Her side was aching, despite the layers she’d put beneath her sleeping bag. She rolled onto her back, groaning. She tried to change her position every twenty minutes; it helped with the pain. Years ago, Juno had a patient with lupus—Cynnie Gerwyn. And who could forget a name like that? But what Juno remembered most about Cynnie was the butterfly mark on her face and the way her thirty-year-old frame was bent and warbled like a wire hanger. She distinctly remembered feeling sorry for the woman. It would be years before Juno was diagnosed herself.

Cynnie had gone on to have a kidney transplant, and Juno had seen her twice weekly after that as she worked her way through a depression brought on by her disease. Back then, Cynnie had been just a client, a woman who paid Juno to listen to her talk, but she’d thought about her more and more since her own diagnosis, wondering what Cynnie had done with her life since the fresh kidney.

Juno moved her hands from where they were pressed between her knees to keep warm and held them close to her face; they were blue. Not from the cold—not yet, anyway. The swollen, blue hands were a sign of her sickness. She bent them at the knuckles and flinched when her joints popped painfully. Juno didn’t have so much as an aspirin down in her cave, not with the entire Crouch family quarantined.

She returned her hands to their place between her knees and wished she were already dead. And she might be by the end of the week: her immune system worked like a bunch of fat old ladies with gout. There was nothing to do but think as she lay underneath the Crouches’ house, below the humming bodies of the family who owned it. She wasn’t ashamed of what she was doing. When it came to survival, in Juno’s opinion, anything was acceptable. She’d watched them, wanted them, and found a home with them.

By the time the Crouches purged the virus and left the Turlin Street house to return to their outside worlds, Juno hadn’t eaten anything in three days. She wasn’t hungry; she wasn’t anything, really—barely existing outside of the pain in her body. She had to talk herself into sitting up, and then slowly she crawled forward, the exertion of leaving her nest enough to leave her gasping for breath. The smell of her body made her gag, and she realized that at some point she’d wet herself, probably in the middle of her pain-hazed sleep. It took her close to an hour to get through the trapdoor where she rested briefly in Hems Corner before hauling herself to her feet.