By the end of the week, something had changed at the square. In the morning, Mr Dubois pulled out a roll of insulating plastic from the storage room and made Robert cover all the window frames of the store with it. As he worked, he could see the edge of the crowd even from here. It felt like half of the city was on the square and they were very angry.

Hershel didn’t return home for the night in the past two days, and neither did Natan yesterday. Mom kept crying when she thought nobody could see her, and last night she did it openly together with Natan’s wife. With both women staying home for the time, Nikolai didn’t need to be babysitted separately. Despite hating his job, Robert was relieved to get out of the house.

He got down from his step ladder and examined his handiwork with a grimace. The windows of the shop didn’t have any outer fixtures so he had to improvise. The panels looked sturdy but they weren’t pretty, that’s for sure.

Nothing Robert ever did was pretty.

“Hey.”

He turned around, surprised to recognise the voice. Anka stood a few steps away from him also looking at the barred windows with polite neutrality. They haven’t talked for three days now, and Robert was sure it meant they were no longer dating or something. He wasn’t going to write first, but he had to admit it kinda sucked being alone again.

“Hey.” He replied stupidly. “Mr Dubois wanted the windows covered.”

“Yeah, dad says stuff’s getting ugly at the Administration after the morning news.”

“What news?” Robert frowned. He put his multitool back in the pocket of his shorts and tried to rub his hands clean with a dry cloth. 

Anka shrugged with one shoulder. She watched Rob’s hands for a bit, tugging on the thrum of her crop top. “There has been a leak. Internal documents about how they knew something was wrong in the shaft on the morning of the accident and still sent miners down there. I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening.”

“Huh. Fuckers.” Robert commented awkwardly. Anka wore shorts today instead of her usual dresses, and wow her legs were distracting.

“Yeah, that’s what my dad also said.” 

She fell silent, giving him a kind of stare that was meant to convey something. Rob scrambled to figure out what exactly it was. Maybe it was the heat or maybe it was exhaustion from having to hold his arms above his head for a prolonged time, but he was drawing a blank.

Anka sighed heavily and pouted finally. “Are you not gonna apologise at all?”

Robert scowled. “What for?”

“Seriously? You don’t feel even a little bit guilty about being a jerk to me that night?”

“Me?!” He would have laughed if he wasn’t so angry all of a sudden. “Girl, you decided to be a whiny bitch over nothing!”

Anka gasped, her lips in a perfect circle. “‘A whiny bitch’?! Did you really just call me a bitch, Hoffman?!”

Okay, so maybe he immediately regretted saying that. But he was not going to back off under her push. Yeah, if she looked sad about it, he would’ve apologised. But if she planned to yell at him, well, he was not going to give in.

“Well deserved, Zograf. If you don’t want to be called that, don’t act like one.”

Anka swung her hand to slap him but Robert wasn’t going to let it happen. He caught her wrist and pulled it down and away. He knew right away he shouldn’t have done that. He didn’t realise just how much stronger he was compared to her. Anka’s face shifted from anger into fear and anguish, and when he let her go, she took several steps away from him, cradling her hand to her chest. 

Robert squeezed his hands into fists and tried to shove them into his pockets but kept missing. His throat was dry. “Uh, sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“Moron!” She yelled back, her eyes welled with tears. “Fat pig! Brainless oaf!”

“I said I am sorry, okay?!”

“All my friends laughed at me when I told them I was dating you. Should have listened to them! Guess, I just felt fucking pity for someone like you! We are done! Forget my contacts!”

He still felt guilty, but that was immediately pushed down by fresh anger.

“Yeah, good fucking luck finding a guy who would even look in your direction!” Robert hissed.

Anka spat on the ground between them and ran down the street towards the district they lived in. Robert glared after her, hating the tremble that took hold of his limbs.

“That wasn’t terribly nice of you,” Mr Dubois stepped outside, dangling a heavy bunch of keys.

Rob tried to compose himself, which unfortunately sounded as if he sniffled. “She started it,” he grumbled and hated himself for saying that. What a childish excuse. The same one he hid behind last summer during that ugly business with Ehud. And here he was again: hurting someone, proving all the enforcers right. 

Mr Dubois chuckled to himself. “Ah, but what can be done? When you love a woman, you have to put up with eccentricities, and sometimes take the blame where you weren’t at fault.”

“You are divorced,” Robert glared at him and started folding the step ladder.

The shopkeeper snorted. “Sometimes, you don’t love her that much.”

Robert hauled the unused plastic and all the tools back to the storage room and grabbed his bag. It was not even noon yet, but Mr Dubois locked the door and pulled down the bars over it. “Go home, Rob. It’s not safe for a kid in the centre today.”

“You think they are going to start a full riot or something?”

“Hopefully not. But if they do… I can’t say I would blame them. Unless they decide to ransack my shop. Then, I would blame them very much.”

The ambient hum of people on the square got more agitated as Robert headed home. When loud bangs echoed through the streets (possibly something breaking, possibly gunfire), he started running.

Hershel returned at sunset. Nobody heard him enter because of the media screen blaring news at full volume while Moishe cussed at each manager shown on screen. Natan’s wife was sitting next to him, her eyes haunted, and trembled each time she caught a glimpse of Natan in the recordings, his face covered in blood. He was fine now, having received medical care, but was detained for the night as a ‘witness’. She didn’t believe that; Natan was one of the organisers of the strike, after all. Her daughter kept squealing and running up and down the corridor, chased after by breathless Nikolai who surprisingly volunteered to look after her while adults were busy. Robert, sitting on the couch and feeling out of place, kept catching glances of them and found it both ridiculous and somewhat endearing. His mom was sitting next to him, wailing into her interface while on comm with Aunt Ofra.

