Blackout (26 page)

I paced around the room a few times, feigning my normal restlessness, before climbing back into bed. I’d been sleeping more and more, and all sense of time was going rapidly out the window. If the alarms were going off for six hours, and they’d been off for about an hour and half, that meant I’d been awake for less than eight hours. It felt like forever. I was exhausted.

Maybe they were putting something in my food after all.

The throbbing in my head kept me from falling into anything deeper than a light doze. It shattered when the door opened. I sat up, squinting.

“Hello?”

“We have sixteen minutes,” said Gregory. He didn’t leave the doorway. Maybe there was too much risk of him getting stuck in the room when the sixteen-minute security window closed. “I’m sorry. It was the best I could arrange on such short notice.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I swung my feet around to the floor, wincing a little. “Did you bring any painkillers I can actually trust?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” Gregory dipped a hand into his pocket. “I even brought water.”

“Thanks,” I said. The word seemed to stick in my throat. Shaun was always the one who brought me painkillers when the light got to be too much and one of my migraines decided to start making its presence known. I missed him so much.

“We don’t have long.”

I paused in the process of getting up. Then I stood and walked toward him, holding out my hand for the pills. “What do you mean? Sixteen minutes, right?”

“We arranged the window when today’s testing schedule went up on the intranet.” Gregory sounded grimmer than I’d ever heard him. “Someone’s going to get caught over this one. It won’t be me, but whoever it is, they’re going to be lucky if all they lose is their job.”

A chill started in the pit of my stomach. “What are you saying?”

“They’ve started stress-testing you. That isn’t good.” He dropped two pills into my hand, producing a bottle
of water from his other pocket. “Four subjects have made it this far. None of them got through the alarm sequence without permanent psychological damage. Georgia, I’m sorry. We didn’t realize they were going to speed things up like this, but with your brother—” He stopped dead.

The silence that stretched between us was the loudest I had ever heard. I opened the bottle of water and tossed the pills into my mouth, washing them down without really registering the motion. It was something that had to be done, and so I was doing it; that was all. The silence continued, Gregory waiting to see how I would respond, my mind racing through all the possible ways that sentence could have ended.

None of them were good.

“With Shaun what?” I asked. Gregory didn’t answer. “With Shaun
what
?” I repeated.

“Off the grid,” said Gregory. He took the empty bottle from my hand. “He and the rest of your old news site dropped off the radar following Tropical Storm Fiona.”

He mentioned the storm like it was a big event. I frowned. “Were they in the area? Are they missing?”

“No. There have been a few sightings, all of them on the West Coast. The EIS has been planting sighting reports elsewhere in the country, but it’s hard, with as little data as we have.”

“So what, they’re thinking they can tell me to find him, and I’ll know where he’s gone to ground?” I scoffed. “That’s not going to happen.”

“No. They’re thinking they can finish running their tests on you, demonstrating to the investors just how stable a clone can be, and then they can decommission you in favor of a Georgia Mason who’ll be willing to play the part they ask it to play.”

The chill continued to uncurl, spreading to cover my entire body. “What part is that?”

“Bait.” I couldn’t see Gregory’s expression with the light shining so brightly behind him. I didn’t need to. His voice told me everything I needed to know. “They’re going to put the new Georgia on the air, and they’re going to use it to do the one thing they couldn’t do on their own.”

“They’re going to use her to lure Shaun in,” I finished, in a whisper.

“They’ll use her to do more than that, if they possibly can. I’ll be honest, Georgia, because this isn’t a time for being anything else. Shaun’s psychological profiles since your death have been… disturbing, to say the least.”

“Disturbing how? Cutting up children and old ladies disturbing, or not showering anymore disturbing?”

“Talking to himself. Refusing to let go of the idea that you’ll come back someday. That’s part of what let the investors sell the idea that you would have multiple uses.”

“But not me in specific.”

“No,” Gregory admitted.

I took a deep breath. The painkillers hadn’t had time to work, but the chill was muffling the pain nicely, making everything seem a little more distant, and hence a little easier to deal with. “Well, all right. I guess that means it’s time to get me the hell out of Dodge, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” said Gregory—and now he sounded sad, and deeply concerned. “There’s just one problem.”

I closed my eyes. “You still don’t know how you’re going to do that, do you?”

“No. We don’t.”

“Well.” I opened my eyes, sighing once. “This is going to be fun.”

Every time I think my life can’t get any weirder, it does. Today has included a missing Newsie from the Rising generation who just happens to be running a rest stop on the smuggler’s route to Canada, rednecks with guns, listening to Shaun sing along with the radio (badly), and a zombie bear. Who knows what delights tomorrow will bring? And will tomorrow bring a shower with enough hot water to finish washing my hair?

Stay tuned for our next exciting update that I can’t post because it might give our location away to some mysterious shadow conspiracy.

Fuck, this sucks.

—From
Charming Not Sincere
, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, July 26, 2041. Unpublished.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR ROOM. If you are already outside your room, find a secure location immediately. The following places on campus are currently secure: The library. The Life Sciences building. The student store. Durant Hall. The Optometry lab. The following places are confirmed compromised: The English and Literature building. The Bear’s Den. The administrative offices.

