Restraint Protocol

Restraint Protocol: On the Management of Contagion

Then

Noor had chosen a pendant as her Amanat for her twelfth birthday. A state-issued disc of brushed steel no bigger than her thumbnail had rested against her sternum for long enough that Hamza waited for a glimpse of the circle of pale skin it concealed. She called him a week before their Nikkah, asking him not to bother with a ring.

“Do you think we can get something attached to my pendant instead?” 

The wedding ring he had bought was already burning a hole in his pocket when he agreed—a cheap sliver of gold he then pawned off in exchange for a lab-grown diamond. He simply waved a hand when Ali Bhai said that the diamond was impure, that it was worth less than the ring he was giving up. It twinkled at him now from the hollow of her neck, distracting him from the sickly yellow light that all jewelry emitted. The light from his own ring was steady as it tracked his heartrate, body temperature, location, only beginning to blink when it registered the electromagnetic signature of another body within six inches of his. He’d had the diamond fitted to her pendant that same afternoon—paid extra for the soldering, more than he could afford. The night she first wore it, the diamond caught the yellow light glowing steadily from her pendant, and turned it into something almost gold. Noor looked down at it, then at the matching flickering light from his ring. He never mentioned the wedding ring, but moved his Amanat to his left hand.

Her hand twitched towards him before she pulled it back. Hamza sat a foot away from her on the bed, the measurement automatic after so many years: the pendant rising and falling with her even breaths, catching the streetlight from the window. He let his left hand creep closer to her and, though his ring began to blink, her Amanat remained steady. Hamza couldn’t breathe. The ring warned him, growing warmer against his skin, as he tentatively brushed a fingertip over Noor’s bare shoulder. She shivered.

Hamza stumbled to his feet. In the kitchen, he carefully lifted the false back of the spice cabinet, swallowing a sneeze as paprika rose to meet him. His pulse hammered in his ears, against his skin, in his throat. If he checked his phone, there would be an alert for his elevated heart rate, cautioning sukoon, meditatecalmpeace. If he checked his phone, there would be no warning, his ring unable to flag Noor’s proximity without her Amanat reporting his own. Her pendant hadn’t blinked. It didn’t, or couldn’t, and he could feel the warmth simmering against the pad of his finger. Hamza dry-swallowed two tablets of Lagao from the locked case, his shaking thumb slipping off the dial twice before the latch clicked, and pulled his jacket on. 

He returned in the early hours of the morning to his wife pacing a hole in their threadbare rug, not flinching when she made to shove him for “scaring the shit out of me, Hamza, oh my god, is that blood—” and reached for her when she froze with her arms outstretched. Her words died when he stroked a knuckled over her jaw. Her eyes were wide, wider than he had ever seen them. His hand curved against her cheek, feverishly hot under his cold, cold skin, but the light from her pendant did not flicker. He only grinned at her confusion, tasting copper at the back of his teeth, and held up his left hand. 

“Someone owed me a favor,” he murmured. A tiny, dull diamond identical to hers winked in the lamp’s glow, and the light from his ring did not, not even when he lowered his mouth to hers. 

There was virtually no research on how impure stones could affect an Amanat’s accuracy.

#

Now

A wail tore apart the still morning air. Hamza dropped his spoon, black coffee splashing out and scalding the back of his thumb. He licked the raw skin, wondering bemusedly if that, too, was somehow forbidden in the Protocol, if there was something heinous and unforgivable about the act of soothing himself, when even a doctor couldn’t approach him without the barrier of a magnifying screen. Following the sound of muffled sobbing to the window, he peered through a slit in the blinds onto the street below. Such commotion wasn’t uncommon—living in the southern end of the city as they did, where rent was cheap and the apartments run-down enough to justify it—but he found himself drawn to such misery with morbid curiosity. Most of the city had fallen  into disrepair as its people despaired, until only DHA’s towering buildings and sprawling houses climbed higher and grew vaster, like ivy scaling concrete. Holding the dusty blinds still and holding in a sneeze, he didn’t open the window more than a crack—it had an affinity for popping out of its sill, and he wasn’t keen on drawing the attention of the two ivory-clad officers puffing their chests out. A woman knelt before them by a pothole, arms stretched out towards a little girl being wrenched backwards by the Nafazi. The child thrashed in their grip, yowling. 

“She doesn’t know any better, it was an accident, I swear!”

“The law is the law,” the officer intoned, and moved for his stun gun when the girl threw herself to the ground. 

