On the fourth- or was it fifth?- day of the riots that the news was carefully not calling a revolution, she had to leave the flat for food.

She cautiously left the apartment building, glancing furtively down each alley and side-street as she walked to the supermarket. The idiot eyes that were broken windows stared at her as she scuttled from cover to cover and the shops drooled glass from the slack jaws of their product displays; she caught gut-wrenching whiffs of tear gas from time to time, and once some kids in hoodies, the oldest of whom couldn’t have been more than fourteen, raced past her, shouting about “…da Feds, fam, innit!”

Fires burned out of eyeshot, plumes of thick, black smoke rising above the city, but there were no sirens. An unmarked helicopter thwacked overhead once, but it was heading south, towards the coast.

After two or three hours, she returned to the flat with bread, cheese, bottles of water- and a nice pair of trainers that she found. After all, she didn’t break the window…