I come to hanging by my wrists.

My feet drag the floor, and I get them under me to take the pressure off my shoulders. My hands are bound just over my head with a long length of rope thrown over the only intact rafter in the row of charred, exposed beams overhead. Above them hangs no ceiling, only a low, fat moon.

To my right, Mom slumps unconscious on the filthy, buckled hardwood floor, handcuffs gleaming in the low light. They are secured to an eye bolt screwed deep into the floorboards. In front of me, Abby lies across the hearth of a long-dead fireplace, wrists zip tied together and tethered to the beautiful wrought iron fireplace guard. Dad sits with his back against it, hands cuffed to the rusted curlicues on either side of him. His left hand stretches as close to Abby as the chain allows. Her hair spills across the hearthstone only a few inches from his fingers.

"Jon," he says. "Are you ok?"

"Where are we?"

"You've been here before."

Nightbugs chatter to each other, and the air smells of pine. Half-crumbled stone walls and arches rise up around us, blotting out stars, and steel support beams stand cruciform high above our heads. Ivy climbs the chimney.

I know this place.

Dad brought me here not long after he told me the truth about the family business. "The fire was not an accident," he said.

"Then who?"

"No threat to us now," was all he would answer.

Dad and Aunt Thea were still in the process of reclaiming the house after Isabel Rochev's stunt at QC, and there was some dispute between the family, the bank, and the insurance company. What with the drawn-out legal battle, the house was neither razed nor rebuilt.

"Thea and I never planned to live here again anyway," Dad said. "Everything that made it home was long gone."

"They say it's haunted now."

He smiled. "Could be true."

"Some of the guys, uh, bring girls here."

"I'd have done that myself back in college," he admitted.

I looked around the summer weeds growing up around the bones of the house. "You're just going to leave it like this?"

"I think every city needs some haunted ruins. Don't you?"

Once upon a time, the room I hang in now was a third floor library with fourteen-foot ceilings. It was beautiful. I've seen pictures.

"How do you feel?" Dad says.

I take careful inventory, because his question is not simple concern for my welfare. "Shoulder hurts, and I'm still kind of concussed. Otherwise, I'm good to go. You?"

"Headache, bruised ribs." In other words, get him loose and he is in decent shape to seriously ruin somebody's day.

"Why aren't we dead yet?"

He looks at me steadily, letting me work out why the psychotic mercenary with a sixteen-year grudge might not want this to be over so soon.

"Oh." Cold washes over me. "It's like that?"

He glances from Abby to Mom and back, and beneath his careful calm I see the same fear that is clawing its way up the back of my throat. "Pretty sure it is."

I open my mouth to say something - you know, devil-may-care heroic fortitude - but my breath catches. Because I know what happens now. I've been here before.

For two weeks, I've been here every time I closed my eyes. In the worst of the nightmares, my family was here with me.

When I finally manage to say something over the sound of my pulse crashing in my ears, it is only a hoarse, "Dad."

"Hey, hey. Breathe, Jonny. In slow, out slow."

Once, twice, three times, and the world sharpens into focus around me. Twice more, in slow, out slow, and my spiking heartbeat coasts down to normal.

While I get a hold of myself, Abby stirs with a pained sigh. Slowly she shifts, hair falling across her face, and I see the jerk of panic when she tries to sit up and comes up against the limits of her bindings.

"You're ok, honey," Dad says. "You're ok."

She goes still at the sound of his voice, and then she awkwardly pushes herself up to sitting. Her eyes fall on Mom, on the careless angle of her head and her slightly open mouth, and she pales. "Is she breathing?"

"She is," I say quickly. "Just knocked out."

Abby takes a good long look around, and in a choked voice she asks Dad, "Why are we here?"

He deliberately misconstrues her question. "Risdon must have thought it was poetic. Now listen to me carefully." He catches her eyes and holds them. "No matter what happens, you stay calm. Don't talk to Risdon or his men if you can avoid it. You're the least restrained, so if you get a chance to run, take it. Don't look back, don't worry about us."

"What? No." She shakes her head hard. "I'm not going anywhere without you."

"That was not a request, Abigail." He cranes his neck and peers at the top of her head. "Lean over for me and - "

"Won't matter nohow," a voice reassures her. "Got a man at every exit. You won't get far." Risdon stands in the arched doorway, whipcord thin without the body armor, and he greets us with a smile and a pleasant, "Evening."

