed government collapses, over the next year a half-dozen parliaments to rise and fall.

Alliances, so carefully negotiated, now collapse as a vote is held which brings this still-new government down, the vote passing not by the slimmest of margins but by an overwhelming majority. Even members of the governing coalition vote mostly in favour of bringing it down. This latest failure, this latest inability to proceed through these difficult times does not bode well for they who would seek to lead us through. In the morning, when news breaks of this latest government's collapse, men like Valeri disregard their duties and take to the streets again, filling the open spaces in this city and in cities across the country with their rage. The rebel, though, does nothing but watch and wait, knowing this is his time not to act.

While a new caretaker assumes the reins of power, the last of the power there is to assume gradually slips away, lost the midst of a sea of rage in the streets and a world of hostile powers jockeying for control of such limited and petty things as land; the rebel Elijah, standing over a map in his hidden headquarters, can only smile as his moment draws nearer by the day.

21. Hidden Terrors

After the collapse of the old government, the old parties have fragmented into a dozen factions, each with their own competing interests, each with their own competing ideas on what how to proceed. But within each faction there are a dozen more, with each more a dozen more still, out of the chaos emerging something unlike what we've ever seen before. In the night, a new government comes to power, a caretaker government made up of chosen representatives from each of the old parties, so chosen by one another because of their willingness to compromise. Compromise, it's believed, is the key to a peaceful resolution to the current crisis that's so rapidly spiralling out of control. Announcing their grand coalition outside in front of Parliament in Westminster for all the world's screens to see, the leaders of the old parties share embraces, give speeches in turn, make a good show for the screens broadcasting their day across the country and around the world. Seemingly overnight, some time passes. Summer gives way winter and then winter gives way to summer. After a year has passed, Valeri Kovalenko's in the middle of a painful transition, at the train station bidding goodbye to a few friends. "I'll never forget you," Valeri says to one friend, a woman roughly the same age as him. Her name's Laura. She says, "and I'll never forget you." Though they've only known each other for a few weeks, in that time they've experienced the full length of a relationship that could've lasted many, many years, as tends to be the case in this day and age. It's true that he'll never forget her, that she'll never forget him. But memory means little if neither make good on the time they have left, whether they see each other again or not. As Valeri watches the train pull away, it's this sudden realization that motivates him to act.

A year ago, Stanislaw Czerkawski was among the prisoners who'd seized their prison in an uprising spontaneous and impassioned. In the night, suddenly, there's the bursting of gunfire outside the prison, Stanislaw roused from his sleep by the stampeding of feet along the floor and by the shouting of voices surprised and scared. He reaches the front barricade, rifle clutched close to his chest, and looks confusedly down the road. But it's not the troops who've opened fire. By now, this, the migrant's fate has been sealed, cast as his lot is in with the others in the working class, but still it'll take every agonizing step forward for him to reach out and seize his destiny. Though Stanislaw may not be able to articulate it as such, he's come to know the truth so long expounded by the rebel's apparatchiks: the future may be inevitable, but it is never assured. "What should we do now?" asks one of Stanislaw's fellow inmates. "Stand our ground," says Stanislaw, even as he isn't sure himself. Already the committee they've set up to govern the prison during their occupation has begun to fracture. A few of the committee's members have fled. A few others have surrendered to the army. All that remain are the staunchest of defenders, on one hand the hopeless causes, on the other men like Stanislaw who fight simply for the principle of it all. Their occupation of the prison failed for precisely the reason it succeeded, to the extent that it did: spontaneous and impassioned uprisings must give way to disciplined and dispassionate revolts.

Huddled around their screens, men like Valeri all seem to instinctively look through the fraud, vaguely sensing their struggle has not yet begun. But there are others who see themselves as delivering the nation from evil, that tight-knit group of officers loyal not to the law but to the land, not to words printed on the page or scrolled across a screen but to ideas in their hearts. These loyal officers soon secretly commit themselves to exerting their influence over this grand coalition, and in so committing themselves they change the course of our common history in their own way. After having bid farewell to his lover, Laura, Valeri returns to his flat, taking stock of what's left. He still hasn't cleaned the flat from its ransacking at the hands of anonymous vandals. It's eerily quiet, but not totally silent; still he can hear the almost-silence, the subtle yet overpowering rumbling, the sound of quiet rolling in from afar like the steady beating of drums. "I won't die here," he recalls Laura as having said, the last time they'd been together before he saw her off at the train station. "Where will you die?" he recalls having asked her. Even as Valeri'd taken in with this lovely young woman he'd still not forgotten Sydney, nor any of the others who'd left his life. And he recalls, he recalls Laura having said to him, "stay well, if you can." After his mother and father were killed in the failed uprising more than fifteen years ago, he's become little more than an ill-mannered malcontent bent on thumbing his nose at any authority, in whatever juvenile or puerile manner crossed his heart at any given moment. But this is still a tentative, transitional time, for Valeri and men like him, as well as the country, the world.

Hidden from view, these loyal officers work to put their plan into action, aware as they are of the need to look past the day and into the future with patience, men like Valeri not yet able to see them but soon enough to feel the effects of their secret actions. A year ago, Private Craig Thompson had been manning the army's roadblocks outside the very prison in which Stanislaw Czerkawski had been part of an uprising. Spiralling out of control, the men of the artillery brigade couldn't, then, see a way forward under the banner of the old regime. But then the order came in, squawking over the radio, to fire. "...Each man, fire one round into the air," said the nearest noncom, before quickly adding, "one round only." It made little sense to the men, Thompson among them, to shoot at those poor, pathetic, helpless men. The order came through, "fire!" For a moment it seemed as though the men might very well have been caught up in an act of cold blooded murder, despite the order to fire warning shots only Thompson and the others feeling in their hearts there no difference between firing a warning shot and shooting to kill. Although they couldn't understand it then, much less articulate it as such, they felt this way because, in truth, the application of their force of arms was the same, whether they were shooting to kill or shooting to warn. Still they'd wavered. For a moment it seemed they might've very well chosen to fire. The fight was within each of them, and if any of them should've yielded and opened fire, then all would've been lost. But the troops refused. Private Thompson had led his gun crew in standing down, acting according to no plan, under the influence of nothing but their own roused passions. Now, a year later, and it's a sweltering heat, the summer's sun beating down on their backs, as the others stand down, refusing to fire. Still they're paying a penalty for their act of insubordination. But what happens next, none of them could've foreseen.

After having seen Laura, his most recent love off, Valeri doesn't much see the point in trying at another love so soon. As he treads slowly through the days, he doesn't forget about Laura but soon discards her as the object of his affections for his recollections of that lovely girl Sydney, as if his recollections could be recalled strongly enough, with enough intensity as to As the days turn into weeks and the weeks seem to threaten to turn into months, Valeri keeps on working, managing to secure the odd shift at various sites largely on the strength of his physical fitness. "Have you ever been to North America?" Laura had asked, once, not long before they'd parted ways. "Of course not," he'd said. "I have," Laura had said, "once." And then she'd told him of her one trip to Canada, when she was only twelve years old. It hadn't been all that long ago, in the aftermath of the failed uprising which killed Valeri's mother and father. She'd described it in such loving terms that he half-suspected she'd never really been there at all; the staggering, snow-capped peaks rising from the mountain ranges stretching hundreds, even thousands of miles, cast in the sun's silky, golden glow. And the cities, the cities she'd described as forests of gleaming crystal towers, nestled at the foot of steep mountain ranges or along the greenest of valleys. But now, on a day when Valeri feels particularly lonely, he recalls the way she'd spoken, as he's in the middle of a rare shift as a day labourer the warmth in Laura's voice as she'd recalled her fondest of memories. But when Valeri hears the soft, faded sound of distant rattling of gunfire and bursting of bombs, he's snapped back into reality, his attention diverted, for now.

The rebel's attacks draw down. After a burst of initial offensives, Elijah orders a conservation of strength once more. It's enough, he decrees, that their presence has been felt. Standing in that disused shop, he comes to work, seeing the ranks of the unemployed swell as the current crisis spirals out of control into full-scale war. The concerns of men like Valeri remain fixated on the ordinary, the mundane, the troubles in day-to-day life. His eyes ache from all the hours of sleep yet unslept, and his stomach growls from all the meals missed. A year ago, Garrett Walker had lost his young daughters in a police attack on the demonstrations they'd been taking part in. In the months following their deaths, Garrett came to alternate between a deep depression and bouts of confused anger, without an outlet for either extreme. He never took to drinking, though, and he never took his anger out on his wife, who supported him and remained loyal to him through this difficult time in both their lives. But still Garrett is the almost exactly like Valeri in essence, and his determination to see through the current crisis and avenge the deaths of his daughters and the deaths of so many men's daughters grows stronger with each pang of hunger he feels. But Garrett's only a man, and it took him this past year to summon the courage to take the next step. It comes when he shows up at a worksite, hoping to be among those chosen for a day of labour. "No work for you here," says the foreman, before cruelly adding, "old man." Later that night, when Garrett's alone with his wife, he realizes this is his moment to rise. It wasn't the deaths of his daughters but the unceasing cruelty of the foreman, such unceasingly cruelty confined only to a few words, that pushed him over the edge. "Go live with your friends in the countryside," he says to his wife, "you'll be safe there." And she only nods, knowing this is likely to be the last time they'll see each other. But they're at peace with their fates, at last.

Still the concerns of men like Valeri limit his actions, in the meanwhile at least, to scrounging what meagre resources he can to ensure his own survival in these times. He works whenever he can find the work, receiving his cash in hand, still going home at the end of the day with his pittance in hand but without knowing whether he'll be called in again the next day. His wages seem to fall every day, while the price of simple things like a loaf of bread or a piece of fruit climb. Still yet the way of things remains confident, steadfastly so, in itself, in the impermanence of its way. Valeri completes first one shift, then a few days later another, still a few days later another. As his thoughts drift here and there, there and here, he comes to grips with the immediate task facing him as the troubles facing even able-bodied young men like him seem to intensify daily. After talking about her one visit to Canada, Laura had seemed to only edge back into reality slowly, like a drug addict coming down from her high. And then she'd said, "I wish you had been there with me," before quickly adding, "I wish we could've been there and stayed there." This exchange, this exchange is one that Valeri won't forget, even as he looks back on his nearly year-long affair with Laura as paling in comparison to his love for Sydney Harrington. But when he's caught in the middle of another upheaval, his fate takes a turn he'd never seen coming but should've all along. He's working, working one of the last shifts he'll work as a day labourer at a cement plant far from home when he hears the voice of the boss through the loudspeakers, the boss saying, "all workers to the central yard, at once!" When he musters along with the rest of the workers, he's confronted with a frightening sight.

A year ago, the parishioners left their underground church only to see it bulldozed in the night, the police having waited deliberately until that very moment to move in. Darren Wright had been among the last to leave, and when he'd heard of the demolition of their church he arrived back in time to see it all brought down in a cloud of dust and debris. If this had been meant by the Father Bennett and the old dogma as intimidation, it failed. Armed with Word of God as they are, no weapon can strike them down, no force arrayed against them can arrest their the inexorable advance towards their destiny. "They've attacked us," the rogue priest had said, "they've raided some of the churches we've got around the country." The underground ministry had then (and still has now) only a loose affiliation with each of these churches, answering not to a central authority or a figurehead. As the rogue priest had told them, their loyalty should never be to any earthly authority but to the authority of heaven. "What can we do to fight back?" Darren had asked. But the rogue priest had only shaken his head, then approached Darren to put a hand on his shoulder before saying, "there'll be no fighting here." When Darren couldn't help but let a frown on his face, the rogue priest had said, "we fight in refusing to give in to their terror. No surrender." And this, this gave Darren a momentary calm, its memory continuing to give Darren calm now, as he stands shoulder to shoulder with the others in the streets, obstructing an army column attempting to move in on a working class block. By the time this night is through, they'll make good on their stand.

A searchlight reaches up and down the façade of an apartment block in the working class district, sweeping for any gunmen who might be waiting to open fire on the troopers assembled below. Moments later, troopers barge in through the front and back doors, going from room to room, pulling anyone out into the halls who looks at them the wrong way, soon with a dozen or so piled into the back of a covered truck, handcuffed, to be driven not to a holding cell at the troopers' station but somewhere else entirely, somewhere more sinister, somewhere men like Valeri never would've expected but should've seen coming. It's only in hindsight that these truths may yet become self-evident; in the heat of the moment such things are lost amid the rising passions and the fiery rage of the thousands of voices turning the streets into an inferno unlike any the world has seen before. A year ago, Sean Morrison and Julia Hall, among the other students at the polytechnic in Brentford, had ended their occupation without putting up a fight. After the blood that'd been spilled and the bodies that'd been broken on election day, the students had withdrawn to their halls to lick their wounds and plan their next move. They'd agreed to mount another demonstration the following day. Still the polytechnic remains closed, and as the crisis in Britain deepens any hope of reopening fades into the night despite all the demonstrations the students and others had staged over the past year. "I don't know what to do," says Sean, talking in private with some of the other students. "after we left the polytechnic I just don't know what to do anymore. I wish we had stayed there." In the past year their demonstrations have seen more killed and many more injured, the mounting unrest across all Britain seeming to have not dramatically intensified but slowly built, a frustrating and incomprehensible turn of events that leaves millions like these students unsure what to expect. Sitting across from him, his old classmate Julia says, "we have no weapons." But when she says this, Sean feels a momentary inspiration, looking her right in the eye before saying, "we have all the weapons we need. No surrender." Now, with the army's searchlights trained on them, the students come to realize what must be done. Many of the students from the polytechnic in Brentford will be killed in the coming revolution, and many more will lose loved ones. But their sacrifice in a defiant stand will pave the way for the true revolution to begin.

Another burst of action, in the morning not long after dawn's first light an order coming down from the skies, in a burst of darkness the sound of thunder booming across the city. In Valeri's apartment block, there's not optimism at the violence spiralling out of control but a vast and discontented malaise. They'll fight, as they've been fighting every day of their lives against one thing or another. But Valeri's no hero, not yet, still consigned as he is to the life of an ordinary young man determined to live through extraordinary times. Still there's the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the distance, whenever he wakes up in the morning or lies awake in bed at night the noises of war seeming to draw nearer and nearer, yet never seeming to reach him. His work, he has no work to speak of, struggling as he is simply to stay alive. He contends with the notion that his mother and father might've chosen not to take part in their failed uprising if they'd have known this would be the fate he'd inherited from them. But that's a lie. After Sydney Harrington had left with her family for the relative safety of their countryside estate, Valeri came to feel alone, more alone than ever. He'd underestimated the degree to which he'd become critically dependent on her, on the notion of her, looking back as he does even past Laura, the lovely young woman. In the year that'd passed since he'd last seen Sydney, Valeri's come to be dependent on her even as he's slowly learned to be what he's always been.

As matches to kindling, all forces must commit themselves fully to the struggle for self-determination, must assail themselves against the still-invincible forces blocking the way to the future. Valeri knows this, even if all he can articulate is a burning rage. But Valeri's no soldier, not yet, still consigned as he is to a life of daily struggle, of hardships, of unemployment and hunger while larger forces slowly align. Still living at Dominion Courts after the year has passed, he's only occasionally paid rent in that time, as with all the other tenants only sporadically finding paid work. But now it's been months since he's paid rent, weeks since he's found enough work to pay for anything but food; prices of basic foodstuffs like bread and milk seem to double, even triple every few weeks. It's on the very edge of starvation that Valeri finds himself finally given to the possibility of rising. With all his pretension, with all his posturing, it's taken him this long to become what he's always wanted to be. As he meets with Tonya, Roger, and some of the other tenants at Dominion Courts, their intentions become aligned, slowly, ever so slowly. But it'll take a new sequence of events to compel them to stand, events that've been lingering in the background but which're soon to surge to the forefront like a distant wave crashing against a rocky, treacherous shore.

