I waved my hands. I didn’t want to fight with him, not now. It was a discussion we’d had before and never saw the same side of. Sebastian had never, as long as I’d known him, lost his temper when anyone called him or his brother “illegals” or worse, or said anything shitty. He’d always talked to them, trying to make them see his side of things, and simply walking away when they didn’t. José and I weren’t like him in that way. We didn’t have his patience.

“I just can’t believe they’re all bad,” Sebastian said, refusing to turn away from the topic. “I can’t see the world the way you do, Jesse, all black and white. I don’t want to believe any of them out there wants us all dead any more than we want them dead. You don’t want that, do you?”

I thought about it for a minute. In my darker moments, yeah, I would see the streets run with their blood. But is that what I really wanted, deep down? No. Not even if it had seemed my entire life that they wanted that for me. Not even if that’s what they’d given to Jaden.

“I just want them to disappear,” I said. “When they thought we had nothing left here, that’s what they did. I want us to have a world without them.”

“I just want them to understand,” Sebastian said. “We’re not going to get them to with shields and guns, that’s for sure. I just don’t know what to do.”

“The system’s all-pervasive, Bash,” José said. “They’re in the middle of it. We found a way out. We were lucky. And it sucks that they might die in it. I want them to break through, but I’m not a pacifist. So we’ll fight them and they’ll probably win. But it’ll be a fight that people remember, and it’ll be us standing up for what we helped build and organize and know is right. That’s worth fighting for.”

We sat there talking like that into the night. The night got darker. All that there was for light was a sliver of a moon shining through the window. Somewhere far off, we heard an animal howl. At first, we paid it no mind, but as it got closer, we began to wonder about it.

“It sounds like a wild dog,” I said. “Or a wolf.”

“What would a wild dog or a wolf be doing here in Brooklyn?” José asked.

“What if . . .” Sebastian said, then trailed off.

“What if what?” I asked.

“What if all those animals from the zoo are still alive?”

None of us said anything. We listened to the howls come nearer, then move farther away, disappearing back into the night.

2 At four a.m., we knocked on Makayla’s door.