Revenge10 min read
The Dandelion and the Fire
ButterPicks13 views
I held Finch's collar and felt the old habit of waiting at the station sink into my bones.
"It's okay," I told him, and the dog cocked his head like he understood. "Go on, eat."
Finch limped to his bowl. I watched him, then at the uniform folded on the chair where Christopher's medals used to glitter. I could still smell smoke on it, like memory stuck to cloth.
"You should be home," I said to the empty room, though the siren of a distant engine answered me. I had learned to talk to the empty places where he used to be, pretending they were listening.
Christopher Collins was a firefighter. He wore brave without thinking. I loved him because he never fussed about being brave—he just showed up and did it. I loved him because once, years ago, he had walked into a ruined house and lifted me out, shaking and coughing, and handed me back to life like it was nothing special.
Finch nuzzled my hand. He had been with us since that night. He knew Christopher. He knew home.
The call came like a small stone into a pool. Someone had lied, and the pond rippled.
"He went in to check," the captain said when my legs stopped working. "He went to a fourth-floor window. The resident said—said his daughter was inside. He went in to look—"
"No," I said. "He told you not to—"
"He always thought he could save more if he did more," the captain said softly. "He pulled that dog in front of him. I am sorry."
Finch whined. I followed the people with their blank faces like a puppet. I walked because my feet had a single memory: move. The rest was fog.
"I want his uniform," I said when the coffin was closed.
They gave it to me. They could give me the uniform; they could not give me words to fix what had broken.
After the fire, the files came out. The court. The lawyers. The man who had cried in the stairwell and told them he thought his daughter was inside had a name: Grayson Komarov. He had been poor, the articles said. He had needed ten thousand. He had lied. He had a lawyer and a theory that no one could predict a building collapse. The judge—cold and correct—listened and nodded and folded his hands like a man closing a book.
"Not guilty," the papers said. Grayson walked out, free as air.
"I watched him on the courthouse steps," I told Finch. "He smiled like a man who had not killed anyone."
People like to say "no one can prepare for chance." I wanted to throw up every time I heard it.
He came to our doorstep.
"I want what's missing," he said when I opened the door. "Two gold bars. Have you seen them?"
"You think Christopher stole?" I laughed because I did not know what else to do. "Do you think I would let him—?"
Grayson did not bother with subtlety. He walked in, politely at first, then like a man who had practiced taking what he wanted.
"You'll give them back," he said. "You can either do it the easy way or the hard way."
"There's nothing here," I told him. Finch stood up, hackles up, and pressed his front paw to the floor.
Grayson laughed. "Show me."
"You brought this here," I said. "You came, you lied, and because of you—"
He shoved me. "Give them back!" he shouted. "Give them back, you thief."
Something in me went cold and sharp and fast. I laughed at him, not polite that time. "You killed him," I said. "You took his life with your lie."
That was when he hit me. He hit me hard enough that stars were the only language my eyes spoke. He called Christopher a thief. He called me a liar. He said God would punish us for our sins and spat like he believed it, and I tasted blood and fury.
I struck back because I had to. I broke a glass and I shoved it into his mouth in a motion so raw it felt like the first time I had ever truly been afraid for my own life. He staggered and I hit him until my fists were flames.
He fell; he choked and he bled; and then he lay very still.
I do not remember the full measure of what I did. I remember the proof like a sound—like nothing but the echo of my breath. I remember covering his mouth with a sleep-shirt and thinking: I will go to jail. I will do what is right and I will still hold him in my arms sometimes in memory.
Then someone else heard that sound.
"Grayson Komarov in the living room," a voice said on speaker in the dark. A step. Another step. Then a shadow that smelled of dust and sharp rain entered.
"Don't panic," the man said. He wore a low mask over his face. He had been watching like a patient animal. "Sit. Sit down."
He brought a phone with tiny symbols on it. He called what he had a platform. He told me my name—my name as a stranger might call it: he said I could be more than my fear. He said he could help.
He said he belonged to something called the Capture Tower, and the people who used it were called the Hunters. He said they punished what the law didn't, quietly, cleanly. He said he was called Germain.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Someone who clears things others will not," he said. "We will take the body and clean the house. We cover lives other people cannot cover."
"You will take his body," I said, "and what then?"
He smiled with his eyes. "We will bury pieces of justice where the law can't reach."
I did not know what to feel. I knew I could not trust a man with a mask, but I did not trust the courthouse either.