Aboard the cruiser Borealis, Captain Abramovich announces over the loudspeakers their orders to put to sea the following day. Once underway, the Captain makes another announcement, this announcement on the suspension of pay for the men until further notice. It matters little that the suspension still provides for a small stipend, nor that all pay deferred is to be paid at a later date. Later, there's talk; Dmitri seethes with rage over the crew being made to abandon their homes when there're working men being slaughtered in the streets of Great Britain over nothing but the right to live in their own homes, the right to earn a decent wage. But as the crew talks, a consensus emerges, in the nightly whispers and in the cramped spaces between drills the men agreeing to a new plan. "Are you sure about this?" asks one crewman. "No," replies Dmitri. "Then why do you propose it?" asks a second crewman. "We have no other choice," says Dmitri. "And if we fail?" asks a third crewman. "Then we'll be no worse off than we are now," says Dmitri, "we can't support our families without our pay. And they'll never give us it back. The navy is broke." The sudden appearance of a non-com down the way silences their discussion, for now. But nothing can silence the anger, the bitter resentment they feel for the hardships they've been made to endure. As Dmitri and virtually all the other enlisted men were youths when the failed uprising of more than fifteen years ago took place, they've known little but hardship. It's precisely this experience that should tend them to revolution, when the time comes.

They're edging closer with each passing day to outright rebellion, to casting their lot in with the working men dying in the streets. When the time comes, the men of the cruiser Borealis will smash their names into history so violently as to be remembered for so long as anyone's around to remember them. After the year that's passed, Dmitri can only imagine things getting worse for the whole crew, with stories of rising tensions with rival powers having filled their screens on a daily basis for the whole year. It'd been a year of withering attacks on working class districts, on crowds of demonstrators fighting pitched battles with police and even army troops in the streets, of rebel bombings and gun attacks on miscellaneous targets, all the while a steadily lingering tension builds in the background. But not all is as it seems. For Dmitri and the others aboard, the Borealis is only one of many possible outcomes, a link to the past reaching far throughout the future, through all possible futures, even as the deck heaves gently beneath their feet still the impossibly heavy strain of their loved ones weighing on their minds. For Dmitri, this news is the last straw; he'll find his opportunity soon enough. First, though, there's a turn of events that'll take them far from home and into the mouth of hell. The abundance which had preceded the failed uprising more than fifteen years ago is lost, but still to be lost are many, many lives before a new abundance can be created by men like Dmitri.

But remember this critical truth: the abundance has only disappeared because it has been made to disappear by those very people who now seek to plunge the nation into a war few want and even fewer need. As Valeri puts themselves through the motions of making good through this day, he finds himself needing no more energy, no greater effort than before. With so many hidden terrors in the shadows slowly edging into the light, men like Valeri must commit themselves wholeheartedly to the righteous path laid out before them. Seeing the path is inadequate; they must all walk the path. While Valeri, a woman named Tonya, and the other residents of Dominion Courts form their plans for the coming surge in violence, instructed as they've been by their contacts in the Popular Front, all seems lost. As he survives through these difficult and tumultuous times in spite of himself, he becomes only what he needs to be, no more, no less.

For Valeri, the moment's dominated by these practical concerns, making sure they've stored enough food and water in times of constant shortages. But there comes the little moments when Valeri considers the ravenous beast unleashed in the time it's taken working men to rise. Though we've not yet reached the point of no return, already men like Valeri have come to confront the soon-to-be, the shocking turn of events which none of them can see coming but all should. It's almost his time to rise, and as Valeri counts the meagre stockpile of food shared by residents he looks with a mounting anticipation towards the coming day. But nothing can prepare him, any of them for what must come.

22. Veil of Doom

The revolutionary Elijah and the Popular Front have resisted the urge to escalate the war on behalf of his disciples, both those who are already in with him and those who have yet to be, knowing full well his role in waiting for the anti-revolution to escalate their war on behalf of the wealthy man. After the year that passed, now, Elijah must continue to remind his disciples on the importance of discipline, even as events seem to spiral out of control. Still, it's a tempting urge, and every day that passes sees him remind himself on the necessity of the long war, on the need to preserve his own strength and in so preserving forcing the anti-revolutionary to give in to his own mounting urges and make a mistake. Even while the burgeoning revolution threatens to seize all Britain at any moment, still men like Valeri must make the decision to rise of their own accord. As Valeri has come to realize in the time that's passed since his friend Sergei's disappearance, the legacy of the failed uprising which killed his parents is almost ready to be inherited by his generation. And when a new election for parliament is called, barely a year after the last farce of an election, Valeri feels much stronger and more confident in his refusal to cast a vote, even as the government quietly shutters voting places throughout the restless working class districts.

It's as it'd been when decades of a steadily mounting pressure had erupted in the form of a massacre in the streets. And as the rebel Elijah quietly gathers his strength and awaits the course of history to deliver him an opportunity, other events soon force his hand, events he foresaw but made no effort to forestall. "We're not done yet," says Valeri, "but we'll be done soon. You can count on that." A pause. He's speaking with his neighbours, Tonya and Roger among them. "I can't leave the city," says Tonya, "and there's less food than ever at the shops." They're talking of the scarcity of paid work, and the steadily deteriorating condition of the building they live in. Without family, without friends, with only the She'd been away from home for days looking for food, but with Roger still there the whole time. Tonya and Roger are such an unlikely couple, she short and stocky, with a squat, wide face and a figure lacking in dramatic curves, he with a strength belied by his thin arms and legs and a figure a good half-metre taller than hers. In the time they've known each other, the three have formed a troika of sorts, seeking to keep themselves safe from the violence gripping the streets. For now, though, this troika exists only in their minds, the genesis of something much greater that's to come.

"You must always do what's right," Roger finally says, his voice a nearly-inaudible murmur. "I always have," Valeri says, "and I always will." They agree not to vote in the coming, second election; their agreement isn't a decision but a representation, each person's decision made a long time ago. But this is only a beginning, neither the first nor the last. Every time they speak could be the last time they hear each other's voices. Every time they meet could be the last time they see each other, face to face. But without the certain knowledge of death there comes the freedom of life. After ending their ad hoc meeting in Tonya's flat, Valeri returns to his flat and back to the work at hand, and looks over the pathetic arsenal he and his fellow residents have assembled. It's been tough, in the year that'd passed so recently, for them to keep on soldiering through this difficult period, with forced evictions carrying on even as resistance to them stiffens. It wasn't all that long ago that one apartment block was partially bulldozed with residents still inside, killing several, including two very young children; this was unthinkable just a few decades ago, but now ordinary citizens like them are arming themselves in anticipation of such an attack on their own homes. A veil of doom has descended on them, with no lifting of it in sight. Even in the autumn, it's still hot out, too hot, their flat a thick, musky swamp, the persistent humidity forcing Valeri to use an old, ratty shirt as a rag, mopping the sweat from his brow. Still his stomach growls for want of even a morsel of food. But the steadily warming planet has already imperilled food supplies and the mounting crisis at home and abroad has only threatened supplies even more, further inflaming the passions of men like Valeri against their masters, seeing as men like Valeri do the bountiful harvest kept back from them by fraud. But it won't be this way much longer.

Underway, the cruiser Borealis makes through the North Sea for a destination still unknown to the crew. Cut off from the outside world, they have only terse, infrequent announcements from the Captain to inform their feelings and feed the revolutionary fervour already simmering in the hearts of ordinary sailors like Dmitri Malinin, the son of common labourers, them the children of migrants to Britain from Russia who fled their homeland in the midst of its deep depression following the breakup of the Soviet Union forty-five years ago. It's this past he thinks on, whether lying in his bunk or manning the guns, while the Borealis proceeds towards its fate at twenty-five knots. Dmitri, like Valeri, comes from a long line of the most wretched and pathetic among us, the poor, the prostituted, the addicted, the hopeless causes. It's in this quiet before some insidious event is about to descend on them like a dark cloud; Dmitri can sense it, even if he doesn't realize it. As the decks of the Borealis heave while she powers through the waves of the North Sea, men like Dmitri consult the past in search of a way to the future. "Where do you think we're going?" asks one of his fellow crewmen. "Eastern Europe, I suspect. I don't know," says Dmitri, "but I don't think we'll have long until we get there." The men aboard the cruiser Borealis have been told of the election, and it's expected they'll participate as it'd been expected they'd have participated in the last. In the last election, a polling place had been opened at their home base, though few sailors cast ballots. Captain Abramovich hasn't said what'll be done this time, but the crew expect a ballot to be held in the mess hall. Already Dmitri and the others have agreed not to vote, even if ordered to do so. This act of defiance will lead to something more, much more.

Still, the counter-revolutionary forces the rebel Elijah's hand. As the troopers advance in a long column of armoured vehicles into the working class districts, the rebel Elijah watches, waiting for the right moment to strike. As the troopers stop halfway along a city block and fan out to cover the street, the Popular Front's gunmen hold fast, resisting the urge to strike at the first target to present itself. As the troopers take their positions and ready themselves to fire, the moment comes when neither strike nor withdrawal will suffice. Then, an explosion, the thunderous boom cracking across the sky. A column of smoke rises. Flames colour the night a dull orange. From across the skyline, Valeri recognizes this explosion as having struck at the area around the hospital where Hannah had once worked. For a moment, he forgets she's been sent elsewhere, and he's gravely concerned for her safety. "Are you ready to go out?" asks Tonya, stepping into his flat. "As ready as I'm going to be," Valeri says. "Don't be nervous," says Tonya, "we've got nothing to lose but our lives." In response, Valeri nods grimly, then looks out the window and onto the street below. The announcement of the new election has sparked a new round of violence, of intensified demonstrations and police attacks on working class blocks, interspersed with the odd rebel raid on various cities.

It might seem, for a moment, Valeri's lost in the minutiae of his own thoughts, but still his heart brims with a confidence born from a self-assurance in the righteousness of the cause. In Tonya, Roger, and some of the others at Dominion Courts he's found his counterparts. They've come too far to allow the weakness of doubt into their hearts, and the spirit of the revolutionary cause surges in him, in each of them with every moment that passes, with every beat of their hearts and with every rhythmic contraction of each muscle in their bodies. But Valeri is fully committed to the cause for which he's already sacrificed so much, for which his parents gave their lives in the failed rising fifteen years ago. "If we can summon the courage to stand for what's right," he says, "then we can never fail." He thinks only of the struggle even as his thoughts are dominated by concern for Hannah. "I don't know if you realize what's going on in there," says Tonya, gesturing towards the door and by implication into the hall, "but things are getting grim."

Valeri stands and starts towards the door. "Show me," he says. Together, they inspect the building. From the basement, floor by floor to the roof, they look through every room, accounting for the residents left, the new residents having moved in, their food, weapons, and what little they have in the way of medical supplies, a few rolls of gauze and some paracetamol. They look ragged and haggard, the last working men and women still living in the building, for the imposition of martial law has had some serious effects on daily life for the residents of Dominion Courts. Many residents have fled, others occupying their flats without registration. No one's paid rent in months. Graham hasn't been seen in weeks; Valeri, Tonya, and another tenant named Roger force their way into his suite, finding it empty, with no sign of where he might've gone. They're left to wonder what's become of him, a question to them forever in search of an answer. For Valeri, he's not sure what to do, having left the union he'd once taken to so passionately. Now he stands with the tenants of Dominion Courts in forming a new, ad hoc union, less a labour front than a small, haggard, ragged army. Their armaments are pathetic, consisting, now, of a few clubs, cricket bats, and a single gun which no one can remember bringing into the building. But with this second election imminent, their little arsenal will have to do, expecting as they are an attack to come at any time.

Overnight, eviction notices bearing no names but featuring prominently the seal of the police are posted to the building's front door. A sign goes up outside in front of the building just like the sign once put up in front of the building next door. Tenants of Dominion Courts are surprised but not shocked. They've been expecting this for a long time. The notices gives no date. No date is needed to make the point. Still, it's some small wonder the police have bothered even with this measure, instead of simply deploying bulldozers escorted by troopers to demolish the apartment block while still they live inside. Amid the chaos of the war in the streets, it seems the new government, or at least elements within it, have decided to muster their strength in one great offensive against the working class districts, hoping to smash the revolutionary cause while it can still be so stopped. But Valeri, Tonya, Roger, and all the others don't know this. They can't. All they can know is the time to commit themselves irrevocably to the cause is almost at hand. "They're clearing us out," says Roger. "It's all right for them," says Tonya. "It's not all right for us," says Roger. "They're coming to evict the working class apartments," Valeri says, "one by one. Like driving a bulldozer across a homeless camp. They just want to force us out." Tonya and Roger nod their grim assent. But none of them can know what's happening, why it's happening to them, nor can they surmise the policeman's next move. They can only sense the coming strike against them, in a visceral, almost instinctive way. Valeri notes the uncertain spirit of his working class brothers, later to report on it to the slowly-expanding alliance of parties. They don't know the eviction notices won't be acted on; they're posted to intimidate, to frighten. But all that's accomplished by their posting is to harden the hearts of Valeri, Tonya, Roger, and the others who call this decrepit little block their home.

But no one will hold their tentativeness against them; with every step forward into the future, they're making history. The streets may yet seek deliverance from those who would take from the working man and give to themselves, for the streets themselves will always be, no matter what setbacks the working man should suffer in his struggle. Every tenant evicted, every pound the rent raised, every working-class block levelled to make way for luxury apartments, all are a strike against the working man, and as he looks from within his cramped apartment over the street scene, home at the end of another long day at the factory, he thinks to reach out to the young woman he sees crying and offer a helping hand. Still, he knows better, having been taught better by a lifetime lived as a working man in a wealthy man's world. A factory closes, then another, then another, soon the landscape littered with darkened shells sticking out of the ground like so many tombstones, marking the place where once industry had not only lived but thrived, the working man cast out, thoughtlessly discarded like some old piece of furniture left to rot in the rain on the side of the road. As the final preparations are made, Valeri looks to the building next door. On the plot of land where once there'd been a simple, functional apartment block housing working men and their families there's now a sleek, low-rise, glass-and-steel tower, only half-finished, little more than a shell with the odd bullet-hole pockmarking the outer walls. It'd been abandoned by the owner after construction had stalled abruptly some months earlier, in the midst of this burgeoning crisis. On the façade, someone's spray-painted 'NO SURRENDER' in the night. Homeless families, drug addicts, and prostitutes have taken up residence, parcelling off their own little spaces to squat in. Even amid the rattling of gunfire and the bursting of bombs still the old slogan persists. Valeri doesn't realize what the old slogan means, not yet, even if he thinks he does.

Where Valeri might've once been bewildered by the sight of such an expensive project sitting unused for its intended purpose, now he understands. This is something not meant to be lived in; it's meant as a tool, a weapon of war, for the wealthy man to store his ill-gotten wealthy in the form of something real, to be sold for profit later. But it's also a response to the rising agitation, the aim to engage in a massive population transfer by expelling the undesirable elements of the working class, the prostitutes, the elderly pensioners, the poor made to be addicted to illegal drugs and the common labourers deemed fit only to enrich their wealthy paymasters. Now, the whole of Britain is on the cusp of a new revolution, a revolution that should seek to carry on the legacy of the failed uprising of more than fifteen years ago. In this, Valeri is about to finally inherit the legacy of his mother and father. This new rising, his rising, will surpass theirs, but in ways he never expected.

Even as bullets fly and bombs explode, this weapon continues to be applied, diligently but not dispassionately. No longer used for its original purpose, now it stands gathering the hopeless among the working class, the police allowing squatters to gather in preparation for a final offensive into the working class slums. Valeri doesn't know it, but this is, too, is deliberate; by concentrating in these properties, the most pathetic and despondent among them conveniently group themselves into fewer targets. All Valeri can know, at this point, is that when the police finally come, they'll fight no longer for the streets but for their very homes. Over the next few days, Valeri speaks with the other tenants of Dominion Courts, mostly with Tonya and Roger, they meeting with others, the others meeting with others, a consensus having already emerged among them all: resist.

23. The Way Forward

As tends to be the way of things, something must inevitably set off a war between nations, the mounting pressures inside each soon to compel them to seek an outlet, any outlet at all for their rage. A rock thrown, a rifle shot, an exchange of fire between two warships on the high seas and within weeks, only weeks the empires of the world seem on the cusp of declaring war on one another. It starts with a skirmish between ethnic rivals in the Balkans, but with each of the powers in Europe backing a different faction it's inevitable that they'll all go to war soon. At home, men like Valeri find themselves beset by such troubles and overcome by such fear that he can't but watch as this new caretaker commits itself irrevocably to some alliance of empires, all the while at home Valeri must still worry where his next meal will come from, where his next paycheque will come from, all this started somewhere, somehow, by the looting and plundering of the wealth of the world in this very place. News makes the screens of the millions across Britain and around the world, but for Valeri and the rest of the working class measures close to home demand attention over all others. In the night, their fortifications continue. No one knows what the outbreak of war on the continent means for the coming election here at home, but it seems to Valeri this'll mean nothing for their struggle. He's wrong.

