Dragonfly

Soon, the clattering stopped. The women held their breath and closed their eyes, as had been their practice for the last six weeks. Jo assured them that the hall was soundproof, but it didn’t stop them from worrying they’d be overheard. In front of her were thirty weary women. Some black, some lesbians, some disabled, some poor. All women. They crept to the side of the hall, sticks in hand, and returned them to the store cupboard.

“They’re slow.” Katya spoke with her back to Jo, arms folded. She surveyed the room, as was her habit. She’d served in the SAS for many years before The Reconstitution began.

“And I’m short.” Jo looked up at Katya as she spoke, but most of the women did. Part of the reason the army selected Katya in the first place was her intimidating stature.

“If you’re lucky, short means fast. You're lucky.” She turned to Jo to smile, but thought better of it; she fixed her gaze once more on the women before her. “Slow will get you killed.” She left before Jo could respond.

They were slow; fear is paralytic. Every one of them had something meaningful to lose: it’s exactly why they were there. They all held threatening positions in society before everything began to crumble. Katya had executed dozens of successful missions. Jo had held the title of the world’s greatest female MMA fighter. Most of the women had zero combat experience when they arrived at the loft, but all posed some threat to the recon. They were women who, as Double E said, had "forgotten their place". All had families, many had children.

As long as the women remained alive, their families would be at risk. The resistance concealed them with new identities, relocating the women to the loft. There were other networks training women in similar positions, of course. Some trained men, but nobody could know if they were infiltrators. Since most of them didn’t have families, they had nothing to lose. Men with bombs strapped to their chests had already destroyed two units. Female-only factions protected women when the shit rolled downhill. Double E targeted men in similar ways, of course: black men, poor men, disabled men. But they knew their dwindling significance in society remained more valuable than women's.

Power is dangerous.

It started with the Equitable Eight (known colloquially as Double E). Eight rich white men with a single goal: destroy all progress made by marginalised groups. The manifesto was much more flowery, of course, but that was the crux of the thing. They felt threatened by the prioritisation of those who needed it most. White men, they said, were scapegoats for the world's ills. Their speeches were powerful. Four of the men had PhDs in psychology and communication; they knew exactly what to say and how to say it. As far as the world knew, these were ordinary, hardworking men. Working-class themselves, they said. They monstered the actual working class, depicting them as workshy layabouts.

I could try to explain how it all happened, but even I can’t wrap my head around it. It crept like a weed at first. I thought it wouldn’t go anywhere. And then, before I knew it, we were under martial law. Most of the information about their capture of the government was never uncovered. Katya did her best, but these were dangerous men with every resource in the world at their disposal. One day, the prime minister delivered a speech on the TV. The next, Double E had replaced him. Katya knew about the incoming shit long before the rest of us, and it’s because of her that these networks exist at all.

“Listen up.”

The women turned to Katya with visible apprehension. She was a quiet woman, speaking only when imperative, and rarely delivered good news.

“I have intel, and it’s not good. They’ve breached the Yorkshire border.”

Audible gasps echoed around them. Two women fell to the floor, wailing; they'd relocated their children - along with my mother - on the moors. She’d been instrumental in establishing feminist consciousness-raising groups in the seventies. We represented dissent. I left her with the children not knowing if I’d ever see her again. She pinned her dragonfly brooch to my chest and recited Dylan Thomas. That's my mum.

And then I went to war.

Up until now, there’d been a stronghold moving upwards from the southern border of Sheffield. It seemed as though the class divide would be strong enough that we could retain control of the north. That was until small groups of working-class Tories began to recruit. When they infiltrated the border force, it was too late to stop it. It didn’t even make sense; Double E wasn’t politically right-wing. They held extreme ideas about how to benefit the people of the Left. By which I mean, the people of the Left who looked like them. I suppose they shared a common goal in that both groups sought sympathy for the plight of white men.

Sunderland was by far the strongest pocket of resistance in the UK; that's why we opened the loft there. There hadn’t been a single case of infiltration anywhere in Sunderland since the recon began.

“I’m travelling to the border, and I’m taking the strongest women with me.”

Chatter erupted as women began to scramble to insist that they weren’t ready.

“Look, our people are dying. We are the last hope that they have. Depressing as that may be, it doesn’t change the reality. Are you going to suck it the fuck up or are you going to let them murder your children while they sleep? I buried four tiny bodies yesterday, and I will not do it again.”

The women were silent.

I thought about stepping in to soften the blow, but it wouldn’t help. Would it help anyone to shield them from the reality we lived in? Children are the weakness of mothers. It amuses me that those men failed to understand how that works. If you take them, you can make a mother pull off her own skin in the protection of them, should you desire it. If you don’t have them when you make your threats, you had better hide.