Facing him in my leathers with a bow in my hands was one thing. In my shirtsleeves with my wrists tied over my head, I am wide open and vulnerable. When he takes his first step toward us, I have to remember to breathe again. In slow, out slow.

"We should wake Mrs. Queen," Risdon says. "She won't want to miss this." He strolls over, crouches down, and gives her cheek insistent little slaps.

Mom sits up so fast that she head butts him right in the nose. "Ow!" she yelps.

"Son of a bitch." He stumbles back, hand to his face, and he presses his boot down on her shoulder to force her prone. Dad's cuffs rattle and snap taut against the wrought iron. Risdon leans some weight onto Mom's shoulder, and she hisses in pain. "Now," he says. "Slow this time."

Her eyes dart around the room, lock on each of us in turn. When he lifts his boot, she sits up slowly.

Risdon grabs her chin. "Glad you could join us, ma'am."

She looks him right in the eyes until he laughs and shoves her away.

"You wanted the man who sent you to the Heights," Dad says. "I'm right here. There's no reason to hold them."

"My God, you're right." Risdon waves at the three of us. "Y'all be on your merry way."

"You have made," Dad continues, voice dropping into the subbasement, "an extreme tactical error. But let my family go, and maybe you'll live through the night."

Abby's eyes widen. She has never heard that voice before. She has never seen that murderous expression on his face.

Risdon only chuckles. "I call that bold talk for a man chained to the home decor."

"Fair warning."

"Look, Ollie, it's like this," Risdon says, drawing himself to his full height, standing over Dad. "I spent sixteen years in hell. Just shy of six thousand days. And I been planning all this time how I'm going to visit every single one of them on the folks responsible."

"It seems like that would not include anyone who was five years old at the time," Mom says icily. "Or, say, not even born yet."

As if she hadn't spoken, Risdon starts to circle us. "The gangs in there, they don't think much of a man unaffiliated. Broke six bones my first four years." As he passes Abby, he rolls up his sleeves to show her the silver scars winding up and down his arms, and she recoils. I see the fresher, pinker scar of a messy gash in the meat of his thumb. Yeah, that was me.

"They call these defensive wounds," he tells Abby. "Got more under the shirt. Got others I can't talk about at parties." He straightens, circling back around, and to my parents he says, "I used to plan how I was going to pay it all back to you. And here, come to find you went and pissed off an employer of mine who knows your names." My skin crawls as he passes behind me; I don't like him where I can't see him. Finally he comes to a halt midway between me and Mom, and he smiles. "Then it occurs to me you got kids. Seems you like them pretty well too."

Mom's eyes shine with angry tears, and she shakes her head. "They have nothing to do with this."

"I'm thinking instead," Risdon says slowly, "I'm going to pay it back to them."

I wish the first thing through my head were something noble or stoic or quippy. But no. It is just wordless terror howling up my spine and roaring in my ears.

The second thing through my head is, Please, please don't beat me to death in front of my baby sister .

Only then does it sink in that he plans to hurt her too.

"Hey," I say past numb lips. "I shot you in the hand and fucked up your drug deal and tried to kill you a couple of times, and you're pissed. I get it. But my sister never did anything to anyone. You don't have to hurt her. You have me, right? You don't have to."

He breathes in slow through his nose. "You know what, kid?" he says, hand coming to rest on his belt buckle. "I swear to you I won't leave a mark on her."

Oh God. I'm going to be sick. I can't breathe, and I am going to be sick.

Abby has no context for that, but she knows damn well it's not a good faith promise. My parents watch me choke down bile, and they know exactly what Risdon just said.

"You are going to die choking on your own blood," Dad says.

"I'd be interested to see how you manage that." Risdon turns to me, and he slips his hand into his pocket. When he withdraws it, brass knuckles gleam on his right hand.

"Don't," Mom says as he takes a step toward me. "Please don't."

He doesn't walk - he moseys. By the time he is halfway to me, I am already shaking like a day-old kitten with low blood sugar.

"Jonny," Abby says.

"Look at me, Abigail," Dad says. "Eyes right here. You look at me and nowhere else."

"But Jonny."

"Right here. Right at me."

