The trouble starts after the mutual aid open table, when the anarchist goes off about Russia and the communist says none of that happened except when it was good. Inevitably “maybe they were right to put anarchists up against the wall” and whoa whoa take five restorative justice accountability session.

The communist leaves angrier at herself than anyone. She feared for a second the anarchist would take the fall: her skin’s a shade darker. Would’ve had to step in and defend her, point out who started it. And maybe that would’ve been a less humiliating way to get banned from giving mutual aid. Now she can only receive. Hooray for empowering trans women.

Two months later, the communist comes back, haggard and hungry. Her hair is in knots. The muscle under her washed-out band tee refuses to waste away, but only just. She stands upright and, as a matter of personal principle, looks everyone in the eye. The anarchist serves her soup grown in her own garden.

They don’t speak that day, or for half a year, until the anarchist attends a queer self-defense workshop: the communist says “put your hand here,” and the anarchist learns to force unwitting opponents on their back. She cracks wise about defending herself from the communist, and the communist looks at her with sudden dullness, says, devoid of affect or intent, that it would take years of effort for the anarchist to survive one minute. The anarchist tries to focus on class.

At a punk show the communist says something about ‘fake metal’ and that’s what makes the anarchist hit the table and ask what her fucking problem is. The communist smiles for the first time, sly, knowing. Before the anarchist can hate that, the horizontal nonhierarchical mutualist de facto leader tells them to take it away from the harm redux handout table. They leave in the same direction.

The communist has drugs. The anarchist is already high. The communist would’ve liked to go pro in MMA, if not for the being transgender. The anarchist was hoping to farm forever but the way things are going, the communist doesn’t want to think about the way things are going so she kisses her neck until the anarchist stops them from grinding crotches. The communist says what the fuck was that about, then: the anarchist says she’s horny, she just doesn’t like sex. She likes getting hurt.

The communist grabs her hard by the jaw, pulls her down to level. Is she serious about that? Mmmmfhhfmmh. Knee straight up the solar plexus. The anarchist bounces off the wall. Trapped air stifles in her lungs, increasing in PSI like shaken soda. Sun in her eyes, shadow of the communist moving behind her, punch to the liver, doesn’t even hurt. So why is she on the floor? She can’t scream, her nervous system is so overloaded. She looks up at the communist, head cocked, unmoving, and feels inexplicably avenged.

From there to the car before either can give in to their worst instincts. Only in the apartment does the anarchist realize she’s locked in with a stranger who said she’d like to kill her. She almost pisses herself.

Two almost-gentle touches from the communist and the anarchist is on the floor, how did she do that? The kindness doesn’t last. For too long the communist feared she would lose herself in the moment: in fact it turns out to be perversely, satisfyingly boring. Kill resistance here, move hands out of the way, elbow skin open there. When she’s done her knuckles throb and her mind is still as a lake. She rests on the anarchist’s chest, listening to the unsteady rags of her breath, and purrs.

Morning is a shower and phones buzzing with news of immigrant sweeps. The communist decides to go down fighting rather than get deported. The anarchist figures pretty soon they’ll find an excuse to sweep up Asians too.

A warehouse is not the most defensible structure, not even with all the furniture inside turned to barricades: too many flimsy pull-down garage doors. Still, there’s plenty of space to house a couple dozen people with their loose mattresses, food, water, ammunition and cigarettes.

The anarchist is the first to chance peeking over the barricades, armed with her own leve-action.  Nine milimeters brush her bangs. She replies with her own shot, kneels back down, reeking of smoke, with a mad first-kill smile. The communist licks her lips and drags her away for a beatdown: it’s all she can do to hold back, keep her comrade fighting-fit. Woozy and drunk on her own blood, the anarchist says she wants more, and the communist asks how much, and the anarchist says how much and the communist goes to splash water on her face.

Police turns to National Guard. They only don’t bomb the warehouse because it’s close to the airport. They do send in tanks, for show at first, stoppered at the fences, but the threat is clear: there’s no leaving. The communist isn’t sure what she would leave for anyway. In the moment’s trepidation, the anarchist holds her hand. The communist smells the anarchist’s hair, and an awful dark twists inside her.

The walls come down one bright, shockingly dry summer morning. Yelling and fire and a comrade jumpscaring backwards through a side door, eyes crystal-wide fixed on the ceiling, one big hole in the forehead. The communist says what they both always already knew: their personal investment won’t turn the tide. The anarchist tries to go to the barricade anyway, but the communist holds her tight to the floor until the fight leaves her, until the sobs subside and she looks up with a dead man's eyes and says yeah, okay, yeah, I’m ready.

In the unlit bathrooms (who’s pissing at a time like this?), the communist knocks the anarchist’s head into the impossibly intact mirror. No concussion, not yet. She wants lucidity for this: locking the anarchist’s shoulder behind her back, twisting. The anarchist taps out on instinct. The communist ignores her. There is a pop like an elastic band and the communist shudders with the release of decades. The anarchist says it doesn’t even hurt and the communist says that’s the adrenaline, but here: holding her victim by the ruined arm, the communist brings her down on her knee, until she cries, until she begs to stop, until she pukes. A rib cracks, which the communist honestly hadn’t expected.

The communist hurls the anarchist to the floor, a wrecked ball, and puts all her weight on her knee, levers her foot away from gravity. ACL and meniscus compound tear: plus the shoulder, a year minimum just to heal, then six months of physical therapy. As if. The communist slips behind the anarchist’s head, and puts her in a chokehold.

The last thing the anarchist feels is the smile of the communist counting ten. The communist holds on for fifty more Mississippi, then inherits the anarchist’s gun. The only exit out of the bathroom glows warm orange. She is a terrible shot though an excellent runner. In the chaos she might yet have a chance to slip unnoticed, and anyway there is no one to hold her accountable for teamkilling. She decides, instead, to do what she does best: test her fighting chances.