What Is to Be Done
Chapter 2: Bread Against Memory
The radiator hissed like a dying animal, forcing stale heat into Dina’s cramped one-bedroom. The pipes clicked and muttered behind the wall, old bones remembering storms. She’d taped the windows against drafts with eviction notices turned into insulation, the red barcodes and NOTICE OF RELOCATION glyphs glaring in the dim light like unblinking eyes. The tape bubbled where the cold insisted. A city audit envelope lay slit beneath the door to blunt the wind; its QR seal still pulsed a weak green that meant arrears, penalties, forfeiture; one button away if someone higher up needed a datapoint to feed a chart. The seal blinked in a bureaucrat’s rhythm: not yet, not yet, eventually.
Vera lingered by the counter, duffel slumped at her feet like a sullen dog. Dina had aged in a way that wasn’t about wrinkles; it had found her shoulders and set up a long rent there. Years of ration lines, rent fights, and long nights listening for drones to scratch the sky had laid their hands on her. She moved slower now, deliberately, with a stubborn grace that looked permanent, as if fatigue had tried to evict her and she had signed a lifetime lease with defiance instead.
The kitchenette smelled like onions from the neighborhood pot, a trace of bleach, and the bitter edge of chicory. A dented kettle rattled on the single burner, steam scrabbling at the lid like it wanted out of this life too. On the fridge, magnets from vanished bodegas held up a hand-sketched rota, KITCHEN: M, W, F; CHILDCARE: T, TH; NIGHT WATCH: rotate, next to a cartoon of a rat with a wrench someone had slipped under the door. The rat grinned like it knew where every wire ran.
“You got sharper,” Dina said. She poured the substitute brew, brown as winter water, into a chipped mug. The mug had a chipped logo from a long-dead union drive, a sunrise hex overwritten by a drawn-on cloud that rained pennies. She slid it to Vera. “Eyes like you’re waiting for a punch.”
Vera smirked without humor. “Too many years watching propaganda feeds loop the same lies. Once you see the trick, you stop believing the magic.” She wrapped her hands around the heat. “You just wait for the knife.”
Dina snorted, which was her laugh most days. She sat at the small table, which was a door balanced on milk crates and a prayer, paperwork pinned beneath a sheet of plexi. Mutual aid rosters. Shift lists. Notes that tracked inhalers, space heaters, insulin vials, overdue rent patched by the solidarity fund. Names starred in red for elders who needed a knock if the power cut at night. A scribble read: NO PHONES PAST SINK. The rules read like folklore: keep the hood fan on if you must talk; turn the radio to static; never say a name you can point to. “You think too much about the story,” she said. “Me, I’m trying to keep people alive until the next sunrise.”
The difference hung in the room like smoke, solidarity against narrative, bread against memory. Vera sipped. The taste was sour and earthy, a cup of weathered civic pride. Outside, a patrol drone lifted with a whine that threaded itself through traffic and sirens; its red eye painted a lazy lattice over the blinds. On a neighbor’s radio, Rent Strike Radio counted the blocks scheduled for clearance before week’s end, voice deadpan, humor like gauze. “…and remember, if your kiosk prints CUSTOMER EDUCATION EVENT, that’s code for we stole from you with a straight face.”
Dina’s phone, an unpretty slab without a camera, blinked once, then slept. MESH: CHERRY HOLD NODE: STABLE. GAS: LOW. She tucked it back into its foil sleeve. “Kitchen needs two more hands. You still cut onions like a journalist?”
“I cut onions like someone who needs a place to sleep,” Vera said, and drank.
By afternoon, the demolition order appeared in the city’s audit grid; seventy-two hours until Cherry Street would be cleared for a climate-resilient luxury corridor. The render showed e-bikes and potted trees, carbon credits mapped to faraway screens in Singapore and Dubai. The copy said flood-ready living. The footnote said prior occupants subject to Population Flow Control 19C. Larkin stabbed the paper with his finger. “They call it progress,” he said. “It’s a spreadsheet that eats a neighborhood.”
“People will ask why we don’t just move,” Dina said. “They’ll say take the buyout.”
“What buyout,” Mari asked, not looking up from her elastic. “They offered me a box lunch and a bus ticket to a zip code where my pulmonologist is a prayer.”
“Also,” Rashida said, “we were already here.”
“We were always already here,” someone said from the coats. “Ask the roaches. They’ll vouch.”
Laughter fluttered and died. The basilica listened.
