The vast majority of those people nod appreciatively and then change the channel and watch NCIS and eat the tacos that they made. It’s their own recipe. They’ve developed it over years, and they like it better than any taco you could get at even a super fancy restaurant. They go to bed at 10:30 and worry a bit about whether their son is adjusting well to college.

       A very small percentage get really riled up. They’re angry, but they’re mostly worried or even scared and want to cause some kind of action. They call their representatives and do a little organizing. They’re usually motivated not just by agreement in the message but by a hatred of the people trying to fight the message.

       A tiny percentage of that percentage just go way the fuck overboard. They get so frightened and angry that they need to make something happen. How? Well, that’s simple, right? You eliminate the people who are actively trying to destroy the world. If we’re all really unlucky, and if there are enough of them, those people find each other and they confirm and exacerbate their own extremism.

The bigger the Defender movement got, the larger that fourth group became. Some of them were religious extremists who believed the Carls were a symbol of the coming apocalypse or rapture or whatever. Some of them were purely secular, deeply believing that America and possibly the world was going to be destroyed if nothing was done (no one was really clear on what that thing was, but NO ONE WAS DOING IT!), and eventually they came to believe that I was an active and informed participant in the government’s (or the Carls’) plans to make humanity submit.

This is the first time a truly international issue had hit our newly borderless world this hard, and no one knew how that might play out. The conversation was international—we all knew that. The comments on my videos were in Hindi and Japanese and Arabic and Spanish. We had a team of translators who would subtitle the videos within a day or two of them going live, and the Som was now operational in more than twenty different languages. I saw this as an unambiguously good thing. I felt very strongly that the Carls were a globally unifying force. For the first time ever, humanity was literally sharing a dream. It felt more like we were sharing a planet than ever before, and to me that felt like a gift given to us by the Carls.

I still believe the Carls were very good for the world, but obviously July 13 made that a lot more ambiguous.

The coordinated attacks in São Paulo, Lagos, Jakarta, and St. Petersburg killed more than eight hundred people and injured thousands. That the responsible group had managed to plan an attack in four different continents boggled the mind. This wasn’t radicals making plans in back alleys; it was a growing, worldwide, borderless movement. In the US, it was the Defenders, but every culture had their own name for it, and they found commonality and connection in pop-up forums and anonymous chat rooms. They had convinced themselves that the Carls would be easy to destroy and that world governments were lying about their invulnerability. They also convinced themselves that tourists visiting Carls were not worth saving or protecting or whatever. Whether they saw it as a pilgrimage to a false deity or an act of submission to alien domination, it didn’t matter; any positive connection to the Carls was a threat to the ideology they wanted to push forward. The Carls could not be seen as safe, even if they were the ones making the Carls dangerous.

The Carls, of course, were completely unhurt.

The attacks were synchronized at roughly 4 A.M. eastern time. That maximized crowds in Jakarta, Lagos, and St. Petersburg. It was still early morning in São Paulo, but they coordinated the time with the other attacks nonetheless.

At that exact moment, 4 A.M., when those bombs went off across the world, I awoke from the Dream, where I had been staring blankly at a 767, and shot out of my bed in fear and terror.

Was I somehow psychically roused? Had I sensed a great disturbance in the Force? Did Carl reach out to me through the Dream to tell me of the attacks? No. I had heard a loud CRACK from the direction of the sliding glass door that led to my little balcony. My blinds were closed, of course, so I couldn’t see what had caused the noise.

My first thought was that someone had thrown a rock at it, but from eight stories below that would have to be some arm. Things had been getting heated with the Defenders; the messages were sometimes mean, sometimes threatening, and sometimes deeply fucking disturbing. I grabbed my phone as I got out of bed and slid it into my pajama bottoms. I flipped on the light, and as my heart rate slowly returned to normal, I went to look out the window.

At the base of the drapes, which hung all the way to the floor, if I had looked, I would have seen some little specks of glass mixed in with the Pop-Tart crumbs and dust. But I didn’t look. I just drew back the drapes to see what may have made the noise.

Looking back on this behavior, it’s depressingly dumb. Something has hit my window, and what’s my plan of action? I’ve got it! I’ll turn on the light and pull back the drapes in front of a glass door! SLOWLY!

Even with all the threats, it was still somehow inconceivable to me that someone would actually try to kill me. Harass me? Sure. Threaten me? Yeah. Sue me? If they could find a reason! But murder? That shit’s for the movies. People don’t kill people! I mean, they do, obviously, I’ve seen a newspaper. It says something, maybe, about how my mind works that I had received literal death threats but never considered that someone would try to kill me.

But now I was thinking about it, and two things happened simultaneously.

           Something big (at the time, I thought it must have been a person) slammed painfully into my shoulder, knocking me away from the door.

       The glass in my double-paned sliding glass door erupted out, spraying into the room and leaving a two-inch-wide hole.

I hit the floor hard, and the thing that had shoved me was gone before I could regain my wits. Little shards of glass lay all around the room. Having, by this point, figured out at least half of what was going on, I crumpled myself against the wall of my bedroom, too scared to cry. Someone had just tried to shoot me. Not, like, scare me, but actually put a bullet in my chest so that I could lie on the floor of my lonely apartment to die all by myself. And who the hell had shoved me? They had saved me, but they were also in my apartment!

And then I was no longer too scared to cry, and I cried. My blinds were still open a crack, and I was afraid that, at any moment, bullets would come flying through my window like a true war zone and if I was not backed against a brick wall I would be torn apart. But after about ten minutes of gasping for air between sobs, I convinced myself that I could sneak out of my bedroom and into the living room, where the windows faced a narrow alley, not the street.

So I half crawled, half ran out of the room. Once in my living room, I had access to a bathroom, a carpet, and the kitchen. Everything a girl needs! I did a cursory search, which uncovered nothing out of the ordinary. Clothes, carry-out containers, dirty napkins, maybe a damp towel or two. No sign of an intruder.

Should I call the cops? I thought. I mean, I definitely should call the cops. Someone was very probably trying to hurt me and maybe also there was literally a stranger hiding in my apartment right now?

But for some reason I really, really, really didn’t want to tell anyone. Maybe I was being silly. There is probably some reason for all of this that isn’t attempted murder, my mind was telling me. So far attempted murder has never happened to me, so it seems like there must be some other explanation.

And if it was real, other things were real too. Dealing with a police investigation and the reality that I could never sleep safely in this apartment again. And, oh god, my parents would have to know. And Maya. I knew she’d never say it, but inside there would be that part of her thinking, If only April had listened to me, this wouldn’t have happened. And I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t live with any of those scenarios.

So, instead of the police, I called Robin.

“April,” he said after one ring. Now . . . he never sounded put out (though I’d never before called him at 4 A.M.), but he seemed to positively have been expecting my call, which threw me.

“Were you expecting me to call?”

“Not expecting, but it is not surprising given the reports.” Remember I had been dealing with my own crisis. By this point the São Paulo and St. Petersburg attacks were already being reported on American news. Someone must have called Robin from a less ridiculous time zone.

“What reports?”

“Oh, my.”

“Oh, your what?” This was not how I was expecting the phone call to go.

“You should tell me why you are calling. I think that would simplify this conversation.”

“I think someone’s maybe just tried to hurt me. There is something very strange going on.”

“Have you called the police?” His voice was at a pitch I had never heard before.

“That doesn’t seem necessary,” I half complained, half ordered.

“It does, though.”

“Let’s just . . . not have them involved yet.”

“Would you be all right with me sending up the doorman?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s fine.”