The Song Under the Strike

After a government strike video turns Mara Ellison's anthem into a soundtrack for violence, the people closest to the song reckon with what can be owned, what can be taken, and what must be said aloud.

By Nora Vale, a fictional Bunko byline · Intimate social fiction with political-media tension · 18 min read · Published 2026-07-26

The first call came while Mara Ellison was rinsing lentils in a chipped blue colander, the kind with one softened handle that always left a bead of water on the counter. She let the phone buzz itself quiet beside the cutting board. Then it began again.

Across the kitchen, Tessa Rowan looked up from the school papers she had spread over the small table. Her red pen was uncapped between her fingers. There was a half-moon of flour on her sleeve from the flatbread dough she had insisted on making because she said dinner needed something warm that could be torn by hand.

"That is Jonah," Tessa said.

"It is everyone," Mara said.

She did not move. The lentils clicked softly against the metal as she shook the colander. Outside, the capital was in its late-summer posture: sirens at a distance, damp heat pressed against the window glass, the low insistence of traffic orbiting the ministry blocks. From Mara's apartment, nine floors up, the city looked orderly and lit. Down below, people stood at crossings with shopping bags, courier packs, suit jackets over their arms. The ordinary evening had not yet been informed that something had happened to it.

The phone lit again. Jonah Price's name filled the screen.

Tessa put down the red pen. "Mara."

Mara wiped her hands on a dish towel. The towel was printed with pears, a gift from Tessa years ago, before the song had entered stadiums and weddings and school assemblies, before strangers had begun telling Mara what it meant to them. She answered on speaker because her hands were still wet and because Tessa was already in the room.

Jonah did not say hello. "Do not post anything. Do not like anything. Do not answer any journalist, even if you know them. Especially if you know them."

"I was making soup," Mara said.

"Good. Keep making soup."

Tessa's mouth tightened. "What happened?"

There was a pause, small but full of calculation. Jonah had been Mara's manager long enough that his silences had textures. This one was wool pulled over glass.

"The government communications office posted a short video this afternoon," he said. "It uses the chorus. Your chorus. Over footage of overseas strikes. It is everywhere."

Mara looked at the pot on the stove. Onion, carrot, cumin blooming in oil. The smell was homely and patient, entirely uninterested in public crisis.

"They licensed it?" Tessa asked.

"Not through us," Jonah said. "Legal is checking every possible route. Platform library, blanket agreement, contractor error, some nightmare clause from the old distribution deal. I have calls stacked. Mara, tell me you have not watched it."

Mara had not. But the song was already playing in her head, as if the call had cued it. Not the public version, not the one with the big drums and the bright lift into the final refrain, but the first version she had made at Samir Calder's kitchen table years earlier, tapping time against a mug while rain hit the fire escape. A song about refusing to disappear. A song she had written after Tessa's first year teaching, when Tessa used to come home hoarse and furious and still set out lesson plans for the next day.

"Send it," Mara said.

"No."

"Jonah."

"If you watch it now, you will react from the bloodstream. Give me twenty minutes."

Tessa stood, took the phone from the counter, and ended the call.

Mara stared at her.

"He will call back," Tessa said. "He always calls back."

Then Tessa opened her own phone.

The video was only thirty-two seconds. It began with a black screen and a line of official text in white, severe letters. Then came the first piano notes, familiar enough to make Mara's body answer before her mind did. The footage cut quickly: a night sky gone green through a military lens, coordinates sliding across a screen, a bloom of white on a dark horizon. No faces. No bodies. No room for consequence. Just distance, precision, a flash, and then Mara's younger voice rising with impossible confidence.

Tessa lowered the phone before the chorus ended.

For a moment the kitchen went very still. The onions had begun to catch.

Mara turned off the burner.

"They made it sound," Tessa said carefully, "like a celebration."

Mara laughed once. It was not amusement. It was the body refusing a worse sound.

Jonah called back thirteen minutes later. By then Mara had sat down at the table. Tessa had scraped the onions into the trash and started again without being asked, because soup could be remade and because doing something with a knife gave her somewhere to put her hands.

"We have a statement drafted," Jonah said. "Short. Non-inflammatory. We say the use was unauthorized, we are seeking clarification, Mara's work has always been intended to honor resilience and communal joy."

"Communal joy," Mara repeated.

"It is language that keeps doors open."

"Which doors?"

Another silence. Tessa chopped carrots with deliberate, flat strikes.

Jonah exhaled. "Mara, if you go straight at them, they will make you the story. Not the video. Not the strikes. You. Your contracts, your taxes, old tour footage, who you dated, what you said at twenty-three. They will turn your objection into a brand position and then into a target. I am not saying stay quiet. I am saying be exact."

"Exact about what?"

