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. After Garrett Walker has committed himself to the revolutionary path, still he must walk it, like the thirsty man must walk to water. The Worker’s Party has use for men like him, for the ragged and the haggard masses of workers cast out of work for so long. In the darkness of the night, Garrett leans on his instincts, receiving from the apparatchiks in the Worker’s Party a firearm, to be used, they’ve told him, when the time’s right. It’s a strange thing, to so hold the power of death in his hands, knowing he could mete it out at any moment, rhythmically and methodically dispensing justice. 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 the working man 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. But still Garrett is the working man, 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.
Still the concerns of the working man 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, 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. After the parishioners leave their underground church for the final time, it’s bulldozed in the night, the police having waited deliberately until this moment to move in. Darren Wright’s among the last to leave, and when he hears of the demolition of their church he arrives back in time to see it all brought down in a cloud of dust and debris. If this is meant by the Father Bennett as intimidation, it fails. 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. This is the rogue preacher’s forbidden gospel, forbidden not by force of law but by the faith of man misplaced.
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 storm troopers’ station but somewhere else entirely, somewhere more sinister, somewhere the working man 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. After blood spilled and the bodies broken on election day, the students withdraw to their halls to lick their wounds and plan their next move. They agree to mount another demonstration the following day. Still the university remains closed, and as the crisis in Britain deepens any hope of reopening fades into the night. Sean Morrison thinks to move back to Derry, Northern Ireland, but events soon put that possibility out of reach. He looks into the streets and sees the columns of smoke rising, the fires of liberation burning through the days and into the nights, and he relents. For he is the student lacking in the guidance of the teacher, but when the way of things is faded into history the student will need no teacher. From his vantage point atop a tower, the city seems splayed out before him, over the smoothly undulating hills the urban landscape seeming so ragged and haggard like the charred remains of a forest once ablaze.
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. As matches to kindling, all the working man’s 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. For the men of the cruiser Borealis, this still-invincible force governs in the Captain’s edicts, leaving Dmitri and the rest of the men in obedience to the steadily worsening crisis all around.
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. 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.
To the working man it makes little sense, to take the country to war even as it’s being torn apart from the inside. 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 the working man puts himself 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, the working man must commit himself wholeheartedly to the righteous path laid out before him. Seeing the path is inadequate; he must 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. 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.