Description

Chapter 1 – The Man Everyone Laughed At

The first time Arman saw the Chancellor in full, he was standing in an airport that smelled like ketchup and old coffee, watching the soundless glow of thirty screens at once. Every gate had one: the same man, the same podium, the same banners that said MAKE IT SAFE HERE in letters so large they swallowed the background. On one screen the Chancellor was mid-bellow, mouth wide and eyes narrowed, jabbing a finger at some unseen enemy. On another, from a different angle, he was laughing at his own joke, shoulders shaking, that odd theatrical pause before each insult like he was savoring it. All of it was on mute. The captions crawled across the bottom: HALE TORCHES ELITE MEDIA, PROMISES “INTERNAL BORDER” TO PROTECT TRUE CITIZENS. A pair of college kids in hoodies near Arman snickered as they watched. “He’s such a clown,” one said. “I can’t believe we elected a meme.” The other mimicked the Chancellor’s jutting jaw and blurted, “We’re gonna make it so safe you’ll be scared how safe it is,” sending them both into another round of laughter. Arman kept his eyes on the man’s hands. The gestures were too practiced, the pauses too exact. He’d grown up watching men like this through the static of Iranian state television, their words wrapped in religious metaphors instead of security slogans, but the choreography was the same: repetition, exaggeration, certainty. The sound was optional. The shape of the face did most of the work.

He shifted his backpack on his shoulder and glanced at the ticker beneath the talking heads. Below the clips of the rally, a narrow line of text slid past in smaller, less animated font, the way warnings on medication bottles are buried beside the branding. EMERGENCY TRANSIT AUTHORITY BILL ADVANCES TO COMMITTEE, it read, then vanished under an advertisement for a phone with a better camera. When the gate agent called for boarding, half the people around him were still watching the Chancellor’s frozen grin. A commentator’s captioned voice labeled the performance “unpresidential but authentic,” which Arman filed away as another way of saying, “terrifying but good for ratings.” On the plane, he opened his laptop to review notes for his seminar—Language and Power in Late Empires—and found himself typing a new line above his outline: The joke is the pilot light in which the furnace of fear is lit.

Three states away, in a break room that still had a Reagan calendar curling on the wall from somebody’s idea of irony, Jonah Briggs watched the same rally with the volume turned all the way up. The Chancellor’s voice filled the cramped space, bleeding through the thin drywall into the machine shop beyond. “They lied to you,” he shouted. “They lied about jobs, they lied about safety, they lied about who really belongs in this country.” The guys around Jonah laughed at the insults, but not the way the kids at the airport had; it was a tighter sound, a relief more than amusement. When the Chancellor called one network “garbage puppets” and told them they should be forced to register as foreign agents, Jonah felt something unclench in his chest. He didn’t trust politicians and never had, but he trusted the feeling of not being the one spoken down to. The Chancellor mangled a word—“infratrastructure,” or something like it—and the commentators would probably make a supercut of it later, but Jonah didn’t care. People like him never got tongue-baths from language. They got pink slips and pamphlets about retraining. “Guy says what he means,” his coworker Earl muttered, wiping grease off his hands. “Finally got someone who doesn’t apologize every time a reporter frowns.” Jonah nodded, staring at the screen as the Chancellor promised an “internal enforcement surge” to stop the “invasion” happening “inside our own house.” It sounded like cleaning, like taking out trash. He didn’t picture anyone he knew when he heard it. That was the point.

Arman’s semester opened under a sky the color of cigarette ash, the campus trees stubbornly green beneath it, as if photosynthesis hadn’t gotten the memo about decline. His first class after the airport was a packed lecture hall of undergraduates fulfilling some vague requirement about “Civic Histories and Global Perspectives.” The syllabus said they would be reading Plato, Hobbes, Arendt, a sprinkling of poets who understood how language bends under power. But the first slide he projected onto the screen was a still of the Chancellor at the rally, mouth frozen mid-shout, the slogan MAKE IT SAFE HERE half-cropped behind him. “What’s the first thing you notice?” Arman asked. A few students chuckled nervously; one in the front row raised a hand. “He looks… kind of like a comedian?” she offered. Someone behind her added, “Like, he’s in on the joke.” Another: “He’s not scary. My dad says he’s too dumb to be dangerous.” Arman let the comments hang for a moment before clicking to the next slide: a grainy photo from Iranian state TV in the late 80s, an ayatollah mid-sermon, face similarly contorted, the crowd similarly rapt. Only the banners were different; only the language of the slogans had changed. “One of these men ruled over public executions,” Arman said, “the other over televised firings. Both understood that if you can make people laugh while you talk about danger, you can sneak very large things through the side door of their minds.” A boy in a baseball cap rolled his eyes. “Are you saying we’re like Iran now?” The room tensed around the word “we.” Arman smiled thinly. “I’m saying laughter is not the opposite of fear,” he replied. “Often it’s the dress rehearsal.”

That afternoon in the faculty lounge, the television was tuned to a news channel with the sound on low, subtitles crawling along as pundits dissected the Chancellor’s latest “verbal missteps.” A panel of commentators joked about mispronounced words and contradictory sentences, speaking in that tone Arman had learned to recognize: half horror, half thrill, the human voice adjusting to its own irrelevance. A visiting economist waved a hand dismissively as Arman poured coffee. “He’s a phase,” she said. “The institutions will constrain him. Besides, he’s too incompetent to do real damage. Markets hate chaos.” Arman thought of the Emergency Transit Authority ticker from the airport. “Markets adapt,” he said. “We used to say authoritarianism couldn’t survive globalization. Turns out it just merged with it.” The economist laughed, assuming it was a joke. “You’re always so dramatic, Arman. This isn’t your childhood. We have checks and balances.” Out of habit, he almost told her about the night his father had returned home in Tehran shaken, having watched a televised “discussion” where a reformist had vanished from archives within hours. Instead, he swallowed the story and watched the caption scroll by: INTERNAL BORDER FUNDING PACKAGE EXPECTED TO PASS WITH BIPARTISAN SUPPORT. No one in the lounge looked up.

Jonah’s world didn’t have lounges; it had a bar attached to a gas station where the stools wobbled and the beer tasted like memory. On election night, the place was full, sticky with anticipation. The Chancellor’s campaign had been a year-long dare, an ongoing bet that enough people were tired enough to treat politics like a bar fight. The exit polls came in on the TV above the bottles: pundits looking baffled as maps turned the wrong color. “He did it,” Earl said, slapping Jonah on the back hard enough to make him spill his drink. When the networks finally called it, the bar erupted into cheers, not the sleek champagne clink of donor parties, but something rougher, rawer. Jonah found himself yelling along as the Chancellor came on-screen and shouted, “They said you were finished, but you said no! You said, ‘We want our home back!’” The word “home” landed in Jonah’s chest with a thud. For years, home had felt like something that leaked—a place corporations could close overnight and media people could mock from coasts. Hearing it said that way, loud and unembarrassed, was like having somebody slam a door against the wind. When the Chancellor pivoted suddenly to talk about “restoring internal order,” Jonah barely registered the shift. The bar was chanting now, hands raised like it was a concert. If there was a line where celebration ended and consent to something darker began, it blurred in the neon light.

While the country tallied votes and argued over county maps, the legislature used the soft hours of dawn to move the Emergency Transit Authority Bill forward. On paper, it was a dense stack of clauses about “resource allocation” and “interior enforcement corridors.” In practice, it was a legal skeleton waiting to be fleshed with muscle and uniforms. A single paragraph near the end authorized the creation of “Integrated Interior Security Units” with broad discretion to “identify, detain, and relocate individuals whose presence undermines community cohesion and national security objectives.” The language was deliberately smudged; you could drive a convoy through its undefined terms. A few civil liberties groups sounded the alarm, but their press conferences competed with footage of spontaneous celebrations and outraged monologues about the Chancellor’s latest insult to a news anchor. The algorithm had to choose which fire to feed. It chose the one with better faces.

Two weeks later, Arman received an email from his cousin Kamran in a city downriver, where meatpacking plants and warehouses formed a rusted ring around town. The message was oddly formal, as if Kamran feared being forwarded. “Cousin,” it began, “I know you follow these things. We have new officers here, not police, not anything I’ve seen. Dark green uniforms with a crest that says ‘ISB—Interior Security Bureau.’ They stopped your aunt on the way home from the market and asked for her ID. She has lived here twenty years. They said it was random. The next day they asked our neighbor, who has an accent. No one has asked the landlord across the hall.” Attached was a blurry photo taken from Kamran’s living room window: three figures standing beside a white van, side doors open, logo partially visible—ORDER & TRANSIT DIVISION. The image looked like something halfway between delivery service and raid. “Do people in your city see these too?” Kamran wrote. “On the news they say it’s about bad people. I don’t know. I don’t like the way they look at us.” Arman stared at the photo longer than he meant to, the cursor blinking over a blank reply box. In his periphery, his browser tabs showed articles arguing over whether the Chancellor’s latest slip of the tongue proved dementia or mere stupidity.

That night, unable to sleep, Arman walked through the quiet streets around campus, the houses dark except for the flicker of television light behind a few curtains. Through one window he saw the Chancellor again, face larger than life, gesturing as if conducting an invisible choir. The subtitles read: WE WILL MAKE THEM AFRAID TO BREAK OUR LAWS EVER AGAIN. The “them” was conveniently undefined. He thought of his students, split between eye-rolls and shrugs. He thought of Kamran’s aunt clutching her grocery bag while strangers in new uniforms asked to see her papers. He thought of how every empire he’d studied had a moment when the joke stopped being funny to those outside the laugh track and started being very funny to those who enjoyed watching other people flinch. In his notebook he scribbled one more line before bed: The man everyone laughs at is most dangerous when he stops needing the laugh.