"About consent. About use. About meaning. Not about policy."

Tessa looked over. Mara knew that look. It was the same one Tessa had given her the year Mara paid off their father's medical debt and then pretended the billing office had made an adjustment. Gratitude with anger folded inside it.

"It is policy now," Tessa said.

"Tess," Jonah said, softening in spite of himself. He had known her since she was sixteen and stealing grapes from backstage catering. "I hear you. But I am trying to keep Mara from being used twice."

Mara touched the edge of a student paper on the table. Tessa had marked a sentence with a wavy line and written, Be more specific. The instruction seemed to have been waiting there all evening.

"I want to talk to Sam," Mara said.

Jonah made a tired sound. "Of course you do."

"Do not manage that sentence."

"I am not managing. I am bracing."

Samir Calder arrived after nine with a canvas bag of apricots and a hard drive he had forgotten to return two years earlier. That was Sam's way: an offering and an apology, neither announced as such. He had cut his hair shorter since Mara had last seen him, but otherwise he seemed preserved by his own reserve, a man who moved carefully through rooms as if aware that every object had a history of being broken by someone.

Tessa let him in. Mara heard their low greeting in the hall, affectionate and brief. No one in her life had ever fully separated from anyone else. They only changed rooms.

"I brought fruit," Sam said, entering the kitchen.

"This is not a fruit occasion," Tessa said.

"Most occasions are not until someone brings it."

Mara almost smiled. It hurt her mouth.

They ate at ten because Tessa insisted that no one could discuss public violence on an empty stomach. The soup was thinner than intended. The flatbread had blackened at the edges and remained doughy in the middle. Sam ate two pieces without comment. Jonah joined by video from his office, tie loosened, face gray with screen light. Behind him, shelves held awards and framed tour posters, the museum of Mara before this evening.

"Legal says it is muddy," Jonah said. "The platform may have had access through a promotional catalog. Government contractor likely pulled from there. That does not mean they had the right to synchronize it with military footage, but it gives them fog. Fog is expensive."

"How expensive?" Tessa asked.

"The kind that bills in six-minute increments and lasts eighteen months."

Sam wiped soup from his thumb with a napkin. "The lawsuit is not the only question."

"Thank you, Sam, yes, we have also discovered morality," Jonah said.

Mara looked sharply at him.

Jonah closed his eyes. "Sorry. That was cheap."

"It was tired," Sam said. "There is a difference."

On Jonah's screen, something in his face loosened. He and Sam had never liked each other easily. Their loyalties to Mara had different shapes. Jonah built walls, schedules, exit routes. Sam opened windows and then stood back from them. For years Mara had mistaken both things for judgment.

"What would you do?" Mara asked Sam.

He did not answer quickly. That was why she had wanted him there.

"I would decide what I could live with after the outrage moves on," he said. "Not what will satisfy people tonight. Tonight they want a sentence they can repost. Tomorrow they will want a stronger one. By the weekend they will want proof you have suffered correctly. None of that tells you what is true."

Tessa leaned back. "And what is true?"

Sam looked at Mara, not tenderly, exactly, but with the old steadiness that had once made tenderness possible. "That the song is not only yours anymore. But your name is still on it."

Mara rose to clear bowls she did not need to clear. At the sink, hot water ran over her fingers until the skin reddened. She thought of all the places the song had gone without asking her: gymnasiums, memorial slideshows, advertisements for things she did not use, a clip of a toddler dancing in a hospital gown, an athlete crying into a towel, Tessa's students singing off-key at the end of term because Tessa had taught them the bridge on a borrowed keyboard. Mara had accepted most of it as the price and privilege of making something that traveled. She had told herself that songs were not children. They did not belong at home.

But this was different. Not because the song was sacred. Because the video had no doubt in it. It had taken all the uncertain human weather out of the music and used what remained: lift, shine, permission.

Across the city, in an office with sealed windows and a carpet the color of wet cement, Elena Rusk watched the same video without sound.

She had muted it after the fifth replay. Without Mara's voice, the edit looked cheaper. Cuts too fast. Text too clean. Impact turned abstract by repetition. Elena could see every decision now, each one defensible in the language of her workplace. Broad familiarity. Emotional contrast. Civic confidence. Platform-native pacing. The phrases had passed from meeting to meeting like clean utensils.

Gideon Marr stood behind her chair, eating almonds from a paper cup.

"Turn the sound on," he said.

"I know what it sounds like."

"The sound is the point."

Elena did not turn it on.

Gideon leaned over and tapped her space bar. The chorus burst into the room, bright enough to feel indecent. Two junior desks outside her glass wall remained empty; everyone had gone home or pretended to. On screen, the horizon opened white.

"That," Gideon said, "is what successful communications feels like."

