Cycles of revenge and violence

Cycles of revenge and violence is a central pattern in the novel: structural discrimination and individual acts of retaliation continually produce fresh injury, blame, and demands for payback. The pattern reaches its most consequential form in Jude’s decision to turn Sephy’s unborn child into a future means of revenge after Callum’s death. The book does not present that choice as a restoration of justice; it shows how grief and political inequality make retaliation feel purposeful even as it extends the harm into another generation.

Conditions That Generate Retaliation

The cycle begins in a society where Noughts face exclusion not only through open hostility but through institutions that can dismiss, record, and punish them unequally. At Heathcroft, a crowd gathers outside the school chanting against Nought students, while police try to control the opposing groups. Inside the school, Mr Costa suggests that if the Noughts find the school difficult, they should go elsewhere. Such scenes establish the setting in which anger is generated: hostility is visible in the street, but exclusion also speaks in the language of administrative choice and institutional order.

The reporting of the Heathcroft incident adds another layer. On television, the account acknowledges hostility but omits that police officers allowed members of the crowd to reach the Nought students and that students were subjected to physical harassment. The absent details matter because they shape what the public can recognize as the cause of conflict. When institutional and media accounts minimize harm, the conditions that generate retaliation are obscured rather than resolved.

The pattern also reaches into ordinary administration. At the hospital, staff require Meggie and Jude to show their Identity cards before treatment, citing a government rule that requires patient identification to be checked and registered. Later, Meggie tells Callum that police claim an empty drink can found near the Dundale bombing bore Jude’s fingerprints, supposedly cross-referenced against the print on his Identity card. She believes the accusation is false and connects the police’s access to Jude’s information to the hospital scan. The sequence links routine registration to the machinery of suspicion: information collected in one setting can become part of an accusation in another.

Blame, Evidence, and Loss

The family’s experience of the Dundale bombing shows how the cycle gathers force through contested responsibility. Ryan tells his family that he signed a confession admitting to the charges after police said they had Jude and proof that Jude was the bomber. Ryan says they told him that someone had to take the blame and left him to decide who would bear it. His confession therefore does not end the dispute over responsibility; it shifts the consequences onto him and leaves the family with the belief that Jude has been targeted.

The trial further complicates the public meaning of the evidence. Kelani Adams objects when the prosecution questions Callum about membership in the Liberation Militia, arguing that Callum is not on trial. The judge allows the question as relevant to witness credibility. In another moment, footage from the shopping centre shows Callum pulling Sephy away from the café and running with her toward an exit before a white flash appears and the recording goes dark. The images show him trying to get her out, but the court setting turns even this evidence into part of a dispute about what the family knew. The same sequence can be read as rescue and suspicion, depending on the question put to it.

Ryan is found guilty of political terrorism and sentenced in a trial whose verdict Sephy struggles to hear. Later, at Hewmett Prison, she sees Callum among the Noughts gathered to witness Ryan’s scheduled execution. The formal announcement identifies Ryan as having been convicted of seven murders and political terrorism, and says his appeal has been denied. The scene makes the family’s loss public and ceremonial, while the presence of Callum and the Crosses in the audience brings the personal and political conflict into the same space.

Ryan receives a last-minute reprieve from the Home Office, but the reprieve does not save him. A news report says that he was electrocuted while trying to scale the prison’s electrified fence, four days before he was due to hang. The sequence turns relief into another loss: the sentence has changed, but Ryan dies in prison all the same. The report’s official language records an inquiry, while his family are said to be devastated and unavailable for comment.

From Grief to Revenge

After Callum’s death, Jude places responsibility on Sephy and her family. He believes that Kamal Hadley could have saved Callum but did not, and treats Kamal’s failure to secure his own wishes concerning his grandchild as part of the chain that led to Callum’s death. He tells Sephy that she let his brother die, and she answers that she did. In this exchange, grief hardens into a direct accusation: Jude sees Sephy not as someone who tried to help Callum, but as someone bound up in the forces that destroyed him.

Minerva challenges this version of events. She reminds Jude that Sephy tried to help Callum and told people he had done nothing wrong. Jude answers that if Sephy had left Callum alone, Callum would not have sought her out and been caught. The argument reveals how revenge depends on selecting a decisive cause from a much wider chain. Jude makes Sephy’s relationship with Callum the point at which the story could supposedly have changed; Minerva instead insists that this does not make Sephy his murderer.

Jude’s own explanation shifts as Minerva presses him. He says he is not acting for himself, but she argues that killing Sephy will not bring Callum back or make him rest easier, and that revenge would benefit Jude alone. She names his desire plainly: he blames Sephy and wants payback. Jude rejects her interpretation, yet the exchange exposes the tension between his claim to act for someone else and the personal grief driving his decision.

The Threat Passed Forward

Jude arrives intending to kill Sephy, but changes course when he learns that she wants to die. Killing her, he realizes, would only put her out of her misery, not achieve the purpose he had brought with him. The reversal does not end his violence or resolve his grief. It changes the target and the timescale of his plan: instead of immediate death, he chooses a threat that can continue into Sephy’s future.

After Minerva is shot, Jude waits until Sephy has contacted emergency services. He then uses the fact that she cares about her sister and her unborn child to threaten her through the baby. He says he will ruin the lives of people she cares about and that her child will help him do it. With sirens approaching, he recognizes that Sephy is afraid and regards that fear as evidence that his plan has taken hold. He puts the safety back on his automatic, pockets it, and places a hand on Sephy’s stomach; the baby moves beneath it. The gesture makes his threat immediate, but its announced purpose is long-term: he imagines revenge as work requiring time and patience.

This ending makes the cycle’s generational reach explicit. Jude connects his plan to the claim that Callum will finally be avenged, but what he proposes is not the recovery of his brother or the correction of the injustice surrounding his death. It is the deliberate extension of the conflict into the life of Callum’s child. The contrast between Minerva’s appeal to Callum’s presumed wish that his child live and Jude’s plan to use that child as leverage captures the cycle’s moral cost: grief can preserve love as a reason to protect, or turn the dead into justification for harming others.

Meaning of the Cycle

The novel’s repeated transfers of blame—from the treatment of Nought students, through the handling of the bombing investigation and trial, to Jude’s accusation against Sephy—show how personal vengeance grows within a larger unequal order without becoming a remedy for it. Officials and institutions determine whose accounts carry weight, while families live with the consequences of convictions, executions, and deaths in custody. The evidence of harm is repeatedly disputed or reframed; the resulting anger then becomes a new rationale for retaliation.

The cycle is not simply a succession of equally chosen acts. The scenes distinguish institutional power from private revenge: rules, data, police conduct, courtroom decisions, and prison punishment shape the losses that individual characters later interpret and act upon. Yet Jude’s final threat also makes clear that oppression does not automatically dictate a single response. He can recognize, in the moment, that killing Sephy would not restore Callum, but he chooses a future-directed plan intended to make her suffer. His decision shows the cycle at its most deliberate: violence continues not because it can undo the past, but because someone mistakes another person’s pain for a form of repayment.