Mom yanks with all her might at the eye bolt, cuffs cutting into her wrists and furious sobs escaping her. "Please don't. Don't hurt him, please, we sent you to prison, it was us, do whatever you want to us, just don't hurt him, don't you touch him, I said don't touch him, don't you fucking dare!"

I shrink as far from him as I can, which is not very.

"I'm going to tell you this at the beginning," he says affably. "This stops the second you tell me which of them is going to take your place."

"Don't touch him, I said take me!" Mom yells. "Jon, tell him."

I look at Dad, who mouths, It's ok .I can go unscathed, and they'll pay for it. Gladly.

If Risdon had asked me, just after pulling my head out of that washtub the second or third time I passed out underwater, if he should do it to one of my parents instead, I don't like to think about how I would have answered. I was desperate after an hour, and after two I might have agreed to almost anything.

But we're not there yet. I tremble all over, and I shake my head.

"No smart remarks?" Risdon asks me.

Not a goddamn word.

He starts simple. You don't really need complicated gadgetry or detailed anatomical knowledge to make someone suffer. We're fragile, like Elaine says. There are so many ways to break us.

A gut punch knocks the wind out of me good and solid, and my muscles spasm for air that won't come.

"So, Mayor Queen, Mrs. Queen. Thirty years saving the city, and look where we are now."

I'm pretty sure the next blow leaves a hairline fracture in my cheekbone. Silver linings: I can't catch my breath long enough to scream.

"You give Starling a hero, and they set the dogs on him. Give them justice, and they murder a man in the courthouse hallway. Give them medical miracles, and they riot in the streets."

This time I don't think he cracked the rib. Just bruised. Probably.

"You are going to lose everything for your little crusade. I'm taking it all. I hope it was worth it."

He notes with interest the spreading bloodstain on my white sleeve where the gunshot wound has reopened. I've mangled and re-mangled it so often, at this point even gentle touches are painful.

Risdon is not gentle.

I've caught my breath now. I scream.

After that, I retreat as deep into my head as possible, trying to block out Abby's crying and Dad's soft murmurs to her. It's harder to block out Mom's yelling. I don't look at any of them, because the one time I catch my father's eyes, there are tears in them, and this is terrifying enough already.

Then Mom's voice lowers and hardens, and what she says next startles me back to full awareness.

"Joseph," she says.

Who?

"Joseph."

She's talking to Risdon. What the hell?

"I read your file," she says doggedly. "You risked everything for an ideal once too. I know you come from a long line of Marines - your father and grandfather and great grandfather. I know you had an older brother who died in Afghanistan."

"Shut up."

"Joseph, I know about the dishonorable discharge."

He turns away from me to get in her face. "I said shut up."

I realize she is doing her damnedest to keep his attention on her. Partly it is to give me a reprieve, but it is also to keep his back to the other side of the room, where Dad is still murmuring gently to Abby. She pulls something from her hair: a bobby pin. Dad's tone doesn't change, but the content obviously does. He is talking her through bending it into the correct modified S-shape to pick a handcuff lock.

Mom looks Risdon right in the eyes, terrified but steady, and she says, "A hundred years of honorable men, and look where we are now."

He grabs her by the chin again. "You're bolted to the floor, watching me destroy everything you love piece by piece. Ain't shit you can do to stop me. That's where we are, ma'am."

Abby lets out a little sob, which seems to grate Risdon's last nerve. He spins around, kneels in front of her and reaches for her face. She flinches away, but he grabs and holds her, and he wipes the tears from her cheeks with both thumbs. "Hush, baby."

Dad twists sideways at what looks like a painful angle and kicks him in the throat. I realize that up until now, even circling us like a vulture, Risdon has been careful to stay out of Dad's reach.

Now he stumbles back sputtering and gasping. His mouth moves, but only a rasp of breath comes out.

"You do not call her that," Dad says.

I expect Risdon to retaliate. It's probably what Dad was hoping for, come to think of it, maybe to get him close enough for a triangle choke. But instead Risdon makes a horrible noise that I think he intended as a scoff. He turns back to me, and he draws his Ka-Bar from the kydex sheath at his belt.

That is when Abby starts to struggle for air.

"Easy, honey," Dad says. "Take it easy. Slow down."

