17
Nkiruka took Gus's dark pronouncement as her cue to rejoin the telling of the story.
"From then on we ran and hid like rats, chasing after scraps of food, wanting for even the most pathetic shelters. Lucky for us, we had time to prepare ourselves for these trials. The government, I am sure, in some way, knew of the cold treatment we received, but never said a thing. The day after the attacks we left our old home. We feared Hadi might return to implicate us in his whole folly. Our family was a hermit crab, expect that our shells only got smaller and smaller.
"I had never seen such fear. I felt it and saw it in others. Sefu, my husband, who is dead by that devil, was the only one that had no fear. People's fear of us grew after the killings. Before the Net had seemed a hive of support for us; people chronicled the abuses of power, joined our rallies, and most of all thought about us. It all changed completely. Now we, with so much fear, were feared. Instead of social equality, people talked of punishment.
"We hid for two weeks before the anti-revolution happened. A capitalist's revolution. Yet again, legislation came to kill us. The Proof of Prosperity act leveled its mass against us. We called it the Proof of Property act because it literally made property ownership mandatory for citizenship. Not just ownership but to own a home, under the definition of the state. As you might guess the thing hurt is in many ways, we had no title, no writ of ownership, we hadn't a vouchsafe—under the provision, law required landlords to be responsible for their tenants—and we hadn't the protection of the old squatter's rights law. Perhaps most importantly, we hadn't any leverage in public opinion. The country hated us for the sins of Hadi and his friends. People welcomed the Proof of Prosperity laws. They saw them as the biggest increase in public security since the grid itself and though we were on our own, we read that no one protested, no one remembered the Outskirts. We lived in a no man's land.
"Had Sefu not readied us before the PoP, it would have eaten us alive. Somehow he saw a vision of the future, of his death and of our survival. He was a visionary as only few can be. He told me once that we might find 'an end' in the city.
"I still don't know what that means, but we, some of us, survived to see this day. How we survived seems small now compared to today's trouble—because we are closer to death. How is still strange to me. We did things no one had ever done, the things that made rats flourish for millennia. We lived only at night. We slunk and skulked through shadowed streets to the dumpsters where we hid our soil and our crops, only to fall back to our dark places before the sun could find us. We moved restlessly like the Bedouin. We even attempted to flee the country once. We lost many that day. The rest of Sefu's family. A story I will never repeat. Soon after Victoria, Gus's lovely wife, my dear friend, disappeared. Life was a stake in the heart.
"You might think it strange, you who have never seen violence, to think of degrading yourself in this way for just our lives, but have you ever faced the power of an entire nation grinding you down, like facing the tread of a tank? Perhaps now you are. That is why, once again, we will run, in hope we can remind England that, though we are poor and have little, though we look differently and speak in different tones, we are not rats."