Dune touched the leaftree a few blocks from Elouise’s home, down to where it sunk into the foam board. She squatted down on resistant knees and looked under the table. There were a few tiny tendrils, slender green hairs curling down from the pocked belly of the table, one almost to the vase below.

She had been keeping the heat down in the house, in case that was inviting the mold that kept creeping onto her model. But it didn’t seem to matter. Dune looked around the basement again, for sun, water, seeds, gardeners. Shadows. Ghosts. Anything to explain this little life.

There was no explaining it. She thought the word magic and immediately felt a chill. She had tried wiping the mold off the model to no avail. She didn’t even try to pull this green out. It didn’t seem like weeds.

Three days later, leaning against a building in the dusk, Dune tried to catch her breath.

Two blocks behind her was an evacuation paddy wagon. She’d been out walking around in the first hard snow of the season, letting the flakes touch her face. Coming around the corner from Mack to Second she’d spotted a white van ahead, with two soldiers dragging a third person, resisting.

Dune had immediately slipped back, leaning against the brightly graffitied wall of the small abandoned building that dominated this corner. Then she had run, zig zagging snowy blocks until she had come around to Alexandrine and Second. Her body seemed to need twice the oxygen she could inhale and she worried that everyone in a three-block radius could hear her wheezing.

She peeked around the corner, through a thicket of evergreen bushes coated in snow. The van was now rolling slowly in her direction.

She stumbled back from the corner and ducked into an alley. Hearing the van, Dune dropped to her stomach, the cold air buffeting in the snow and dew-dropping her upper lip. Would they see her bright breath?

She scooted forward and looked out of the alley. The van drove down Second slowly, the soldiers in the front seat with gas masks and guns pointing out the front windows. The van passed from her view.

Dune waited until she couldn’t hear the engine any longer, and then a long time after that, until the cold had penetrated her layers and her fingers started to feel numb. Slowly she walked onto Second, looking in both directions up and down the wide road to be sure the van was out of sight. She pulled off a glove and used it to erase her footsteps, in case anyone got interested in following her through the snow. She walk-jogged back down her street, doubling around to enter off the back alley.