“Girls are fucking weird,” I said.
You should know, George replied.
I smirked and leaned in for a closer look at the octopus. It settled against the glass, watching us with its round, alien eyes. “That is a freaky-looking thing,” I said. “What’s it for?”
“Barney here is for testing some of the new KA strains we’ve been developing,” said Dr. Abbey, removing the cover from the tank. The octopus promptly switched its focus to the surface of the water. She stuck in a hand, and it reached up with two tentacles, twining them firmly around her wrist. “We haven’t been able to infect him yet, although he’s shown some fascinating antibody responses. If we can just figure out what’s blocking infection in the cephalopod family, we’ll be able to learn a lot more about the structure of the virus.”
“Wait, you mean you’re actually trying to develop new strains of the virus?” Kelly looked at her with wide, baffled eyes, like this was the last thing she could imagine anyone wanting to do.
Dr. Abbey took her attention away from the octopus—which was now trying to pull her arm all the way into the tank—as she frowned at Kelly. “What did you think we were doing here? Growing hydroponic tomatoes and talking about how nice it’ll be when the CDC finally decides to get around to saving us all?” She began untangling her hand from the octopus’s grasp, not appearing to take her attention off Kelly. “Please. Are you really going to stand there questioning my medical ethics while you tell me you people haven’t been working with the structuthe cephalthe virus at all?”
Kelly bit her lip and looked away.
“Thought not.” Dr. Abbey pulled her hand out of the tank and replaced the lid. The octopus settled back at the bottom in a swirl of overlapping arms, appearing to sulk. “If you’ll all walk this way, I think we’re about ready to conclude our little tour. You should have all the information you need by this point.” She turned and strode down the alley, shoulders stiff.
“Think we should follow?” asked Alaric, sotto voce.
“I’m not sure Joe here is going to give us a choice.” I glanced at the mastiff. He was sitting calmly behind our little group, blocking the only other exit from the narrow row between the tunnels. “Besides, we’ve come this far. Don’t you want to find out what the big secret the Wizard has to share with us is?”
“Maybe she’s planning to give you a brain,” deadpanned Becks.
“If she does, I hope that means you’re getting a heart,” I replied, and started walking.
Behind me, Alaric said, almost mournfully, “I just want to go home.”
Kelly and Maggie didn’t say anything at all. But they followed, and that was more than I had any right to ask of them.
Dr. Abbey was waiting on the other side of the alley, in front of a wide safety-glass window that looked in on what was obviously a Level 4 clean room. The people inside were wearing hazmat suits, connected to the walls by thick oxygen tubes, and their faces were obscured by the heavy space-helmet-style headgear that’s been the standard in all high-security virological facilities since long before the Rising. Dr. Abbey was looking through the glass, hands tucked into the pockets of her lab coat. She didn’t turn as we approached. Joe trotted up, and she pulled one hand free, placing it atop his head.
“I started this lab six and a half years ago,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you—or someone like you—ever since. What took you so long? Why didn’t you show up years ago?”
“I didn’t even know you were here,” I said. “I still don’t really understand.”
Yes, you do, said George. Her voice was small, subdued, and almost frightened.
“George?” I asked. My own voice sounded almost exactly like hers had.
“We should go,” said Kelly, sounding suddenly alarmed. She took my elbow. I looked down at her hands, but she didn’t let go. “Or we should ask her about the research. You know, what we came to ask about.”
“Dr. Abbey?” asked Alaric. “What’s going on? What are you doing here? Why did you give your dog reservoir conditions, and what do you mean when you say he can’t amplify? And what does it have to do with the deaths of the people with the natural reservoir conditions?”
“The Kellis-Amberlee virus was an accident,” said Dr. Abbey, still looking at the pane of safety glass. Her hand moved slowly over her dog’s head, stroking his ears. “It was never supposed to happen. The Kellis flu and Marburg Amberlee were both good ideas. They just didn’t get the laboratory testing they needed. If there’d been more time to understand them before they got out, before they combined the way that they did… but there wasn’t time, and the genie got out of the bottle before most people even realized the bottle was there. It could have been worse. That’s what nobody wants to admit. So the dead get up and walk around—so what? We don’t get sick like our ancestors did. We don’t die of cancer, even though we keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere as fast as we can come up with them. We live charmed lives, except for the damn zombies, and even those don’t have to be the kind of problem that we make them out to be. They could just be an inconvenience. Instead, we let them define everything.”
“They’re zombies,” said Becks. “It’s sort of hard to ignore them.”
“Is it really?” Dr. Abbey’s hand continued caressing Joe’s ears. “There’s always been something nasty waiting around the corner to kill us, but it wasn’t until the Rising that we let ourselves start living in this constant state of fear. This constant ‘stay inside and let yourself be protected’ mentality has gotten more people killed than all the accidental exposures in the world. It’s like we’re all addicted to being afraid.”
Ask her about the reservoir conditions, prompted George.