In the weeks that followed, that line lodged itself under the surface of other conversations. At faculty meetings, when colleagues insisted the courts would rein in any excesses, Arman heard the Chancellor’s shout under their confidence. In his classroom, when a student insisted that “the system” would never allow anything truly extreme, he almost asked which system she meant: the one that had signed off on every war she’d grown up with, or some other, mythic guardian. Instead, he assigned them to watch an entire rally with the sound off and write about what moved them anyway. Half the essays came back saying nothing had; the other half admitted, uneasily, that it was hard to look away. Far from campus, in a town where bailout posters still faded on factory doors, Jonah noticed a new kind of vehicle cruising slowly past the trailer park at night, its logo unfamiliar but its posture unmistakable: ownership of the road. He told himself it was good, that finally somebody was checking on the “bad elements” everyone talked about. When one of the uniformed officers stopped him on the way home from the bar and asked for his ID, he handed it over with a joking, “Guess I look like trouble, huh?” The officer didn’t laugh. He scanned it, nodded, and waved Jonah on, and Jonah felt, stupidly, a flicker of pride at being waved through.

By the time the Chancellor returned to the stage for his first post-election “Thank You Tour” rally, the Emergency Transit Authority had cleared its last committee. The rally looked the same as the first one in the airport: lights, chants, insults delivered with the cadence of punchlines. But if a camera had panned to the lower corner of the screen, it would have caught a different world assembling itself in footnotes and sidebars: appropriations numbers, new training programs for Interior Security Units, contracts for expanded detention facilities under names like “Community Adjustment Centers.” The feeds rarely lingered there. They followed the face. In one of those faces lit by the glow, in a bar with a flickering neon sign, Jonah watched the Chancellor raise his voice and shout, “Inside our borders, we will build an invisible wall of law so strong that the enemies of order will not dare to cross it.” The crowd roared. Jonah roared with them. Somewhere else, in a small apartment cluttered with books, Arman hit pause on the same speech and took off his glasses, eyes aching. The word that caught him was not “enemies” or “order.” It was “invisible.” Invisible walls were the hardest to tear down, because by the time people noticed them, they had already learned to walk the long way around.

Chapter 2 – The Ministry of Quiet

Mara Kline sat alone in the anteroom outside the Chief of Staff’s office, hands folded neatly around a yellow legal pad she hadn’t written a single word on. The walls were lined with framed magazine covers from better years: booming stock charts, triumphant trade deals, the Chancellor looking vaguely surprised to be shaking hands with foreign leaders. The only new frame showed him at a rally, mouth open mid-slogan, the caption beneath declaring: THE PEOPLE’S VOICE RETURNS. Mara studied the photograph the way some people studied icons. It wasn’t adoration; it was calculation. The image worked because it looked unscripted while having clearly been rehearsed; the tie askew, the sleeves rolled one notch higher than regulations would suggest, the chin thrust just far enough forward to be defiant without turning grotesque. She mentally filed away the angles: which side was his good one, how the light hit his hair, how the hand gestures framed the slogans on the backdrop. When the Chief’s assistant finally opened the door and said, “He’s ready for you,” she rose without smoothing her skirt. She’d learned early in politics that any visible sign of nerves became a scent others couldn’t resist.

The Chief of Staff’s office was large without being grand, the kind of space designed to suggest importance without inviting accusations of excess. He didn’t offer her a seat; he gestured, and she understood it as a test. She sat anyway, posture straight but not stiff. “You know why you’re here,” he said, not quite asking. “You want a new Press Secretary,” she replied. “You want someone who can defend the Chancellor without becoming the story.” He watched her for a moment, eyes unreadable. “We want someone who makes people stop wanting to ask questions,” he said finally. “Not because they’re afraid of you,” he added, “but because they feel like they already know the answer.” He slid a thin folder across the desk. Inside, there were transcripts from previous briefings, annotated in red ink. Every place a former press secretary had said “I don’t know,” “we’re reviewing that,” or “I’ll circle back” was underlined twice. “These phrases are over,” the Chief said. “Uncertainty is a luxury we can’t afford. The Chancellor projects certainty. You will, too. Even when the facts are in motion.” Mara nodded slowly. “Facts are always in motion,” she said. “That’s why people need a fixed voice.” For the first time, he smiled. It was a small, inward thing, like a man recognizing his own reflection.

Her first real test wasn’t in front of the cameras but in a conference room three floors down, where the language for the new era was being manufactured. Around the table sat a dozen people: agency lawyers with thin smiles, communications consultants with expensive haircuts, two uniformed officers from the border service, and a woman from Treasury whose job, as far as Mara could tell, was to make sure whatever they called things didn’t spook bond markets. On a screen at the end of the room glowed the working title of the latest legislative creation: EMERGENCY TRANSIT AUTHORITY – IMPLEMENTATION FRAMEWORK. Underneath, bullet points listed the components: expanded detention facilities, integrated interior enforcement, data-sharing between agencies, “community collaboration mechanisms.” The problem wasn’t what they wanted to do; the problem was what to call it. “We can’t keep saying ‘raids,’” one lawyer said. “The word is contaminated.” A consultant suggested “compliance visits.” A border officer snorted. “We bust down doors at five a.m. and drag people out in cuffs,” he said. “You can call it a hug if you want, but everybody knows what it is.” Mara listened, pen hovering but still. “Then we need a frame that’s bigger than the action,” she said. “Something that sounds like we’re guarding something precious, not attacking something fragile.” She wrote a phrase on the whiteboard: TRANSIT INTEGRITY ZONES. “This makes it sound like we are protecting lawful movement,” she said. “We don’t say we’re going after people; we say we’re preserving the integrity of the system.” The Treasury woman nodded immediately. “Markets like integrity,” she murmured. The border officer shrugged. “Call it whatever you want,” he said. “We’ll still be doing the same thing.” Mara didn’t answer. She knew he was right. That was the point.

Across town, in a drab building decorated with inspiration posters about vigilance and service, Cole Mercer sat in a folding chair with twenty other officers, watching a training video about the newly formed Interior Security Bureau. The acronym, ISB, had been focus-grouped, he’d heard; it sounded solid without being obviously threatening, like a bank or a government agency in a spy movie that people assumed were the good guys. On the screen, an actor in a generic uniform stood in front of a map of the country with no borders marked, only lines of movement—air routes, highways, rail corridors—glowing in different colors. “For too long,” the narrator intoned, “we have thought of the border as a line at the edge of a map. But threats to our security do not respect maps. They move through us—through our cities, our schools, our workplaces. The border is not where the land ends. The border is where the law is broken.” Cole took notes even though nothing in the video was particularly new to him. He’d spent years at actual border crossings, watching people’s faces as they approached the checkpoint, calculating which ones were more afraid than a guilty conscience could justify. What was new was the mandate: he and others like him were being told that every street, every county, every supermarket aisle could now be considered “border-adjacent” if the right person wrote the right memo. That kind of elasticity could be career-making or soul-breaking, depending on how you carried it.

Mara’s first official day in the briefing room felt almost anticlimactic after the high drama of the strategy session. The space itself was smaller than it looked on television, the rows of chairs closer together, the podium slightly scuffed where predecessors’ shoes had bumped against it. The room hummed with the low-level hostility of people whose job it was to watch other people lie to them. She adjusted the microphone once, deliberately, and looked out over the forest of raised hands. Live broadcasts rewarded momentum; she needed to set her own. “Good afternoon,” she began. “The Chancellor has asked me to begin today by emphasizing a simple truth: the first duty of any government is to keep its people safe in their own homes.” She let the word “own” hang for a fraction of a second longer than the rest. “That is why we are implementing the Internal Transit Safeguard Initiative, a set of common-sense measures to ensure that individuals who abuse our hospitality cannot exploit our openness.” A hand shot up from the front row; she ignored it. “Let me be clear,” she continued. “Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from these measures. If you go to work, pay your taxes, obey the law, and contribute to your community, you will notice little change—other than feeling safer as those who despise our values are finally held accountable.” Behind the raised hands, she could see the skepticism in a few eyes. She directed her gaze just above them, at the back wall, as if speaking to a larger invisible audience.

The first question, when she finally took one, came from a reporter with a reputation for persistence. “Madam Secretary,” he said, “critics say this Internal Transit initiative effectively turns the entire country into a border enforcement zone, particularly targeting communities of color and migrants. How do you respond to charges that this is discriminatory?” Mara had rehearsed this one. “We reject that framing outright,” she answered, voice firm but calm. “There is nothing discriminatory about enforcing the law. Our Transit Integrity Zones are designed based on objective risk data, not on anyone’s race or ethnicity. The only people who are targeted are those who repeatedly violate our laws and put our communities at risk.” The reporter tried to interject. “Respectfully, the data you’re using—” She cut him off with a practiced smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Respectfully,” she said, “the people most at risk from lawbreakers are often the very communities you claim we’re targeting. They are asking us to act. We are listening.” She had learned long ago that the easiest way to neutralize a question about harm was to invoke a victim you claimed to be protecting. The specifics could be filled in later, if ever.