By night the basilica was more fortress than church. Stained glass was patched with solar fabric stitched in jagged seams; saints’ robes became power. The altar was buried under ration ledgers and crates stamped with Helion glyphs, helix, arrow, sunrise gradient, liberated mid-route and retagged with crossed wrenches and the rat-with-wrench watermark that now passed for a blessing. The nave’s signboard had been repainted to read NEIGHBORHOOD KITCHEN. Below that, MED TRIAGE HERE, COLORS MEAN WAIT. Green got bandages and jokes; yellow meant patience and tea; red parted the line even for strangers; black was folded carefully and handled tenderly when the kids had been fed.
Portable heaters groaned under the arches. Battery banks dozed beneath pews like obedient animals, indicator lights blinking soft green. Coats hung from a laundry line strung between pillars: an orange sanitation parka turned inside out so the logo could not see; a wool coat with elbows darned in neon; a denim jacket with a winged-wheel courier patch stitched under a second patch that read NO GODS, NO BOSSES, LOTS OF SOUP. The air was lentils and antiseptic with a high note of apple, last of the season, hoarded for children. Folding tables wore duct-tape labels, ONIONS / CHOPPED; RICE / WASHED; BATTERIES / WARM; OXYGEN / DO NOT TOUCH (UNLESS RASHIDA).
Under the choir loft, a butcher-paper map of Cherry Street sprawled across the wall. Every stairwell was plotted, each unreliable elevator circled with the notation COUGHS. A mesh of lines connected roofs and alleys; beside it, IF JAMMED → WALKIE CHANNEL 3 → PHRASEBOOK ONLY. Next to the side door, SAFEHOUSE PROTOCOLS in thick marker: doors stay locked; devices stay outside in the tin box; talk by the stove with the fan on; no names you can point at; leave nothing you cannot carry in a sprint. Someone had drawn a rat with a wrench next to the bullet points, as if to bless the list.
The Southside Collective filled the nave; bodies arranged by function rather than rank. Jackets carried their own heraldry; couriers with reflective tape chevrons that flashed like fish scales; medics with faded red crosses, trauma shears clipped like charms, gauze tucked into glove loops; tenants with rent receipts pinned to sleeves, paper armor against erasure. Aeon loved neat geometry, their insignia a triangle maze on matte gray plates, rank stripes at machine-pleasing angles. The people had thread and tape and obstinacy.
Larkin leaned over the map, a finger flattened where the press had reminded him it was older than he was. His steel union pin, circular and stubborn, lived on his lapel. “Helion doesn’t care about this block; they care about what it means if this block still exists. Knock it down and it spells out to every tenant in the city: nowhere is safe.”
Rashida cut him off without malice. “We don’t have time for meanings. We have an eighty-six-year-old with COPD on six. A dialysis machine in 4B that shakes like an old man’s hand. If we leave, they’re corpses.”
Elliot dropped a cracked tablet onto a folding table, its screen spiderwebbed and faithful. Aeon drones jittered across the display, ellipses with underslung nonlethal pods and dot-matrix projectors, the Aeon mark a tidy maze triangle inside a circle of measures. “We can jam their uplink and smear their optics,” he said. “Relays tucked into old phone booths nobody paid to remove, lunchboxes under eaves, wok-pan dishes on rooftops. They will black the net; we bounce it ugly. LoRa for text, PMR for voice. Pretty video later; right now, color codes and coordinates.”
A sticker on the tablet read never comply, always connect, a hand-drawn cat holding a wrench beside it.
Taye hung at the edge, nineteen and all tendon. Automation had taken his route and his rent in the same quarter; his bike was stripped for barricade parts, the courier bag remained like a stitched-on spine. He laughed too loudly when nervous, exactly like a kid who feared being invisible. “You need a runner,” he said. “I still know alleys drones can’t thread.”
“We need ten,” Dina said. “You can be one.”
Mari sat on a milk crate with a needle in her hand. Sixty-two, retired by a line of code and a memo that called it optimization, her rent book’s corners polished by decades of proof. “I paid,” she told anyone who argued. “It is not charity to keep me where I live.” She threaded elastic through masks that fit over oxygen cannulas. “‘Compliance mask,’ they call it. Cute.”
