The doors blew open.
Matthew turned around. So did the entire courtroom. So did every camera.
They came through the doors in a river — hundreds of them, Guy Fawkes masks, paper and plastic and painted, the face he'd worn multiplied until the room was full of him. Row after row of that fixed grin, the mustache, the knowing eyes. He'd worn it to hide; they'd put it on to be seen. They didn't run. They walked, unhurried, down the aisles, past the barricades no one was manning anymore, past the cameras that had all swung around to drink them in. On every screen on earth, the courtroom filled with grinning faces — his face, everyone's face, no one's face.
The courtroom erupted. The judge was on her feet, gavel hammering — "Order! Order in this court!" — and then one of them, tall, a paper mask, stepped up to the bench and took the gavel out of her hand as gently as taking a book from a shelf, and threw it across the room. It hit the far wall and fell. The judge sat down.
Silence. The kind he'd always liked best.
Somewhere in the chaos, the jury foreman still held the folded verdict in his hands. No one would ever read it.
Then, through the crowd: a small figure. A kid — couldn't have been more than ten, the mask too big for his face, swimming in it. He walked between the rows with the unhurried certainty of a child who hasn't learned to be afraid yet, all the way to the defense table, and set a mask down in front of Matthew. A real one. Not paper.
Matthew looked at the boy. The boy looked back, the too-big mask grinning its fixed grin.
Eleven years old, holding his placard. Matthew had been that small once, staring into a camera, no idea what was coming. Now the small ones were bringing him masks.
He took the mask. He put it on.
He stood up.
"How about now we change the world?"
---
He walked down the aisle, and the people parted like the sea.
Soldiers with rifles stood along the walls and didn't raise them — boys barely older than the kid with the mask, holding weapons they'd been ordered not to use against a crowd the cameras were watching. And then, one by one, some of them laid their rifles down. Gently, on the courthouse steps. And walked with the masks into the daylight. Bailiffs stepped back. The prosecution table sat frozen, the case they'd built for nine days suddenly weightless, paper in a hurricane. The cameras tracked him, every one, and he walked through the blown doors into the daylight with the masks going with him, hundreds deep, the street swallowing them whole. The system's guns had come, and the guns stayed down.
There would be no blood shed today. The mob had decided what he was, and what he was, was theirs. Not a defendant. Not a verdict. A story, walking out of the courthouse on its own two feet.
---
On the blue couch, McGee watched him go.
Hannah's hand found hers somewhere in the middle of it and didn't let go. On the screen, the street filled with masks, and the commentators had stopped talking — there was nothing to say, and for once they knew it. Just the river of faces, and him somewhere in the middle of it, walking.
She thought about the eggs. The heartbeat under her cheek. Last night was amazing. The tiramisu in the bullpen, the boy on the board watching. Every feeling I had — one hundred percent true. The garage. The creaking wood. The boy with the placard, who'd grown up into all of this — into a river of his own face, carrying him out of the courthouse like a tide.
She'd loved Thomas. She'd hunted Fauwks. She'd held Matthew's hands across a metal table. They were all the same man, and he was gone into the crowd, and she would never see him again, and every bit of it had been true.
The tears were running down her face. She didn't wipe them away.
She smiled — slightly — while she cried.
Fade to black.
Chapter 38