“Nikola!” Kaveh whirled around, pushing his way through the crowd, which had already swelled in the odd half hour he’d been running around down here. “Nik, for fuck’s sake, answer me!”

It had taken him an hour to drive all the way down here, though not as long as he’d feared, all things considered. It seemed as though the angry denizens of Southern California had elected to use their oft-ignored public transportation system for once to come to this protest, one of many that were happening simultaneously all over the country. But once parked, and still getting no answer from Nikola, Kaveh had no clue where to go, only intuition, and his intuition told him that Nikola’s interest would take him where the action was thickest, and Kaveh knew enough about this event to know that it was supposed to culminate in Pershing Square.

It looked like the police had only been expecting a crowd of a few hundred, but as Miranda had predicted, this was well into the thousands. This event had been organized a few weeks ago, but a few weeks ago, there had been no Enola Gay to fan the coals of outrage, and it had taken him a solid fifteen minutes to make it from his car to Pershing Square where it should have taken five.

“Nik? Nik!” He looked up, half expecting Nikola’s dark silhouette to be perched on the side of some skyscraper like a peregrine falcon about to dive. “Where are you?”

The odd thing about this protest was the wide spread of interests represented. There were some “Take me away, Xethorp” moon children present, eager to see if the great awakening was nigh, but the vast, vast majority of the people here were different flavors of discontent demanding answers—transparency activists, Ortega supporters, students, plenty of people with reasonable standpoints and valid upsets. But the radical wing of those ideologies was present, too, the proto-fascists, the conspiracy theorists, and of course, the Gadsden Line in much greater numbers than there had been in Temecula. They’d streamlined their messaging, too. Several of them were holding up signs that said things like, NO ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT and DEATH TO THE GLOBALISTS.

Ah, globalists, thought Kaveh. By night known as “Jews.” The dog whistle was so loud it was piercing, but Nils Ortega’s fans, high on anger at the lack of information and transparency, either did not hear the fascist undertones or ignored them. Enemy of my enemy and all that.

“Truth is a human right!”

A whoop bellowed up from the crowd as everyone turned to the source of the voice—Jano Miranda, standing on a stage that was little more than a few folding tables in a row, talking into a loudspeaker.