Blackout

into the world to find Shaun and give him a brisk smack upside the head. I was the only one he’d listen to, after all.

Regretfully, I set that pretty daydream aside. If they just wanted to make Shaun settle down, they’d hit him with a tranquilizer dart or something. Cloning a single sterile organ for a transplant patient cost millions of dollars. My shiny new factory-issue body probably came with a price tag somewhere in the billions. Shaun could cause a lot of trouble if he wanted to, but he wasn’t capable of that much trouble—certainly not enough to justify the cost of resurrecting me.

So what had he done that justified it? What did they want from me that they couldn’t get from him? My fingertips brushed the edge of the door. I stopped, turned, and paced in the opposite direction, letting the fingers of my other hand whisk along the wall. Fine; so they hadn’t brought me back from the dead for purely altruistic reasons. I knew that when I woke up. I represented too much money and too much time to be a purely scientific exercise. If this had happened before the Rising, human cloning might have been seen as a way to enhance and extend life. Worn out your body? Get a new one! Every cosmetic procedure imaginable in one easy step. Well, assuming you considered having your brain—whatever it was they did to my brain—having your brain somehow extracted and inserted into a whole new body “easy.”

That was before the Rising. Our modern zombie-phobic society would never embrace something that brought people back from the dead, even if they came back without all those antisocial cannibalistic urges. When I got out of here—if I got out of here—I was going to have a lot of extremely fast explaining to do, unless I wanted to find myself getting shot dead for the second time in my life.

There was something wrong with that phrase. I reached the wall, turned, and continued pacing.

Shaun was alive, Shaun was causing trouble, and they weren’t willing to risk getting caught in a lie if they told me he was dead. That might mean they were planning to use me against him somehow, convince me to spill private information about where we hid our network keys and offsite backup drives. That idea felt thin, like there was something I was missing, but it was a start. Every article begins with a line that can be twisted, somehow, into a hook.

Fine: The CDC brought me back so they could use me as a weapon against the only person in the world I loved more than I loved the truth. How they were planning to do that, I had no idea. Shaun knew I was dead. If anyone in the world knew, without question, that I was dead, it was Shaun; he’s the one who pulled the trigger. Seeing a woman who looked like me might make him pause for a second, but it wouldn’t be enough to bring him running.

Would it?

The door opened abruptly, sending light flooding into my absolute darkness. I recoiled, more from the expectation of pain than anything else, stumbling to a stop and catching myself against the wall.

The light didn’t hurt my eyes the way it would have before my resurrection, but it still made them sting, blinding me for a few disorienting seconds. I raised a hand to shield them, squinting through the brightness at the man standing in the doorway. He wasn’t moving, and hadn’t moved, as far as I could tell, since he opened the door.

I dropped my hand. “Hello?” I hated the uncertainty in my voice. I was still unsteady, and the CDC was controlling too damn much of my environment. I hate being controlled.

Having two things to hate actually helped. I stood up straighter, frowning at the man silhouetted in the doorway. Being in pajamas should probably have made me feel vulnerable. Instead, it just made me angrier, like it was one element of control too many. Let them take away my connection to the outside world, my autonomy, and hell, even my body, but they weren’t allowed to dress me.

“I said hello,” I said, more sharply. I took a step forward. “Who are you? What are you doing in here?” Belatedly, it occurred to me that maybe walking toward a man I couldn’t really see was a bad idea. Human cloning was illegal, after all, and it was entirely possible that there might be people at the CDC who didn’t want me up and walking around.

“I saw you on the monitors,” said the man. He had a low, pleasant voice, with just a hint of a Midwestern accent. He stepped out of the doorway, moving back into the hall, and giving me my first real look at his face. His skin was a medium brown with reddish undertones, a few shades lighter than Mahir, a few shades darker than Alaric, with a bone structure I thought might be Native American. He had straight, dark hair, worn loose and almost as long as mine. It grazed his shoulders, tucked behind his ears to keep it from getting in his face. I’d have to remember that trick, at least until I could get my hands on a pair of scissors. He was smiling cautiously in my direction, like a man facing a snake that could decide to bite at any second.

I’d never seen him before in my life. But he was wearing hospital scrubs, with a CDC nametag pinned to his chest. That made him, if not an ally, at least a vaguely known quantity.

“Who are you?” I asked, taking another step forward. “Did Dr. Thomas send you to check up on me?”

“No,” he said, with careful patience. “Like I said before, I saw you on the monitors. You looked unsettled. I thought I’d come down and see if you needed anything. A glass of water, another blanket…”

“What if I wanted to go to the bathroom?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I’d call for guards to escort us there, so I didn’t get fired. But I’d be happy to get you some water and an extra blanket first.” He took the clipboard from under his arm, flipping back the top sheet. “Are you having trouble sleeping? This says you had some caffeine earlier. I know that when I have too much coffee, I can’t sleep for love or money.”

“I was sleeping just fine,” I said. “Then I woke up. My internal clock is all messed up. It might help if I knew what time zone we were in.”

“Yeah, it probably would,” he agreed. “I’m Gregory, by the way, Miss Mason. It’s a pleasure to see you up and about.” He turned his clipboard as he spoke, holding it against his chest with the paper facing me. “You had everyone concerned for a while there.”

I’ve had a lifetime of experience in the fine art of not reacting to things. Still, I froze as my eyes found the block letters on the top sheet of Gregory’s clipboard, clearly intended for me to see.

YOU ARE NOT SAFE HERE.

Gregory’s expression begged me not to react, like he knew he was taking a risk, but had gauged it a worthwhile one. I managed to school my face into something close to neutrality, tilting my chin slightly upward to hide the unavoidable wideness of my eyes. I would have killed for my sunglasses in that moment, if someone had offered me the opportunity.

“I’m not sure you can blame me for that. I was technically dead at the time.”

Relief flooded Gregory’s expression. He nodded, turning his clipboard around like he was reading from it, and said, “That’s true. You weren’t legally alive until you started breathing independently.”

“That’s interesting. Who got to make that fun call?”

“It’s part of the international agreement concerning the use of human cloning technology for medical research,” Gregory said, flipping over another page. “As long as the clone never breathes independently of the life- support machines, it’s not a living entity. It’s just meat.”

“So you’re allowed to call me a clone?”

“Dr. Thomas said you’d reached that conclusion on your own, and that we were allowed to reinforce it, if it came up. Said it would make you more confident in your own identity.” Gregory glanced up from his clipboard and smiled. “I don’t think anyone expected you to figure it out so soon.”

“That’s me, refusing to meet expectations,” I said, struggling to keep my tone neutral. This man said I wasn’t safe. Did I trust him? Could I trust him?

Did I have a choice?

“All we expect from you now is that you keep getting better,” said Gregory, with the sort of firm, bland sternness I’d been getting from medical authority figures since I was seven years old. He turned his clipboard around again, showing me the second sheet of paper.

I AM WITH THE EIS. WE ARE GOING TO GET YOU OUT OF HERE. GO ALONG WITH EVERYTHING THEY ASK YOU TO DO. DO NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION.

I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I said, replying to both what he’d said aloud, and to what he’d written down for me to see. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“Well, you’ll be seeing a lot of me. I’m one of your night attendants. Now, are you sure I can’t get you anything?”