After having given up on working as a day labourer, Valeri Kovalenko returns to his dark, empty flat and looks to his screen just in time to see the squawking of the wealthy man's apparatchik proclaiming the virtues of this fight, calling on all his countrymen to devote themselves wholly to this new struggle. But as he sits in his chair and watches, Valeri's stomach growls, his feet ache, and his back's pain spasms slightly, just enough to remind him on all he's been made to surrender. To ask, now, for more is the final insult. Astride a wave of revolutionary fervour, the working men of Britain, Europe, across the world surge towards a war decades in the making, while their paymasters fumble about looking for a way to head off their own demise. And although none of them had planned this next step, in fact it'll take place in the way that it will through pure happenstance, when the dust has settled the future will look back on our past and see it could've happened no other way. When it's announced the election is to be delayed because of the war on the continent, Valeri and the others react with disinterest, knowing as they've come to know that this next election is unimportant.

Though now we can't see more than a few days ahead, when a clarity emerges and the lost years of our lives are at last reclaimed, we'll see it all. In Valeri's life, this has become as his final resting place, without having died his consignment to this dilapidated, falling-apart apartment block become his castle, his last redoubt, the ramparts on which he'll make his final stand for dignity and justice. As Valeri looks out across the street, he decides it's time to leave, venturing out into the city again in search not of supplies but company, the last company he could expect to find amid the terror and violence gripping Britain's streets. But Valeri's wrong in at least one way: this place is not to be his tomb. Though he has no way of knowing it, the dark essence which guides all our struggles has greater plans for him. It seems like such a strange notion, quaint even, that it was only sixteen years earlier that Valeri should've been looked to the distant skyline and seen gleaming, glass-and-steel towers reaching for the sky, higher and higher with every passing week. In truth, there's been war, someplace, sometime, for longer than anyone can remember, and this new war is not new but rather a sudden and unexpected escalation of an old war once confined to some province of some country none of us have ever been to but which now involves us all. At the mercy of forces so much greater than ourselves, we can think only to press ahead.

Walls crumble, only to crumble again days later. A third of the stars fall from the skies, only for those very stars to fall again the next night. Before the failed rising fifteen years ago, everyone had been led to believe here in Britain, but also throughout the rest of Europe, the United States and Canada we'd led peaceful lives, free from conflict, as though all had once been well. But it's a fraud. This, this war erupting on the streets of our cities is but the logical culmination of hundreds of years of fighting, of exploitation of man by man, the way of things collapsing under the weight of so much greed. The air's filled with the sounds of sirens wailing, of gunshots cracking, of water gushing from fractured mains and of buses trundling along, stopped only by troopers searching them for something, anything at all. In the time it's taken all this to transpire, an insidious evil has gathered its own strength, filling the screens of the thousands and thousands with scathing denunciations of this new, foreign enemy, who had only a short time ago been merely a rival, a short time before that a friend, an ally even. This, then, is an insidious power of the way of things, the power to rewrite our common history to convince us these were our enemies all along. But for Valeri, the war at home has meant his developing anger arrested by the tempering influence of the dark essence which surrounds him and all other working class men at all times. Although Valeri's very close to the appropriate moment for him to rise, he's still not quite there yet. If he should rise, now, then he would be killed, he would throw his life away in an act of resistance that'd achieve so little compared to the future the dark essence has in store for him.

In Valeri's lifetime, he's seen much anguish. Now, as he emerges from his sleep into a world suddenly at war, he can only look out over the street and imagine himself with another again. At his side Tonya appears, her last suspicion and the last tension having eased. Though he's committed, she's not, not yet, still clinging to that last bit of doubt left in her. "You must come to the hall," he says, "there you can meet our friends, so you can make yourself useful to them later." "It's not safe to go out right now," she says. Tonya, she's not at all like him, even as she comes from the same stock as him. She fights not on behalf of her children, but on behalf of the children she'd never had. "And you," Valeri says, turning to Roger, "you ought to come, too." It's risky for them to be leaving Dominion Courts when the police or even the army could come around at any time and discover the weapons they've stored, but Valeri's sure this is a risk they have to take. After Valeri, Tonya, and Roger have formed something vaguely resembling a governing troika on behalf of the residents at Dominion Courts, they've failed to institute any real order. All they've done is gather some limited armaments to defend themselves from the expected assault by the police, even the army. Valeri hopes to get help from sympathetic parties, any help at all, at the union hall. It'll be there, but it'll come at a cost.

Though neither Tonya nor Roger have told anyone, it's obvious to the other residents they've fallen in love, not from anything either has said or done but from the way they seem to avoid one another in the day and only take into each other's rooms at night. But Valeri looks on her with a muted envy, half-wishing his love Sydney could be there with them to make their stand, whether they live or die unimportant to him in this frame of mind so long as they're together. But he shakes the thought. "It's imperative we all do what we can to get help," he says, "we can't do this alone." Tonya asks, "What help could we get from the union?" Valeri says, "I don't know, but there's nowhere else to look." And to this, Tonya can only nod. Though this is that time, that short, brutish time between war's declaration and the first battles, the city and the country beyond is already burning, from the corner of his eye Valeri spotting through the window behind Tonya a column of smoke rising from the city's streets, casting a shadow that strikes the two of them at just the right moment to send a shiver running the length of his spine. In the end, Tonya relents, agreeing to go to the hall in the morning. But overnight, he listens to the bursting of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the distance, seeming each and every night to draw closer but never to arrive.

In the morning, Valeri takes Tonya to the union hall and in so going she encounters her own future. There won't be any one sight, any one word spoken or clenched fist thrust into the air that should move her to commit herself wholeheartedly and enthusiastically to the Popular Front's struggle; there's no way to explain what happens, if anything happens at all. This is what she was meant to do, the path she was meant to walk in service of the higher purpose assigned to her by the flow of history. It's all happened so fast. It's been building for hundreds of years. If you were to tell Valeri that these are the times foreseen by learned men, men more learned than him for every one of those hundreds of years, he'd scoff and push you away. As men squabble over which personality ought to take the chair of some committee in parliament, forces gather. As Valeri arrives with Tonya at the hall, he instinctively looks for his old mentor Mark Murray, but doesn't see him. And without Murray there, he doesn't know who to go to. He recognizes many of the faces, but doesn't recognize many more. Carefully, the rebel chooses his target, and when the timing is right he strikes. In the time before the rebel's next strike, though, Valeri's found himself caught up in the turmoil, his life spiralling out of control until he soon finds himself struggling to maintain anything like a normal, day-to-day routine.

Aboard the cruiser Borealis, the Captain announces they've made into port at Copenhagen to take on supplies and join a multinational task force. Their sister-ship, the Australis, has already arrived some days earlier. Then he dashes hopes by declaring there's to be no shore leave. Already Dmitri has become something of a leader among the men. Perhaps it's inevitable there should be a leader who arises from the men, out of the little conversations that forge a consensus the men self-selecting for their own. Still, the men are allowed time on deck, during one such break Dmitri looking out across the port at a Spanish-flagged frigate, the frigate's crew on deck looking right back. There's a silent moment exchanged between the men of the two nations, cut off by the sudden exploding of a bomb in the streets. It's distant enough not to be seen, but close enough to be felt like the quivering of a slight earthquake, to be heard almost like the backfiring of a lorry's engine. Then, the intermittent rattling of gunfire, only for a moment before cutting out. If Dmitri should close his eyes and listen, he would think the Borealis still at home on the Thames. After made to go below for the night, Dmitri and the others keep on talking, keep on trading in rumours on what they're out here for. As they're confined to the ship, none of the crew will have the chance to go ashore, but Dmitri knows they'd find the same disorder here as they'd find back home. Not tonight, but in the coming weeks they'll find out why they're on the way East. Soon, Captain Abramovich orders the crew of the Borealis below decks, curtailing even the minimal privilege of fresh air for the men. There's some resistance, but it's limited mostly to the muttering of expletives when the officers' backs are turned. Dmitri, though, remains standing on deck for a moment, gripping the rails, thinking to stand firmly in place and force the officers to drag him away. But it's a fleeting thought, a futile notion, in the end the better part of him turning in with the rest, in the bunks that night those mutterings becoming open dissent. "I hate that Captain," says one crewman. "We've lost men in these drills and still he orders more," says another. "If we're ordered into action, what will we do?" asks a third. "We'll fight," Dmitri says, to himself as much as his bunkmates, "it's what we do." The others nod their grim assent.

As the fires rage and as the world he knows crumbles into dust, Valeri might be forgiven for seeking at least some small measure of solace in the memories of his own making. In the union halls he meets with his brothers and sisters, but now the mood has become grim. Their numbers have thinned, some jailed, some killed, but most scattered into the wind in cobbling together at least some meagre sustenance for their families. The rebel has not yet begun to provide for him; as if to punctuate this fact, a string of explosions rip through the city, scattering debris like wooden splinters and broken bodies like broken dreams. At the hall, Valeri gathers his strength and goes to the elders in union, asking them for help. At the union hall where Valeri takes Tonya, they encounter not one but three angry men standing up high on the stage. "...Are you ready?" one speaker asks the crowd, receiving in response cheers and roars. The speaker at the union hall says, "they have spent our wages on weaponry and technology to defeat armies on the battlefield, at sea, in the skies, but none of these expensive weapons can possibly defeat the rising of us all against them!" Another round of cheers and roars. But Valeri and Tonya don't shout, instead continuing to look for Murray's old contacts in the Popular Front. Although the Popular Front has swelled in numbers since agreeing to form over a year and a half ago, it's not certain Valeri and Tonya will find any of the Front's agents here. For a short time, Valeri thinks it was a mistake to come here. But then he's vindicated, finding Miguel Figueroa and Rose Powell in a dark corner of the hall.

In agreeing they'll fight, the crew of the cruiser Borealis silently acknowledge the truth of the matter, that it's not important whether the coming battle against some foreign enemy is won or lost, whether the men aboard the Borealis live or die in the waters of the Baltic Sea. (They still haven't been told where they're headed, but from their course so far it's abundantly clear to all.) Clinging to the futility of a life marked by impoverishment, indignity, and despair is the folly of the delusional. Still, as Dmitri listens through the night to the rattling of gunfire and the intermittent thud of explosions on the streets of this foreign city, he is committed to the working class struggle in ways even he can't understand, his spirit given to the way forward offered by the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front, even if his mind is not yet made on the exact way forward. Still there's talk of mutiny; it'll come to that, sooner than they think. But this election, this election that's coming will wind up delayed indefinitely, leaving the men aboard the cruiser Borealis unsure what'll come. It's in this political vacuum that the next stage in this burgeoning revolution will be reached, leading all to a place much darker and bloodier than anything we've seen.

It seems random, but when the first in a string of explosions rattles across the city it all becomes clear. The dust settles, revealing a bombed-out storefront, with debris scattered across the street like so much useless confetti. An old café, on the same block as a police station, the café known locally as a favourite place for the policemen to come when off duty. Policemen are among the dead and wounded. In an act of calculated savagery, the rebel Elijah has, unknown to all but a select few, struck a declaration that he is to be reckoned with. In the coming days, another explosion rocks the city's streets, then another, then another, all across the country a series of explosions all strike at the same targets, all using the same methods, bombs set to demolish places highly visible, near the instruments of power, restaurants near army bases, stores near state offices, warnings phoned in without enough time to get word out to evacuate. It's been this way for so long, so many people killed already in the war at home but still so many more to be killed in the months and in the years ahead. But before these attacks can take place, there's that meeting at the hall between Valeri and Tonya on one side and Rose and Miguel on the other, this meeting the start of something more.

Like an exclamation point inappropriately placed at the end of a too-long sentence, these are a sequence of attacks meant to show they are all carried out by the same people, using the same tools, but without declaring their identities, the rebel Elijah aiming to induce all to find him and make him known in ways no propaganda ever could. Still living in the sewers, in the little nooks and crannies where the light cannot reach, the rebel Elijah blends in with his surroundings as seamlessly as a rivet made flush with sheet metal, and in so blending evades detection; when the troopers raid his hideouts, they find only empty warehouses, tunnels, and old, disused garages, one after the other until, there must happen something, until there must be that opportunity inevitably handed down by way of divine influence, a few days after all that'd happened this influence reaching out to offer its intervention in the affairs of the human heart. At the union hall on this night, Valeri and Tonya receive assurances of help from Rose and Miguel, but assurances satisfy neither Valeri nor Tonya. They want something real, something more. They'll get it.

It's a fight to the finish, all will come to realize, and in fighting to the finish all will come to see theirs as a fight for the finish, an explosion, then another, then another, a string of explosions bursting across the city at precisely the right moments, creating the impression without confirming the fact all come from the same place. Still at the union hall when these explosions take place, Valeri and Tonya stand aground, looking as one. "...And this is why we must all stand together now and fill the streets as one!" says the speaker on stage, his voice carrying in the background as Valeri and Tonya meet with the Popular Front's agents. The speaker says, "united we can never fail!" And the crowd follows his lead, whipping into an ever-intensifying frenzy, receptive to his calls for a new uprising while outside the world sets itself on fire. A murmur sweeps across the crowd as news breaks of this latest attack. "Brothers and sisters!" Another speaker takes the stage, Valeri turning back with Tonya to watch from the side. "Don't fear the acts of our friends who fight! They're fighting for you! They will attack the rich man who controls all, and their attacks will pave the way for our future!" But the assent is far from unanimous. In Valeri's heart, though, the sounds of explosions booming across the city inspires in him a surge of passion, and he steps forward to cheer and urge the crowd on. After the speech is had, Valeri and Tonya meet again with Miguel and Rose, this time in the alley behind the hall with Rose and Miguel promising them guns to use in their stand.

Meanwhile, in a lot somewhere, holding the half-finished shell of what were to be an investment for the wealthy man, troopers stage another of their raids, finding nothing, as they're about to leave one young trooper pressed into service during these times of crisis mistakenly setting off a bomb. Only the one trooper dies, and only later, after his colleagues rush him to the nearest hospital. It may seem like a small thing, the death of a single trooper against the violence and the loss of life all around, but it's these little acts that, over time, add up, provoking a larger turn of events. A young woman's death, still an act with the power to shock and outrage after all that's happened, provoking an outpouring of anger as crowds again take to the streets, in turn provoking the shooting deaths of scores more, when the cycle of crowds and shootings and crowds and shootings reaches its apex the rebel stepping to set off another of his explosions, this one placed so perfectly at the head of the largest crowd yet, in the immediate aftermath spreading the notion it was an attack by the troopers themselves. In the morning, when Valeri and Tonya have returned to Dominion Courts with the promise of supplies, they find Roger with a few more of the residents agreed to stand and fight, if the need arises.

Through this whole period, the rebel Elijah sends his gunmen out into the streets in ever increasing numbers, drawing on his reputation as a man of the people to recruit, under the cover of darkness gunfire rattling across the city. It's almost time.

24. Call to Arms

It comes suddenly, as such things tend to, with all but a few among Valeri's ranks taken by surprise. Britain joins the war on the continent. The army, the Prime Minister declares, is to be marched into battle right away, where it will surely rout the enemy and bring quick victory to the nation and to every man, woman, and child living under the banner of heaven. For his part, Valeri can't figure out what to make of this grand pronouncement, and it only hits him hard the next day when he sees his own, fresh faced, young men being marched along the street in formation. The war has finally hit home. (Wisely, the rebel Elijah orders his disciples in the Popular Front to allow these formations through the streets unmolested). But once Valeri learns the demands that'll be placed on the already battered and bruised British working class, he finally realizes the will to do what must be done, to whatever end. At Dominion Courts, preparations continue, preparations for what Valeri, Tonya, and Roger don't know. After war has been declared, an eerie calm settles on the streets, as if rebel and army have lost their focus while events overtake them. Soon, the government declares the organization of a Home Guard, reserves of troops too old, too young, or otherwise unfit for duty abroad. And it's this Home Guard that'll come to be a central antagonist of men like Valeri and the rebels in the Popular Front.

