Not child. Dune was aging quickly as Vivian watched.

Some days ago, Dune had come home distraught. Someone else was gone, but Vivian couldn’t guess who. Dune had stopped in and said hello with a raw face, and then disappeared down to the basement. The girl seemed better when she came back up, as if she had put something together, or away, or in order. She’d always had that way about her, seeking order and satisfied by it.

Vivian didn’t mind order, but she was a deconstructionist at heart. She couldn’t deconstruct this moment, pull it into neat pieces in her mind and find the part that was wrong, out of sync. Her mind was not working quite right anymore. Now she needed someone who had come out of her own body, once removed, to wipe her like a baby.

It made her furious. Most of the time she just waited to die, not thinking about something beyond, about reuniting with loved ones like Wes had promised, or reincarnating like her parents had believed.

She just wanted to end this current experience.

Everyone around Vivian was dying, had died. The whole city was dying—young, old, friend, foe. It had been dying for decades, in a variety of ways: economic, cultural, visceral. She’d believe that capitalism would die and then the people would truly be able to survive. She never imagined the people going first.

Places can be so confusing in their death throes, convinced that longevity lends permanence, history yields opportunity—that because a city was built, it has a right to exist. That if it ceased, it failed.

Vivian knew some Detroit would exist for someone, she hoped for Black people. She was more interested in communities than in the structure of a city, or a nation. But after years of fierce battles for the future of this place, she didn’t think the people she counted as her own, as loved ones, would make it to that future Detroit, where their lives were not pure struggle. She had believed in the necessity of struggle when everyone was still alive. Struggle with this much misery was too heavy. She wanted everyone still here to simply find a place that felt like home, and felt free.

This home, where she could feel Brendon and the foolish amazing Kama, this was where she wanted to cross over. But, somehow, she couldn’t get free of this ancient body.

She didn’t want to go on like this, unable to muster the care with which to communicate, losing every capacity, dependent on another for everything. Everyone else was getting something, some disease that manifested by freezing people in what looked like the first private shock of grief, making it impossible to function. This she had slowly pieced together from seeing Kama, Bab, watching Dune.