“None taken,” said Kira. “That’s what I’ve been saying all night.”

“Right,” said Xochi. “So think about it: Why put your most junior student in charge of something that important unless you want to guarantee that it’ll go wrong? Or to use her as a scapegoat when the whole thing blows up in their faces?”

“I’m sure there’s a better reason than that,” Kira said, though at heart she wasn’t sure at all. She looked out the window again, scanning the dark street. Nothing.

“I don’t think he’s coming,” said Xochi.

Kira turned back quickly. “What? No, I was just … looking at the trees. At the open street that isn’t teeming with panthers and poison ivy.”

“The world across the line was pretty different,” said Jayden, nodding. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

“It’s because there weren’t any people,” said Isolde. “Manhattan’s gone more primal than Long Island because there’s never anyone scaring away the animals or stomping down the plants.”

Jayden laughed thinly. “There are forty thousand people on Long Island,” he said. “There used to be millions. Sometimes I think this island doesn’t even know we’re here.”

“It’s not just Manhattan,” said Kira, “it’s everywhere—we saw a panther in Brooklyn. We saw a baby antelope—a little antelope fawn, probably two months old at the most. Someday they’ll wonder where all those weird, two-legged animals went, and then they’ll take a drink from a river, and look up at the clouds, and then they’ll forget they were ever even thinking about us at all. Life will go on. There’s no point even leaving a record behind, because there will never be anyone, ever again, who can read it.”

“Somebody’s depressed,” said Jayden.

Xochi punched him in the arm. “Does anyone want some more home fries?”

“Ooh, me,” said Isolde, sitting up. “Forget extinction—I’m dying the day all our vegetable oil finally runs out.”

Xochi passed her the plate and stood up. “I’m sick of ‘Antonio, on His Bar Mitzvah.’ Any requests?”

“Phineas,” said Kira. “No—Nissyen. He always cheers me up.”

Xochi sorted through her basket of players, glancing quickly at the generator to make sure there was power. Isolde took a bite of potato and pointed at Kira with the other half, talking with her mouth full.

“I think you’re just spooked,” she said. “All joking aside, that thing almost killed you in the field, and now you have to work with it.”

“Not with it.”

“With it in the room,” said Isolde. “You know what I mean. I think it’s scary.”