“If you’re feeling better now, ma’am, sir, I would very much appreciate it if you’d let me begin the testing process.”
Shaun and I exchanged a look, and I jumped a little as the blood on his shirt fully registered. Maggie wasn’t dead when she was bleeding on him. That didn’t mean her blood couldn’t potentially carry a hot viral load.
“Please,” I said.
“Sure,” said Shaun, sounding oddly unconcerned. I frowned at him. He mouthed the word “later,” and gave me what may have been intended as a reassuring smile.
I was not reassured.
The EMT produced two small blood test units, using them to take samples from our index fingers. No lights came on to document the filtration process. Instead, he sealed the kits in plastic bags marked “biohazard,” nodded as politely as a bellhop who’d been doing nothing more hazardous than delivering our luggage, and left the room. The door closed behind him with a click and a beep that clearly indicated that we had been locked in.
Shaun looked at me. “You okay?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Is Maggie going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.” Shaun folded his arms, looking at the closed door. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Yeah. I guess we will.” We stood there in silence, waiting for the door to open; waiting for someone to come and tell us how many of us were going to walk away alive.
When Maggie went down… fuck.
Maggie was one of the first people Buffy hired after we said “sure, we want a viable Fiction section.” She’s never been anything but awesome. She took us in when we had nowhere else to go; she took care of us when we would have been frankly fucked without her. She’s been our rock. If Mahir is the soul of this news team—and I’m not an idiot, I know that when George died, the mantle went to him, and that’s cool, because I never wanted it in the first place—then Maggie is the heart. And when she went down today, the only thing I could think was “Thank God it was her. Thank God it wasn’t George. I don’t think I could survive that happening again.”
George being back is a miracle, and it’s also what’s going to mean this all ends bad, because I’m not thinking straight anymore. I lived without her once. I can’t do it again.
Fuck.
—From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, August 4, 2041. Unpublished.
Madre de Dios… Mother Mary, hold me closely; Mother Mary, love me best. Mother Mary, treat me sweetly. Mother Mary, let me rest.
I have never hurt this much in my life. Morphine is supposed to make the hurting stop, but instead, it shunts the pain to the side, like a houseguest you never intended to keep. It isn’t in your face, but it’s there, using the last of the milk, leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor…
This hurts. I am alive. The two balance each other, I suppose.
This was supposed to be Buffy’s revolution. It was never supposed to be mine.
—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Grace Garcia, August 4, 2041. Unpublished.
SHAUN: Thirty
I don’t know how long they left us in that room. Long enough that George was pale and freaking out a little by the time they came back, even though she was trying pretty damn hard to hide it. I watched her anxiously, not sure what I was supposed to do. She’d never had a problem with hospitals before. Then again, I guess being brought back from the dead and used as a CDC lab rat would fuck up just about anybody.
The delay may have put George’s nerves on edge, but it helped settle mine. When those bullets started flying… there was a time when that would have elated me. With George in the field, all it did was make me sick to my stomach. She could have been hit. I could have lost her again. Again. And I couldn’t even grab her and hold on until I stopped feeling sick, because there was blood on my shirt. If it was hot, even touching her could kill her. I should never have grabbed her hand. I should have stayed away from her and observed proper quarantine procedures. And I couldn’t.
It was sort of ironic. I couldn’t catch the live form of Kellis-Amberlee because I’d managed to catch the immunity from her, and now that she was back where she belonged, she didn’t have that same protection. Even when I was safe, she wasn’t.
“I hate the world sometimes,” I muttered.
“What?” George stopped staring at the wall, turning to look at me instead. She removed her sunglasses, rubbing her left eye with the heel of her hand. “Do you think we’ll find out what’s happening soon?”
“I hope so.” I sighed. “All that for nothing. We didn’t get the damn IDs.”
“Didn’t those people send you to the CDC?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“So it wasn’t for nothing.” George shrugged, trying—and failing—to look nonchalant as she said, “It got you me.”