One stopped behind me, nearly close enough to touch. The men leapt off the sides, unspooled the hoses, and struggled to work the pumps. The way they fumbled with their equipment showed that these were not the brave men of Engine Company Eighteen. They wore the tattered blue of the Fourth Precinct. Every one had a pistol in his belt, and a few had rifles too. Thorne rode on top of the contraption, rifle slung over his shoulder like he was leading a hunt. I’d never seen him standing so tall.

They got the hoses working and trained them on Van Alen’s fire. Steam hissed over the battleground, a sickening gray cloud that swallowed the armies of both sides even as black descended. The guards on the platform struggled against the water, throwing what fuel they had left on the dying blaze, but in less than a minute, the fight was lost. The fire died, and night surged up the avenue.

As the water swallowed the last embers, I saw Barbarossa in silhouette, one of Van Alen’s guardsmen kneeling at her feet. She clutched his hair in her fist, pressed that curved knife to his throat, and pulled until she hit spine. She wrenched his head back like it was on a hinge and sawed against the bone, and the darkness was total.

I ran. I had no choice. I pushed past the cops and ran north to find Cherub Stevens, because I did not have the strength to let another friend die. I called his name, but my voice was lost amid the sizzling of the dead fire and the whimpering of a thousand frightened children.

Thorne’s men opened fire. What happened next, I saw in the light of their muzzle flashes—jets of flame that beat the night back just long enough to show a little scene of hell. A bullet burst through the throat of a blue-eyed boy and sailed on into the crowd. Flash. Another clipped a guardsman on the arm and caught a second in the eye. Flash. Two boys dropped their weapons and were cut down as they raised their hands in surrender. Flash. I did not know what gangs they fought for. Their standards were gone; their uniforms were stained with blood. They were just children now.

It was like a flipbook. With each flash, I saw a little more. A guard’s left leg raised, then his right, then his left, then he was dead. With each burst of light, the crowd grew closer to panic, until Lower and Upper forgot their division and united in a desire to get away from the men with the guns. But there was nowhere for them to go. No matter how bright the rifle fire, the light could not penetrate the shadows of the Borderline. There was a wall of darkness about to crash down.