“That might make sense,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on fixing it.”

“I know, I know. I can get past this,” he said. He was frowning, staring at the road, even though the van wasn’t moving. “If I’m reactive and defensive, I need to make that work with something that’s either stop or go.”

“It’s a pretty crummy battle mode if you’re reacting to things that aren’t there,” Chris said.

“Hey Kenzie,” Tristan said. “Do me a favor?”

“Any time.”

“Get him. Shut him up by any means necessary.”

Chris was directly behind me, so I couldn’t see anything more than the periodic glimpse of a flailing limb I got in the window’s reflection.

Tristan continued driving, a little more confident now that he wasn’t being heckled and cackled at. He seemed oblivious to Chris’s noises and curses of protest.

No, not oblivious. He smiled wide without looking back as Chris protested with, “No tinker tech!”

Outside the van, the city was in a weird place. There were a lot of businesses with signs left dark, and a lot of people out on the sidewalks and stairs. People weren’t going to work, or they couldn’t.

Something was simmering.

I could understand it. The sky had been taken from us. There might have been an undercurrent of hope, the idea that if we tried hard enough and waited long enough, we could do things right this time. Every last person had lost someone or something they cared about. We’d all had to work hard to get through the first winter and contribute.

There had been an implicit hope, I imagined, that if we made those sacrifices and threw ourselves at the problem, we’d be rewarded with a city that had learned from the mistakes of the past. We’d experienced a paralysis in terms of leadership and even the name we gave the city, and the conflicting desires from the various groups who had very different ideas of what that perfection looked like might have played a role.

That hope had been leveled. There wasn’t a point in the city where one of the portals wasn’t visible at the horizon. There were several points in the city where the portals loomed overhead, dense areas where the main infrastructure of the city had been positioned close to the portals.

“Tristan,” Sveta said. “There’s something I wanted to bring up, but it’s awkward to, and I don’t know if it’s going to be any easier to fit things in when we get to Ashley’s.”

“Oh geez, you’ve got to drop this on me today?” Tristan groaned.

“Sorry.”

“My friend goes to jail, we’re anticipating another friend doing the same, and I have to drive through this mess, and now you’re bracing me for something.”