Russia launches an invasion of the Baltic countries where the Borealis has been heading; they don't call it an invasion, but that's what it is. The Baltic countries are part of a Western military alliance, and the Russians are betting none of their allies will come to their aid given all the internal turmoil going on within their rivals' borders. The United States, given to isolationism and with a faltering industrial plant, refuses to honour its treaty; but the United Kingdom and most of the others dutifully declare war. Serbia takes advantage of the opportunity to launch an attack on Kosovo. Old rivals Greece and Turkey trade air raids in the night, each refusing to honour their alliance in declaring war on Russia. In the span of a few days, the last vestiges of the old European Union are gone. But at home, the government announces a program, as they call it, to conserve all strategic resources for the war effort. (With all the collapses and formations of parliamentary coalitions following the recent farce of an election, no one can tell who's in power at any given moment). Although Valeri hasn't seen his old friend and mentor Mark Murray in a while, he imagines Murray would know what to say. When the list of 'strategic resources' the government intends to confiscate is published, Valeri's imaginings are proven right. A schedule is drawn up and released, with neighbourhoods marked according to when the Home Guard will enter to confiscate anything of value. This gives Valeri pause, as it tells them exactly when they'll be forced into action. Dominion Courts isn't in a zone targeted for the first raids, but the second. There're many, many others who will resist by force, many, many others who've armed themselves as Valeri, Tonya, and Roger have. This is the beginning of a new army, one which'll become something more.

Like the Americans, the Chinese government stays out of the fighting, for now content to continue quietly consolidating strength through covert means in all combatant countries, but in time their central role in this, our apocalypse rising, will become clear as a summer's rain. Beset by internal conflict, the world's empires seek a resolution to their own strife by using each other as an outlet. Each of these empires has their ruling interests, each is governed by a coalition of these interests as is this country in which we live. For Valeri, this turn of world events strikes near to him, his mother and father having come from the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, leaving many family and friends behind. He has aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins still in Russia; however far this war reaches, however long it lasts, some of them might be killed in it. He's never been to Krasnoyarsk, nor to Russia, but that doesn't matter. He believes in Russia the working class families are being subjected to the very same demands as those here, that the Russian government must be in the midst of its own announcements of confiscations. And although Valeri doesn't know what the response of ordinary Russians might be, he knows, he believes they'll undertake the same course of action that already Valeri, Tonya, and most of the others who live at Dominion Courts are about to. No matter the cost, no matter the cost, Valeri they must stand and fight. They'll get their chance.

This, Valeri realizes as he watches the news on his screen, is reason enough to oppose the war. It's around this time when the summer usually gives way to the steady advance of the winter's rains but which now, with the rapidly warming climate, men like Valeri persist through an unseasonable heat and humidity. If the rapidly changing climate and the worsening global crisis had produced chronic food shortages before, then the outbreak of war should soon threaten starvation for all. Although we've not yet seen the worst of it the streets of London are to pile high with bodies not only shot dead but starved into a slow and painful death. Already the first deaths from starvation have occurred, but broadcast of this news, of images of dishevelled and emaciated corpses lying in alleys is forbidden by act of parliament. But no act of parliament can stop men like Valeri from speaking with his neighbours, with Tonya and the others, and them with their neighbours, word soon spreading faster by mouth than would be possible by screen. Although thousands defy the invocation of the Emergency Powers Act by the King, on advice of the Prime Minister, to protest the war, Valeri, Tonya, and the others remain at Dominion Courts, preparing for the moment when they, too, will be made at gunpoint to surrender what little they have for a war they want no part of. It'll come, sooner than they expect.

On board the Borealis the news comes immediately, even before the public is made aware, and Captain Abramovich announces the declaration of war over the ship's intercom. Dmitri's in his bunk when the announcement comes through. "At last, the waiting is over," he says. "I'm not ready to give up on this," says another crewman. "Nor am I," says Dmitri, "but soon enough we'll find which way we'll turn." Later that day, the Borealis joins a task force headed up the Norwegian coast for Russian waters. Still in his bunk when the order comes down for all hands to battlestations, Dmitri scrambles with the others, arriving at forward gunnery unsure whether he would live or die that day but determined nevertheless to see his shipmates through. Before the day is out, he'll lose some of them, still to lose many more before the real war is won. Though none aboard can know it, the war between nations which has been in the making for decades is but an intermediate step, a larger struggle playing itself out in plain view, yet hidden to all. Although the rebel Elijah has as his goal the overthrow of the United Kingdom, he knows that his true enemies have their own designs on power, still concealed beneath the chaos and the bloodshed in the streets but, in time, to make themselves known to all. Parliament is so weak, the Prime Minister a random official chosen from a group of unknowns in the House of Commons. Although the central government has been weakening for decades, it's only now become weak enough to be deposed.

In the back alleys, the rebel Elijah is not concerned but reassured by this turn of events, unexpected as it's come even to him. In time, the working man and his rebel ally will come to regret the latter's overconfidence, not because they'll wind up on the losing side but because their lack of prescience and foresight will surely make their ultimate victory so much costlier than it'll need to be. Not all is lost, and as it seems so unlikely for a nation so embroiled in bitter civil unrest to go to war against its rivals, but in fact it's the perfect moment. As the rebel Elijah looks on, the wealthy man musters his influence and his strength in service of this new war, the wealthy man placing his faith and his fate entirely in the fight against nothing at all. And when the student, the parishioner, the worker, the trooper, and the migrant all learn Britain has gone to war, they react with unanimous outrage, taking to the streets not as disparate interests but as a united front, surging against the government and the wealthy men who control it like the raging waters of a powerful storm against the face of a dam.

Though it may not be readily apparent, this is one dam about to spring the smallest of pinhole leaks, in turn about to collapse in a torrent. This is the last we'll follow each of these men, each of these individuals who represent a facet of the working class movement, but their stories have yet to end. As the United Kingdom goes to war each will keep on fighting, in their own way. Valeri's heard the reports, seen the footage on his screen of the disorder gripping cities in other countries around the world, though none of the other powers are experiencing the open revolt here at home. What neither he nor any of the others in revolt know is this war was inevitable. It's what major powers do to resolve internal crises and tensions brought about by decades, even centuries of corruption and exploitation. The announcement that war's begun succeeds in calming the crisis gripping the streets, for a little while at least. The thousands defying martial law are only a small fraction of the crowds that'd flooded the streets of all Britain's cities seemingly every day for many, many years. But when Valeri succeeds in reaching out to an old friend of a friend, he finds that not all is as it seems. "You'll get what you need," says the friend of his friend. "I don't know why you say that," says Valeri, "but you'd better be right." They're speaking on the phone, their exchange terse and cryptic, and over quickly. "Well?" asks Tonya, with Roger at her side. "We'll see," says Valeri, the most he can manage.

But the corruption that's been eating away at the innards of our way of life has left us weak and vulnerable, like the emaciated gazelle being stalked by ravenous lions. It's enough for wealthy men to realize the futility of their struggle, and plan to take action anew. While they scheme, the world's working men are made to march into the slaughter for reasons no one can understand even if there are those among the wealthy elite and their co-conspirators in government think they can. As the nation's armies gather and make off for war, the screens of the world watch with a curiosity unlike that of a nation facing a life-and-death struggle. The Popular Front is vociferous in its opposition, its apparatchiks like Miguel Figueroa and Rose Powell denouncing the mass slaughter of working men by the hand of other working men. But in these uncertain times, the outbreak of world war strikes a mood none can read in the working class apartment blocks and the shantytowns rolling along the hills. Young men are marched three abreast in a long line along the streets, many still wearing civilian clothes, while women, children, and the elderly crowd the sidewalks. No one quite knows what to make of it. In his secret headquarters Elijah considers the timing of it all, and issues orders to the swelling ranks of the Popular Front to cease their attacks. "Cast off the crutch," he says, "and the body shall learn to walk anew." Still they conserve their strength, waiting for the perfect moment to launch a renewed offensive, one which, Elijah says, should succeed in giving new life to their still-burgeoning revolution.

But it all comes down to the struggle of ordinary working men like Valeri and the other residents of Dominion Courts. With their limited armaments, they can't hope to survive a resistance against a police raid they're sure will come. In the lobby, Valeri stands with Tonya and Roger, the three of them having taken it on themselves to see all the residents through. They've heard the rumours of conscription. "I won't join the army," Valeri says. "Nor will I," says Tonya. "Nor I," says Roger. "We don't have much time left," says Tonya. "They're going to come for us very soon," says Roger. "And when they come around to conscript us," Valeri says, "we'll fight. We were ready to fight them in spirit if not in form anyways, should they have come around to evict us. Now we'll make a stand against them all the same." It's quickly agreed. But these are times more complicated than even they realize. While the rebel Elijah gathers his strength for his next move, men like Valeri plan for their own survival against odds growing longer by the hour. So long as Valeri stands, he stands among brothers and sisters. In his working class apartment block, they ready themselves for the coming storm. Pooling their limited resources, they cobble together the money to buy a semi-automatic rifle and some ammunition off the street. With the couple of handguns and the one bolt-action rifle they've been supplied by the rebels in the Popular Front, it's a small arsenal Valeri declares enough to defend their right to live in their own homes. It's not that important how Valeri and the others have gotten their hands on these weapons; in mid-twenty-first century Britain such weapons have become much easier to come by, though still nowhere near as easy as in the United States. Still, as Valeri and Tonya, among others, begin to squirrel away these limited armaments for the time when the police come around to confiscate from them what little they have. It seems like they're so far from where they'd been; only a few years ago they'd all been working, they'd all been able to feed themselves, and they'd all thought of the bombings and the gun battles, then confined largely to the post-industrial north, to be so distant, always edging closer but seeming never to arrive. Now, they're about to join in.

"We are dangerously low on food," says Roger, "water could cut out at any time." And it's true; whenever a local store receives a rare delivery of foodstuffs, it's quickly dispensed to the crowded and starving people who make it there first clutching bundles of cash. "We'll live," says Tonya, "for now." "We'll live," Valeri says, "I don't know to what end, but we'll live. We're all going to die anyways, if we let them take all our food. We've all seen the bodies in the streets. If I've got to be a body, then I'll make them come and pay for it." They turn to other matters. Some residents in the building have already left, taking little but the clothes they had on with them. For the rest, this means their suites can be raided for supplies. "We've got enough arms to make a go of it now," Tonya says. Valeri shakes his head and says, "and when they come for us they'll regret it." Roger asks, "who will come to help us?" He asks of the rebels. "No one," Valeri says, "if you want to go out and join the rebels then you can do it. I'm staying here." Tonya lights a cigarette, taking a drag off it before handing it to Roger. "That's all well and good," she says, "but what do we do if the police force our hand?" Roger takes a drag, then offers the cigarette to Valeri, but Valeri shakes his head and says, "then we'll fight." The three nod their grim assent. Still, they know there're some among the residents who won't want to fight, that Valeri, Tonya, and Roger, among others, don't speak for everyone. But this doesn't matter to Valeri, nor to Tonya or Roger. They agree not to be limited by the actions or the attitudes of those who would refuse to stand. "After all that's happened," says Valeri, "we'll stand for the rest of them, even if it means standing without them." Soon, they agree to give warning to the residents of their plans, telling those who wish to leave or stay, if they choose to stay then to fight or keep out of the way.

After all that's happened, it seems to Valeri that their deliverance is at hand, with it to come his personal vengeance against the apparatus that killed his parents fifteen years ago. In the midst of this, he recalls one of the last conversations he'd had with his roommate Hannah, after the hospital had all but shut down owing to a shortage of critical supplies and equipment. "I'm not coming back for long," she had said to Valeri, "I've just come back to gather some things, get a night of sleep, and then say goodbye to you in the morning." But Valeri, unknown to all, to even himself, even then had something of a death wish, which he's only now becoming aware of. The thought of the police, the army, anyone attacking them in their little block of a fortress with lethal force excites him, it quickens his pulse and waters his mouth until he can't help but sit down to calm himself. After so many years of futile and intemperate rebellion, he believes, the chance to make good on the legacy of his mother and father seems imminent. When the government announces the first round of confiscations set to go into motion, he becomes bitterly disappointed that their block, their neighbourhood is not among the working class districts targeted. But then his disappointment turns to anticipation when the second round is announced, their block, their neighbourhood included. At last, he'll have his chance to become a true martyr.

"Where are you going?" Valeri had asked, the last time he'd spoken with Hannah. "I'm not sure," Hannah had said, "but I've got to go somewhere. There's too much fighting, too much death. It's become unbearable. I can't eat, even if there was anything left to eat. I'll die here, and I don't want to die here." She'd looked away. As she'd looked away, there'd been the distant rattling of gunfire to punctuate the moment, forcing her look back towards Valeri who met her eye for eye. This had been an uncertain moment, one in which the war abroad could've seemed to shatter families and break apart the flimsy bonds that'd held together lives for so long. But it'd been a fraud. As Valeri is starting to realize, these are bonds that've never been even as they were, fictional creations even as their grip on our lives have always been real. In Hannah, he now sees his equal, his opposite, the perfect complement to his burning rage, unlike him in every way and therefore exactly the right person to stand aside him as he takes these decisive next steps into the rest of his life. But this is only now, after she's left. Back then, Valeri had taken her hand in his. "I can't predict the future," he'd said, "but I can tell you I won't let go of anything. When the police come around here next time there's no guarantee of what will happen. I'm glad you're leaving, you need to get yourself out of harm's way." Even as he'd said it, Valeri didn't believe it, chiding himself inwardly for encouraging such selfishness in even his good friend and roommate.

That was then. Though he wishes there was something he could've said to keep one of his best friends in his life, he knows the fight has frightened her too much for her to stay at his side. Theirs are concerns of a new manner, the hardening of the steel in their nerves contrasting sharply against the gnawing of their guilt against their innards. It's a terrible, terrible time to be alive, aligned with the forces of evil who strike back against the forces of good. In the end, Hannah had left without fanfare, fleeing the city to the relative safety of the countryside. Though Valeri doesn't know when, or if, they'll see each other again, he looks on her fleeing the war zone of the streets for the safety of the Scottish highlands as but the end of one chapter in their lives, not the end of their own story. They'll see each other again. Even if she dies, or he dies, they'll see each other again in the next world. Their salvation is had not by deeds but by faith. As the residents of Dominion Courts prepare to defend themselves, Valeri takes to reciting the creed of the working class, the words spray-painted across walls, in alleys, emblazoned on banners, 'NO SURRENDER.' He adopts it as his own. He takes it to mean an embrace of fighting to the death, but he takes it wrong. With time, he'll become fortunate enough to learn his mistake, but it'll require a faith in those around him he still doesn't have, a faith that's a critical part of his rising to become the man he's destined to be, he's been chosen to be.

Earlier, much earlier, Valeri had floated the idea of using her for her expertise as a medic of sorts, but she'd left before it came up. He'd held up some small hope she'd come back, but his hope was misplaced. No matter, he decides, as he turns to Roger and says, "we'll go without her." Roger nods. "Gather whatever weapons you can find," Valeri says, "and when Tonya comes back, we'll have enough to make a stand." "And if she doesn't come back?" Roger asks. "Then we'll fight with what we have," Valeri says. Roger nods. "We should secure the doors and finish boarding up the windows now," Valeri says. "Agreed," Roger says, and turns to head down the hall and see to it. But as Valeri himself turns back to his work, there's the sound of a thunderous explosion and the sudden rattling and rumbling of the floor, the walls, the ceiling. It's over in an instant. A bomb somewhere nearby, set off by one of the rebel's remaining units in the city. Though Valeri, Tonya, and the others at Dominion Courts can't know it, the Popular Front is expending the last of its strength, willingly sending its units here in the cities to their certain deaths. This is in anticipation, though, of the coming uprising which Valeri, Tonya, and Roger, among others, are to launch. Across the city and around the country, men just like them prepare to resist the confiscations.

