“How can they possibly stand themselves, knowing what they’re doing?” I agreed. “I mean, how many cute shoes can one company need?” You’d think I was megalomaniacal enough to understand their mind-set, but I didn’t. It was like, make a bunch of money so you can control things, like land or armies or governments or countries — and you want to control them so you can . . . essentially make more money. So you can control more things. So you can make more money. Kind of an empty loop, huh?

Not to be judgmental.

But someone had to be judgmental! Someone had to judge that this was crazy and wrong, and those companies were boneheaded idiots! If that person had to be me, so be it. I might not be the perfect spokesmodel against global warming, but I could still absolutely be against pollution. That had been proven to be bad, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I want a baby penguin,” said Angel, tugging on my jacket to get my attention.

She snapped me out of my alarm-clock-of-doom reverie, and I looked down at her.

“No,” I said, before I really processed what she had said.

Her face got that set look I’d learned to dread.

“No,” I said more firmly. “You already have Celeste and Total. We cannot also have a baby penguin to cart around. Especially when that baby will grow up to be the size of an average third-grader.”

Angel took a deep breath. “They’re so fuzzy and cute,” she began. “They make little cheeps. There’s a bunch here — it wouldn’t even cost anything. We could —”

“Angel?” I said. “Baby penguins eat a regurgitated mixture of partially digested fish, krill, and an oily substance from their fathers’ stomachs. Are you willing to eat a bunch of raw fish and krill, and then barf it back up into a baby penguin’s cute, cheeping mouth? Like, every hour?” Sometimes my crushing logic astounds even me.

Angel bit her lip. “Hm,” she said. She straightened her small shoulders and walked away with dignity. Another disaster averted.

Leaving me with only Fang’s adoration of Brigid Dwyer to really get stuck in my craw. (What is a craw, anyway? I’ve always wondered.)

I watched as they worked side by side, his dark head almost touching her blond one. They knelt in the snow, and at one point the brilliant scientist couldn’t unscrew the lens from her special camera. She needed the help of a superstrong fourteen-year-old bird kid. Her smile when Fang opened it was almost as blinding as all this freaking snow.

Just then, Akila strode by on her way to where Michael was working. She was followed by Total, who had to trot a bit to keep up. I barely heard part of what he was saying.