I wondered if they fixed her and sent her home. That would be even worse. Lux had tried to kill herself once when she lived there. She’d gotten her exit bag ready and had the helium and everything, and was going to lie in bed and just go, you know? She posted a suicide note to a support group she was part of on LinxUs, and then turned off her notifications and sat down to pet her cat, who she really loved and was sad to be leaving behind. Turned out a lot of people cared what happened to a fucked-up sixteen-year-old trans girl, because in the time she petted her cat, someone had found her info on the internet and called the authorities. They took her and locked her up for a while in a crazy house, she told me. They put her in the men’s ward, and all the men catcalled and harassed her except for one guy who called her baby and said he wanted to run away with her. She got out and detransitioned for a while to cope. Then she couldn’t take it anymore, retransitioned, and got kicked out.

“Hey,” Sebastian said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Aren’t we near the Tenement Museum?”

We were walking down the east side of the island, through Alphabet City. There were huge condos all around us, abandoned now, but rising up to the sky like redwoods. Fucking overdeveloped city. All these people were gone, now, though, and their homes empty. We tried scrounging around in some of the dumpsters as we walked, but everything was long since picked over.

“Yeah. It’s down on Orchard Street, I think,” I said. “We should head over that way and check it out.”

We got there before too long. The Tenement Museum was easy to find—it was the only building that wasn’t a highrise or a 24/7. It looked so weird, this little brick building squished between all these behemoth condos. It had a historical landmark protection, I think, or it would have been gone a long time ago, too.

The front door wasn’t gaping open or anything like lots of the doors in other buildings were, but it wasn’t locked. There wasn’t anyone guarding the place. We made our way in, climbed some stairs, and were standing in this room that was made up super old-time. There was an ancient motherfucking monster of a sewing machine. There was a gas lamp and some other old, rusty things that could have been used for anything, I didn’t know what. José just sort of stood in the corner, looking around and not saying anything, but Sebastian and I walked through, touching things lightly with soft brushes. It was kinda awesome, being here alone. There were no guards, but nobody had touched the place after the storm.