In a modest apartment not far from campus, Arman watched the briefing on a lagging livestream, the image freezing every few seconds into a series of unintentional portraits. In one, Mara’s mouth was fixed mid-word, teeth visible in a way that made her look vaguely predatory; in another, her eyes were cast down at her notes, giving her the air of someone praying. Without sound, her gestures were almost soothing: open palms, slight nods, the bodily language of someone inviting trust. He turned the volume up in time to hear the end of her sentence: “…and our message to law-abiding families is simple: you are seen, you are valued, and we will not allow those who abuse your generosity to exploit your kindness any longer.” He felt the back of his neck prickle. It was not that her words were more extreme than others he’d heard in his life; it was the way the language folded reality into a story in which suffering was always happening to someone else, somewhere else, off-camera. There was a familiarity in her cadence that pulled him backward in time to a childhood living room, his parents smoking in silence while an Iranian anchorwoman assured viewers that “temporary security measures” were necessary to protect “ordinary, pious families” from invisible enemies. Different country, different slogans, same structure: abstract nouns standing in for actual bodies.

After the briefing, in a smaller room without cameras, Mara watched the replay with a team of advisors. They didn’t comment on the content; they commented on the optics. “You held the line on that discrimination question,” one said approvingly. “No defensive body language.” Another noted, “The phrase ‘law-abiding families’ tested really well in suburban focus groups; you hit it three times.” The Chief of Staff came in halfway through and said nothing until the clip where she cut off the persistent reporter. He laughed. “Beautiful,” he said. “He’s going to whine on social media about being silenced and our people will eat it up.” For Mara, the real feedback came from elsewhere. Her phone buzzed with notifications: clips circulating, partisan accounts praising her “strength,” others calling her a liar and a monster. The polarity didn’t bother her. In this ecosystem, being loved and being hated were both forms of engagement. Indifference was the only real failure. When she looked at the metrics later—view counts, average watch time, favorable sentiment—she felt a quiet satisfaction. She had done her job: she had made the story about her performance, not about the specifics of what Interior Security would be allowed to do.

For Cole, specifics arrived the next morning in the form of an assignment printed on thin government paper. He was called into his supervisor’s office, where a map of the country hung on the wall without state lines, only clusters of shaded circles that someone had decided meant something. The supervisor tapped one of the circles. “Halden,” he said. “Mid-sized, industrial, decent rail links, lots of ‘transit friction’ according to the models.” Cole knew “transit friction” was their new term for people who didn’t fit cleanly into any database. “You’re being reassigned there as part of Operation Hearthfire,” the supervisor continued. “It’s a pilot Interior Enforcement initiative. Integrated teams, no more jurisdiction squabbles with locals. You’ll be point for Order & Transit Division.” Cole felt a small jolt: Hearthfire sounded almost cozy, like something you’d market to retirees. “What does that actually mean, day to day?” he asked. The supervisor slid a packet across the desk. “Compliance visits. Status verification. Community reassurance. You know the drill. You’ll get discretion.” The word “discretion” landed with unexpected weight. It was permission and burden all at once. “And oversight?” Cole asked before he could stop himself. The supervisor’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “We are the oversight,” he said. “If we do our jobs right, most people will never even see us. They’ll just feel safer.”

Later that afternoon, Mara received a different packet, heavier, stamped with the dull authority of sensitive material. The cover sheet read: OPERATION HEARTHFIRE – COMMUNICATIONS GUIDANCE. Inside, the language was oddly bifurcated. The public talking points were pure comfort: “localized initiatives,” “community partnerships,” “flexible support for local authorities.” The internal description, in smaller font, told a different story: ISB units authorized to operate within designated Transit Integrity Zones without prior approval from local law enforcement; expanded authority to detain on “reasonable indicators” of status irregularity; centralized data-sharing hubs to track “movement patterns of interest.” At the bottom of one page, a phrase was underlined: MINIMIZE VISIBLE DISRUPTION. She circled it once with her pen. She understood what it meant: do what you need to do, but do it quietly. Her job would be to make sure that when something broke into public view—a video, a protest, a body on the floor of a corner store—the narrative would flow around it like water around a stone, smoothing edges, eroding memory.

That night she watched a recording of her own briefing again, this time without sound, in the dim light of her apartment. It was an odd experience, seeing herself behave like someone she had designed. The woman on the screen moved with composure, smiled strategically, wielded phrases like “integrity” and “security” as if they were self-evident goods. Mara tried, briefly, to imagine how she might look to someone like the professor whose op-eds occasionally irritated the communications team, or to someone whose hands shook when they opened the door to a knock they weren’t expecting. The thought skittered away like a bug from light. She closed the laptop and stared at the ceiling instead. In the next room, her television muttered on about ratings and polls; the Chancellor had called another journalist a liar, and the clip was already being tagged and retagged as proof of his authenticity. Somewhere in the middle of the noise, an anchor mentioned Operation Hearthfire by name and moved on. The term floated through the air of the apartment, warm and misleading. Hearthfire, she thought. Fire in the center of the house. Fire that keeps some people warm and makes others run.

Across the city, Arman sat at his desk with two screens open. On one, he replayed a segment from the day’s briefing, finger hovering over the pause key. On the other, he drafted notes for his next seminar: examples of how language had been used historically to make extraordinary measures feel ordinary. He jotted down phrases from Mara’s briefing alongside quotes from older regimes: “temporary security zones,” “emergency economic measures,” “protective relocation.” The parallels were uncomfortably neat. He thought briefly about inviting a representative from Interior Security or the Ministry of Information to speak to his class, then discarded the idea. He knew how such performances went; they answered questions without saying anything. What unsettled him more than their answers was the possibility that his students would be reassured by them. He deleted the half-formed email from his drafts and instead wrote Kamran back, telling him to keep copies of anything official that came through his door, no matter how trivial it looked. “The story of what is happening will be written from the paperwork later,” he typed. “Don’t let them throw it all away.”

When Cole arrived in Halden a week later, the air smelled faintly of metal and river mud, the way cities did when they had been built around things that no longer paid as well as they used to. He checked into a government-rate motel just off the highway, where the clerk barely looked at his ID. Outside, a train rattled past, graffiti flashing by: names, dates, a spray-painted slogan that read WE SEE YOU. He didn’t know who “we” were supposed to be, or who “you” was aimed at. That was the thing about this new job, he thought as he dropped his duffel on the bed: everyone felt watched now—for some, for the first time. In his bag, the Hearthfire packet lay folded, its euphemisms pressed flat between pages of rules. He didn’t open it again that night. He already knew what it said. What mattered now wasn’t on paper. It would be in the knocks at doors, the flashes of fear in strangers’ eyes, the moments when his hand hovered over a name on a list and he had to decide whether “discretion” meant mercy or thoroughness. Somewhere hundreds of miles away, in a windowless room in the capital, Mara was rehearsing new phrases for the same old acts. The Ministry of Quiet was open for business.

Chapter 3 – Operation Hearthfire

The morning the vans began to appear in Halden, the air over the river sat low and wet, clinging to the brick warehouses and the hospital windows like it was trying not to let the city see what was coming. Laila Ortiz stepped off the bus with her lunch in a reusable bag and her ID badge already clipped to her scrub top, a reflex as automatic as breathing. The hospital sat three blocks from the river, all steel and glass pretending it wasn’t silently drowning in debt. It was, strictly speaking, a “community medical center,” which in practice meant it treated whoever walked through its doors: insured, uninsured, documented, undocumented, the intoxicated, the confused, the uninsured veterans, the quietly desperate. Laila was unofficially known as “the one who speaks both,” which meant both Spanish and English, but also, increasingly, both the language of the charts and the language of people who were afraid of what answering questions might cost them. On the sidewalk outside the hospital that morning, she noticed two white vans idling at the corner. The logo on the side was new to her: a stylized shield encircling a road that seemed to lead nowhere, beneath it the words ORDER & TRANSIT DIVISION. Two men in greenish uniforms leaned against the hood of the first van, watching the street with the casual boredom of people who had been told they could take their time.

Inside, the day began like any other: a line of patients at the triage desk, a code called on the intercom, someone from administration arguing quietly about reimbursement rates in the break room. It wasn’t until Laila went down to the lobby to interpret for an elderly man with chest pain that she saw the uniforms again, this time inside the building. They stood near the entrance, just far enough from the doors to make it clear they had no intention of leaving quickly. One held a tablet; the other scanned the crowd, eyes lingering on faces with darker skin, on women with headscarves, on people with accents audible even when they said nothing. “They’re just here to ask a few questions,” the receptionist whispered when Laila frowned in their direction. “They said something about a joint initiative with the hospital to ‘verify critical records.’ We don’t want trouble.” The phrase sounded like it had been cut and pasted from a press release. When one of the officers approached the triage desk and asked to see the list of today’s appointments, the receptionist hesitated, then turned the clipboard around. Laila watched the man’s finger trace down the names, pausing on some, skipping others. Her own name did not appear; employees were on a separate list. For a brief, irrational moment, she felt guilty anyway.

On the other side of town, in a makeshift operations room carved out of a former insurance office, Cole’s team was getting its final briefing. A map of Halden glowed on the wall, overlaid with translucent circles that indicated “Transit Integrity Zones,” as if law had a geography separate from the streets it was supposed to govern. The supervisor pointed with a laser at a dense cluster of apartments near the slaughterhouse and the rail yards. “Zone 3 has the highest concentration of status unknowns,” he said. “Under Hearthfire protocols, we are authorized to conduct compliance visits without prior coordination with local law enforcement. We verify, we document, we encourage voluntary adjustment where warranted.” The room smelled faintly of burnt coffee and printer ink. Cole flipped through the roster of addresses stapled to his packet. The names were a mixture of Anglo, Latino, South Asian, Eastern European. Next to each was a code: C1 for citizen, L1 for legal resident, P1 for pending, U for unknown. Those marked U had no dates, no backstory, just the void where paperwork should have been. “Rules of engagement are unchanged,” the supervisor continued. “We go in pairs. We record interactions when feasible. We avoid escalations. But remember: the border is here now. If you see something that looks wrong, you act. We will back you.” The last sentence hovered in the air like a promise or a threat.