Detective Dawson Thomas arrived with a calm face and the look of a man who had set a trap with his hands and found only shadows.
"Did you see anything?" he asked gentle, watching me like he kept tabs on my heart.
"Yes," I lied at first. "I was alone. I panicked."
Dawson watched the floor where a scrap of glass glittered. He was not convinced. He told me to keep my phone on, to stay near, to be careful. He gave me the kind of watchful counsel that meant he would look and find what he would find.
What I could not know then was that the Hunters were watching me as well.
They were not what the stories said and also everything the stories said. There was strength in their anonymity, and cruelty too. They tracked the men who took a girl's life by pulse and pattern. They knew where a liar's hands had reached. They found the gold bars, and they put them where I could find them—taped behind the frame of the wedding picture Christopher had once laughed in.
"They are trying to give you back your husband's honor," Germain said. "Do you want it?"
"I want him back," I said. "I want him back every morning at tea, and when he made faces at me for picking poor dresses, and when he asked if I wanted the three-scoop or the two-scoop."
He did not answer. Pedro Herve— a name Germain spoke with a rough respect—was the Hunter of hunters. Pedro was the one whose legend filled the platform in black letters. He was the one who had failed once. He bore that like armor dented.
"You were the one who failed," I said to Germain. "Pedro failed to save Christopher. My husband died because of a lie and something else—someone didn't make it in time."
Germain's face did not change. "Pedro came. He tried." Germain's voice cracked like a burned rope. "He tried and he failed. Sometimes even the strongest do when the world tilts."
I held Finch's cold head and learned that things give away the truth in small ways. A collar chewed a little wrong. A tire track. An elevator seam that kept its secrets.
The Hunters offered me a window: a membership, an account, a name. They gave me a choice—watch the world and do nothing, or stand under the mask.
I created an alias the way you steal a coat: Hadlee Rasmussen. It tasted like a dandelion—brave and fragile. They marked me "raised to be the kind to try." They told me the app would ping when someone needed saving. I told myself I would look, and look only.
"Promise me you'll be careful," Germain said, and for the first time someone who was not my husband tried to hold me like it was dangerous that I was alone.
"Fine," I told him. "I'll go. Once."
The first time the app blinked red, I stayed home intentionally. The message said a man named Pierre Zhao—the contractor who had allowed the house to stand like a trap—would be touring the square, and people would gather, and the town would be watching.
I had to see someone punished in public.
They told us in the Hunters' rooms that public punishment served a purpose. The law had failed the families who fed the sirens. If the law would be careful and soft, the Hunters would pick a new course: a public exposure, the cage of humiliation, then the choice for the town.
We took him to the square. I remember the face he made when he was outside and the crowd knew who he was. He had been tried and found not guilty by the law; he had been given a nod and a fine. The square filled with curious people, faces lit by phones and the noon sun. There were whispers like moth wings.
"Pierre Zhao," the town crier said, but it was not the crier's voice. It was a voice over the station speakers, clear, deliberate. "This man built houses people lived in. This man cut corners. This man told fire was a chance. He walked free."
He tried to hide his face. He had a tie with a pattern that meant nothing now. He had a lawyer's cough, the kind of cough that sells innocence.
Contracts had defended him. The judge had dismissed premonitions. The papers had moved along. But there are places the paper does not touch. There are crowds that need a mirror.
They pushed him to the fountain's edge. The Hunters had found evidence that the contractor had bribed safety officers and falsified reports; they had gathered testimonies from families, frogs of voices that croaked into the square. Video footage of collapsed beams rolled on a rented screen. People gasped.
"You built death as if it were a harvest," Germain said into the microphone, but it was Pedro who spoke after that.
Pedro came forward with a slow gait. He wore a shirt open at the collar and a scar that traced his left jaw like a lightning strike. He was made of quiet and edges. When he spoke, the square grew still as if a storm had folded its hands.
"People trusted you with shelter," Pedro said. "When they knocked on your buildings, they asked for the sound of their doors. You delivered ash. Their children had names. You gave them a hole."
There was a hush. Phones rose. Some people wept openly. Children clung to their mothers' skirts.
Pierre's eyes were glass marbles. "I paid for tests," he whined. "The engineer said—"
"Gold and excuses," Pedro said. He spoke like a slow stone. "What can the law do? It counts rules. We need a counting of consequences."
A man in the crowd shouted, "Arrest him!"
