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by Mira Grant

  “I know I’m being watched right now,” I said, trying to sound brave and tough and fierce, and not like a handcuffed woman with her hair covering her face. “You people don’t tranq someone and then dump them in a room without supervision. A little help here, if you’d be so kind? Before you get me really ticked off?”

  There was a long pause. I heard the sound of footsteps coming toward me. The cadence was familiar, but the echoes were not. Whoever it was, they were wearing unfamiliar shoes, weighted in a way I couldn’t reconcile with my vague memories of someone who walked that way. These were heavy boots, field-rated by the dull thud of them, with metal toe and heel protection. It clinked, ever so faintly, every time a foot hit the floor.

  “Goddammit, Aislinn, why did you have to dig without telling anyone what you were doing?” The voice was Audrey’s, filled with weary exasperation. “I could have helped you. Or steered you away from something that you shouldn’t have been prodding. This isn’t the way I wanted you to find out.”

  “Audrey?” Hope warred with betrayal in my tone, filling the syllables of her name with conflict. That was good. That matched what I was feeling, and quite nicely. “What the fuck is going on here? Why am I cuffed? Why did you have me tranquilized?” Why did you claim to have authority with the EIS? What have you been hiding from me?

  “You’re cuffed because that’s standard protocol when dealing with a prisoner in an unsecured location. I had you tranquilized because you were a walking biohazard zone, and I couldn’t risk you touching or attempting to touch anyone who hadn’t already been exposed. It was the kindest way.”

  “The kindest—!” I tried to stand without thinking about it. My zip-tied ankles refused to hold my weight, and I toppled back to the cot, glaring through my hair in the general direction of Audrey’s voice. “There’s nothing kind about waking up in the middle of a bizarre medical bondage scenario with my girlfriend saying things like ‘standard protocol.’ As to why I dug in without telling you, you weren’t speaking to me, remember? I kept trying—Lord, how I kept trying—and you just kept going back to your bloody sulking place. I’m sorry I nearly got eaten in the woods, and I’m sorry I wouldn’t leave my colleagues for dead while I hied it up the nearest tree, all right? Now don’t you damn well go blaming me if you didn’t know what I was doing. The silence started with you.”

  There was a long pause before Audrey said, “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have frozen you out like that. You’d never scared me that way before. I still wish you’d tried harder to tell me what you were doing.” Her tone shifted slightly, moving away from coldly official, and toward the warm concern I’d always heard there. She sounded like the woman who had kissed my bruises and massaged my shoulders after a bad field run. She sounded like the woman I loved, and somehow, that just made me angrier. She didn’t get to sound like that anymore. Not after she’d betrayed us.

  “Why? So you could have stopped me?”

  “I would have tried.”

  That brought my thoughts to a screeching halt. I hadn’t been expecting honesty: not from her, not under these circumstances. “Why? Why in the world would you want to stop me from pursuing a story? Pursuing stories is what I do. And you—what are you doing claiming to have authority with the EIS? Audrey, what’s going on?”

  “Because I knew this story would get people killed, that’s why,” she said. There was a clumping sound, boots against the floor, as she came closer. “This isn’t the sort of story that changes a local government or protects a state park, Ash. This sort of story changes everything, and that makes it dangerous. Too dangerous for people like us.”

  “I don’t think there’s an ‘us’ here, Audrey,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t shout. The words fell between us like stones, and I knew that the wall was under construction at last. When it was finished, there would be no breaching it.

  “Ash…” She stopped, not seeming to know how to continue.

  That was fine. I could continue for the both of us. “You need to start answering questions, and you need to start answering them now, or there’s going to be a reckoning when I get untied. Why are you speaking for the EIS? Where am I? Where is Ben?”

  Ben was dead. That was the only reasonable explanation for why Audrey had separated us. I hadn’t been careful enough about preventing blood exposure, and he’d managed to catch Kellis-Amberlee from the smears I’d left all over our gear. Ben was dead, Mat was dead, Audrey was apparently working for someone else, and I was the last man standing. I had always suspected that it was going to end like this—well, without the “my girlfriend sells us all out” part. That, I hadn’t seen coming.

