She covered her nose and marked it with her sharpie on the door. She’d learned the hard way that most of the just-in-case houses were tombs for dead people. She was surprised at how strong the rotting scent was even in the cool air, was grateful for the warnings the smells provided, even when they turned her stomach.

There weren’t always smells. She found newly dead people in beds, slumped over tables, in piles in the kitchen, almost always alone. She found dead people who had obviously committed suicide, in bloody tubs, sleeping forever next to empty pill bottles, collapsed in armchairs with holes through their heads, their final thoughts strewn across the wall.

She learned what made her retch and what she could look past.

She found lots of notes and journals. She always left them. That was outside her field of study, beyond her emotional reach.

She wasn’t the only one searching houses—the CDC had a task force mostly focused downtown, going apartment by apartment. Because of them, she had spent three nights boarding up the lower windows on her house. Because of them she only used the back entrance these days, off the back alley. Because of them her home became truly circadian.

Dune’s father had been obsessed with New Orleans after Katrina, fascinated by the codes they used to communicate about the living and the dead in their watermarked city. He and Kama had a photo album from their visit there as a sister city delegation, and he’d shown it to Dune when she was doing a climate justice report in the sixth grade.

Now, conjuring her father’s collaboration, she came up with a similar system of marking the houses of the dead in Detroit. A circle, halved, with a number on top for the dead person or, occasionally, people, found inside. The bottom half was the date she’d found them. If she found pets inside, she liberated them and also noted that. Her marks were small, visible only once you knew to look.

She began to see the city through this tiny new pattern. It reminded her of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project. For years, Tyree had marked solid pastel circles on Detroit buildings that he felt should have been demolished before his father’s childhood home, protest art.

She did enough research to know that decomposition takes a really long time and decided not to even attempt to forage these houses for at least six months, maybe a year.

Such long-term thoughts. What was she resigning herself to?

chapter thirteen: Two Graveyards

Dune was biking down Mount Elliott. It was the first truly cold day outside, frost on the grass. She could feel the air on her earlobes and jaw. She wouldn’t be able to bike much longer.

She slowed down as she approached the cemetery.