If there had been a camera in Jonah’s living room that morning, it would have caught a different map: a local news graphic showing Hearthfire’s “rollout cities” as dots scattered around the country, with Halden one among many. The anchor’s voice carried the practiced cheerfulness of someone reading bad news disguised as progress. “Operation Hearthfire, the Chancellor’s flagship internal security initiative, is now active in twelve communities, with more to come,” she chirped. “Officials say the program will target repeat offenders and transit abusers, not ordinary law-abiding families.” B-roll footage showed bodycam clips of officers helping an elderly woman up a stairwell and returning a lost child to his mother, all of it scrubbed of anything resembling fear. Jonah leaned back on his couch, one sock on, one off, watching between mouthfuls of cold pizza. “About time,” he muttered. A headline crawl beneath the story mentioned layoffs at the plant where his brother-in-law worked; the two stories didn’t connect in his mind. He saw the vans and uniforms on the screen and thought of drugs, crime, people taking advantage. He did not think of his sister-in-law, who had come over the border in the back of a truck at nineteen and now worked double shifts at a poultry processing plant while sending money to her mother. When the anchor moved on to a segment about the Chancellor’s latest insult to a celebrity, Jonah turned the volume up. The security story had done its work; it had lodged a vague sense of reassurance in his gut and withdrawn without demanding reflection.

By early afternoon, Laila had been asked three times to help “clarify” things for patients who had been approached by the Interior Security officers. In one case, a young father with a broken wrist had been pulled aside in the hallway and asked to confirm his address and immigration status in halting English; his answers didn’t quite fit the categories on the officer’s tablet. Laila arrived midway through the questioning, called from a neighboring ward. When she switched into Spanish, the man’s shoulders loosened marginally. “Do I have to answer?” he whispered. The officer, who did not understand the words but understood the tone, stiffened. “Tell him that cooperating will speed up his care,” he said. It was true in the narrowest sense: refusing would get him flagged, and flagged files had a way of drifting to the bottom of every priority list. Laila repeated the officer’s sentence in Spanish, adding quietly, “But you don’t have to tell them anything beyond your name and date of birth if you don’t want to.” The man nodded, confused. He gave the bare minimum. When they finally wheeled him into X-ray, the officers conferred by the elevators, heads bent over the screen. One of them caught Laila’s eye and smiled thinly. “Thanks for your help,” he said. “We’re just trying to keep everyone safe.” She forced a smile in return. “Safe for who?” she wanted to ask, but the words stayed parked behind her teeth.

The day’s slow-motion unease snapped into something sharper in a grocery store three blocks from the hospital, the kind of corner shop that sold both fresh cilantro and lottery tickets, where the lines between legal and illegal commerce were as blurry as the security footage. Cole’s unit had received a “community tip” earlier that week about a man using a stolen identity to work there, a tip that might have been malicious, might have been genuine, the paperwork didn’t say. Protocol required a follow-up. The store was crowded, the aisles narrow enough that two carts could not pass without someone pressing into shelves. Chili powder, canned beans, diapers, batteries—they all sat in quiet stacks as the ISB officers stepped inside, uniforms suddenly too bright under the fluorescent lights. The store owner, an older man with a beard and a name tag that read “Amir,” looked up, face going expressionless in the way of people who have learned that their feelings are dangerous.

Laila happened to be there, on her break, buying a few things to take home. She was in the produce section when she heard the first hiss of tension: a raised voice, a command in English that didn’t sound like a question. She turned and saw one of the officers blocking the exit, hand hovering near his holstered weapon, while another approached a young man stocking a lower shelf with bags of rice. “ID,” the officer said. The young man froze, hand halfway to the shelf. “I’m working,” he answered in accented English, the bag sagging. “ID,” the officer repeated, louder now. Customers near the aisle went very still, the way rabbits freeze at the shadow of a hawk overhead. The young man put the bag down and reached into his back pocket. Someone at the register raised a phone, and the scene’s gravity shifted; the presence of a lens made everything both more real and more unreal.

Cole entered at that moment, having been delayed outside by a dispute over where the vans were parked. He saw the tableau—officer, young man, phone in hand, exit blocked—and registered the risk factors the way he had been trained: confined space, uncertain status, bystanders. “Let’s slow this down,” he started to say, but his voice was too soft, swallowed by the humming refrigerators. The young man pulled out his wallet, fumbling, cards slipping to the floor. One officer stepped forward quickly, misreading the sudden movement as resistance. “Hands where I can see them!” he barked, hand now fully on his weapon. The young man’s hands shot up, palms open. One of the cards on the floor showed a photo that looked like him but just slightly off, the way bad lighting can make a person look like their own cousin. Laila, caught between aisles, had the absurd thought that everyone needed to breathe at the same time or something terrible would happen.

What happened next would later be described in reports as a “rapidly evolving situation.” In the compressed space of the grocery aisle, it felt like a stumble through a series of avoidable choices. Someone near the back shouted something in Spanish—“Déjalo en paz!”—and the officer nearest the young man flinched, glancing away for half a second. The young man, misinterpreting the flinch as an opening, took half a step back, hands still up. The officer, adrenalized, interpreted the movement as flight. His weapon came out, a reflex more than a decision. Cole saw the gun leave the holster and shouted, “Hold!” but the word barely existed before the muzzle flash erased it. The noise in the aisle was enormous, a snap that seemed to punch the air out of the store. One of the jars on the shelf exploded, red sauce spattering the wall. The young man crumpled, soundless, knees folding first, body following. The bag of rice he’d been holding burst open when it hit the floor, grains scattering like teeth.

Time distorted. For a moment no one moved. Then chaos arrived all at once, screaming in two languages, someone sobbing, someone swearing, the high-pitched wail of a child who had been invisible until that second. Laila’s body moved before her mind caught up; she dropped her basket and pushed through the circle, dropping to her knees beside the young man. Blood was spreading under his side in a widening halo, mixing with the rice and the sauce. “Don’t move,” she told him in Spanish, pressing her hands hard against the wound. His eyes were wide and unfocused. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she lied. The officer who had fired stood frozen, weapon still pointed at the space where the young man had been standing, breath loud and ragged. Cole grabbed his wrist gently but firmly, lowering the gun. “It’s over,” he said, though they both knew it was anything but. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman near the end of the aisle holding her phone high, hand trembling as she filmed. Her face was pale with fear or fury or both. He thought, inanely, about Mara’s phrase: “law-abiding families have nothing to fear.”

By the time the ambulance arrived, escorted by local police whose faces wore the strained expression of people who sensed both moral and professional traps, the young man was barely conscious. Laila rode with him, hands still pressed to his side, her scrubs soaked through. The officer who fired sat in the back of an ISB van, staring straight ahead, mute. Cole stayed to give an initial statement, the words coming out in the flattened cadence of someone narrating a documentary he does not quite believe. The grocery store was taped off, its windows now reflecting flashing lights instead of produce displays. Outside, small knots of people formed, some crying, some filming, some arguing loudly in the way people do when they are too afraid to be quiet. Someone shouted “Assassins!” at Cole’s unit. Someone else shouted “He should have complied!” The sentences bounced off each other and fell to the pavement.

Hours later, in the briefing room miles away, Mara stood at the podium with a printed statement in front of her and a directive in her mind. She had read the internal incident report already, noting the phrases that would be useful: “officer felt threatened,” “non-compliant behavior,” “high-tension environment.” The video from the bystander’s phone had started to circulate online, already racking up views, annotated with captions calling it an execution, a murder, proof of fascism. Her job was not to watch it; her job was to talk over it. “This afternoon in the city of Halden,” she began, “an officer of the Interior Security Bureau was involved in a tragic incident during a lawfully authorized Transit Integrity operation.” She paused for a beat, letting the words “tragic” and “lawfully” share space. “Preliminary reports indicate that the officer feared for his life when the subject of the inquiry made a sudden movement during an identity verification procedure. A full investigation is underway, and we extend our deepest sympathies to all those affected.” A hand shot up. “Madam Secretary,” a reporter called out, not waiting to be recognized, “the video shows the man with his hands up when he was shot. Where is the threat?” She tilted her head slightly, performing concern. “I would caution everyone against drawing conclusions from selectively edited footage circulating online,” she said. “These situations are complex, and split-second decisions are made in difficult circumstances. What I can assure you is that the Interior Security Bureau operates under strict rules of engagement designed to protect both officers and the public.” The word “public” did a lot of work in that sentence; it erased the specificity of the young man on the floor.

The question came, as she knew it would, about discrimination. “Isn’t it true,” another reporter demanded, “that these Transit operations disproportionately target communities of color and immigrants?” Mara kept her face neutral. “What is true,” she replied, “is that the communities in which these operations occur have been pleading for order and safety. They are tired of seeing their neighborhoods used as havens by people who think the law doesn’t apply to them. We are responding to their call.” It didn’t matter that no one had asked the people in that grocery store what they wanted. The sentence inverted their fear into a request. In a small apartment in Halden, Laila sat on her couch, wrapped in a blanket she had forgotten to take off at the hospital. She watched Mara speak, the sound turned down low so as not to wake her roommate. The caption at the bottom of the screen read: OFFICIALS URGE CALM AFTER HALDEN INCIDENT. Her hands still smelled faintly of iron. When she saw the phrase “tragic incident,” she felt something inside her harden into a shape she did not yet have words for.