She claws at the fireplace guard behind her, and she tips her chin up to clear her airway. Her breath comes faster, deeper. Too fast, too deep.

Oh, God, not now. Not now , junebug.

Risdon gestures harshly at Abby and glares at Dad.

"She has panic attacks," Dad says. "She needs her meds. They were in my wife's purse when your men cleared it out."

I lift my head and stare at him. What meds?

Risdon waves that off with a look of disgust.

"She needs the medication," Dad insists. "This will only get worse if she doesn't get it."

I glance at Mom for an explanation, only to see her hurriedly working the silver comb out of her hair. Dad made it for her as a Christmas present last year. The tines flash in the moonlight, and they aren't symmetrical. One is a hook pick, the next a snake rake, ball pick, double round… and a modified S-pick.

Oh, Abby, you glorious little faker.

My sister gasps and pants - "can't breathe, can't breathe" - and tears run down her face. Snot too, I think. Give the girl an Oscar. All of the Oscars.

Risdon crouches down in front of her again. He shoves her back against the fireplace guard, and he covers her mouth with his hand, forcing her to breathe through her nose. Then he makes the only sound he's capable of right now: a soft shhh .

My parents pop their cuffs at almost the exact same time.

Dad tackles Risdon to the filthy floor, and Mom grabs his knife when it slides toward her. She runs straight for me, and she stands on her tippy-toes to reach over my head and cut me loose.

I collapse onto her shoulder, and she eases me to the floor. Quickly she kisses my forehead - "I'm so sorry, baby, everything's going to be all right" - and she scrambles over to cut Abby's zip-ties.

Dad passes Risdon's guard and lands a punch to his face, which has already taken some abuse tonight. Risdon makes a horrific, hissing cat noise through his fucked-up throat, and they roll sideways.

Footsteps pound in the hall. Risdon's men are coming.

My father and I are both free. They are not going to like what they find.

Six of them pour in, all told, and they converge on Dad and Risdon. I yank one away from the pile, trying to dig my way to Dad, who has fought his way to his feet. Risdon crawls away from him, and two men force Dad back a yard.

I'm a little busy breaking someone's wrist, so I don't see what happens next.

But I hear the snap.

The man falls limp in Dad's hands, his head dangling at an obscene angle. The body thuds to the floor.

I stare.

Then Dad looks right at me, and in a split second I understand.

If Risdon were smart, he would have come for the Arrow. That guy doesn't have a family. He doesn't love anyone, and no one loves him. What he has is a code. But the Arrow isn't here tonight. Risdon came for Oliver and Jonathan Queen, the dumb son of a bitch, and we are going to drown him in his own blood.

Risdon scrambles up to the relative safety of his men, and with his face twisting in pain he breathes, "Alive. If can."

"Jon, here." Mom passes me Risdon's knife. Then she grabs my sister's hand and starts pulling her toward the windows. "Come on, honey, we're taking the back way out. Knock the rest of the glass out of the frame for me, please." She goes to work tugging the rope down from the rafter. I assume that's how she plans to get us out of a third floor window.

Dad and I form a barrier in front of her and Abby. The nauseous fear in my stomach eases for the first time since I woke up here, and my panicky pulse slows to an almost leisurely tha-dump. My shaky limbs steady. This, I know how to do.

Six men come screaming down on us.

They are not amateurs. Even spliced out of their minds, wild with adrenaline, they fight smart, targeting my weak left arm and Dad's stiff right shoulder. And holy shit, they take damage that would put a Spanish fighting bull out of commission, and they keep coming. One nearly passes my guard spitting blood and breathing raggedly from what sounds like a broken rib puncturing his lung.

We tear into them savagely.

I have sparred with my father a few hundred times, and the night we raided the Port Authority I saw the security camera feed of him taking on a small army by himself. I've seen him fight for life-or-death stakes.

But I've never seen this. Tonight he is holding nothing back.

The knife flashes in my hand, and I'm pretty sure I nicked that guy's brachial artery. He doesn't know he's dead yet, but he'll bleed out in under a minute. That means I've just killed a man. On purpose.

I feel only fierce satisfaction.

The way Dad and I fall into sync is like no teamwork I've ever experienced before. We achieve some kind of nirvana, I swear - fast and brutal and nearly telepathic. Dad throws an attacker over his hip, and I stomp hard on his face. I knock the next one back on his heels, and Dad crushes his windpipe.

