I stiffened, glancing back toward the sound of his voice. He wasn’t in view; if he was coming after me, or sending his guards, he was still a little ways away. With only a few seconds to move, I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. I just bolted for the trees.
Shaun was always the one who put himself in mortal danger for kicks, but I still tried to stay in decent physical condition. It was the smart thing to do if I was going to keep following him into hazard zones, looking for the “perfect story” to slap up on his side of the site. I’d never been an athlete, but I’d been running ten-minute miles since I was fourteen, and that was enough to outrun any zombie that ever shambled into my path. I felt weirdly betrayed when I found myself gasping for breath, my heart hammering hard against my ribs as I slumped against a tree. All those hours of work, undone by one little death.
I yanked my socks off. The little gun fell to the grass. I scooped it up, lifting my top long enough to tuck the gun into my waistband, the muzzle digging painfully into my stomach. I pulled the drawstring on my pants a little tighter. The pajama top was loose enough that when I let it go, it fell to cover the weapon without a trace.
“Georgia?” Dr. Thomas’s voice was closer this time; he was coming for me himself, rather than sending his flunkies to fish me out of the biodome. That was good. He’d be less attuned to the little details than a professional guard would have been—they would have noticed the high color in my cheeks and the slight unsteadiness of my legs as I stepped out of the cover of the tree line.
“Here,” I said, proud of the way that I was barely gasping at all. My bare toes dug into the grass, tangling deep. I was going to need a serious shower when all this was over. “I’m sorry. Were you calling me?”
Dr. Thomas fixed me with a stern eye. “What did I say about no funny business?” he asked.
Cold arced down my spine. Someone must have seen me pull the gun out of my sock. He knows, I thought, desperately wondering if I could draw before he had a chance to call for his guards, and whether it would do me any good if I did. Even if I didn’t shoot myself, they’d just decommission me, or whatever it is you call getting rid of a clone that you don’t need anymore. They’d throw me out like yesterday’s garbage—and all because of a pair of goddamn socks—
“That means you come when I call,” said Dr. Thomas. “I’m willing to forgive it this time—we can call it youthful exuberance, and it doesn’t need to go into my report of the day’s activities. But that assumes you’ll behave from now on. Can I trust you to behave, Georgia?”
“What?” Relief flooded over me, washing away the cold. I nodded so hard it felt like I was going to sprain something. “Yes, absolutely. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ignore you, I was just… the grass, and then the trees, and…” I paused, making my voice very small before I said, “It reminded me of home, that’s all.”
If the CDC did their research on Berkeley, they knew we had more green space per capita than any other densely populated city in the state of California. Chalk it up to general perversity and being built around a university that resisted all attempts to render it fully secure. The idea of trees being something I would miss was believable if you didn’t know me well enough to know that I’d been avoiding unnecessary exposure to the outside world for my entire life.
Dr. Thomas’s expression softened. “I can understand that.” His frown returned as he glanced down at my feet. “Georgia, what in the world happened to your socks?”
“They got wet, so I took them off.” I held up my grass-stained socks. “At least we have plenty of bleach, right?”
To my surprise, Dr. Thomas actually chuckled. He seemed more human in that moment than he had since the first uneasy hours after I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. Too bad that wasn’t going to make me change my mind about getting the hell out of here before they had me “decommissioned” and replaced me with something more tractable.
“We can get you new socks. Come on, now. We’ll have just enough time to get you cleaned up before they expect you at the lab.”
“All right, Dr. Thomas.” I walked toward him, the grass damp beneath my feet. I was getting better at deceit. I didn’t like it—I didn’t think I would ever like it, and that was good, because the day I loved a lie was the day I stopped being even remotely Georgia Mason—but I was getting better. I was going to need those skills if I wanted to get out of the CDC still breathing, rather than going out in a biohazard container bound for the incinerator.
I took the deepest breaths I could as we left the biodome, trying to capture the smell of the green in my lungs. That was what freedom would smell like. And I was going to be free.