“My rent goes up in March.”
“My bus stops at eleven and my shift ends at one.”
“My brother was stopped three times last week and he still goes to school.”
I wrote two names on my hand because paper gets lost and skin does not. They watched me do it and softened by a couple of degrees. Not safe. Seen.
A boy offered me a sticker that said homes not headlines. I put it on the back of my phone and it felt like a vow. A woman asked me not to cry for photographs. I told her I would not cry at all. She smiled like we had made a deal and it was binding.
I reached the pallet they called a stage. Small. Wooden. A platform hacked from the bones of delivery crates. It put me above when I wanted to be inside. I stepped onto it anyway because bodies pack to edges and sound forgets how to carry.
The noise folded in. The square pressed closer without moving. From up here I could see the color map of the city. Navy coats and neon vests and school blazers and old army green. I could see the kettles the police would form if they had to. I could see the alleys where men with small plans like to wait.
Viktor took two paces back and to my left. The wall that keeps rooms honest. He lifted his chin half an inch toward the southwest parapet. A lookout. I followed the angle and found a shape that was not dangerous yet. He must have read the same calculation because he eased. Barely.
The chant rose and fell. “We are not asking. We are owed.” It was not angry so much as tired of being reasonable. I felt it settle somewhere old inside me. Thirteen in the rain. Eighteen with a crown I never wanted. The city asking to be loved back.
I breathed in wet stone and onions and wool and ink. I thought of my father’s hand on my shoulder at breakfast telling me be who you are. I thought of Élodie’s fingers straightening my collar like a spell. Ithought of Viktor pressing his comm into place and stealing one soft kiss by a window where the portraits could not stop us.
In my ear the comm clicked alive. Viktor’s breath entered first. Then his voice, low.
“I am here,” he said.
I raised my hand. The chant broke the way a tide breaks. The square looked at me. Not as a prince. As a man who had run out of places to hide.
“I hear you,” I said. I kept my voice level. I kept my words clean. “And you are not wrong.”
Silence landed. A clean one. I felt the windows behind me look. I let them.
“You say the city has forgotten you,” I went on. “That rent eats wages. That transit eats hours. That safety is a word used in glossy reports and not on your streets. You say we take your taxes and return photographs. You are not wrong.”
A ripple. Then still again. Cameras leaned in. The sky held its breath.
“I am not here to promise miracles. I am here to say the crown will listen with its hands. We will open clinics where there are none. We will add late-night buses where the shifts end. We will audit contracts you were never meant to read. We will meet you every week for the next three months at tables where the doors stay open. Organizers will choose the rooms. You can bring cameras or you can bring quiet. Your call.”
A shout from the back. “Words.”
“You will see dates by tonight,” I said. “Lines in budgets by the end of the week. If they are not there, you come back and make your noise twice as loud. Not everyone behind these windows is the same. Some of us are trying. If we fail you, you will know it. If we help, you will feel it.”
I looked out at them and let the truth live in my chest.
“I love this country,” I said. “You are this country. I cannot love one and silence the other. I will make mistakes. You will hold me to them. But I will not ask you for patience you cannot afford. I will ask youfor partnership. For three months. For one chance to prove that mercy and money can share a line item.”
A woman near the front lowered her sign a fraction. A man in a neon vest blinked hard. I could feel Viktor at my shoulder like weather. He did not touch me. He was there anyway.
“Finally,” I said, “to the ones who would bring knives to this crowd. Do not. Your enemy is not the nurse with a placard or the kid with a megaphone. It is the machine that benefits when we are busy bleeding. Leave your weapons home. Or I will help the law separate you from them.”
A beat. Then the square breathed again. Applause rose messy and real. Boos too. Both were honest. I took them both. I stepped down. I shook hands until my palms were inked with cardboard paint and sweat. I listened. I wrote names. I made promises I have to keep.
On the comm, Viktor’s voice was steadier than mine felt. “We will exit north. Two minutes. Smile for the last camera and keep your shoulder low. Good.”
Good, I thought. And for the first time in a long time, it felt like a word I could trust.
By eveningthe square was quiet. Trash crews swept up slogans and rain. The city put its public face away and showed its bone.
I wore the hood and the plain mask. Black on black. The bow across my back like a sin I refused to confess to anyone but myself. Roof tiles slick under my boots. I watched the last of the organizers fold tables and stash megaphones in a van with a bent bumper. I watched two men who were not organizers check a bag heavier than it should have been. I kept them in the corner of my eye and made decisions about what I would do if they decided to be history.
A door behind me opened with a breath and clicked shut. No stumble. No wasted motion.
