What the beating spared him was the sight of his desires being forever extinguished. Copy’s captor was for some reason jerking her around, digging his thumbs into the fleshy space below her chin. She peed herself, then started shaking. We all agree it didn’t take long, and that there was nothing we could do from the places where we remained, the musclebound counterprotesters holding us back by the wrists with a scary ease and laughing at our attempts to extricate ourselves. Copy made a noise that sounded like a sigh and a burp at the same time, then she went limp, then the stink of her emptied bowels overwhelmed us. It took a minute for her killer to realize what the smell was, at which point he dropped her.

“Guys,” he said to the other counterprotesters. “Guys.” Something in his voice. One man stopped kicking Arts’s side for long enough to see the woman lying prone at his friend’s feet.

“Oh shit,” that man said, then he punched the shoulders of his two nearest friends to call their attention to this latest development. Soon all of the counterprotesters left off beating Arts or holding us back to stare at our Copy on the ground. Oh shit.

They took off running, and we didn’t stop them or even try to fight back. The thing about assholes is, they’re unbelievably strong, and the rest of us didn’t want to die. The guys walked to the corpse and tried to resuscitate, to breathe into its mouth, to no avail, and someone had to tend to Arts, who was allegedly lying facedown in a pool of his own vomit. News flipped him on his side to be sure he didn’t choke — even though she knew you’re not supposed to move an injured person — and she held his hand until we heard sirens. The counterprotesters piled into an SUV the size of a tank and sped away, but Layout had the presence of mind to jot down the license plate, and — wouldn’t you know it — these idiots were the sort of people who make a getaway in their own registered vehicle. All of them were in prison before the year was out.

Copy was sharp, so sharp she cut herself and everyone around her, so she probably knew she was a goner. She even had a minute there, while her body went about the business of dying, to think about what was happening to her. Did she? Did she regret that she never got to take Arts’s jaw in the palms of her hands and pull his