The last time I’d seen Foxy, she’d been waving from the window of a house that was about to explode. I had assumed that she’d been killed in the blast. We both had. So finding her standing in Dr. Abbey’s lab was a bit jarring, to say the least.
But it was still Dr. Abbey’s lab. I knew Shaun had been in touch with her during the trip. Sometimes he’d called in over wireless relays when he thought I was asleep or dealing with something that would keep me distracted. He hadn’t wanted me to hear how worried he was about me, like he thought my own awareness of my condition was somehow veiled in self-deception. He didn’t know how many symptoms I’d been able to hide from him since we’d left the cabin, and hopefully, he never would. It was a small, petty wish, but it was mine, and I was holding to it.
Dr. Abbey would have told us if it wasn’t safe, or if she wasn’t here. So I raised an eyebrow, and asked, “What are you shooting us with?”
“Huh? Oh, nothing, if you come with me to decontamination. Didn’t I say that first?” Foxy’s face scrunched up as she thought about the last few minutes. “I guess maybe I didn’t. It’s good to see you again! I figured for sure you’d be dead by now, but Shannon says nope, you’ve been alive this whole time. That’s important, you know. Staying alive in a straight line. You can stop, if you have to, but it’s very hard to start again.”
“That’s true,” I said, trying not to laugh at her. We still didn’t know what that gun of hers did. It looked like it might be some sort of tranquilizer delivery system, intended for use only if we refused whatever decontamination process Dr. Abbey wanted us to go through. Since Foxy was the one holding it, we could probably wind up tranquilized for sneezing. It was best to tread lightly. “Let’s go get decontaminated, and then we need to unload the van. We’ve been living in it for the last few days, and it smells pretty ripe.”
“Shannon collects dead things and doggies,” said Foxy. “Nothing can smell worse than dead things and doggies. Come on.” She started down the hall. We followed her, lacking anything else to do.
Shaun took my hand as we walked, lacing his fingers through mine and holding on so tightly that it hurt. I didn’t mind. I still felt shaky enough that having him there to lean on was important, and if he needed to hold me to be sure that I was real, it was a service I was happy to provide. My own heart was hammering, seeming to echo through my entire body. Until we’d arrived, I hadn’t really considered the part where Dr. Abbey was a doctor. Maybe that seems silly, but it was the truth. She didn’t fall into that category in my thoughts. She was a mad scientist, an ally, a friend, a dangerous enemy, but not a doctor. Even when we’d been asking her to help me, she hadn’t clicked over into that category.
But now here we were, and it was time for her to start doctoring. Time for the white walls and the backless gowns and the needles and the tests—
My hands spasmed, forcing themselves into fists without my willing them to do so. Shaun gasped a little as I crushed his fingers, but he didn’t pull away. Instead, he pulled me closer, close enough that I could smell the sweat under his deodorant.
“Breathe,” he said, in a low voice. “This isn’t like before.”
I shot him a grateful look. He didn’t need to ask what was wrong, because he knew. He knew every part of me, the ones that were like his original Georgia and the ones that were entirely my own, forged in the strange crucible of cloning and medical experimentation and escape. He didn’t judge, either. That was the best part. Whoever I was, whatever the source of my soul, he loved me all the same. I was his George. That was all he’d ever needed me to be.
“I know,” I said. “I just … I guess I didn’t think about what this would mean until we got here.” I hadn’t allowed myself to think about it, because thinking about it would have meant admitting that I was willingly handing myself over to a woman who had belonged to the CDC, once upon a time, even if she’d found it in herself to walk away. Dr. Abbey was our friend. She was also the face of my worst nightmare. Those two things didn’t contradict each other. They existed simultaneously, informing each other, and nothing I did would change them.
“I’m going to be with you the whole time,” he said. “No matter what.”
“That’s not quite true,” chirped Foxy, turning around and walking backward as she led us down the hall. “You have to go into separate rooms for decontamination. Doctor’s orders. Something about making sure that there’s no confusion about what came from who.”
“What are you doing here, Foxy?” Shaun sounded more weary than curious. He didn’t let go of my hand. “I thought you were dead.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Foxy brightly. “I’m pretty sure I was dead, or close enough for tax purposes. Got some real nasty shrapnel in the back when the house went boom-boom, and bled all over the place. It was a bad, bad scene. But then some of the Monkey’s friends came to see what had happened, and they found me and took care of me until they didn’t, and then I came here, and now Shannon takes care of me, and tries to help me remember how to be a people instead of a weapon of mass destruction, and Tom makes me my space lobster juice for when the screaming gets too loud. So it’s all good. We’re here, by the way.”