That night, Arman received the video as an attachment from an email address he didn’t recognize. The subject line was simple: YOU SHOULD SEE THIS. He hesitated before clicking, a lifetime of caution around unsolicited files still active in his bones, but the glimpse of the thumbnail—the cramped aisle, the flash of green uniform—overrode his wariness. He watched in silence as the scene unfolded on his screen: the demand for ID, the raised hands, the shout, the shot, the collapse. The video ended not with the young man on the floor but with the filmer’s own breathing, rough and audible, and the blurry image of an aisle covered in spilled rice and blood. No narration, no commentary. His immediate instinct was to close the laptop, to protect himself from overexposure to a pain he could not alleviate. Instead he replayed it, this time paying attention not to the violence but to the words that preceded it: the officer’s commands, the scattered protest from the back of the store, the half-formed explanations. He heard the structure of power more clearly than any accent. Later, with the video paused, he opened a new document and wrote at the top: The Joke That Learned to Shoot.

He wrote through the night, his essay less a plan than an exorcism. In it he braided together the Chancellor’s rallies, Mara’s briefings, the slow expansion of Interior Security, and the thirty seconds of panic in the grocery store. He wrote about how fear was being systematized, not as a byproduct but as a methodology. He wrote about laughter as consent and about the way words like “integrity” and “safety” had been repurposed to cover the sound of a gunshot. He compared the video to old Iranian broadcasts edited to remove screams, to American footage from earlier wars where the camera always seemed to wobble away at the crucial moment. He named Hearthfire for what it was: not a program but a theology of inside and outside, of whose presence counted as warmth and whose as fuel. When he finished, his hands shook. He sent the essay to three outlets he still trusted, knowing even as he hit send that their legal teams would read it before any editor did.

Within twenty-four hours, Halden’s streets filled with people. At first it was a small march organized on messaging apps and forums, a procession from the grocery store to the hospital, candles and hand-painted signs held high. Laila walked near the middle, her hospital badge tucked into her pocket, unsure whether she was more afraid of being recognized by the wrong people or not recognized by the right ones. Some signs bore the young man’s name; others simply said WE BLEED TOO or AM I NEXT? The chants were mostly calls for justice, for accountability, the phrases that arise when people still believe asking might matter. As the crowd reached the central square, they were met by a line of uniforms: Halden police in their blue, and behind them, in a second row, the green of ISB. Cole stood there, helmet on, shield at his side, trying not to look at any individual face in the crowd. He spotted, without quite intending to, the woman from the store who had filmed, her phone again raised, her expression flinty. He felt a wave of nausea and blamed it on the heat.

Jonah had not planned to attend. He’d mocked the idea of marching on social media the night before, posting something about “professional protesters” and “people with too much free time.” But his sister had called that morning, voice tight, asking him to keep an eye on his nephew if things got bad in town. The boy’s school had sent home a bland letter about “an expected civic gathering” and “possible transit disruptions.” Jonah drove in partly out of curiosity, partly out of a feeling he could not name that sat heavy in his chest when he thought of the word “Halden” in the same sentence as “incident.” At the edge of the square, he parked and walked closer, hands shoved into his pockets, trying to look like someone who might have just happened to pass by. The chanting felt different in person than on television; it vibrated the air in a way that made his own heartbeat feel conspicuous. He saw the police line and felt the familiar pull of siding with authority, the reflex that had been trained into him by a lifetime of narratives. Then he saw how close the front of the protest was to the shields, how small the children looked between legs, and something in him misfired.

From a control room in the capital, Mara watched live feeds of Halden’s square on a bank of monitors, each screen a different angle supplied by media and security drones. The footage was being streamed in real time to broadcasters, but with a delay that could be used, if necessary, to cut away. Her team was already drafting statements. On one document, the phrase “peaceful protest” was highlighted and replaced with “emotional gathering.” On another, “crowd control measures” was swapped in for “use of force.” She knew from experience that the word chosen within the first hour would shape the entire country’s memory of the event. The Chief of Staff stepped in behind her and placed a hand on the back of her chair. “If this gets ugly,” he said quietly, “they’re not protestors. They’re rioters. Say it first. Make it stick.” She nodded without looking up. On the middle screen, a plastic bottle flew from somewhere in the crowd, hitting a shield with a hollow thunk. It was enough. The officers tensed. Cole felt the line move forward an inch, not because anyone had ordered it but because bodies under pressure tend to close ranks. Jonah, stranded between the rear of the crowd and the front of the uniforms, realized there was no clear path out. He had a sudden, absurd thought that he should have worn different shoes.

The sound of the first canister firing into the air was, to those who had never heard it before, almost abstract—more pop than bang, more punctuation than threat. Then the gas bloomed, pale and curling, and abstraction ended. People coughed, staggered, grabbed at their eyes. Laila tried to pull a teenager in a hoodie away from the densest part of the cloud, but someone crashed into her from behind, and for a moment she was on her knees again, the ground too familiar. Cole shouted something about holding formation, his own eyes stinging behind his visor. From the control room, the view of the square went hazy, the cameras struggling to adjust to the smoke. The producers in the media networks cut away to studio hosts who shook their heads gravely and asked whether “outside agitators” were to blame. Mara’s phone buzzed with a message from the Chancellor’s personal account: CALL THEM THUGS. WEAKNESS IS OVER. She stared at the words for a long second, then typed back a single line she would never send: If they are thugs, then so are we. Instead, she put the phone down, picked up her prepared statement, and headed for the podium.

Chapter 4 – The Beautiful Silence

In the week after Halden’s square filled with smoke and shouting, the city did what cities do when they don’t know what else is safe to do: it went quiet. The curfew arrived not as a dramatic proclamation but as a scrolling line at the bottom of local news screens: DUE TO RECENT UNREST, NON-ESSENTIAL TRAVEL DISCOURAGED AFTER 9 PM UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The mayor stood in front of a podium flanked by both blue and green uniforms and called it “a temporary measure to give everyone space to cool off.” The Chancellor called it “decisive leadership in the face of chaos” and promised to extend Hearthfire to “every community that wants order.” In practice, it meant the streets emptied earlier, the bars closed sooner, the storefronts locked their doors before the last light had drained from the river. It meant that the kids who had filmed the shooting and the crackdown had one more reason not to loiter outside with their phones out. It meant that the hum of conversation in grocery lines and laundromats shifted topic when anyone in uniform stepped within earshot.

At the hospital, Laila floated through her shifts like someone whose body had been left behind somewhere on a tile floor. She slept poorly, waking to imagined gunshots and the smell of tear gas that wasn’t there. For a few days after the protest, there had been a flurry of activity: activists wandering the wards asking for statements, lawyers handing out cards in the cafeteria, reporters hovering with notebooks and politely hungry eyes. The administration responded with a memo reminding staff about “confidentiality obligations” and “the importance of maintaining institutional neutrality in public discourse.” No one mentioned the grocery store by name, but everyone understood which kinds of stories they were being asked not to tell. When a journalist cornered Laila near the vending machines and asked if she had been there “when it happened,” the words jammed in her throat. She could still feel the heat of the young man’s blood on her hands, but the memory had already begun to calcify into something she visited only in the privacy of her own chest. “I can’t talk about patients,” she said finally, and watched the reporter’s face fall into a familiar pattern: disappointment, then resignation. The woman scribbled something anyway. A week later, a small article appeared online quoting “sources” about the shooting. It got a few thousand shares, then vanished under fresher outrage.

One night, after a double shift, Laila didn’t make it home. Or if she did, no one could later agree on how. Her roommate woke to an empty bed and a phone buzzing itself to exhaustion on the nightstand with messages from coworkers: You okay? Did you get home? Need coverage for your shift? At first, people assumed she’d simply crashed at a friend’s place or gone to stay with family in another city to “get some distance.” It was only after three days with no answer, then five, then seven, that the tone of the questions changed. A nurse mentioned her absence to a supervisor, who frowned and said, “She probably left town. Things have been stressful. We can’t hold positions open forever.” Someone suggested filing a missing person report. Someone else quietly wondered aloud whether “drawing that kind of attention” was wise. After all, if Interior Security started asking questions about her, they might start asking questions about everyone. Word traveled quickly that the best way to help Laila might be not to say her name too loudly. A week after she disappeared, her name tag was removed from the staff roster on the whiteboard by the nurses’ station. No one made a ceremony of it; the marker squeaked once and moved on.

Cole’s investigation concluded faster than anyone who hadn’t worked inside a system like his would have believed possible. An internal affairs team arrived in Halden, conducted interviews in conference rooms that all smelled the same, and reviewed footage that seemed to leave just enough ambiguity to support whatever conclusion had been preselected. The report, when it landed on his desk, was thick and carefully written. It acknowledged “procedural irregularities” and “training gaps” but found “no evidence of malicious intent or criminal negligence.” The officer who fired the shot was “reassigned to administrative duties pending further training.” The language was designed to imply accountability without conceding fault. Cole read the pages twice, then a third time, looking for a sentence that would tell him how to feel. Instead he found the familiar reassurance at the end: “The actions taken were in line with established Hearthfire protocols given the rapidly evolving circumstances.” The words had the approximate comfort of a cold blanket. He signed the acknowledgment page when it was slid toward him, his hand steady. Later, alone in his motel room, he poured a drink and told himself, out loud, “If the system says we did it right, then we did it right.” The first time he said it, it sounded like a question. By the fifth repetition, it began to resemble belief.

