by Mira Grant
“Still?” I couldn’t quite keep the wistfulness out of my voice. The world wasn’t kind—the world had never been kind, and I knew that better than most—but I had been hoping, at least a little, that things would have changed after everything we’d done. Maybe that was egotistical of me. I didn’t know. I just knew that we had paid a great deal for a new world, and now it didn’t look like we were going to get it.
“They’re better than they were. Haven’t you been reading my articles?”
“Some,” I said. “I read more of Alaric’s work these days.”
Mahir looked hurt. “Really?”
“Really.” I shrugged. “He does human interest and history; things that have already happened. Things I could never have changed. You… you’re still reporting the news. You’re doing heavy digging, and you’re doing it from Europe, which means you’re not endangering your family in the process. I am so proud of you. But if I read your work, I’d want to help. I’d want to get into those situations, I’d want to dig for those answers, and I’m not… I’m not ready yet. I’m still recovering. So is Shaun. We both need more time, and that means I can’t afford to let you make me start caring again.”
Mahir looked at me silently for a long moment before he nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’ve had similar thoughts. I went to Australia—did you see that one? Beautiful country, just beautiful, and their approach to security is so evenhanded and sensible, it made me want to grab Nandini and Sanjukta and head straight for immigration. San’s young enough that she could grow up thinking that was the way the whole world was. She could be so much less afraid than I know she’s going to be, living in England, with a blood test unit on every doorway and regular contamination drills in the Underground. I could spare her, if I was just willing to walk away. I haven’t gotten there yet. Some days, I feel like it’s only a matter of time.”
“How did you get here, anyway? You must have been on a plane the second Dr. Abbey contacted you.”
“It took me a few hours, actually,” said Mahir, with a short smile. “I hopped a flight from Heathrow to Hamburg, went from there to Helsinki, and finally got dropped off at an old research installation up in Nunavut. It’s supposedly fully decommissioned, although we both know how often that’s true, especially when there’s something useful to be had by keeping a place operational. A few bush pilots fly out of there, small-range planes, exorbitant fees. The site paid for my tickets, by the way. In case you were planning to question my use of the operational budget.”
“Are you planning to write an article about the pilots in Nunavut?” I asked.
Mahir grinned this time, bright and lasting. “Your instincts are still good. Yes, I am. I’ll be spending a few days up there before heading home. A few of the pilots have agreed to show me around, as long as I elide any identifying details that might lead the government to them.”
As if the government didn’t already know: As if places like that, in a world like this, hadn’t long since been accepted as the cost of doing business. People still needed to move around. We had become a global economy before the Rising came, and there were always going to be reasons to travel between continents—reasons that sometimes didn’t allow for the long, grueling process of going through official channels. Mahir’s passport had been issued by the nation of India, a place that currently didn’t technically exist. As such, he was in a better position than most to use the smaller, underground airports; he didn’t need a visa to go anywhere in the world, and he couldn’t be arrested for crossing international borders unless he was already a wanted criminal.
Some of the things we’d done in the process of toppling the CDC’s leadership and replacing them with people from the EIS were technically illegal. All those charges had been dropped by President Ryman after we got his wife back. As long as he was careful, Mahir’s freedom of movement would remain unchallenged, and he could continue to report on the ways in which the world had adapted.
“That sounds fun,” I said. “I think you’ll really enjoy writing that one.”
“I enjoy writing all of them, even the hard ones.” He was quiet for a moment before he said, “You know, Georgia, people wonder what happened to you.”
“I know.” There were whole forums and bulletin boards devoted to Shaun and me, groups of people who traded rumors and blurry snapshots that could have been virtually anyone like they were currency. We had become celebrities by doing the impossible—unveiling the CDC, coming back from the dead—and we had cemented our place by doing something else that should have been impossible. We had disappeared. In a world where surveillance was king and the CDC almost always knew where everyone was, we had dropped off the grid completely.
“It’s a great story.”