The woman shrieked, hands tearing at her hijab. “No, please! Don’t hurt her! Amal,” her voice cracked, “go with them, please. They won’t—they will help you, mera bacha, please. Please—”

The girl sobbed. “Mama, please, please, Mama, I’m scared…”

“Please…” The mother’s voice broke again as she clasped her hands at her breast. “She was only trying to help, I tripped, she didn’t realise she wasn’t supposed to grab me, she’s only eight…” The officers were unmoved, the man waving his baton threateningly at the child until she got to her feet, shuddering violently. Her chubby cheeks were splotchy from exertion, upper lip shining with tears and snot. Small cuffs snapped unceremoniously around her wrists.

“Children over the age of seven are no longer subject to the parent-child exemption outlined in Clause 4 of Restraint Protocol.” The female officer’s voice was bare of any affect, her gaze clearly fixed somewhere over the woman’s head. Both officers half-carried the girl who was now limp, gasping for breath through her tears, and pushed her into a spotless white Vigo. 

Hamza didn’t bother to tug the window closed. The sound of weeping followed him as he picked his way through the clutter, past the bookshelf pushed to the side, exposing the entrance of the lab. Noor nodded her thanks when he placed her too-bitter coffee beside her workstation, focused on counting the drops of binding solution falling into a tray of powdered tablets. 

“Another one?” she asked after placing the tray into a small tablet press.

He snuck a sip of her coffee and grimaced. “A child.” Noor closed her eyes, muttering a prayer under her breath. She absentmindedly thumbed her pendant. The yellow light between her fingers was steady. Hamza gently tugged at a curl spilling over her forehead, because he could, and because he wanted to see if he still could, as he did every morning, reaching for her in the bleary haze of waking. Her hands shook only slightly as she reached for the centrifuge, drawing a glass vial of amber liquid to inspect it before replacing it. Her equipment was the only remnant of a life past, having turned her back on her prestigious Ministry family to marry him three years ago. Hamza had no family to speak of. He recalled a memory similar to what he had just witnessed. He had bounced from state-run foster homes to homes of government officials until he’d won a scholarship to the only university left with an engineering programme. 

Noor exhaled sharply, and her eyes were marginally clearer when she nodded at him. “It should be ready in time for tonight.”

“Third batch this week.”

“It’s getting worse in the old city.” She scrubbed a hand over her face. “I had three new referrals through the clinic. One of them is seven years old.” 

The problem with touch, according to the Nafazi, was that it remembered itself. Groups of them in ivory uniforms littered street corners and alleys, descending at the first sound of an alert, dragging adults and children alike behind them, never to be seen again. They named the trackers ‘Amanat,’ as though naming them something virtuous made the shackles easier to bear. It started with a warning: the Amanat’s light blinking with increasing intensity the more the wearer’s space was breached, growing hotter until it was almost burning when it registered the touch of another. It dissuaded most people, though many had faint pink scars under their Amanat, skin rubbed raw and blistering in warning. It was recent enough that there were only two generations that didn’t remember a life before the Protocol; generations that entered adolescence with steel pieces as much a part of them as their own flesh. There were reports of parents and grandparents ending up in hospitals that were already vomiting patients out onto the street; wrists or fingers or, in one quickly retracted report, a neck, rendered useless by nerve damage, fingertips blistering and peeling the more they tried to yank the metal off. 

The newest directive for Restraint Protocol had passed just three years ago, the last in a sequence of pandemic-response measures that had begun four decades prior, in the year the world learned a new relationship with its breath. It was after COVID, after the strains that followed in its wake, each one worse than the last, until soldiers were being pulled out of warzones under threat of being exposed to the virus, until half the world’s population turned to ashes, because it was too risky to bury a contaminated body. It had been reasonable, and reasonable people agreed with it in the beginning: contact was transmission; the body was a vector; maintaining the space between bodies was one’s duty as a citizen. The state had simply not deigned to repeal it once the emergency died down, years after the last global Code Black, even when reports started to filter in about people drowning themselves in scalding showers, bloated skin pink and shiny with burns, wanting for the touch of another. Population control, they called it. By the time anyone mustered the will to resist, the perpetual emptiness had caught up to all of them. They would step out onto the street, only for the steel to brand them before they had even begun to protest. It made it easier to identify the dissidents. 