His team adapted quickly. On the next compliance visit, no one mentioned the grocery store. The younger officers told jokes in the van, trading memes about protestors and “professional victims.” “At least this one isn’t near a camera store,” someone quipped outside a small apartment building. Cole barked out a laugh he didn’t feel. The phrase “once burned, twice shy” floated through his mind and collided with the training directive to always project confidence. He started leaning harder on the jargon. When neighbors asked what they were doing, he said, “Just verifying some transit records,” as if he were a census worker. When a frightened woman clutched her toddler and asked if they were “taking people away,” he responded, “Ma’am, we’re just checking statuses to keep everyone safe.” Each time he said it, the words grew smoother, more detached from the faces in front of him. He began to understand what older colleagues meant when they said that the job got easier once you stopped trying to translate policy into moral terms.

Up in the capital, Mara’s stock had never been higher. The Halden incident, as it was now officially called, had been a pressure test for her messaging—and by the only metrics anyone in her world cared about, she had passed. The briefings where she fielded questions about the shooting drew record viewership. Clips of her parrying what sympathetic outlets called “hostile gotcha questions” went viral among the Chancellor’s supporters, who praised her “steel spine” and “no-nonsense attitude” in the comments. Even some of her detractors admitted, grudgingly, that she was “formidably disciplined.” The Chief of Staff called her into his office with a rare look of unguarded satisfaction. “You controlled the narrative,” he said simply. “We were one badly worded sentence away from letting them turn this into a martyr story. Instead, you kept it in the frame of law and order. They’re talking about ‘split-second decisions’ instead of ‘execution.’ That’s not an accident. That’s your work.” Then he slid a new folder across the desk, embossed with a slimmer, more ominous seal. NATIONAL INFORMATION INTEGRITY OFFICE – ORGANIZATIONAL PROPOSAL. “We’re formalizing what you’ve been doing off the side of your desk,” he said. “Coordinating messaging across agencies. Making sure we speak with one voice. The Chancellor wants you to head it up.” The title glittered in her mind even before she opened the packet. Ministry of Quiet, she thought, not without irony. But she accepted, of course. In this building, you didn’t turn down power and expect to be invited to the next conversation.

The first thing she did in her new role was not to invent lies but to create harmonies. She convened representatives from Interior Security, Justice, Defense, Health, and half a dozen other agencies in a windowless room and taped three phrases to the wall: SAFETY, STABILITY, FAIRNESS. “These are your anchors,” she told them. “Whatever you announce, whatever you defend, you tether it to one of these. No more mixed messages. No more apologies unless we’ve decided, strategically, that contrition serves us better than defiance.” She had learned from watching the Chancellor that people forgave almost any cruelty if it was delivered with the right mixture of certainty and wounded innocence. “We are not suppressing information,” she said when someone from Justice grumbled about the new clearance procedures for press releases. “We are organizing it so that our enemies cannot weaponize our own words against us.” The phrase “our enemies” went unexamined. It had become one of those flexible pronouns whose content could be filled as needed: sometimes the term meant foreign competitors, sometimes opposition parties, sometimes journalists, sometimes the citizens who had the misfortune of being filmed while suffering.

Back on campus, Arman discovered that there were more subtle forms of censure than outright bans. His essay, “The Joke That Learned to Shoot,” had not been picked up by the larger outlets he’d sent it to; their rejections came couched in praise for his “passionate voice” and regretful references to “current legal sensitivities.” One editor wrote, “We’re aligned with your concerns but have to be cautious with language around agencies currently engaged in active operations.” A small independent journal finally agreed to publish it online with a disclaimer that the views expressed were solely those of the author. The piece attracted a modest but intense audience: activists, academics, a few former students who wrote to say they felt both seen and terrified. Within his own institution, the response was frostier. The dean asked to “chat” and suggested that Arman “consider the impact” of his public writing on “the university’s relationships with key stakeholders.” A colleague whose work he respected pulled him aside and warned, “They’re watching faculty now. Not officially, of course. But you don’t want to get the reputation of being… incendiary.” In class, he noticed a slight change too. A handful of students seemed more engaged than ever, eyes bright with the recognition that their professor was saying out loud what their feeds only hinted at. Others grew quieter, their notebooks blank, as if hoping not to be drafted into some drama they didn’t fully understand. When he mentioned Hearthfire in a lecture as an example of “how names can beautify brutality,” one student raised her hand and said, “My uncle works for Interior Security. He’s a good man. I don’t like you implying he’s some kind of monster.” The room tensed. Arman chose his next sentence carefully. “Good people often do their worst work when the language they’re given hides the consequences,” he said. After class, he found an email from the dean asking him to “avoid personalizing political critiques in the classroom.”

Jonah, for his part, found that it was easier to return to his old habits than to sit with the discomfort the square had left in him. The first few nights after the protest, he had trouble sleeping, replaying the sight of gas spreading across faces that looked like his neighbors’, the way the shields had seemed less like protection and more like walls. He almost posted something critical about the crackdown, his thumb hovering over the screen, but the comments he read beneath similar posts made him hesitate: accusations of betrayal, of siding with “invaders,” of being a “useful idiot.” Instead, he shared a meme about “Halden drama” and added a caption about how “both sides” needed to calm down. When his brother-in-law’s plant announced another round of layoffs, Jonah caught himself wondering whether Hearthfire’s “cleaning up” would free up jobs for “real locals,” then immediately felt a surge of shame he couldn’t quite locate the source of. To silence it, he turned the television on. On one channel, a panel of commentators insisted that the Halden incident was proof the country was sliding into fascism; on another, different commentators insisted it was proof the country had finally “found its backbone.” Somewhere in the middle of the noise, an ad promised that a new brand of mattress would help him “sleep like nothing outside your door can touch you.” He ordered one using a discount code the Chancellor had promoted. When it arrived, he slept more soundly—not because anything had become safer, but because he was too tired to keep interrogating the feeling in his chest.

The algorithms did their work with the efficiency of organisms that had evolved to feed on attention. The video from the grocery store still existed, but it now floated in an ocean of other clips: celebrity feuds, natural disasters, short bursts of rage from strangers whose names blurred together. The footage of the protest in the square was chopped into fragments, each used to support a different argument: one angle showed a protestor throwing a bottle, shared widely by those insisting that “lawlessness” had to be met with force; another showed a line of officers shoving a woman to the ground, shared by those arguing that the state had turned predatory. Each clip lived its life cycle and then sank into the archive, replaced by newer, shinier outrage. The official narrative, meanwhile, remained steady: Halden had experienced “civil unrest” triggered by “misleading footage.” Interior Security had acted “within guidelines.” Operation Hearthfire was “largely successful,” with “increased cooperation” from “local stakeholders.” That last phrase became a favorite in Mara’s talking points; it conveyed partnership without ever specifying who, exactly, had agreed to what.

Weeks later, when reporters stopped asking about Halden at briefings and shifted their focus to a new foreign flare-up, the silence felt, to those who had lived the incident, less like relief and more like a lid settling slowly on a pot. Laila’s coworkers adjusted to her absence by dividing her workload, grumbling about understaffing without naming its cause. Cole developed a sense for which doors to knock on and which to pretend not to see, a private calculus that allowed him to hold onto just enough of his self-image as a “decent man in a hard job.” Mara refined the choreography of control until it felt effortless: she knew which words to emphasize, which to glide over, how long to pause after mentioning “loss of life” so that no one could say she had been callous. Arman, feeling the walls of his own timidity closing in, began to write shorter pieces instead of long essays, thinking that smaller truths might slip under the radar. Jonah stopped driving downtown altogether, telling himself it was because parking was a hassle, not because he didn’t want to see the square where his certainty had cracked.

In the new office of the National Information Integrity Office, on a floor that might once have belonged to some vanished tech startup, Mara stood before a wall of screens that showed not images but graphs: sentiment over time, topic frequencies, spikes of fury and boredom mapped in lines of color. A staffer pointed to a chart where the line representing “public concern about interior enforcement” had peaked around the Halden incident and then dropped back to below its starting point. “See?” he said, a hint of pride in his voice. “We weathered it. Attention moved on.” She nodded, feeling a strange mixture of accomplishment and vertigo. This, she realized, was what success looked like now: not triumph, not even persuasion, but the quieting of questions. The beautiful silence was not an absence of noise; it was the presence of a particular kind of hum in which nothing stuck long enough to threaten the structure. She thought briefly of the young man on the grocery store floor, of the woman in the crowd holding up her phone, of the professor in the provinces writing essays no one in this building read. Then she turned back to the screens and said, “Let’s talk about the rollout language for the next phase of Hearthfire. We’ll want to lean harder on the word ‘normal.’ People are tired. Give them the feeling that this is just how things are now.”

Chapter 5 – The Name of the Country

The Day of Internal Order arrived with balloons. In the capital, schoolchildren were given small flags printed overnight, the ink still faintly tacky when they waved them at the cameras. The Chancellor stood on a raised platform built on the plaza’s central axis, flanked by banners bearing the new emblem of national security: the same stylized road inside a shield that decorated ISB vans, now enlarged and gilded. Officially, the holiday commemorated “the restoration of safety and stability within our own borders,” though no one could quite remember which particular date it was supposed to be tied to. It felt, instead, like a celebration of an idea: that the greatest threat was no longer imagined as something breaching lines on a map, but something already inside the house. The broadcasts cut between the capital and a patchwork of cities, each showing parades of uniformed units and selected “community representatives” walking together in carefully curated optics. In Halden, Order & Transit vehicles rolled slowly past the square where gas had hung days before, their sides newly polished, their occupants sitting up straighter than usual. The local mayor called it “a time to come together and move forward.” There was no mention of the young man in the grocery store, nor of Laila, whose absence had been quietly absorbed into the city’s new rhythm.

