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by Mira Grant

  “What should I call you now?” The words came out before I could fully consider their meaning.

  Audrey looked away. “Margaret Sung died when I walked away from the EIS. That was our agreement, in exchange for the things I knew not being released into the public eye. I couldn’t be her and function in a world that had morality and believed in the sanctity of human life. Please, call me Audrey. That’s who I am now. That’s who I intend to be for the rest of whatever time I have left.”

  “All right, Audrey. You want me to keep loving you? Tell me what you did.”

  She looked back to me, eyes large and liquid in her too-pale face, and asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  And she told me.

  Told me about the experiments with serotyping the virus and introducing new strains to volunteers, political prisoners, and the dead; about the way they’d rendered Kellis-Amberlee terrible and new, about the fires they’d set and the facilities they’d cleansed to keep their new strains from getting out. About the way the new strains had gotten out anyway, leading to zombies that didn’t moan.

  Told me about the infants born to infected mothers kept chained down for their entire pregnancies, born unamplified but legally already dead, perfect guinea pigs for the things the CDC felt were necessary. About the lies, and the deaths, and the manipulation of the media. About the reasons she didn’t sleep anymore. And when she was done, she looked at me, and waited.

  “I still love you,” I said softly.

  She leaned in to kiss me, and stopped as something clattered from the second door. It opened, revealing Ben. He was sitting in a wheelchair, slumped in on himself, and Amber was behind him, pushing. She looked exhausted, and her eyes were red; she had been crying recently. That wasn’t a surprise. Whether she was crying for Mat or John or both, we had all lost someone today.

  Like Audrey, she was dressed in military black. That made me tense. Amber caught the look and shook her head.

  “I don’t work for the EIS,” she said. “They just have protocols before they’ll let people into the field, and I needed to come with Audrey when she brought a team to retrieve you. I needed to see that you were safe. I’m so sorry, Ash. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” I said, and shifted my attention to Ben. “Hi,” I said.

  Ben’s eyes were red too, but they were alert, and he was sitting up fully, taking in everything. His face had relaxed into true neutrality, betraying nothing of what he might be thinking. It was a trick I had always envied. Must have been nice to be able to hide everything away like that, keeping it on the inside until it was safe to let out.

  “Hi,” he said. “You okay?”

  “A little numb, but apart from that, I’m fine,” I said. “They had me all cuffed and zip-tied like a cartoon supervillain. You?”

  “I guess they think of me as slightly less dangerous, probably because sedation makes me pukey,” he said. “All I had was one hand cuffed to my cot.”

  “Not sure whether I should be flattered or pissed off right now,” I said. “So I’m going to default to ‘pissed off.’ It’s generally safer.”

  “We’re sorry about that,” said Governor Kilburn. I turned. She was standing in the other doorway, expression weary and normally perfect hair in disarray. Unlike Amber and Audrey, she wasn’t wearing black; she was still in one of her campaign pantsuits, this one slate-blue and accented with blue topaz jewelry. Chuck and Mat had probably worked together to select it for her, basing their color palette on Mat’s makeup designs. The thought made my chest ache. Mat was never going to be doing another makeup design, or rebuilding another transmission, or anything. Mat was over. Mat was done.

  Distance wasn’t going to make this better. Distance was only going to transform new injury into immobile scar tissue. I was never, never going to forgive the people who had taken them from us. There was something pleasant about that realization. It meant that I was a little less shallow than I might have been, and a little more prepared to do whatever needed to be done.

  “But really, come on,” said Amber. “If you hadn’t been cuffed all to hell and you’d woken up before one of us could get in here to monitor you, you’d have like, kicked a wall down and gone rampaging around the place, and there are a lot of people with guns outside, keeping things locked down and keeping the CDC out.”

  Audrey shot her a quick glare. Amber smiled sunnily instead of glaring back, expression wholly unrepentant. I looked between them before looking to Ben.

