Clap. Clap. Clap.

From the alley entrance. A man walked in, features with a family resemblance to Raphael’s, but older, more lived-in, the weight of more years in the lines of the face.

He crouched beside the boy and met his eyes at the same level.

"Father, I... I..."

Raphael looked at his father without direction, and the older man put a hand on his shoulder.

"The first time. Taking a life." He looked at the man on the ground. "Look at him, Raphael. You’ll do this many more times. Remember the weight of it. Only by doing that will you understand why you kill."

The young Raphael looked down with something like numbness. The gaunt-faced addict had both hands pressed against the puncture in his throat, eyes going opaque, mouth hanging open, his body still working through its convulsions.

The wound was letting air in. Air and blood mixing together, becoming dense foam, the bloody bubbles pushing through the gaps in the fingers pressed against the neck and spilling out, bringing with them a smell that landed sharp and immediate.

The man tried to breathe. Every attempt pulled more foam in. It moved toward his mouth gradually, thick and gathering, filling what should have been an open passage.

He tried to turn over and force it out. His body refused. He thrashed and seized the way a person does when the body is still fighting what the mind has already understood, each movement less than the one before, the suffocation building.

The young Raphael’s hand started moving toward him on instinct. His father’s hand came down on it and held it still.

The dying man’s arm rose, trembling, reaching out, his fingers open toward Raphael. His lips moved. The shape of them: I was wrong. Help me.

Raphael looked at him. His arm went back down. His face was empty.

One more tremor. The whites showed. The arm fell to the side.

The moment pressed itself into the record of Raphael’s memory, and became the origin point of this particular fear.

Alp recognized the opening. He slid into the space behind Raphael’s perception and took on the register of an inner voice, accusatory and certain:

Look at what you did. You killed a man. Look at how he died, did you think about how much pain that was? How much despair? Executioner. You’re worse than a Demon.

Did you think about his family? Maybe his child is at home right now waiting for him to come back. Maybe his parents are waiting to hear how his day went. Maybe his wife, all of that. Gone. You destroyed all of it. Yes, you.

The nightmare shifted. The memory departed from its actual course.

Raphael raised his head. His blue eyes held something uncertain.

"Was this right, Father? I know what you taught me, if someone does evil, meet it with equal force. But I keep thinking... this far? Killing him?"

Frank Alanster scratched his chin and nudged the dropped knife with the toe of his shoe.

"Let me work through what would have happened if you hadn’t acted. First, that young woman experiences something from which she doesn’t recover, this man violates her, destroys every idea she’d formed about love or romance, leaves only something polluted and permanent in its place."

He took his time.

"Snow that’s been trampled, can it still be a fairy-story princess riding away with a prince? Maybe. But what does she believe? The answer is shame. It follows her for the rest of her life."

Alp hadn’t anticipated the old man joining the argument at all. He pushed back from inside Raphael’s perception immediately:

Don’t excuse your crime by speculating. What era are we in? How long has the world been sexually open? Purity hasn’t been worth anything for a long time, nobody cares about that anymore.

Yes, it’s a scar that stays forever, but the other person? His entire life actually ended here. That’s real. That’s permanent.

Frank glanced, with a certain thoughtfulness, at the empty air beside Raphael, the exact location where Alp was, and spoke without waiting for Raphael to answer, a short sound of dry amusement in it:

"Think through what happens next, once it makes the news. Her friends pity her. Anyone pursuing her quietly steps away.

Her social media becomes a sustained public performance of sympathy that keeps striking at whatever is left of her self-respect. Her life dismantles itself around the story."

A pause.

"Depression. Self-harm. Suicide is within the range of it. And at that point, what is the functional difference between that and simply being dead?"

Alp started to object, none of this has happened, this is all one person’s speculation, and Frank made a short sound before he could:

"No need to rush the counter. Think about him. No mask. No attempt to hide his face. But he came with a blade, sharp and specific. What was he planning to do about a witness who had seen everything?

He couldn’t afford to leave her alive. He’s a coward, and a coward who was willing to ruin an innocent person’s entire life for his own sake, but a knife through the throat afterward, and no one ever knows what he did. He had already made that decision."