"There are men at ground level," Mom says, securing the rope to the window frame. "That complicates things."

"I don't see that it does," I say. They try to stop us, we kill them too.

Dad has armed himself with a dead man's knife, and he goes for Risdon's throat. One of the two remaining thugs tries to jump him, and whatever Dad does to him happens so fast that all I hear is the scream. Risdon takes the moment of distraction to try to kick Dad's knees out from under him. Dad crowds him enough to lessen the impact, but that had to hurt.

I guard his back against Risdon's last man standing. The guy lands a powerhouse of a punch to the bloody hole in my shoulder, and the pain nearly takes me to the floor. But if I go down, I leave Dad wide open.

That big, messy punch has left the guy vulnerable. I slide up under his guard, and I do something kind of horrific to his throat. He hits the floor gurgling.

Risdon looks over at the sound. In the sudden, panting silence, he realizes six bodies surround him.

He runs for it.

I break ranks with Dad to take off after him.

"Jon, don't!" Dad yells.

But I'm through the door, chasing Risdon down a wide hallway, dodging the places where the floor looks rotted through. I've got a longer stride, and I'm gaining on him fast.

He disappears around a corner, and I skid around it seconds later.

A dark shape waits in the shadows, and the blast of a gun deafens me. The knife skitters out of my hand, my right leg crumples beneath me, and oh, holy shit, that's splintered bone I'm seeing through all the red. Oh, Jesus, I can't feel it yet - too much adrenaline - but it looks horrifying.

Risdon steps right up to me and presses the muzzle to my forehead, finger still on the trigger guard.

Dig once told me, from experience, that if a man has you at gunpoint, "you had better hope he's a sick bastard. That kind of man wants to savor the kill, draw it out. He'll talk, he'll gloat, and the best part is he'll get in your space with a ranged weapon like an idiot."

"I'm going to kill all three of them slow," Risdon says in a wet, spitting whisper. "But first I'm going to - "

I wrench the gun out of his hand by the barrel. He doesn't even have time to establish a guard before I've got him in a mount, and I slam the butt of the gun down hard into his face.

Risdon's nose breaks with a crunch.

I slam it down again. Break his orbital bone.

Again. Shatter his jaw.

The pistol comes away bloody, and I don't stop.

His frantic bucking stills, and I don't stop.

"Jon, that's enough."

I know it's Dad's voice, but the words don't even make sense. Besides, some psycho is completely drowning him out with a frenzied, feral string of curses.

kill you I will fucking kill you son of a bitch you're fucking dead you hear me

"Jon, he's gone."

Me. It's me snarling those things.

"Jonathan!"

I stop. I sit back, panting hard.

"You're losing a lot of blood," Dad says in the tone he might use with a wild animal he intended to free from a bear trap. "Let us help you."

Us?

I finally look up. Dad is favoring his bad knee and leaning heavily on Dig, and Lyla comes up behind them, holstering her weapon. At the other end of the hallway, the Canary swings her staff onto her shoulder, and the Bat keeps to the shadows.

"Area's secure," Lyla says. She crouches down next to me, and in her gentlest voice, she says, "Let's get you taken care of."

Then Mom and Abby come around the corner, and if I live to be a hundred, I will remember with perfect clarity the looks on their faces when they catch sight of me. It's all the horror and wariness and pity you might feel for your rabid Labrador before you put him down.

I hear sirens outside.

"It's over," Lyla says, reaching for my mangled lower leg. "It's all over, Jonny."

I slap her hand away. "Don't touch it."

"I need to stop the bleeding."

"I said don't."

Mom comes to kneel next to my good leg, and she reaches for my face. Combs her fingers through my hair a few times. "Look at me, sweetheart. Come here." She pulls me sideways, and the Canary drags Risdon out from under me. It jostles the broken bone, and I feel the first stabs of pain.

I mean to say Mom , but my face is going numb, and my lips don't work properly. What comes out is more like, "Mama."

Well, that's humiliating.

Lyla goes to work on my bad leg. I have no idea what she is doing, because I don't dare look, but it feels like she is holding a lit match to raw nerve endings. I make more humiliating noises.

"Come here," Mom says, though we both know I have not fit on her shoulder in a very long time. She pulls me down anyway.