Through the night there's the intermittent sound of gunfire, punctuated by the dull thud of distant blasts. Half a world removed from the fighting on the front lines, Valeri and the rest of the residents at Dominion Courts prepare to join in on the war in the streets, a war over little more than the right to live in their own homes. But even they are aware their struggle has taken on a new character in these recent months, with the residents here preparing for the next showdown while still crowds of demonstrators vent their anger at the slaughter around the world. Defiant, the working man raises his fist in anger. Dedicated, he marches in the street with the other working men and with the allies of the working man, the student, the parishioner, the soldier, and the migrant the lot of them shouting slogans until their voices are hoarse; still then they shout. At street level, the sound of their shouts dominate the scene and overpowering all others, yet high above the street in the glass and steel skyscrapers that house boardrooms and bright, expansive corner offices the sound of so much rage has softened until barely audible over the subdued thrum of an air conditioner and the swinging of doors open and shut. In the navy, the cruiser Borealis is one of the ships docked in harbour when first the word comes around that war's been declared. On board, Dmitri is working when a fellow sailor bursts in to tell him. Sometime later that day, Captain Abramovich announces over the ship's speakers their orders to put to sea immediately and join up with the rest of the fleet for a decisive first strike at the enemy. In the mess hall when the order comes down for all crew to their stations, Dmitri declares, "now we have the privilege of fighting to make sure our people can keep on dying in our own streets." There's a chorus of agreement from the others, met with a sharp glare but nothing more from the officer on deck. A year ago Dmitri might've been put in the brig for such a remark; things have changed. "I don't even know why we're going to war," Dmitri later says, manning the gun after a drill's ended, "so the enemy's country has attacked a government we've got a treaty with. So what? We die because one group of wealthy men need to grow their power over another group of wealthy men. It's all a crime." As they steam towards battle, the same sentiment is echoed by crewmen in compartments from bow to stern, the crew almost ready to throw their lot in with the working men dying in the streets. But this sentiment is not yet reached its critical peak; it'll take one more setback.

While men like Valeri vent their rage at the world having left him by, the wealthy man plots the next scheme to enrich himself. It seems almost a parody, a caricature of the life the wealthy man leads, yet still it's not even close to the truth. In this hardened discourse, filled as it is with impassioned pleas and inflamed tensions, the wealthy man still seeks to wring every last pound he can from men like Valeri, chewing up and spitting out so many carcasses until the time comes to reach his next goal. To men like Valeri, these times see him tired and sore, but ready to fight as ever.

25. Hope and Fear

Early news arrives from the front, the nation's armies having faced off in a faraway land against its declared enemies. A much smaller force humiliates us, routing our troops on the battlefield, scattering our men and massacring them. As news filters back, the wealthy man's apparatchiks selectively omit certain details and exaggerate others, putting the best possible spin on this humiliation, stopping just short of outright fabrication. Now, men like Valeri see the true expression of love as anger and anger as love. As news of the army's defeat on the continent filters through the working class districts at home, a new anger burns, an anger at their brothers and sons being humiliated in defeat, at the loss of so many of their own. This anger comes from love. But as their anger at their own loss stems from a forsaken love for their own, a brotherly, fraternal love, the anger which follows reflects their love in its intensity. Although Valeri doesn't know this as such, he's come to embrace this character of their struggle, on the verge as he is of realizing the beginning of his place in the apocalypse, rising. "They're coming for food now," says Valeri, "next they'll be coming for people." He's speaking with Tonya, in one of the common areas at Dominion Courts. They hear the news, watching on their screens as the first round of confiscations are met with violence, the residents of many working class blocks fighting back, sometimes with their bare hands. There're many deaths, mostly residents, as the Home Guard applies heavy force.

But it's all in vain. The first round of confiscations have begun sooner than the expected neighbourhoods across London and cities all throughout Britain, catching many defenders ill-prepared. It's only been weeks since war had been declared, and already the government in Westminster is declaring this a war unlike any before. These neither nameless nor faceless bureaucrats and members of parliament are right, but not in the way they'd expect. The simmering unrest that'd gripped the working class districts of all British cities, large and small, it lingers, reset by the commencement of war on the continent. For Valeri, it's still in that confusing, disorienting in-between time, when all seems as though it could be lost, but also when it seems they've got little left to lose. Armaments continue in the working class districts, and armaments continue until the first confiscations take place. "When they come here," says Tonya, "do you think we'll stand a chance?" It's not the same conversation, but some days later, after the first confiscations end. "It doesn't matter," says Valeri. "I know it doesn't," says Tonya, "but not everyone agrees." They watch on their screen as the government's apparatchiks in media denounce terror and lawlessness in the streets, declaring resistance to the confiscations tantamount to treason.

The working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner can't be convinced by these lies, so many years of being subjected to it having desensitized them to the power of the apparatchik's so carefully chosen words. And there's one thing the apparatchiks can't conceal, can't omit, the deaths of so many young men, the families of each receiving the news no family should ever receive. Amid crying and shouting and the raising of fists and the scattering of voices into the wind like so many grains of dust, the rebel watches, planning his next move carefully, so carefully, choosing his target like a surgeon about to make an incision with no margin for error. The first raids, though, were badly executed, leading the Home Guard to prepare greater force and caution for the next. As Valeri looks to their defences, little more than furniture blocking entrances and hastily boarded-up windows, he knows they stand a chance, they've got to stand a chance. The dark essence creates this knowledge in him, choosing now to act.

Limping home, the Borealis is part of a retreat disorganized and haggard. Caught in an ambush by a Russian fleet, they fought a confused action in a thick, night-time fog and suffered several direct hits. Once docked, the crew goes ashore, and later that night Dmitri holds a meeting of dedicated crewmen who agree they won't put out to sea again. "If the order comes down, we must occupy our own vessel," he says, "and we'll refuse our orders. Others will see us, and they'll join in. With no fleet the government will have to declare a truce." Nods go around the room. It's decided. There's no vote taken, but there needs to be no vote. And when they hear of the first round of confiscations, the righteousness of their chosen path seems confirmed. Dmitri doesn't know whether his family is to be among those targeted for confiscations, nor do any of the others aboard; information is controlled tightly enough that they're deprived of such specifics, leaving them only aware of the broad strokes. That's all it takes for them to commit to one another, as they've been so committed for as long as any of them can remember. Their opportunity will come, as the Borealis was too badly damaged in action, and isn't to be ordered out to sea for a while. In the morning, the crew pack the pier and watch as her sister ship, the Australis, puts out to sea, missing her aft batteries and steaming under half-power. Parts had been scavenged from the Australis to make the Borealis fully operational, but the Borealis had been so badly damaged there was little of value to be returned. Dmitri watches along with the rest of the crew as the Australis disappears over the horizon, and he says, "we may never see them again." Though he's never been one to believe in superstition, Dmitri can't help but imagine the shiver running down his spine as proof his brothers and sisters at arms will soon meet their end.

It's all come so suddenly, or so it seems, the months, the years having led up to these difficult, impossibly difficult times. As the ghosts of our history's past linger in the streets, the moment comes when the rebel Elijah's gunmen mount their next attack, their first since the war had begun. But this attack is different, this attack is unique, striking not some random scene in the street nor some of the patrolling troopers, instead the rebel Elijah focusing his arms on a recruiting office for the army somewhere deep in the city's centre. The first A few rounds crack through the air, a crude bomb is thrown into a window, but none of this matters much when held against the grand scheme of things. As the rebel gathers his strength, his is committed only to the minimum needed to keep pressure on his enemies, on the troopers who serve the interests of the wealthy man. Never seeking much for himself, the rebel is content, for now, to dwell in his squalor, living underground, using the sewers as roads for his bands of gunmen who leap out of manholes to fire their volleys before disappearing again beneath the streets that produced them. While Valeri, Tonya, Roger, and the others at Dominion Courts continue to wait out this confusing and eerily calm period, anticipating the next round of confiscations to begin earlier than scheduled but unsure how much earlier.

The working man is lost, still yet committed as he is to the cause of taking on the way of things. But we must never allow ourselves to be seduced by the notion that the way of things was peaceful before all this started; this is the insidious temptation offered by they who would dream themselves our masters. For, you see, our way of life is one of force, with the wealthy man and his servants in the apparatus of the state relying always on the threat of force to have their way. And so, too, will the working man of the future rely on this threat to have at his way, to safeguard the future he will have built for himself and to lay down the path through to a stage of historical development even more advanced than what he will have built for himself. And Dmitri's intuition should soon prove right. But in the meanwhile, at home events soon come to a head. Captain Abramovich has gotten wind, somehow, someway, of the planned mutiny, and he's acted to head it off. "All you better think twice about it," says the Captain, "if you all don't muster for duty in the morning then I'll put you all in the stockade. And you'll be hanged after you're court-martialed." But threats have long since lost their power. "There's not enough room in the stockade for all of us," Dmitri says at the next meeting of co-conspirators, "and unless we want to wind up dying for the sake of some rich man's wealth, I prefer the hangman's noose to the enemy's guns." All are in agreement. The mutiny will go ahead as planned, but with one key difference.

Amid the carnage, news breaks of the current government's troubles, of backroom dealing and of petty squabbling the likes of which Valeri has become used to by now. But after another defeat on the battlefield and another round of attacks by the rebel's gunmen, the remaining recruitment centres grow desolate, the invalids and the retired soldiers manning them spending their days alternating between fearing for their lives and fighting off sheer boredom. It's a far cry from where we've been, where we've come from, the scene around the city and across the country the way of things, the glass and steel towers that once so threatened the essence of the working man's way of life. It's under these circumstances that the announcement comes of compulsory service, with the first of the young men to be inducted within days. In the morning, the time comes for the crew to muster outside the barracks at the base. But Dmitri and the others are already on board the Borealis. "No more the enemy can kill us," he says, "than can we be provoked into killing them." News comes of the next battle, in which the Australis has been lost. She took a missile right to the forward magazine, not far from the very spot on the Borealis where Dmitri serves. In this same battle, one of the Royal Navy's mightiest class of ships, a massive aircraft carrier with unreliable, near-useless stealth fighters sinks, too, a single enemy missile striking at exactly the right spot. When he reads the report on his screen, that same shiver runs the length of his spine, the knowledge he'd have died had the Borealis received that hit instead in his mind confirming every instinct he has to rebellion.

Events have come to a head. Whatever the wealthy man and his apparatchiks in government might've expected, this announcement produces only a renewed burst of rage on the streets. The working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner defy the state of emergency and fill the streets once again, at the centre of their mass the Victory Monument jutting into the sky like a pillar of salt cast from a mould of steel. As punishment for their failure to turn for muster, Dmitri and the others have been confined to quarters, the stockade on base already filled beyond capacity. In the afterwards, the rebellious fervour among the crew of the Borealis has nearly reached its inevitable climax. Still Dmitri thinks of his friends on the Australis, sunk by a Russian hunter-killer submarine. There are no survivors. Lying in his cot, he says to himself, "they die for no purpose but a sacrifice to the criminals in parliament." While confined to quarters, Dmitri and the others can hear the cries of the people in the streets through the distance like the surging of a mighty river through the rapid's jagged rocks. To Dmitri, this is the call of the wild. And he bitterly resents being locked in his quarters while so many are fighting and dying not only on the faraway battlefields in a foreign land but on the streets of this very city.

In the night, parliament falls, the coalition government cobbled together from a dozen different parties giving way to a new coalition government cobbled together from a different assortment of parties. At times like these, no one really knows who's in power. But news of this sudden and new formation of government does not resonate far, the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner still in the streets. There's violence; of course there's violence. The troopers attack, while the crowds respond with hurled bricks and raised fists. Gunfire cracks through the air. Bodies fall. Blood stains pavement. This is an orgy of violence without end, which must never end, a grand act of theatre under which all must carry out their prescribed roles to their logical and inevitable ends, no matter the futility.

It becomes as one could've predicted, a storm of chaos unravelling by the day, as each new sequence of events brings with it a new burden placed on the way of things, soon the day coming when there'll be one burden too many and it'll all come crashing down. In the street, in the halls in his little apartment block, Valeri meets Tonya, asking her, "are you leaving?" She replies, "never." "Good." He's about to go on, when she pre-empts him by saying, "I'm not going anywhere." "I'm glad to hear it," he replies, "with people like you on our side, how can we fail?" She smiles. "Have you spoken to your friend?" Valeri asks. "I have," Tonya replies, "and we'll get what we need." A few days later, Tonya knocks on his door and presents him with a package, inside a semi-automatic rifle and a few hundred rounds of ammunition. "Just one?" Valeri asks. "It's all I could get," Tonya replies. And Valeri believes her. He takes the rifle in his hands, holds it as one would and looks down the sights, envisioning his soon-to-be target.

With the couple of revolvers and the old, bolt-action rifle they've been able to scrounge from among the remaining residents, what they'd had before, this is the arsenal they'll have to defend themselves from the coming attack. They'll be hopelessly outgunned, but Valeri knows in his heart it's not the firepower they can muster but the mere act of raising arms in defense of the right to live in their own homes that matters. Although the rebel has been carrying out his attacks for months, theirs will be, with others, the first rising of the ordinary worker. It's a tantalizing thought, one which makes Valeri's mouth water even as it makes his stomach turn. In the night, there's regular blackouts, the power switched off, they say, to make the city less vulnerable to enemy air raids and to enemy ships and submarines that might be lurking just offshore.

As if life on the street in Valeri's part of town could become any more distant, any more of a struggle, from day to day the rest of that mass of people live, now, under the harshest of circumstances, the vaguest yet most insidious of threats, the suggestion that bombs might fall at any moment on his head without warning seeming at the same time absurd and frightening. As the glass and steel towers of yesterday have become little more than monuments to the disorder and to the chronic shortages plaguing every part of the country, permeating all aspects of our society, resources commandeered and supplies redirected; immediately, it's as though the whole country has been placed under a blockade, with not a single shot fired by any enemy against our homes or our people nor with a single bomb dropped from any of the aircraft that can be seen to fly past at so high an altitude they're all but invisible to the naked eye.

As Valeri readies himself for the coming stand, he shivers in place but refuses to put on a coat. So late in the year, winter has fallen, but it's unlike the mild and dreary winters Britain had used to know. The rapidly changing climate has meant shorter, more brutal winters across the northern hemisphere, and every day it seems the streets of London are enveloped in near-freezing temperatures. The clouds threaten snow. And all the while Valeri's stomach growls and his innards seem to contract with every pang of hunger he feels, the chronic food shortages which'd become a fact of life in London's working class districts now so much worse. The little food they had has already been commandeered by the troops of the Home Guard, army units stationed on the home front and made up of those slightly too old, too young, overweight or underweight, or otherwise unfit for military service on the continent, to be dispensed, they say, as needed. But Valeri realizes he's lucky simply to still be alive, a gift given to him not by his own choice but by the dark essence supplying him with a sustenance so he might become more than he is.

The rebel Elijah has all but called off his armed campaign, laying low for a while, gathering his strength, letting loose only the occasional attack on recruiting stations, on power plants, on bridges and on railway stations. Britain's army, toothless from decades of expensive blunders and cuts, struggles to control the urban areas. The wealthy man and his apparatchiks in the current government, whoever might be pulling the strings, they choose to interpret the apparent subsiding of the rebel Elijah's campaign as proof that their decision to take the country to war was the right one, even as their armies are humiliated on the battlefield and as civil discontent rises with each passing day. It's all an act, it's always been little more than an act, but when you are fighting this kind of war an act is all that matters, all that one needs to be concerned about.

The wealthy man's apparatchiks take to the screens of the nation and proclaim an end to what they call the terrorism and the lawlessness that've come to plague this city and this country, even as the working man and his allies the student and the parishioner keep on filling the streets like water fills the mightiest of rivers. It's all a deeply confusing time, for you and for me, and in this time it becomes so entirely unlike any of us to imagine something more than what we have. But even now, with an unseasonably long and hot summer having given way to the onset of an unseasonably short and cold winter, the changing climate has joined with the war to worsen the food shortages, putting men like Valeri in a state of mind where they must confront the very real possibility of their own deaths soon enough. It's not much of a choice: starve slowly or take the bullet and bleed out in the street. But when faced with this choice, these two paths, Valeri and the others are to take the third path: resist!

In his weaker moments, the wealthy man can only look on these times and imagine something entirely different had transpired. But as we linger on these moments, these moments in time when the hopelessness of our common path seems self-evident, know that there are those who would seek to change the course of our history and in so changing make possible through great suffering and great anguish a tomorrow better for us all.

26. Face of the Enemy

At last, it comes. Home Guard troops approach the front of the building, as the next round of confiscations begin in earnest. From a fourth-floor window, Valeri watches, waiting for the troopers to come closer, closer, still closer, when they're a half-metre from the front door tightening his grip on his rifle and drawing in one last breath. There's the crack of gunfire as his first round fells one of the lead troops, the others scattering for cover instantly, the rest of Valeri's opening volley punching holes in the concrete. There's more gunfire, there's shouting and screaming and the wailing of sirens, the troopers falling back, then withdrawing altogether, in the time this brief exchange of gunfire has taken the fires of liberation burning brighter than ever before, here and around the city.