Alp looked at Frank more carefully. The longer he looked, the more wrong it felt. This old man didn’t resemble a projection of Raphael’s subconscious. He resembled something else entirely.

He shelved the question. His purpose required making Raphael accept the accusation, if the fear took hold and expanded, the round succeeded. He pushed harder:

That’s all speculation. He hadn’t done anything yet. Maybe he only wanted the knife to keep her cooperative, it doesn’t prove he would have killed her.

And even if he had, even if he had become a rapist, a murderer, does that mean he had no rights? No possibility of rehabilitation?

You can’t take a single act and use it to define an entire life, to say this is all he ever was or ever could be. If punishment was warranted, that’s what legal processes are for. Procedures exist.

What you did is violent vigilantism. You committed a crime. Do you understand that? A crime.

Before Raphael could respond, and before Frank could speak, the boy shook his head, quietly, with a conviction that hadn’t been visible before:

"But what about her? If she’d really been killed here, who gives her another chance? Who has the right, who has any right at all, to forgive the killer on behalf of a victim who can no longer say anything herself?"

He looked at the ground.

"People rush to defend the criminal’s rights. People with no connection to any of it come forward to express understanding on his behalf. But the victim? The life that was forced to its end, who pities her?"

Frank allowed a slight smile. He stood, took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and exhaled a lungful with the particular satisfaction of a man who has been waiting for the right moment.

"Good question. Who indeed." He examined the end of the cigarette. "Money, perhaps? Relevant parties who accepted something to look the other way?

Family members counting what came to them? Or maybe a human rights organization scoring another public victory."

He smiled with something that wasn’t warmth.

"The answer is that he gets put away for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and then released. Sometimes earlier, you understand, early parole, because the question is always human decency, because the question is always that the criminal has reformed and deserves a second chance."

He paused, as though something else had just occurred to him, and made a small sound of appreciation for its absurdity.

"And then perhaps he writes a memoir. Billed as a life of contrition and confession. In practice, a revenue opportunity, and who would turn one down?

As for the girl mentioned briefly somewhere in the middle, the person who actually deserved the pity, she goes unremarked.

Even the media: a victim still living in the past is no match for the story of a criminal’s redemption in terms of engagement.

You soften the weight of the crime a little, add a few touches of warmth and transformation, and people who don’t know anything about the situation will be moved to tears."

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

"Ha."

He blew a smoke ring, and patted Raphael’s shoulder.

"But you made none of that necessary. The criminal is dead. The victim wasn’t victimized. Everyone is better off."

Alp’s teeth came together. The conversation was leaving him behind entirely, this pair was completing each other’s arguments and Raphael was visibly settling into something harder and more certain with every exchange.

He went for something uglier:

This is extremism. You can’t condemn an entire life because of one act, one moment. He may have done good things.

Human beings are gray, there is darkness in everyone, and light in everyone, and you cannot take an axe to a person’s whole existence and declare that this moment is all they ever were.

And beyond that: if punishment was due, you are not the one to administer it. There are laws. There are procedures. What you did is a private violent act. It is a crime. You are a criminal. Do you hear me? A criminal.

No response. Raphael might not have heard.

Alp went for the throat:

You think you’re something, don’t you? Some kind of dark hero, sweeping the city clean. Its garbage collector in a cool coat. No. You are a criminal.

A real one, with no ambiguity about it. The kind that goes somewhere specific after they die. The kind history doesn’t speak kindly of.

And it won’t stop here. You’ll take more lives, and yes, maybe those people will have done terrible things, but the hand that picks up the blade accumulates what it has done, and sin doesn’t wash off.

Whatever peace you might have had is gone now. You’ll carry this forever. Every one that follows.

Raphael was quiet. Something passed through his expression, uncertainty, and something struggling against it. He closed his eyes.

Frank stood where he was and waited.

The silence held.

When Raphael opened his eyes, only one thing was left in them.

"Then I won’t be a hero. I won’t stand in the sunlight." He said it simply, without heat. "Condemnation can come. Denial can come. None of it matters to me."

He exhaled, long and complete.

"I do what I believe is right. If that is a difficult road, I’ll walk it anyway."

A pause.

"As a sinner."

He looked forward, toward the edge of the dream.

"To hunt sinners."