Disability justice organizations across the country have responded with outrage, rightfully calling the discussion an unacceptable step toward eugenics.

Frequently reported side effects of meningitis infections include focal neurological signs, hearing loss, and epilepsy. Focal neurological signs comprise a wide spectrum of potential phenomena, including but not limited to unsteadiness and weakness of limbs, partial paralysis, dyslexia or dyspraxia, amnesia, aphasia, seizures, and loss of smell.

Twenty-five

Grace

Sofia and I go back to Sam’s Throne three days later. Late at night, when the overcast starlight won’t give us away. The faint light of the coolers gives the store an eerie glow. We find nothing new in the aisles of the store. What little was left has been scavenged and put to better use.

But I expected that to happen. I brought Logan’s hand-drawn map with me, where she drew all the abandoned houses we saw. All the houses with plague signs and warnings. We follow the same route, and Sofia is quiet when she sees all the reminders of illness and death.

I don’t say anything—I don’t know what to say—but I reach out and brush her fingers with mine. It sparks like touch always does.

“It’s one thing to know that this is happening to us,” she says, eventually, softly, when we walk past the church and its countless markers for the dead. “It’s something else completely to see it happen to everyone.”

“It’s hard to wrap your mind around the scale of it, isn’t it?” I ask, though it’s more of a statement than a question.

“Hope is such a small world,” Sofia says. “Between what happened inside those walls and our hunts outside, I never thought about anything else. I tried to call my brother again, but he never picked up. And I…I compartmentalized, right? Easier to imagine everything’s okay if you don’t linger on it too much.”

I nod. “I thought about the good foster families a few times. The friends I made when I stayed with them. I learned not to grow too attached. It’s the easiest way to survive.”

“When you think about it, probably the worst too.” She winces. “Luca has a wife and two little girls. Before I got sent here, I was supposed to go live with them.”

“Maybe you still can? Once this is all over?”

“Yeah, maybe.” The wind picks up around us and yawns through the street, the sound a soft, distant cry. Sofia turns to one of the houses with a bright-white stripe across the door. “I’m afraid of what I’ll find.”

I brush my hair back. “Yeah. I wish I knew how to make that better.”

“You can’t,” she says simply. “We’ll hold on, and we’ll make it through. As many of us as possible.”

It’s all we have. I take a pen out of my pocket and fold open Logan’s map. I mark the door with the new plague cross. As we walk, I note the changes we see. The new slashes on doors. The worn, old ones. The houses where flowers and plant have rotted and dried out without anyone replacing them. The houses that look completely abandoned.