The City has a long memory. The people don’t forget. The last time the children of the City rose, when their numbers were great and their hearts burned for change, there was no mercy for them. Neither woman nor child was spared. The streets ran red with blood.

I shudder.

We take the back way, knowing that the army is probably already on the march. We choose alleys and narrow roads where soldiers would find it hard to walk two abreast. But we can’t avoid the smell of saltpeter, and the eerie soundlessness of a city that usually roars with life, even in the latest hours.

St. Juste suddenly comes to a halt. I don’t need to look up at the street signs to know where we are. I can tell by taste, by touch. I wear this city on the soles of my feet.

“Rue Villmert,” St. Juste says. His eyes narrow. “We’re near the first cell. There should be more noise than this …”

He’s right. From all the talk, I expected a barricade manned by students drinking and cheering. There should be anything but this unnatural silence. Still, I shake my head.

“Perhaps they heeded Orso’s warning and called it off,” I suggest, not believing my own words.

St. Juste frowns at me, then makes up his mind and sets off down the street toward the avenue Ficelle, where the cell should be.

At least the flag still flies, red as the blood of angry men—or so Grantaire informed me one particularly drunken night. It protrudes from the top of an impossible structure built of barrels, tables, and chairs, anything that could be spared or ransacked from nearby houses.

“No …,” St. Juste says, and I hear the unfiltered rage in his voice.

For this is not the sight of a waiting protest, of young men preparing to fight. A smell hangs in the air—it is a smell of slaughter and death, the air foul with human waste and blood. And when we go closer, we see them: the dead festoon the barricade like garlands, the bodies of men, women, even children tossed up against the structure at awkward, unnatural angles. They lie at our feet, a carpet of ruined flesh. Their shattered remains are not tragic figures made beautiful in paintings, but the bleeding, open corpses of true battle, guts, excrement, and all.

I bend down and force myself to gently touch the corpse of a small girl. She is not yet cold. They have been dead for scarcely an hour.

“Monsters,” St. Juste says. “We will show them no mercy.”

I glance around, my heart heavy. The barricade stands, not dismantled or burned or broken in any way; there are no soldiers’ bodies. The enemy took the cell completely unaware, trapping them against their own wall and killing them where they stood, as they could have done only if they knew where the barricade was going up.

“I told you, St. Juste. Orso told you. You are betrayed! We must get back and call off the uprising. It has no chance of success.”