A Massive Movement

The President sat forward in his chair, tie loosened, eyes on the central feed. “How did this get so out of hand?” he snapped. “Was anybody tracking it? I’m hearing it’s even nudging markets. Why am I just now getting this?”

He’d watched other crowds overseas chant themselves into revolutions that started with language not far from Joshua’s; every time, the people in his chair got blamed for not seeing it coming.

The Vice President shifted in his seat, smoothing his jacket. “Mr. President, we were monitoring it,” he said. “But Senator Thompson—he chairs the Subcommittee on Domestic Security—didn’t treat it as a high priority. And FDTA seems to have underestimated the scope. They slotted it under ‘nonviolent influence operations’ while they chased three harder threats.”

The Secretary of State cut in. “We raised flags months ago. Intelligence labeled it noise. Low threat. They said it would burn out on its own. I think some just wanted it to be one of the rare good stories we could ignore without consequence.”

The President’s gaze finally left the screens and settled on them. “This is not the time for finger-pointing,” he said, voice low and tight. “Thompson was supposed to have eyes on this. FDTA was supposed to grade the threat. Both missed the pace of it, and that lands on me if this goes sideways.”

He jabbed a button on the phone console. “Get Thompson in here. If he’s in a meeting, pull him out and walk him into the Oval.”

The Vice President nodded quickly. “We need to rethink our posture, sir. The fact that he’s cleaning up messes we left is exactly why people trust him. We step up efforts to undercut Steel’s credibility before someone more cynical rides his wave into something uglier. Especially on the media front.”

“Your view?” the President asked, looking at the Secretary of State.

“Agreed,” the Secretary said. “We need coordination—State, intel, domestic agencies. One line. No more freelancing. The goal is clear: we keep this from tipping into a movement that neither he nor we can control.”

The President’s expression didn’t soften. “From now on, I want daily updates on this,” he said. “We are past the stage of letting it ‘fizzle.’ This isn’t just optics. If those crowds sour and someone gets hurt, it’s a national security problem and my name on the chyron. And keep this away from the Republicans. The last thing I need is them turning it into a campaign weapon.” He exhaled through his nose. “Loop in Bureau of International Affairs. I’ll deal with Thompson.”

The door opened and Chief of Staff O’Brien stepped in, holding it for Director Harrison from FDTA. Harrison gave a brief nod around the room before facing the President. “Sir. Morning. I’m guessing this is about the Steel situation.”

“We were just talking about you, Harrison,” the President said. “Who’s the screwup at FDTA who let this thing explode on us?”

“My apologies, Mr. President,” Harrison replied. “We were brought in months back. At the time it looked like a service convoy with a charismatic front man—high sympathy, low lethality. Frankly, a lot of what they’re doing is patching holes we should’ve fixed years ago.”

“Who’s doing the patching?”

“Senator Thompson, sir.” Harrison sighed dramatically, then continued as if he hadn’t just thrown a senator under the bus. “But our job is to get there before something like this turns. Large, emotionally charged crowds, a single trusted voice, cross-border traction—that’s exactly what the Domestic Stability Act and the Emergency Courts were built around. They let us move faster than the regular system when pressure starts to look like this. Our pattern now—arrest early or get burned later.”

“Richard Thompson?” the President said. “Big guy, ego the size of Jersey, thinks the world runs on his schedule?”

“I, um… can’t speak to his ego, sir,” Harrison said. “But that sounds about right.”

“Damn.”

The meeting broke not long after, aides peeling off with new assignments and tight faces. The President stayed in his chair for a moment, eyes back on the image of the Cairo rally—thousands of people on their feet, chanting a name that wasn’t his. He didn’t envy Steel the adoration; he feared the vacuum it pointed to, the sense that people trusted a man with a van more than the institutions he was sworn to protect.

* * * * *

In newsrooms across the country, producers were reacting in real time. Graphics teams built lower thirds with STEEL MOVEMENT stamped in red. Panels were booked. Old clips dug out of archives.

Some anchors framed Joshua as a danger—too much influence, too fast, on foreign soil. Others tried to turn him into a curiosity. In the middle of it, Lisa Carter’s segments cut a different line. Her packages carried on-the-ground footage, interviews with people whose lives had actually been touched by the work, and fewer adjectives.

“Despite the government’s efforts, Joshua Steel’s message of peace and unity is still finding an audience,” she said in one report, looking straight into the camera. Her tone was level, more like a court record than a sermon, as clips of the Cairo crowd rolled over her voice.

* * * * *

The late afternoon sun fell low over Cairo, turning the windows into dim mirrors. Inside a small meeting room off the main hall, the inner circle sat scattered around a scarred table. Jude paced the length of the room, fingers drumming against his thigh, frustration written clear on his face.

