I’d been able to see Tristan starting to get riled up for a debate. I’d seen it a couple of times before, and my gut feeling was that when it came to facts against feelings, and the facts came from someone as convicted and die-hard as Tristan, the feelings from, well, Kenzie? There was no way it would end well.

Others were taking food from the tray. I waited until people had made their choices, then took a wrap.

Erin and Rain ducked out, heading to one of the other vendors. A burger place had just opened for lunch. ‘Patty’s Patties’. That took me back—if I had to go back to earliest memories, then fuck, one of my five or ten earliest memories of Amy was from a family trip—would have had to have been, since the franchise wasn’t in Brockton Bay. She had been outright weeping because she’d been so bothered by the decorations around Patty’s—whole herds of tiny cartoon cows marching off assembly-line style through the process of getting carved up and served, then dining on burgers.

Sure enough, the cartoon design had been updated to something more clean around the edges, but right beside the store’s sign was a cartoon cow with knife and fork, disembodied upper body floating over the pelvis and legs, a slice cleanly removed from its middle. Because of the design, it had no expression, only vertical lines for eyes and two circles inside an oval for the nose.

Of all the things to survive the end of the world.

Rain ventured partway back, with Erin hanging closer to the counter. Order put in, and he was close enough to listen in while waiting.

Kenzie took another bite of her food then sniffled once, before reaching for a napkin. She dabbed at the corner of one eye, then wiped at her nose.

“Kenz,” Sveta said. “You okay?”

“This taco is really, really spicy. I had no idea,” Kenzie said, her voice distorted by the spice. She made a small cough, then thumped her fist down on the table.

“It really is,” Tristan said.

Reconciliation? Middle ground by way of hell tacos?

“I was worried you were really upset,” Sveta told Kenzie.

“I don’t get weepy,” Kenzie said. “I am slightly annoyed. Chris had a hard time with people, but he showed he cared in other ways. He cared about my stuff, he listened to me blab on about my work when others would run away. He always was up-front about calling things out the way he saw them. That’s how he cared. Even when things got nasty, he’d usually step in and pull it back to say something nice after taking it too far. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t care.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Damsel–Ashley said.