I pulled my hand out of his and sat up straighter in the bed, trying to look imposing, trying to look like I wasn’t as upset as he was. It was hard not to resent the fact that I needed to be strong for him, even though I knew that he spent a hell of a lot of time being strong for me. “Do you remember Dr. Shoji?” I asked.
“I do,” said Shaun. “He’s still with the CDC, isn’t he?”
“Technically, he’s with the EIS; Joey quit the CDC a long time ago,” said Dr. Kimberley. “More importantly, he’s still a friend before he’s anything else. He’s your friend. He’s my friend. He’s the President’s friend.”
Ryman’s term in office was nearing its conclusion, but as long as he held the White House, we could at least be sure that the United States government wasn’t going to hunt us down for shits and giggles. That was a small mercy. “He’s coming here.”
“What?” Shaun’s eyes narrowed. He turned to glare at Dr. Kimberley. “Why?”
She licked her lips nervously, eyes darting from side to side before settling on Shaun. Sounding almost apologetic, she said, “I want you to understand that this wasn’t part of a nefarious plan, Shaun. This was all about the medical science, and about understanding how a simple neural map had been able to become so strong. There was the possibility that Kellis-Amberlee was bonding with people on a genetic level, through the same process that has happened throughout history, and that it might thus be absorbed and become less dangerous, and we needed test models for that…”
“That is some Resident Evil bullshit,” said Shaun. “What did you do?”
“They didn’t lose all their samples when the Seattle lab went up, and even if they had, they would have still had all the blood she”—Dr. Abbey gestured toward me—“donated at the various checkpoints and checkups between her escape and the two of you getting the fuck out of Dodge. They’ve been cloning Georgia ever since she ran away.”
Shaun went very still. I put a hand on his arm.
“No more neural maps,” I said. “No more implanted memories. None of them have been allowed to wake up.” At least that was what Dr. Kimberley had told me, and I needed to believe her; I needed to let myself believe that this was a genuine rescue, and not a deal with the devil.
“Mostly, we’ve been working with isolated systems,” said Dr. Kimberley. “Tissue analysis, infection analysis, even a few maps of the process via which a reservoir condition takes hold. We’re learning a lot. We’ve been utterly respectful, I swear.”
“Did you ask permission?” asked Shaun mildly. I recognized the danger in his tone. “I mean, did you like, e-mail her or something and say, ‘Hey, can we keep playing with your genetic material, just to see what happens’? Because if you didn’t, I’m not sure you can call what you did ‘respectful.’ True to form, maybe. You science assholes, you never care who gets hurt, do you? You just want to see what you can do. How far you can push it.”
“Since she’s offering to save my life, could you maybe stop with the recriminations for five minutes and listen?” My voice cracked. I felt bad about that. I wanted to stay strong, serene, the girl who could handle anything. But I was scared out of my wits, and I needed Shaun to focus. I needed him to be in my corner, not just on my side. “Please. I’m begging you here. Just listen.”
“Sorry.” Shaun rubbed his face with one hand. “I’m listening.”
Dr. Kimberley took a breath to steady herself, and said, “Dr. Shoji is bringing the supplies we need for a full transplant operation. Since all cloning is done under sterile conditions, we don’t need to worry about conflicting strains of Kellis-Amberlee; Georgia’s infection will be the only one present, and will spread into the new tissue. There’s a chance, given her previous reservoir condition, that she may develop a new reservoir condition following the transplant. She’ll be monitored the entire time. She’ll have three of the best doctors in the world working on her.”
“Is either of you a surgeon?” Shaun demanded.
“Joey is,” said Dr. Abbey. “He’s fully licensed and has been practicing within the last five years. He only takes cases that interest him. People would kill to have him operate on them.”
It was my turn to frown. Something wasn’t adding up. “Then what were you working on with Dr. Shoji when you were both at the CDC?” I asked. “What would you need a surgeon for?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. There was no way the truth could be worse than the things my imagination could come up with.
“I’m a virologist who works in genetic engineering,” said Dr. Abbey. She was sidestepping the question: I could hear it in her voice. “Joey is also a virologist, but he specializes in the impact of the virus on the body, not in the virus in its pure state. He genuinely wants to know what a disease will do to somebody.” She sounded faintly baffled, like this was an obsession that made no sense at all. “He’s been a licensed surgeon for the past twenty years. If there’s anyone you should trust to open up your sister, it’s him.”
Shaun went pale and didn’t say anything. I sighed.
“I don’t think he trusts anyone to ‘open me up,’” I said. “But since it has to happen anyway, please continue.”
“Joey is coming here with fresh, untaxed organs,” said Dr. Abbey. “He’s going to perform the surgery, stay long enough to be sure that Georgia is on the mend, and then get back to his very important work.”
Sometimes Shaun was faster on the uptake than I was, generally when our lives were on the line. “Dr. Shoji is with the EIS. Dr. Kimberley is with the EIS. Both of them are working on Georgia’s case. Neither of them can really afford to do this sort of charity case unless there’s good publicity in it for them. Dr. Abbey, who did you tell?”
