Yuguo felt tears falling down his face. Sorrow and remorse and rage.

He should have been up there. He should have leapt onto that table. For all he’d said about coming together, about someone needing to be first… he’d kept his head down when the police had come.

He slammed a fist into his palm.

“You’re alive, Yuguo,” his mother said. “I’m so thankful! We’re so fortunate.”

He turned to the discussion boards. They were alive with buzz. The video was everywhere, millions of views. There were other videos, he saw now. Videos from Beijing, from Hong Kong, from Guangzhou, from everywhere… More signs, stating the truth for once. More evidence of brutality, of repression.

And thousands of threads, tens of thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of messages, at least. People talking openly of their anger, of their anger that the police would beat students this way, their anger over being censored their whole lives, their anger over having no control.

People talking openly of how shocked they were that their messages and videos were getting through. That the censors weren’t working.

The conversation had evolved over time, he saw. As people realized that something had changed. That they could talk. They became emboldened. He saw people talking openly of things they’d never spoken of before.

That the police were part of the Ministry of State Security. That the man who controlled them now controlled China. That he was responsible. And his name was Bo Jintao.

That the police could beat a few hundred students. But that they couldn’t beat a billion Chinese citizens.

There were people talking openly of the coup.

Of bringing back the Billion Flowers.

Of democracy.

Of striking back harder, in larger numbers, with more organized protests, tomorrow.

Of revolution.

“Mother,” Yuguo said. “I’m not sure how this happened… but I think we’re winning.”

Zhi Li stood at the wall-to-wall window of Lu Song’s penthouse flat in the Pudong, staring out and down into the lights of Shanghai at night.

Across from her, her own gigantic face winked and smiled at the river of humanity, watching over all of Shanghai like a goddess.

Or a demon.

“We should join them,” she said aloud, pulling the bed sheet more snugly around her naked form. “The protesters, tomorrow.”

The videos had been shocking, raw. She’d seen such things when she traveled outside of China. Not here. She wanted to be there, fighting against Bo Jintao.

Lu Song came up behind her, still nude himself, and wrapped his strong arms around her.

How she loved when he held her.

“He’d kill us, my love,” he said, kissing the top of her head.