She stopped walking between two doors. They were labeled, in quixotic fashion, “Squids” and “Mollusks.” Shaun raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “Which one am I?”
“All gender is a construct and binary gender doubly so, but you have a hard shell and you’re hard to kill, so you’re probably a mollusk,” said Foxy blithely. “You should get clean now. Shannon doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Right,” said Shaun. He looked toward me, expression going grave. “George…”
I let go of his hand. The gesture felt somehow terribly final. “It’s fine,” I said. “We’re going to get clean, and then we can go tell Dr. Abbey all about my medical history. It’s fine.”
Shaun didn’t look so sure. I was starting to get frustrated with his separation anxiety. Yeah, he was going to have issues if I died, but dying was the last thing on my list of things to do, right after “topple one more major world government, just for fun” and “learn how to make jam that doesn’t ferment.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and pushed open the door marked “Squid,” stepping into the echoing white chamber on the other side.
The Shady Cove Forestry Center had been intended as half educational opportunity, half training ground for the rangers of tomorrow. During its heyday, up to fifteen junior rangers would be living there at any given time. That meant the facility came with a good number of showers, enough to keep everyone clean when they were at full occupancy. Dr. Abbey and her people inhabited the building more completely and for longer periods than those long-dead rangers had ever dreamt, and they’d taken the time to make a few modifications to the place.
The wall between the Squid and Mollusk rooms was clearly newer than the walls around it, tiled in an off-green shade that looked like it had been raided from a hotel pool. The door closed behind me as I was studying the tile, sealing itself with an ominous click.
“Hello, Georgia,” said a female voice. It came through a hidden speaker and echoed off the walls until it seemed larger than the world. I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming.
The doctors back at the CDC had almost always used the intercom to talk to me. They didn’t want to risk getting any closer. At first, that was because they weren’t sure whether I was going to amplify and kill them all. Later, it was because they didn’t want to deal with my endless questions and demands. They had taken away anything that could have been used as a weapon, but I still had my hands, my knees, and my teeth. Those things were more than enough, once you had nothing left to lose.
There was a click from the intercom, and the door on the other side of the room opened, revealing a short, curvy woman in a lab coat and a bright yellow T-shirt with a biohazard symbol blazoned across the breast. She looked almost apologetic, which was nearly as jarring as the voice from above. Dr. Shannon Abbey didn’t do apologetic. She was a slave to science, and followed wherever it led, no matter how cruel those roads became.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stunning me further. “I remember you talking about the intercoms back at the CDC, but I didn’t think about the fact that you might not like faceless voices speaking to you. You want to come with me? Please? It’s good to see you again, even though you look like shit.”
“There’s the sympathy I was expecting,” I said. I looked around the tiled room again, and then back to Dr. Abbey. “I haven’t showered yet.”
“I know. The decontamination cycle is nine minutes long, and can’t be canceled once it begins. That gives us time to talk before your—should I even call him your brother? Before Shaun gets involved.”
“Legally, he’s my brother, because we were adopted by the same people,” I said, understanding washing over me. She needed to talk to me alone, and we were both smart enough to know that that wasn’t going to happen if Shaun had anything to say about it. The choices were “trick him” or “drug him,” and while the latter might have been easier, I didn’t want to go there if I had any other choice. I walked toward her, my steps echoing against the tile. “Functionally, he’s my best friend, and my … boyfriend seems so small. He’s my Shaun.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, stepping aside to let me exit the room. The door slid shut behind me, and I heard the water come on. The room was decontaminating itself now that it had presumably been exposed.
Exposed … I stopped, eyes widening. “I haven’t been tested,” I said. “I could be an infection risk right now.”
“You could,” agreed Dr. Abbey. “There’s also the part where you’re turning into a blood fountain with very little warning, which is all kinds of fun. I can’t decide whether that’s a function of high blood pressure, or a weakness in your sinuses. Either way, we’re going to find out. Come on. I promise, I’m a big girl, I can monitor my own infection risks.”
Her logic was sound. My legs still felt like lead as I forced them to start moving again and followed her down the long white hall to a small office. Joe the mastiff was asleep on a huge cushion against one wall, his massive head down on his paws. He was snoring. I couldn’t stop myself from shuddering at the sight of him. Dogs aren’t common these days, since Kellis-Amberlee is the ultimate spillover disease: It moves between mammalian populations with ease, and large predators are its best delivery system.
