H-8 had a different effect. Dune tried to pinpoint it—the first thing she knew was that it produced a reaction in her body, a chill, a goose-pimpling of her skin. There was a deeper stillness, a giving up way down in the nervous system. The look on the faces of the sick was usually somewhere between horror and immense longing, the way the word “why” looks when something precious and irreplaceable dies.

She had nothing to offer but her witness to these moments in people’s lives. Possibly the worst moments, although she had never felt comfortable assuming death was worse than life. Who knew what awaited them? Were the days or weeks of sickness purgatory? Was it a feeling of being trapped deep inside oneself as she’d dreamt more than once now? Or was the spirit far off already?

Slowly, approaching person by person, sick or well, Dune felt her own fear fall away. She kept moving close to H-8 and surviving. She didn’t take this for granted. It felt important that she kept surviving, like an emergent responsibility. It emboldened her to move closer, to learn more.

Dune was frustrated by the lack of clarity her “research” yielded. She wanted an answer, or at least a solid clue. She needed theories to explore beyond official variations of “What the fuck?”

A week or so after the visit with Dr. Rogers, Dune woke up frozen, in a panic again, and had to find her way back into control of her body. She didn’t think this was H-8, though she wondered if maybe she was patient zero for some variation that created this horrible phase of conscious sedation before returning to the body.

After she had blinked, breathed, shaken herself out of the ice, she had a thought that made her panic: Maybe she wasn’t Black enough to get H-8.

She had been right there in the room with her mother. Gone to the hospital, gone to the store, taken no real precautions besides a mask that she wore intermittently. She was grieving, she was sad, she was scared … but she wasn’t sick. She kept not getting sick. Why? What sick logic was sparing her from this syndrome?