Elena paused the video. Mara's face was not in it, but Elena had begun to see her absence as a presence, a cutout around which the whole thing had been arranged.

"The rights are messy," Elena said.

"The rights are always messy. Legal will say what legal says."

"The songwriter is objecting."

"Has she?"

"Not yet."

"Then she is not objecting."

Elena turned in her chair. Gideon was older than she was by fifteen years and younger in all the ways that mattered badly: appetite, certainty, the ability to sleep after making other people defend his instincts. He had come from campaign media and still spoke as if every morning were an election day.

"We paired a grief machine with a song people use at graduations," she said.

He smiled without warmth. "We paired national resolve with a song about shining under pressure. Do not get poetic because strangers are yelling online."

Elena looked toward the interior window. In the reflection, her own face appeared small beneath the office lights. She had approved the post that morning while drinking coffee from a travel mug and searching her bag for a missing transit card. The strikes had already happened. The footage had already been cleared. The edit had arrived with three music options, and she had chosen the one that made the room lift its head.

That was the part she could not move away from. It had worked on her.

"If she releases a statement," Gideon said, "we respect artistic feeling, note that all materials were used through available channels, and pivot to the seriousness of the operation. No apology. Apology makes it a two-day story."

"It is already a story."

"Everything is a story. Our job is to decide its size."

After he left, Elena stayed at her desk. Her dinner, a plastic container of rice and greens, sat unopened beside her keyboard. Oil had gathered in one corner. She thought of the song coming through the tiny speaker in her apartment years ago, back when she was still writing captions for a city council office and believed government work was mostly a matter of making the necessary legible. She had played it while painting her bathroom yellow. She had sent it to no one. It had belonged to a private hour of wanting her life to become larger and not yet knowing the cost of largeness.

At midnight, Mara's apartment had the worn feeling of a place after guests, though no one had left except through screens. Tessa was asleep on the couch under a quilt too short for her. Sam stood at the balcony door, looking down at the avenue. Jonah had finally stopped calling and sent instead a document titled HOLDING STATEMENT V4.

Mara opened it, read three lines, and closed it.

"He is not wrong," Sam said.

"No. That is his most annoying quality."

Sam smiled faintly.

Mara joined him at the glass. Below, a bus sighed at the curb. Someone laughed, unseen, the sound rising and vanishing. The capital was always producing evidence that life continued, whether or not continuing was admirable.

"When we made the demo," Mara said, "you told me the bridge was too sweet."

"It was."

"You said it needed a shadow."

"It did."

"I thought you were being difficult."

"I was also being difficult."

She folded her arms. "I keep thinking, if I had written a sadder song, they could not have used it this way."

Sam shook his head. "They would have found the usable part."

That landed with a quiet force. Mara pressed her forehead to the cool glass. She had spent years believing that sincerity protected a song from vulgarity. But sincerity was not armor. It was material. It could be cut and sewn into another uniform.

Behind them, Tessa stirred on the couch. "Do not let them have my graduation assembly," she murmured, not fully awake.

Mara turned.

Tessa's eyes were still closed. "Or the hospital video. Or the terrible winter concert with the broken microphone. They do not get to make all of that into this."

Mara crossed the room and sat on the floor beside the couch. Tessa's hand had fallen from under the quilt. Mara took it. When they were children, Tessa had been the one who could sleep through storms, through arguments, through their father coming home late and trying too hard to be cheerful in the kitchen. Mara had lain awake then, making bargains with ceilings. She had become famous, in part, because vigilance made good craft. She heard what rooms wanted. She heard when a chorus needed to arrive before hope curdled into pleading.

Now the room wanted something simpler from her.

In the morning, Jonah arrived in person wearing yesterday's shirt. He carried coffee, legal notes, and the brittle patience of a man who had slept in a chair. Tessa had gone to school before dawn, leaving a note on the counter: Soup in fridge. Say what you mean. Eat first.

Mara taped the note to the cabinet.

Jonah saw it and sighed. "Of course."

"I wrote something," Mara said.

His shoulders rose. "Show me."

She handed him a page torn from Tessa's grading pad. Her handwriting looked younger on lined paper.

Jonah read standing up. Sam, who had slept badly in the armchair and claimed not to have slept at all, watched from the table.

The statement was not long. It said the song had been written for people trying to keep hold of one another in fear and difficulty. It said Mara had not consented to its use in a government video showing military strikes on foreign targets. It said no legal pathway could turn that use into an endorsement. It said she objected to the transformation of communal memory into a soundtrack for violence. It said she would be pursuing removal and a full accounting of how the use had been approved.

It did not say she was ashamed of the song. It did not say she was the victim most worth noticing. It did not tell anyone what to think about her bravery.