New faces drifted with the draft. A man in a patched hoodie and steel-toe boots introduced himself as Jonas, cousin of a cousin from Montgomery. He kept his head down like the pious and smiled quick like the guilty. “Ran med for Soup Line West when they kettled Delancey,” he said, tapping choke points on the butcher-paper with a finger that knew stairwell acoustics. His eyes lingered on Elliot’s schematics a beat too long. “No heroes,” he added, as if the phrase were a prayer he had borrowed.
“References after dinner,” Dina said. “We will take your hands until then. Do not touch the oxygen.”
In the kitchen corner, a Dominican auntie beat a ladle against a stockpot, the basilica’s bell. A Bangladeshi uncle in a Mets cap inventoried shelf-stable milk; the helix-and-arrow had been crossed out with permanent marker and replaced by two wrenches and a rat. Inventory moved by hand and whisper, not by app. Chalk on a board read FUEL (DIESEL): 3 JERRIES; PROPANE: 2 TANKS; BATTERIES: 13 GOOD / 6 TIRED; INHALERS: 8 (ASK DINA). Below that, HOT CHOCOLATE FOR KIDS → ASK MARIA. “No seconds if you are taller than this spoon,” the auntie warned, holding it high enough to make teenagers duck.
A table labeled PROPAGANDA SWAP was a mess of zines and taped posters, Dagger & Pen, a Rent Strike Radio grid, an infographic tearing apart Population Flow Control 19C in simple, furious lines. Helion corridor renders had been vandalized with Sharpie, father with a wrench holster, mother flipping off a drone, child holding a pot of soup like a sacrament. A work-in-progress poster leaned against a pillar, WE KEEP US SAFE. WE KEEP US HOUSED. Damp haloed the paint. Someone had stenciled TENANCY IS TREASON on a barricade crate, a corporate threat inverted into a dare. Children pressed paint-wet palms along a plywood shield; the prints dried into a chorus of red and blue and stubborn.
Dina’s voice settled like mortar. “We have three layers. One, bodies. We hold the stairwells; we keep elders on the lower floors if we can get them down. Two, barricades. Refrigerators, washers, CitiBike bones, bolt the frames through; fill the washers with rubble; stack sandbags from the flood kit to waist height; no open flame near oxygen tanks; write babies here and oxygen here on doors with white paint.” She nodded at a kid whose fingers were already white, and he saluted grinning. “Three, the feed.” She looked to Vera. “They win when the only record is their report. We win when the record is us.”
“Fourth layer,” Elliot said, the words dragging him forward. “Mesh. Relay in the bodega’s walk-in freezer; jump to the lunchbox under the fire escape; then the wok dish on the roof. If they jam, we go low-band. Skip the pretty pictures; just text. RED, blockade breached; YELLOW, hold; GREEN, move elders. Drones hate ugly radio; ugly radio wins wars.”
“Fifth layer,” Larkin said. “Logistics. Food and heat. I can get pallets from Hunts Point if men in uniforms look the other way for ten minutes.” He tapped his union pin. “Some still remember which side their hands live on.”
“Sixth,” Rashida said. “Medical. SALT tags. Green walk; yellow wait; red at the front. Black gets a blanket and a hand, not a camera.”
Vera slotted batteries, taped cables, and checked the hood fan’s whisper before speaking. “No hero shots,” she said. “Receipts. Their logos, their orders, their faces; and ours, on our terms. Blur kids; blur elders. If you are in frame and you do not want to be, you will not be. Consent is not a luxury.”
“Hero shots are for recruitment posters,” Jonas said with a flash of teeth. “We will need those too.”
“No posters until after dishes,” Dina said, not smiling. “We are not a brand.”
Taye jiggled on his toes. “Where do you want me?”
“On your feet,” Elliot said. “Run batteries; run notes; do not be seen twice by the same drone.”
“I can do that,” Taye said, as if running were the only joy he trusted.
The basilica doors opened on a gust that smelled like the river and the subway and trouble. Outside, the block rehearsed its death and refused it. A grandmother in house slippers argued the price of an onion like it was a mortgage. A kid chalked the sidewalk with WATER → and CHARGING → and DON’T TALK TO COPS in bubble letters with stars. A maintenance drone paused at the curb, uncertain, as if embarrassed by how often its paint had been corrected.
Vera stepped into the nave’s cold center and lifted the camera like a vow. The red light found her, a small hot dot that meant someone else would see. The collective arranged itself by need rather than rank, kitchen to one side, med to the other, logistics in the back with wheels and straps, media on a pew with chargers. Rank lived in patches and scars; authority lived in who could carry what and who could be trusted with a door code when it changed at midnight. A small typ o in the rota went unfixed, beloved for its insistence on being human.
