Kate had slumped all the way down in her armchair. She felt like she was going to melt, too, into a puddle of shame. In that moment she wished she could un-hear everything the animals had just told her. She wished she’d stayed home and never gotten on the Silver Arrow. She’d thought she was escaping from her boring pointless life, but this was so much worse, and the worst part of all was that it was all her fault. When you’re a child the adult world looks so exciting, and it is, but it’s also so much sadder and more complicated than you expect. And you can’t just take the good parts, you have to take it all, even if it’s not what you wanted.

And once you do, there’s no going back.

“You must hate us,” she whispered. “You must hate us so much.”

“But we don’t,” the heron said. “Not really.”

And that was the strangest part: It was true. There was no hate in their voices.

“Hate is a human thing,” the fishing cat said.

“We can do anger,” the porcupine said. “Personally, I do it a lot. But not hate.”

“So you can see why we’re not that worried about the problem with the train,” the heron said.

“You mean—because we’re all going to die anyway?” Kate said.

“No. We’re not worried because there is nothing more terrifyingly effective and resourceful than a human being. In all the four billion years that there has been life on Earth, you are the most successful animal there ever was. You’re better than us at everything. If you want to fix this problem, you will, because when human beings want something, nothing gets in their way.”

“But we’re awful!” Kate moaned. “We’ve done such terrible, terrible things!”

“Yes,” the heron said. “You absolutely have. But as animals go, you exhibit an unusually wide variety of behaviors. Some humans are terrible, but others aren’t bad at all. Some are almost good.”

“A good human being,” the fishing cat said. “Imagine what one of those could do.”

“They could do anything,” the snake said quietly. “Anything at all.”

Kate raised her head. They were all looking at her: the snake with his black lidless eyes, the cat with her green ones. The porcupine’s eyes were jet beads. The heron’s were a striking burnt orange, and perfectly circular.

After everything humans had done to them, they still had hope. Whatever happened, the animals would never, ever give up. They couldn’t. They didn’t have that luxury. When Kate saw that, she knew that she couldn’t either. Grace Hopper used to have a clock on her wall that ran backward, to show that you could always do things differently, no matter what. Kate would be a different kind of human.