Holly Pietrus arrived in D.C. just before the order was given to lock down the city. Her husband had agreed to stay in New York and keep up the battle to free her father, while she took the train to Maryland. She reached a maze of abandoned cars on I-395 and had to hike the rest of the way. She couldn’t believe her eyes. The district looked positively reinvented, a humming dayglow carnival awash in graffiti. In just over a month artists had transformed the buildings: a twenty-foot banner of deceased congressman John Lewis on the Potomac-facing side of the Mandarin Oriental with GOOD TROUBLE stamped beneath his scowl; the other side of that building hosted a three-story image of a little girl as a circus fire-blower, incinerating a group of briefcased, besuited businessmen; a mural painted around Stanton Square and visible from the sky with THIS IS OUR CRADLE, OUR SCHOOL, OUR HOME, OUR GARDEN. Surveillance drones buzzed overhead.
Met by the mephitic stench of trash, portable toilets, and trench latrines, the smell watering her eyes, it took Holly an hour to check in at the entrance, where she was searched for weapons by a stinky woman in a blue armband. Then she waded into the encampment, clopping over plywood bisecting neighborhoods of tents, yurts, tipis, and crude wooden shacks. Grass long eradicated now that the summer heat had moved in (eighty-seven degrees that day, May 7), the pulverized ground had dried to a fetid dust. Flags flew: Blue Fire, BLM, Veterans for Peace, upside-down Stars and Stripes, and the row of First Nations tribes along the buffalo horn formation, restaking a claim to their homeland. She was directed toward the stage, where the executive committee typically huddled. She spotted Kate, and for a moment was filled with the same anxiety as their previous three encounters: When you so idolize someone, you’re quick to think they find you a silly and tedious distraction.
“I had to walk from outside the city, and these shoes—” she began to stammer, and Kate stalked to her like she was going to throw a punch. Holly even flinched as the taller woman wrapped her arms around her neck. Kate didn’t know her own strength, and it hurt.
“You are fucking awesome,” she hissed in Holly’s ear. She pulled back, and there were tears in her bright banshee eyes.
“What you said about my dad— I had to come, and just say I’m with you. Whatever you need.”
“You fucking awesome nuclear bitch,” Morris went on, gripping her by the back of the neck and shaking her. Then she embraced her again, roughly.
While she was still wrapped up, Holly said, “It really stinks here.”
Kate laughed right in her ear. “Yeah, I know, we’re working on it.”
As she took Holly Pietrus on a tour of their exploding festival, Kate of course understood this girl would make the perfect informant, and she quietly sent a message to Liza to make sure eyes were on the FBF New York director—not that she approved of snitch-jacketing. Just in case.
That night there was a bonfire near the National Gallery. Reporters gathered for this impromptu press conference. People crowded around and strained their ears to hear what Kate Morris had to say.
“The city’s given you forty-eight hours to pack up,” said a reporter from CBS. “Will there be violence?”
“Not by us,” said Kate. “No one here even knows how to punch.”
“What do you hope to accomplish? You don’t expect Congress to actually enact your platform, do you?”
“Why wouldn’t we? We’re not bargaining anymore. We want unconditional surrender from the corporate state. Why don’t people believe me when I say that?”
Laughter at this, but her face remained untroubled, as if it had all come to pass already, and the laughter ceased. Light from the fire glimmered across the orb of a VR camera, and Quinton Marcus-McCall edged past it, blocking the viewers at home. A busybody camerawoman shooed him, and he sidestepped to the left.
“Moral suasion hasn’t worked. Electoral politics hasn’t worked.” Kate poked the fire with a long, slim log, and the embers hissed. “So all we have left is revolt. We have to make this country ungovernable, this economy unprofitable, this system unworkable.”
Quinton had joined the mutual aid arm of A Fierce Blue Fire and helped work the wreckage of the Great Eastern Flood and then Hurricane Rose the past fall. Shortly after that, he’d received an email asking if he was interested in becoming a leader of a nonviolent army. The reporter, bored with Morris droning on, looking for another angle, abruptly turned to him.
“What about you, sir? Why are you here?”
Quinton felt like a bank robber with the spotlight suddenly trained on him and laughed nervously. “Maybe I think about it a little different.” He shifted his eyes to Kate and back to the fire. He could remember seeing her speak for the first time in Detroit, what felt like three or four lifetimes ago, after what happened to his parents, but before he lost his sister. Before he ended things with his fiancée. Before he dropped out of school. All these years of trying to do something worthy, and no one had ever asked him what he thought. “Sure, this is an act of physical rebellion.” He shifted on his feet and decided to let his freak flag fly for these folks. “But that can’t be all it is. It’s gotta be spiritual. It’s gotta be about an immaterial force within us. To save one life is to save all of humanity, right? Ever heard that? That’s the Holy Qur’an. But it applies across all faiths and nonfaiths. So to save a species from extinction, a people from annihilation—if that’s not summoning the Divine, I don’t know what is.”
Everyone paused, trying to grasp this somewhat inscrutable take.
“Yeah, I’m a little less froufrou than that,” Morris finally said, to much laughter.
Quinton felt his face flush in a good way. The beat of the drum circle drifted back to them from the east along with, gratefully, the scent of woodsmoke. Somewhere near the Washington Monument people were dancing, and the Capitol’s bright dome still shone in the wine-tinted twilight.
MAY 20
The next week the D.C. Police shut down every road leading into the city. Shelter in place. A state of exception. The only people allowed past the checkpoints had to have written permission from DHS. People continued to try to sneak over the Potomac on motorboats or wind their way up side streets through southern Maryland, a veritable underground railroad of activist passage on the way to the occupation. Meanwhile, police stood guard, studying the nightly glow of this invented city, waiting on something to snap.
Was Loren Victor Love the figure Kate had been waiting for all along? Had Mary Randall served a second term, would she have been able to use her—a woman she’d endorsed for president in ’28—as a suitable foil? In order to spark rebellion against an enemy as faceless as anonymous capital, it helped that capital chose a hired gun like Love, a true hypermasculine paranoiac if ever she’d seen one. She’d expected covert rock and bottle throwing by agent provocateurs like she’d seen at Sacred Stone nearly twenty years ago. Infiltrators played the long game now, living out of tents but reporting to the task force organizing on the perimeter of the city. The occupation was surveilling its own, looking for undercovers, but this was needle-in-haystack work as the numbers grew.