Lagao started from a whisper on the street. It had been an ordinary word before the Protocol: touchapplyaffection. Through careful manipulation of the oxytocin pathway, it attempted to simulate the neurological event of being touched. Doctors prescribed it for the worst of the withdrawal—not too different from morphine, but not nearly as strong. Hardly a dent in a lifetime of deprivation. The ones who couldn’t cope—mahroom, they were called, bereftdepriveddenied—would stumble towards Hamza, their skin nearly translucent from cold and want, ghostly frames listing sideways in the dense Lahore smog. They would scrabble at the air till he handed them a pouch—not enough, never enough, not for this, and he would caution them to ration the doses, try to explain, but some of the truly desperate would lunge for him, swallowing the packets whole and undissolved, and he would watch the tremors turn to wracking sobs, their cries turn to shrieks, and he would force himself to turn. He marked each scream in a line on his arm, a scalpel steady in his hand. Other times, he would catch the bodies barreling towards him, praying that the signal jammers in his pocket wouldn’t fail him, and wrap his arms carefully around shoulders caving in on themselves. Some would cry themselves sick; others would immediately flinch and throw themselves back, looking around wildly for an ivory jacket. No one knew about the jammers on his person, but the lack of blinking Amanats was difficult to hide. He never mentioned where or how he got the jammers, and everyone knew not to ask, not even when he began coordinating with other Embracers to organise Blocks, not even when the new Directive pointedly outlined the punishment for the movement he had inadvertently begun.

Hamza had still been in university when he started.

#

Then

Embracers were rare, when Hamza had started five years prior. Uncoordinated thieves who smuggled Lagao out of pharmacies and hospitals, at the mercy of sympathetic nurses turning a blind eye to forged prescriptions. Hamza used to meet them down the street from his university, following the path of the sewer, the smell pungent even through the bandana tied over his nose. The thieves would pass over small baggies of drugs—weed or stronger, anything to dull the ache of something missing; Lagao less often. September was always the worst: seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds released from the surveillance of their own homes, ignoring the heating band of metal against their skin in favour of the warmth of another’s skin. Then the Nafazi would appear, and the university would let them in, because there was no other choice, and the sound of begging would echo long after thrashing bodies were dragged away. It was just a way to make money, at first. But word crept across his campus, and slowly through other universities: a boy with a black bandana, selling respite in sleights of hand. Students were growing more desperate by the day, and he found himself cutting prices, taking the losses, just to see their dead eyes come alive, even briefly. 

As months passed, everyone learned to fall into drugs instead of beds, and Hamza heard of a Ministry-born girl who could formulate anything anyone wanted. A girl with coffee-brown eyes sharper than her crooked smile; he started breaking into locked labs in the dead of night to watch her mix and measure and wish he could trace soft edges of her hands with the calluses of his own. Noor had heard of him too, if the knowing twinkle in her eyes was anything to go by—the orphan with a bleeding heart, willing to risk his scholarship and life to bring a few moments of reprieve to others, a boy no one would miss.

It didn’t take much longer for them to drop out of university, before the end of their third year. They couldn’t do what they needed to within the little bubble of buildings, not when they saw bodies littering the streets every time they stepped out. Noor cut all ties with her family right before he married her, and her grin was blinding when she found out they had disowned her. That was before their Nikkah, before the discovery they guarded with every breath. They maintained a careful distance when they stepped out of the decrepit apartment, never giving anyone an opportunity to realise that their Amanats did not blink when they should. The lights hadn’t wavered since the day he had welded the dirty diamonds onto them. 

It had just been the drugs, at first: a way to help others numb the pain, even if they themselves swore off it. Then he’d made the jammers. 

#

Sweat trickled down his temple. Hamza slid off his Amanat, leaving a band of pale skin on his left ring finger. Immediately, it started to blink, counting the seconds it was removed. He had less than a hundred seconds to confirm his suspicion. The vice clamped around the ring, the small machine’s red light blinking to match the yellow. Across the bench, Noor crossed her arms, anxiety radiating off her, palpable as the heat from the soldering iron. The diamond on his ring was clouded with nitrogen, blocking the electromagnetic pulses the Amanat relied on. 

“If you fry the transmitter, the Ministry will flag dead air,” Noor said, her eyes darting to the poorly reinforced door. 

“I’m not frying it.” Hamza picked up a brown-tinted stone, slightly larger than the one on their Amanats, forceps twitching slightly, and pressed it against the diamond on his ring. The yellow light stopped pulsing. 

