The two of them ended up separated from the rest of the protest by a series of police rushes and advances designed to carve up the main mass. They were together with maybe three hundred protesters on a tight little street. It felt boxed in because the only exit was the far terminus of the street, what seemed like a world away, where cars were peacefully passing. The sides were a flat wall of buildings. At first everyone relaxed. The rest of the cop army kept streaming past. Some of the protesters in the little group tried to keep the energy up but everyone felt splintered, cut off, they couldn’t even see any of the other groups, just the endless passing legion of police. Then the thin strip of cops guarding the entrance of the street suddenly got a whole group of reinforcements, tripling their numbers. As the legion kept streaming past, the armored cops at the mouth of the street began to beat their batons against their shields and advance. Kierk suddenly felt that everyone in the crowd was thinking the exact same thing—There’s only one exit to this street in the far back and if any of these passing police circle around and block it off then we’ll be trapped in here and we’ll all be beaten and arrested and so we have to get to that end of the street before they block it off and wall us in because they are probably circling around right now. The thought raced across the crowd like a neural pulse through a web of synapses, everyone sparking off at once, and in about five seconds suddenly all three hundred people were surging, running, forming a stampede. The line of police followed the running protesters at a jog, banging their shields like they were flushing animals. As the stampede gathered force there were calls for everyone to stop, to slow down, but by then it was too late because people were now running just to keep from being trampled, their eyes wild and rolling. And over the moving mass of bodies, within it, everywhere and nowhere all at once, hung a single feeling, felt by each person, yes, but also all on its own, a dull beast experiencing fear and existing only for a few minutes.