It wasn’t easy—Kama’s computer was full. Dune’s mother had kept pictures and videos of meetings, events and conversations for some future history book project she hadn’t gotten to. Dune didn’t want to risk losing anything that belonged to her mother, so she used the old hard drives to hold her growing files. Brendon’s color printer allowed her to put the pictures on paper.

She had started taking pictures on her phone in case her descriptions were insufficient, later, if people came back to hear what had happened to their sick. But she found that the pictures had become her company, a way to help her stay in touch with her humanity. The far wall behind the model now watched her work through a few dozen listless eyes.

Mostly she had just written things down in her notebook to transfer into her system in the basement, though sometimes she didn’t understand enough to grab out coherent words. When she felt on the brink of understanding people, she made recordings to listen to later, often finding she could hear more without the distraction of their sickness in front of her. These she filed away too. Three or four words sometimes made life stories, if she was willing to fill in the middle ground.

The hardest days were when she could find one word amongst a blur of language, but couldn’t decipher the rest. The unfinished stories for the unfinished lives.

She created her systems and then recreated them, adding slips of paper, descriptors, numbers, dates, moving the files around based on geography, chronology. Nothing seemed exactly right, but getting lost in the work felt right.

Dune was proud of the intimate portraits she’d been creating of the people she’d found. She felt like an investigative reporter, someone official. She had who, when and where on lock. What, why and how beckoned her into deeper and deeper obsession with the infected.

She had different notebooks—small ones that fit in her pocket, which she took with her into the world, and a thicker unlined book that was partially full of notes, with more and more reflection and journaling. She wrote about how lonely she felt, which felt like such a Marta thing to do. But she found that writing down her feelings, not just what was happening, but how she felt about it, always left her feeling better, clearer, afterwards.

The mold was back. Somehow the model had been mold-free for a decade and now, every time she came down, she was wiping off the thick persistent green, which grew faster and faster, in more places. Her imagination couldn’t explore the possible sources of the mold, she felt the cage grief built around her dreams and wonder.