“That’s not possible,” Noor whispered. A grin spread across his face, stretching underused muscles until it was manic, but Noor didn’t flinch at the wild gleam he was sure was in his eyes. 

It took over two months to figure out how to make the device itself. The difference between their jammers and those in illegal circulation was that theirs only faltered when registering another Amanat’s signal. Ali Bhai passed over dirty diamonds from discarded industrial stock in exchange for extra child-strength Lagao for his daughter, and Hamza tested stone after stone against his Amanat’s sensor. 

In the third week, the Ministry sent a compliance inspector to the building. Hamza heard the tell-tale whine of the electric vehicle backing up outside, and, within the space of a breath, he swept the stones from the workbench into an old coffee tin, snapped the lid shut, and shoved it beneath a stack of rusted equipment. Noor pushed the bookcase in front of the lab’s entrance, hurrying to the couch and pulling up a research paper on her laptop. Hamza was nauseous from the strain of keeping his breathing even, forcing a polite smile to his face when he swung the door open. The woman didn’t step inside, her nose wrinkling at the stained rug and uneven floorboards. She waved her sensor over their Amanats, and, seeing their signals come through uninterrupted, turned and left without a word. Hamza held Noor’s hair as she retched into the toilet. It was almost an hour before either of them moved from the bathroom floor, even though Hamza’s legs cramped from being curled up against the tub, and Noor’s back must have ached, but she burrowed her head in his chest, fingers fisted in his collar. 

“Say the word,” he murmured. He felt his wife shake her head. “Say the word, and we burn it all.”

“We can’t.” Her voice was hoarse. “It’s not about us.”

Noor tried offering her pendant, but he refused to risk it, even when the vice jammed and Hamza very nearly went over the allowed hundred seconds of not wearing his Amanat. Ninety seconds were all one needed to clean their Amanat in the state-issued cleaning vessel, with a ten-second buffer to put it back on. The cleaning vessel. He recalled the sonic vibrations in the small machine, the ripples in the solution, and the next time he took his ring off, he focused a miniature green laser on the dirty diamond and held it a foot away. 

His Amanat blinked out.

#

Now

Hamza drew the tray out from the tablet press, shaking pink pills out on the table so he could sort through them. They’d experimented with the dosage after dropping out, wanting it to do more than the placebo of pharma-strength Lagao, but not so strong as to debilitate, as it had them the first time they’d tested it. 

“How many tonight?” she asked. 

“Largest one yet. Over fifty.”

“And they’re all…” 

“All vetted.” Hamza blew his hair out of his eyes, hands slick with grease as he adjusted one of the larger jammers. “Amma Bina’s coming, too.” 

Noor lit up. “She’s recovered?” 

“Farrukh said the burn didn’t even scar much. Her wrist still hurts, I’m sure, but she puts a brave face on for her grandkids.” Noor grimaced, clearly remembering the old woman’s daughter the same as he was: struck across the face on the road, in front of her children, all because she’d dared to pull a child out from an uncovered manhole. She’d disappeared, of course, before they could take her. No one knew where she was, but Hamza had heard of a woman with orange hair encouraging the rumblings of another movement in Islamabad, Blocks spreading until there weren’t enough forces to hit all of them simultaneously. Hamza tucked the new tablets into pouches and the pouches into concealed pockets in the lining of his jacket. Noor reached out to him as he made to leave, her forefinger and thumb lightly circling his wrist. She pressed her forehead to his, and his eyes fell to where the chain disappeared under her shirt. 

“Come back to me,” she murmured. “Come home.” 

The Block was off Mcleod Road, in a warehouse for generators. Hamza entered through the workshop, past the smell of solder and old rubber. The jamming equipment ran from a repurposed signal router mounted on the ceiling, and he felt the moment it took over, the incessant, negligible buzz on his ring finger quieting as the metal cooled, muffling his Amanat’s own tracking, something the diamond couldn’t. Strip lights flickered in the main room, making him instinctively tense. By the door, a girl was having her hair braided by a woman who held a section of hair in her mouth, laughing as the girl squawked in indignation. Two men stood with their shoulders pressed together, speaking quietly about cricket—Hamza caught “the second innings” and “pathetic”—passing a cigarette back-and-forth. An old woman sat on a rickety chair with a child on her knee, arms folded around him, face turned into the top of his head. The child was eating a Sooper biscuit. He nodded a greeting when her gaze found him, still sharp despite the wrinkles and protruding eye bags. A circle of shiny pink skin peeked out from under her steel bangle. She curled that hand into a fist, raising it. He raised his own, thumping it against his left shoulder. 

