Kama had always told Dune, “You are Black. Black plus Chinese, yes, but Black.” Chinese ancestry notwithstanding, Kama wanted Dune to always know her Blackness as the first non-­negotiable aspect of who she was. “Every light-skinned Black person comes from a lineage of dark-skinned Black people and something else. For a lot of them, that light skin was a wound, from an act of violence and domination. And for a lot of us, every day, whiteness tries to make light skin wound the rest of us. But for you? You come from a love story. You come from two lineages of oppressed peoples who found love with each other. I love your daddy, we both free, and I have raised you to know your Black story and B has raised you to know your Chinese story. But there’s no world in which people would see you and just say, oh she’s Chinese. There’s no world in which they would see you and think you ain’t Black. You ain’t half of nothing. You Black.” Dune had never felt less-than in Kama’s presence.

But now she looked in the mirror, wondering if Kama’s loving miscegenation had produced a child who wasn’t Black enough to die with her people. And that thought made her breath catch again, a different kind of cold prickling her spine.

Every day now, Dune would get up, take care of Mama Vivian, and then leave the old woman to her own quiet company.

She wasn’t angry with her grandmother, but she didn’t have the patience to sit there yelling to herself, sharing news of the nothing that was spreading outside. The only time she felt connected to Mama Vivian was when she sang to her.

Dune was grateful for Bab, who visited several times a week now. Bab approached keeping Vivian company with the same steadiness that Dune approached demystifying H-8. They sometimes passed in the hall, heading towards their chosen apocalypse work.

Dune went out looking for encounters all hours, first thing in the morning, at sunset, by moonlight. She was surprised by how many people came out at night. Perhaps they were ashamed to have neighbors see that their houses were touched by the sickness? Perhaps they, like her, thought that their fragile, grief-stricken states would come to less harm in the dark? She wondered if some of her neighbors were leaving their sick outside at night.

At this point the question for those who stayed wasn’t “has H-8 taken someone from you,” but “how many? How close? How often?”

Detroit is a small town in a big city’s dress. Dune felt a deeper, stranger intimacy emerge as the numbers of living people dwindled. Those who stayed all walked with their ghosts at hand.