“What? The fuck? You a doctor?” The woman deserved a person to be angry at. She was watching her child die, slowly, for no apparent reason. Dune stood still, a cloud being passed through by the sharp edges of a winged creature. The woman looked at Dune’s eyes, darting back and forth, right and left. “At the house! Why?”

“They seem to do a little better if you keep them near the place they got sick,” Dune offered, gentle, her eyes hawking the boy.

Since Red, Dune had taken to moving people inside their home if she found them outside, laying them down if she found them standing, increasing the comfort of transition, in lieu of curing them, in absence of magic.

Dune didn’t know why advice was the first thing she offered up, immediately regretted it. The boy was so lovely, how was it possible that he couldn’t come back?

Mama Bear turned away from Dune, just shook her head. “Better? Tuh. No one gets fucking better.” Her breath was slowing down, the words she spoke seemed to hurt her. “His daddy gone, his brother gone. I can’t do it again.”

Mama Bear was lost in her own suffering, standing next to her son, following his lost gaze out the window. Dune faced the maze of empty fountains with them for a moment. She was surprised this mama hadn’t gone too, all that loss on her face.

“I could give you my address if it would help.” Dune felt the seed of an idea forming as she said this aloud. The woman looked raw for a moment, considering. “If you need to leave … I’m staying.”

“I’m not leaving my baby.” Mama sounded disgusted.

Dune understood what was out beyond the woman’s words, the exhaustion of grieving so continuously, for so many. She shrugged a little at Mama Bear and thought to the boy, looking at his perfect young baby boy face, “get free.”

She slipped back down the stairs, feeling the attention of the atrium shifting away from the edge of conflict, eyes on her drifting back to their own business. She found her reluctant placeholder and eased back into the line. People were trading stories, numbers, theories about the sick, the wasting away, the dead. One person repeated the rumor that if sick people came in with generational insurance, they got hooked up to life support machines, dropped into induced comas to stop the flood of tears, a controlled wall of silence.

Dune didn’t like the idea of taking away the small whispered communication—who knew how hard it was for the grievers to get those words out?

Her Reluctant Placeholder, when folks in the line started to get excited by this gossiped possibility, snapped that those machines were all occupied. “We can’t convince no one to loan us anything with no end in sight,” she added. “Just delaying the inevitable anyway, what’s the point?”