“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. But there’s more to it than that. For now, they wait, 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. These men are not loyal to the way things were before all this began; rather, they are loyal to an idea in their head, a conception of the way things had been that they still hold to be the way things ought to be now. 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.
“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. 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 the working man has changed little. For Garrett Walker, the last of a long line of 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. 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.” As the crisis steadily worsens, the wealthy investors who have so driven prices sky-high and plunged wages 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. 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 and criminal foreign investor 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 gas stations running out of gas 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. Soon, the police arrive, deploying their troops not to enforce the working man’s right to life but the wealthy man’s right to property. In the streets, there’s the rattling of gunfire and the chattering of voices. 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. 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, he declares they must resist and refuse to turn out for the election; in so refusing, he says, they withdraw their consent to be governed. It’s a lesson they’ve come to learn at some great cost.