Her father had done a particularly good job recreating Eastern Market, the largest open air farmer’s market in the country, tinfoil and brick sheds with lots of small flowers and fruit piled underneath. Dune and Brendon had volunteered at the Grown In Detroit stand together every summer of her teenage years—Brendon interviewing every customer about their Detroit stories, Dune rolling her eyes and gathering cash.

Back across 75, two blocks west and six blocks north, stood the house she’d grown up in, the house she sat in now, nearly alone on its block. Gerald and Nina’s bright purple house sat across the street with two languishing apartment complexes on opposing corners, fenced in, as if they had valuable things inside.

Dune touched the model house that her father had made into their home—it was just a little monopoly game house glued on top of a flat lego, but Brendon had brought her and Kama downstairs when he painted it. She could see him now, his face soft with pleasure as he gripped the little building in tweezers, dipping it into the actual sunbright yellow paint they’d used on the house’s facade, and placing an X on top with a mangled paper clip. Detroit was his treasure map, home was his gold.

His placement was specific. Dune knew her parents had been proud of this house, of holding a radical enclave in the heart of the Cass Corridor. They had never adopted the “colonizer name” of Midtown that was cast over the neighborhood in the erasure trends of gentrification. Her parents had loved their outpost, even as they watched the heart of Detroit go pale outside their windows.

Now sunlight was shining on the model house. Dune looked around, trying to see if there was a hole in the wall or ceiling somewhere. There were no windows down here, but there was sunlight, a bright, active beam on the small house. Dune waved her hand over the house, but could not block this light.

For a brief moment, Dune saw Kama standing in the kitchen window, frozen, outlined in golden light. She looked around again for a light source and then berated herself inside, feeling foolish. She knew why she was down here.

“Father. Mom, Kama, is dead.”

The silence hung around her. She wondered if she could feel him here, as the air, listening to her, or if it was just her own longing becoming a presence.

“She died of something they think is a virus, a syndrome. H-8. Maybe. She—we were in the kitchen. And she just stopped talking mid-sentence. She just ... went away. And never came back. She never came back.”

Dune’s voice was straining, her throat tightening. She needed to get this out. “She died here, upstairs. With me. I ... cremated her. In the backyard. So. She’s here.”

She felt the silence thicken, the stillness deepen, the basement go cool.