At Halden Elementary, Jonah’s nephew stood in a line of fourth-graders on the cracked asphalt of the playground, clutching his own small flag. The music over the loudspeakers was tinny, a mash of patriotic marches and contemporary anthems that shared a steady drumbeat. Teachers had been instructed to “keep the messaging upbeat but apolitical,” which in practice meant they told the kids to be grateful for the people who “kept them safe” without explaining safe from whom. When the pledge was recited, an administrator added a new line at the end—“…and to the security that keeps our home in order”—and stumbled only slightly over the unfamiliar words. Afterward, as the children filed back inside, two visitors waited in the office lobby: an ISB officer in uniform and a woman in a blazer carrying a tablet. They were there, the principal would later say, for a “routine records alignment check,” something about making sure student files matched national databases. Jonah’s nephew was called out of math class halfway through a problem about trains. In the office, the woman in the blazer smiled and asked him to confirm his address, his date of birth, his mother’s name. When she typed the data into her tablet and saw a field flash yellow next to “parental status,” her smile thinned. “Sometimes the systems take a while to sync,” she said, more to the officer than to the boy. “We’ll just need to verify a few things with your family.” By the time the school day ended, a note had been added to his file: REFER TO TRANSIT COMPLIANCE UNIT.

The call came to Jonah while he was at work, halfway through tightening a bolt on a piece of machinery that already looked obsolete. His sister’s voice came through the phone jagged and too loud. “They pulled Nico out of class,” she said, skipping greeting. “They said there’s a ‘status question’ about his records and that they need to talk to me and… and maybe to you, since you’re listed as emergency contact.” Her words tumbled over each other. “They said it’s probably nothing, that it’s just a data thing, but they kept saying ‘Transit Compliance.’ Does that mean ISB? Are they going to…?” She didn’t finish the sentence. Jonah felt his mind split along an old fault line. One part of him reached automatically for the phrases he’d swallowed whole from press conferences: probably a simple check, nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong. Another part of him pictured the grocery store floor, the square, the lines of shields. He told his sister he’d be there, left the shop without asking permission, and drove toward the school faster than the limit allowed. On the way, he passed an electronic billboard displaying one of the Day of Internal Order slogans: BECAUSE YOU DESERVE TO FEEL SAFE. Beneath the text, a stock photo of a smiling family glowed. The mother in the picture had skin just dark enough that Jonah could tell some consultant had greenlit the image to signal inclusivity. The father’s jawline looked suspiciously like the Chancellor’s.

In the small office designated as a “family consultation room” at the school, an ISB officer and a woman from Child Services sat across from Jonah’s sister at a table too low for adult knees. His nephew sat next to her, kicking his heels nervously against the chair. A folder lay open on the table with copies of documents: birth certificate, school registration, a form Nico’s mother had filled out years ago listing her place of birth. The officer spoke first. “Ma’am, our systems flagged a discrepancy between your son’s status and your own. This sometimes happens when records weren’t correctly updated when you moved. We’re just trying to straighten it out.” The words were gentle, the tone practiced. Jonah’s sister clutched her purse strap like it was the only stable thing in the room. “I’ve been here for fifteen years,” she said. “I pay taxes. I work nights. My son was born here. He’s a citizen.” The Child Services woman nodded sympathetically. “No one is questioning his citizenship,” she said. “But under Hearthfire protocols, when there are unresolved questions about a guardian’s status, we are required to assess whether the child’s living situation is ‘stable and compliant.’ It’s just a formality.” The phrase “required to assess” carried the weight of something much heavier than paperwork.

Jonah recognized the rhythm of the conversation. He had heard its public version in Mara’s briefings, translated into the language of safety and fairness. Hearing it here, with his nephew’s hand creeping toward his under the table, it sounded less like protection and more like a rehearsed justification for breaking something that wasn’t yet broken. “What does ‘assess’ mean?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level. The officer glanced at him. “It means we may ask follow-up questions, conduct a home visit, verify employment and residence. In rare cases, if there’s reason to believe that the environment is unstable, temporary alternative arrangements can be made while things are sorted out.” Temporary alternative arrangements. The phrase slid into the room like a draft under a door. Nico’s mother went very still. “You mean you can take him,” she whispered. “You can take my son because of a ‘discrepancy.’” The officer spread his hands, the gesture from training manuals. “We’re not here to take anyone today,” he said. “We’re here to make sure everyone is safe and compliant with the law.” Jonah felt something in his own chest, long dormant, twist and snap. The word “compliant” had never before been applied to someone whose face he loved.

While that conversation unfolded in Halden, Arman stood backstage in a hotel ballroom in the capital, reading over his notes for the panel he’d been invited to join. The event was titled “Democracy and Security in Times of Disorder,” sponsored by a coalition of foundations and think tanks that liked to brand themselves as centrist. He had flown in that morning on a delayed flight, losing himself in the anonymity of airport crowds where the Chancellor’s face flickered endlessly on screens. The organizers had found his essay online—a minor miracle in itself—and, after several cautious emails, had decided he would add a “valuable critical perspective” to the discussion. The panel’s other participants included a retired general, a tech executive in charge of “trust and safety” at a major platform, and a former justice official who now consulted on “rule of law initiatives” abroad. In the green room, they made small talk about travel and sleep schedules. No one mentioned Hollowden or Hearthfire by name. When the moderator poked his head in and said, “We’ll be live in three,” Arman felt the familiar mixture of adrenaline and dread settle over him. He had prepared a measured set of remarks about historical patterns, about the balance between security and liberty, the kind of calibrated speech that might earn polite applause and be immediately forgotten. In his pocket, folded into quarters, was a different text: an excerpt from the piece he hadn’t yet dared to read aloud in public.

The ballroom was half lit, the stage bathed in the kind of soft light that made everyone look slightly better than they did in daylight. As the moderator introduced the panelists one by one, their institutional affiliations drawing varying levels of applause, Arman scanned the audience. There were policy people in suits, a smattering of students, journalists with notebooks, donors with expressions that said they had seen too many events like this to be easily impressed. At the back, cameras from a couple of networks were set up, their little red lights like unblinking eyes. The moderator led with safe questions about “the challenges of a turbulent world,” about “striking the right balance.” The retired general spoke about “hard choices” and “fog of war.” The tech executive talked about “content moderation at scale” and the difficulty of “nuance in fast-moving information environments.” The former justice official lamented “polarization” and called for “civility.” Arman listened, feeling the gap between the vocabulary onstage and the lives of people like Laila widen with every sentence. When the moderator finally turned to him and asked, “Professor Dara, how do you see the relationship between democratic values and internal security evolving?” he heard himself say, “I’d like to answer a slightly different question first, if I may.”

There was a fractional pause—the moderator’s smile tightening at the edges—before he gestured for Arman to proceed. Arman unfolded the paper in his pocket with fingers that he hoped didn’t look as unsteady as they felt. “We keep using words like ‘security’ and ‘order’ as if their meanings were neutral,” he began. His voice sounded flatter in his own ears than he had rehearsed, but it held. “But in every late empire I’ve studied, and in the one I grew up in, those words slowly become code. Security becomes the name we give to making certain people vanish. Order becomes the name we give to managing fear instead of addressing its causes. We tell ourselves we are protecting ‘our own,’ but we never quite say who ‘our own’ includes.” A rustle went through the audience. On stage, the retired general shifted in his seat. The moderator interjected, “Professor, are you suggesting that our current policies are equivalent to—” Arman cut him off, surprising himself. “I am suggesting,” he said, “that a government that builds an interior security apparatus with broad discretion to remove people from their homes based on paperwork discrepancies, that deploys that apparatus most heavily in neighborhoods with the wrong accents and the wrong skin tones, and that trains its population to accept this as ‘normal order’ is not simply making ‘hard choices.’ It is redefining who counts as part of the country.”

He heard a cough from somewhere near the front. The tech executive’s smile had frozen. “We have a Day of Internal Order now,” Arman went on, the words coming faster, as if they belonged to someone who was less afraid than he was. “We celebrate it with parades and slogans and flags. But consider what we are actually commemorating: the acceptance that those among us who live closest to precarity are now subject to a different kind of law, one administered not by judges but by officers with tablets and guns, justified by briefing-room phrases like ‘split-second decisions’ and ‘temporary arrangements.’ Consider that we are told, again and again, that ‘law-abiding families’ have nothing to fear, as if fear itself were a confession of guilt. That is not security. That is the quiet establishment of a hierarchy of belonging.” He did not say the word fascism. He did not need to. In the silence that followed, the audience filled in the unspoken comparison with their own private archives of images and stories.

In a government office a few blocks away, Mara watched the panel on a muted screen as she reviewed a draft speech for the Chancellor’s evening address. The caption beneath Arman’s name read: ARMAN DARA, HISTORIAN. The camera showed only his face and shoulders; she could not see his hands clutching the paper. She read the subtitles as he spoke about redefining who counted as part of the country. Something in her chest tightened, an old reflex from a time before she had learned to think of language as material to be shaped rather than as something that could shape her. One of her deputies, passing by, glanced at the screen and snorted. “Another academic calling everything fascism,” he said. “They really need new material.” She didn’t answer. Her attention had snagged on a different line in the speech draft on her desk: “Every child in this country is safe in their own home tonight because we have had the courage to act.” She had written it herself a few hours earlier, almost mechanically, layering the familiar cadence onto the Chancellor’s preferred themes. Now, with the professor’s words floating across the screen—those among us who live closest to precarity—she found that sentence lodged in her throat like a stone.