THIS IS NOT A HOAX. THIS IS NOT A PRANK. This is Professor Michael Mason. We are in a state of emergency. If you are reading this, do not leave your room.

Stacy, darling, I’ll be home as soon as I can.

—From
Breathing Biology
, the blog of Michael Mason, July 18, 2014. Taken from the archives of The Wall.

D
ad’s map was just that: a large piece of paper with roads and landmarks drawn on it. He spread it out on the dining room table, smirking a bit when he saw the disbelieving expressions Becks and I were wearing. “What?” he asked. “You’ve never seen a map before?”

“Not outside of a history book,” I said. “Haven’t you ever heard of GPS?”

“What isn’t on a computer can’t be hacked, oh foolish son of mine,” said Dad. He was comfortably in professor mode now, that old “I am imparting wisdom to the young” twinkle in his eye. George used to love it when he’d get like this, like it was some secret language the two of them could share—the language of knowledge and the truth. Naturally, that meant I’d always hated it when he’d get like this, because he was lying to her. He was letting her believe he cared.

“Mom, make Dad stop acting like he knows everything,” I said, without any real rancor.

“Michael, tell the kids what they need to know,” said Mom. “And in exchange, Shaun will tell us what
we
need to know. Isn’t that right, Shaun?”

“Yeah, Mom. That’s right.”
I’ll tell you how to steal the last things in the world that belong to your adopted daughter, and you won’t even think of yourselves as grave robbers
. The acid in the thought was almost shocking, even to me. I realized I was digging my nails into my palms again. I rested my hands on the edge of the table, forcing my fingers to uncurl. “So what are we looking at here?”

“The trouble is the distance. There’s no single safe route from here into the Florida quarantine zone—maybe if you were aiming for something in the contaminated parts of Texas?” Dad glanced up, a canny glint appearing behind the amiable twinkle in his eyes. “You didn’t mention exactly what you were trying to accomplish on this little road trip, come to think of it.”

“True, and we’re not going to mention it, so don’t bother fishing,” I said. The map covered the Southwestern United States, stopping shortly after it crossed into Texas. “Are you saying this is as far as you can get us?”

“I’m saying this is as far as we can get you before things become complicated,” Dad replied. “You don’t mind complicated, do you, Shaun?”

“I like to think it’s a specialty of mine.”

“Good.” He beckoned me closer. I motioned for Becks to do the same. He began tapping highways and side roads, rattling off names, security levels, and known geographical quirks with a speed that was almost daunting. I was so busy trying not to lose track of what he was saying that I barely even noticed when Mom slipped out of the room. Dad pulled out another map, this one covering the space from Texas to Mississippi, and kept talking.

Shaun
.

“What?” I asked, without thinking about it.

Dad glanced up, eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”

“I think I’m confused, too,” said Becks smoothly. “What do you mean about fuel shortages in Louisiana?”

Dad smiled at her and began talking again, saying something about fuel pipelines being compromised in the wake of Tropical Storm Fiona. I couldn’t quite make out the details; George was talking too loudly for that.
You need to get Becks and get out of here. Abort the mission. Abort it
now.
There isn’t time to argue
.

Maybe there wasn’t time to argue, but there was time to scowl at the map, trying to wordlessly express my confusion to the voice inside my head.

It must have worked at least a little, because George groaned and said,
They’re hiding something from you. You told them you had the files. They should have tried to make you hand them over before they told you anything, and they didn’t. That means they think they can have their cake and eat it, too. You need to get
out
of here
.

I stiffened, hoping Dad was too focused on Becks to notice. George was right. We’d made this plan, which was, admittedly, a stupid, suicidal plan, expecting the Masons to be willing to make a trade. Normally, that would mean they wouldn’t expect me to give them the files without proof of cooperation on their part. So where were those negotiations? Where was Dad insisting I give them a single file, just to show that I was serious? Hell, where was Mom? She should have been in the room, keeping an eye on us, making sure Dad didn’t get too excited by the process of showing us how clever he was and show us a little bit too much. That was the most damning piece of the admittedly sketchy evidence: Mom should never have left the room.

“Who’s paying you?” I asked conversationally, taking my hands away from the table. Becks cast a startled glance in my direction. I smiled reassuringly. “It’s cool,
Becks. They’re just selling us up the river, and I was wondering who they were selling us to. That’s all.”

Dad paled. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve been on the run too long, son. It’s starting to affect your thinking.”

“Well, yeah. I know that part. I mean, it’s driven me crazy and everything, which I know you know, since you’ve been looking for an excuse to have me declared mentally unfit and take my stuff since George died—great job mourning for her, by the way, really top-notch—but I don’t think this is me being crazy. I think this is an unfortunate moment of me being sane, and when I’m sane, I have to admit that everyone in the world really
is
out to get us.” I pulled George’s .40 from my belt, bringing it up and aiming it at his head. “I’m only going to ask you one more time. Who’s paying you?”