Shaun’s laughter was as welcome as it was unexpected. “Oh, wow. ‘Hey, Dr. Abbey, you’re a dedicated violator of the rules of God and man and everything, but how’d you like to come join us in the middle of the country for a threesome?’ Yeah, she’d probably hang up on us.”
“Or worse, she’d say ‘sure,’ and show up,” I said. “She was married once, remember? She still has needs. We could host a mad science sex party.”
“Hey, George, remember when I said I didn’t know what I wanted for my birthday?”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to never say those words in that order ever again.”
I laughed as he carried me down the hall to the bedroom, my head resting against his shoulder. Maybe things were going to be okay.
Three
George was not okay.
She thought she was fooling me, but even the three percent variance between her and the original Georgia couldn’t make her that good of a liar. Her hands had been trembling as she was getting dressed. Not much. It was a little tremor, and I might have missed it if I hadn’t been so focused on making sure she didn’t fall down again. I wondered whether I might have missed it the night before, or the day before that. She’d been feeling dizzy for a few days, and I had been too distracted with my traps and my furs to notice. The thought made me sick. What if I lost her again because I didn’t pay close enough attention?
A ghostly hand touched the back of my neck. I shrugged it off. This wasn’t the time to let myself get distracted, especially not by something that wasn’t even real.
“Okay, ready,” said George, grabbing her laptop off the bedside table as she turned toward me. The sunlight was coming through the window behind her, catching all the bleached bits of her hair and turning them almost white. It was time to dye her hair again. Bartering for the stuff was pretty easy, but she didn’t like to do it too often; said that her vanity shouldn’t be taking food out of our bellies. What she didn’t seem to understand was that her vanity was also my peace of mind. It was easier to remember that she was the real Georgia, and not the little voice inside my head, when her hair was the right color.
“You sure you don’t want me to carry that?” I asked.
George hugged her laptop against her chest in an almost defensive gesture. “I’m sure,” she said. “The day I can’t even hold my own computer is probably the day they bury me.”
I felt myself go blank. “Don’t even say that.”
Her face fell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I know. Just don’t … don’t even say that.” I turned my back on her and left the room. I wanted to keep walking, to go and wait for her in the kitchen and let my sudden, panicky anger drain away, but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I waited for her to come out of the room and trailed her down the hall. She didn’t say anything, and so neither did I.
Silence was a common companion in our household. We’d been waiting to be alone together for most of our lives, and part of what made it so appealing was the silence. With George, I knew I didn’t have to be funny, or manic, or smiling all the time. With me, she knew she didn’t have to pretend to be objective. She could have thoughts and opinions that didn’t fit her public image; she could wear flannel pajamas and watch kitten videos online, and not worry that someone was going to judge her less of a serious journalist because she’d done it. This silence was different. This silence was filled with things we weren’t saying, concerns we didn’t want to give voice to.
What if she’s dying? whispered her voice in the space behind my ears, and I didn’t say anything. George didn’t like it when I acknowledged her phantom twin. It made her feel like an intruder, and I guess that was fair, on some level. I’d had three versions of her in my life: the original, the hallucinatory companion who showed up after she died, and now the clone. She’d only ever had me.
George sat down at the kitchen table and turned on her screen, fingers flying across the keys as she requested a connection to Dr. Abbey. I relaxed a little. Her hands weren’t shaking. She was typing as fast and as sure as she ever had, her own shoulders unlocking as she eased into the rhythm of the work.
There was only one thing she needed to complete the picture of Georgia At Work, the tableau I’d been watching since we were kids. I walked to the fridge, pulled out a can of Coke, and popped the tab before setting it down next to her left hand. She glanced away from her screen long enough to flash me a quick smile, business tempered by affection. I smiled back, and just like that, things were okay between us again. Our fights usually ended like that. It wasn’t a matter of arguing: It was a matter of letting the silence grow until it could encompass us both again.
The laptop beeped. George turned her attention back to the screen as a chat window popped up, framing a round, freckled face topped up by a mass of brown curls streaked with bleach spots. Dr. Abbey was frowning. That was pretty much normal, for her. If she’d ever known how to smile, she had traded that knowledge in a long time ago, for things man was never meant to know and a sweet assortment of deadly pathogens.
“Georgia?” she said, eyebrows raising as she took in George’s image in the webcam. “You look like hell.”
“Nice to see you, too,” said George.
Dr. Abbey shrugged. “It’s been three years since you bothered to call. We got the postcards, so I knew you weren’t dead, but if you think I’m going to be all sunshine and rainbows just because you left me alone for a while, you’ve never met me. What happened?”
“I had a nosebleed,” said George.
“I know. Your nostrils are red and irritated, which says they’ve been wiped a lot recently, and you wouldn’t be calling me for a cold, or I would have heard from you a long time ago. How bad was it?”
“Bad enough that I found her blacked out on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood,” I said, looming up behind George’s chair. I’d told myself that I was going to let her have this conversation without my interference, but I couldn’t do it. She was being too cagey. Yeah, it was her health, but she was my life.
“Huh,” said Dr. Abbey. “Any other symptoms?”
