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. 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.” You see, we’re not there yet. 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. “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, stepping past the old man, “I’m mad.” 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.
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 Her 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.
The working man eventually returns to work, the student to class, the pastor and the preacher to their desks counselling troubled wives with their troubled lives. 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 a guerrilla 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. 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 guerrillas never came, why they never showed.
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’. The working man is 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. “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.