And there it was. Finally, the thing he’d been waiting to say since the day he arrived was out in the open, sitting between us like the inevitability it was. I leveled a flat gaze on him, waiting until he looked away before I asked, “Does it matter whether I want it to be written? Do I get to ask for professional courtesy, and actually believe that you’re going to extend it?”
“Dammit, Georgia, don’t try to make me the bad guy here.”
“Why not? You and I both know that the only way you could bring yourself around to the idea that Shaun and I would want to be a human interest story is by casting us as either victims or villains somewhere in the back of your head. I’m guessing ‘villains’ was easy, since we walked away and left you holding the bag, until you actually saw us again, and saw how damn sick I am.” I waved a hand furiously at the equipment surrounding me. Even that much motion tugged on my IV, sending a twinge of pain through my arm. I wanted to rip it out. I wanted to reject everything about the machines that were keeping me alive, and the technology that had created them.
I was the product of modern science and fringe medicine. I should never have existed. There was no one in the world who hated that fact more than I did.
“You think we want to be here? You think I want to see you look away every time I turn my head, like I might somehow not have realized that you were watching me? Newsflash, Mahir: If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be in this bed. I want to live, yes, but not like this. Not in a… in a white room, where everything smells like antiseptic, and you never get to see the sky.” The walls were a pale cream green, but the principle was the same. This room was a cousin of those sterile rooms at the CDC, where clever scientists had violated the laws of nature in order to prove to themselves that they could. On paper, I had been created so that they could use me as a weapon against my brother, but that was never the real reason. They made me because they could. They didn’t give a crap about whether or not they should. Scientists never did.
“People want to know,” said Mahir quietly. There was guilt in his tone, but there was steel there, too. I had put it there. I had taught him to pursue the story no matter what tried to get in the way, no matter how hard your target squirmed and fought. What mattered was telling the truth, writing it all down and showing it to the people who needed to know about the things they hadn’t been there to witness for themselves. What mattered was the record. The person who wrote down what happened was really the one who made history, like a craftsman made a wall. One brick—one story—at a time.
“What if I don’t want them to?” The question came out rawer than I’d expected. I paused, swallowing to steady myself, before I continued, “What if I want to be forgotten? I’m not really interested in being anybody’s martyr. Been there, done that, got the urn with my ashes in it, sort of creeped out by that. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be a story anymore either. I want to be a person.”
“What about what I want?” Mahir raised his head and met my eyes squarely for the first time since he’d arrived. He was so much older than he’d been when all this started. We all were. “You walked away, and I let you go, because I thought you’d come back. I thought we’d have time to put all this in order, arrange the narrative, figure out what sor
t of direction we wanted to go. And you never came back. We’re here now because Dr. Abbey called us.”
“Why did she?” It was the question I’d been itching to ask. She had no good reason to summon our friends and acquaintances—not unless she thought I was dying, and if that had been the case, she would have been better off sedating Shaun and finding a nice room without anything breakable in it. This made no sense.
Mahir frowned. “She said you had something to share.”
“No. Not really. I missed you all—please believe me when I say that—but I never said I wanted to see you again. Sort of the opposite, really. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”
“I called your friends because I was calling my friends, and I wanted to be sure that no one was going to get so excited by the squishy science goodness of it all that they failed to remember that you were a person,” said Dr. Abbey. We both turned. She was standing in the doorway of my room, next to an Asian man in tan shorts and a Hawaiian-print shirt.
“It’s always a risk, with us,” said Dr. Joseph Shoji. “Hello, Georgia. You’re looking awful today.”
“Thanks, Doc,” I said, and scowled. “You summoned everyone here because you didn’t trust the people you were already calling? Doesn’t that seem a little counterintuitive to you?”
