An older man was doubled over, but he was on the far side of the pillar, not a location that suggested he could have been hit. He was elderly, with gray hair that still had color in it. Two people had already drawn close to him, supporting him while he knelt, rocking slightly in place. The sound he made was the heartbroken, strained sound that people made when they couldn’t even draw in a full breath.

Such shitty, shitty bad luck, that he’d been here when the collision happened.

‘Pillar’ was the wrong word, but the right word felt wrong. ‘Monument’ implied something huge, but it was barely taller than I was, maybe three feet across at the base, tapering to two feet across at the top. Plaques were recessed into three of the four faces—the fourth had come free and fallen after the collision. Each plaque bore an etching of a face, a name, a date of birth, a date of death, a message.

I looked down the length of the one-lane road. There were as many pillars as there were trees, and there were a lot of trees, enough that the sunlight that peeked past them was dappled. This pillar was one of what had to be over a thousand that had been set throughout the city by now, punctuating quaint streets and surrounding parks. Places that were nice.

They were part of an initiative by an independent cape, a hero turned rogue, helping out.

There could easily be a thousand more of these pillars before the year was over, that number repeated every year thereafter, and if that work continued for another fifty or a hundred years, there wouldn’t be a pillar for one percent of the people we’d lost. Not even if ‘we’ were just the people who hailed from the northeastern U.S.

The girl who’d been driving the car had a thousand-yard stare as she faced down the small crowd. She looked like she’d just hit a real person and reality was sinking in.

The wailing stopped. People were consoling the old man, some shooting hard looks at the girl who didn’t seem to be registering much of anything.

“Hey,” I called out.

She didn’t seem to register that I was talking to her, as she stared at the lower portion of the pillar that had crumbled, stone chunks broken away, cracks webbing across the surface.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

She nodded, said, “I’m so sorry.”

The old man looked up at her.

People in the crowd were staring, apparently angry on the old man’s behalf. One hapless teenager and thirty or forty very upset people.

“Listen,” I told her. “Stay close by, okay? I’m sure someone in the crowd there is calling for help—”

Someone in the crowd raised a hand to get my attention. They had a phone to their ear.