George nodded. “Dizziness, some muscle weakness, a, um, burning sensation when I try to pee…”
“Wait, what?” I said. That was a new symptom to me.
Dr. Abbey and George both ignored me. “Well, we know it’s not an STI, unless you and Shaun have gotten really bored wherever it is you’re holed up; you both had a clean bill of health the last time I saw you,” said Dr. Abbey. “That could mean kidney involvement. Have you had any unusual bleeding? Apart from the nasal variety, I mean.”
“I didn’t have my period last month.” That had been a scare. We always kept a supply of pregnancy tests on hand. Condoms could break, pills could fail to work. There was always the risk of someone deciding to relabel expired medication for the sake of making a quick buck. Any time George was even five minutes late, she was popping open a little white box and checking to make sure we hadn’t fucked up. It wasn’t that we were morally opposed to the idea of kids, someday. We knew we weren’t actually genetically related, and our upbringing had been screwed up enough that we weren’t likely to pass along any weird brother-sister socialization, even if we had more than one. We just weren’t sure what bearing a child would do to a cloned body. It had never been done … or at least, it had never been done openly, legally, or outside a CDC lab, and the sort of people who would think getting a clone pregnant to see what happened was a good idea were exactly the sort of people we didn’t want to talk to.
“Okay.” Dr. Abbey’s usual expression of mild annoyance smoothed out, replaced by a neutrality as unfamiliar as it was terrifying. “I don’t want to know where you are, and I know you wouldn’t tell me if I asked. But do you have a car, or some other means of transport?”
“We have our van,” said George. “It’s in perfect working order, and we know it’s not currently bugged or transmitting any sort of signal that the people who might be lookin
g for us are capable of picking up.”
“At least not while we’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere,” I added, before she could offer any more reassurances. “There’s every chance that there’s some sort of sat-tracker on the thing that triggers if we go over the border back into the United States.”
“No, there’s not.” Dr. Abbey dismissed my concerns with a wave of her hand. “I’ve had my sources looking for details on the bugs that were planted on you for years. None of them has ever mentioned a sat-tracker, or anything remotely like it. If you’ve cleared the bugs out of your onboard computer systems and removed any physical trackers, you’re clean. Which is a good thing, because you’re coming here, and I’d rather not have the entire EIS land on my doorstep looking for the opportunity to chat with the pair of you.”
“Can’t you diagnose me over the video link?” asked George. “Put me back to bed for a week and tell me to drink lots of orange juice. Which is superexpensive up here, by the way, so I’ll wind up drinking cranberry juice instead.”
“Adorable as your misguided faith in me is, no, I can’t diagnose you over a video link,” said Dr. Abbey. “Or, rather, I can, but you won’t like any of the conclusions I can draw without a physical examination. You know I supported the two of you running off to play Little House on the Prairie. Nobody wants you to have a happy ending more than I do. But at the end of the day, we can’t allow sentimentality to make us forget your rather, well, ‘unique’ origins. You’re not like any other patient I’ve ever worked with.”
“None of them were clones, you mean,” said George. She made no effort to conceal her bitterness. With us, she didn’t have to.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Dr. Abbey. “You’re a singular case, Georgia. Maybe someday that won’t be true, but right now, you’re the only clone on record to have survived more than two years outside of laboratory conditions—and before you say anything, yes, that’s because all the others have been cut open and harvested for their organs, or otherwise sacrificed to science. There’s no reason to think they wouldn’t have been able to live long and healthy lives if not for people like me who wanted to pull them apart and see what made them tick.”
“There’s also no reason to assume they wouldn’t have fallen apart as soon as the proteins binding their muscles to their skeletons started to dissolve,” said George.
“Exactly,” said Dr. Abbey. “How long will it take you to drive here? I’m still in Shady Cove.”
I did a double take. “The forestry center? Really? I thought you would have abandoned that place years ago.” Some bad stuff had happened there, including the deaths of a whole bunch of her people. If any place was going to be haunted, it was the Shady Cove Forestry Center.
“It suits my needs, and the EIS has agreed to pretend that they don’t know I’m here, if I promise not to tie any of their spies to anthills to express my displeasure,” she said. “It works out. I’ve got a good setup. We’ve improved a lot since your last visit. We’ll be able to figure out what’s going on with you, Georgia, and get you back in fighting shape in no time.”
“It’ll take us about three days,” said George. “Is there anything we should bring?”
“Some samples of your topsoil, groundwater, and if you have something you’re using for a well, bring a sample of that, too. Do you do your own canning?”
George nodded.
Dr. Abbey snorted. “Oh, man, the Masons as domestic little farmers. I should have been making bets. I could be buying myself a brand-new car right about now with all the cash I’d be raking in. Bring a couple of cans. I want to do as much of an environmental sweep as I can.”
“But you don’t think this is environmental, because Shaun isn’t sick,” said George, in her calm, collected, “I am conducting an interview and must not get emotionally involved” voice.
“No, I don’t,” said Dr. Abbey. She sobered. “I think you should have called me a week ago. Better yet, I think you should have been coming to see me once a year, just to be sure everything was working properly. Now, pack your things and get over here as fast as you can. I won’t leave the door unlocked, but I will leave the lights on.”