“She told us,” said a voice from the doorway. We both turned. Mahir—older, thinner, with more gray at his temples than I remembered—offered a wan smile. “Alaric’s just parking the car and negotiating a ceasefire with Foxy. He and Maggie should be right in. Hello, Shaun. Hello, Georgia. It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah,” I said, and smiled back. I couldn’t stop myself. It wasn’t possible. “It has.”
Book V
The Gang’s All Here
None of these people understand what “good-bye, we’re disappearing forever now, have a nice life” actually means.
—SHAUN MASON
Friendship is a love that endures past death, but not always past living.
—GEORGIA MASON
One
Dr. Abbey and Dr. Kimberley had left us alone to get reacquainted—at least, that was what Dr. Kimberley said. Dr. Abbey had just snorted, said, “Well, we have a lot of shallow graves on the property,” and sauntered out, following her taller, blonder friend toward someplace where a bunch of reporters weren’t. Foxy had accompanied Maggie and Alaric into the room, and stayed to watch the fun. I wanted to ask her to leave. I wasn’t sure how to do it without getting myself shot. I didn’t say anything.
Alaric looked about the same, like he had looked at the past few years, shrugged, and decided he was going to let someone else play-test them and then get back to him after the beta. Maggie had aged more visibly. There were gray hairs mixed in with her customary blend of natural brown and bleached-blonde curls. Even without that, the dome of her belly would have made it impossible to deny at least six months of the intervening time. Despite her obvious pregnancy, she had still been delighted to see Joe the dog, giving the massive carnivore chin-scritches and belly rubs before he had lumbered to his feet and gone looking for Dr. Abbey. Now Maggie was sitting in the chair next to George’s bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes wide and serious and solemn as she waited for an explanation.
That was what they all wanted: an explanation. How could we have run off and left them; how could we have let our own need for a happy ending supersede the debts we owed to our friends and to the people who loved us. And I … I didn’t have an answer. I had never really thought about it before. There had always been something else that needed doing, whether it was r
epairing the plumbing or dealing with a wasp’s nest in the eaves, and life had been simple, in part because life had been too full to become complex.
“We just don’t understand why you never came back,” said Maggie, with the air of someone who was asking a perfectly reasonable question and hence had every expectation of a perfectly reasonable answer. Her tone was light, with none of the shadows or recriminations I heard whenever Alaric or Mahir spoke. But then, Alaric and Mahir had always belonged to George: She had recruited them, trained them, and guaranteed their loyalty in a hundred little ways, all while I was busy with my own team. Maggie had been Buffy’s, a Fictional to the core, and owed no firm allegiance to either of us. I found myself wishing, more than anything, that at least one member of my core team had survived. Dave had died getting the rest of us out of Oakland, and Becks had died getting us out of the White House. That was what Irwins did. We died.
It was my fault that I couldn’t master that small, essential part of my own damn job.
“We never said we were going to come back,” said George. “As I recall, we said exactly the opposite. We said we were going to vanish into the wilds of Canada, and that we were going to miss you all, but that you were never going to see us again. We told you. It’s not our fault if you didn’t believe us.”
“I suppose that we felt we deserved better than a few tense IRC sessions and double-blind texts, after everything we’d been through,” said Mahir. “I’ve tried not to be mad at you, Georgia. It’s … difficult. You were my best friend.”
“Shaun was mine,” she said. Her words were clear, but not cruel: She wasn’t trying to be hurtful. She was just doing what she had always done best of all, and telling the truth as she understood it. “I love you all. You were the most amazing team we could ever have assembled. But if we’d stayed, we would have been painting giant targets on all of you, to go with the targets we would have been painting on ourselves. Even with Ryman protecting us, we’d pissed off too many people, and we’d all be dead or in jail by now. I’d probably be in a lab somewhere, being taken apart one piece at a time…” She stopped, grimacing at the ironic nature of her words, given her current situation. “We had to go. You know that.”
“You could have called,” said Alaric.
“Or answered a few of the notes people had me pass to you,” said Mahir.
“Or come to the wedding,” said Maggie.
“And don’t try to say that communication wasn’t safe—you’ve been sending articles this whole time,” said Alaric hotly. He always did have a surprising temper under those glasses and that calm expression. Most Newsies did. They were calm until they weren’t, and then, look out. “If it was safe for you to write about the farming communities of the Canadian wastes, it was safe for you to send an e-mail saying ‘congrats on your marriage, sorry we couldn’t be there.’ It was safe for you to send an e-card for Alisa when she passed her firearms safety exam. You had options. You had choices.”
“We did,” agreed George. “We chose to stay away. We chose to let the story end. Because that’s what everything becomes when we’re together, when we’re making the news instead of just reporting it. I’m a clone who thinks she’s a dead woman and helped to uncover a generation-spanning CDC plot. Shaun has PTSD, talks to the dead woman whose memories I have, and is the first person confirmed immune to Kellis-Amberlee amplification. You don’t think people have been monitoring you all for signs that we were in direct communication, not just using dead drops for our articles? Looking for ways that we could be tracked? We walked out because we were done. We still are.”