Jonah finished and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

"It is stronger than I wanted," he said.

Mara waited.

"It is also better."

Sam looked down at his coffee.

Jonah took out his phone. "I need fifteen minutes to make sure this does not accidentally waive something. And then we post it everywhere at once. No video. Text only. Comments limited. Tess will be unbearable."

"Tess is often right," Mara said.

"Yes," Jonah said. "That is what makes it unbearable."

At the communications office, Elena read Mara's statement in a bathroom stall because it was the only place where no one could see her face. Around her, the building performed its usual bodily functions: pipes knocking, hand dryers roaring, a door opening and closing. She read the sentence about communal memory three times.

When she returned to her desk, Gideon was waiting.

"We have the response," he said. "I sent it to you. Clean and firm."

Elena opened the draft. Respect for artists. Serious threats. Available licensing channels. No intent to imply endorsement. The words were smooth enough to leave no fingerprints.

"I approved the music," she said.

Gideon looked annoyed, then cautious. "You approved an edit in a process. Do not personalize workflow."

"That is the problem."

"The problem is you are tired."

Elena thought of her apartment bathroom, the yellow paint dried unevenly near the mirror because she had been impatient with the second coat. She thought of the song filling that small room, promising not triumph but continuation. She had wanted a life of consequence then. She had not understood that consequence often arrived as a form with her initials beside a checkbox.

"We should take it down," she said.

Gideon's expression hardened into something almost paternal. "We do not reward pressure campaigns."

"We made the pressure."

He stepped closer to her desk. "Listen to me. Virality is not a weather event. It is an asset. You do not throw away an asset because a songwriter has feelings about context."

Elena stood. Her knees felt unreliable, but her voice did not. "Put my objection in the record."

"Do not be dramatic."

"Put it in the record, or I will put it there myself."

For a second, Gideon seemed less angry than disappointed that a tool had developed an opinion about the hand using it. Then he laughed under his breath and left her office.

Elena sat back down and wrote the memo before she could become sensible. She used plain language. She named the approval chain, including herself. She wrote that the song's public associations had been knowingly used to soften and glorify footage of military force. She recommended removal. Her hands shook only after she sent it.

By noon, Mara's statement had traveled farther than any careful thing ought to travel. Jonah watched numbers climb with professional misery. Sam made toast. Tessa sent a message between classes: They asked if you were okay. I said you were eating breakfast. Please be eating breakfast.

Mara ate half a piece of toast to make the answer true.

There were denunciations, praise, demands, invitations, threats dressed as questions. There were people who said she had ruined the song by making it political, as if the video had been a weather report. There were people who thanked her in language so extravagant it made her want to hide under the table. Through it all, the apartment remained stubbornly itself. A sock under the radiator. A basil plant giving up in its pot. Tessa's stack of papers, still waiting to be graded.

In the late afternoon, the video disappeared from the government account without explanation.

Jonah confirmed it twice before allowing himself to react. "Removed," he said. "No apology. But removed."

Mara sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet. She had been there for twenty minutes, not from collapse but because the floor was cool and honest.

"Is that a win?" Sam asked.

Jonah considered. "It is a thing that happened after pressure. In my profession, we often rent that and call it a win."

Mara closed her eyes. She did not feel victorious. She felt as she had after finishing the original vocal take: emptied, alert, unsure whether what she had made would hold.

That evening, Tessa came over with a tote bag of ungraded work and a container of sliced cucumbers. She found Mara still in the kitchen, now at the table, reading nothing on her phone.

"They sang it today," Tessa said.

Mara looked up quickly.

"Not because of the video," Tessa said. "Because it was already on the end-of-week list. I almost skipped it. Then I thought that would give the whole mess too much power. So we sang it badly and too fast, as usual. The second verse remains a disaster."

Mara put a hand over her face.

Tessa sat beside her. "They do not know how to clap on beat. You would hate it."

Mara laughed, and this time it was laughter. Small, cracked, but real.

Sam began washing dishes though no one had asked. Jonah took a call in the hall, his voice low and combative. Tessa uncapped her red pen. The city outside moved toward another night of lit windows and official statements, of buses sighing and dinners burning, of machinery looking for music to make itself beloved.

Mara pulled one of Tessa's papers toward her. In the margin, a student had written a sentence too general to survive Tessa's standards. Mara picked up the red pen and, beneath her sister's note, added another: Say what you mean.

Tessa saw it and leaned her shoulder against Mara's.

For a while they stayed like that, two sisters at a kitchen table, the famous song somewhere beyond the walls and also not beyond them at all. It had gone out into the world and been mishandled. It had come back altered, carrying smoke. It would go out again. Mara understood now that she could not guard every doorway.

But she could stand at this one.