“We’re pushing too hard, too fast,” he said finally. “Too many irons in the fire. We’re spread across three, four continents now. Funding’s fine—money’s pouring in. Manpower’s the problem.”

Joshua sat near the end of the table, hands folded, watching him. “We knew it wasn’t going to stay easy,” he said. His tone was calm, not dismissive.

Andy nodded. “Every movement hits this kind of pressure,” he said. “What we have is the way we hold together.”

“I’m not arguing the slogan,” Jude shot back. “But ‘Kumbaya’ doesn’t help when volunteers are stuck in transit and centers in Kansas or Newport are dark for a week. Or when they’re getting arrested and we don’t have anyone to cover them.”

The room went quiet. Eyes dropped to the tabletop, to notebooks, to phones that weren’t being checked. No one rushed to agree with Jude, but no one told him he was wrong either.

Emily shifted in her chair, thumb worrying the edge of her notebook. “He’s got a point,” she said. “We can’t keep asking the same fifty people to hold up the whole thing. Maybe we slow the expansion a notch. Give some crews time to breathe before we add another continent.”

Joshua rubbed at the bridge of his nose, feeling the grit there. For a second the idea of hitting pause tugged at him—shorter lists, fewer fires, one city at a time again. Then he pictured the emails he’d been reading at two in the morning, the messages from places already hanging by a thread.

“If we slow now, the places that already reached out don’t get what they were promised,” he said. His tone stayed calm, but there was an edge under it. “We’ll lose people we haven’t even met yet. We’ll regroup on the fly—rotate crews, pull in more local help. It’ll hurt, but pulling back hurts too. Momentum matters.”

Jude let out a short, humorless laugh. “That’s easy to say when you’re the one everyone’s running toward,” he said. “You’re not the one covering three shifts because the rota fell apart.”

He waited a beat, saw nothing coming, then shook his head and headed for the door. It closed harder than it needed to.

“We’re all human,” Joshua said into the silence. “There’s no shame in saying when something feels heavy. He’ll circle back.”

No one argued. A chair shifted. A pen clicked twice. Outside the window, the city carried on in a muffled wash.

The next evening, the heat had bled out of the air. The group gathered in a quiet corner of their building’s courtyard, a few floor lamps throwing soft light against chipped walls. The day’s meetings and errands sat on them as a kind of dull weight.

Joshua sat cross-legged on a mat, eyes closed, breathing slow. Around him, the others settled where they could—steps, plastic chairs, low walls—each caught up in their own loop of thought.

“Remember,” Joshua said after a while, opening his eyes, “the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Tad, sitting a few feet away with his back to the wall, gave a small nod. “You’ve steered a lot of us straight, Joshua,” he said. “We know it’s rough in spots. But we’ve got good people. A lot of them.”

Jude scratched at his jaw, then cleared his throat. “And… yeah,” he added. “About yesterday. I was hot. Didn’t handle it great.”

Joshua didn’t make a speech. He just dipped his chin once, accepting it. The circle fell into a quiet that felt less strained than the night before. Someone flipped open a worn book. Someone else rubbed at their eyes, half-asleep already. These late hours were the only time no one needed anything from them.

As the sky darkened fully, Joshua let his gaze travel around the group. “We’re being led by more than just our own ideas,” he said. “Let’s try to carry that with us into whatever comes next.”

A few eyes met his and held. Nobody claimed to understand exactly what he meant, but no one pushed it away either.

By late September, the morning light came in softer. In the courtyard, boxes and duffel bags lined the walls, tagged for different vans. Volunteers moved in and out of the building with clipboards and thermoses, the air loud with last-minute questions and the rumble of idling engines.

Joshua stood in the middle of it, checking off items as people reported in. When a small crowd of local volunteers gathered near the gate to say goodbye, he stepped toward them.

“You’ve already pushed things loose here—real ripples, even if they’re hard to see from inside the city,” he said, voice raised just enough to carry. “Mumbai’s next. People there have been telling us about things that should never be happening, and how badly they need a hand.”

Andy, standing at his side with a duffel strap over his shoulder, glanced back toward the building. “Feels like we just got our feet under us here,” he said. “Part of me wants to stay. But the advance team in Mumbai says they’re ready.”

As the last cases were loaded, some of the team paused to look past the gate at the street and the city beyond it—mosque domes, satellite dishes, laundry lines, all layered together. Then the doors slid shut, latches clanked, and the vans rolled toward the airport.

About ninety minutes after they cleared the gate, their plane lifted off from Cairo International, engines humming steady as it banked east toward the next city waiting.