One older man in the crowd turned around and said quite clearly, enough that people flinched from the raised voice, “Don’t you give them that—don’t you give the zeds that pleasure.”
“I don’t care. We’re probably being kettled.”
“We aren’t—we aren’t,” said the old man. “You see the trucks with the gates? You see the ladders? We aren’t.”
“Just don’t bring that baby in,” said the militia officer. “No kids, no cars. That’s the rule.”
“You and whose army?” scoffed the person; but the old man said, “Don’t be a fool. You know whose army. Stay back here with me, sonny, stay back here with me.”
Nona was grateful that she and Hot Sauce passed unnoticed beneath the officer’s nose; there was already a cross-faced collection of kids and teenagers in the back of a militia truck, grumbling and swapping cigarettes, some of them significantly older than Hot Sauce and looking a lot older than Nona. She ducked her head a little bit more inside her hood and tried to walk bigger.
The crowd was thick and tall. Hot Sauce grabbed Nona’s forearm and beelined between the people—Hot Sauce never cared who she jostled—until she stopped dead by one of the traffic lights, right next to a raggedy trash can. It was the kind of traffic light with a pole stuck through it crossways to hang signs off. Hot Sauce said, “We’re light enough. Come on. Here,” and suddenly there was a cradle for her foot, and Nona found herself boosted up the pole—she wrapped her legs around it and wriggled upward more out of fright than skill—to sit on one of the crossbars. It squeaked a little, but it didn’t feel as though it was going to immediately give way. Hot Sauce shinned up the other side. She sat beside Nona on the bit that stuck out opposite and they laced their arms around the central pole and huddled there to watch the screen, head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, their legs dangling.
There was a huge noise of breathing—feet shuffling—coughs and sneezes, and the ignition and exhaustion noise of motors, but nobody was talking. Every so often someone would raise their voice and everyone around them would converge, as though they had all agreed beforehand that nobody would talk. Nona looked at the faces of the crowd, hooded against the heat and the dust, wondering briefly and hopefully if Pyrrha and Camilla or Palamedes were somehow among them, or Crown. It was like looking at the sea—grey colours, drab green colours, every so often a paler moving blotch of dun or tan. It made her feel a little sick to look at so many people, so many sets of shoulders and crossed arms, so she stared at the screen instead.
It was still unfolding—they had set up the big metal frame, and shiny skin made of tessellated hexagons was slowly being stretched over it by people attached to guy lines. They had gotten nearly all of the way and were fixing the ends now, but a corner would come loose, and by the time they could re-pin it an opposite corner would go. Nobody seemed to find this funny. Eventually the pale grey shiny hexagon stuff was taut before them, as high as the second storey of the school building, seemingly five times as wide. A trembling rectangle. They clipped power lines to the sides, and every so often white light would popple over one of the hexagons.
There was a murmur from the crowd now, the first one that wasn’t interrupted. People were looking at their watches, they were looking at the screen. The broadcast was late.
At first nothing happened, and for a moment Nona wondered if the broadcast hadn’t been all some big joke or prank—if nothing was going to happen at all. Then one hexagon close to the corner rippled again.
Each of its neighbours rippled, and a cascade of white light burned over the surface of the screen. There was an enormous screech from the collection of speakers piled untidily at the bottom of the screen—the crowd shuddered at the sound, and Nona’s teeth set on edge—and then a voice suddenly emerged. A strange, low voice, speaking what everyone called House, caught halfway into a sentence.
“—esolved through official government channels. We will, of course, be happy to facilitate local elections to ensure the populace feels represented in those committees and resolutions. Under these conditions, no population-wide penalties will be levied. There will be no effects on resettlement. No legal ramifications will fall on groups or individuals, unless they are found guilty of terrorism in the aforementioned tribunal. Definitions of terrorism will be agreed on via elected representatives. All households and individuals can make a plea for restitution, which will be answered not through local authorities but by the Emperor of the Nine Houses.”