“Last thing,” Dina said. She held up a laminated card the size of a ration chit. IF DETAINED: SAY “I WANT A LAWYER.” DO NOT SIGN. CALL, RING TWICE/HANG/TEXT DOTS. A string of dots followed, a rhythm you could drum on a table without anyone noticing. “Put it in your shoe,” she said. “Shoes arrive where pockets do not.”
Rashida tugged her scarf tighter. “We are going to need heating oil,” she said. “We are going to need more chairs.” She scratched at the pepper-spray freckles on her cuffs like they itched when the wind came from the river. “We are going to need luck.”
“Luck is more hands,” Dina said. “And a plan.”
Helion’s demolition sat in the audit grid like a countdown. Aeon Defense swept ahead, marking sidewalks with orange glyphs, geometric grammar for demolition crews and foremen who spoke in acronyms. Maintenance drones sprayed serials along curbs and doors, breadcrumbs of erasure, their cameras never blinking. The city had painted its threat in a language it understood too well, icons and tiers and access, while the people made their own language from thread and marker, from pots and antennas and rules whispered near a stove’s hood.
The Collective’s problem was simple enough to hurt. Hold the block long enough to make the raid a liability. Move elders without losing them. Keep heat and food moving when the street froze and the power flickered. Jam the drones, spoof the feeds, make the city look at itself while it still had a face. The barricade would be wood and steel; the real battlefield would be the feed.
“Three days,” Larkin said.
“Three hours,” Rashida answered.
“As long as it takes,” Dina said.
“Long enough,” Vera said, and hit record.
Vera checked batteries, coiled cables, and taped over logos that might try to claim the work later. No hero shots, she said. We shoot receipts, their patches, their orders, their faces, ours on our terms. Blur kids, blur elders. If you do not want to be seen, you will not be seen. She tapped a laminated card: IF DETAINED: SAY I WANT A LAWYER. DO NOT SIGN. CALL, RING TWICE, HANG, TEXT DOTS. A string of dots followed, a rhythm you could drum on a table without anyone noticing. In your shoe, she said. Shoes arrive where pockets do not.
Larkin thumped a hand against the butcher paper where a wide orange stripe ran curb to curb, the latest spray from Aeon maintenance drones. The glyph language was its own syntax, a stack of chevrons for CLEAR FOR HAUL, bracketed dots for DISPLACE, DO NOT INVENTORY, a serial number below like a bureaucrat’s prayer bead. They painted our funeral in a code only their friends can read, he said. Cute.
They always label the violence, Rashida replied. Helps them sleep.
Elliot pointed at the tablet again, worrying his lip. He had pulled Aeon doctrine off a contractor’s forgotten cloud and printed it on cheap paper for posterity. The bullet points read like the opposite of bedside manner: SEGREGATE. IMMOBILIZE. CATALOGUE. In the margin someone had written oat-milk authoritarianism and underlined it twice. Look, he added, zooming, rank marks, three small triangles for field intel, two for sweep leads, one for line. No names, no eyes. The helmets looked like blindfolds worn by machines.
Helion’s demolition clock says seventy-two hours, Dina said. We will be lucky to get three. Her calm had a serrated edge; you did not notice it cut until resolve bled.
Three layers, she went on, raising three fingers. Bodies, hold stairwells; get elders to the first two floors if they will go. Barricades, washers, fridges, CitiBike bones, bolt through frames; fill drums with rubble; babies here, she pointed to two doors already marked in white paint, oxygen here. The feed, text first, then video. They win if the only record is their report. We win if the record is us.
Add a fourth, Elliot said. Mesh. Bodega freezer node, lunchbox relay, wok dish. If they jam, we go ugly. RED, breach. YELLOW, hold. GREEN, move. No flourishes, no filters.
Fifth, Larkin said. Logistics. Food, heat, waste. I can pull two pallets out of Hunts Point if a foreman remembers who he used to be. He touched his union pin like a talisman.
Sixth, Rashida said. Medical. SALT, sort, assess, lifesaving, treatment. Greens walk. Yellows wait. Reds right now. Black gets a blanket and a hand. No cameras for grief. She looked at Vera when she said it and Vera nodded once.
