Deadline

“You don’t know,” I said. “We could have claimed there was something wrong with the test. It’s happened before.”

“How often?”

I didn’t answer her.

George sighed. “Three times, Shaun. With a top-of-the-line test, three times. In all three cases, there was proof of mechanical failure—and in two of the cases, the people were killed anyway. Their families won their suits on the basis of secondary testing units. We both know what a secondary test would have shown in my case. There’s no point in pretending that we don’t.”

That was too much. The blood flickered back into visibility a second before I spun around, feeling my fingernails cutting into my palms as I shouted, “For f**k’s sake, Georgia, there was a chance!” The empty chair would fix it. I’d see the empty chair, and she’d go back to being a voice in my head, just a voice in my head, because she was dead, I killed her. I just had to see the empty chair.

Instead, I saw George.

She was sitting in her customary place at the counter, her chair turned to face me. The computer monitor behind her framed her head like a technological halo, and the position, the lighting, all of it was so familiar that I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh, scream, or thank God that I’d finally gone all the way insane. She was wearing her usual fashion-impaired ensemble: black jacket, white dress shirt, black slacks. Only her face was wrong—no, not even her entire face; just her eyes. Her sunglasses were missing, and her eyes were the clear, undistorted coppery-brown that I remembered from the years before the progression of her retinal Kellis-Amberlee turned her irises into outlines.

I stared at her. She ignored it, the way she always did when she wasn’t willing to wait for me to catch up. “Was,” George agreed. “Not is. There was a chance. But we’re past that now, aren’t we? We’re way, way past that.”

My mouth went dry, and the room, already unsteady, started to spin. “George…?”

“Glad to see you haven’t suffered any major head injuries lately,” she said, wistfully, and smiled.

I kept staring until she sighed and said, “It’s not like we have all day, you know. They’re going to come looking for you sooner or later—probably sooner—and you really don’t want them to find you like this.”

“They’re used to me talking to myself,” I said quietly.

“To yourself, yes; to me, no.” George shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, we both know that I’m not really here. There’s no such thing as ghosts. But if you’re actually looking at me, they’re going to have a harder time taking you seriously, and you have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do.”

I decided against asking how “we” could do anything, if we both knew that she wasn’t really here. If I did that, she might decide to stop talking to me altogether, and then I really would go crazy. The kind of crazy that puts you in a rubber room, rather than chasing conspiracies and running a news site. I forced a smile of my own, wondering how believable it would be, and said, “It’s good to see you.”

“I’d say it’s good to be seen, but it’s not,” said George, looking at me steadily. “Just how crazy are you?”

“On a scale of one to ten?” I bit back a laugh. “Crazy enough that we’re having this conversation. How’s that for a starter?”

“Can you function?” She leaned forward, bracing her elbows against her knees. It was such a familiar gesture that my chest tightened, making it hard to breathe. “The way I see it, this is either where you man up and stop letting yourself freak out, or where you admit that you’re too cracked to do the job and hand things over to somebody else. It’s your call. You’re the one who isn’t actually dead.”

I winced a little at the word “dead.” “Can you not—?”

“Can I not what? Call myself dead? It’s true, you dumb-ass. You’re talking to me because I represent the part of you that still has a f**king clue how bad things are going to get. You’ve been f**king around since Tate decided to play martyr, and I’m tired of it. The team needs you. I need you. You can either step up, or you can step down, but you can’t keep treading water like this.”

She would have gotten better, whispered Kelly.

“Be quiet,” I muttered.

“You’re only saying that because you know I’m right,” said George implacably. Apparently, the voices in my head couldn’t hear each other. That was just another slice of crazy pie. “God, you never could take an honest critique. You would never have made it as a Newsie.”

“Then it’s a good thing I never tried to.” My knees were shaking. I sagged back against the counter on my side of the van, resting my weight on my hands. It was as much to keep myself from trying to grab hold of my hallucination as it was to keep from falling over. “How do you expect me to step up for something like this? This wasn’t the plan.”

“No, the plan was to make me do it.” She looked at me solemnly, alien eyes wide and grave in that familiar face. “We always knew one of us was going to be finishing things alone. Maybe we didn’t know why, exactly, but we always knew this would happen ect how.” Her solemnity broke, replaced by the half smile that meant she didn’t want to be as amused as she was. “I have to admit, even when I was being self-important, I never thought they’d put ‘assassinated to conceal a massive political conspiracy’ on my Wall entry. I always figured it’d be something less… I don’t know. Something less your department.”