The riots ended.

The emergency crews picked through rubble for the wounded and the dead.

The funerals started the next day ... and lasted for weeks.

The investigations lasted longer, and so did the healing. Some of the wounds never healed at all. The rookie officer who’d shot three women outside a sidewalk café. The average New Parkers, the innocent bystanders, who'd kicked a man to death. All the mourning spouses, all the motherless children. The survivors who’d lost someone and the survivors who'd killed someone would both live with that memory forever.

The city, rocked by violence, faltered. The city grieved.

And the country found a hero.

A champion.

A brave and lonely hero, who’d survived a brutal attack and saved thousands of lives. This modest hero refused interviews, so in the following days, the TV stations replayed the same few seconds of footage of our savior, on an endless loop.

I remember the first time I saw the clip. I was lying with my chest bandaged in the guest room at Dr. Wainwright’s house on Little Big Rock. Scrolling through videos on Dewitt’s laptop, listening to his favorite songs.

I saw a video called To Save a City: The Story of a Hero, and felt a flicker of a smile, thinking about Rachel Kravitz.

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Two-hundred and forty-four funerals is a lot of grief, but without Rachel, there would’ve been ten thousand more--and counting.

She’d won. She’d stopped a nightmare from becoming a cataclysm.

Except when I clicked play, the video wasn’t about Rachel.

Instead, I saw shaky camerawork in an alley between a few municipal buildings, crowded with cops and forensic techs. A blurry man paced behind the crime tape, then the camera zoomed toward two bodies on a tarp, surrounded by men in hazmat suits.

I froze the video and double checked. One of the bodies was PJ, with a hole in his chest. The other was Spandle, her skin bloated with insect stings.

With mozzy stings.

After a time, I hit play again.

A reporter called a question to the blurry man, and he stepped into glow of a crime scene light to answer. His face was bland but strong, handsome and implacable.

"Can you tell us what happened?" the reporter asked again. "Can you comment on the reports of hallucinogenic gas? Can you tell us what you did?"

"We stopped them," the man said. "This time."

The reporter questioned him and thanked him, and finally said his name. "Carson Boone."

With a steely glint in his eyes, he disappeared into an armored limousine. A young woman slipped in beside him: Maddie.

She’d killed Spandle for Boone, and she’d helped him take credit for stopping PJ’s rampage. The same rampage they’d planned and funded and let spin out of control.

After Rachel saved the city, Boone emerged from the shadows. With PJ and Spandle at his feet, he'd explained how he’d crushed the terrorist plot. When the authorities were helpless, Boone and his team had stepped in.

"The man who saved New Park," the reporter said, looking earnestly into the camera. "Falsely accused of crimes years ago, Carson Boone returned--in the nick of time--to save Manattan. To save us all."

A real American hero.