The screen flickered and a disembodied voice said, “This broadcast will repeat at five o’clock tomorrow as a recording.” Then it all went dead.
The hexagons flared white. One sparked at the end of the frame. The sun had sunk a little lower behind the buildings, so when the broadcast stopped it all seemed extraordinarily dark, like nighttime had come early. Nona clung to the pole with slippery hands, feeling all at sea; she focused in on Hot Sauce’s breathing—which was very shallow and very soft, but there. Nona looked at the way Hot Sauce’s nostrils flared deep inside her hood, at the rise and fall of her chest. She wanted to make sure.
The silence had broken. Some of the militia had taken over the loudspeakers, telling people to go. They repeated, “Disperse, disperse.” But nobody seemed to want to disperse. The noise grew and grew and grew. Someone right under Nona’s pole said, “This city’s over. I’m going into the desert. We won’t survive another one of these.”
Someone in the crowd was yelling. They were being pulled away by two other people. Nona saw their face as the crowd pressed and the crowd parted. They were saying, “Liars! Liars! Ur is fighting! They’re losing! Liars!”
The megaphone was still bleating out Disperse, disperse. One of the militia trucks had turned on its alarm so that Nona couldn’t hear individual voices anymore; it was a horrible sound, a long dying whine punctuated by a whirring WHEE-ooh WHEE-ooh noise like when the poison cats were fighting. She clung to Hot Sauce and the pole. Some people tried to throw things at the screen, but other people were pulling them away. The crowd’s fear had changed and mixed them up; they were surging this way and that, forming rivers and currents, some people refusing to move, others struggling to get away. One of the militia trucks was slowly chugging into the crowd, people pushing to get out of its path, as someone on the back of it yelled and gesticulated: “Everyone on this side of me, go down the broadway. Everyone on this side of me, back toward the motorway. Come on…”
No shots had rung out, at least. There were scuffles among the people, but most sets of shoulders Nona saw seemed more depressed than anything. She looked at Hot Sauce and nervously joggled her elbow. Hot Sauce didn’t seem inclined to move. She whispered, “What now?”
Hot Sauce looked at Nona. Her pupils had gone small and dark.
“They’re not people, Nona,” she said. “They’re not people.”
Nona ventured, “They seemed strange…”
“Because they’re not real,” said Hot Sauce.
Her lips were a little wet. She was terribly afraid all of a sudden, Nona could see, filled with the fear her body spent so much of its time rejecting. Nona thought about her tantrums and, buoyed by the courage that had brought her here, reached out to seize Hot Sauce’s wrist that wasn’t holding the pole. “Listen to me,” she commanded. “I’m your Teacher’s Aide. Breathe with me … I’ll squeeze your hand for in and let go for out. In through the nose … Out through the mouth … Not so quickly. Don’t hyperventilate,” she added, knowing she sounded exactly like Camilla.
Hot Sauce acquiesced. She took five breaths in—five breaths out—all the while the alarm blared horribly and the crowd surged and billowed beneath them. Her face still looked strange and rigid, as though she might puke. Nona realised that although Hot Sauce was still her leader, she had to help Hot Sauce, she had to be the one who was nearly nineteen. She started to caterpillar herself back down the pole—her long career as the worm with problems had taught her the movements she needed to lower herself—and when her feet touched the bottom, jostled by people on her elbows and shoulders all the way, she called: “Come down, let’s go.”
Hot Sauce came down. Nona held her hand as they joined the crowd. She had scanned over the top of people’s heads and thought, a little desperately, that she knew where the crowd was thickest: she was very grateful in that moment that she knew about movements. She hurled herself and Hot Sauce into the current and dragged her toward where they had come from—changed her mind in a moment of stillness, joined a rivulet heading east, wriggling into their midst and saying loudly, “My sister’s going to be sick,” which got them a tiny opening, enough to move through. The crowd extended all the way up the back street. She could smell the smoke where the old water treatment plant was still smouldering. They had barely made it into the artery going up the street before a shot rang out in the crowd behind them. Everyone screamed and cringed, and then everyone ran.