Upon apprehension, Donnelly exhibited complete detachment from his crimes, claiming confusion when shown footage of himself. He referred to the masked figure on screen as“him”, stating:
“He does it when I’m asleep. I wake up and there’s red on me that isn’t mine.”
SILK ON BONE
Start A Riot - Banners
Ghost
Gunfire tears the night into shreds.
Muzzle flashes strobe the rooftop, turning the world into a stop-motion nightmare – men in blocky armour lurching, Nightshade a broken-frame blur, Honeymonster a stone that spits thunder. We came up loaded – the hatchet snug in Hatchet’s grip, Honey bandoliered, Nightshade pocketed with fresh mags, my pistol slick and too light in my shaking hands. I can taste copper and gun oil at the back of my throat. Every shot ricochets through my ribs and rattles around inside my skull like a trapped hornet.
The wind is a blade. The helicopter across the pad ticks and whines, idling, rotors slow – like a heart that refuses to quit.Rain is threatening somewhere out there, stalking the clouds. The city beyond the water is a smear of teeth and glass.
I try to breathe around the pain in my thigh and the burn in my cracked ribs and the fact that my hands won’t stop shaking. The barrel of my gun dips lower than I mean it to. I drag it back up. Point. Squeeze.
The visor I’m aiming at tilts; the round pings off a shoulder plate. The man staggers, not down. My brain is half a second behind my hands.
Drop it,Donnelly purrs, silk on bone.You’re a liability. Let me have it. I won’t miss.
Don’t,Silas whispers.Don’t hurt anyone else. Please. Please?—
I bite down hard until I taste blood. “Not now,” I say aloud – or at least, I think I do. The word tears my throat like cloth.
A gauntlet closes on my jacket and yanks me sideways. I slam into a concrete vent. Honeymonster grunts in my ear. “Stay with me.”
I nod. Or twitch. Hard to tell what my head is doing because everything leaves a comet trail. His hand is gone and he’s already pivoting past me, firing twice, three times. Two armoured shapes drop. One twitches on the gravel; the other is still.
Nightshade laughs, low and delighted, as he rips a rifle out of someone’s hands and uses it like a lever to throw the man into the low wall that rings the roof. The crunch carries even through the rotor whine. Nightshade is bleeding, beautiful in that terrible way avalanches are beautiful: you can’t look away and you know it will bury you.
He’s perfect,Donnelly sighs.He knows how to make a point.
He’s scaring them,Silas says, smaller than a breath.He’s scaring you. He’s?—
I lurch forward. A visor fills my sights; the mouth behind the shield is gritted and human and young. I pull the trigger. The young man doesn’t rise again.
My stomach turns over and crawls into my chest. The world tilts.
He would have shot you,Donnelly murmurs, satisfied.We can tally the mercy later.
Honeymonster is suddenly at my shoulder again, a wall moving with purpose. He shoves me down behind the steel lip of a maintenance hatch as rounds chew chips from the concrete where my head was a heartbeat before. Pebbled roofing bitumen grinds into my palms. Hot blood leaks down my wrist and disappears in my sleeve.
“Enough,” Honeymonster says – not to me. To the air. To Nightshade. To the men with the rifles and the men without.
Nightshade doesn’t hear him. Nightshade is a storm cell breaking open. He vaults a duct, drives an elbow into a throat, spins, sweeps, follows the fall down with a knee. He is smiling in a way that has nothing to do with joy. It is worship. It is ritual. It is the only prayer he’s got left.
Pretty,Donnelly says again.But wasteful.
Stop him,Silas begs.Stop him before he?—
A new voice slips into the noise.
“Enough.”
It isn’t shouted. It moves through the gunfire like a knife through gauze, and the edges of things rearrange around it. Heads turn: the armour, Honeymonster, even Nightshade – blood on his knuckles, breath in drags – half-pivots toward the stairwell.
Valentine steps into the wind, as if the night were a suit he’s used to wearing. Black coat, black gloves, hair smoothed back like the weather can’t touch him. He looks at the mess, and his expression is not one of anger. It is fatigue educated intoelegance. He has the air of a man who has written a list and finds all the items on it depressingly familiar.
