Elouise was an auntie to Dune and many others. She had been part of Kama’s support circle after Brendon died, bringing food and talking about the accident and the man as long as Kama needed, when other people were scared to broach the topic. The two women could fill an evening with venting, fill a room with rage. Now it fed Dune to see such unchecked passion, even if it felt a mile away from her own heart.

Dune had no interest in leaving Detroit. Where would she go? All she wanted was to understand why her mother was gone.

“Ma’am. Sergeant Miles Booker.” One of the young guardsmen stood up and spoke with his chin thrust up, holding his hat in some sort of deference to the crowd. His whiteness was a glaring part of his look. Most of the men in uniform Dune could see were white. Either no one had thought about the optics, or the Guard knew what everyone in Detroit suspected: that white bodies were safe from the syndrome. “No one is imprisoning anyone. Everyone here is free to stay … in their own home.” The crowd groaned. “Anywhere within the epicenter of the crisis you can move about freely. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of only thinking about the 504,000 people in Detroit. We have to think about the 324 million people currently living within these borders, whom we protect. Now, of course, that includes y’all—”

“Don’t lie!” Elouise’s body snapped, her voice filling the room in a way that left no air for nonsense. “Don’t lie to us! We not in some luxurious delusion! Just subtract us then. If we are the expendable enemy you contain? There is not one shred of evidence that this plague is spread between people. It comes over people who have never met, in isolation. But it comes here! In this place! If you put a wall around Detroit, you are locking us in a room with a rabid dog! And you won’t even admit it?”

Elouise spun around then, a warrior dancer in a frenzy, and faced the crowd. Dune couldn’t look away. She noticed the sullen guardsman, still sitting back, swarthy, with a sour set to his chin. He caught Dune’s eye, shrugged with one shoulder. Dune softly sucked her teeth at him and grabbed her elbows, turning away.

“I am not going out like this!” Elouise’s eyes flashed over Dune and she lifted her arms to the room as if she wanted to gather all of them into her heart. “We have an ancestral responsibility to this place, to each other, to beat this, to survive! As Mama Kama taught us, ‘to live and not die!’”3