  “Have they been doing this to you, too?” I asked. “Implying that the CDC isn’t on our side and then clamming up like they’ve done something messy on the carpet?”

  “I think they’ve been talking a little less freely in front of me,” he said. “I got freedom of movement, you got freedom of information. It’s almost like they knew what our respective strengths were and wanted to be sure that they didn’t give away more than they intended to.”

  “Funny thing, that,” I said. My hands were no longer tingling. My legs still felt weak, but I forced myself to stand, ignoring the way my short hospital gown barely covered the tops of my thighs, and walked across the room to take the handles of Ben’s chair from Amber. “I also notice that you got a full set of scrubs, while I got this stupid surgical nightie. If anything’s been implanted in me, I’m going to be very cross.”

  “Benjamin didn’t have any wounds on his lower body that were actively bleeding,” said Governor Kilburn. “You, on the other hand, had badly scraped knees. The pseudoskin set better without fabric in the way.”

  “I can accept your logic without liking it,” I said, as I wheeled Ben over to my cot. Those same knees were knocking, trying to buckle under the strain of supporting the rest of me. It was a relief when I reached my destination without falling down. I parked Ben, turning his chair so he could face the others, and sat, smoothing my too-brief gown as far down over my legs as it would go.

  The divide in the room had never been clearer. Ben and I on one side, Amber and Governor Kilburn on the other, and Audrey in the middle, seeming more than a little lost as she looked between us.

  Then Governor Kilburn stepped fully into the room, moving out of the way of a tall, brown-skinned man with long brown hair that grazed his shoulders despite being tucked behind his ears. He was wearing khaki slacks and a black tank top under a startlingly white lab coat.

  As was so often the case, my mouth engaged before my brain got a vote on the subject. “How often do you bleach that thing? Every fifteen minutes? It’s like you’re wearing a toothpaste commercial.”

  He looked down at himself and laughed. It was a genuinely amused sound. It didn’t make me relax one bit. “I guess that is pretty white, isn’t it?” he asked. “It’s new. That’s the secret to keeping things clean: recycle them before they have the chance to get dirty.” He looked back up, studying me and Ben before he said, “I’m Dr. Gregory Lake. I used to be Dr. Sung’s supervisor. I’m glad to see that you’re both awake and alert—the lingering effects from the sedatives should wear off shortly—and I came to answer any questions you might have about what’s going on here.”

  There was a pause before Ben said, cautiously, “When you say ‘answer any questions,’ you mean—?”

  “I mean I’m going to answer your questions, and I’m going to explain what would happen if you released any of the information we’re about to give you.”

  Information… I sat bolt-upright, heart suddenly pounding against my ribs. “Where’s my laptop?”

  “All of our equipment is safe,” said Audrey. “We were able to decontaminate and save almost everything. A little clothing was lost, and one of Mat’s eye shadow palettes tested positive and had to be destroyed for safety’s sake, but all the equipment is fine.”

  “How much of it is being accidentally erased?” asked Ben, earning himself a moue of displeasure from Audrey. He shook his head. “I’m not sorry about asking. You’ve been lying to us this whole time. I need to know
our data will be intact when we get it back.”

  “I thought you trusted me more than this,” said Audrey.

  “And I thought your name was ‘Audrey Wen.’ This is a day where everyone gets disappointed, isn’t it?” The nasty edge on Ben’s voice would have seemed more natural on mine. I couldn’t blame him. More than anything, he hated being lied to. Finding out Audrey had been lying to him right after losing Mat had to be devastating.

  “Everything is as we found it,” said Dr. Lake. “We haven’t even accessed your files. If there’s any damage, it didn’t come from us.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” I said.

  To his credit, Dr. Lake nodded. “I can understand that,” he said. “This has all got to be very confusing, and not very comforting. I’m sorry about your friend. We recovered her body, and—”

  “Mat’s preferred pronouns were ‘they’ and ‘them,’” Audrey interrupted. “Please respect that. Just because they’re dead, that doesn’t change who they were.”

