I pulled the lid off the can of peaches and swallowed a few pills with the syrup. Then I ripped open the foil on my chocolate bar and started to eat it. Slowly, a bit at a time, smelling it and letting it melt on my tongue. A few feet away one of the twins (I couldn’t tell which one in the dark), moaned in his sleep. Maybe he was dreaming about Lux, too.

I’d met her in the middle of a riot. It was a global summit in Chicago, the kind they have where a handful of first world leaders meet up and decide what they’re going to do about the rest of the world, how money is going to be spent, if they should forgive debt and let other countries put their money into fighting their AIDS epidemics and famines. I hate that sort of horseshit on principle, a bunch of fuck-ass old white men in suits sitting around in a room and calling the shots about who lives and who dies, all with a dollar bottom line. So there I’d been, all in black, with a hood up over my head, a bandana over my face, and a hammer in my hand, surrounded by hundreds of people who looked exactly the same. If we were real with ourselves, we would have admitted that the tactic hadn’t worked in decades, no matter how many of us were there, no matter how many Molotov cocktails we threw. No one had stopped one of these meetings since last century. They’d been ready for us every time since then. But we were still out there in the streets, and as I swung my hammer through the front door of a 24/7, I thought, We won’t stop them, but at least they’ll see our rage.

All around me, there was the smashing of glass. When I turned back around and looked in the crowd, I could see that the cops were firing something at us, probably rubber bullets. A sound cannon was blasting through the air. People were running away, and pepper spray was being fired off at their receding figures. I looked to my left and saw a kid up on the roof of a cop car, and then, as he jumped off, I saw flames coming up from it. I looked down and saw this tall, skinny girl curled up in a ball at my feet. She was wearing Doc Martens and this thin, tight, pretty hoodie that barely covered her head all the way. She was kind of queer and punky looking, she had shoulder-length blond hair that looked like she had grown it out from a short cut and never had it evened out. I knelt down next to her.

“Are you okay?” I shouted.

She was hyperventilating. “I’m going to die,” she said, in between breaths. “I’m going to die.”