  I’d just hoped it would take longer for me to wind up alone.

  “Ben’s in another room, still sleeping,” said Audrey. A ripple of amusement moved through her voice. “Congratulations. Your system shrugs off tranquilizers faster than his. Don’t get too impressed with yourself, though. You’re still within the human norm. Once he’s awake, we’ll be able to debrief you both.”

  “I don’t want a debriefing, I want an explanation,” I said. “You know those aren’t the same thing. They never bloody well have been.”

  “No, they’re not,” she said. “As for what you said before… you can hate me, you can break up with me, you can do whatever you want, but there’s always going to be an ‘us,’ because we’re not as different as you’re currently thinking we are.” Audrey’s hands brushed my hair away from my face, clearing my field of vision. I glared at her. She didn’t look away. “I’m one person. One person is an easy thing to kill. So yeah, this is the sort of story that gets people like us killed.”

  She was still wearing the black tactical suit and Kevlar vest she’d had on when she came into the visitor’s center—that, or she was wearing another suit exactly like the first. Her hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, the bleached streaks from decontamination radiating around the outside of it like the world’s worst highlights. Her boots were knee-high, but not in the sexy way; in the “I might need to wade through rivers of blood, and I want to be ready for every eventuality” way. She didn’t look anything like herself. In some ways, she looked more like herself than she ever had before. This was what she’d always been meant to wear, not her paint-stained jeans and comfortable T-shirts. This was the real version of her.

  The room was as I’d assumed from the short glimpses I’d been able to catch before: small, white, square, and effectively featureless. The only furniture was the cot beneath me. It looked like the sort of thing that could be put up and torn down in an hour, a mobile interrogation unit. There were two doors, both in the wall opposite where I was sitting. Both of them were closed. Neither was flanked by a blood testing unit. That just reinforced the impression that this—whatever it was—was a temporary thing, somehow assembled around me. Everything was spotless, but the smell of bleach was faint, like no cleansing protocols had ever been carried out here.

  “You said you were ex-military,” I said. “You said you’d been given an honorable discharge because of your PTSD, and that you’d changed your name to keep anyone from connecting you to your past. You lied to me.”

  “I edited for you,” she said. “I am ex-military. I do have PTSD. I don’t take all those antidepressants for show. They’re the only things that get me through the day. But I was a military doctor, and I went to work for the CDC after I left the service. That’s what broke me. Not the army; the people who were supposed to be protecting us here at home. The CDC… they’re not the angels everyone makes them out to be. They’re not our friends.”

  “So blow a whistle next time, instead of betraying your girlfriend,” I snapped.

  Audrey just looked at me, expression so profoundly weary that the part of me that was accustomed to comforting her immediately sprang to attention, demanding I make it better. The fact that my hands were cuffed behind me was the only thing that kept me from reaching for her before my rational mind could step in and remin
d my instincts that I was angry.

  “People who blow this whistle die,” she said. “They aren’t martyrs to the cause. They don’t change the world. They don’t reveal the big truths and make everything different. They die.”

  “How’s that any different from any other story we’ve ever told?” I demanded. “Maybe fiction doesn’t get you killed—although we both know that’s not true, you Fictionals have had your share of obsessive fans who think they deserve you more than anyone else—but chasing down the news has always had the potential to end badly. We signed up for that. We knew what we were doing when we logged in.”

  “You’re not listening,” she said, sounding frustrated. “The people who chase these stories die, and they don’t come back, not even virtually, because they get discredited on their way out the door. Remember that big scandal last year? The Newsie in New Hampshire who hung himself right before the FBI revealed him as the head of a child pornography ring? His wife and kids didn’t get the insurance money, because it was a suicide. They’ve been harried out of their hometown, they’re living with her sister in Oklahoma now. They’re probably going to have to change their names and disappear, once they realize this is the sort of thing that doesn’t go away.”

