I was lying on the bed in what had become my usual room when Dr. Abbey looked up from her computer, said, “I’ll be right back,” and rose, stalking out the door. I barely had time to lift my head and blink before she was gone, leaving me alone with Joe. The big black dog was asleep again, stretched out so that he occupied most of the floor to one side of my bed. Dr. Abbey was an expert at stepping over and around him, seeming to waltz through the spaces where the dog was not, all for the sake of not needing to disturb her faithful companion. It was sweet. It was surreal—I had never lived with a dog, and her devotion to the animal was strange to me, like it belonged to somebody else, somebody who wasn’t a no-nonsense mad scientist dedicated to understanding the structure of Kellis-Amberlee. But it was nice not to be alone.
“I wonder where she’s going in such a hurry,” I said. Joe didn’t respond.
We’d been in Shady Cove for a week. I spent my days moving between the bed in the treatment room and the bed in the room I shared with Shaun. Not for fun reasons, either. On one end, I gave blood and allowed Dr. Abbey to subject me to every test she could think of, looking for the place where my body was betraying me. On the other end, I crawled under the blankets and slept, so exhausted by the effort of lying on a mattress and answering questions that I couldn’t see straight. I was alive. I couldn’t call what I was doing living.
Shaun wasn’t handling the situation well, although he was doing his best to keep me from seeing how distressed and frightened he was. Every morning, he walked with me to meet Dr. Abbey, and kissed me on the cheek before he left us alone together. From there, he walked to the lobby, met up with Foxy, and left the building, heading out into the woods to collect samples for Dr. Abbey’s studies. He’d brought back six infected humans, three infected deer, and two dead wolves in just the last few days. It seemed to help him, and it wasn’t like he needed to worry about infection. Idleness was a much bigger threat for him. It left him too much time to think about what was happening—and as we both knew, Shaun’s mind was his own greatest enemy. I was aware that my phantom twin was waiting in the wings, ready to replace me the second I stepped aside. She would probably have done it before then, if she’d thought Shaun would let her get away with it.
I knew she couldn’t think anything: that she was just a function of the damage my death had done to the man who loved me more than anything else in the world, and the damage he’d done to himself as he struggled to adjust to a world that didn’t contain me anymore. She was a figment, a phantom, incapable of thinking anything that Shaun didn’t think first. Her desire to replace me was a reflection of his deep-set fear of being left alone again. As long as he held on to her, he would never have to worry about me leaving him. I couldn’t be angry at him—not for that. I understood his terror all too well. So I had to settle for being mad at someone who didn’t exist for reinforcing those fears, and making him think that I was going to leave him.
Even though she might be right. It was getting harder and harder to get out of bed, and my nosebleeds were becoming more frequent. Dr. Abbey was patching the leaks as quickly as she could find them, but without knowing the underlying problem, I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do enough. I was going.
I just didn’t know where.
I was staring at the ceiling, considering the virtues of getting up and finding something to drink—Dr. Abbey kept orange juice in the little fridge next to my blood samples—when someone knocked on the doorframe. I lifted my head to see a tall, Nordic-looking woman with ice-blonde hair standing there, wearing weathered blue jeans, a green cable-knit sweater, and sensible sneakers. I blinked once, my mind briefly overlaying her image with a silk blouse, red pencil skirt, and stiletto heels that would sound like gunshots whenever she took a step.
But Dr. Shaw had been an illusion, cold and bright and mirror-brittle, only intended to get the woman behind it to the finish line before the mask was dropped. Dr. Danika Kimberley was real, a warm, living, smiling human woman who walked to my side and brushed my hair away from my forehead the way I’d always imagined a mother would. “Hello there, you silly little thing,” she said, voice thick with unshed tears. Her accent was Welsh: She was a long way from home. “Had to go and break yourself, didn’t you just? I suppose it was a decent excuse to see me again, although really, you could have just called, and saved us both the trouble.”
“I thought you’d have more fun this way,” I said, and forced myself to smile.
Dr. Kimberley hadn’t been a part of the team that grew me, but she’d been associated with them, close enough to the heart of the project that she’d been able to steal some of my time for her own use. She had claimed sleep studies and analysis of my brain waves, anything to keep her interventions believable while she worked to get me the hell out of there. I would be forever grateful to her for that, even as her position within the EIS guaranteed that I would never really be able to trust her.
“Well, you’ll be glad to know that Shannon sent me copies of your scans to review while I was on the way over here, and there’s nothing wrong with your neural integration. I’ll want to run a few more tests, of course, for the sake of being thorough, but it looks as if your memories are locked in there as tight as ever.” She leaned over and tapped one finger against my forehead, like she was checking a melon to see how ripe it was. “Your network is not unsnarling. Your troubles are purely physical, nothing to do with those early, implanted thoughts.”
I relaxed slightly, letting out a breath I’d only been half-aware of holding. I was Georgia Mason because of the memories implanted in me during the final decanting process at the CDC: They had grown a body from the original Georgia’s genetic material, but even as identical twins would grow up to be different people, I would have become someone very different if I hadn’t been programmed with all the original’s thought patterns and recovered memories. Maybe it was a crime that the woman I should have become had never been allowed to develop, but I didn’t see it that way. I was me because of those memories. I didn’t want to lose myself. I needed to be here.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Am I just too awesome for this world?”
“Something like that, yes.” Dr. Kimberley pulled a chair over to my bedside and sat down. There was a flicker of motion from the doorway. I glanced past her. Dr. Abbey was standing there, her face drawn in an expression of silent regret. My heart seized in my chest, cramping up until I couldn’t breathe. Dr. Abbey never made that face. Dr. Abbey raged and scowled and demanded that the world adhere to her standards. She didn’t stand there refusing to meet my eyes while her own eyes grew over-wet with tears.
Dr. Kimberley took my hand in both of hers. I transferred my terrified gaze to her.
“I need you to remain calm,” she said. “Can you do that for me, or would you like a sedative first? I have some that won’t put an undue amount of pressure on your system.”
I wanted to ask why she would come prepared with sedatives, but I was direly afraid that I already knew the answer; more, I didn’t want to hear the careful, clinical words she would use in answering me, each chosen to convey the maximum amount of information, with the minimum possible amount of distress. Her bedside manner could be cold at times. No one was ever going to say that it was anything less than professional.
“I don’t need a sedative,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “We need to run more tests. We need to be sure. But I believe we’ve found a cause.”
“Tell me,” I said.
She did.