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By Root 1255 0

twenty metres from the front. People around it scattered. Some fell, but scrambled to their feet and ran, hands to their mouths. An acrid whiff reached his nostrils. For a couple of seconds his lungs felt as if he’d inhaled acid. Through a wretched, racking cough he heard more bangs. Black tumbling shapes scythed the air overhead. He saw a woman raise an arm to fend one off, stagger back as a length of planking clattered to the street. She walked on for a few paces, then sagged and was grabbed by the woman next to her. Somebody else snatched up the wood and hurled it back. Jordan glanced over his shoulder and saw that most of the missiles – smashed bits of barrier, stones, placards, cans – were falling on the Warriors from both sides, but it was the stray shots that were doing all the damage: it wasn’t the marchers who had armour. Cat kept right on singing, her voice thin and hoarse.

Two Warriors charged past him and ploughed into the front of the crowd, lashing out with long truncheons. In a moment all the people seemed to be running, in different directions. Then, as if through clearing smoke, Jordan saw that nearly everybody he could see had a hand-gun and was raising it but not bringing it to bear. Jordan dropped the hailer and turned to Cat. Her red-eyed, tear-streaked, mucus-slimed face barely registered surprise as he caught her by the shoulder and pulled her down with him. The pistol she’d given him was in his hand. He had no idea how to use it.

He saw the now ragged line of Warriors, the wreckage of the border barrier a few metres ahead across a stone-strewn gap, and other weapons brandished by the other crowd. Still, silent seconds passed. A Warrior officer waved his arms, crossing and uncrossing them above his head. Warriors who’d run into the crowds were propelled out of them. With slow and cautious steps all the Warriors retreated to the sides of the street.

Cat stood up and Jordan followed, then had to run to keep up as everybody else moved forward and the two crowds became one. There was an overwhelming, confusing moment of handshakes and hugs, of swaying and shouting, and then they all started walking forward, into Pentonville Road. The song was taken up again. BRING ME MY ARROWS OF DESIRE. Jordan looked sideways at Cat, who for some reason had chosen that moment to look at him.

The streets from Islington to Marybone, to Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood, were builded over with pillars of gold, and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

Janis watched the uprising on television, as she had watched the war.

The crowds were moving now, partly refugees from the fighting that had reached the suburbs, partly demonstrators taking the fight to the centre. ANR and Left Alliance agitators laboured to turn the one into the other. Along Bayswater and Whitechapel and Gray’s Inn Road they converged, and merged. Across the city, and across all the other cities that seemed to be one city as she flicked from channel to channel, the walls were coming down, the divided communities breaking through and discovering that they were one people. The front ranks of soldiers tore insignia off, surrendered rifles. The harder corps backed off, taking up new positions or vanishing into obscure doorways while the crowds ran past them.

And elsewhere, outside the cities, shown on shaky cameras from cover, from quickly detected and obliterated ’motes, other forces were beginning to move. The barb, alerted like sharks to the smell of blood.

Even from here she could see it wasn’t over, that nothing had been settled yet. But the crowds thought it was over, cheering, splashing in fountains, ransacking offices, pulling down statues and dancing in the streets.

Janis watched the crowds, her face wet, remembering herself thinking it was all over and dancing in the street, dancing in the hard rain.

This time she knew what to expect. She systematically went through the house, packing what portable and non-perishable food she found. Without sentiment she divided the contents of Moh’s baggage and hers, ending up with a single backpack whose priority