"No," said a voice near me. It was a woman whose husband had died in one of Pierre's buildings. "Don't put him in the same cages. Let him feel what he built."
The Hunters did not kill. That is the line they carved between themselves and monsters. They did something stranger. They unstitched his life.
They had him stand in a clear platform in the square. On a simple board, they placed photographs—children's drawings, bus passes, the smoky faces of people who had died in fire. They had the town come forward and speak. Each testimony was a small stone they laid on his chest.
"Your son might play on the roof," one woman said, her voice a cracked bell. "Did you ever feel the hand that will someday bury him?"
He tried to laugh, and the sound fell dead.
They gave him a crate of burned toys and set a line of people to take them, one by one, from him to the fire pits used in festivals. He had to put his hands to each toy. He had to light the match for each one and watch it blacken on the tongue of the flame. The square watched as his fingers turned sticky and red.
He was not allowed to speak during the burning. He had to listen to the names read out loud—names of houses, names of children. People stood and spoke—"My sister, Marina Colon," "My neighbor's boy, Jayden Guerrero's nephew," "My cousin, Clementine De Luca's student"—and each name took one of the burned toys away.
The crowd watched and murmured. Men with cameras took videos. Some people recorded to keep for themselves, like talismans of seeing. A baker spat on the pavement. A teenager lit a string of crackers and tossed them. There were sobs and there were angry laughs in the press of shoulders.
Pierre tried to flee when the burning reached him. A woman blocked his path. "Don't run," she said. "You ran before. Let us see if you can stand now."
He fell to his knees and scrubbed his hands with water from a public fountain, but the smoke and ash would not wash out. They had taken his documents, and the town took his name. They did not hand him over to the courts; the court had already done its small work. The Hunters had instead made him hold the weight of every small life he had crushed in a hundred bills of cheap steel.
I watched him change. He went from bright, to baffled, to furious, to small. At the end, when the last toy was black and his fingers peeled and raw, he could not stand. The crowd, which had been watching like a hunger, had become a set of faces like windows. Some were kind. Some were empty. Some were burning with the same color as the toys.
"Say his name," a woman called out. "Say the names and make them real."
They did. The names rose and fell like a tide. He bowed his head into his palms and wept openly. Not the weeping that comes from regret so much as exposure—a man becoming what everyone knew, and the world naming him.
When at last they released him, he staggered into a van with a private mark. He would be taken to live where his work could no longer touch people—sent to labor that built repair rather than profit. For a while, he would have to learn measurement by the goods he made, not by the money he pocketed. He would be watched. He would have to hand homes to those left and watch them lay bricks. The Hunters called it reparation by labor—not perfect, but a kind of public balancing.
He walked through that crowd a changed thing. The townspeople watched him go. Some applauded in a way that felt less like celebration and more like release. A child handed him back one burned toy and then took it away, like offering the man a second chance and then snatching it back, teaching him a lesson that could not be given by paper in a courtroom.
There were cameras, and the footage went viral, and everyone who watched had an opinion. The mayor made a speech the next day about due process and the dangers of mob justice. The paper printed both: a photograph of a contractor with his hands blackened, and the judge's stern piece on law.
"Did we make it worse?" I asked Germain later, my eyes still wet from the wind. Finch rested his chin on my knee.
Germain looked at me with the kind of tired a man keeps under his skin. "We made it visible," he said. "The law can be right and still leave a hole. We make men look at the lives they touched. It is ugly. It is necessary."
I could not say if the public punishment was truly justice. It was a raw thing, pulled through a public window. It had the feel of something honest and terrible. I only knew this: the town had seen, and the town would not forget.
That night, I sat with Finch and reviewed the app messages. A red blink asked me to go protect someone in a café. My finger hovered.
"I will look," I whispered. "Just look."
Hadlee Rasmussen—that was the name the Hunters had given me—sat in the dark and decided to watch the world for one more warning light. I was a dandelion in a storm. I would not forgive myself for doing nothing.
But the sky gives you choices the way a razor gives you answers. And some choices cut deeper than others.
The message was a single line about a father named Pierre Zhao—no, not the contractor in the square; a different man. He would take his daughter to a cafe and then to a river, and he would use betrayal to make blood bargain. The coordinates were precise. The capture plan was clear.
I moved my hand to accept the task.
My hands were shaking. Finch licked my fingers like a small tide.
"Come on," I told him. "We go."
We did not know then that the next door we opened would end everything we had learned to keep safe.
The End
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