Witness

2 - The Beginning of the End

I woke to the sound of pounding on the front door. Not the polizí, or my door would have been in splinters on the floor, a flashlight in my face as they dragged me out of bed. I stumbled over from the couch, whole body aching and bruised. The gashes on my legs stung, adhered to my pants by the blood that had seeped through the bandage.

I must have looked like a ghost with my stone-dust covered skin and hair, like a child pretending as they played in flour. I opened the door and Agathe almost fell into me, so furious was her knocking. "What?" My voice was a rasp from the gas and the smoke I had endured.

Agathe, normally so polished and serious, looked up at me with spectacles askew, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead. Most knew her as the editor of that paper, but I knew her as Endeis's closest friend. "We need to go, Karsa!"

I blinked blearily at her, exhaustion weighting my limbs like lead. "Why?"

"They've arrested Endeis and the others! They're going to come looking for us!"

I choked on my breath for a moment, lodged between relief and agonizing fear. Endeis was alive...but at a devil's price. I grabbed the bag by the door. It was my sister's go-bag, the one she said she would take to her grave. I was smaller than her, so the clothes would fit well enough and the cash would help. Besides, it held something even more important: Endeis's fevered writings. If they found that scrawl, Endeis would walk into a cell she would never walk out of.

Why are you writing that down, End? Are you suicidal? The ghost of older sister past demanded that in my bleary head, but I knew her answer.

Because it's true. All of it is true and you know it.

I grabbed Agathe's arm and started walking, bare feet tender against the pavement. "Do you have a place to go?" My words came through numb lips. None of this seemed right.

I had always been a good little Lath. I worked hard, paid my taxes, kept my head down, and bit my tongue. I lived in the cracks and thanked our country for every breath of air they forgot to take away from me. Was that not enough? Even as I struggled to grip the situation, a familiar bitterness crept up my throat. It was anger, powerless anger, at this place I was in, where nothing I could do would change it.

Agathe nodded, guiding me down the steps and through back alleys. Our route took us through foreclosed houses and tenement buildings, across rooftops and down alleys so shady they seemed to exist in a perpetual night. It was agonizing for me, but you keep going through that kind of pain, that kind of exhaustion, after you see your first checkpoint and men with riot batons as long as your arm, overlooked by one armed and armored in military gear.

"They've shut the city down," Agathe said as we crawled under an iron grate to get out into the street again. I cursed in pain. I scraped my skinned knees against rough pavement as I moved.

"I can't hide forever, Agathe. It will look suspicious."

"Would you rather be suspicious or in a grave?"

"Is there a difference?" I demanded.

"I do just fine," Agathe said almost stiffly. Her publication gave her plenty of reason to know how to hide. It normally blew over, once they'd smashed the printing machines and burned the copies. Mostly because even polizí don't want to deal with the four hundred people who showed up outside to watch. That was before a spire had fallen, though. People would want blood.

"I have to go to work."

Agathe turned to face me as we stepped into a ramshackle apartment building. She whipped off her spectacles as if drawing the sword of God. "This is the work now, Karsa. Can't you see that?"