The troopers scatter, drawing gunfire from Valeri's people manning third-floor windows, but scramble for cover in time. Valeri's people don't know what they're doing, even if they're convinced they do; these are not trained soldiers, not even enthusiasts, workers only learning to use firearms for the first time. Valeri leans out of the window slightly, looking to take another shot, a bullet to the wall scaring him into falling back into his apartment. More rounds burst around him, then stop. He picks himself up and pins himself against the wall, edging forward, listening to the sound of erratic gunfire, on reaching the window seeing no troopers where once they'd been. It's over, for now.

Valeri turns his gun into the sky and fires one, two, three more rounds, using the last of his ammunition as exclamation points on the day's events. As night falls, this same sequence of events plays itself out a hundred times across the country, coordinated not by some master plan but by the dark essence that's already begun to run its course in the common pulse shared by working men here and everywhere there's work to be done. It's around Christmastime, but all there is to say about that is this Christmas is marked not by the giving of gifts but by the sharing of one gift, the aspiration to freedom. It matters little what's going on in the streets right now, for the dark essence secretly yet openly guides the aspirations to freedom of men like Valeri and the others in the working class districts.

Even in the thick of winter, it's much too cold out for Valeri to leave the shelter offered by Dominion Courts. A sudden cold snap has plunged temperatures below zero, unseasonable even in the midst of a changing climate. And once the Home Guard troopers have a second go at the block, it becomes readily apparent that the food shortages having worsened to the point where even the Home Guard is starving. In the meanwhile after that first exchange of fire, the residents of Dominion Courts have gotten their hands on another supply of ammunition and guns, looted from the bodies and the burned-out lorries left behind in the Home Guard's retreat. Another exchange of fire, quickly after the first attack. In the street, a loose formation of armoured cars making their way past when someone opens fire on them. Valeri returns to his position, gun at the ready.

This is the promise of the uprising fifteen years ago finally realized, Valeri thinks. This is what his mother and father died for, along with the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of many others just like him. A thunderous explosion booms through the air, sending a plume of smoke rising from the street. Valeri stops. He can't tell what's happening. There's a rumbling felt under his feet, next the walls shaking slightly for a half-moment or two. A wall of smoke obscures the sun's light. A wave of heat fills the air. For a moment Valeri thinks he's dead. For a moment he thinks this must be his time. But the smoke clears. Valeri stands up and looks out the window, the street empty, without any troopers in sight. There's an abandoned truck, shot through with flame, windows shattered. For the Home Guard hadn't expected such stiff resistance when they'd moved in to confiscate resources from the residents of Dominion Courts and all the other apartment blocks seized by their own residents, making the organized resistance enough to shock them into retreat. Still, in the larger struggle it looks like the residents have won a dashing victory, and in the larger struggle how it looks is more important than how it is. On that night, Valeri guards from the roof, looking through it and projecting himself into the world outside, joining the rebel in spirit if not in form in this latest, decisive assault on the way of things, that the way of things might yet become something incomparable to what the world has seen.

A body lies motionless. Shell casings are everywhere. A quick survey of the building reveals bullet holes, broken glass, parts of walls fractured along beams, and two of the defending workers dead. But Valeri keeps his gun in hand, though it's empty brandishing it as if it were loaded. From across the city the sound of gunfire rattles intermittently into the night, at sunset rising columns of smoke blending with the after-industrial haze that lies permanently over the city. It's over, for now. In the confusion of the night, there's no one moment when it's clear they're no longer under threat, and for the rest of the night there's more shooting, more troopers coming by here and there, the whole city, the whole country in a state of confusion. It may seem Valeri's instincts have become honed to the sensitivities of this fight, but it's not so simple. In fact, his instructions were to take this moment to rise, as part of a wider offensive about to take place here in this city and across the country. We have reached this stage when not all is as it seems, when our enemies in state have grown overconfident and have come to foresee in their own actions victory where there, in fact, lies only the inevitability of defeat.

When the night is upon us, men like Valeri can sleep but can never rest. As night comes, the dark essence chooses this moment to complete its descent into our world, reaching out to Valeri in his moment of weakness to inhabit him with the ultimate strength. For when there's no clear way forward, there can be only one choice for Valeri: resist. In the night, Valeri feels the tightening of his muscles and an electric sensation running the length of his spine at precisely the moment this dark essence has come to him. But still he lives in a world hostile to his way of life and to his liberation, in this moment of weakness the dark essence choosing the most pathetic among us to serve as a vessel with which to grant itself form. There's more gunfire, rattling off through the night as troopers stage attacks on holed-up workers who've taken over factories, warehouses, yards, and apartment blocks across the country, some attacks failing to dislodge the workers, others succeeding with deaths on both sides.

But, this is by design. As the working man rises to no clear end, around the city and across the country the rebel lies in wait, about to spring his own trap. Taking stock of their situation, Valeri meets with Roger and Tonya on the roof, Roger there to say, "I'll be damned if we lived through that," Tonya nodding before saying, "but what's next?" Valeri's first thought is to admit he doesn't know, but he pushes doubt from his mind and says, "we wait for help. If they attack again, then we'll fight them again. So long as we fight for our homes and our families, we can never lose." This may not have been where any of us thought it'd take us, but it's where we were, all along, destined to be.

As the last of the rebel Elijah's known strongholds in the area are ferreted out and destroyed by the reactionary's troopers, all seems lost for the way of the future. Continuing his speech to the world, the current government in Westminster lays out its case for reconciliation with the country, promising change even as all who listen know it a false promise. Even the wealthy man knows it a false promise. Still he is compelled to promise change, just as an apple falling from the tree is compelled to drop to the ground by the immutable laws of nature, the wealthy man rendered impotent in his own words, the rebel Elijah lying in wait, licking his lips as the appointed time draws nearer by the second. As if he knows what's to come, the wealthy man finds himself roused by an ever-mounting passion, screaming himself hoarse, his lies burying upon lies, he becoming an absurd caricature of himself. Meanwhile, the residents of Dominion Courts look to Valeri for their next move. Valeri, Tonya, and Roger agree to tell the others to keep watch and send runners out for supplies, but until the Popular Front reaches into Greater London from its strongholds in the North to relieve them, they must posture themselves as though the next attack could come at any moment.

Valeri doesn't know what to expect but he puts on a brave face for the others, only letting it down when alone on the roof standing watch for the next attack never to come. The dark essence from above lives in Valeri, now, as it lives in men like him around the world who've irrevocably pledged themselves to the task of their own liberation. Already teetering on the edge of collapse, the way of things needs only the gentlest nudge to send it plunging into the abyss. Naturally, the rebel Elijah intends not to give the slightest nudge but the hammer blow.

Tonight, as the wealthy man declares to the world that the revolution was well and truly finished, his ally, the reactionary, knows better. As the wealthy man finishes his speech to the world, already the first shots mark this new and dramatic escalation of the revolutionary war, bullets tearing through the wealthy man's lies as though they're tissue paper, shredding the last, best hope the way of things have and clearing the way forward to a new beginning.

II

27. At the Threshold

At dawn's first light, it begins. Gunfire rattles through the air and columns of smoke rise into the sky. As the first confused reports filter onto screens across the country and around the world, it seems, to some, this is but another of the episodic outbursts we've all grown used to, but these first confused reports are wrong. As the day wears on, the attacks only intensify, the number of the Popular Front's gunmen in the streets only multiplies. They strike at police stations, at public halls, at government offices and at docks and airports, all at once. By the time the day's out, most of the Popular Front's gunmen have been killed, taken prisoner, or beaten back, but that matters little to the rebel Elijah himself, as he watches on the screens breathless new reports of the carnage and the chaos the sly grin on his face only growing wider with each passing moment on this decisive day. In the wake of the last round of confiscations having been met with unanimous violence, the government announces a suspension of the third round, but this does nothing to placate anyone among the working class blocks.

Still on the ground, Valeri greets the arrival of the rebel's offensive by flying the red flag from one corner of the roof using a cricket bat as a makeshift pole. With the rest of the residents in the building, they're tired and they're hungry but the promise of liberation keeps them all going strong. After the New Year has passed and the month of January has given way to February, it's still far too cold out, with nothing but the frigid temperatures and clear blue skies to see over all Britain. Now, with food supplies depleted, there're the first reports of deaths by starvation in the streets, decades of a steadily shifting climate and a steadily worsening poverty having brought us to this. Although Valeri and the others at Dominion Courts have thrown their lot in with the rebels, it remains their goal to live through the day, with each breath that passes in and out of his lungs and each beat of his heart pumping blood through his veins taken by him as a sign they've won through at least one more moment.

Meanwhile, on board the cruiser Borealis, Dmitri and the others have been released from their quarters, allowed to return to duty on account of the severe shortage of manpower crippling the navy. But still they can't put to sea on account of yet-unrepaired battle damage. "Our moment is at hand," says Dmitri to the crewmen with him in the ship's forward compartment, "and we must not miss it." Having established contacts with the rebels in the Popular Front, Dmitri and the others on board must now seize the moment. Breaking free, they reach the cruiser's armoury and arm themselves with rifles, then leave a pair of their own to guard the armoury while Dmitri leads the rest to the bridge. On arrival, they find Captain Abramovich and the other officers gathered, unarmed. It seems they were expecting exactly this when ordered to release the crew from confinement. "Do what you've come here to do," says the Captain, looking Dmitri right in the eye. "I haven't come to kill you," Dmitri says. "Oh?" the Captain asks. "No," Dmitri says, "I've only come to see to it that the crew of this cruiser are fighting for our own people for once." He orders the Captain and the other officers taken into custody, and soon the whole lot of them are being led at gunpoint down to the ship's brig. But on the way past, the Captain shoots Dmitri a mean look, filled with venom and bile, the glare of a man impotent with rage.

As this day dawns, Valeri hears the rattling of gunfire, the residents manning their apartments defences as though they could fight off a determined attack. Without much ammunition for their few guns, they couldn't withstand another attack, were the police not consumed in the Popular Front's offensive. Valeri's acutely aware the police could come again at any time, and if they should try the residents of Dominion Courts would make for easy prey. But still it escapes him the ease with which they fought off the first attack was owing to the working man's own determination to survive, not anything conscious in their planning. The working man knows, fully knows that his is a struggle not only against the truncheon of the trooper's physical oppression, but as well against the vast continuum of ideas meted out upon him, ideas posed as natural, healthy, yet which are designed by their very nature to instil in him a division against himself. Struggling, always struggling, the working man pledges to ignore the growling of his stomach and the fatigue behind his eyes, so sure he is of the honesty and the nobility of his cause that he's willing to put himself through an untold suffering to see it through. As the day drags on and the Popular Front's attacks don't peter out but escalate, the air fills with the endless chattering of gunfire and the thumping of exploding bombs blending into a terrible cacophony of hell building until there's nothing but death sounding out. But Valeri's part of town is mostly spared by this dramatic new escalation of violence, with only a misplaced round here and there to mark the day. No longer is his concern that of paying the rent or forcing himself through another day, instead he, now, concerning himself with standing guard at the door while his neighbours look on. It's a frightening turn of events, one which prompts Valeri, sometimes, to look back and in so looking consider the possibility that he may have been wrong, that the future these people thought they'd been fighting for all along was scarcely better than whatever hellish nightmare the old way was to have offered them. But this is a foolish thought, and Valeri pushes it from his mind, denouncing these self-doubts as mere echoes of the lies he'd once been so fed.

After seizing the Borealis, Dmitri and his colleagues secure all compartments and then muster on the bridge. They signal to the rebels their success by taking down the naval jack and flying in its place the flag of the Popular Front, a simple yet elegant design of crimson and gold. "Now we prepare for battle," says Dmitri. He turns to his fellow crew and says, "the simple part is over." Critically short on food, fuel, ammunition, and all the other supplies that fighting men and women need to fight, the crew of the Borealis have only strength of will to see them through. In truth, Dmitri and the others on board the Borealis know theirs is a struggle that can only lead them to a place of pain and suffering. Once secure, the Borealis casts off, then makes down river a few hundred metres before dropping her anchor and training her main guns to maximum elevation. Without knowing what can come, Dmitri has teams assembled to go ashore and secure supplies, but it's a futile effort as the men don't get far before they're set upon by a mob of confused and frightened people. Without options, Dmitri orders the crew of the Borealis to loot a nearby storehouse for food, then commandeer a civilian tug and seize its fuel from the desperate crew. The crew of the Borealis haven't made any new friends among the local population, not amid the Popular Front's offensive against the entire city and across the country, but they've secured their own survival. For the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front this new and dramatic escalation of the war in the streets is but a calculated gamble, an expenditure of so much strength in service of an offensive to push the enemy over the edge.

In this city, where Valeri lives, the streets are filled with near-total anarchy, violence, and bloodshed, as are the streets of many other cities across Europe. But there are those cities, whole provinces even, where an almost-calm still prevails. The working class here in Britain and across the whole of Europe is not yet united under the banner of their own liberation, as the consensus has not been forged. As columns of smoke rise throughout London to mark the spots where the rebel has staged his attacks, discarded shell casings and broken bodies litter the pavement. A clarity emerges from behind the thick, grey haze. In the time it takes one moment to blend with another, the last vestiges of peace begin to fall apart in the face of a sequence of events none could've predicted but all should've seen coming. After all that's happened, it was inevitable that the governor should lose his ability to so govern, in the face of withering attacks from all sides the decisive moment in his fall coming not in the halls of the capitol but in that narrow space between one moment and the next, in an instant, late at night, a single bullet fired or a single fist raised finally depleting the last of his will to power. But where one's will depletes, another's strengthens, in short order the spiralling of events out of control playing right into the hands of he who would set the world on fire.

An explosion, another explosion, this one preceded by a warning phoned-in scarcely a half-hour in advance. As men stop to look on their screens filled with images of the carnage in the streets, they devote the thoughts lingering in the back of their collective minds not to the lives lost nor to the bodies mangled on that afternoon but to the bare cupboards waiting for each of them when they're to go home at the end of the day. As another of the day's explosions booms across the sky, this one much closer, close enough to sound like the trembling of an earthquake, men throughout the city, the country looking up from their screens to promise that this, this will be the moment they last worries about such things as the growling of their own stomachs. It's not that each of them won't ever tend to their own needs again; rather, it's their newfound willingness to push through this momentary discomfort and on to the new beginning promised him by the future history has so earnestly promised each of us. But Valeri is like all the others in his aspiration to something more. Although he may not know exactly what he aspires to, there's the promise in the rebel Elijah and his disciples in the Popular Front to guide men like Valeri through to a new tomorrow, if only each of them can survive through his horrific time, now.

An explosion, another explosion, tearing across the city, snapping Valeri out of his self-imposed reverie, forcing his attention on the here and now. He knows not what to make of this escalating campaign of terror and lawlessness; he knows only that the rebel reassures him, in a curious, backwards, roundabout sort of way, that it's all part of some master plan, that it will lead inevitably to the changing of the guard and through to a new, better tomorrow. Amid the cacophony, an unbearable lightness settles into Valeri's nerves, freeing him, if only for this one night, from the burden of caring for himself, of caring for what happens to his person, aware as he is, now, of the greater whole to which he belongs. In the night, through the night, the restrained passions of so many of the his brothers and sisters ignite, chasing themselves round and round in an endless orgy of self-delusion and self-sacrifice. All through this interlude when Valeri realizes himself, events unfold which will soon enough give the working man his leadership, and in so giving place him firmly in control of his own destiny. At night, in the night Valeri lies in bed and stares at his flat's ceiling, imagining patterns in the cracked drywall and visualizing colourful lights swirling around the darkened room.

We're almost there. It's almost time. In the night that follows all that's lead up to this point, Valeri takes around his little apartment, boxing up books, clothes, a pair of shoes, before he leaves taking one last look around the mess he lives in, right now, and decide—realizes his lot belonged thrown in with rising tides of history all along. But it's never that simple. It can never be that simple. Then, in the night, it comes. A new government proclaims itself in power, having liquidated parliament, arrested all MPs, placed the King in detention, and taken command of the armed forces under its new banner, calling itself the Provisional Government. Neither republic nor monarchy, the Provisional Government is led by a mysterious coalition of unknowns who proclaim an end to the violence in the streets and promise a people's government. Gone, they say, are the days of degradation and greed of the old regime, to come a new era of peace and prosperity for all.

