George couldn’t go to sleep without the sound of my breathing, and she couldn’t come to me, wired up as she was to all those tubes and machines. We dozed together, me stretched on the six inches or so of mattress between her body and the edge of the bed, her squarely centered, arms at her side, like a wax dummy in a store window. I tried to pretend I wasn’t scared out of my mind. She tried to pretend the same, and neither of us spoke. What would there have been to say? I couldn’t beg her not to leave me; she was already trying her hardest, and implying anything else would mean implying that I thought she was going to fail.
Besides, the Georgia who didn’t really exist was more than happy to fill the silence. She had talked all night long, giving voice to the thoughts that raced through my aching head, but putting her own brutal twist on them.
“She’s going to die again, you know. That’s what people made of meat and mad science do. They die. That’s going to suck for you. At least you’ll have a date for the funeral, huh?”
“You should give up on her right now. If you walk away, you can pretend she got better. How does that sound? You and me and the big wide world, and you get to tell yourself she’s still here, furious and alive.”
“You always knew it was going to end like this.”
“You’ll always have me.”
I kept my eyes closed and swallowed my whimpers, refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing how she was getting to me. She knew, of course. She was inside my head. But for the moment, I could still curl next to my flesh-and-blood girl, stiff and silent, and tell myself that things were going to be all right.
Morning broke and the lights in the room came on, chasing away the shadows behind my eyelids. I opened them and Dr. Abbey was there, flanked by Dr. Kimberley and Foxy, a solemn expression on her face. George was still asleep, or at least still had her eyes closed. I sat up.
“Is it time?”
Dr. Abbey nodded. “You need to leave the room now, Shaun.”
“What?” I stared at her. “No. You’re not going to operate on her in here, are you?”
“No. We have an operating theater prepared. You can watch if you want—I know better than to try to stop you—but I wish you wouldn’t. It will probably be distressing for you.”
“I’m supposed to try to convince you to come out hunting with me,” said Foxy blithely. “I have grenades and a rocket launcher and I went out last night and found some big holes that probably have bears or foxes in them. We could set them on fire if you wanted. Ever seen a burning zombie bear trying to climb a tree? It’s really funny.”
“I can’t decide whether or not that’s animal cruelty.” George still wasn’t waking up. I frowned at her. “Hey, George? You okay?”
“She’s out,” said Dr. Abbey. “The sedatives in her IV put her under hours ago. We’re going to be sedating her further for the surgery, but this was the best way to make sure she was fully relaxed before we went in. With the amount of work we’re going to be doing, this was the best thing for her, medically.”
Slowly, I turned to look at Dr. Abbey again. “She didn’t tell me you were going to be doing that.”
“She didn’t know.” The admission was calmly made, as if there was nothing wrong with drugging someone who didn’t expect it. Dr. Abbey looked me in the eye as she continued, “She might have refused because she wanted to be awake to support you, and that wouldn’t have been good for her overall health. You’re my … long-term science experiment who walks like a friend. She’s my patient. I have to put her first.”
All those words made sense. None of them should have been put in that order. I slid off the bed, glaring daggers at Dr. Abbey and Dr. Kimberley. “This isn’t right.”
“This is the only thing that’s right,” said Dr. Kimberley. “Please, go with Foxy, and let us save your sister.”
“No,” I said. But I didn’t stop them when they unhooked the IVs from their stands and unclamped the headboard from the wall, and rolled George—still sleeping peacefully—out of the room. I followed, with Foxy dogging my heels like an eager, murderous puppy. I wanted to tell her to back off and leave me alone. I didn’t. Not only was I a little bit afraid of what she’d do if openly rejected, but there was something comforting about her presence. As long as she was there, I couldn’t be left alone with the voices in my head.
And maybe she knew a little about hearing voices. I glanced at her. “Hey, uh, Foxy? Can we talk later?”
“Sure,” she said. There was no smile, for once; only sympathy. I wondered how much of her “space lobster juice” she’d had today. It didn’t seem to be nearly as much as usual. “You want to ask about getting hopped up on drugs, huh?”
“What?”
She shrugged expansively, the motion seeming to originate somewhere around her sternum and then spread out through her entire body, rather than being localized like a normal shrug. “You’re crazy. You know that, right? I mean, Shannon says it’s not a good word to use, because sometimes people who aren’t crazy point it at people who are and use it like a weapon, but I figure we’re both crazy, so that makes it okay.”