  “He blew the whistle?” I asked, horrified.

  “Someone who was good—really good, better than Mat, God rest their soul; we’d need a Georgette Meissonier—might be able to find his original reports. The ones where he talked about corruption at the CDC, and conflicting accounts about research into the cure for Kellis-Amberlee. He’d been talking to the wrong people. People who knew too much, and weren’t as careful about sharing it as they should have been. Most of them are dead now, too. It’s a real shame. There were some brilliant minds on his contact list.”

  “You can add Georgette Meissonier to the ranks of the dead,” I said. “There was an attack on the Ryman convoy. She was killed.”

  “I know,” said Audrey. “The rest of her team is in CDC custody right now. They may not get out alive. It depends on what kind of long game the people in charge are trying to play. And that’s my point, Ash, all right? If the Masons had known where to look, if Meissonier had known where to dig, they might have been able to get the information out before someone shut them down. They had a chance of getting the real data and going viral. We never had that. We were the second ring of this circus, and no one was ever going to watch us when they had the chance to watch the elephants.”

  I looked at her for a long moment before I said, “You could have warned us.”

  “I did my best.”

  “You could have warned me.”

  “I couldn’t risk it.” She shook her head. “You kept my secret, and I am and will always be grateful for that, but the secret I gave you to keep was full of holes. It wasn’t dangerous. You could have told the world I was ex-military and hiding in a commune in Alameda because I couldn’t stand the smell of cordite, and it wouldn’t have changed anything. A few Newsies might have come sniffing around to find out whether I’d been involved with any of the big cleanups that weren’t open to the public. You and Mat would have shut them down, Ben would have threatened to start writing about the things they didn’t want to have shared, and it would have passed. It would have blown over. If you’d been able to say that I was EIS, on leave, not actually retired, people would have come looking for secrets, and these secrets are the things that get you killed. How many ways do I have to say that before you’ll start listening to me?”

  She almost had me convinced. Almost. But almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, as my mother used to say, and I wasn’t buying it. “Come off it, Audrey. They were trying to kill us—all of us—long before I started prying into anyone’s secrets. We lost more than half the Irwins at the convention before I’d ever pried into anything. They didn’t start this because of my investigating. You really think they’d have stopped if I’d gotten distracted by a shiny thing and wandered off?”

  “I can hope,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  “You want to fix this? Start giving me actual facts, and not just vague woo-woo ‘oh they’ll kill you, oh I did it to protect you’ bullshit,” I said. “I’m not some fainting flower who needs to be protected. What I need is for you to tell me what’s going on. And maybe to unfasten my hands. That’d be a start on me trusting you ever again.”

  “Uncuff her, Agent Sung,” said Governor Kilburn. I turned my head and there she was, standing in the leftmost doorway. It was open now, and on the other side I could see a dim room with broken glass on the tiled floor.

  “We’re still in the visitor’s center,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Governor Kilburn. She stepped into the room, looking to Audrey. “I sent Frances on ahead with the rest of the campaign. She thinks we’ve stopped to look for survivors. I don’t know what I’m going to tell her.”

  “Neither do I,” said Audrey. She looked back to me. “That’s sort of up to Aislinn.”

  I felt my eyes widen to comic proportions as I stared at the two of them. “Are you seriously standing there and implying you’re going to have me killed if you don’t like what I say? Because I can guarantee that if that’s the case, you’re not going to like what I have to say.”

  “Mouth like a sailor,” said Audrey, with such obvious affection that I wanted to slap her across the face. She didn’t get to sound like she loved me. Not now. “We’re not going to kill you. I couldn’t if I wanted to. I love you.”

  That was the final straw. “If you love me, take these cuffs off,” I snapped. “If you’re not going to do that, stop pretending to give a damn.”

  “All right,” said Audrey. She put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me forward. I didn’t resist. “My name isn’t ‘Sung’ anymore, Governor. It’s ‘Wen.’ You know that.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you didn’t choose that name purely for the puns it afforded you,” said Governor Kilburn.