It was this that caused every one of those women to return to the store cupboard and reach for her weapon.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Katya’s glare bore down on me.

“Don’t do this, K. You said it yourself: you need the strongest women. I wasn’t training women in self-defence all these years for no reason, was I?”

“I need you safe. You stay here; that’s final.”

We were best friends, but I couldn't take this. “The fuck it is.”

“This isn’t a debate.” Katya turned to assemble the women.

I doubled down. “Those raids…”

She stopped without facing me.

“The children you buried. Which faction?”

Her head dropped as if the only thing holding it up had collapsed. “Delta.”

I didn’t hear anything she said after that. Before that moment, I didn’t know silence could be so loud. The world grew dark and small around me. I looked down at my hands as Katya placed a bloodstained heart-shaped locket into my palm. My mother was dead. Katya didn’t want to tell me because she had one rule: never obstruct vengeance. Not that it mattered; Double E themselves couldn’t have stopped me from climbing into that van. None of us had prepared ourselves for what we saw at the border, now situated north of the city centre. The resistance had fallen back, maintaining control of everything north of the cathedral. The church became a makeshift command centre. The Peace Gardens held the bodies of the dead - theirs and ours - and City Hall housed enemy troops.

A weathered man leant on a burned-out Ford Fiesta, grinning as he blew smoke out of his nose.

“Mick.” She greeted him with a nod. “What’s the status here?”

“The status, dear Katya, is why I am smiling.”

“Any minute now you’ll stop wasting my time and elaborate.”

“Is she always like this?” He looked at me as he drew once again on his cigarette.

I didn’t answer.

“The resistance has an uprising.” Mick pushed out his chest as he adjusted his trousers.

“I’m struggling to see how this is a good thing.”

“We’ve been pissing about on the defence for too long, mate. It’s time we took offensive action. Time we pushed those southern bastards back where they fucking came from.”

“And who, exactly, is in charge of this uprising?”

“I have a name and some stories. Intel’s your job; I only hear the rumours.”

“I’ve only been away for five days.”

“Yeah, well, the word is that one of the raids touched a nerve. More kids got killed and our operative went rogue. Took about thirty seconds for every fucker else to get on board. Dead kids’ll do that, love.”

“Do I look like the kind of woman you get to call love? Try that again and I’ll tell your ‘comrades’ exactly how much money was in your bank before this shit went down. How long do you think you’ll last here, Mickey boy?”

Mick rose from his lounging position. “They call her the Dragonfly.”

I stopped breathing.

“She’s marching them down to Double E’s HQ as we speak. And not in armoured vehicles. They’ve mown down everything in their way. Last I heard they’d left Cambridge in a bloody mess.”

I reached into my jacket and squeezed the locket.

“They found a way to access terrestrial TV. Bodger had an old big-back in his garage. Stick a coat hanger in it and it works a treat. I mean, not high-def or anything but it works just fine for what we need. Fuck knows how they did it, but we’ve had front row seats to the lot. She’s only a tiny thing, that Dragonfly, but she’s leading that fucking army into war, mate.”

I didn’t have to see it to know. I always knew. Even before the war, I knew my mother would die in battle. She’d seen things in her life that nobody should see. Corrective gang rapes. Battered women. Mutilated mothers. The fire in my mother had burned since before I was born.

Mick’s radio sparked into life. News broke that another broadcast was airing from inside the walls of London. Even that far south, we had pockets of resistance relaying information to the north. Mick pulled an old TV out of the back of the car and twisted the dial until the image cleared, and there she was. Flanked by soldiers of the resistance, my mother lifted a bag off the head of a frightened man. He looked so small now, next to her. A veritable, light-radiating giant. His uniform told me he was Double E. The response from the crowd told me he was the last.

Her face appeared, obscured somewhat by the poor picture quality, and she moved to speak to the congregation. Predictably mum, she recited poetry, barely audible over the din of the roaring crowd. Like that, it seemed more poignant, somehow.

Dragonflies were as common as sunlight...

...hovering in their own days…

...the veins in a dragonfly’s wings were made of light…

...there will be no one to remember us...

I knew it, of course. Merwin. She'd read it to me a thousand times, each reading more meaningful than the last as she clutched at her chest.

A wall of ageing women wearing dragonfly brooches emerged from the crowd and raised their fists in solidarity. I recalled the line of Thomas my mother had recited before I left.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I watched as they raged and their light filled the sky. My mother, the dragonfly.

Now we’ll remember them.