Calliope didn’t care if they were brainless. She needed more fluids now, and so did Eunjoo. From the refrigerator, she pulled two 32 oz. bottles of Gatorade and took one to the girl beside the car before she began drinking the other bottle. “Don’t gulp it or you’ll get sick, chica. Just sip.” She watched Eunjoo’s small sips and tried following her own instructions. She felt vomity and dizzy despite the relief in her mouth and throat, so she sat down in the driver’s seat, trying to regain her energy. She felt like she’d been running for hours.

Amy emerged from the broken window instead of the door holding a bag of white powdered minidoughnuts and a Pepsi. “I wanted chocolate milk, but it smelled gross.”

“You should drink more water, Amy. That’s all sugar. You’re probably dehydrated, too.”

“Nope, I go days without water. At school, I lived off junk food.”

Calliope wondered how Amy stayed so thin then remembered she danced for a living. She chastised herself for comparing herself to another woman, here in the middle of an apocalypse (Amy’s words, not hers). She glanced away from the white girl toward the glass shards littering the sidewalk, a crackling hole in the window. “We should gather supplies and keep moving,” Calliope said, scanning the landscape that surrounded the gas station. They were near the Río Grande; cottonwoods and other trees of the bosque only grew near water. There was a Starbucks in this town where she’d stopped for a coffee and chocolate milk the last time she’d driven down to her tía’s. Andres had teased her, You and your Starbucks addiction. She drank decaf mochas daily, all through both pregnancies, pointing out the safe caffeine levels and defending her right to drink coffee. Give me this small comfort, at least. Humans might someday evolve like seahorses—and men will bear the children. She reminded him that seahorse fathers went through childbirth and labor and were the ones physically distressed. She had asked, Where, pray tell, does the biblical story of Eve figure into that? Her mother hated when she disrespected God, but Andres never minded. Although he was devoutly Catholic, like her mother, and attended church every Sunday without Calliope—who preferred to spend her mornings sipping mochas and researching or hiding out at the planetarium—Andres always listened to her hypothesize without censure or judgment. Where could religion meet science? Answering that question had consumed her since Bisabuela’s death. And not just religion but belief. Bisabuela’s belief, for instance. At what cliff, what burial site, what meteor in the vaulted dome of sky did God, the Ancient Ones, and science coalesce? Could her family be there now? Andres, Phoenix, and her mother? They couldn’t just be gone. It didn’t make sense.