Hamza took up the post by a folding table and began distributing. Zaviyar, quiet as always, took his month’s supply and tucked it into his breast pocket without counting. Huma pressed a folded five thousand into his hand; he pressed it back; she pressed it forward again, and they maintained the impasse for a moment before he gave up and pocketed it. He moved through the room and the room moved around him and the air was warm and soupy with the heat of too many bodies pressed too close together. Hamza caught Farrukh’s eye through the throng, the other Embracer gesturing to the back of the room.

The boy was by the back wall. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. His earring still shone, with none of the dullness that overtook the metal after a decade of wearing it. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his arms folded across his own chest, the earring dark—jammer running—and he was pressing his own forearms against his body . methodically for the pressure. 

“Murtaza?” Hamza crouched in front of him. The boy nodded. “I was told you’d be here. Are you with an adult?” 

“My khala dropped me.” He jutted his chin toward Amma Bina, now rocking her grandson. “That’s her neighbour.”

“Where’s your khala?”

“Getting chai from the dhaba down the street.” His arms tightened around himself. He wasn’t thin, exactly, but the gauntness of his cheeks spoke of the mahroom, for whom it took decades for the hollows to form. The Children were being born with that, now. “Do you have the medicine?”

“I do. But you’re a kid.” 

“I’m fourteen in March.”

“It’s June.” Hamza gave him a look. Murtaza’s face was void of emotion. “Does your khala know you take it?”

“Doctor told me to. But she—she couldn’t help. Said I needed to be strong. She was talking to Khala, and I don’t think they knew I was awake, I wasn’t ‘sposed to listen, but… Khala was crying. I think the doctor said I wasn’t going to live. I don’t think I will.” Hamza simply inclined his head and raised an arm, allowing the boy to tuck himself against his side as he pulled a dose out of a hidden seam in his pocket. 

With a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he was showing him how to read the dissolution time on the foil—“let it fully dissolve before you swallow, here, see”—when the strip lights went out.

A second of darkness. Then the emergency lamp, red.

Somewhere outside the room, a door slammed  open.

Hamza caught it first. The sound of a rattle, then a low, prolonged hiss by the crack in the doorway. He knew the cloyingly sweet smell, like rotting flowers: a sedative compound the Nafazi used for sealed-building operations, working rapidly in enclosed spaces and slower in the open air. He was moving before he fully registered it, one hand grabbing Murtaza’s collar and the other pushing people out of his way. Red light drenched the room. 

Someone screamed.

They pushed through the swell of bodies quickly. Weaving around those still moving and those lying still on the ground. Hamza didn’t let himself hesitate, not when Noor was waiting for him. You will save no one if you let yourself be killed. In his periphery, Farrukh hugged the child to him as he pushed Amma Bina to the hidden exit; a boy yanked a fainting girl out of the sightline of the doorway, dragging her to the back as well. Hamza went the other way.

The workshop owner had shown it to him a year ago: a vent, sealed with a slat of painted wood that looked permanent and wasn’t. His palm found it in the bloody half-dark, fingers feeling along the baseboard, and lifted the slat clean off once he found the groove, pushing Murtaza ahead. The space beyond was a gap between buildings, stinking of the wet garbage and the rain that had fallen earlier.

They came out into the alley, the Nafazi’s vehicles were somewhere on the opposite street. Murtaza jogged to keep up with Hamza. Something by his jaw reflected the streetlamps. Around them the city ran its late-night self: a truck loaded with fruit, its tarpaulin roped carelessly; a chai dhaba with three men at the counter; the overhead wires dense as ever against the orange sky. The city never paused for transgressors. 

#

Hamza knew something was wrong the moment his feet hit the landing. 

The apartment door was flush with the frame in a way that their door—which sat slightly crooked and required a particular angle—never was. Murtaza’s head knocked into his back when he abruptly stopped. A sound from inside, like something being dragged across the floor, shuffling, then nothing.

The door swung open when he pushed it. He had locked it before leaving.

The lab’s entrails were vomited outside the entrance. The centrifuge lay in pieces by the kitchen cabinet. Amber-filled vials had been swept from the workbench, the yellow-brown stain of them soaking the cheap grey rug Noor had salvaged. The false cabinet back had been torn out and thrown in the corner. Her notebooks—pocket-sized ones she used for formula notation, covered in both their handwritings, hers which ran from Urdu to English and back mid-sentence—had been riffled through, pages littering the ground. 