"'M cold," I realize. Shock. That means I'm going into shock.

"I've got you," Mom keeps saying as the world fades out. "I've got you."

I wake to the feel of a warm weight pressed against my less-injured side.

"Hey, frat boy."

When I open my eyes, my first thought is that no one in the history of the universe has ever been as pretty as Laetitia Cuvier at this very second, sitting up in her chair and smiling warmly at me. Behind her is a broad window set into a blandly green wall, and the sunshine pouring through it turns her auburn hair to fire.

"Hey, pretty girl."

Oh, God, someone gave me the good drugs again.

" Mon Dieu, ces analgésiques sont très forts . " She sets aside the glassbook in her lap, folds down the railing on the hospital bed, and reaches for my hand. "How do you feel?"

With some trepidation, I look down at my leg, and I'm somewhat surprised to see that it's still attached. A black electromyographic cast extends from my knee to my ankle.

"Are you in pain?" Tish says.

My whole lower leg pounds dully like a far-off drum, and I know for damn sure that at some point it is going to be excruciating. But for right now, the smile I give her is a little dopey. "Nah. Stoned off my ass."

She laughs (ten points to me - no, a hundred points to me) and picks something up from right next to me on the mattress: a black cord with a round black button attached. "When you need it, the self-serve morphine is right here, ok?"

I turn my attention to the weight next to me. Abby is tucked snugly under my arm, curled up in a ball with her back pressed to my side. I can feel her slow, steady breath on the inside of my elbow. It tickles.

"Don't wake her," Tish says. "This is the first she's slept for more than an hour at a stretch."

I am not in any hurry to wake her. The last time I saw my sister, she had just caught me wearing another man's blood after I caved his face in. The next time she opens her eyes, I expect she is going to look at me different.

I expect I will deserve it.

"Hey, man," Dig says from the doorway. "Good to have you with us again."

"Hey." Now that he is here, it occurs to me to wonder: "Is everybody ok? Where are my parents?"

"They're fine," he assures me. "Already back at work."

"Here." Tish picks up her glassbook. "This casted just an hour ago."

The video she pulls up from the Star Herald shows a crowd of thousands packing Duwamish Street outside the convention center. As it zooms in, the caster's voice says, "Mayor Oliver Queen appears unshaken by his family's ordeal at his inauguration. This afternoon he met with protesters outside the historic Bioethics Conference, where Thursday night's demonstrations erupted into violence. Newly appointed Police Chief McKenna Hall accompanied him to discuss their concerns with the leader of the anti-GMO movement and ensure that today's protest remains peaceful."

"After Risdon took you," Dig says, "Chief Broussard set a curfew and declared zero tolerance. When the crowd wouldn't disperse, things got out of control. Rubber bullet took out one kid's eye. Empty cop car got set on fire. Big mess."

On video, Dad and Hall move through the crowd with an energetic, bearded man in a wrinkled flannel button-down. He seems to be introducing them to the other protest organizers. They shake hands, ask quiet questions, and listen more than they speak. The cops nearby are all in blue patrol uniforms, and there is not a single gas mask or helmet or plastic shield to be seen.

"Let me tell you," Dig says, "SCPD was not happy when Oliver and McKenna told them they were facing that mob without riot gear."

"It doesn't look like a mob to me," I say.

Dig smiles, and he rests a hand on Tish's shoulder with a familiarity I wouldn't have expected. "It's like Thea says. You'd better believe the costume matters."

Don't I know it. If Jonathan Queen had stood atop the Convention Center and yelled for a general chill-out, no one would have listened. But I did it in the hood. Now Dad and Hall have made sure that when the crowd looks at the cops, they see peacekeepers instead of faceless stormtroopers.

In a long shot, I catch a glimpse of Mom smiling and holding out her hands for a protester's cellphone. The young guy hands it over gratefully, and she starts swiping at the screen with a little frown of concentration. I think she is fixing it for him.

Then they take a selfie.

"Winning hearts and minds," Dig says, shaking his head. "Last night SCPD managed the most polite mass arrest I've ever seen. The protesters got to make their point, no one got pepper-sprayed, and hardly anybody even got handcuffed."

"Maybe this mayor thing wasn't the worst idea ever."

