“For the first week or so, when people first get sick.” Dune realized there wasn’t really a language for this crisis yet, other than time and death. “They are almost always saying, whispering, something.”

“Yes, the mouths!” Elouise was a lightbulb coming on a rickety fuse, flashing to brightness. “I thought it was just babbling.”

“It is. Sometimes there’s words. I document that. Basically, where they are when they get sick, and what they are saying, if it’s clear. And … anything else.”

“Wow! Like clues? Wow. What a way of honoring our people! We should all be doing that!” Elouise grew taller with the thought.

It hadn’t occurred to Dune to get others to join her. Elouise turned towards the door as if she wanted to go back in and recruit right now. “That should be the next town hall, ‘Listening to Our Sick!’ ‘Black Voices from Beyond!’ We can map the area out and try to at least get everyone who is infected now. Shame is, I’ve been so scared of them, scared of my own! I didn’t even—we could come see who you’ve documented so far. This will give us something to do ’til they let us out of here or figure out what’s wrong.”

Dune felt a little thrill in her belly. It was a familiar feeling, when it seems like the world can be changed by some action that happens at the scale of a few committed people. She was raised attuned to this feeling of possibility, could trace it throughout the years, flowing through her mother, flowing through a crowd at the downtown Detroit rallies on water ownership or food deserts or impossible heating bills or other human rights concerns, during the big marches on Washington she had attended as a teenager, walking between Brendon and Kama and feeling connected to everything alive.

She mostly didn’t trust the feeling anymore, after years of having it followed swiftly by some reminder of who held power and who didn’t.

Kama had always told her the feeling wasn’t about anything that could be put on paper, it was the feeling of being of this earth. “You are a child of mother earth and sometimes you can feel the connection as undeniable,” she’d say.

Dune felt a cellular battle between her cynicism and her hope, who she came from versus who she was. In this moment, she let it all shiver, let Elouise’s desperate hope infect her.

“You don’t think people would be too scared?”

“I mean, most of us are not hiding in a bunker, we out here.” Elouise twisted her mouth at this in a way that made Dune wonder who was hiding in a bunker. And was it working? “Might as well be doing something meaningful.”

Dune nodded.