CHAPTER TEN

 

AS POET LAY there, at the end of everything the Judges’ severance package promised, Ezekiel’s eyes watched Elijah. Another boy dead, in one way or another. The boy hadn’t breathed, standing so still for so long Ezekiel wondered if he’d been drowning in the air, stale with death and lingering between them all.

“Judge down, Judge down!” Pellegrino called out over her wrist comm. She darted to Judge Poet’s side.

Ezekiel’s arm shot up, dead-aimed at Aaliyah Monroe’s head. Aaliyah had, true to form for a militant, readied her weapon at Judge Jones in kind.

“I—I didn’t… I—”

“I hereby sentence you, Aaliyah Monroe, for murder in the second-degree—”

“Ouch. I’d say manslaughter in the second at best, if we’re—”

“Colin Jobee, you are wilfully impeding an arrest.” Judge Jones said without looking Jobee’s way. The engineer shrugged with his arms still raised high in the air.

“Ezekiel…” Judge Jones heard Marisa call from below him, but he didn’t take his eyes off the murderess who had shattered a man’s life. “Ma’am?” he prompted.

“Will—Judge Poet is breathing,” she said. Ezekiel didn’t remove his aim from Aaliyah’s centre mass, but his finger slackened on the trigger.

“What are we doing, Judge?” he heard Colin say. He didn’t have an answer. He could only wait. Wait for Poet’s last breath, wait for an ambulance, wait for something, anything, that could lead to judgement.

“Cuff her. And the kid,” he finally spat, not taking his aim away from Aaliyah Monroe, or the child that made his way to her, tightly clutching his mother’s waist.

Marisa fumbled the cuffs as she pulled them from her trench coat, and did as directed.

When the first cars arrived, Poet was rushed away. While Chicago offered many adequate options, the Judges would see that Poet got the very best care possible. He might not be very pretty, but none of them were getting out of Operation Revelations unscarred.

Judge Jones made it out in a fairer condition than most of the others in the house, but he still felt a loss. There was an imbalance, in that hate burrowing into the hollow of the boy Elijah’s eyes as he’d watched his mother, in a separate car, torn from his life. In that child being sent home with his remaining parent, Citizen Colin Jobee.

Aaliyah’s aunt, the family lawyer she’d called before the Judges’ arrived, met her niece at the precinct.

Officer Wilson was thrilled to have his perp back in custody, and the chance to protect the American public from her hysterical, abrasive rhetoric.

The law had persevered. The judgement had protected all of us. A father reunited with his son, a radical threat neutralised. There was peace.

But Jones had difficulty seeing it as earned.

Was it the bodies a button-press had broken? Was it a partner that had saved his life, seen something of worth in him, and paid a price for that humanity? Did it have something to do with the tattered moleskin he’d found that night in Aaliyah’s room?

It was most likely that first thing.

Regardless of what it was, after the nigh endless paperwork, Judge Jones would seek refuge in something that mattered.

In favours he hadn’t earned from boys he never took the time to love at police stations he hoped to never see again.

As he sat in that post office, sending his third letter to Officer Ocasio, dancing around what mattered and asking about the… refugee he’d agreed to harbour after their escape, he knew the choice he made was the right one.

That even where the darkness lay, he could be worth something; could be human.