“Maybe if Buffy were still here.” Everyone turned to look at me. I realized I had spoken, and shrugged, deciding to roll with it. “She could have watched the watchers, and made sure our secure lines stayed that way, and no one would have been in danger. But she’s gone. She was the first to go. Y’know? Maybe if she hadn’t died, we would have stayed immortal, like we were supposed to be. Reporters are supposed to live forever, or die off camera, where no one has to admit that we signed off for good. Buffy died. Becks and Dave died.”
“I died,” said George quietly. Alaric and Maggie both winced. Mahir just looked sad. “I know I’m not her—I know I was born in a lab—but I remember the shotgun against the back of my neck. As far as I’m concerned, it happened to me. I died. If I want to walk away, I should be allowed to walk away. I’ve earned it.”
“We’ve earned it,” I said. “Nobody gets to say that we didn’t.”
“We’re not saying that,” said Maggie fiercely. She rubbed her belly with one hand, looking down at it reflectively for a moment before she said, “It just feels like it should have been more … final. It should have been something we could remark on later, like ‘oh, that ticker tape parade was a big clue that things were changing.’ You just left, that’s all. You slipped away. We thought we’d have more time.”
Belatedly, I realized that Maggie was the only one in this room who hadn’t been given the opportunity to say a real good-bye. She’d been recovering at the Agora while the rest of us went to Washington D.C., and by the time she’d been well enough to be released from the hospital, George and I had already been gone. We hadn’t been willing to risk going all the way back across the country just to tell her how grateful we were for all her help. Alaric had promised to tell her. But it really wasn’t the same thing, was it?
Maggie looked up and met my eyes, her mouth twisted into a bitter downward curve that told me her thoughts had mirrored my own. “It shouldn’t take a medical emergency for you two to come home, you know. You should just … you should just come.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d promise to do better, but right now, I don’t think I can make any promises that I’ll actually keep.”
“I can understand that,” said Mahir. He pushed himself away from the wall. “Let’s go impose upon Dr. Abbey’s unwilling hospitality a bit more, shall we? The kitchen’s still there, so far as I know, and I could murder a pot of coffee.”
“I miss coffee,” said George, closing her eyes.
“No caffeine?” Alaric sounded horrified and fascinated in equal measure, like the idea of an uncaffeinated Georgia was the most terrifying thing he could think of.
“No, Alaric, no caffeine.” She opened one eye, shooting him an amused look. “As it turns out, when your kidneys stop working, the doctor cuts back on your unnecessary habits. Like Coke. I can’t afford the filtration.”
“God, get well soon,” he said, and she burst out laughing. There was a pause, and then everyone else joined in—me included. She still had a sense of humor. Our friends were here, and they were still talking to us; they were willing to let us lean on them now, the way that, in a fairer world, we would have been leaning on them this whole time.
Maybe things were going to be okay.
Two
Things were not okay.
Our days had fallen into a quick, easy rhythm. Maggie and Alaric worked from the kitchen, where there were plenty of outlets and Dr. Abbey’s assistants were unlikely to complain too much about having their space occupied. It helped that having Maggie around was sort of like having an infinite credit line to the black market, especially since she was pregnant; her parents had always loved spoiling her, and if she wanted to run up her credit cards smuggling chocolate and medical supplies into a not-so-secret mad science base in the middle of Oregon, they were fine with that. At least this time no one was shooting at her, and she was surrounded by some of the best doctors in the world. True, Dr. Abbey was more likely to mutate the baby than she was to improve its chances of a healthy birth, but Dr. Kimberley had worked in pediatrics, and several of Dr. Abbey’s assistants had experience with pregnancy. Some of them firsthand. Maggie’s appearance unlocked a certain level of access to the private lives of the people around us. At least three of the assistants had children, on-site, and brought them out to meet us as soon as “us” included someone who was about to be a mother.
Shaun stil
l spent most of his time outside, gathering samples and specimens, but he came back earlier, and decontaminated sooner before going to catch up with the people who’d once shared every aspect of our lives. He wasn’t coming to see me as much. I tried to tell myself that it was because he had missed having other people to talk to, and not because he was afraid of being there when my kidneys finally failed and I choked to death on my own blood.
I wasn’t that good of a liar.
Mahir was taking up the space Shaun had vacated. He only budged from my room when he needed to sleep or eat, or when Dr. Kimberley ordered him out—something she was doing with increasing frequency as my kidney function dipped lower and we waited for Dr. Shoji to arrive with my replacement organs. She was still being cagey about how they were going to be transported without amplifying. I was afraid I already knew the answer, but I couldn’t voice my concerns aloud. Not without really considering what I was willing to do for the sake of my own survival.
Mahir had no such constraints, possibly because his life wasn’t the one on the line; possibly because he had been so close to the original version of me, the one who was willing to die for the sake of a story. He was sitting next to my bed three days after they had arrived, laptop on his knees, tapping away while Dr. Kimberley administered my morning medication. She murmured some vague pleasantry, some unformed comment about how well I was doing, and she was gone, rushing off to do another series of labs and gather another file of invaluable data. My situation was going to make it easier for the EIS to work with cloning technology in the future. I should have been bitter about that. Mostly, I was just so damn tired.