Riley rolls her eyes. “Right, those.” She clears out some cobwebs around her head.

“So how do we make any of this nutritional?” I ask, gesturing at the seed packets.

“Well, we can eat persimmons in a couple of weeks.” Khalil looks at the orange trees in the corner of the garden with a wistfulness that aches. They’re flanked by other trees, but they’re the only ones that look like they’re bearing fruit.

“Besides, it’s not like we’ll actually need to be able to sustain ourselves,” Mei says, with more determination than I’d ever felt about anything in my life. She’s holding a hand rake and uses it to pick at her nails. “Isaiah said as much last night. The state senate promised to look into the situation in prisons and residential facilities. They’ll come for us.”

Riley scoffs. “They’ll think about us. And then decide they have other priorities. They left us here in the first place, remember?”

“Grace said there were no plans. That doesn’t mean they can’t still make plans,” Mei objects. “It’s only been a week.”

“It’s only been a week here. It’s been longer on the outside,” Khalil says.

Silence.

“It’s a mess out there. They will come.”

Riley picks up a packet of cucumber seeds and frowns at it over her makeshift mask. The bright yellow fabric pops against her dark skin. “Of course. And who knows, maybe they’ll decide to let us all go and live free and happily ever after. And the plague will magically disappear, and we’ll find unicorns in the wild.”

I can’t help but agree with her. Isaiah did mention the state senate adopting a resolution to look at incarcerated populations, but he also spoke about outbreaks in the juvenile detention center, and it didn’t sound like they were doing anything about that. It didn’t sound like they could do anything about anything. Death rates continue to rise, and from Isaiah’s news reports, daily life has almost ground to a halt.

If a third of us are sick and it’s the same outside, it must be chaos. There’ve been pandemics throughout history, and everyone knew there would be another one sooner or later. The literal plague must have been on scientists’ watch list. But I don’t think anyone could have anticipated this—not anything like this. The news stories call it a nightmare scenario, and not for nothing. We have no better antibiotics or other treatment.

It nags at me. The question of what it’s like back home. Are my parents sick or safe? Can they still go to church? Does their faith make them less afraid?

Maybe I should try to call. Be the better person. Father Michael would tell me to honor my parents.

“Maybe you can simply give up,” Mei snaps. “But I won’t.”

Riley shakes her head and mutters something under her breath.

Mei narrows her eyes. “What was that?”

“We should ask Isaiah to find us information on fall and winter crops,” I say, before the situation escalates further and we lose more precious time to fighting between ourselves. If I’m honest, that’s the main reason why we’ve only cleaned the garden and done nothing else yet. Everyone is scared and touchy. I nearly punched Khalil yesterday when he reached out and poked my shoulder, and two days before that, Faith snapped a rake in two with the sheer force of her frustration.