Dr. Abbey and Dr. Kimberley had left us alone to get reacquainted—at least, that was what Dr. Kimberley said. Dr. Abbey had just snorted, said, “Well, we have a lot of shallow graves on the property,” and sauntered out, following her taller, blonder friend toward someplace where a bunch of reporters weren’t. Foxy had accompanied Maggie and Alaric into the room, and stayed to watch the fun. I wanted to ask her to leave. I wasn’t sure how to do it without getting myself shot. I didn’t say anything.
Alaric looked about the same, like he had looked at the past few years, shrugged, and decided he was going to let someone else play-test them and then get back to him after the beta. Maggie had aged more visibly. There were gray hairs mixed in with her customary blend of natural brown and bleached-blonde curls. Even without that, the dome of her belly would have made it impossible to deny at least six months of the intervening time. Despite her obvious pregnancy, she had still been delighted to see Joe the dog, giving the massive carnivore chin-scritches and belly rubs before he had lumbered to his feet and gone looking for Dr. Abbey. Now Maggie was sitting in the chair next to George’s bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes wide and serious and solemn as she waited for an explanation.
That was what they all wanted: an explanation. How could we have run off and left them; how could we have let our own need for a happy ending supersede the debts we owed to our friends and to the people who loved us. And I … I didn’t have an answer. I had never really thought about it before. There had always been something else that needed doing, whether it was repairing the plumbing or dealing with a wasp’s nest in the eaves, and life had been simple, in part because life had been too full to become complex.
“We just don’t understand why you never came back,” said Maggie, with the air of someone who was asking a perfectly reasonable question and hence had every expectation of a perfectly reasonable answer. Her tone was light, with none of the shadows or recriminations I heard whenever Alaric or Mahir spoke. But then, Alaric and Mahir had always belonged to George: She had recruited them, trained them, and guaranteed their loyalty in a hundred little ways, all while I was busy with my own team. Maggie had been Buffy’s, a Fictional to the core, and owed no firm allegiance to either of us. I found myself wishing, more than anything, that at least one member of my core team had survived. Dave had died getting the rest of us out of Oakland, and Becks had died getting us out of the White House. That was what Irwins did. We died.
It was my fault that I couldn’t master that small, essential part of my own damn job.
“We never said we were going to come back,” said George. “As I recall, we said exactly the opposite. We said we were going to vanish into the wilds of Canada, and that we were going to miss you all, but that you were never going to see us again. We told you. It’s not our fault if you didn’t believe us.”
“I suppose that we felt we deserved better than a few tense IRC sessions and double-blind texts, after everything we’d been through,” said Mahir. “I’ve tried not to be mad at you, Georgia. It’s … difficult. You were my best friend.”
“Shaun was mine,” she said. Her words were clear, but not cruel: She wasn’t trying to be hurtful. She was just doing what she had always done best of all, and telling the truth as she understood it. “I love you all. You were the most amazing team we could ever have assembled. But if we’d stayed, we would have been painting giant targets on all of you, to go with the targets we would have been painting on ourselves. Even with Ryman protecting us, we’d pissed off too many people, and we’d all be dead or in jail by now. I’d probably be in a lab somewhere, being taken apart one piece at a time…” She stopped, grimacing at the ironic nature of her words, given her current situation. “We had to go. You know that.”
“You could have called,” said Alaric.
“Or answered a few of the notes people had me pass to you,” said Mahir.
“Or come to the wedding,” said Maggie.
“And don’t try to say that communication wasn’t safe—you’ve been sending articles this whole time,” said Alaric hotly. He always did have a surprising temper under those glasses and that calm expression. Most Newsies did. They were calm until they weren’t, and then, look out. “If it was safe for you to write about the farming communities of the Canadian wastes, it was safe for you to send an e-mail saying ‘congrats on your marriage, sorry we couldn’t be there.’ It was safe for you to send an e-card for Alisa when she passed her firearms safety exam. You had options. You had choices.”
“We did,” agreed George. “We chose to stay away. We chose to let the story end. Because that’s what everything becomes when we’re together, when we’re making the news instead of just reporting it. I’m a clone who thinks she’s a dead woman and helped to uncover a generation-spanning CDC plot. Shaun has PTSD, talks to the dead woman whose memories I have, and is the first person confirmed immune to Kellis-Amberlee amplification. You don’t think people have been monitoring you all for signs that we were in direct communication, not just using dead drops for our articles? Looking for ways that we could be tracked? We walked out because we were done. We still are.”
“Maybe if Buffy were still here.” Everyone turned to look at me. I realized I had spoken, and shrugged, deciding to roll with it. “She could have watched the watchers, and made sure our secure lines stayed that way, and no one would have been in danger. But she’s gone. She was the first to go. Y’know? Maybe if she hadn’t died, we would have stayed immortal, like we were supposed to be. Reporters are supposed to live forever, or die off camera, where no one has to admit that we signed off for good. Buffy died. Becks and Dave died.”
“I died,” said George quietly. Alaric and Maggie both winced. Mahir just looked sad. “I know I’m not her—I know I was born in a lab—but I remember the shotgun against the back of my neck. As far as I’m concerned, it happened to me. I died. If I want to walk away, I should be allowed to walk away. I’ve earned it.”
“We’ve earned it,” I said. “Nobody gets to say that we didn’t.”
“We’re not saying that,” said Maggie fiercely. She rubbed her belly with one hand, looking down at it reflectively for a moment before she said, “It just feels like it should have been more … final. It should have been something we could remark on later, like ‘oh, that ticker tape parade was a big clue that things were changing.’ You just left, that’s all. You slipped away. We thought we’d have more time.”
Belatedly, I realized that Maggie was the only one in this room who hadn’t been given the opportunity to say a real good-bye. She’d been recovering at the Agora while the rest of us went to Washington D.C., and by the time she’d been well enough to be released from the hospital, George and I had already been gone. We hadn’t been willing to risk going all the way back across the country just to tell her how grateful we were for all her help. Alaric had promised to tell her. But it really wasn’t the same thing, was it?
Maggie looked up and met my eyes, her mouth twisted into a bitter downward curve that told me her thoughts had mirrored my own. “It shouldn’t take a medical emergency for you two to come home, you know. You should just … you should just come.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d promise to do better, but right now, I don’t think I can make any promises that I’ll actually keep.”
“I can understand that,” said Mahir. He pushed himself away from the wall. “Let’s go impose upon Dr. Abbey’s unwilling hospitality a bit more, shall we? The kitchen’s still there, so far as I know, and I could murder a pot of coffee.”
“I miss coffee,” said George, closing her eyes.
“No caffeine?” Alaric sounded horrified and fascinated in equal measure, like the idea of an uncaffeinated Georgia was the most terrifying thing he could think of.
“No, Alaric, no caffeine.” She opened one eye, shooting him an amused look. “As it turns out, when your kidneys stop working, the doctor cuts back on your unnecessary habits. Like Coke. I can’t afford the filtration.”
“God, get well soon,” he said, and she burst out laughing. There was a pause, and then everyone else joined in—me included. She still had a sense of humor. Our friends were here, and they were still talking to us; they were willing to let us lean on them now, the way that, in a fairer world, we would have been leaning on them this whole time.
Maybe things were going to be okay.