The basilica doors opened and winter stepped in with the river under its tongue. Outside, the block rehearsed its refusal. A grandmother in house slippers argued onion prices like theology. Chalk arrows pointed WATER and CHARGING and DO NOT TALK TO COPS in bubbly letters with stars. A maintenance drone hesitated at the curb, as if embarrassed by how often its paint had been corrected.
Across the avenue, a corporate billboard rose fast, HELION PROSPERITY CORRIDOR, FLOOD-READY LIVING. The font generous, the gradient warm, the footnote in microprint, PRIOR OCCUPANTS SUBJECT TO POPULATION FLOW CONTROL 19C. Someone had already slung a bucket of mud at it; the splash looked like a continent.
Vera lifted the camera and found frames, hands, faces, symbols. A woman from Sunset, scarf tied like her mother’s mother’s mother, ladled soup into a broad man’s cup. Orion Occupation patches still ghosted his sleeves, stars half unpicked, thread ends like hairs. He watched the door as if curfew might crash through it again; a breath later he laughed at something the woman said and the boy he had been showed through before the constellations were uniforms.
Taye stood with Elliot, tapping map corners, memorizing routes. He kept a runner’s superstition, left sock first, then right, and refused to let anyone see him switch them if he got it wrong. Dina pressed a folded list into his hand. Batteries to media; heat to 4B; soup to 6C. If a drone sees you, be a person. People are harder to evict in daylight. What if it is night, he asked. Then be a shadow, she said, as if it were obvious.
Jonas lingered by the Propaganda Swap. His fingers drifted over a flier, EVICTION IS A WAR CRIME, thick block type without apology. He smiled at a child’s painting of a rat wielding a wrench like a sword, slid a finger under the table edge as if checking how it was built, then excused himself toward the side door and muttered about a smoke. In the alley he pressed his palms to cold brick as if to pray. A second later his posture changed; the slouch straightened, the smile abandoned. He produced a cheap city kiosk card from his sleeve and palmed it, rubbing the chip flat. He did not call anyone. He listened to the drones’ angle, to the basilica’s breath, to the mesh static. He returned with cold ears and warmer eyes, and said nothing to no one.
Last thing, Dina told the room. This, she tapped the safehouse list, is not theater. You follow protocols because surveillance is a utility like water; it always finds low ground. You run dishwater while you talk. You cough when you say names. You trade phones at random so metdata gets seasick. If you get grabbed, you shut up. This is how we make it to morning.
Morning is an aspiration, Larkin said.
Morning is a logistics problem, Elliot countered.
Morning is soup, the auntie declared, and smacked the ladle against the pot. Amen.
Cherry Street had been a Syndicate bastion when Luis Ortega still breathed, fed and armed when other blocks went quiet. After his murder, Syndicate territory folded like a map. Cherry held, less by strength than by the inertia of refusal. The survivors called it a ghost hold, a building that refused the lesson the city kept trying to teach. If Helion razed it, the legend died. Everyone knew it the way a tongue knows a missing tooth.
Above the nave a banner hung, WE KEEP US SAFE. WE KEEP US HOUSED. Damp haloed the letters like weathered streetlight. On the barricade crates: TENANCY IS TREASON, once a threat, now a taunt. Elders handed out a leaflet, A LANDLORD’S CONTRACT IS A BULLET WITHOUT GUNPOWDER, each QR a tunnel to an underground feed quicker than the official one, the rat with a wrench blinking in the corner like a heartbeat.
Three days, Larkin said.
Three hours, Rashida corrected.
As long as it takes, Dina said.
Long enough, Vera murmured, and hit record. The camera’s red eye glowed, one more witness the city would have to account for.
Outside, Aeon swept the sidewalk with orange marks. Drones sprayed glyphs with unblinking patience, leaving geometric breadcrumbs for demolition crews and future lawsuits. The doctrine lived suitside, segregate, immobilize, catalogue. The counter doctrine was stove hum and duct tape, mesh nodes and watch rotations, laminated cards in shoes, children’s handprints drying on plywood. The task was simple enough to hurt, hold long enough to make the raid a liability; move elders without breaking them; keep the heaters alive; keep the soup hot; jam the drones; spoof the feed; make the city look at itself while it still had a face. From the radio came a voice as dry as winter salt, and in other news, the mayor says the corridor will be climate resilient and inclusive, by which he means you can watch it flood on your device regardless of income. Weather overnight, more of the truth. Back to work, Dina said, and nobody needed telling twice.