Dr. Abbey followed my gaze and smiled, an expression that was equal parts fond and sad. “Good old Joe,” she said. The dog didn’t stir. She walked past him to a cabinet, opening it and beginning to take down an assortment of medical supplies—a blood pressure cuff, a package of syringes, all the basic, terrifying tools of the medical profession. “He’s getting on. Big dogs don’t live as long as small dogs. Their hearts give out. I don’t know what I’ll do when he’s gone.”
Having never had a pet, I didn’t have anything useful to say. Instead, I stood where I was, trying not to fidget or shy away as she kept removing things from her seemingly bottomless cabinet of horrors.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Georgia; even if I wanted to, I’ve never been the sort of person who sugarcoats or censors things for the sake of other people’s sensibilities, and I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Dr. Abbey began putting things on her desk, lining them up in a neat little row. “I’ve talked to Greg and Joey about your situation, and they agree that we’re in uncharted territory here. They also say hello, and wanted me to remind you that you’re allowed to contact them once in a while, just to let them know that you’re still breathing.”
“I always knew I was allowed,” I said. “If they were that worried about whether I was dead or alive, they could have checked with Mahir. He still publishes my op-ed columns, when I send them in. I think he’d notice if I was dead.”
But he didn’t know why Shaun and I had both gone silent for the last three days, did he? Neither of us had bothered to notify him, or anyone other than our immediate neighbors. Part of it was habit: We had always been a closed loop, me and Shaun, Shaun and me, and moving to the wilds of Canada had just made that tendency even stronger. If we couldn’t supply something, we went without, rather than asking someone else to help. And part of it was the knowledge, absolute and unshakable, that if I called, Mahir would come. We had been friends even before we were colleagues, and I had never questioned his loyalty. Mahir had a life now. He had a wife, and a daughter, and really good reasons never to set foot in North America again. Calling him would have been unfair.
“Mmm-hmm,” said Dr. Abbey. She didn’t sound convinced. I didn’t feel all that convincing. “Danika is on her way.”
I stiffened. “What?”
Dr. Danika Kimberley was an EIS neuroscientist who’d been undercover with the CDC during the project that had cloned the original Georgia Mason and created me. She probably understood the neural interface that had given me Georgia-prime’s memories better than anyone else who was still alive. She was a good woman, and she had played a pivotal role in getting me out of the Seattle installation before it was blown to hell. And none of that meant that I wanted her anywhere near me, especially not right now, when I couldn’t afford to decline medical care.
“One of two things is happening right now, Georgia. I don’t know whether I can stop either one of them, but one is within my skill set, and the other is so far beyond me that it might as well be rocket science,” said Dr. Abbey. She picked up a piece of tubing and a syringe. “First, we have to consider the possibility that your body is just giving up. Multiple organ failure has been observed in clones before, and none of them were as old or as unsupervised as you’ve been. There may have been early signs that you missed, just because you didn’t register them as potentially important.”
“Right,” I said. That was always a risk, even with medical texts and access to the Internet. I wasn’t a doctor. At the end of the day, I wasn’t going to see the things that doctors saw.
“This may be difficult for you to believe, but that’s actually the good option. Roll your sleeve up, please.”
I rolled up my sleeve. “What’s the bad option?”
“The bad option is that your neural programming is starting to go.” Dr. Abbey tied the tubing around my arm, bringing the veins into stark relief. “You’re a unicorn, Georgia. You’re something no one had ever done before—something that ethically speaking, no one should have done in the first place—and you represent an ethical black hole. Scientifically speaking, you should have lived and died in the room where you woke up, monitored constantly, so science could learn everything about you. How have those implanted memories settled? Are they being undermined or reinforced by the memories you’ve formed since waking? Is the neural matrix flexible enough to deal with changes, or is it too static to adapt when confronted with data that contradicts things the original Georgia Mason believed were true? Is the matrix really stable, or is it just taking a long time to degrade? You’re a walking, talking database of lost chances and unanswered questions, and ethically speaking, that’s exactly what you need to be. You became a person as soon as you opened your eyes and started thinking.”
Cold fear slithered along my spine, reptilian and ancient. “What would it mean if my neural programming went?”
“Honestly, Georgia?” Dr. Abbey uncapped her syringe and slid it into my arm, not even bothering to warn me about the pinch. Both of us watched as my blood flowed red and hot into the chamber. “I have no idea.”