Chapter 484 - 225: The People of Pittsburgh (Part 2)
He knew that in this battle for public opinion, speed was everything.
He had to seize the narrative and define the nature of this transfer before the FBI and the mainstream media could react.
He needed to make the workers understand this wasn’t a surrender under pressure, but a strategic move to keep the flame alive.
"Philadelphia."
Luna read the name aloud.
The workers around them crowded closer. They stared at the name, and the anger in their eyes gradually began to change.
They didn’t quite understand the intricacies of the situation, but the article explained everything.
If Luigi had been taken by the FBI, he would have been sent directly to Washington to face prosecution under federal anti-terrorism laws. His fate would have been sealed—lethal injection or rotting away in prison.
That was the capitalists’ and Washington bureaucrats’ turf. Luigi wouldn’t have stood a chance.
But Philadelphia was different.
The prosecutors there were Democrats, and the legal system operated under the state government’s framework.
As long as he remained in Pennsylvania, as long as he wasn’t labeled a terrorist, Luigi could survive.
"He stopped the FBI."
Louis pointed to a corner of the photo in the news alert, at the few livid-faced federal agents standing outside the police tape.
"Look at those guys in the trench coats. They’re furious."
The workers understood the power play behind the photograph.
Leo Wallace had gambled his own political future, staring down the barrels of federal agents’ guns, to forcibly take custody of Luigi and hand him over to the state police.
"He saved the kid’s life."
Luna sniffled, her voice trembling.
"I knew we picked the right man."
"His heart is with us."
This realization spread quickly through the crowd.
It was a class bond, one that had been tested and was now unbreakable.
Leo Wallace was their brother.
A brother who, at the critical moment, would defy Washington for their sake, stand before them, and shield them from the storm.
BEEP—
Louis’s phone rang.
It was the alarm, a reminder that their shift at the construction site was starting.
It was time.
Louis turned off the alarm and took a deep breath.
He raised his head and looked around at his fellow workers.
They were all wiping away tears in silence.
Grief is a source of strength, but wallowing in it makes you weak.
This was no time for weakness.
Luigi was inside for them, and Mayor Leo was still fighting the powers that be to protect him.
What could they do?
Break him out of jail? Hold a march?
No.
That would only make things harder for Leo and cheapen Luigi’s sacrifice.
There was only one thing they could do.
And that was to prove they were worth saving.
Louis stuffed his phone back into his pocket.
He took off his hard hat, slapped the dust off it forcefully, and then put it back on.
"Alright!"
Louis bellowed.
"Stop your crying!"
"What the hell good is crying?! Are tears going to get Luigi out?"
The workers looked up at their foreman.
"Now wipe those tears away!"
Louis pointed south, toward the Inland Port construction site, where the red lights of the tower cranes were blinking.
"That’s our battlefield."
"Let the people who look down on us, the people who want to see us crushed, take a good long look!"
"The workers of Pittsburgh aren’t a bunch of spineless crybabies!"
"If we can forge the best steel in this country, then we can build the best damn city in this country!"
Louis waved his arm.
"Let’s go!"
"Back to work!"
Luna looked at Louis, then wiped her tears away.
She felt a surge of strength rise up within her.
It was a power hotter and heavier than the grief she’d felt just moments before.
She thought of the mug of hot milk at home, of her husband still asleep in bed, of the paycheck that was deposited on time every single month.
This was her life.
She couldn’t throw this life away.
"Let’s go."
"Shift’s starting."
The crowd began to move.
A thousand workers turned as one, their backs to the police station, their faces toward the construction site.
Their steps were uniform and heavy. The sound of their boots on the wet pavement was like a rising thunder.
In a second-floor window of the police station building, Director Everett Carter stood behind the curtain, watching the scene unfold.
He watched the crowd recede like the tide, disciplined and orderly, and felt a sense of shock that rose from the soles of his feet.
He’d seen countless rallies.
They usually ended in tear gas, batons, and a field of debris.
But he had never seen a sight like this.
For this crowd, after experiencing the arrest of a top wanted man and enduring a massive emotional shock, to be so restrained... to so quickly channel that emotion into productivity...
It was a terrifying display of solidarity.
"Mr. Mayor," Carter murmured to himself.
’What kind of monster have you created?’
Carter watched the dust rise from the distant construction site, where thousands of machines now roared to life and tens of thousands of tons of materials were in motion.
For the past few decades, bureaucrats like him and politicians like Carter Wright had arrogantly believed that they ruled this city—that the lines they drew on blueprints were what gave it life.
They thought a city was just piles of steel and concrete, a complex network of subterranean pipes, a GDP figure on a piece of paper.
They thought that as long as the buildings were tall enough and the roads wide enough, the city would be great.
But steel is cold, and concrete is lifeless.
Without these people in grease-stained coveralls, wrenches and hard hats in hand, to give them form—without their sweat to water the foundations—all of it would forever be nothing more than a pile of construction debris.
There is no such thing as a great city.
The walls of Babylon have long since crumbled; Rome’s Colosseum is now just a broken shell.
What makes those names echo through history was never the stone, but the people who lived there, struggled there, roared for their survival, and built for their future.
It is the will of the people that holds up the city’s skyline.
It is the people’s endurance and their eventual outburst that forges a city’s soul.
Leo Wallace didn’t create anything new.
He just did something none of his predecessors had done.
He gave the city back to its builders.
He made these people understand that they weren’t just tenants on Morganfield’s turf, nor were they mere statistics in a City Hall report.
They were the owners.
And because they were the owners, they showed restraint.
Because they were the owners, they wouldn’t burn down their own home just to vent their anger.
They swallowed their anger and turned their grief into fuel.
They weren’t working for the Mayor.
They were building a new Jerusalem for themselves.
Carter took a deep breath, feeling an unprecedented sense of awe.
’Perhaps this city really can be great again.’
’Because it belongs to the crowd below, to the people now marching forward in silence.’