The second wave struck just before dawn, the hour when resolve thins and buildings remember they are only stacked air. Frost filmed the plywood; breath made ghosts in the stairwells; for a lull the heaters sounded like tired animals sleeping. Elliot’s cracked tablet showed the alley glowing green, the blind spot he had sworn was clean, a corridor stitched from garbage sheds and a rusted fire escape. Mesh status nominal; packet loss tolerable. His finger hovered over the screen like a blessing.
A hiss, not the soft kind, this one with teeth. A breaching charge coughed; white fire bloomed and turned every shadow into a knife. Aeon surged through the blind spot as if the alley had been paved for them.
They arrived in doctrine, armor slick with condensation, visors blacked to drink the world without returning it. Plates etched with the triangular maze of the Aeon glyph spiraled inward until meaning swallowed itself. No names, barcodes where identities should be, unit hashes where families used to go. A white stencil on each pauldron read AEON FIM, LOT C, Forward Integrity Module, Lot C, so the lawyers would know where to mail the invoices. Three tiny triangles above the barcode meant field intel; two meant sweep lead; one meant line. Their tasers and batons wore soft colors like a dentist’s office; their verbs did not.
Drones fell out of the pale sky like obedient stars. Elliptical hulls with downwash sharp enough to shave. Dot matrix projectors splashed a slogan on brick and bone in calm municipal font, Compliance Ensures Continuity. Beneath it, smaller, Auditable Use of Force, number 7719. Somebody laughed, a short animal sound, at the idea of ethics in Helvetica.
Panic moved like weather and in many languages. English split into commands and prayers; Spanish into questions that already knew the answers; Mandarin and Arabic called front doors by their childhood names. Mothers dragged children toward stairwells, faces wrapped in dishcloths against pepper spray. Elders clutched rent books like scripture and oxygen tanks like relatives. A maintenance drone, repurposed for war, traced orange glyphs on the curb as it came, chevrons for haul, brackets for displace, neon breadcrumbs of erasure left for later crews.
Dina did not wait for permission. Her voice cut the static like a metronome. Runners, channel three, phrasebook only. Green to kitchen; yellow to med; red to laundry. Elders first; if a door sticks, you are a crowbar. Couriers collapsed into runners because names change faster than jobs. She turned the butcher paper map into a bloodstream and threaded people through it like beads on wire. The mesh relays in the bodega freezer and the lunchbox under the fire escape held; Aeon’s jammers met a city that had learned to talk even when gagged.
Elliot, she snapped as a drone nosed inside the vestibule, your alley is full of their mothers.
He saw it then, a door maintenance had condemned on paper but never sealed; a sewer vent big enough for a dog and a doctrine. His stomach buckled. They seeded a mouse, he said, meaning a rolling microdrone had mapped his blind spot from below. He pulled a spare relay from his coat, hands shaking, and tossed it to a kid already trained to say yes. Roof; ugly radio; no pictures.
Rashida planted herself at the main stairwell, a makeshift shield strapped to her forearm. The shield had once been a deli cutting board. Her medic patch, crooked and restitched, shone like a bruise. Keep moving, she shouted, as the first breach team advanced, knee to knee to knee, batons singing their practiced hymn. Hold the rail. The first baton found her shoulder; the second found her ribs; the third lost its name somewhere inside her. She stayed upright because the elders behind her could not. When a child tied a scarf around her bleeding arm, Rashida winked and said, red tag my jacket, not me, which made the child cry harder and keep moving.
In the alley, where dawn turned muck to oil, Taye sprinted narrow. The drone that found him came low and fast, rotors shredding air, a camera eye red as a credit warning. He swung a rusted pipe with both hands. For a heartbeat his strike made sparks and possibility; he could have knocked it cold. The drone’s defense system coughed two concussive rounds into his chest, a door slamming inside a body. He folded against the barricade of CitiBike bones and laundry machines, mouth set in a grin too close to triumph. Comrades fumbled him backward, courier bag still slung crosswise. Inside, spare batteries; five ration chits with a church stamp; a folded flier for a mesh workshop; a stick of gum; a note in his own blocky hand that read be faster. Discarded by automation, killed trying to keep the lights on; contradiction wrote his epitaph in plain letters.
Vera filmed while fear drummed her ribs. She shot like a coward and like a witness because both were useful. Tape hid a brand that did not deserve credit; a scratch on the polarizer smeared lights into knives. She knew they could not hold the building; she knew the footage already lived beyond Cherry Street, mirrored across mesh to basements in Queens, server closets in Flatbush, a hard drive stuffed inside a rice bag in Sunset, a backup blinking in a union hall in Oakland. The building could fall; the story had already slipped its leash.
