At night she would check the porch and find business cards, food, offerings of condolence—Bab must have let the community know about Kama. Kama’s best friend, Elouise, left a note for Dune, offering to organize a memorial. Dune hadn’t considered that and felt briefly feral in the selfishness of her grief. But she didn’t move to pick up the phone and reach out to her auntie. Dune had always been the introvert who was pushed to connect with people through her parents. She remembered the memorial for her father. She didn’t want that for her mother, a bunch of people in her face. She just wanted to lay here, undisturbed in her mother memories. Now there was no one to nudge her towards social behavior.

Another note was from a comrade asking how the sickness had advanced in Kama, because his daughter seemed to have it. Dune knew there was nothing she could say. It came, it didn’t leave. They would learn.

The house was near Detroit Receiving Hospital, between two firehouses. Dune noticed the sirens of ambulances, fire trucks and police vehicles racing by the window with increasing regularity. There was a new signal blasting, but she wasn’t sure what it was supposed to warn against.

H-8 was spreading faster than the story could be told. People who got sick around others were identified, counted, efforts were made to save them. Wealthy sick people were put on life support ventilators and tubes. There were people stopping in the middle of streets and causing accidents, freezing halfway up a flight of stairs, losing themselves while driving cars, which then crashed. Fires sparked as people got sick while cooking or smoking cigarettes.

One or two a day. Then five. Seven. Twenty a day.

How it was spreading from one body to another was not clear, or if it even moved body to body. The earliest notable pattern in the great Black city of the north was that only Black people appeared to be getting H-8.

In the quiet of the house, Dune wished that Mama Vivian would speak again. Not to bring an analysis to this moment, not with an answer to the mystery, but because Dune wanted to hear a familial voice, wanted the comfort that comes with sound. But her grandmother stayed silent, physically contained, watching Dune as the only point of information of the outside world.

And in the outside world, people of all backgrounds started flocking out of the city in chaotic migration.

Dune’s closest neighbor, Gerald Thorn, managed the community center two blocks away. He and Brendon had been friends when Dune was younger, and Kama had cared for his plants when he took his family up north to their farm in the summers. His weathered, brown skin was covered in blue tattoos from another life, and his afrobeard reached down, gray and black in twisted tendrils that made him look as if he was eating an octopus.