“I . . . ” began Van Sloane, and then she faltered.

More whistles now. Louder and louder.

“Here’s the way this is going to work,” said Dahlia, raising her voice so everyone could hear. “Anyone in this crowd who came here looking for shelter and has had to work for it, step forward. Anyone who is a ‘helper.’ Anyone forced to work. Anyone who’s had their stuff taken away. All of you step forward.”

Out of a crowd of nearly three hundred people, more than a hundred people moved through the crowd toward Dahlia. They looked at her, and then at each other, and it was clear to her that they were surprised at how many there were. Van Sloane had probably kept them in small groups so they wouldn’t have exactly this kind of realization.

The people were a mix of races—several kinds of Asian, and every shade of brown skin, from one couple who looked more African than African-American to Latinos and Middle Eastern faces. There were some white people, too, but they might as well have had “fringe crowd” tattooed on them. They were skaters, squatters, street kids, and others. No one who would easily fit into the world of manicured lawns, upscale socials, or summers in the Hamptons. They were dressed in a kind of uniform—as much as available clothing supplies allowed, she reckoned—jeans and T-shirts. All soiled by hard work, except for the ones who probably worked indoors or with kids.

As Dahlia climbed up onto a low brick decorative wall, she felt a whole speech rising to her lips, but she had to bite it down. Anything she said would be obvious to everyone, and they would all know that this wasn’t an aberration. This was an extension of how it so often was—of an affected few using force, or laws, or trickery, or money to subjugate anyone who did not have the same skin color, the same politics, or belong to the same exclusive bloodlines. It made her want to stab Van Sloane in the face. A lot. It made her want to take all of the assholes who ran Happy Valley and toss them over the walls so the Rovers could do whatever they wanted to them. It made her hate being who she was—a child of privilege herself, a white girl. Fuck, it made her loathe being a carbon-based lifeform in this twisted world.

What she said aloud was different, and it took a great deal of willpower to say what she needed to say rather than what she wanted to say.