“Not really.” Dr. Abbey walked into the room and started fiddling with my IV, ignoring Mahir completely. “I needed the best in the world if I was going to save you, and I needed an escape plan if I wasn’t going to save you. Shaun would tear this place down around my ears if he thought I’d done something to hurry you to the grave. So I called my contacts at the EIS, focused on people who already knew your medical history, and summoned my medical dream team. At the same time, I tipped off the people who love you as to your location. There’s no way we could fail to give you the best possible care with this many eyes on us. It just wouldn’t work.”
“Huh,” I said. I couldn’t dispute the wisdom of her actions. They were backward and strange and not even remotely the actions of a normal person, but they made sense for her, and they would do what she needed them to do: They would protect her. If I didn’t survive the transplant, Mahir, Alaric, and Maggie would be able to talk Shaun down. Nothing was going to make him okay at that point—nothing was even going to come close—and they were probably the only people in the world, excepting Rick, who stood a chance of reaching him.
If Rick showed up next, I was going to scream. Having the vice president of the United States swing by to see how I was doing was just too surreal, even for me.
Dr. Shoji’s smile was clearly forced. The concern in his eyes was just as clearly real. “Georgia,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’m two steps short of a medically induced coma, but who’s counting?” I looked at him calmly. “Did you bring what you needed?”
“I did,” he said. “We can operate in the morning.”
Three
George couldn’t go to sleep without the sound of my breathing, and she couldn’t come to me, wired up as she was to all those tubes and machines. We dozed together, me stretched on the six inches or so of mattress between her body and the edge of the bed, her squarely centered, arms at her side, like a wax dummy in a store window. I tried to pretend I wasn’t scared out of my mind. She tried to pretend the same, and neither of us spoke. What would there have been to say? I couldn’t beg her not to leave me; she was already trying her hardest, and implying anything else would mean implying that I thought she was going to fail.
Besides, the Georgia who didn’t really exist was more than happy to fill the silence. She had talked all night long, giving voice to the thoughts that raced through my aching head, but putting her own brutal twist on them.
“She’s going to die again, you know. That’s what people made of meat and mad science do. They die. That’s going to suck for you. At least you’ll have a date for the funeral, huh?”
“You should give up on her right now. If you walk away, you can pretend she got better. How does that sound? You and me and the big wide world, and you get to tell yourself she’s still here, furious and alive.”
“You always knew it was going to end like this.”
“You’ll always have me.”
I kept my eyes closed and swallowed my whimpers, refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing how she was getting to me. She knew, of course. She was inside my head. But for the moment, I could still curl next to my flesh-and-blood girl, stiff and silent, and tell myself that things were going to be all right.
Morning broke and the lights in the room came on, chasing away the shadows behind my eyelids. I opened them and Dr. Abbey was there, flanked by Dr. Kimberley and Foxy, a solemn expression on her face. George was still asleep, or at least still had her eyes closed. I sat up.
“Is it time?”
Dr. Abbey nodded. “You need to leave the room now, Shaun.”
“What?” I stared at her. “No. You’re not going to operate on her in here, are you?”
“No. We have an operating theater prepared. You can watch if you want—I know better than to try to stop you—but I wish you wouldn’t. It will probably be distressing for you.”
“I’m supposed to try to convince you to come out hunting with me,” said Foxy blithely. “I have grenades and a rocket launcher and I went out last night and found some big holes that probably have bears or foxes in them. We could set them on fire if you wanted. Ever seen a burning zombie bear trying to climb a tree? It’s really funny.”
“I can’t decide whether or not that’s animal cruelty.” George still wasn’t waking up. I frowned at her. “Hey, George? You okay?”
“She’s out,” said Dr. Abbey. “The sedatives in her IV put her under hours ago. We’re going to be sedating her further for the surgery, but this was the best way to make sure she was fully relaxed before we went in. With the amount of work we’re going to be doing, this was the best thing for her, medically.”
Slowly, I turned to look at Dr. Abbey again. “She didn’t tell me you were going to be doing that.”
