Read: Hong Kong’s protests have cemented its identity

On Monday night, Tsang, the graduate, ushered me into a sixth-floor bunker in a sleek PolyU building with hard lines and stark-white spaces. Some students hoped to preserve the cleanliness of this one place on campus by taping a sign to the door: Dont Destroy this building!

Unlike most protesters, he looked tidy, in an untucked collared shirt on his gangly frame. We had first met in June, on a night when many young people were rounded up, their bags searched and IDs taken. Tsang stood out—he was calm then and now, and talked about the necessity of the long game when dealing with the Chinese government.

When I saw him last week, he was completely cloaked in battle gear, all black with dark swim goggles. At the time, he told me that he was staying put until everyone was out. He knew the stark, compact campus well, with its connected buildings. Most of the several hundred people there were not PolyU people, he said, and as an alum, he could offer an insider’s help.

But as the days wore on, protesters on campus wanted out. After several escape plans ended in arrests, Tsang reconsidered his commitment. His team weighed its options. Leaving through a barricaded entrance had worked for some, until the riot police posted a detail nearby. Molotovs thrown on a bridge to a nearby subway station had rendered it unstable. One protester said he might slither through the sewer tunnels, although most such attempts ended in capture. Many had simply given up. To them, a riot charge—and a possible 10-year prison sentence—was better than weathering this siege. For hours on Monday, young people stepped off campus, hands in the air. Tsang’s squad decided to leave and run north along the rail tracks. There was no other way.

Tsang told me that as they sprinted up a gravel path, under a highway bridge, riot police opened fire. Whether it was rubber bullets or live rounds, he could not tell, but the police missed. The squad scrambled on hands and knees through a water tunnel and kept running for 45 minutes. At a footbridge, they crossed over a highway and entered a public housing estate. The residents had been bottled up for days because of the extensive police cordon, and they were angry. Somehow, volunteer drivers, coordinated through the messaging app Telegram, threaded through the traffic. Those who made it this far needed rides. At 2 a.m., I received a message. “Just got home.” Tsang was safe.

Of course, smart protesters had left earlier, or never set foot on campus. PolyU now holds just a few hard-core holdouts and some well-meaning, unlucky naifs who didn’t know the geography and didn’t have the guile or foresight to negotiate, bargain, lie, or sneak their way out. One protester I met on campus told me, choking back tears, that the occupation of PolyU had been one of the movement’s major mistakes.