A silver chain lay by the workbench. No pendant. 

“Hamza bhai?”

He turned. Murtaza stood in the doorway. The Amanat at his ear was lit. It had been lit since they left the warehouse. Hamza looked at the chain in his hand, not remembering when he’d picked it up. He looked at the boy, cheeks still round with baby fat. 

“I’m sorry. They have my khala.” His face contorted, grief flashing across it, before it stiffened into blankness once again. The red dot of a rifle scope appeared on Hamza’s sternum from the window, and through the open door, Nafazi flooded in with their visors down, and one of them kicked him in the back of his knees and forced him to the ground beside the spilled amber of Noor’s work. 

The chain he kept closed in his fist, even when they cuffed him. They had to pry it loose one finger at a time.

#

He was in the cell for eleven days. He counted them by the slot of light from the vent above the door, which shifted by degrees and was the only moving thing in the room. They gave him food and no one spoke to him, and after the third day he stopped trying to calculate what was coming and began instead to think about the formula—running it from the beginning the way Noor had taught him, each compound and its ratio, the half-life, the dissolution curve—because it was the closest thing he had to her voice.

On the twelfth day, they brought him a mirror, a dull razor, and a clean shalwar kameez. White.

#

The stage was in front of the old High Court on Mall Road, still bearing its colonial columns and ornamental gardens. It wasn’t the original layout, not even close; the Court had been falling apart decades ago, and it was only with the passing of the first Directive that they reconstructed it in an echo of its former glory. A crowd had been assembled in rows on the lawn, from children to the elderly, carefully equidistant, with Nafazi at intervals along the perimeter. A microphone. A speaker system that amplified the procedural reading of charges—“manufacture and distribution of unlicensed biochemical compounds, violation of Directive 7, Clauses 2 through 9, deliberate interference with state-issued Amanat signals, organisation of prohibited contact gatherings, code-referenced as ‘Blocks’”—in the flat affect of someone reading from a screen. 

Noor was sitting at the back of the stage, hands bound before her. Her neck was bare, the first time he had ever seen it so, and Hamza couldn’t help but stare at the circle of pale skin under the hollow of her throat. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon with an expression he had only seen once before, on a night in university when they had swallowed the first tablets, and everything had spiralled from there.

He was brought to stand beside her. 

A Nafazi read the final clause. A man in civilian clothes approached with two items in a sealed plastic envelope, which he opened and presented: her pendant and his band, removed as evidence, returned for the execution as procedural courtesy. The state is not cruel. The state is efficient.

They placed his band back on his finger. It was cold and its light was yellow and it registered, as it always had, the precise measurements of his living body. It did not flicker. The man’s eyes shot up to meet his, widening only minutely before he swallowed and turned. 

Hamza looked at Noor, only to see her staring back. Her pendant was back at her throat, the diamond catching the late October sun, glowing gold against her skin. He had no words for what passed between them in that moment. They had never needed words. She knew by the way      way his body registered her presence before he could see her, how he could always sense every line of tension in her frame. Whatever they shared existed beyond words, beyond touch, somewhere the state could never reach, not even with their trackers. The crowd’s silence pressed in on him. 

Hamza reached for her hand. 

She grasped his in the middle, both of them moving on instinct, their fingers locked together in front of the assembled crowd and the columns and the cameras, her hand warm and familiar in the way that it had never been allowed to be.

Hamza felt it before he heard it. A shift in pressure, a collective intake of breath. Then the chant, rippling from the back of the crowd, reaching out, closer to him and Noor. 

“Haath thaamo, dewaar dhao!” Join your hands, bring down the wall.

Once, twice, thrice. Someone shouted over the microphone, but he couldn’t parse the words; there was the distinct buzz of a stun gun, a shout, a thud. Hamza opened his eyes. The perimeter had dissolved, and people were moving  towards each other with decades of deprivation lacing their hands. The Nafazi cordon shifted inwards, and the chant grew louder, louder, and someone was running onto the stage—

Hamza pulled Noor into his arms. She burrowed her head under his chin the same way she had done so many times in secret. He could feel it in the open air, in the glee as the chant crested and the crowd kept coming and the warmth moved between them like it always had, in the old way, the way that was older than any law that tried to control it.

Haath thaamo. Dewaar dhao.