Friday Evening, February 28, 2025 (Return to Present)

The memory dissolves. Not gently.

The phone buzzes and Nisha is back in the dorm room, back in the chair, back to the weight of 1.2 million eyes.

Alexis is blocks away, at the activist collective's communal apartment. She's been there since noon, helping prepare for tomorrow's protest. Sign-making, route coordination, legal observer training. The kind of work that keeps hands busy and mind focused.

The knock is ordinary. Three quick taps. Nothing dramatic. It still detonates her chest.

Chelsea looks up from the other bed. "You expecting someone?"

"No."

Another knock. The peephole shows two figures in the hallway, coats, neutral faces. A badge appears, tilted up.

"Ms. Patel?" the taller one says through the door. Calm, practiced. "We're with the FBI. We'd like to ask you a few questions. It's a voluntary interview."

Nisha texts her:

nisha_d:

they're here. feds at my door.

nisha_d:

they're here. feds at my door.

they're here. feds at my door.

She hits send before she can think about what sending it means. Before she can calculate the liability of admission.

Alexis responds instantly—always alert, always watching her phone during actions and pre-actions, already half-expecting something like this:

alexis:

do NOT open the door without a lawyer

alexis:

do NOT open the door without a lawyer

do NOT open the door without a lawyer

Then, rapid-fire:

alexis:

call the legal hotline. 555-ACLU-NOW. do it now

alexis:

i'm coming to you. 15 minutes max.

alexis:

call the legal hotline. 555-ACLU-NOW. do it now

call the legal hotline. 555-ACLU-NOW. do it now

alexis:

i'm coming to you. 15 minutes max.

i'm coming to you. 15 minutes max.

But Alexis can't be there in 15 minutes. Alexis can be there in 20, maybe 25 if traffic on the arterial is clear. And the FBI agents are here now, patient on the other side of the door, waiting for the choice Nisha hasn't made yet.

Nisha stares at the phone. Alexis's last message glows:

alexis:

you are not alone. remember that.

alexis:

you are not alone. remember that.

you are not alone. remember that.

But alone is exactly what she is right now. Dorm room. The knock still echoing. The deadbolt under her hand. No one except a girlfriend blocks away and two federal agents who say it's voluntary.

The phone screen fills with notifications. Trending in her city. Mentions hissing. Half the campus angry for opposite reasons.

The Analytics tile previews enough to make her stomach drop: 187,000 retweets. 1.2M likes. Trending #3 nationally. She does not tap it open. She does not want to see which line did it.

Was it the part about tomorrow–"we show up"–or saying Trump and Palestine in the same breath? The way she named equal rights without hedging? She'd tossed in a meme about Trump she'd laughed at earlier–a stupid cartoon, a caption that felt harmless at the time. Was it the meme?

Whatever it was, it caught, and then it climbed, and now it's theirs as much as it was hers.

She is afraid to look at her own tweet. As if opening it will make the knock she hasn't heard yet arrive faster.

She thinks of how the words felt in her throat before they were words. How they burned a little. How they felt like the beginning of a bruise and also like a match.

Nisha rests her forehead against the door for a second. The wood is cool. The building hums. She can hear one of them shift their weight on the other side. Patient. Professional.

What brought them here? Not 1.2 million strangers. Not by itself. A word? A pairing of words? The way velocity turns speech into threat in someone else's inbox? The meme? She tries to remember the exact sentence that felt like a match.

She refuses to open the app and find out.

Options line up in her mind, clean as bullet points and nothing like that in her body:

Her hand finds the deadbolt and stays there, not turning. She doesn't know which choice is brave and which is stupid and which is both.

From the hallway: "Ms. Patel?" Softer now. "Up to you."

Nisha closes her eyes. The tweet is still out there, multiplying in other people's screens. The protest is tomorrow either way.

Her phone buzzes again. She doesn't look.

Her hand on the latch. The choices, all at once.

She inhales.

And—