by Mira Grant
“So you’ve said, but you know I have to ask. Has Esther Hoffman brought suit against you?”
Ah: there was the sting. Dr. Webb forced a smile. “No. Miss Hoffman is recuperating from her ordeal, but has expressed no interest in suing the institute.”
“She hasn’t been seen since you were both released from the hospital.”
“She has provided proof of life whenever asked. Please, respect her privacy, and mine, during these trying times.”
The interview from there followed the usual lines: questions about her work, about the people who might have been trying to steal it away from her, about where she was intending to take it next. Dr. Webb answered them all as best she could, and managed to hide her relief when it was over until she was no longer anywhere near a camera.
She was learning.
“ESTHER! I'M home!”
The living room of their small colonial home was silent, but that was normal. Esther didn’t usually leave her room when there was no one else in the house, preferring to sit by the window and watch for signs that they were about to be attacked. No sooner was the door shut than Esther came pounding down the stairs, hitting them each as hard as she had when she was sixteen and had no weakness in her ankles or concern about falling.
Jennifer lit up at the sight of her, and let go of the overlay of her adult self, which she had been—has been—struggling to hold in place since she left the house this morning. It’s so much easier to relax into the seamless “now” of the teenage self her equipment created. The one her equipment can’t unmake. Too many shocks, too many stresses—it will be years before she can find a way to delete the ghosts of a past she never had from her conscious mind. If she even chooses to go back. She may be an echo of a girl who never lived, but that doesn’t mean she wants to die. Not when she’s finally alive.
Not when Esther needs her.
Esther had been the primary target of the scenario, and she doesn’t have the luxury of choosing. There’s too much damage; it runs too deep. She dreams the adult version of herself, but she always wakes up crying, aware that what she’s seen from a shattered distance has been lost forever, burned away by the effort of breaking free, of getting to Jennifer. To save her friend, she sacrificed herself. She doesn’t mind, though. She has her sketchbooks, and the whole internet to discover, hundreds of movies and television shows and books that seem to have been tailored to exactly her tastes (curated by an adult self she has abandoned), and best of all, most of all, she has Jennifer.
As long as she has Jennifer, she’ll be fine.
They embrace in the middle of the room, two teenage girls who never existed, out of place and out of time and finally back where they feel like they belong, and everything is just the way they want it to be. When they let each other go, they continue holding hands, and they walk, the risen dead of their own past selves, onward toward the trembling and uncertain future.