“I was space diving when I was fifteen,” she said, shrugging. “Not a big deal at all, Mach 1 without a craft is only scary if you can’t get your spin down, which really isn’t that hard if you know what you’re doing. I was practically pro by the time I was seventeen. But by then I was more interested in surfing really big waves—which you don’t see unless you go somewhere where tsunamis happen a lot. So that was how it started, the disaster thing. And then, the thing got to be the people—that was more extreme than any of these things. People doing all kinds of shit, killing and dying and freaking out. You never know what people are going to do.”

“So you follow disasters?” I said.

“Pretty much all the time, now,” she said. As she talked, she pulled an elastic band off her wrist and wrangled her tangled blond hair back into a ponytail. “It’s been a few years. Place to place, never stopping really because the disasters never stop. You see the wildest stuff. I saw a mother kill a dog with her bare hands, roast it over a fire, and feed it to her children in Oakland.”

As she talked, she walked around the lobby, looking the walls up and down. There were grayish water marks on them. She walked over to one and kicked it.

“Drywall’s painted,” she said, “which is great fucking news. The best you’ve heard all day. Because that means we don’t have to tear every piece of it off the beams.”

Jaden and I looked at each other. He nodded his head once and raised an eyebrow at me. Back at the shelter, I had nearly flown off when Jaden suggested we ask her to come back to the building with us.

“Her?” I’d whispered. “Jaden, you must be phrenic if you think I’m bringing that girl back to live with us.”

“She’s a professional at this shit, Makayla,” he said. “I guarantee you she’ll come in handy.”

And he’d been right.

“What do we use to get rid of the mold, then?” I asked.

“I prefer tea tree oil, because I like the way it smells,” she said, “but try getting that shit in the middle of a disaster zone. Still, if there were any holistic wellness stores in the neighborhood, we could always raid them and grab some. But really lots of other stuff will do. Ammonia, bleach, or vinegar would all work. I just wish they didn’t all smell so bad.”