On May 27, 2021, 10 army trucks and four dark SUVs slid into Yangon's Insein township hours before dawn.
As residents slept, more than 100 soldiers from Myanmar's military quietly moved through the neighbourhood along the eastern banks of the Hlaing River.
When they reached Grace Oo's apartment door, all hell broke loose.
"They broke down the door. I thought to myself, 'I'm done.' They can kill us," Grace told the ABC.
"They were yelling, 'Do you have a weapon? Do you have a bomb?'"
Grace and her boyfriend were held at gunpoint in their living room and repeatedly punched.
Within minutes, they were thrown into trucks and taken to the police station.
Grace recalls feeling stunned and bruised all over her face as they sped through the empty streets of Yangon.
On her phone, police found selfies of her posing with a handgun, and training videos on assembling a homemade bomb.
"Before 2021, I never imagined that I could do this. But what they [the military junta] did was not right," she said.
"I had to do it."
Just four months earlier, the 31-year-old was a classically trained opera singer who coached Myanmar's celebrity pop stars.
By the time she was arrested, she was an armed urban guerrilla who had planted bombs at military facilities.
Life in Myanmar before the coup
Grace's unlikely metamorphosis was triggered by a military coup that toppled the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party in February 2021.
Months earlier, the NLD had swept the polls in a landslide, winning more than 80 per cent of elected parliamentary seats.
The fact that this ballot was even held was nothing short of a small miracle.
For more than 30 years, pro-democracy activists had been fighting and dying on the streets of Myanmar to resist military dictatorship.
By the time Grace's generation was old enough to vote, these efforts were beginning to pay off.
In 2010, Suu Kyi was released after years living under house arrest, and the NLD was allowed to stand for political office.
In the 2015 and 2020 polls, it won an absolute majority of seats.
The optimism that swept the country was electric. Voter turnout peaked at about 70 per cent in the last election, with residents lining up outside polling stations before dawn, eager to be the first to cast their ballots.
Many, including Grace, who voted for the NLD, were convinced that the era of military rule was behind them.
"We had so much hope that our country would become great," Grace told the ABC.
"If we could win the election, our future was brighter and brighter."
It was also an exuberant time in Grace's life.
She was the daughter of two pastors and had grown up singing in their church choir in Yangon.
An American music teacher introduced Grace to opera when she was 17, and it quickly became her passion, along with karate.
"Before 2021, I was a professional vocal coach for famous pop singers," she said.
"I was so busy with coaching, and I had started a professional choir in Yangon. I also worked in a church every Sunday as their music director.
She said that most of her friends were from "music circles and from karate".
"We would always meet at home and at practice time," she said.
"We performed at music concerts. I loved my life."
This was also because she was in a four-year relationship with a hotel chef who had joined the navy.
Everything for Grace, and for her country, seemed to be falling into place.
"I had a lot of plans. I was going to open a music school after I got the [COVID-19] vaccine," she said.
The year when everything changed
In the early morning of February 1, 2021, fitness instructor Khing Hnin Wai inadvertently livestreamed what is now remembered as one of the most bizarre scenes in history.
As she shuffled and gyrated across the screen in her aerobics video, behind her, flashing military vehicles moved in on the parliament in the capital, Naypyidaw.
The military was staging a coup.
"I was at home, and I didn't know what had happened," Grace said.
"My father came in and said, 'There was a coup. They did it again.'
"I couldn't do anything, I collapsed. I was so disappointed and depressed."
Six days later, Grace wandered into downtown Yangon alone and disappeared into the crowd of demonstrators.
"I had to do it because all of our hope was destroyed by them," she said.
"We had to protest to show them that we did not accept the coup.
"We didn't fight. Some students even gave flowers to the police because they wanted to show their love. It was very peaceful."
The demonstrations continued for weeks — there were dragon dances outside the Chinese embassy, gen Z girls protesting in pink pyjamas, poets leading thousands of people in chants.
But in April, the trajectory of Grace's life, and that of her country, changed forever.
'We have to do more than protest'
After spending what had become a typical morning attending the protests, Grace got word that five of her friends had been taken into custody.
They hit the streets again to demand their release, but this time the police opened fire.
She watched as one protester dropped dead next to her. Another was shot in the back while trying to run.
As news spread of more killings across Yangon, Grace said she realised, for the first time, that the military wanted to kill her.
"That's when I thought to myself, 'We have to do more than protest. Demonstrations are not enough to fight them,'" she said.
"We found some weapons, some bombs and bullets to fight them, because we didn't have anything.
"We thought that sooner or later they would kill us too."
To keep her parents and brothers safe, she had already moved out of home.
With her boyfriend and other protesters, she rented an apartment and started stockpiling weapons they had bought from soldiers.
They went on "missions" to plant bombs at military facilities and police stations, and released smoke bombs at protests to help demonstrators escape.
Grace said they held their operations at night to avoid casualties and that she never fired a gun or killed anyone. All she wanted was for the military to be as afraid as she was.
"We didn't have any experience using these weapons," she said.
"The aim of our missions was to send the message that, 'You cannot touch us. If you arrest us, we will also do something.'"
Living in exile
By the time security forces caught up with Grace, more than 600 people had been killed nationwide, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).
Monitors now estimate this death toll has risen to at least 16,600 civilians as the civil war triggered by the coup continues to rage across Myanmar.
More than 22,500 political prisoners are in detention.
After spending three years in Yangon's notorious Insein Prison, Grace escaped Myanmar to live in exile in neighbouring Thailand, where she teaches music to young Burmese refugees at a community centre called Joy House.
She said she has read about the elections the military is currently holding, a process that they said would return the country to normalcy after years of bloody turmoil.
But Grace said she had no illusions about returning to a normal life.
"I don't think I'll get my old life back," she said.
"I'm a very different person today. I'm cold-blooded."