Tish smiles up at Dig as she slides the glassbook into its case, and she slips her hand into mine. "I voted for him."

"Aren't you glad you didn't run off to Kandahar and miss all this?" I ask him.

"Oh, we will," he assures me. "There's a hotel with an infinity pool and its own pomegranate orchard, and we are going."

"But not yet."

"No," he says quietly. He gives Tish's shoulder a squeeze, and through the gentle pressure of her fingers I somehow feel the reassurance as if it were mine. "Not just yet."

They keep me at Starling General for four days after they weld my leg back together. Ten or fifteen years ago, this injury would have put me out of the vigilante business permanently. With Kord's biotech, I may set off metal detectors for the rest of my life, but they expect me to get full function back.

Among the first of many visitors are SCPD's finest, who ask me a lot of very serious questions in the presence of the family lawyer.

"What happened in that hallway, Jonathan?"

They already have the rest of the family's statements, in which the new mayor and his family were targeted for political reasons, and heroic representatives of Panoptic Security unfortunately had to use lethal force to subdue our captors.

I say the minimum necessary to confirm this version of events.

"I guess the less said about vigilantes, the better," I tell Dad with a tight smile the next time he visits. "And it would be a shame to start off your mayoral term with justifiable homicide in the headlines. We'd have a lot of explaining to do."

"Yes." Dad looks at the floor. "Also, if we told SCPD the strict truth, we would put Laurel in the awkward position of having to charge you with second degree murder."

I swallow hard. I've been waiting for someone to bring up the fact that I killed three people, and I went a little crazy on the last one.

"You would claim provocation," he says, meeting my eyes, "which would knock the charge down to voluntary manslaughter. Five to fifteen in this state."

"He had a gun to my head. He'd just shot me."

"No one could dispute that the first two were self-defense. But you pursued a fleeing man who was no longer an immediate threat," Dad says with neither judgment nor gentleness. "After you disarmed him, you announced your intent to kill, and you kept hitting him long after he was incapacitated."

I would have kept hitting him until I was incapacitated if they had not stopped me. I would have kept hitting him if he had waved a white handkerchief and begged for mercy. I would have kept hitting him if fluffy-winged angels had come down from heaven to announce mandatory peace on earth effective immediately.

I think it over for a good long time, and Dad lets me have my silence.

Even after everything Risdon had done and everything he planned to do, I didn't have to kill him. I did that because I wanted to. The law does not recognize "he had it coming" as a valid defense. Going by the shame that churns my insides when I replay the wet smack of the gun into his bloody face, neither do I.

"You told me not to go after him."

Dad looks down at his hands. "I also told Risdon he was going to die choking on his own blood."

Another long silence follows.

"I killed a man in anger," I say, as much to feel the shape of the words in my mouth as for him to hear them.

Dad nods. "Righteous anger. Justified anger. But I won't tell you it was right."

The words slice out a hollow space inside me, just above my diaphragm and a little to the left. I imagine someday it will turn to scar tissue, an old wound remembered only when I move the wrong way.

Someday.

Right now, I know with leaden certainty: "I would do it again."

He holds my gaze. "I won't tell you it was wrong."

I close my eyes. Three deep breaths. "The way Abby looked at me..." But I don't have the words.

As in so many other things, with Dad I don't need them. "She looked at me the same way."

"I think maybe this is why I didn't tell her for so long. I was afraid one day she'd look at me like that."

He skims his hands alongside his head, and his fingers interlock at the nape of his neck.

"When I woke up, she was, um," I pat the space beside me where she was curled up. "Like it never even happened."

His hands fall, and he looks up at me. "You will always have killed those three people."

I suck in a breath.

"You're going to have to find a way to be the man who killed them, the vigilante with the code, and the brother she loves. Because they're all the same man, Jon."

"Masks all the way down," I murmur.

Dad's phone buzzes, and he checks it in irritation. "I have to go. But before I do," he digs in his pocket, "Thea asked me to give you this." He hands me a note on thick linen paper.

"Is this about, um…" Alone among my family members, Aunt Thea has not come for visiting hours. I can't help wondering if she has finally started to blame me.

"She's not avoiding you," Dad says. "She's in D.C."

That night on C-SPAN, I watch my aunt walk onto the Senate floor. She walks slowly, with great effort and the aid of forearm crutches, but she walks. She takes her place at a podium to testify against the Kobel Act.