  “So what if I did?” There was a click as the handcuffs were removed from my wrists. Audrey straightened, clipping them to her belt before she reached for my ankles. I pulled my hands around in front of me, massaging each of my wrists in turn as I tried to get the circulation back to normal. I hadn’t been cuffed tightly enough to hurt, but I’d been putting all my weight against my hands for long enough that they were numb and aching.

  Audrey produced a knife from her belt, slicing easily through the zip ties. “Puns are the highest form of humor, and anyone who tries to tell you differently has never found a way to make a joke resonate through three languages at the same time.”

  I kicked her. Or rather, I tried to kick her: My bare foot whisked through empty air, and Audrey wasn’t there anymore, having somehow rolled back three feet while the muscles in my calf were still tensing. She gave me a sympathetic look.

  “I know you’re angry, but I’m still your girlfriend, I still love you, and we’re not supposed to solve every problem with our fists,” she said.

  “That wasn’t my fist, it was my foot,” I said. “Completely different.”

  “My little Irwin.” Audrey looked over her shoulder at the governor, and said, “This is on you, Susan. You decide what gets said and what doesn’t.”

  “I’ll go get Benjamin,” said the governor, and disappeared, leaving me alone with Audrey. I glared at her. She looked at me, and sighed.

  “I tried so hard not to have to lie to you,” she said. “I thought we were signing up with the lowest-rated Democratic candidate. We weren’t supposed to make it this far on the trail. We were never supposed to be having these conversations.”

  “Who did you think was going to win?” I asked. “York?”

  “There was a fourth potential candidate. Senator Darren Hart of Pennsylvania was supposed to be running. Based on his numbers and his performance, he would have wiped the floor with Kilburn and Blackburn both. He would have done the same thing Susan did, and chosen Blackburn as his VP candidate, and we could have all gone home.”

>   I’d heard about Hart. He’d featured heavily in the pre–campaign cycle buzz, and Audrey was right; everyone had expected him to run. And then, sometime between Ryman announcing his candidacy and Blackburn announcing hers, he’d just dropped off the map. There hadn’t been a peep from his camp since all this had started. “What happened?”

  “His wife got sick. Staph infection leading to multiple organ failure. Can you believe it? We cure cancer, which used to be the big reason people didn’t have the chance to do things; we replace it with zombies, which become the big new reason people don’t have the chance to do things; and the world finds new ways to keep the hospitals open.” Audrey paused. “I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me. Every human life matters. Every human life should be respected.” It sounded like she was reciting a mantra, rather than espousing a long-held belief.

  I leaned as far from her as I could without getting off the cot. My hands were still tingling, and my legs felt faintly loose. I wasn’t sure they’d hold my weight just yet. Better to wait than to stand and fall. “What did you do for the CDC, Audrey?”

  “Terrible things,” she said. “And then I left them for the EIS, where I did more terrible things, but at least I did them for the right reasons. The EIS is still working for a better future, even if the CDC isn’t. Please don’t ask me what those terrible things were. I’m afraid… I’m afraid you won’t love me anymore, if you ask me, and I need you to love me right now. Even if you’re so angry you could spit, I need you to love me. It’s the only thing that’s allowing me to keep going.”

  “Oh, I’m too angry to spit right now,” I said primly. “I’m saving all my precious bodily fluids for when I might actually need them. I’m not too mad to glare, however, or to tell you that we’re going to be having some serious conversations about where we go from here, when all this is over.”

  “Since that implies we’ll both still be breathing, I’ll take it,” said Audrey. Her expression softened, becoming more like the Audrey I knew, the one who cooked me dinner and kissed my bruises and loved me, sometimes fiercely, sometimes with restraint, but always, and continuously, to the end of my days. Seeing that look on her face when she was dressed in military gear and her hair was pulled back in a practical, field-ready style made me feel off balance, like the whole world had shifted, and was never going to shift back.