They invite the rebel Elijah and his Popular Front to join them, but Elijah refuses. Though Elijah and the Popular Front have achieved their long-sought goal of fostering the overthrow of the capitalist state, they see only a new betrayal rising in the Provisional Government's determination to continue the war against the nation's foreign enemies and to preserve the wealthy man's dominion. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the people are sceptical, even more than the working class of London and all other cities in England. Nothing's changed.

The rebel Elijah sees nothing less than total liberation for the working man as his goal, and these unknowns are the kind of spineless cowards who will come to be manipulated by an evil into advancing not liberation but oppression. For now, we watch, and wait for the rebel Elijah to make his next move.
28. Betrayal

As news spreads of the British people's betrayal, so too spreads anger and fear. So early in the morning, a small crowd forms outside the now-closed Palace of Westminster, the crowd swelling as the sun slowly brightens the sky. Soon, the square fills with rage, with the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner massing in action against this latest outrage, the accumulation of so many outrages and so many indignities overpowering the feeble orders marshalled against them to cease. Home Guard troops are present. Then, gunshots crack across the cold winter's morning, by some stroke of fate the course of our history changing, again, forever. Another massacre, the Home Guard's troops shooting dead ten times as many as were killed in the massacre that precipitated the government's downfall. As Valeri mans the ramparts at Dominion Courts, in the distance there's the sound of thunder rolling over the horizon, channelling through the city's streets between tall buildings like a burst dam unleashing water along a canyon cutting a path deep into the earth. Defying the law, working men like Valeri form their own ad hoc governing councils, declaring their own autonomy even as they secretly harbour fealty to the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front. As they were before, Valeri's cupboards are still bare, his windows are still broken, and halls still smell of cigarettes, only now mixed with the acrid and sour stench of spent gunpowder and the thick, oaky stink of fires only just burnt out. Soon, but for the colours of the flags flying from parliament Valeri can see no evidence of a change in power. It's all a confusing mess, but soon enough the working man will form from among this confusing mess his future. He needs only to reach out and seize what's rightfully his with both hands.

Aboard the cruiser Borealis the word arrives of the Provisional Government's determination to carry on the war on the continent. Immediately, Dmitri declares, "we can't follow this banner either," receiving a chorus of agreement among the rest of the bridge. Around this time, the crew receives word from a Coast Guard station on the Suffolk coast offering safe haven, the station's new commander elected from among the men and determined to oppose the Provisional Government, too. It's a gamble, but with no other options Dmitri orders the crew to weigh anchor and make down the Thames for the North Sea. "It's a great risk," says Dmitri, "but if we stay here for long then we'll starve." The rest of the men on the bridge nod their quiet but determined assent. Dmitri orders the banner of the Provisional Government flown, hoping to deceive anyone who might try to stop them. When night falls, the Borealis makes up the river, slowly, quietly, limping along, every turn of her screws bringing the first vessel in the Popular Front's unofficial navy closer to her own liberation.

After all that's happened, and with all that's yet to happen, the working man's enemies seem teetering on the edge of their final collapse. But not all is as it seems. Even in these heady times, the love which once bound us together now can only be found in pieces, shredded like so much useless paper, the fires of liberation fuelled by the rage of the ten thousand fists in the air. That night, as news spreads of this current government's collapse, obscured in reports on the screens is the fact that there's no readily apparent path to the thatching together of a new one. Every bridge has been burned, every alliance has been torn asunder, every last possible piece of goodwill has been cast into the same fiery cataclysm that now threatens to consume us all. But it's not all for nought. For Valeri, this in-between time is a time of uncertainty; his contacts in the Popular Front have spared him precious little information since their offensive. He worries they're dead. It seems only yesterday Valeri was a troubled but determined young man living in a world of grinding poverty, hopelessness, and violence meted out by unthinking, uncaring businessmen and their apparatchiks. Now, their passions aroused, men like Valeri can stand invulnerable as guardians of the future. His old friend, Maria, gone. His old roommate, Hannah, gone. His old lover, Sydney, gone. Each of them was only in his life for a short time, a few months to some years, but in those short months and years they've come to mean something more to him than he'd ever thought possible. Though Valeri doesn't know it, he'll see each of them again; even as the war in the street's been raging since the failed rising fifteen years ago still it has many more years left to rage, to consume all and to change each of Maria, Hannah, and Sydney until their next meeting should see Valeri hardly able to recognize them at all.

In the night, it comes quickly, unexpectedly, like a blade between the ribs. In the morning, nothing is left but the smoldering ruins of where once there'd stood a national pride, an emblematic sleight of hand never once successful in its intended purpose but kept up anyways. In the night, on the continent the British Army has suffered a devastating defeat, leaving many mothers without their sons and daughters without their fathers. As news spreads of this, the army's latest humiliation at the hands of its vastly inferior enemy, so, too, does an anger, an anger new, unlike the anger already festering in every factory, every mill, every university and every pew, even as it all seems so eerily familiar to those with the time and the inclination to remember. It seems to recall the exact moment when the news had first broke. "Parliament has been overthrown!" Tonya had said from across the room. At Dominion Courts they'd taken refuge in a third-floor flat, repurposed as a makeshift headquarters. "I can't believe it," says Roger. "I can," says Valeri, confidently. It seems their moment of victory is at hand. But once the residents of Dominion Courts realize this new regime is to change nothing for them, their celebration turns, first to despondency, then to grim determination to carry on the struggle, no matter the cost.

The new government's determination to carry on with the war effort becomes less credible, less tenable with each of these defeats. When Valeri takes to the streets, he does so with a muted despondency, worrying he'll never see Sydney again but nevertheless proud to have known she who would grow to pledge her life in service of their struggle. Whether she is lost is become of no consequence to life on the streets, her place in the masses immediately taken by some other pathetic soul. But love is not so easily sacrificed, even in the name of a noble cause like the working man's struggle which Valeri has come to devote himself to. Soon, Valeri meets with Hannah, one last time before she's to disappear from his life, from their shared life, forever. In the street outside what's left of his apartment they come together and embrace. She's come around to find him, having heard of the fighting, not knowing until arriving at Dominion Courts that this is where Valeri and the others had made their stand. "I admire your courage," she says, "to join the fight as you are." "It's not courage," he says, his voice low, his jaw straight in a grim look that betrays his uncertainty, "I'm fighting because there's no other way to go about this. We can fight and take our chances, or die lying on our backs. I choose to fight." "That's what I admire about you," Hannah says. "Don't admire me," he says, "I'm only a man, and this is what men do. We are all bound by the same duty."

Hannah sighs and looks away, then says, "I don't understand you when you talk like that." Valeri says, "I didn't expect you would." But Valeri realizes this is not his. He doesn't have that conversation in the street, she doesn't ever explain her true motives for fleeing the country for the relative safety of an old family friend's in western Canada. This is merely his imaginings, the way he might've preferred it to be, the mind powerful enough to create its own fiction yet vulnerable enough to need to use its powerful to reassure itself. But as the world collapses all around us, it seems only a matter of time before the end comes. In those heady days when once it seemed the promise of the uprising fifteen years ago had at last been realized, Valeri was ecstatic. But now, as he sees on his screens the talking heads pledging us all to carry on the war against our foreign enemies, his heart hardens again. As our defeats mount, the lists of the dead and dying that used to be released to the public are released no longer, the screens instead filled with bombastic paeans to victories past, present, and future. At exactly the right moment, timed to occur at the precise time when one such paean reaches its triumphant peak, a bang, a flash, and a plume of smoke rising into the air mark another of the rebel's attacks, while Valeri watches from his place on the front lines of the war at home, in the midst of the greatest coordinated act our world has ever seen.

But Valeri can only look away and wonder, truly wonder what has come to be. Then, a bang, a crack, Valeri looking down the street in time to see a tank's cannon spitting fire in his direction, blood spilling in the street as Valeri and the other picketers scramble for cover, finding none, in the time it takes one thousandth of a second to flash to the next a surge of adrenaline coursing through his veins and propelling him to superhuman strength. It's all come to this. But Valeri is never alone. "At last, at last, we have our vengeance!" shouts a voice, squawking over the radio. "At last, at last, we fulfill our destiny!" the voice shouts. Tonight, the world burns brighter and hotter than ever before. Reaching out, Valeri finds himself marching along a path, a narrow, winding path, his brothers and sisters at his side, the voices of the thousands carrying as they all stride into their future, together. But then, we all have our roles to play, and play them we must even as the futility of our efforts becomes clear to all but the most deluded among us.

The wealthy man, once so much wealthier than he is now, must continue to muster all his remaining strength against the forces arrayed against him, forces which, once so arrayed, are become all but unstoppable. It's a small thing, a simple truth, meaning so little when held up against the vast continuum of our shared history, our history which once seemed so impersonal but which now seems to know us so well it's frightening. But we're not afraid. We can't be. Fear has come to be an excess, an indulgence we can no longer afford. Along the way through to our common future, we must discard our fear and embrace the horror of all that's come to pass; it's only in rejecting our own narrow, personal self-interest that we can come to earn the future we've so long deserved. After the night has passed and the new day has dawned, Valeri takes stock of what's left. Among the remaining residents in the buildings under his stewardship, there's enough canned food to keep them all alive for a few days, perhaps a week or so, if rationed carefully. The electricity's still off. The water still runs, more or less, but the foul smell means no one will drink it; Valeri orders coffee filters used, assuring the others they'll make the water drinkable.

They're out of coffee, anyways. Until someone can restore service, they know they'll have to make do with what they have. But when Valeri meets with Roger and Tonya in the lobby, theirs is a conversation short and to the point. "We can't survive much longer," Roger says. "And the others are going to figure it out pretty quickly," Tonya says. "That doesn't matter," Valeri says, first looking Roger, then Tonya in the eyes with a steely glare of determination, "we tell the others whatever they need to hear. So long as they continue to believe there's hope, there is." Tonya and Roger nod. For now, it's all they can do. This is not what Valeri would've wanted, but if it's the way to the future then he pledges to embrace it with open arms, no matter the hardships it'll bring. And so we look to the future no longer with fear but with a mounting anticipation. Even among the still falling-apart ruins of the old way, there's hope. In this state, the loyalties of Valeri, Tonya, and Roger, as well as those of all their fellow residents belong to the rebel Elijah, even if they know him still only as more myth than man. He's both. Whispers of his name can be heard among the residents of the newly-liberated zones, growing louder with each flutter of the Popular Front's banner in the winds. Soon, all will see him.

Now that we've come to know Elijah's present, we should next turn to exploring his past, inextricably linked as it is with all our pasts, and the pasts of our children, and our children's children. But not yet. That time is not yet come. For now, let us embrace the totality of his person, even the parts which are not yet known to us, which can never be known to us. We are confined to looking into the moment even as we look on the past, in this contradiction there lying the essence of Elijah's forbidden knowledge. Novel among our heroes is the determination not to be deified by the passage of so much time, the rebel Elijah and the working men like Valeri knowing theirs is struggle born out of greatness and is not yet won. As the government teeters on the brink of its inevitable collapse, its apparatchiks offer the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner a concession; they offer to outlaw foreigners from owning homes and promise a basket of measures to prevent wealthy foreigners from absconding with their ill-gotten capital beyond the country's borders once the war has ended.

But it's too late for reconciliation. At the church repurposed as an ad-hoc headquarters, Valeri receives this news on his screen but then promptly discards it. The fires of liberation, once lit, can't be extinguished by half-measures. But as this provisional government forms, the working man fulminates, Valeri already pledging himself that this is not the end of his struggle.

29. Behind the Scenes

In the night, it's always in the night, the Popular Front's attacks subside, his gunmen remaining in place dotted around the city. They occupy parcels of land, in places no bigger than a street corner, in other places whole neighbourhoods under their control. They've seized spots of territory, here and there, and in anticipation of the enemy's counterattack they dig in, turning apartment blocks into ramparts, storefronts into bunkers, roofs into lookouts. The rebels have given Valeri and the other residents of Dominion Courts a few rifles, some ammunition, but no food or water; there's none to be given. As Valeri watches through binoculars from the rooftops, looking out for any sign of troopers, he looks upon a street with two armoured cars parked blocking the road, the troopers using them as makeshift fortifications. "They're sealing us in," he says, "they're going to starve us out." As if to accentuate this moment of realization, his stomach growls. He takes a drink of water from his bottle, forcing it down despite the bitter taste. (There's a ruptured pipe somewhere, but he doesn't know that.) Overhead, an air force bomber flies low enough to make its point but still high enough to pass cleanly over the tallest buildings.

At this critical moment, all seems to teeter on the edge of collapse, with hunger in the streets and with the bodies of the dead still lying wherever they'd fallen. Still the sound of gunfire rattles out through the night, leaving Valeri, Tonya, Roger, and the other remaining residents of Dominion Courts to look ahead to an uncertain future, one governed not by the whims of the wealthy man's greed but by forces of nature unleashed in this, the beginning of our history's end. No more are they slaves in their own homes; now comes the hard part, the part where they must overcome the divisions within. The rebel Elijah has foreseen this, as he's foreseen the fall of parliament. And through his allies among the working men, the unions, the churches in other countries he knows the corruption and the degradation is spread through them all like an insidious disease. Although we've spent and should continue to spend most of our time here in Britain, know that the working men around the world all fight the same war. But in an office overlooking the floor of a still-operating warehouse across the city, there takes place on this very day a meeting taking place between a very wealthy businessman and a mid-level officer in the army, a meeting that'll have grave repercussions for each and every one of them.

Looking out over the floor, the owner of the warehouse stands at a panel of windows and watches the day's work. Every day fewer workers show up, what's left the skeleton crew needed to keep operations running. The owner, a man named Nathan Williams, has chosen this day to meet with Douglas Schlager, a colonel in the army recently returned from the front after being wounded. As Williams sips on a glass of single-malt scotch, Schlager stands aside. "You should indulge in the finer things in life," Williams says, "war can be a rather thirsty endeavour, I find." He offers Schlager a drink. "No thank you," Schlager says. "So be it," Williams says, then turns back to the floor, then says, "how many brigades can you call on to support us?" "Six," Schlager says. "Only six?" Williams asks. "The rest will follow once we eliminate the Chiefs of Staff," Schlager says. "I suppose that'll have to do," Williams says, before turning back to look out over the warehouse's floor. He doesn't sip on his drink, but tilts the glass around a little to hear the clinking of the ice cubes.

At this particular warehouse, only one of many Williams owns, the product shipped is ammunition, bullets for small arms used by the army. Factories elsewhere produce the ammunition, then ship it here where it's sorted and forwarded to the army's own supply chain. War can be profitable business, but with so few workers still reporting for work it's becoming harder and harder every day for men like Williams to fill their quotas and make good on their deliveries. But this is by design. As the workers from one shift make way for those of the next, the warehouse floor quiets, leaving Williams and Schlager to stand in a momentarily awkward silence, this budding alliance between wealth and power now almost ready to coalesce around these men. These men have a knowledge that comes from an open secret; though Britain is consumed by war, at home and on the continent, they see the neutral Chinese, on the other side of the world, as the real enemy. They're at least half right.

"I assure you," Schlager says, "six is more than enough for us to carry out the plan." "I hope so," Williams says. "If you've never served then you can't know what even one man is capable of," Schlager says, an edge in his voice. "I see what men are capable of all the time," Williams says, turning back and looking Schlager right in the eye, "I see the screens filled with news from the front of our army's latest humiliation. I see troops on the street who've become afraid to confront a small number of untrained and poorly armed malcontents. It was not always this way." "Our troops may be humiliated but it's not their fault," Schlager says. Williams raises an eyebrow and asks, "is it yours?" A moment passes, then Williams turns back to the floor. He raises his glass of scotch to take another sip, and looks out at the workers from the next shift making their way in. But Williams does not own only the warehouses across the country that feed munitions to the army; he owns the factories that produce those very munitions.