I was painfully aware of how close Dr. Abbey and Dr. Kimberley were. They were focused on getting George’s bed down the hall without bumping the equipment that was keeping her alive into anything, but they could still hear every word that we said. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe they needed to know that I had been thinking about these things.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’m crazy.”
“Good,” said Foxy, visibly relieved by my admission. “So see, here’s the thing: I’m the kind of crazy that can’t handle what it’s done, and gets dangerous, so they give me drugs to make me a different kind of crazy. I’m not like this naturally. Tom makes the juice, and I drink the juice, and Elaine stays way down, below the surface, in the place where reason and rhyme and writing desks can be sort of forgotten about until we need them. She’s always here. I’m always here. But she doesn’t get to be in charge, and so I get to keep breathing. Your kind of crazy is … it’s sadder, I think. You don’t need the space lobster juice. You need something else.”
“He needs antidepressants and a mild antipsychotic,” said Dr. Abbey, glancing back over her shoulder. “I don’t know that you’re schizophrenic, Shaun, but I know that you shouldn’t be hearing voices the way you do.”
“She won’t hurt you,” said Foxy. “She just wants to help. She’s helped me, and she didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did,” said Dr. Abbey. She sounded suddenly tired. I looked up, and saw that she and Dr. Kimberley had stopped, George between them, in front of a closed door. “Shaun, if you really want to watch this, go with Foxy; she can show you to the theater. But I wish you wouldn’t.”
“You know I have to,” I said quietly. I turned to Foxy. “Show me?”
“Okay,” she said, and pirouetted on her heel, light and graceful as she turned and led me back down the hall to another door. This one was smaller, recessed into the wall. There had been a sign affixed there once; the scars from the screws still stood out against the wood. She opened it, and I followed her mutely through, up a flight of stairs to a small room, once a projectionist’s booth. It held seven chairs, pressed too closely together for comfort. Only one was open, at the very center of the row. The others were filled with faces I knew—Maggie, Alaric, Mahir—and faces I didn’t know as well—Jill, Tom, and another of Dr. Abbey’s assistants. The people who knew me and George as people, not just accidents of science, looked at me with quiet sympathy in their eyes. The people who worked for Dr. Abbey didn’t look at me at all. Their attention was reserved for the glass wall in front of us, and the round, sterile room below.
Dr. Abbey’s people had been rebuilding the forestry center to suit their needs for years. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that their rebuilding had included a full operating theater, complete with observation room. The fact was so logical that it seemed almost silly to question it. I walked silently to the open chair and sat, folding my hands white-knuckled on my knees. Maggie put her right hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn. I knew that if I looked at her, she would be overflowing with sympathy, so concerned for my well-being that she couldn’t contain it. And I would break. That would be one step too far into the darkness, and there would be no coming back.
Below me, a woman who looked exactly like my sister lay naked on an operating table, a ventilator covering her nose and mouth. I would have thought that she was George, if not for her hair, which had been shaved completely off—that, and her lack of scars. George didn’t take the kind of risks I did, because she couldn’t afford to. There was still no such thing as a risk-free life. She nicked her hands, skinned her knees, went through all the small injuries that the body was heir to, especially when that body lived in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. This girl, this … body, was pristine. She had never opened her eyes, never seen the sun, never had the memories of a dead woman used to jump-start her cloned mind into sudden self-awareness. She was an empty shell.
A shell that contained something we needed. Dr. Shoji moved around the motionless clone, checking machines, checking his tools. He barely looked up when the door opened and Dr. Abbey backed into the room, pulling George’s bed. George followed, eyes closed, surrounded by the silent sentinels of her IVs. Dr. Kimberley came last.
There was a pause while all three of the doctors left the room to scrub up and get ready for what was to come. When they returned, they were gowned in green, faces and hands covered, sterile. Dr. Kimberley sprayed some sort of aerosol, decontaminating the room.
“This process used to be a lot more complicated,” said one of the assistants—Jill. She sounded like she was trying to be helpful. Just the sound of her voice made me want to punch her lights out. “Sterilizing a room was difficult and time-consuming, and the risk of infection was much higher than it is now. The spray binds to particles in the air, and—”
“Not right now, okay?” interrupted Alaric. “That’s our friend down there. We don’t want to talk about this now.”
“Oh,” said Jill. “Sorry.” She fell silent. The rest of us remained that way.
In the theater below, Dr. Shoji picked up a scalpel.