A rhythm establishes itself. Once every two weeks Cate signs on at the job center, and once a month money lands in her account. It is not much, but enough to cover the small bedroom, and to buy cheap food—enough to allow her to breathe. She is pleased to find her needs are few. Hesther tells her there is a job available in the café in which she works, a bike ride away, on the other side of town. Cate takes the job. At the end of her first shift she is paid money from the register in cash. The first time is hard—she feels like a cheat. She tells Hesther this, and Hesther tut-tuts. “You know how much the British government spends on weapons? Besides, it’s just until you get sorted, until you get on your feet.”

It is easier after that.

On the weekends they go down to the seafront and drink cider and watch the sunset, watch the starlings stream in to roost on the skeleton of the West Pier, watch them cast themselves in great clouds of murmuration against the evening sky.

Lucy and Hesther are part of a group of young people who like to gather together at the house and talk—about capitalism, about hierarchies, about horizontal power, and the potential for change. They plan actions. Cate has no idea what an action is until, one dawn in late summer, Lucy knocks on the door of her room and tells her to get out of bed. Cate pulls on her sweater and sweatpants and they drive out along High Street, where Lucy stops the van and instructs Cate to sit in the driver’s seat. Which she does, nerves jangling, as Lucy covers her face with a bandanna and neatly spray-paints the word SLAVERY—the V made by the swoosh of Nike—on the front of a sporting goods store. Lucy jumps back in the van and shouts at Cate to drive, which she does—giddy and fast. She feels like Bonnie, or Clyde.

She begins to read again, different books: Chomsky and Klein and E. P. Thompson. She starts to join the discussions. At first it is odd to hear her voice in a group—it has been so long since she felt she had anything to say. She begins to think that Oxford, that place of power—that place she hoped would confer power onto her—robbed her of her voice, or rather, that she gave it away. Or perhaps, she thinks, it was only hidden. Perhaps she only had to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to find it again.