“George—I mean, I want to know, what do the reservoir conditions have to do with any of this?” My voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears, like someone else was asking the question.
“The immune system can learn to deal with almost anything, given sufficient time and exposure. How else could we have stayed alive for this long?” Dr. Abbey turned to look at me, eyes dark and very tired beneath the erratically bleached fringe of her hair. “The reservoir conditions are our bodies figuring out how to process the virus. How to work around it. They’re our immune responses writ large and inconvenient, like the autoimmune diseases people used to suffer from before the Rising.”
Just about everyone with an autoimmune syndrome either died during the Rising or found their suffering greatly alleviated as the body’s immune responses got something much better to waste their time on than attacking their own cells: the sudden burgeoning Kellis-Amberlee infection doing its best to wipe out everything in its path. Autoimmune disorders still crop up, but they’re nothing compared to their numbers before the Rising turned the medical world on its ear.
The facts flashed across my mind like puzzle pieces falling inexorably into place, each of them notching smoothly into place with the ones around it. The things Kelly was surprised by. The illegally massive dog with the induced reservoir conditions, and the casual way Dr. Abbey said he wouldn’t amplify, like she knew, absolutely, what she was talking about. The spiders, the bugs, and the octopuses with their grasping limbs and their staring, alien eyes. All of it made sense, if I just stopped trying to force it.
I turned toward Kelly before I realized that I was intending to move. Her eyes widened, and she took a step back, almost pressing herself against Maggie. Maggie gave her a puzzled look as she stepped out of the way.
“I don’t know what he’s so pissed about, but I’m not going to get in his way,” she said, in a tone that bordered on the sympathetic. “Better you than me.”
Alaric and Becks were watching me with confusion. Dr. Abbey turned to watch me advancing on Kelly, and there was no confusion in her expression, just calm satisfaction, the teacher’s face once more watching her student finally understand the lesson.
“The reservoir conditions are an immune response,” I said. It wasn’t a question; it didn’
t need to be. I could see the confirmation in Kelly’s widening eyes. “They’re the way the body copes with the Kellis-Amberlee infection, aren’t they?” She didn’t answer me. “Aren’t they?!” I shouted, and slammed my hand into the safety glass.
Maggie and Alaric jumped. Becks stepped up beside me. And Kelly flinched.
“Yes,” she said. “They are. They just… they just happen. We think it has something to do with exposure in infancy, but the research has never been… it’s never…”
All my sympathy for her was gone, like it had never existed at all. I wasn’t seeing a person anymore. I was seeing the CDC, and the virus that took George away. “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”
Kelly nodded mutely.
“Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now, tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”
“They teach the immune system how to handle an ongoing live Kellis-Amberlee infection,” said Kelly, meeting my eyes at last. She sounded oddly relieved, like she’d known we were going to wind up here and just hadn’t known how to force the issue on her own. “They teach the body what to do about it.”
“Meaning what?”
Alaric spoke abruptly, his own voice glacially cold: “That’s the wrong question, Shaun.”
“All right, you’re the Newsie. What’s the right question? What should I be asking her?”
“Ask her what would have happened if you hadn’t pulled the trigger.” Alaric looked at Kelly for a long moment, and then looked away, like he couldn’t bear the sight of her. “Ask her what would have happened to Georgia if you’d just left her alone in the van and hadn’t pulled the trigger.”
Kelly’s answer was a hushed whisper, so soft that, for a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The words seemed to get louder and louder as they echoed inside my head, repeating over and over again until I couldn’t bear the sound of them. I slammed my fist into the safety glass as hard as I could, so hard I could feel my knuckles threaten to give way. Then I turned on my heel and stalked away, back down the dank-smelling alley where the octopuses watched with their alien eyes, back pastiggnks of massive spiders, past the working lab technicians, who barely even looked up as I passed them. I was running by that point, running as I tried to outpace the words still echoing in my ears—those horrible, condemning, world-destroying words. It didn’t do any good. No matter how fast I ran, no matter how hard I hit the world, nothing could take those words back again.
Those five small, simple words that changed everything:
“She would have gotten better.”
Shaun and I had one of those awkward talks today—the ones that hurt the most because they’re the ones you don’t want to have, ever, but have to have eventually. This one was about our birth parents. Who they were, why they gave us up, whether they survived the Rising, all those things they say adopted kids are supposed to ask. Whether they wanted us. That’s a big one for Shaun. He’s always been more forgiving of the Masons than I am, but for some reason, it’s really important to him that we were wanted before we wound up here.
I know what triggered it. I got the same e-mail he did, from a service promising to “reunite the orphans of the Rising with their families.” According to the e-mail, these people would—for a modest fee, of course—run blood and tissue samples through every public and military database in the country, looking for a genetic match. Satisfaction guaranteed; they were clear on that point. We Find Your Family, Or Your Money Back.
