There were children down there, not a lot, most on a parents’ hip. Most people looked dejected, confused, depressed, pulled deep inside themselves. Dune herself embodied that melancholy. It was easier to see the emotional shape of the crowd from above. As she’d come in she had passed an armed guard, and there was another at the back door. She wondered, again, what they were protecting against. The sickness was either inside them or it wasn’t. It couldn’t be killed.

On her way back to the stairs Dune looked off to her right and stopped mid-step. At the end of the balcony, a boy was looking out the window, angled away from her. Maybe eight-years-old with ashy, slender, brown limbs extending from a t-shirt and what looked to be swim shorts, massive feet in red high tops, his head too large for his long frail body. He looked stretched thin.

She didn’t judge him for being underdressed in this desperate time. It still befuddled Dune that, in spite of the crisis, the season was changing.

When the boy started to rock back and forth she realized he was sick and felt a little foolish that it had taken her mind a minute to realize what was so obvious in his little body. The boy must have been stationed here while someone watching him got supplies. No one wanted to be near the sick with so much unknown.

Moving closer and around him so that she could see his face, she took in that his vast dark eyes were unfocused, his jaw dropped. She hadn’t seen many sick children up close. His lips moved in the soft whisper of H-8, “hashem, toolin’,” nothing she could understand. He was so young, he looked like it would be easy to tip him back into the realm of the conscious. Dune stepped closer, trying to understand him better.

“Don’t!—don’t touch him!” A shout came up from the atrium, someone was pushing through the crowd, racing up the stairs. Dune was already moving back, but when the tiny Black woman got close, she pinned Dune against the wall with her forearm, mama bear wilderness on her face. No one moved to intervene on Dune’s imminent ass-whupping.

After a moment’s breath, the woman stepped back, positioning herself between Dune and the boy. Dune noticed that the woman didn’t touch the boy. Mama had the same massive eyes as her son, hers red rimmed and swollen, dangerously alert. She was compact and round, wearing a sweatshirt several sizes too big for her, the sleeves cut off at her elbows, her hair a soft unkempt haze around her face escaping a brown scarf, gathered in lumpy puffs under the satin.

“Where’d he get sick?” Dune asked gently, as if the woman had just strolled up easily.