The woman was saying, quietly but very clearly, “Juan, home, dance, kiss.” She was standing in the walkway of a small one-family house, vines and bushes growing all around it. There was a busted grocery bag at her feet and her trembling arms were still arranged to hold it, her hands gesturing smoothly below the space where the bag had been.

She had an elegance in her hands that drew Dune in, along with the clarity of the words, the pace of repetition.

Dune pulled out her phone and recorded the woman. Then she took several pictures. This woman gave her comfort, it was only the circumstances that were disconcerting. She looked into the windows of the house the woman was facing to see if anyone was in there. No one obvious.

She checked the woman’s pockets and purse for keys, and when she found them, it made her sad in a strange way. No one had even tried to take this woman’s purse. Theft was at least a form of attention, an interaction. People were so scared or absent that they’d left Red alone here, facing this house long enough to have frighteningly cold skin. None of the keys Red had worked on the front door, so Dune used her own tools to jimmy the lock, feeling a small pride in this skill that made everything accessible.

She pushed Red into the house. Since her mother, she only touched sick strangers when it was absolutely needed—getting them out of the road or the weather. This body had the now-­familiar stiffness, but offered no resistance to being moved. There was no commitment, no desire to stay, to go.

Dune made Red wait just inside the door while she moved quietly through the house, checking for dead, for food, for signs of animals. Satisfied that nothing was here to disturb Red’s dying, Dune arranged the woman in a high backed leather chair facing the window.

She started to leave, but suddenly felt careless. People shouldn’t die like this.

When Dune got home that night, she logged Red into her system. So many people now. And she knew she was barely getting a sliver of the overall numbers of sick people in the city.

Sleeping, waking, eating that whole day, she couldn’t get Red off her mind. Maybe that wasn’t even Red’s home. And she was so coherent. Dune decided to go back and if the woman was still alive, bring her home, or get her to a hospital.