I took the wallet, too abashed to know what else to do. It was open to a picture of a slim, sharp-eyed woman with dark hair that she must have dyed regularly, to keep the bleach from showing. She was wearing a cowl-necked sweater the color of cherry cola, and frowning at the camera.
The resemblance wasn’t perfect. Her skin was too dark and her clothing was too impractical and her nose was a little bit too long. But something in the way she held herself, something about the expression in her eyes…
“She looks like George.”
“Yes.” Mahir leaned over and plucked the wallet from my hand. I didn’t fight him. “It was an arranged marriage, but she wasn’t the first bride they offered me, or even the fifteenth. She was just the first one I fancied enough to have a go with. Traditional enough to suit my family, but fierce enough to be worth fighting with. I’m not sure whose parents were more relieved, hers or mine.” He gave the picture a fond look, snapped the wallet shut, and slid it back into his pocket. “I told her to divorce me when I bought my tickets out of London. She’s not much for listening—still, I’ve no doubt she listened this time, for spite if nothing else.”
“I didn’t mean to… I mean, I didn’t know…”
“What, that I loved your sister? Of course you didn’t, just like you had no idea Rebecca fancied you. You never had to go searching like the rest of us. She was haunting you a long time before she died, and if you’d been the one to go, you’d be haunting her the same way.” Mahir stood as the water turned off. “We’re all hauntings waiting to happen, Shaun. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll get past wondering when our normal lives will be starting up again.”
He didn’t look back as he walked out of the motel room, letting the door swing gently shut behind him. I stayed where I was, listening to the silence inside my head and the soft sounds of Kelly drying herself off behind the bathroom door. We were all hauntings waiting to happen? Really?
“I guess I can live with that,” I said, to the silence.
“Live with what?”
I turned to see Kelly standing in the bathroom door, wearing an outfit I hadn’t seen before. She must have bought it on one of her innumerable shopping trips with Maggie. Tan slacks, a white button-down blouse, and a pair of low, black heels. A starched white lab coat completed the illusion that she’d left the CDC only yesterday, not months before. I blinked and said the first thing that popped into my head: “What the hell happened to your hair?”
Kelly reached up to self-consciously touch her long blond ponytail. It was the hairstyle she’d been wearing when she first arrived in Oakland, if maybe a shade or two lighter. “Maggie found it for me at a beauty supply shop. Don’t you like it?”
“Shit, Doc, anyone who sees you is going to think they’re seeing a ghost.”
Very funny, said George.
“That’s the idea,” said Kelly, and smiled. There was a bitterness in that expression I don’t think she would have been capable of before she came to us. Even if she survived, the things she knew now had broken her, maybe forever. “Wiping my biometric information from the scanners would be expensive and time-consuming, and these people are arrogant bastards—I know, because I’m one of them. My profile will still be there. We won’t have any issues with the automatic doors. The night guards don’t really know any of the junior staff by name—we’re just faces to them, and with all the traveling we do, it’s not unusual for us to disappear for weeks at a time. As long as we don’t wander into a spot check, we’ll be fine.”
“What about the part where we’ve been hiding you all the way across the country, on account of that whole ‘faking your own death’ thing? This seems risky as hell.”
“It would be, if we were planning to deal with anyone but security, the janitorial staff, and Dr. Wynne. Security won’t stop anyone the scanner says is allowed to be there, and janitorial doesn’t care. We’ll get past them.”
“That leaves us with only the automatic systems to navigate.” We’d gone over all of this before. I was so thrown by her appearance that my mouth was running on autopilot.
“So we’d better hope the servers haven’t been updated.” Was that doubt in her voice? It could have been. It didn’t really matter either way. We were miles past the point of no return, and she was as committed as the rest of us.
“Good.” I stood. “Let’s get you across the hall to Becks. If we’re going to invade the Centers for Disease Control, I want to do it while I’m at least remotely clean.”
Kelly nodded and ducked back into the bathroom to grab her street clothes before following me to the room across the hall. It was the mirror image of the room we’d just left, with the exception of Becks. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of one of the room’s two beds, field-stripping a sniper rifle I hadn’t even been aware she had. I raised an eyebrow.
Becks looked up, hands continuing their work as she glanced at Kelly and gave an encouraging nod. “That’s good. You look like a CDC flunky.”