  Dr. Lake nodded again, more slowly. “My apologies. Your friend’s body has been destroyed, I’m afraid; it was necessary, for both biological and logistical reasons. There was no way to falsify your remains, so your disappearance has been reported to the CDC—all three of you. While they’re trying to locate you in the surrounding countryside, we’ll be able to keep you safe, at least for a short time.”

  “And this changes the shape of the search,” I said. “Three people don’t move as quickly as two. Or as unobtrusively. Especially not when they’re running and loaded down with all manner of equipment. You’re trying to keep them off our trail. Why? Why not tell them that we’re alive, and fine, and a bit pissed off, thanks awfully?”

  “Because the people in charge of the CDC are not your friends,” said Audrey. “I don’t know how many ways I can say that before you’ll start believing me. If they caught you, they’d kill you.”

  “You said the Masons were in the custody of the CDC,” I said. “Did you mean it when you said they might not make it out alive? I thought you were saying that they might have been exposed.”

  “The CDC has lost track of its primary mission,” said Dr. Lake. “They became… confused, some time ago, and have been drifting further and further astray as time has gone on and they have managed to go unchallenged. At this point, nothing short of a miracle is going to loosen their hold on the government.”

  “That’s tosh,” I said. “They’re a government agency. That’s not how politics work in America. I just took my citizenship classes, I know that’s not how politics work in America.”

  “They have a lot of money, a lot of lobbyists, and a remarkable amount of public support,” said Dr. Lake. “Tell me, Miss North, when was the last time you heard someone speak out against the CDC? Without being branded a crank and a liar, and finding themselves thoroughly discredited in the aftermath of whatever information they’d managed to release?”

  “There have been a few Newsies who have tried to do less than flattering exposés on the CDC,” said Ben. “Most of them have been laughed at. It’s… interesting that you’re putting it the way that you are, because I knew a few of those bloggers before they got interested in the Centers for Disease Control. They did good work. But after the fact, when people started looking at their older pieces, they were full of holes and errors and outright fabrications. It didn’t match up with the way I remembered their work. I never pursued it. It didn’t seem that important, and on some level, I was…” He stopped, looking unsure of how he should continue.

  “You were afraid,” said Audrey. “You didn’t want to say anything and turn yourself into a target, and you didn’t want to think about what that fear meant, so you kept pushing the fear aside and focusing on things that didn’t seem as potentially dangerous. You made yourself feel like it couldn’t possibly be important, because if it was important it deserved your attention, and if you gave it your attention, you’d be making yourself a part of it.”

  Ben looked at her levelly. “Yes,” he said. “Did you feel the same way?”

  “I know what my fear means,” she said. “I used to work for the CDC, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I joined the EIS, and when I couldn’t even handle that anymore—when I started waking up screaming because of the things I’d seen—I walked away from my life and found someone else to be. I did it because I was afraid.”

  “John recognized her,” said Amber. “He worked for the CDC too, a long time ago. He was security for one of their bigger labs. Not a doctor. I don’t think he’d ever actually said two words to her when they were both there. But he knew who she was. He told me he did. Said he was going to see what it was like to nail an epidemiologist. Er. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” said Audrey.

  “No it’s bloody not,” I said.

  “He still worked for the CDC,” said Dr. Lake. “They have people embedded with all the major campaigns—even York had his ringers. The Ryman campaign, ironically, lost theirs during the first engineered outbreak. They’ve been running largely without supervision. The rest of the candidates have been monitored since the day they started.”

  “I knew we had a mole,” said Governor Kilburn. “I thought it was Amber for a while. No offense, Amber.”

  “None taken,” she said. “I would have assumed it was me, too, given my aunt and everything. Not sure you’re who she would have asked me to go work for if she was trying to spy on someone, and not sure I’d have agreed to do it, but I can’t blame you for thinking it was me.”

