Foxy trotted off when we reached the forestry center door, heading for the decontamination rooms. She needed to strip off her gear and scrub herself clean as soon as possible, to avoid potential infection. I needed to decontaminate—I was a danger to others until I did—but I wasn’t in any hurry. There was no way for me to catch Kellis-Amberlee, and Dr. Abbey had taken to requesting blood samples every time I showered, just in case she could catch my cells in the process of doing something interesting. She never explained what “something interesting” meant, and to be honest, I was afraid to ask. If anyone was going to mutate me into some sort of giant green monster, it was probably going to be her.
I sauntered down the hall, waving to a few of Dr. Abbey’s research assistants as they passed on the catwalks overhead. Most waved back. Some I knew by name; others were just a part of the ever-shifting landscape of the place. They were all individuals. Jill had a prosthetic leg and rolled her eyes a lot. Tom walked in a constant mild funk of pot smoke, and was always happy to share a joint in the hydroponics section—an offer I had taken him up on several times, when the pressure of worrying about George got to be too much. In the end, though, they were all the same. They were the people who were going to help Dr. Abbey find a way to save Georgia. Nothing else mattered.
The first decontamination room I came to was unlocked. I slipped inside and disrobed, shoving my soiled clothes into the hamper before I stepped into range of the showerheads. “Shaun Mason, visitor,” I said clearly. “Preferred temperature: hot. Preferred scent: eucalyptus. Duration, max six minutes.”
“Preferences have been noted and logged, Shaun Mason,” said the bland, pleasant voice of the shower. “Did you have a productive excursion?” The water came on, blasting me from all sides.
“Caught two more zombie deer, and I think there’s a bear somewhere nearby,” I said. “I will forgive the oatmeal in this place if there’s a bear. I haven’t shot a zombie bear in ages.”
“Wow, that’s interesting,” said the shower. “Dr. Abbey wishes me to remind you that you will need to submit to both a blood test and a small donation before you will be allowed to exit the chamber.” I wasn’t really having a conversation with the shower, of course: A.I. technology isn’t that advanced. The decontamination system had a variety of preprogrammed responses and cues, which it cycled through according to the input it received. It flagged keywords at the same time; when Dr. Abbey got the report on the decon, she would also receive a memo listing my kills and the fact that I suspected a bear of living somewhere nearby.
I used to hate it when computers talked to me. After a few years in the middle of nowhere, I’ve gotten more resigned to the fact that it’s never going to stop, and I’ve become more willing to talk back. At least that way I’m carrying on a conversation with something that’s not in my head.
“Oh, come on,” said George’s voice. “The things in your head aren’t so bad.”
I knew I shouldn’t turn around, that turning around would do nothing good for my state of mind. I turned anyway, and there she was, naked, leaning up against the shower’s far wall and smiling a slow, sly smile. I had to give my hallucinations this much: They were high quality. Water beaded on her skin, and when she uncrossed her arms, I saw the flash of her ID tattoo on the inside of her wrist. The original George had had that tattoo. The current one didn’t. The CDC had never prepped her for release—had never prepped her for me—and since she hadn’t bothered to renew her license after we fled the country, neither of us had ever seen the point of seeking out an underground tattoo parlor. Tattoos were dangerous enough under rigidly controlled and sterile conditions. Vanity wasn’t enough reason to get one.
“Go away,” I said. “I don’t need you here.”
“But you do, Shaun, you do,” she said. “When’s the last time you saw your little clone up and walking around under her own power, huh? She’s running down. You need to come back to me while I’m still willing to have you.”
“See, that’s the awful part,” I said, giving her one last look before I turned my back, closing my eyes and tilting my face up into the spray. “I know you’ll always be willing to have me. I’m the only thing you have. But I have a life that doesn’t have to include you if I don’t want it to. Go away.”
“You’ll always want me,” she whispered, her fingers brushing the back of my neck one last time. I knew that if I turned around to look, she would be gone—for now. Because the worst part of it was, she was right. I would always want her. She was safe. She couldn’t leave me. Not like the original had; not like the replacement might. The fake could never go anywhere.
