(AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…) AFTERMATH

Taylor became aware of several things in the following minutes. Her hands would not quite stop trembling, even after she wiped the blood from her palms on her clothes. Her eyes kept drifting back to the stretch of road behind the bus, to the glittering ruin that still caught the light where the woman had landed, beautiful and monstrous all at once. And her stomach felt empty, as if something important had been scooped out and left behind.

She had not forced the woman into this situation, or taken her family hostage, or pressed the detonator and ended her with her own hands, and some small, technical part of her mind insisted that this distinction mattered. The woman had died because of the bomb in her skull, because of the choice of a faceless mad bomber and the cruelty of the ABB, because of a chain of decisions that stretched far beyond Taylor herself.

And yet, none of that changed the fact that she had pushed her through the window, fully aware of what would happen next. Or the fact that by any reasonable definition, the woman’s death was a direct result of her actions.

Taylor Hebert was a murderer.

The acknowledgement should have crushed her.

She waited for it, in a way. For the nausea, or the shaking, or the sudden, overwhelming guilt people on TV always talked about when they described taking a life, even accidentally. She waited for the weight of it to drop onto her chest and make it impossible to breathe. Instead, once the last of the adrenaline faded, all she felt was an odd sense of calm that she did not entirely trust, but could not deny. 

No, that wasn’t right.

The closest thing she felt to guilt was a dull irritation, more like the echo of an emotion than the thing itself. And it had nothing to do with the woman who had died.

It had everything to do with the people on the bus.

Once the initial panic burned itself out, once the screaming ended and the driver pulled over and emergency services were called, the mood shifted in a way Taylor found deeply uncomfortable. Fear and horror gave way to relief, and relief turned almost immediately into something else entirely: gratitude, awe, and curiosity. People looked at her like she was something remarkable, something brave and decisive and heroic, but that attention crawled under her skin.

They crowded around her, voices overlapping as they spoke at once, but eventually, individual words began to separate themselves from the noise. Questions, mostly, all circling the same point from different angles. How did you know? What tipped you off? Why did you do it? Someone kept saying thank you, their voice breaking every time, and someone else grabbed her arm as if they needed physical reassurance that she was real.

She let them touch her. She let them talk. And as they did, she noted that this was what came after, the aftermath she had never seen before because of the intervention of others or her body blacking out. 

“How did you know?”

A phone appeared in front of her face, the back camera shining as it recorded. Taylor blinked at it, then at the woman holding it, whose expression held a strange mix of relief and excitement.

“How did you know?” the woman asked again, slower this time, as if Taylor had not heard her the first time. “I mean, how did you know it was her?”

Taylor inhaled, then exhaled, and found that her voice worked when she needed it to.

“I live near their territory,” she said, keeping her tone even. She focused on the words themselves, on choosing them carefully, the way she always did when lying mattered. “You hear things. Rumors. Mostly about the ABB doing this sort of thing.” Then because she needed to clarify things to prevent widespread discrimination, she added, “Forcing people into it.”

A few heads nodded immediately, eager and almost grateful. 

The explanation wasn't very good. It felt flimsy, full of holes, the sort of story that would fall apart under even mild scrutiny. Anyone with half a brain should have questioned it, should have pushed back or asked why a teenage girl had been the only one to hear such since many of them lived in that area, and acted on such suspicion. 

That did not happen.

Civilians, she was learning, were remarkably good at accepting answers that made some sense and let them stop thinking about uncomfortable things.

“And then she started talking,” Taylor continued, gesturing vaguely toward the front of the bus, toward the empty space where the woman had been standing. “About Lung, and how things were only going to get worse without his presence. About nothing being there to hold her back anymore.” She swallowed. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I also didn’t want to die.”

That part, at least, was not a lie.

Someone asked if she was a cape, the question carrying something hopeful, and something wary. Taylor shook her head immediately, sharper than she meant to, and answered before the question could build momentum among the crowd.

“No. I am not.”

When faced with the choice between doing nothing and risking the deaths of everyone on the bus, herself included, she had chosen to bite the bullet and do something unforgivable because the alternative had been certain death for all of them.

They nodded. They murmured. Some of them exchanged looks and decided, collectively, that they understood enough. A few of them even looked embarrassed, as if her explanation had highlighted their own inaction in a way they did not want to dwell on. Whatever doubts they might have had were smoothed over by relief and adrenaline and the simple desire to move on.

Another voice chimed in then, more confident now that shoulders had lowered and breaths came easier, asking whether Taylor had been sure, whether there hadn’t been some other reason she’d chosen that woman in particular.

“No,” she snapped, with more heat than she strictly needed. Paranoid, yes. Terrified, absolutely. Willing to make a horrible call under impossible pressure, apparently. But that had nothing to do with how the woman looked, and everything to do with what she’d said, and the fear that had poured off her.

More glances were exchanged, but that seemed to satisfy them. Or perhaps they simply wanted to be satisfied. After all, the danger had passed and they were still alive.  

A man laughed shakily, the sound loud and inappropriate in the cramped space, and someone else clapped Taylor on the back hard enough to make her stumble a step forward.

And then it somehow got worse.

More phones came up, their cameras pointed at her. They asked her to stand still, to look this way, to say again what she had said before, but clearer this time, because it was hard to hear over the shouting and they wanted to get it right. No, because they wanted to get it all on video.

They wanted proof. They wanted a story. Something unbelievable that had happened to them, something they had survived, and they wanted to show their family, friends, and strangers alike.

So Taylor stood there, frozen, aware of the dried blood under her nails and the heaviness in her arms. The hammer lay abandoned near the seat where she’d dropped it, unnoticed now that it had done its job. Beyond the shattered window, the crystallized remains still glittered, just out of focus.

She forced a small, tight smile because that seemed to be what they wanted. 

She wondered, distantly, if being doomed to die over and over in an explosion might actually have been preferable to this.