On the nightstand next to me, her note lies open-faced.

Jon,

So glad you're going to be ok. I wish I could be there when you wake up, but I've got to go fight for a miracle. I gave Felicity a hug to pass along to you, just until I get back.

Love always,

Aunt Thea

P.S. - He had it coming. I'm sorry it fell to you, sweetheart.

Kobel dies in the Senate.

I fold the note up small and tuck it into my wallet.

Starling General releases me just before dusk on a Thursday, and when I swing out of the hospital room on crutches, it is my mother and sister who wait for me at the desk.

I was right. Abby looks at me differently.

"You ready to go home?" Mom says, jingling her car keys.

"I've been ready."

Abby doesn't fight me for shotgun, and my crutches ride in the backseat across her lap. On Duwamish Street, we glide past smashed storefronts and burnt husks of buildings, and I watch an elderly man sweep glass into a neat pile in front of a corner store. I make a deep, dissatisfied noise before I can stop myself.

Mom casts me a sideways glance. "We've rebuilt after much worse."

"Doesn't mean it won't tumble down again."

She reaches for my hand where it rests on my knee, and she covers it with hers. Eyes on the road again, she murmurs, "No, it doesn't."

"Can we stop somewhere before we go home?"

"Anywhere."

Greenwood Cemetery smells of ligustrums and freshly cut grass, and May breathes soft evening warmth on my face as I hobble among the headstones. Mom and Abby lean against the car, waiting.

In Memoriam

Roy Harper

1991-2042

Nemo vir est nisi qui mundum reddat meliorem

I lay the crutches against a nearby statue of an angel - no disrespect intended, ma'am - and I sink down clumsily in the grass. Five years of Latin classes, and it takes me a full minute to parse the inscription.

"Nobody man is never... no, wait, that's except. Except world render… Oh. I remember this one." I let my head fall between my hunched shoulders, and I let out a little huff of breath that couldn't be called a laugh. "No man is he who does not make the world better." I tip my head back. "Dig, was that you? Sounds like you. You military types love you some dead languages."

The wind moves in the ligustrums and washes their dark, heavy scent over me.

"So, um. Hey." I've never talked to a headstone before. I don't know the etiquette. "I was supposed to have your back, and I fucked it up."

A lifetime ago, my uncle leaned back against Mom's desk in the lair and made it abundantly clear how he felt about jackasses named Queen who believe everything is their fault because obviously the world revolves around them.

Climb down off the cross, moron , Captain Lance said not long after.

But I am going to say this, out loud, at least once: "Roy, I am so sorry."

The shadows of the angel's wings darken as they reach for me.

"Starling doesn't know what you did for her, but I do. I won't let it be undone."

It is what I came here to say, but it seems oddly anticlimactic. Am I supposed to sense his presence or remember some inspiring thing he said forever ago or, I don't know, experience some kind of inner peace? The wind could at least shut up rustling while I'm having a respectful silence.

I'll try one more time.

"They say people sleep sound in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. All these years, that's been you, standing guard on that wall, telling other people it was safe to turn out their lights. Defending the ones who couldn't defend themselves. And I know what it cost you."

My eyes burn.

"So rest now. I've got it from here, ok?"

And that's my limit, right there. I sit with my bad leg sprawled out awkwardly next to me, and I tear up handfuls of grass while I catch my breath.

When I'm finished wiping my face on my sleeves, I start the awkward struggle to my feet. As if by magic, Abby materializes next to me. Without quite looking me in the face, she holds out both hands, and with her help I make it upright in one semi-graceful movement.

When I reach for the crutches, she steps right in the way and sidles up under my arm.

"What do you think you're doing? I'll squish you."

She head butts my chest. "Maybe I'm stronger than you realize."

"No." Mom gathers up the crutches on her way over to us, and she assures Abby: "He'll squish you."

I hold a hand out. "Gimme."

As if I hadn't said anything, Mom tells Abby, "It'll take both of us." And she ducks under my other arm. They both look up at me, smiling expectantly.

I shake my head. "You are both ridiculous. This is what crutches are for ."

But I squeeze Mom to my side, kiss the top of Abby's head, and take a step. I lean hard on my mother and sister, and they bear me up all the way home.