with you. I remember my first blog post. I even remember dying. I remember everything, right up until you pulled the trigger.”
“George…”
“I remember thinking I was the luckiest woman in the world, because you were there to do it. But those memories aren’t only mine. Do you understand?”
“You’re Georgia enough for me,” he said, finally pulling his hand away. “Neither of us is perfect anymore.”
I nodded. Fine, then. If this was who I was going to be, then I was going to be her. “You saved me.”
Shaun dipped his chin in what would have been a nod, if he’d raised his head again. Instead, he kept looking down at the floor, slow tears beginning to make their way down his cheeks. “I wanted to die with you.”
“You didn’t.” I grabbed his hand again, squeezing his fingers. “You kept going. And now I’m back, and we get to finish this thing together.”
He raised his head, looking at me anxiously. “What if you get hurt again?”
“We can’t start living in ‘what if,’ Shaun. If we do that, I might as well have stayed dead.” I smiled a little. “Is there a first-aid kit? I want to get some sealant on my feet.”
“What? Oh!” He straightened, focus returning almost instantly as he realized he had something he could
He led me to the bathroom, where a search of the medicine cabinet yielded a first-aid kit that could have put some hospitals to shame. I sat on the edge of the bathtub while he wiped my feet off with a wet cloth, then sprayed them with a fast-drying layer of wound sealant. It would act as an artificial skin, porous enough to let my wounds heal, but thick enough to prevent infection. I’d used the stuff before, although never on quite such a large area. It’s amazing how big the bottoms of your feet can seem when you’ve managed to run all the skin off of them.
He wrapped my feet in a layer of gauze once the sealant was dry, just in case. I didn’t ask him to stop. I just watched him work, studying the tension in his shoulders and the new strands of gray at his temples, visible even through the bleached-out streaks of almost-blond. I saw the moment when that tension turned into decision, and was prepared when he straightened up, leaned forward, and kissed me.
There have been times when I wondered how people didn’t put the pieces together. How many so-called siblings share hotel rooms after puberty, much less share bedrooms with a door connecting them? We never dated. We never went to school events with anyone but each other. We never did any of the normal social things, and yet people still assumed we were on the market, not that we’d been off the market before we even knew what the market was.
We were still in the bathroom ten minutes later when someone knocked on the front door. The voice of the hotel said politely, “Mr. Mason, your request from the front desk has arrived. Would you like to claim it now, or would you prefer that it be left for your convenience?”
Shaun pulled away from me, cheeks flushed. “Uh…” he said. Then, more coherently, he said, “I’ll be right there. Thanks.” He got up, leaving me sitting where I was as he walked out of the room. I’d expected being alone to make me nervous, but it did the opposite. For the first time since the CDC decided to bring me back, no one was watching me. I was genuinely free.
Low voices came from the hall, followed by the sound of the door closing. Shaun reappeared, a brown paper bundle in one hand and a bottle of hair dye in the other. “What do you want to do first?” he asked.
I smiled.
An hour later, I actually felt like myself again. My hair was damp and dark brown, sticking to my ears and forehead as it dried. The clothes Maggie requested were perfect, if two sizes smaller than I would normally have worn—black slacks, a white button-down shirt, and a black blazer with pockets for my audio recorder and notepad. I didn’t have either of those at the moment, but just having the pockets made me feel better. Even the shoes fit. My eyes were the only things that didn’t look right, and that was what the sunglasses were for. Once I put them on, I looked like I’d been sick for a while, but I didn’t look like a clone.
I looked like Georgia Mason.
Shaun apparently thought so, too. When I put the sunglasses on, he stopped talking and just stared at me. Finally, in a quiet, reasonable tone, he said, “If it turns out that this is all some crazy, impossible hoax, and you’re a fucking android or something, I’m going to kill us both.”
“Cloning is crazy enough for me, so I’m good with that,” I said. “Can we kill a bunch of other people first?”
“Yeah,” said Shaun, and smiled. “We can.”
“How much of this is our fault, Shaun? How much… how many questions did we ask that we should have left quiet? People are dying.” I walked over to the bed, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. “Do we own this?”
Shaun barked a short, humorless laugh. “The people who started all this shit own it. We just made it happen a little faster. I think… enough of it is ours that we have to fix it if we can.”
“We can.”
“God, I hope so.” He sat down next to me, taking my hands. “This is what you missed. Your post got out— you know that—and it changed a lot of things, and nothing, all at the same time. It’s part of why Ryman got elected. You made it pretty clear he wasn’t playing on Tate’s team. It probably doesn’t help that Tate went all bad movie villain when I cornered him.”
My eyes widened. “When you what? Shaun—”
“Just listen, okay? See, after you… after I… I had to leave the van. Steve—you remember Steve, from Ryman’s security detail? Big fucker, looked like he could stand in for the entire Brute Squad?”
“Please don’t tell me Steve died,” I said.
“No, he’s fine. Still writes me sometimes, or did, before we had to go off the grid. See, Steve and I broke quarantine to get to Ryman…”
The story he told was crazy and impossible and enough to break my heart. I’d always known that Tate was bad, but Shaun was the one who confronted him, and got fed a line about restoring America to its roots through fear and control. Tate martyred himself. It might have worked, too, if he hadn’t martyred me first.
Shaun buried me and tried to move on, but the world wouldn’t let him; the world never does. Instead, he wound up neck deep in conspiracies and craziness. Dave died. Kelly Connolly died. Dr. Wynne turned out not to be an ally, but one more crazy man out to change the world into what he thought it should be. The longer Shaun talked, the more I realized that the only allies we had were the ones we shared a website with.
I only stopped him twice: once to ask about the reservoir conditions, and once to make him repeat, several times, that he’d been bitten and hadn’t amplified. Crazy as it might sound, that was the part I had the most trouble believing. The additional details on the insect vector for Kellis-Amberlee just left me cold. Maybe mankind was going to lose the war against the living dead after all—and this time, it might not be because someone dropped a vial.
Eventually, Shaun stopped talking. Then he reached up and removed my sunglasses, putting them beside me on the bed. “We could run,” he said. “You and me. Head for Canada, or something. The others could finish this without us. You know they would.”
“And we’d never forgive ourselves,” I said. “We finish this. And if we survive, somehow, through some miracle… then we run. You and me, and anywhere they won’t find us.”
“It’s a date.” He leaned back, reaching for the phone.
I blinked. “What are you doing?”
“Calling room service. I don’t want you to blow away if there’s a stiff wind.”
I laughed and hit him without thinking about it. That brought a totally sincere smile to his face before he turned away to deal with placing our order. Less than fifteen minutes later, two massive bowls of chicken cacciatore were delivered to our door, along with a six-pack of Coke and a piece of tiramisu the size of my head. My stomach growled when I saw the food, and I realized that I was genuinely hungry for the first time in a long time.
The only thing I wanted more than food was access to the Internet, which Shaun provided as soon as our dinner was just memory and crumbs. My laptop wasn’t at the Agora—why would it be?—so he let me borrow his, both of us stretching out on the bed with our backs to the headboard, my shoulder pressing into his chest as I
