For political activists, getting people to see beyond physical comforts to issues such as more professional policing and freedom of speech and association is the challenge. “We have to try to convince people that these reforms are not going through, and that the military is not capable of managing a transitional rule where social justice is a primary goal,” Shahba said. “Right now, they just want a better life.”

So far, there are signs that both sides are returning to old practices. The military has turned to its supporters to fill roles in the government. It’s also rounded up hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members. Morsi, who remains detained, reportedly will face charges of “insulting the judiciary.”

The government has shut down news channels friendly to the Brotherhood and charged its leaders with inciting violence. After clashes Monday morning between Morsi supporters and the military that led to at least 54 deaths, the military said it was protecting the nation from “terrorists,” and obliquely suggested that the attacks on troops in the restive Sinai and the gathering of Morsi supporters in eastern Cairo were one and the same.

On Monday night, attackers set a church ablaze in the Nile Delta city of Port Said, the sixth such attack in as many days, one for each day since Abdel-Fattah el Sissi, the minister of defense and the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, announced that Morsi was no longer the president.

It’s lost on few people here that one of the main events that preceded Mubarak’s ouster was the bombing of a church in Cairo. Christians remain divided over who was most likely responsible, Islamists or the government – trying to prove its claim that only it stood between the nation and chaos.

In the meantime, the military continues to say it wants no role in governing Egypt now and that it toppled Morsi only to fulfill the will of the people. A “road map” laid out by the interim president, Adly Mansour – which calls for drafting a new constitution in four months and for parliamentary and presidential elections by February – is the solution, the military said in a statement Tuesday, a clear path to a future where “no one can go against the will of the nation.”

Where the Muslim Brotherhood fits in to that is still working itself out. Late Tuesday, hundreds of Morsi supporters who’d marched toward the presidential palace demanded that soldiers move aside so the marchers could return to their headquarters at a mosque in Rabaa, the district in eastern Cairo where more than 50 Morsi supporters died Monday. “We are peaceful. We want to go through,” they chanted.

When the military refused, the protesters turned away and searched for another route.

“Why do they come here when they know we are here?” Islam Jafer, a military commander at the scene, asked a McClatchy reporter.

That standoff between the military and the Brotherhood is likely to bode ill for stability.

El Sherif said the Brotherhood’s insistence that Morsi be reinstated was the sort of all-or-nothing stance Morsi was famous for, which had alienated so many Egyptians. “They must accept defeat and minimize losses,” he said.

And the military must learn to work with them. Without the Brotherhood as part of the process, “you will never have stability,” he said. “You will have perpetual conflict, maybe low-level but persistent.”

McClatchy special correspondent Amina Ismail contributed to this report from Cairo.