“Do you want to be an inspector?” she asked.

“That’s the plan,” he said.

“Will you be coming with me for the car ride?”

“No. You’ll get in the car and go to your house alone. Everyone’s in place.”

“Okay,” Izabel said. She tapped her right heel against the front of her left shoe. She was scared. She was not the brave person she thought she would be, could be.

A car pulled up for her.

“Good luck,” Officer Evans said.

In the car, Izabel couldn’t stop fidgeting. She opened her app, kept it on 2017, and tapped on International. She scrolled through until she found the headline, “AH-CHOO.” The article was about a new political campaign in Japan, “The Twelve Zeroes,” and one of its promises was to “Zero hay fever.” Izabel tried to imagine allergies being a main concern of a political party in the US in 2017 and she almost laughed.

Near the end of the article was a paragraph that made her dizzy. They had been trying to make pollen-free trees, with, as the article said, “some success.” That sounded like a myth. Like a fantasy. She felt like if she opened her mouth to exclaim about it, her voice would come out in squeaks. She searched for evidence of pollen-free trees online.

She found a lot of old gardening websites about making your garden asthma-friendly. Discussions of low-pollen trees, trees with their pollen stored deep in showy flowers that relied on cross-pollination from bees and birds, instead of the wind. And then, on one old website, she found this: “A pollen-free tree to avoid allergies has been made, AgraFood Biotech 127 (26 April 2004), 25.”

2004, she thought. Holy shit. For a second she wanted to scream about it—The answer is in a lab somewhere! Let’s find it! It’s the solution! We’re saved!

But then she admitted to herself that she didn’t know what would’ve happened to the world if they’d tried something, if they’d made some grand gesture of felling forests and planting all new trees. The disruption to the O2 and CO2 levels in the air, to the animal habitats, to the food chains.

And still all the mold, still all the grasses and weeds.

With what she knew now, with Elm, maybe the trees would have only moved up their plan. Maybe Izabel wouldn’t have ever been born. Maybe Izabel would have been a young child and she would have died in the Turning. The killer, too. Maybe none of this would have happened. Right now, part of her wanted that.

When she looked up from her tablet, her eyes had trouble focusing on the street. But then she saw it—her old house. Next to it was the empty lot of her neighbors.