When she stepped into the speechwriting room, the Chancellor was already there, marking up a teleprompter script with a thick black pen, altering phrases to match his tongue. “Karoline says we gotta say ‘safe’ more,” he joked to an aide, using the wrong name for a predecessor, not bothering to remember. Mara allowed the misnaming to pass; correcting him in front of others was not part of the job description. She pointed to the paragraph about children. “Sir, on this line,” she began carefully, “I’d suggest a slight adjustment. Instead of ‘every child is safe in their own home tonight,’ perhaps ‘we are committed to the safety of our children and their homes.’” It was a small change, a shift from declaration to intention. “Why?” he asked, eyebrow rising. “’Every child is safe’ sounds strong.” She thought of Nico in the school office, of Laila’s vanished name tag, of thousands of kids for whom “home” had become a question mark. “Because,” she said, “there are always unpredictable factors—the world is complicated. If anything happens anywhere, that line could be used against you. This way, you still sound strong, but you’re not promising something no one can promise.” He considered for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “You’re the words person.” It was not resistance, not in any grand sense. It would not prevent a single raid. But it was the first time she had altered a sentence not to protect him, but to avoid telling a lie so blunt it made her skin crawl.

Back in Halden, after hours of tense conversation and phone calls to numbers that rang too long before connecting, Nico was allowed to go home—for the moment. The Child Services worker had agreed, after a series of hushed exchanges with someone higher up, that the situation did not yet meet the threshold for “temporary alternative arrangements,” provided that his mother agreed to appear at a Transit Compliance office within a week with whatever documents she could gather. They left with a stack of leaflets explaining her “rights and responsibilities,” written in English dense enough that Jonah offered to translate. Outside the school, the late afternoon light was thin and gray. Jonah knelt in front of his nephew in the parking lot, looking him in the eyes. “You’re coming home with us,” he said. “Nobody’s taking you today.” The word “today” tasted like failure mixed in with relief. Nico nodded solemnly, a new awareness settled behind his gaze. Children learn the topography of danger quickly; they had just been shown another border, one that ran not along geography but through their own family.

In an ISB regional office two counties away, Cole sat at his desk sorting through digital case files that had been auto-assigned by a system that claimed to optimize workflow. One of them, flagged with a yellow marker, bore Nico’s name. Under “guardian status,” the field read: PENDING VERIFICATION. Under “recommended action,” it suggested a home visit and “preliminary evaluation for temporary care placement.” The guidelines were clear: in cases where parental status could not be confirmed to the satisfaction of the system within a prescribed period, children might be “provisionally relocated” to facilitate “uninterrupted access to educational and social services.” The language was almost impressive in its ability to obscure the reality it described. Cole clicked into the case and skimmed the notes: school consultation, family meeting, appointment scheduled at Compliance office. He could see, between lines of text, the outlines of a situation that resembled a hundred others and also, somehow, felt more fragile. Perhaps it was the phrase “emergency contact uncle present,” perhaps it was the memory of the square and the grocery store, blurred together now in his mind as a composite scene of things spiraling just past his reach.

He stared at the dropdown menu that controlled the next step: ADVANCE, HOLD, ESCALATE. Officially, “hold” was intended for cases awaiting further information that had already been requested. Unofficially, it was used by officers who wanted to procrastinate on work that was tedious or politically sensitive. A file on hold did not vanish, but it slid down the priority list, making room for more urgent matters. Cole’s hand hovered over the mouse. The system would leave a log of whatever he did, but it would not record what he had been thinking when he did it. He imagined, briefly, a future inquiry: Why was this case delayed? Why was this child not processed sooner? He imagined himself shrugging, saying something about workload, about clerical oversight. He imagined Nico’s mother arriving at the Compliance office two days later than scheduled because her shift had run long, finding that her son’s file had not yet advanced to the point where anyone felt compelled to suggest removing him. He clicked HOLD. The screen refreshed. The yellow marker faded to gray. On his performance dashboard, somewhere a metric ticked infinitesimally in the wrong direction. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened another file.

When the panel ended, the moderator deftly steered the conversation away from Arman’s monologue and back to safer territory, thanking him for his “provocative framing” and promising to “return to those important points in future discussions” that both men knew would never materialize. Some audience members approached Arman afterward to shake his hand, speaking in lowered voices about how “brave” his words had been. One young woman, a graduate student from his own university, said, “I didn’t know we were allowed to say that out loud.” A few others avoided his gaze, filing past as if he had become radioactive. Outside the hotel, the city moved in its usual patterns: traffic, deliveries, people hurrying home to watch the Chancellor’s speech. In his room that night, Arman turned on the television and saw Mara at her podium again, introducing the address. When the Chancellor spoke the adjusted line—“we are committed to the safety of our children and their homes”—he heard the absence of the word “every” like a faintly spared blow. It changed nothing, he told himself. And yet, in the accumulated ledger of tiny resistances and larger compliances, it was a mark in a different column than he had expected her to choose.

Later, walking back from the hotel to his temporary lodgings, Arman passed an enormous digital billboard that curved around the side of a glass building. It displayed a looping sequence: children laughing at a Day of Internal Order parade, Transit units high-fiving them, the Chancellor smiling with uncharacteristic softness, Mara’s face for a fraction of a second as she said, in close-up, “You deserve to feel safe in the country you call home.” The ad ended with the words OUR HOUSE, OUR RULES overlaid on a waving flag. He stopped on the sidewalk, head tilted back, watching the cycle repeat. The phrase “the country you call home” snagged in his mind. He thought of his cousin Kamran, of Laila, of Nico, of his own green card tucked into his wallet like a talisman that had started to feel less reliable. He thought of how the pronoun in that sentence—“you”—had been drained of specificity until it could be applied to anyone, and therefore to no one in particular. At his hotel desk, he opened his laptop and began writing a new piece, the one that had been forming in the spaces between his previous sentences. Its working title, for now, was “The Ministry of Quiet,” but as he wrote, another phrase kept elbowing its way into the margins: The Name of the Country.

A few days later, back in his own city, he published it online, knowing that its reach would be limited, its reception mixed, its consequences uncertain. In it, he argued that a nation is defined less by its borders than by the circle within which law admits people as fully real. He wrote that when a state creates categories of people whose suffering does not register as a scandal, it has silently renamed itself. Not from Republic to Empire or Democracy to Autocracy, but from a country that pretends to be for everyone to one that has decided, without saying so, that some live inside the word “we” and some permanently outside of it. He named the new configuration as plainly as he could: a managed decline in which fear had become policy, and policy had become a liturgy recited by officials who no longer believed in anything but their own continued relevance. He did not ask his readers to resist, or to hope, or to vote differently. He asked them to stop lying to themselves about what they were already part of.

In a parking lot behind a strip mall in Halden, where the Wi-Fi from a café bled just far enough to reach his car, Jonah sat in the driver’s seat scrolling through his phone. The article had been sent to him by a coworker who’d added no commentary, just a link. He almost didn’t open it; he was tired, his head full of forms and deadlines and the quiet whimper his nephew had made in his sleep the night before. But the first lines hooked him, the way the author described watching a leader everyone called a clown slowly assemble a machine that ran on other people’s fear. He read about Hearthfire as theology, about interior security as a new kind of border that ran through schools and hospitals and homes. He read the sentence that said, “If you find yourself hoping that the people at your door will recognize you as ‘one of the good ones,’ you already live in a country that has divided its population into castes, even if it still uses the old words on its coins.” At the end, the author wrote, “The name of this country is no longer the one on our passports. Its true name is whatever we are willing to accept when it is done to our neighbors.”

Jonah stared at that line for a long time. He thought of how close he had come to telling his sister that “the system would work it out,” of how he had once cheered at promises to make “them” afraid, without asking who “they” were. He thought of the officer’s face in the grocery store, of the gas in the square, of the woman with the phone. He thought of his nephew’s small hand gripping his under the school table. He didn’t know what to do with the shame that rose in him, but for the first time he didn’t push it away. He forwarded the article to his sister with a brief message: I think this is what’s happening. No emojis, no caveats. It wasn’t action, not yet. It was a naming.

Somewhere in an office where walls were lined with screens, a graph flickered as the article registered as a small spike in shares within certain clusters of users—academics, activists, a few disaffected veterans, a growing number of people whose search histories combined the Chancellor’s name with words like “out of control.” The spike was noted, logged, deemphasized. The larger lines on the chart, tracking overall satisfaction with “internal security initiatives,” continued their gentle upward drift. In the Ministry of Quiet, the hum persisted. But in scattered rooms and cars and break rooms and dorms, individuals sat with the discomfort of seeing, however briefly, the structure that held them. The holiday would come again next year, and the parades would roll, and the slogans would be refined. The apparatus would continue its work, absorbing some acts of resistance, punishing others, rewarding most people for doing nothing at all.

Arman closed his laptop and stepped outside into the cooling evening. The campus was quiet, the flag on the main quad moving listlessly in a weak breeze. Overhead, a surveillance drone hummed past on its way to somewhere else, its presence as unremarkable now as streetlights. He thought of all the names a country could have: official, colloquial, whispered, cursed. He thought of the ones he had lived under, and the one he was living under now. “You are what you answer to,” his grandmother had once told him, long before he had words for exile and return. On a distant television, in a living room where someone had left the sound on as background, the Chancellor’s voice boomed about unity and strength, about safety and greatness. In that room, the words might still land as reassurance. In others, they would land as threat. Between those rooms stretched the real border of the nation, invisible and deadly. Whether anyone would, in time, find the courage to redraw it—or to give the place a different name altogether—was a story not yet written. For now, there was the fact of having seen, and the refusal, at least by a few, to pretend they hadn’t.

—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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