I went still, letting the water run over me. Was that really how I thought of her? The “replacement”? Sure, she wasn’t the first George, but she wasn’t a replacement. She was George. In every way that mattered, she was George. There wasn’t a word for the part she played in my life. She was my sister, in that I didn’t have any other model for what a sister was: someone who loved me, had always loved me, would always love me, no matter what. I could chase a million rabbits down the burrows in my head, and she would still be waiting for me when I popped back out. She believed in me, even when I was too lost to believe in myself. She understood me better than I understood myself.
She was my sister because the Masons had wanted us to be family, and she was my family because there was no one else in the world who loved, wanted, and accepted me the way that she did. She wasn’t a replacement. She was George.
The shower said pleasantly, “Please close your mouth and eyes,” and the water became bleach, cold and caustic and sleeting down over me like a punishment. I stayed where I was, enduring it as my due. I deserved a little suffering for even thinking the word “replacement,” even if it went unspoken. She was sick. She needed me. I couldn’t let myself weaken.
But maybe it was time, after all this was over and we were getting ready to head home, for me to talk to Dr. Abbey about steps we could take to quiet the voices in my head. I had tried drugs once before, and it hadn’t worked out so well—it had made me actively suicidal, which was no good—but that had been before George returned from the grave. As long as I had one of her, I could be basically okay. I just couldn’t be alone, that was all. Not that big a deal. Not that unusual a thing. And if we were going home, if we were lucky enough to be going home…
I knew I was the only man in her life. It was time to make sure that she was the only woman in mine.
The bleach cycle was followed by one more rinse, and a fine citrus mist intended to keep the bleach from doing too much damage to my skin. Dr. Abbey didn’t hold with blood tests every five feet or constant monitoring of where people went once they were inside, but she kept her sterilization systems fully operational. That was essential. Bleach dried people out, and dry skin could split and crack, creating an infection risk that went way beyond Kellis-Amberlee. Without lotion and citrus sprays to rehydrate people, staph infections would have run rampant, and things would have become a lot less pleasant.
Foxy was waiting in the hall outside. Like me, she was clean and dressed in fresh clothes, with the scent of strawberries and lime hanging in the air around her. She was barefoot, and kept rocking from her heels to her toes, an anxious expression on her face. I had never seen Foxy look nervous before—not like that.
My heart sank, and somewhere on the edge of hearing, phantom laughter echoed. I swallowed, trying to moisten my suddenly dry tongue. “Hi, Foxy,” I said. My voice sounded high and strained, the voice of a man who was barely keeping it together. “What’s going on?”
“Shannon said I was supposed to come and get you, and that I should be really normal and casual about it, because she doesn’t want you to freak out,” said Foxy meekly.
“I’m not going to freak out,” I said, without pausing to think about whether or not I was lying to her. “Did she tell you why?”
Foxy shook her head.
“Did she tell you where you were supposed to take me?”
Foxy nodded.
“All right. Did she tell you whether Georgia was alive?” That was the real question: That was the only question that mattered. Because the first time George had died, I’d been in the position to avenge her. There had been people I could hit, people I could blame, and when that was over, there had been people I needed to survive for. This time…
There was no one I could hit. If Georgia was dead, Dr. Abbey hadn’t killed her; Dr. Abbey had simply failed to save her, and I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t understand the difference. Dr. Abbey deserved my thanks, not my vengeance. And there was no one else. All our enemies were either dead or so nebulous that I couldn’t fight them. George was the one who saw ignorance and public misunderstanding as things to battle and destroy. I needed jaws to break and noses to punch. I couldn’t do this alone. If she was dead, then I was done. I was going to turn around and walk back out the door, into the green, violent world of the woods. Kellis-Amberlee couldn’t kill me. Its creations still could.
The dead had always given me a reason to live. It was only fitting that my life should end with them.
Relief washed over Foxy’s face. “Gosh, no,” she said. “You mean your sister, right? The one who keeps having oopsies?” She fluttered her fingers near her lip, like she was miming a bloody nose. “Gosh, no, she’s not dead. I mean, she’s not fine, that would be a little untrue, since she’s really sick and all, but she’s not dead.”
I moved without thinking, sweeping Foxy into an embrace that lifted her off her feet and pinned her arms to her sides. “Oh, thank God!”
