I tried to think more about the building. Everybody was radicalized by being left behind, nobody had faith that anything would save them but themselves and each other. Here was the real dream of it all: we were winning. We were warm and eating, we were happy and free. But how long could it last? For now, we were still under the radar, just another building in a city full of destroyed buildings. But what would happen when they found us here, playing music and playing soccer, stealing and surviving? What then?

It got boring just thinking about all this stuff, and it got boring following the leader at committees. I started making my own zine for the library. I’d never made one before, but I really liked the aesthetic of some of the real old (like last-century-old) zines José had. They were little rectangles typewritten with old machines or handwritten and cut out of a bigger sheet of paper and plastered over a magazine picture before they were photocopied. That’s how all the text looked. It was tedious, but it was what I wanted. I started getting people to write things down about the building. About how they had gotten there, their lives before it, what their life was like now. People wrote about all sorts of things, in all sorts of languages. Some of the kids drew pictures. Alejandro drew himself playing soccer with Sebastian.

One morning, I woke up and went down to the lobby with the idea that I was going to get this really old lady, the one who’d been training with José, to write something for my zine. She usually was down there, waiting for something to start, talking to people. I kind of felt like an archivist, you know? I wanted to get everybody.

When I got down there, though, I walked right into the middle of another Makayla/Jaden fight. Or, rather, a Makayla meltdown. It took me a minute of listening to even figure out what they were talking about.

“Why the hell aren’t you out there more?” Makayla said. She looked just plain bad. Her jawline was sticking way out, all the softness gone from her neck and cheeks. Her eyelids were twitching. It was something I’d noticed before, but now it defined her sunken face.

“What are you talking about Makayla?” Jaden said, calm as ever.

“I mean it, Jaden. There are a million bikes in this place. You ride faster than anybody I’ve ever met, and you let other people go out and do the collecting of all the shit we need. That’s some sienty bullshit. That’s some entitled, sienty bullshit that you think staying in this building when you could be doing the slag that people out there are doing, but better, is okay.”

“What do you want from me, Makayla? I slag hard here. Everybody does.”