“She didn’t know.” The admission was calmly made, as if there was nothing wrong with drugging someone who didn’t expect it. Dr. Abbey looked me in the eye as she continued, “She might have refused because she wanted to be awake to support you, and that wouldn’t have been good for her overall health. You’re my… long-term science experiment who walks like a friend. She’s my patient. I have to put her first.”
All those words made sense. None of them should have been put in that order. I slid off the bed, glaring daggers at Dr. Abbey and Dr. Kimberley. “This isn’t right.”
“This is the only thing that’s right,” said Dr. Kimberley. “Please, go with Foxy, and let us save your sister.”
“No,” I said. But I didn’t stop them when they unhooked the IVs from their stands and unclamped the headboard from the wall, and rolled George—still sleeping peacefully—out of the room. I followed, with Foxy dogging my heels like an eager, murderous puppy. I wanted to tell her to back off and leave me alone. I didn’t. Not only was I a little bit afraid of what she’d do if openly rejected, but there was something comforting about her presence. As long as she was there, I couldn’t be left alone with the voices in my head.
And maybe she knew a little about hearing voices. I glanced at her. “Hey, uh, Foxy? Can we talk later?”
“Sure,” she said. There was no smile, for once; only sympathy. I wondered how much of her “space lobster juice” she’d had today. It didn’t seem to be nearly as much as usual. “You want to ask about getting hopped up on drugs, huh?”
“What?”
She shrugged expansively, the motion seeming to originate somewhere around her sternum and then spread out through her entire body, rather than being localized like a normal shrug. “You’re crazy. You know that, right? I mean, Shannon says it’s not a good word to use, because sometimes people who aren’t crazy point it at people who are and use it like a weapon,
but I figure we’re both crazy, so that makes it okay.”
I was painfully aware of how close Dr. Abbey and Dr. Kimberley were. They were focused on getting George’s bed down the hall without bumping the equipment that was keeping her alive into anything, but they could still hear every word that we said. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe they needed to know that I had been thinking about these things.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’m crazy.”
“Good,” said Foxy, visibly relieved by my admission. “So see, here’s the thing: I’m the kind of crazy that can’t handle what it’s done, and gets dangerous, so they give me drugs to make me a different kind of crazy. I’m not like this naturally. Tom makes the juice, and I drink the juice, and Elaine stays way down, below the surface, in the place where reason and rhyme and writing desks can be sort of forgotten about until we need them. She’s always here. I’m always here. But she doesn’t get to be in charge, and so I get to keep breathing. Your kind of crazy is… it’s sadder, I think. You don’t need the space lobster juice. You need something else.”
“He needs antidepressants and a mild antipsychotic,” said Dr. Abbey, glancing back over her shoulder. “I don’t know that you’re schizophrenic, Shaun, but I know that you shouldn’t be hearing voices the way you do.”
“She won’t hurt you,” said Foxy. “She just wants to help. She’s helped me, and she didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did,” said Dr. Abbey. She sounded suddenly tired. I looked up, and saw that she and Dr. Kimberley had stopped, George between them, in front of a closed door. “Shaun, if you really want to watch this, go with Foxy; she can show you to the theater. But I wish you wouldn’t.”
“You know I have to,” I said quietly. I turned to Foxy. “Show me?”
“Okay,” she said, and pirouetted on her heel, light and graceful as she turned and led me back down the hall to another door. This one was smaller, recessed into the wall. There had been a sign affixed there once; the scars from the screws still stood out against the wood. She opened it, and I followed her mutely through, up a flight of stairs to a small room, once a projectionist’s booth. It held seven chairs, pressed too closely together for comfort. Only one was open, at the very center of the row. The others were filled with faces I knew—Maggie, Alaric, Mahir—and faces I didn’t know as well—Jill, Tom, and another of Dr. Abbey’s assistants. The people who knew me and George as people, not just accidents of science, looked at me with quiet sympathy in their eyes. The people who worked for Dr. Abbey didn’t look at me at all. Their attention was reserved for the glass wall in front of us, and the round, sterile room below.
