Like many others, she'd received a threat from the Riffraff - though she wasn't sure she understood it completely - accusing her of helping to maintain the status quo, and even profiting from it.

The Riffraff defended themselves fiercely, arguing that months had passed without the slightest change. People should unite and forget the Gate, they said but they couldn't offer any convincing alternatives, so everyone in the queue - those behind the barriers and the rest - refused to give up hope.

If a doctor or nurse had been with him when he'd been injured, she would have made the others carry him more carefully. Doing so would have taken just enough time for them to arrive at the emergency room an hour or so after Tarek's shift had ended, and the name of another doctor would have been at the end of this file....

The High Sheikh invoked a few passages from the Greater Book, explaining that if a believer were to be struck by a bullet (despite his prayers and supplication), his faith would guide him to the understanding that it was God himself who'd struck him down. A wounded believer should not despair or oppose God's will. Nor should he question the unquestionable - such an act could lead him down a perilous path toward doubt. Instead, the believer must accept the will of God. He must acknowledge how lucky he was to be struck by a bullet, and exalted to a place in heaven ordinarily reserved only for the most dutiful.

The status quo sucks.

The status quo is simply unacceptable.