The connection went dark, disconnected from her end. George sighed.
“She always did have to get the last word,” she said, and closed her laptop, standing. “We need to pack.”
“I need to pack,” I said. “You need to sit back down and, I don’t know, catch up on e-mail or something while I do the strenuous stuff.”
“No,” she said. She sounded surprisingly calm. “I need to pack. You need to go take those samples Dr. Abbey needs. We can’t put me to bed right now. If we’re going to get out of here as fast as we need to, we both need to be working, and we both need to go tell the Smiths that we’re going on vacation. Otherwise, they’re going to assume you buried me somewhere on the property, and that we’re not coming back.”
“They’d have a hell of a time getting through the automated defenses,” I said. “The cabin will be fine.”
“Yeah, but I sort of like the Smiths,” said George. “I don’t want to get a reputation for blowing up the neighbors. We need to tell them we’re taking a trip and will be back soon, and we need to do it together. I will pack clothes. You will take groundwater samples. I will sit down if I feel even a little bit dizzy. I will call you if I think I’m about to pass out. We will get out of here a lot faster if we’re both working on getting our stuff ready, and the first step is for you to stop arguing with me.”
Her voice was calm, but her cheeks were red and her eyes were wild. I paused.
“You’re scared,” I said. It seemed so understandable once I said it out loud. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”
“I know you’re afraid of losing me,” she said, reaching out to set her hand on my arm. Her skin was warmer than it should have been. She was probably running a fever. That didn’t seem like the sort of thing that came on all at once, and I found myself wondering what Dr. Abbey would say. How long had I been overlooking symptoms? George continued, “I don’t blame you. I’m terrified of losing you. But Shaun, I’m the one who’s sick. I’m the one who could be … getting sicker. So I need to help. Okay? I can’t just sit around letting you take care of me. Not when it means we get to the doctor even one minute later.”
“I can’t do this again,” I said. My voice was soft. I couldn’t make it any louder. Not without screaming. “I don’t care if we have to kidnap the head of the CDC, I can’t do this again. You have to be okay. You have to.”
“And that’s why you have to let me help,” said George patiently. “We need to get moving. Okay? Can we do that?”
“Okay.” I leaned in and kissed her. She kissed me back. Her lips, like her fingers, were too warm. Images of funerals danced across my mind, refusing to be pushed aside.
“Okay,” she said again, pulling back. “Let’s get moving.” She walked toward the hallway. I watched her go before turning to the back door. I had water samples to take, and neighbors to notify, and most of all—most importantly of all—a sister to save.
Book III
Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot
The only way anyone ever knows what matters to them is by losing it. If losing something breaks you in a way that can never be repaired, then that was what mattered. Now you know. Congrats. Try to live with it.
—SHAUN MASON
There’s always time for one more draft, one more round of revisions, one more fact-check. Until there isn’t. Until you realize that all this time, you’ve been spending the time you had on things that didn’t matter at all.
—GEORGIA MASON
One
It had taken us years to turn our cabin from somebody else’s abandoned vacation home into a place that we could consider our own. Every wall, every floor, every window sealing had something of us in it. Usually caulk, sure, but also time, and sweat, and tears. We had learned how to be adults in that cabin. We’d learned how to take care o
f ourselves, and figured out how to take care of each other. Years. And yet it only took a few minutes for the cabin to dwindle and disappear in our rearview mirror, becoming part of the past, and not necessarily part of the future.
If Dr. Abbey couldn’t fix me, I was never going to walk on the creaky floorboard in the hallway, or gather eggs from our broody chickens, ever again. I was pretty sure that if that happened, Shaun wouldn’t be going back either. He was still a haunted house all by himself, still playing host to the ghosts he’d gathered for his own protection when the original Georgia died. He couldn’t go back to a house that was also haunted by his memories of me. That would be one ghost too many, and it would break him, if losing me hadn’t broken him already.
It was funny. I wanted to live. I wanted to keep having a life. Georgia—the original Georgia, the one I remembered being but had never been—had spent most of her life worrying about how people saw her, chasing the next big story, and dreaming of a time when she could have what I had. She’d only ever wanted to be able to spend her days with Shaun, unjudged by the people who saw them, telling the truth as she understood it. She had died chasing the truth, and the part of me that was closest to being her still wasn’t sure whether or not it had been worth it. I was pretty sure it hadn’t been. I would never have existed if she’d been a little less committed to the chase, but she shouldn’t have died for what she got. Her cause had needed a martyr. There was no reason it had to be her.
After the original Georgia was dead and I’d been coaxed out of the wreckage of her mind, I’d believed that I was going to live my days in the custody of the CDC. I had no allies, I had no assets, and I had no way out. But I’d found a way out, thanks to the EIS and the sheer cussed stubbornness that the original Georgia had baked into every particle of me. I had found Shaun. I had convinced him I was real. And I had finally, for the first time in two lifetimes, been in a position to do what I wanted to do, and not give a damn about what anybody else thought. When I wanted to kiss Shaun, I kissed him. When I wanted to be something other than perfectly dignified, I relaxed. I was free.