And he sells to all sides, through his own complex network of intermediaries and subsidiaries held at arms' length selling even to the armies of the countries his is at war with. He didn't start this war; men like him don't start wars through conspiracies whether elaborate or simple. In fact, Williams personally would prefer this war to end. War is only profitable for men like him if this country merely watches from the sidelines while he quietly ships his armaments to all countries involved in the fighting. With an embargo in place and with much of the country a shambles, Williams can only watch as his once-bustling factories, warehouses, and rail yards languish in a state of near-total disuse. Although Williams is already a man of some importance, he's about to become a man so much more. But he is only a man, and history is not made by men. It's not who Williams is or what he's about to do that's important. If not him, then someone else would be there to take the steps he's in the midst of taking. In fact, an angel of light guides these men, among others, whispering in their ears everything it knows they want to hear.

The angel of light has been present all along, hiding in plain sight, compelling men to make decisions in service of a goal unknown to them. But it's not the end of the story. In fact, it's only the beginning to them. Although the rebel Elijah represents an alignment of forces, the angel of light which has yet to represent itself as a single person represents an alignment of forces still. A conspiracy is afoot, a conspiracy not of the men in this room nor the Provisional Government they seek to control, but a conspiracy of forces beyond their comprehension, of forces that've been at work for longer than men have been alive. And when the time comes, the angel of light should step out of the shadows and demand obedience from leaders and laymen the world over; most will be too eager to submit to him to notice the deception being meted out upon them. "You politicians are all alike," Schlager says. "Oh?" Williams asks, eyeing the colonel's reflection in the office's window. "You all love to talk about yourselves," Schlager says, "you all think you have all the answers." "Doug, I would think we'd have known each other better than that by now," Williams said, giving the workers one last look before turning and walking past Schlager to sit in his chair behind his desk.

"This isn't about me," Williams says, "nor is it about you. Once we take control of the provisional government, we'll restore order, and we'll marshal the nation's strength against our enemies. Is this not what you want?" Schlager doesn't answer right away, instead standing firm. Then, he asks, "And then you will have your profits higher than ever?" Williams chuckles, for even he, on some level, knows there can never be altruism in his heart. Although they've known each other for years, theirs has never been a relationship quite amicable. Nevertheless, they need each other, now, for theirs is a conspiracy born out of the greed, whether greed for power or greed for prestige. Williams is not only the chief executive of the nation's largest supplier of munitions to the army, but a former Armaments Minister in government. And Schlager was his attaché in the army, the man to whom he submitted his requests for briefings with the generals, production estimates, and, perhaps most important of all, bills for his goods and services. Then Williams left politics to head this armaments conglomerate while Schlager requested and promptly received a return to duty in a command position. A few years later this war began.

Williams saw his conglomerates worldwide operations disrupted by this war while years of oversupplying the army meant no more business to be had in this country. Schlager lived through his troops humiliated on the battlefield by lesser enemies while politicians at home bickered over seats in parliament and cabinet posts, only to be returned home after an enemy air raid put shrapnel in his leg. Still nobody remembers the specific chain of events that set off this war, nor those that set off the disorder in the streets, but it's never been important what specific events led us all into this crisis. If not these, then others, the pressures of so many decades, centuries of worship at the altar of greed having inevitably set us along the path to this ruin. This fact remains true even as we follow this thread in our descent into madness. But even as these men are but pawns of history, as we all are, this fact does not diminish their responsibility for the crimes they are to commit in their quest to advance their own vision of what's to come.

As our history advances, the fight to advance necessarily provokes the rising of the fight to regress, the act of fusing the two into a single experience the next step in reaching out to our future's end. But it's not over yet. The cruiser Borealis has made it almost out to sea, just past the docks at Tilbury, and still Dmitri looks through the darkness of the early-morning light with a mounting anticipation. Suddenly, there's action. "To the cruiser Borealis," squawks the radio, "this is the army. I order you to stop and heave to. I have vessels underway and I intend to board you. This is your only warning." Dmitri snaps into action. "Fly the banner! All ahead full! Raise the main batteries! Open fire!" From the warehouse's little office, the past can't be seen for all the future's troubles looming in the distance like a mountain towering over a highway reaching straight out to the horizon. From this little office, men like Williams and Schlager plot to unseat the new provisional government and institute a regime of terror against the workers and the rebels in the streets of the nation's cities, but while they so plot they can't but keep their mouths from watering at the prospect of satiating their deepest, darkest desires. Theirs is a lust for power and prestige unleashed by the working man's quest for justice and dignity, an evil's rising necessarily provoked by the emergence of the virtues of decency and modesty in the physical act of the working man's rising.

But now is the time of our history's future, when the rising of evil must be confronted by the rising of good. But not everyone sees things this way. It's not only a few persons who come from the wealthy class or from the army's privileged officer corps who will conspire to oppose the working man's war of liberation or who will take to the cause of fighting against it, of trying to beat back they who would seek to free themselves from this current regime of injustice and indignity. There are others under the sway of these forces of evil. We've spent the bulk of this account of the revolution focusing on the actions of a few residents fighting for the right to live in their own homes, but in truth there's a vast array of forces fighting for one thing or another, the common thread uniting them all the inexorable advance of our history towards is end. The decks of the Borealis heave as her engines struggle up to full power. Searchlights blind the bridge crew. "Shoot them!" Dmitri orders. Gunfire thunders out. The enemy responds in kind. The cruiser shudders and shakes as rounds fall in the water all around her, while her own guns shoot back, nobody seeming to aim at anything, the whole action immediately degenerating into a confused mess. "Evasive manoeuvres!" Dmitri shouts at the helm, the crewman turning hard to port, then hard to starboard, the Borealis tracking a zigzag path down around the last bend in the river Thames. But then she takes a hit, a round crashing aft, knocking out one engine, the cruiser lurching, shuddering to a crawl. It seems she's done for.

From this little office, the marshalling of forces against the provisional government should not be taken as a suggestion that compromise the provisional government was meant to embody should have succeeded had it only been given a chance. In any war between the forces of good and the forces of evil, any compromise between the two is a moral and intellectual fraud. Given its inherently fraudulent character, the provisional government was destined to fail, corrupt as it was from its inception. Whether Williams the wealthy man or Schlager the officer understand the character of the provisional government is irrelevant, as is their conception of their own actions and motivations as noble is irrelevant, as our history shall show men like them to be acting in service of the interests of oppression and in so acting reducing themselves to the level of objects to be manipulated according to the whims of the forces against which we fight.

As we stand still on the precipice, ready to cast ourselves into the abyss, I urge you to keep in mind the propaganda disseminated by they who would seek to preserve the way of things in the face of an overwhelming campaign for justice. They convince others, even many working people that the rebel's cause is meant to oppress them, that the cause of justice and dignity is, in fact, the cause of injustice and indignity, that the rebel and his supporters the worker, the student, and the parishioner are marshalled in service of oppression and not liberation. Aboard the Borealis, the ship struggles forward. "We're hit!" shouts a crewman, a second round striking forward. "Keep the engines ahead full!" orders Dmitri. "Helm's sluggish," says the helmsman. "Keep her straight and steady," says Dmitri, "we just need to make around the next turn in the river." He turns to the gunner and says, "keep firing, fire as fast as you can. Don't aim, just keep shooting." More fire crashes around the ship, erupting columns of water over her bow. All it'll take is one more square to break the cruiser's back. It seems all is lost. Then, deliverance.

From this little office, it may seem to the conspirators plotting to overcome the rising tides of history as though they can plot out a course through to safe waters, but this is a fraud. As their plot is still in its infancy, they are as governed by the currents as is the working man fighting against them. If these men had not met to hatch a plan, then someone else would've, and if no one would've been there to hatch that plan and take the actions these men are about to take then someone or something else would've stepped in and forced an attempt to counter the revolutionary fervour gripping the streets. As the working man rises, so too does the wealthy man engage in a counter-rising, the experience of these two forces clashing in a fight to the death a necessary and inevitable precondition for our collective advancement through to the next stage in our history's future. Still in this tentative early time when neither the forces of good nor evil have assumed their ultimate form, we see this conspiracy form away from the still-growing influence of the dark essence in the streets, in the hearts of working men everywhere, whether they realize it or not.

The dark essence is dark not because in its darkness there lies the blackened character of evil; rather, because it is made to live in the dark, in the little crevasses where shadows lie. After all the wealthy man's propaganda had begun to fail him and after the thin visage of prosperity he'd built had begun to fade, the dark essence slowly emerged from its hiding place in the shadows and exposed itself to the light. While the dark essence has found men like Valeri to use as a vessel with which to grant itself expression, still it occupies a place neither spiritual nor physical, even as it has come to embody both of these mutually exclusive sides at the same time. On the Thames, explosions erupt ashore, followed by the heavy rattling of machine gun fire. The batteries targeting Borealis fall silent, suddenly. With the Borealis having lost fire control, her guns spit out fire at random, until falling silent themselves, not out of ammunition but jammed. "What's happening?" asks one crewman. "Steady," Dmitri orders, "keep watch. Best speed ahead." But inwardly Dmitri realizes they are all but lost, and he's determined to go down fighting. He'll live to fight another day, though, as forces have aligned to deliver him and his men from evil.

"Attention cruiser Borealis," squawks the radio. This voice's different from the last. "This is Private Craig Thompson. We have pledged our men to follow the banner of the Popular Front and we have silenced the batteries targeting you. Proceed on your course. We'll cover you." At once, Dmitri radios back, acknowledging the signal, then orders the helm to proceed on course. Slowly, the Borealis limps out to sea, making good for the Coast Guard station on the Suffolk coast. Safe, for now, Dmitri takes a breath, knowing full well the real fight is yet to begin. In our immediate future, the task of individuals is simply to survive the night, each night. With all that's happened, we must never lose sight of the fact that there's still more to happen in our history's future. After all the bombings, the gun battles, the riots and the massacres, it may seem the state of affairs could hardly get any worse. It may be a bit of a letdown to rely on a cliché such as this, but so long as there's hope we can never fail. In the heart of every working man who's given himself over to the struggle for a better future there's hope, and so long as this hope remains unconquered by the forces arrayed against it then the cause of the working man shall remain triumphant even in the face of certain defeat.

Men like Williams and Schlager can plot and scheme all they want, it will never change the inevitability of our final victory. All that remains to be seen is how much pain and suffering the enemies of our final victory will put us through before we destroy them, before we smash them so utterly that it will someday be as though they had never been. Still there's more blood to be spilled, here in the streets and across the world in battlefields hot and cold, dry and wet, high and low. But when we are victorious at last, it will be as if there'd never been any blood spilled at all.

30. The End of the Beginning

As gunfire rattles intermittently in the early morning after, Valeri stands watch, looking out over the city as if to follow the sound of the rattling gunfire to its source. But it comes from all directions. Troopers manning roadblocks fire back, aiming at nothing in particular, seeming to fire just to hear the sound of their own gunshots cracking across the morning. Even as Valeri had been fully aware of what's been going on all his life, it seems as though he's woken up and suddenly found himself immersed in an alien world. Still in its early stages after all that's happened, our revolution is not yet won, the revolution gaining strength even as its enemies are in ascendancy. In time, the revolution shall be won. As we've come to see, love is anger and anger is love. Love stems from a resilience in the face of unending hatred, a determined antipathy which makes it angry. Anger stems from a desperation in the face of repression, a desperation to make a better tomorrow for the next generation, and the generation after that, and the generation after that, which makes it love. Anger as love and love as anger have propelled men like Valeri to fight.

But their fight will not be won by arms but by aims; so long as men like Valeri set their aims as no less than total victory they can never fail. It is inadequate simply to state this truth. They must assert it, vigorously and unapologetically. They must believe it, with all the passion and sincerity of a pastor ready to die for his faith. And they must brook no compromise with the forces arrayed against them, the forces who would assert and believe in the righteousness of their own cause. Their enemies cause is lies, and theirs is truths. So long as they come to steadfastly and honestly believe, they can never lose. This uprising is what working class Britons have already taken to calling a second revolution, and it's the first real battle of the working man's budding revolution, the first one could mark on the map the seized territories, the liberated zones. But the true meaning behind the uprisings across Britain now known as the first battle in the new revbolution won't become apparent to men like Valeri for some time, after the coming weeks and months see much more pain and suffering than there's been so far.

Explosions can be heard in the area around the polytechnic where the students have returned to seize their campus once more. Church bells ring erratically across the city as parishioners signal to one another. Troopers stop and quickly search random passers-by. Whole neighbourhoods lose electrical power. Since all this began, the wealthy man's frantic campaign to wring every last has been stopped, leaving hollow concrete shells where once the wealthy man had sought to erect glass and steel monuments to his own greed. And Valeri had nearly become one of them, with the rest of the residents at Dominion Courts to have become little more than one of many footnotes in the historical narrative to be written by the wealthy man. But now our time is come. Every bullet fired, every bomb set off, every day worked and every foot brought down in front of us and every muscle smoothly contracted and expanded like the hydraulics of our machines all bring us closer to our goal. But this remains true only so long as we commit ourselves to nothing less than a final victory.

Men like Valeri realize this now, after all that's happened, all their lives having led to this moment. Men like Valeri have reached this point in their lives after much struggle and much hardship, but realize this formative experience could never have been without much hardship and much struggle. It's the way of things; it has always been and shall always be. If we are to realize our final victory we must not only acknowledge this truth but embrace it. Later, Valeri turns to his screen along with the millions of others across the country and around the world. In a public square in a city in the North of England, the rebel leader Elijah has taken to a pulpit overlooking a public square to denounce the provisional government led by the criminals who have conspired to carry on the international war and to call for its overthrow. Behind him there's a red banner with gold letters reading 'NO SURRENDER.' A crowd watches, cheering him on, every pause in his speech filled with the shouting of revolutionary slogans.

"For as long as they've fought the rising tides of history, every day they have sought to extend their way has only ensured that the final rising should take the form of a cataclysm still more violent," the rebel Elijah says, "and the more they have fought us, the greater the devastation our final victory will bear us witness. Let our history show the criminal act should not be considered the act of rising against the repression of poverty, depression, and exploitation but that of the institution of poverty, depression, and exploitation in the first place. We, they who fight injustice are the heroes; let they who perpetuate injustice be seen as the villains. Out of the many we form an indivisible whole, in service of a democratic ideal that should transcend the boundaries so long imposed on us by an alien class. In consenting to continuing the slaughter of working men by working men on the world's battlefields, and in consenting to the continued reign of the wealthy over the worker the provisional government has vacated its right to govern us. And so it must be destroyed. The criminal-illegal regime in the Westminster and the wealthy men it enslaves us all for must be overthrown and in its place a democratic regime established so that the working man may yet cast off the shackles of the wealthy man's oppression and come to control his own destiny. Our future does not belong to the healthy, but the sick. Our lives do not belong to the wealthy, but the poor. Our allegiance is pledged not to the sin, but the sinner. This is our calling. This is our time." As he listens, Valeri feels an electric sensation running the length of his spine, chills standing every hair on his body and raising goosebumps on every patch of exposed skin. This isn't a man speaking to a crowd. This is a prophet speaking to his disciples, to a world yet filled with unbelievers almost ready to receive the gospel even if few have yet to realize it. This man's name has long been whispered in the shadows and screamed from the rooftops whenever the working man has called out in anguish. His real name is unimportant, for he's known only as Elijah.

This is the rebel released from prison, in so achieving his release reaching for his destiny. "As it is written, the first shall be made last and the last shall be made first. In rising we give a voice to the voiceless, defence to the defenceless, spirit to the dispirited and power to the disempowered. From the slums of Britain to the shantytowns of Mexico, from the decrepit factories of the Russian hinterland to the scorched oilfields of Arabia, from even the sweatshops of India to the plantations of Rwanda, let the working man combine his disparate factions into an indivisible whole, and let the fires of liberation consume the world. All shall be called to account for their sins by this dark essence, in whatever form it chooses to assume. But our struggle is not yet won. Our struggle may never be won. Our enemies are strong, and they shall continue to divide us against ourselves for so long as there remains air in their lungs and blood in their veins. The tide of an unwinnable war may yet turn against us. Already we have won the full-throated support of many once-dissident factions. Already we have seized our homes, our factories, our mills, our universities and our churches. Out of the many, we form an indivisible whole. Against the few we summon our strength. Against one task we muster all our strength. Workers of all countries, rise!"

The End
A Note From the Author

'Apocalypse Rising' is the first in a four-book series of novels. Part II, 'Paradise Falling,' is available for sale at many retailers. Parts III and IV are to be released.

You can follow J.T. on Twitter, where his handle is @jtmarshauthor for the latest news.

You can also visit his personal website at http://jtmarshauthor.com/

