An orderly came and took my empty dishes after I finished eating. The pills I’d managed not to take were safely tucked into the seam of my pillowcase by then. I smiled. He flinched. I smiled wider. If these people couldn’t handle the results of their crazy science, they shouldn’t be bringing back the dead. The orderly all but scurried from the room, and I started to feel a little bad. It wasn’t his fault. None of this was. The orders that controlled my life came from way above his pay grade.
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.”