Back in the nave, triage filled and overflowed. SALT tags hung from wrists and jackets, cheap laminates that turned pain into queues. Green, walk. Yellow, sit by the saints, better lighting. Rashida, half conscious now, refused morphine, cursed the medics, and asked for a peppermint like a grandmother at a bus stop. Not dead yet, she told a terrified volunteer, blood bright on her teeth, breath turning to glass. Not pretty either; mark me yellow high. The volunteer nodded like a penitent and slid a hand under her head anyway. Rashida would live; she would lose the frontline and gain a city’s ear.
On six, Mari refused evacuation. Aeon smashed her lock with a polite thud and shouldered into a home that cost them nothing. She sat in her chair with an oxygen tube soft in her nose and her rent book in her hands like a shield. I paid, she said in a voice that had purchased a thousand small dignities. I live here. The mercs pushed past, a shoulder camera blinking green, chain of custody for later. They catalogued her chair and not her name. The hallway camera caught her anyway, ledger lifted like a banner, and the image went out over the mesh straight as a spear.
Aeon built a forward camp fast, the way corporations are good at erecting places that feel like nowhere. Trucks unfolded into kiosks and awnings. Stanchions snaked tape around a sign, EVIDENCE INTAKE, with a friendly arrow and a QR for staff only. Another banner said DETAINEE COLLECTION, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3. People wore plastic bracelets with numbers and no names. A supervisor in a white two triangle coat walked with a tablet, stylus scissoring the air, approving fines the way a waiter used to take orders. A sign on chainlink warned UNAUTHORIZED RECORDING PROHIBITED, CITY CODE 33B. Vera recorded anyway from a second floor landing, lens peeking over a radiator. Compliance foam splattered a stairwell, honey thick and vanilla scented to make brutality smell like dessert. Oat milk authoritarianism, Elliot had called it. Nobody laughed now.
Drone projectors kept repeating, Compliance Ensures Continuity. Rashida, drifting between pain and profanity, muttered, continuity of what, misery. A medic wiped blood from her mouth and said, continuity of lunch if you survive it, and got a laugh that hurt everyone.
Dina made decisions that would calcify into legend and regret. She sent two elders down a freight lift that only came when you kicked it; she split a family because the safer stairwell had no room for fathers. She watched Vera’s red light and thought only of batteries. She moved people the way a medic moves blood, away from clots, around wounds, toward breath. When Elliot whispered I am sorry into her shoulder, she set a hand on his head and said, then get me another relay, because apologies do not jam drones.
Jonas appeared at the edge of it and then did not. Helpful earlier, knowing which stairwell coughed and which alley smelled of gas, he slipped toward the side door when the breach hit with a look that said smoke break. No one saw him after. Later, the alley camera would catch a pale rectangle taped under the eave where the blind spot had been, a little beacon the size of a matchbox, industrial tape like the city uses when it wants something to stay. Later still, someone would peel it off, pocket it, and say nothing, because proof is a currency, and you spend it carefully.
By morning, Cherry Street was a carcass with warm blood. Half the block smoldered; scorch marks licked old paint; windows gaped like teeth knocked out and never replaced. Furniture lay in the street with laundry tangled around it like flags that had missed their war. The air tasted like burnt insulation and pepper and the inside of a battery. A city audit drone bobbed politely, cameras blinking the municipal green of forgiveness you have to pay for. It scanned the ruins and tabulated fines for unlawful modification of curb furniture; unpermitted structural reinforcement; obstruction of emergency egress; a Reconstruction Assessment Fee appended at plus eighteen point four percent. Heat signatures registered; names chalked on concrete did not.
The fight was not lost; it changed address. Vera cut live from the basilica with fingers she had to hold steady with her mouth. The feed she stitched hit harder than any barricade. Aeon dragging elders down stairwells. Taye’s last run and the notch his body carved in the air where a life had been. Rashida, the blood, the wink, the cussedness. Mari, ledger aloft, the oxygen tube like a ribbon on an unbreakable gift. It broke the underground first, because under is always faster; rat press graffiti screens, tenement courtyard projectors, union hall TVs balanced on milk crates, a hacked Jumbotron in a Midtown sports bar where a bartender unplugged the sound and let the pictures shout. For sixty clean seconds, before Helion’s scrubbing team caught up, subway ads flickered from carbon offsets and private policing plans to a woman in a chair with a rent ledger, and the city looked at itself like a stranger and then like a mirror.