She was stiff as a board against me. I realized abruptly that I had picked up another human being without asking. I looked at her face. Her eyes were wide and glittering bright, filled with a calm, still breed of terror that I normally saw only in the very young.
“Please put me down,” she said. Her voice was level and steady. She sounded like every teacher I’d had in elementary school, prepared to tell me, at length, why roughhousing was never acceptable. “If you don’t, I’m going to cut off your balls and your thumbs and anything else that looks like it sticks out more than it strictly needs to, and I’m not going to be sorry.”
“But I’m sorry.” I lowered her back to her feet and let go. She promptly scurried backward, stopping when her shoulders hit the wall. She stayed there, watching me warily. I sighed. “Foxy, I’m really sorry. I was just so relieved that I didn’t … I shouldn’t have touched you without your permission. It won’t happen again.”
“Shannon told me about what Georgia is to you, and what you are to Georgia.” She was still using that calm, measured teacher-voice. I’d never heard her sound so lucid. Somehow, that made her seem even more frightening. “I know you’re worried about her, and I know you were probably scared that something had happened. But you don’t get to touch me. No one gets to touch me. I’m the Monkey’s girl.”
“Foxy … the Monkey’s dead. We saw him die.”
“I know. Sucks, don’t it?” The corner of her mouth twitched, like she was trying to smile. “When I’m really lucid, I know I’m no one’s property, especially not a dead man’s, and especially not a dead man who used drugs to rewire my brain so that I’d have to love him. But it doesn’t change things. He made me. He owns me. Just because I’m here and he’s not, that doesn’t make things any different. No one gets to touch me but the Monkey, and the Monkey’s never going to touch me again. Now, come on. Dr. Abbey is waiting.”
She turned and padded off down the hall. Still shaky from adrenaline, and sorry to have grabbed her the way I had, I followed.
The door to George’s treatment room was open. I stepped into the doorway and stopped, eyebrows raising at the scene in front of me. Dr. Abbey leaned against the wall, her hand resting on Joe’s head, the massive black dog leaning against her leg. A tall blonde woman sat next to the bed, talking earnestly with George—at least, she was until I entered. She stopped then, and they both turned to face me. George managed to find a smile, although it was strained, colored with pain and weariness. Dr. Kimberley didn’t bother. She just looked at me, expression neutral. She had a poker face that could have ended dynasties, and in a way, it had—it was her infiltration of the CDC that had allowed George to get out before they killed her, and without George, the EIS would never have been able to succeed in their coup.
“Shaun,” she said, after a few seconds had passed in silence. “You’re looking surprisingly well for someone who went to live in a place without reliable electricity. Have you lost weight?”
“A few pounds,” I said. “You’re looking good for a scary neuroscientist who may be working for the enemy. Dr. Abbey…?”
“Danika is here as my guest, and you’d do well to remember that I have rules against murdering my guests,” said Dr. Abbey. “They’re even written down these days.”
“That’s because of me,” said Foxy. I glanced to the side. She was slouched against the hallway wall, picking her fingernails with the point of a scalpel. I couldn’t decide whether that was intended to be a warning or a harmless fidget. There wasn’t any reason it couldn’t be both.
I looked back to Dr. Abbey. “Why didn’t you tell me she was coming?”
“Because I asked her not to,” said George. I turned to her. She looked so tired, and so small, like that bed was in the process of swallowing her alive. “Dr. Kimberley is the only person we have who really understands my neural programming. We needed to be sure it wasn’t coming undone. And if you’d known she was coming, you would have pitched a fit, and we would have wasted time trying to make you understand why this was necessary. Silence was the fastest way.”
“You’re getting way too good at lying to me,” I said. There was no heat in my words. I couldn’t be mad at her for long.
George smiled again. “Only through omission, and only when I absolutely have to. She’s here because I needed her. Can’t you play nice for that?”
“I can try,” I said.
“You’ll be glad to know that her neural programming is holding,” said Dr. Kimberley. “That was one of the primary reasons I needed to be involved.”
My George existed because the people who had cloned the original’s body had also been able to clone her brain. I wasn’t sure what would happen if the neural programming failed, but I was willing to bet that I wouldn’t like it. “What was the other reason?”
Dr. Kimberley stood. “Why don’t you sit down?” she said.