She was the one who first noticed Hershel in the doorway to the living room. A moment later, Natan’s daughter ran into him and fell back on her butt. He didn’t react. Nikolai dropped to his knees next to the toddler, mumbling something barely resembling words while making sure she was okay. Slowly, as if unused to expressing emotions, the child stopped laughing and started crying instead.

“Harry!” Golda dropped her interface and jumped to her feet, rushed to her son and threw her hands around him. “Oh, you are home! You are safe!”

Moishe cussed again and got up. “Were you one of those assholes who ordered to break the strike?!”

Mom turned around and waved one hand at him, angrily. “Shut up for once, Moishe!”

Hershel didn’t seem to hear them. He looked like a ghost. His short black hair was stuck to his scalp, unwashed for a week, he had dark bags under his eyes, and his face looked like a skull shrink-wrapped with skin. 

“They know,” he croaked in a hollow voice. 

Mom looked back at him and cupped his face in her hands. “Who? What do they know, dear?”

“They know it was me. I asked Stotska and Cestac to help me with the dump. Cestac refused. I think he went to the higher-ups when he heard the news. Stotska has a travel permit, she is boarding a railrunner as we speak.”

Natan’s wife got up, picked up her crying daughter and disappeared into her room. Moishe looked between his brother and the media screen and muted the news. “Wait, you leaked the records?”

Golda slowly shook her head, keeping her eyes on her son. “It will be alright, dear. You did a good thing. Even if they fire you, there will be plenty of people willing to hire you privately.”

“I signed an NDA, mom.” Hershel slowly looked down at her face. “It’s not about being fired. I’ve committed one of the worst corporate crimes.”

Their mother turned around to pick up her interface once again. “Ofra was contacting an attorney to help Natan. We can ask him to take your case. We will fight them. No judge would side with the mines after today!”

“No attorney would take this. NDA is NDA.”

“Shush!” There was something fierce in Golda’s eyes. She stood tall as if she didn’t spend the last few days crying. Her sons were being unjustly persecuted and she was ready to fight for them. Despite them being 24 and 27 years old. “You are tired, Harry. You are to eat dinner, and then you are to go to sleep. And in the morning, we will discuss this again. We are not giving up, nobody is giving up! And I’ll do everything in my strength to get you and Natan back home, where you belong.”

She wrapped her hands around Hershel’s elbow and led him into the kitchen past Nikolai, who was sitting silently near the doorframe, unsure what to do now that the toddler he was responsible for was gone. Moishe crashed back into a soft chair and scratched his scalp with both hands in frustration.

Robert slipped down the couch and stepped into the corridor too. “Come on,” he waved Nikolai over and went upstairs, back to their room. The younger boy followed, silently.

Once again, the lamp above his workbench was too dim to illuminate much else in the room, but neither of them turned on more lights. Robert started swiping all the trash from his projects for the engineering workshop into a storage container. Nikolai climbed onto his sofa and pulled his knees to his chin. They remained silent for several minutes.

“Will they send Hershel to the bad mines?” Nikolai finally whispered.

Robert sighed. “I guess. Probably, not even close to Port. I’ve heard there are experimental digs where the condemned disappear and their bodies are never found.”

Nikolai let out a quiet sob.

“It won’t be fast though,” Rob turned around, feeling like he should reassure him. “There will be this looong trial, and an even longer search for evidence. The words of just one guy are never enough.”

The younger boy perked up. “Evidence? Like…logs showing that he sent company data to the external network?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“We could delete it?”

Robert blinked. “Who is ‘we’?”

Nikolai’s cheeks grew pinker. His eyes were focused on the container on the chair. “...I?”

“You think you can hack into the company network?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, you’ve hacked into a company network before?!” Robert’s jaw dropped as Nikolai turned red as jello. 

“It wasn’t an essential system,” he mumbled. Despite acting guilty, he sounded almost smug. “And it wasn’t for the Northern mines, but surely it’s not that different…”

“When?”

“At New Year’s.”

Fucking shit. This no-longer-little guy hacked into some kind of company network and they didn’t find him in the following half a year. Meaning, he did it pretty well.

Impatient, Nikolai reached for his interface. “There are different ways with which to prod their firewall-”

“No, don’t do it now, what the fuck.” Robert waved his hands urgently. Nikolai blinked in confusion. “What if they track you to here? What if you make it worse? No, we need to ask the adults first. Like, mom said tomorrow they’ll have a serious talk, right? You can offer to do this tomorrow.”

“The people from the Northern mines have probably already hired someone to look all this stuff up.”

“Nah, their office is in lockdown, right? The news said the enforcers blocked employees from entering while they were looking through documents. Otherwise, the higher-ups would’ve sent enforcers our way already. We have a couple of days.”

Nikolai nodded slowly and put his interface down.

They didn’t stay up for much longer. As he tried to fall asleep, Robert pressed his face into the pillow. Horrible day. But it was only uphill from there, he told himself. Tomorrow, they will make a plan and things will get better.

In the morning, he woke up from his mother’s scream.