I tell her safe things. Gentle pictures, like Nia calls them. The way we try to make normal life go like it’s supposed to, even if there’s nothing normal about anything here anymore.

Like, “We took inventory in the kitchen and the pantry. I counted the bags of rice and weighed the bags of flour. We haven’t had a food delivery since the start of this, and you can tell. Did you know they barely accommodated anyone’s diets? We can’t do anything but the minimum either, and it makes me feel bad.”

And, “I taught Nia to sign. Hello and how are you and a few other words. She was the first to ask. She sketched me cutting my thumb on a can opener.”

Or, “Isaiah is looking up recipes for raccoon. Granddad would be proud.”

I don’t tell Leah about the things that scare me.

Like how Isaiah hasn’t been able to go online for the past three days, because we’ve been having power outages and the phone lines are down.

Like how seven of us have died, and three others are still in the infirmary with her.

No one has recovered yet. Xavier and Isabella ran as high a fever as Leah’s, and they’re holding on like she is. Jeremy is slowly fading away.

It’s only a matter of time before we all catch it, because despite all our precautions, we can’t simply avoid each other. And maybe I want that. To be close to her. To be with her. Is that terrible?

I can draw out the plague’s progression in everyone else. Someone starts to cough. It’s so innocuous at first. Someone starts to cough, and sooner rather than later, they’re coughing up blood. They collapse. They lose consciousness. And within a handful of days, they’re gone.

I don’t tell Leah about any of that though. What’s the point of it, when she needs to focus on recovering?

What’s the point, when she can’t hear or see me anyway?

I talk to her every night, and in the morning, I wake before dawn to go to the kitchen. Familiarity is the only safety I have. I get there before Nia arrives. Because I’m the first, I’m the one who turns on the lights. I go through the kitchen to make sure everything is clean and nothing is weird, and clean our counters again. I collect the food we need for the day and mark on Nia’s sheets what we are missing. What we will miss, in a day, a week, a month.

By the time Nia gets there, I’ve gone through all my motions. I am less overwhelmed and ready to share our work.

Then Elias comes in to prepare breakfast.

Or came in, anyway.

He started coughing three days ago. He died last night.

* * *

Today is different. I wake and get dressed and brush my teeth. I wonder how much longer we will have toothpaste.

Then I slip through the door, through the quiet east wing, through the dark. The sun isn’t quite up yet, but the night lights are off. I don’t know if it’s another outage, but I keep my head down and keep walking.