Helion and Aeon declared victory in clipped releases. Their drones looped sanitized footage with captions that read compliance operations successfully concluded and population flow restored. Boardrooms filled with low curses. We won the block, said one executive, and lost the narrative. A consultant suggested new messaging, stories of resilience, Helion cares. A security chief suggested new doctrine, compress the timeline, reduce media windows, acquire predictive crowd analytics. A lawyer suggested silence, which everyone liked, because silence bills by the hour.
Out of rubble, new ties knitted themselves by hunger and fury. Couriers lit candles for Taye in warehouses in Bushwick, flame halos pooling in the slick of machine oil. Someone passed a hat for his mother, digital credits pinged phones with notes that read for the boy who ran past my kid every morning, for the sound of spokes, for a route stolen. Medics in Queens pledged shifts at the next barricade, dropping their names into an encrypted sheet that asked BLOOD TYPE, and next to it FAVORITE SOUP, because morale is a supply. Transit workers slid flyers through turnstiles like contraband, slogans lifted from the footage in thick black marker, WE KEEP US SAFE, WE KEEP US HOUSED, WE KEEP THE TRAINS RUNNING, TRY EVICTING THAT. A Yemeni bodega owners’ group offered back rooms and sandwiches. A Haitian church in Flatbush opened pews as cots and brought in a grandmother who had seen two dictators fall to advise on patience. A Bangladeshi drivers’ collective started a shuttle after dusk that ran on diesel and spite.
Diaspora threads tightened. In Miami and San Juan, in Santo Domingo and Bayamón, in Dhaka high rises where night shift cousins live on New York time, the footage pinged and spread. Group chats chorused, hurricane, eviction, same wind. Someone sent ten credits with an apology for smallness; someone sent two and said it was everything this week. An abuela in Hialeah recorded a voice note, Tell Mari I know how to breathe stubborn, and somehow it reached the basilica, because mesh is messy but relentless.
In the basilica by night, heaters clicked and sighed like animals thinking about sleep. Dina’s coat hung heavy with new patches, a small black ribbon for Taye, a strip of duct tape penned with RASHIDA LIVES, the rat with a wrench stamped on her sleeve in fresh, wet black. Elliot’s hands would not stop shaking until an auntie pressed a mug into them and said, Drink. Guilt is a winter. Do not camp in it. He nodded and added a relay to the map in silence.
Vera projected the cut on cracked plaster. The image stuttered in damp air. Rashida bleeding and refusing collapse, Taye laughing like someone who knew better and ran anyway, Mari small and immovable as an anchor. The heaters hummed like bees. Phones buzzed with messages whose subjects were not subjects but verbs, need, bring, lost, found. A list on butcher paper grew, NEXT TIME, WHEELCHAIR RIGS x 3; BATTERIES, HOT; FOAM SCRAPERS; ANTACIDS; EXTRA LENSES; BABY EARMUFFS; LAWYERS WHO ANSWER.
A teenager spray mounted a sticker to a plywood shield, Mari’s face in two colors, oxygen tube like a saint’s halo, text beneath SAINT OF ARREARS. The printer had jammed and sliced one sticker in half; they pasted that up too, because even broken saints have work.
The Cross Industry Workers’ Alliance coalesced like a bruise, visible after the impact, deepening into fact. Not with a banner drop but with check ins, couriers, tenants, medics, transit crews, warehouse hands. An icon appeared in chats, a worn metro card crossed with a wrench. The first pledge of dues was a sack of rice and a roll of Tyvek. The first bylaw was a sentence Dina wrote on a napkin, We do not leave our people behind, even when that is all they offer.
On the wall, a final frame froze, Mari, ledger high, oxygen tube bright, a merc’s barcode catching a sliver of light like it wanted to confess. Someone in the back said, They thought they erased Cherry Street. Vera’s voice came hoarse. Instead, they wrote it in fire.
No one argued. They did not have to. The city had already learned the new call and response. Outside, a patrol drone floated near the patched stained glass, projector idling. It blinked once, bored, and drifted on. Inside, the rat with a wrench on the safehouse protocols poster grinned its old grin, we know where the wires run. The heaters ticked. The basilica breathed. The fire moved block to block the way a story moves when it stops belonging to its maker and belongs to the people who need it.