  “Hold on,” said Ben. “How did you know we had a ‘mole,’ and why in the world wouldn’t you fire that person as soon as you figured out who they were?”

  Governor Kilburn looked at him. Her eyes were weary, filled with shadows I couldn’t name and didn’t want to. “I knew because sometimes the things I put in the press releases were inaccurate on purpose, and yet several groups always seemed to have the correct information. They were all groups with government ties, which to me, said we had someone reporting back to one of the other candidates, who was then leaking the things I didn’t want to say.”

  “Instead, it was the CDC leaking things, because they wanted witnesses to every move you made,” said Dr. Lake. “They can’t fix the elections without getting caught—the voter suppression and voting machine scandals of the last few elections before the Rising made that sort of thing much harder—but they can guide the results. The attacks on the candidates weren’t all intended to kill. They were meant to shape public opinion and sympathies, without showing too much of an early hand.”

  Speaking of hands: I put mine up like a schoolchild hoping to be called upon. I didn’t wait. “If they weren’t all intended to kill, which ones were? Since it seems you’re telling us things to make us trust you, and all.”

  “The Ryman ranch was never intended to harm the candidate. Neither were the attacks in Eakly, or outside the convention center. I’m fairly sure whoever’s in charge of this program expects a Republican win, since the Democrats only rated a single group attack by that stage, while Ryman was still getting tailored attention. The attack in Portland…” Dr. Lake trailed off. “Miss North? Is something wrong?”

  I was so angry it felt like my eyes were crossing. I knew my cheeks and the tips of my ears would be turning red as the blood rushed to my face, gradually blending into my hair. One of the many reasons I’ve never tried to hold down a job that required any subtlety: Subtlety is not a part of how I was made. “You said those attacks were not intended to kill,” I said, and my voice was harsh with the effort of not screaming every word at him. “Would you like to tell that to the survivors of the dead? Either those used as weapons, or those the weapons were used against? I knew those people. Some I knew because we worked together. Some I knew because I could have been them, so, so easily. They were me, and now they’re dead, and you’re going to stand there in your fine white coat and tell me that the intended target is what matters here, like that somehow
makes everything—or anything—better. It does not.”

  “My apologies,” said Dr. Lake. He sounded sincere. Somehow, that didn’t help as much as I wanted it to. “It’s hard to work with the CDC and avoid falling into their ways of thinking. Most of the doctors who work for them are good people who went into medicine because they genuinely wanted to help. You don’t make it through medical school and all the hoops that are required to get a CDC job if you don’t really, really want to make the world a better place. But they’re myopic there, in some very specific, very targeted ways. They see the world in columns. ‘Avoidable loss’ and ‘acceptable loss’ run down every page. Those attacks were either intended to kill the candidates or they were not. In this scenario, in this situation, that was the only loss that mattered. Everyone else was background noise.”

  “It doesn’t take that much pressure to separate a man’s scrotum from his body,” I said pleasantly. “If I demonstrated on you, would that be an ‘acceptable loss’ or an ‘avoidable loss,’ d’you think?”

  “Dr. Lake is on our side,” said Governor Kilburn wearily.

  “Dr. Lake has just described the attacks on you, and on my aunt, as both intentional and possibly intended to kill the candidates involved,” said Amber. “In the absence of anyone else to take responsibility, I say we let Ash rip his balls off.”

  “You’re all talking in circles,” said Ben quietly. “Why is the CDC committing acts of terrorism to guide the leadership of this country, and why do they have preferences among the candidates?”

  “They’ve been trying to steer public opinion toward the candidates with families,” said Audrey. She looked at the floor. My heart ached to see her looking so gutted, but I didn’t move toward her. I wasn’t sure she was mine anymore. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to be. “Ryman has a wife and two surviving children. Even if the children had died during the attack, he would still have had a wife. Tate has a wife, but they haven’t been seen in public together for years, and it’s generally accepted that they’ve remained married only for the sake of his career. Not a good lever if you need to move him.”