I stopped. We hadn’t talked about Makayla that much. Ale had been attached to her like woah and he cried and cried when he found out she was never coming back. I still felt guilty for giving her those zines, books I knew had info on how to build bombs out of household shit. But how could we have known?

“Wasn’t she?” he asked.

I thought about it for a while. Makayla had done a lot of great things, that was for sure. She’d saved a lot of people’s lives, and she had empowered them to help themselves. I couldn’t put my finger on her final moments. In some ways, it was the ultimate act of resistance, all she could do besides give in. When she died, she took out two people from the building, three riot cops, and injured countless others. We’d been real with Ale about what she had done. But here he was, asking his hard questions.

“Makayla was a hero,” I said, “in a way. I just wish she had found a way to be without leaving you like she did.”

“But I have you and José and Sebastian,” Ale said. “You won’t leave, right?”

He loved us, and we loved him. Sometimes you have to lie to people you love when you don’t know the answer.

“None of us are going anywhere,” I said.

I lie in bed as long as I can, thinking these warm thoughts under a cheap, thin blanket. But then I wake up out of my daydreams to the sound of the guards yelling that it’s morning.

4 Makayla did what she did, but Makayla died. The rest of us paid for it. The daydreams will never erase what really happened.

I woke up handcuffed to the hospital bed. There were cops all around me. Those guys are generally not such big fans of bombs.

The minute I was out of the hospital, I was put in a prison cell. They gave me a lawyer and shit, but he didn’t care, nobody cared except to make us out as some demons who killed all these innocent people. José and Sebastian were deported. My trial was short and biased. Anarchist, bomb, murder. Goodbye, Jesse. See you in fifty years. Have fun with all the other women in the women’s prison they’re sticking you in.

I tried to find out from my lawyer what happened to Ale, but all he could find out was that Ale got put in the system. I tried to find out what had happened to José and Sebastian, but I never did. And Lux? I was never sure if she died that night or not.