That sort of scam fascinates me, but I don’t want the answers that they’re offering. I’ve had my genes tested for every nasty recessive and surprise health hazard we can test for, and that’s most of them—anything they don’t have a chromosome type for is so damn rare that at least it would be interesting to write about as it killed me. I have no pressing need to find the family that created me. The one thing I have in this world, the one thing I’m not willing to risk losing, is Shaun. And if I went out and found another family, I’d run the risk of losing him.
Whether the Masons rescued us from certain death—like the press releases say—or stole us, or hell, bought us on the black market, I don’t care. The girl I would’ve been if I’d grown up with a mother with my nose and a father with my funny-looking toes never got the opportunity to exist. I did. I was the one who got to grow up, and I grew up with Shaun, and that’s all I give a damn about. We got lucky. If he doesn’t see it, well… I guess there’s no way to make him.
But I still know.
—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted May 13, 2034
The good thing about Kellis-Amberlee, as a virus, is that it only goes after mammals. I mean, think about it. Can you imagine an infected giant squid? It would be like the Sea World Incident of 2015 all over again, only this time with bonus tentacles. Not my idea of a good scene. If that doesn’t disturb you, consider this: The average crocodile well over the amplification threshold.
Yeah. That was my thought, too.
The bad thing about Kellis-Amberlee, as a virus, is that it goes after all mammals. From the smallest field mouse to the largest blue whale (assuming there are any blue whales left down there), if it’s a mammal, it’s a carrier. That means that any cure we devise will also have to work for all mammals, because otherwise there’s always the chance that Kellis-Amberlee can mutate and come back for another try. Viruses are tricky that way. At least we’re used to dealing with this form of the disease. I’m not sure how quickly we’d adjust if it somehow changed the rules.
—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, April 12, 2041
Ten
The outside air slapped me hard across the face as the door to Dr. Abbey’s lab clanged shut behind me. I stumbled to a stop, realizing two things at the same time—first, that I was alone in the middle of a mostly abandoned industrial park, and second, that while I had my standard field arms, I wasn’t wearing any armor beyond my basic motorcycle gear. It was like a recipe for suicide, and while it might have been acceptable when I was too out of it to realize what I was doing, that moment had passed. I let my gaze flick wildly around my surroundings, looking for signs of movement. I didn’t find any. What I did find was the van, sitting like an island of serenity among the ruins.
I took another step forward, barely aware that I was going to do it until it was already done. The van. That’s where I was going when I ran away. To the van, where George and I saved each other’s lives a thousand times… where I pulled the trigger and killed the woman who was my sister, my best friend, and my only real family, all with a single bullet.
She would have gotten better, whispered Kelly’s voice, in the black space behind my eyes where only George was supposed to speak. The world blanked out again.
The sound of the van door slamming forced me back into my surroundings for the second time. My index finger was slightly numb, with the deep, subcutaneous ache that meant I’d taken—and passed—a blood test to open the doors. No amplification for me. Not yet, anyway. I looked dully around the van’s interior, eyes flicking toward the ceiling in an automatic check for the Rorschach test that was formed by George’s blood immediately after I pulled the trigger. For a moment, I could see it, streaks of red trending into a dozen shades of brown as it dried. Then I blinked, and the blood was gone, replaced by pristine white paneling.
“Breathe, Shaun,” said George. Her voice came from behind me, rather than from inside my head. It was calm, soothing, even slightly amused; she was just talking me down from a panic attack. Nothing important, all part of a day’s work. I’ve never been terribly prone to that kind of episode, but when you spend your days playing with dead things, one or two flip-outs
are bound to come with the territory. “You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm.”
“Didnt you hear her?” I demanded, clenching my hands into fists. The urge to look toward the sound of her voice was nigh irresistible. I kept looking at the ceiling instead, waiting for the blood to repeat its flickering appearance. “You would have gotten better.”
“Says her,” George said. The amusement vanished, replaced by the barely chained irritation that was practically her trademark. “The test results were locked in—the CDC knew I was dead. If you’d walked away, something would have happened, and you know it. Worst-case scenario, you would have been treated to the delightful sight of men in hazmat suits dragging me into the open while I screamed for them to take another test. My last post might not have gone out. The truth might not have gone out.” She paused before delivering what I was sure was meant to be the killing blow: “Tate might have walked away clean.”
“You don’t know,” I said. “We could have claimed there was something wrong with the test. It’s happened before.”
“How often?”
I didn’t answer her.
George sighed. “Three times, Shaun. With a top-of-the-line test, three times. In all three cases, there was proof of mechanical failure—and in two of the cases, the people were killed anyway. Their families won their suits on the basis of secondary testing units. We both know what a secondary test would have shown in my case. There’s no point in pretending that we don’t.”
That was too much. The blood flickered back into visibility a second before I spun around, feeling my fingernails cutting into my palms as I shouted, “For fuck’s sake, Georgia, there was a chance!” The empty chair would fix it. I’d see the empty chair, and she’d go back to being a voice in my head, just a voice in my head, because she was dead, I killed her. I just had to see the empty chair.