"Get back on the bike, Shaun."
Get back on the bike, Shaun.

She - they - damn. This still wasn't getting any easier, grammatically speaking. George spoke simultaneously, inside my head and from behind me. She had been doing that more recently; my hallucination syncing up with the real George. Or, the 97% real one, anyway.

It should have been irritating, and the weird, stereo effect was disorienting at times, but on the whole I found the phenomenon comforting.

It was reassuring to know that I had kept George with me as well as I could, that my haunting was somewhere in the region of 97% true to the sister I had lost. It helped, having regular reminders that I really had known her as well as I thought.

Reassuring, too, to know that whatever I had lost in that missing three percent wasn't important, not really. That ninety-seven percent was enough. Enough that my phantom George couldn't find fault with the cloned one.

I turned, taking my attention from the zombie I had been facing, but trusting that the baseball bat I held planted in the middle of its chest would keep it at bay while I flashed George - and the cameras she was wearing - what I hoped was a convincing facsimile of my classic, Irwin grin.

Once upon a time, I wouldn't have had to fake that grin. Once upon a time I wouldn't have been able to repress it. This, right here, was all I had ever wanted; dead things to poke, and my sister to watch my back. Except that when I'd lost my sister, I'd also lost the desire to be an Irwin. Zombies were less fun when you'd seen one wearing the face of the person you loved most in the world. It turned out that Shaun-the-Irwin was far harder to resurrect than George had been.

I counted in my head; one-two-three- all the way up until ten, before giving my undead playmate a rough shove with the bat, knocking it sprawling and giving me time to climb on the bike behind George and let her speed us both back to safety. The wait was crucial to maintaining the illusion that everything had returned to normal. Before the campaign, I never would have left the field as soon as George asked me to.

This charade was necessary, we had decided. If the world were to accept George's return to After the End Times - albeit as just another Newsie, since Mahir was running the show these days - then I had to return to my old, Irwin ways. I had been a constant throughout the months without George; a violent, crazy, and only occasionally lucid constant, but a constant nonetheless. George's return had been too widely broadcast for us to bring her on under an assumed name as another beta, and even after everything that has happened, she couldn't have given up the news any more than she could have given up breathing.

We decided that in order for the world to read her articles - read them for the facts that she was presenting, and not just for the thrills of reading words written by a dead girl - our whole net presence had to scream 'business as usual'. That way, we hoped, our readers would fall back on habits they had been forming since we were sixteen, and first started blogging seriously, and just read what she wrote, as though nothing had changed.

And business as usual meant I had to be an Irwin again.

We got back to the house and walked straight in, ignoring the blood testing unit we kept at the door strictly for appearances. It had taken money - a lot of it - to find an engineer willing to outfit the abandoned pre-rising house we had chosen to inhabit with only the security tech we chose to include. Yes to decontamination showers, and a unit to sterilise our clothes and equipment when we came in from the field, but no blood testing units, barring the one by the door, which wasn't linked in any way to the house security system.

My immunity had drastically reduced the risks I ran being in the field - a zombie pack could still kill me, of course, but I would never amplify. Unfortunately, it had also meant that the security tech which other people relied on to keep them safe was more likely to get me killed. While my body was in the throes of fighting off an infection of live Kellis-Amberlee, there was a good chance that I would test temporarily positive on a standard blood test. Immunity to zombies didn't also give me immunity to overzealous security systems, or the chance that regular positive test results coming from this address would start ringing alarm bells that we didn't want being rung.

So we'd found an engineer who needed cash and couldn't care less whether a couple of idiots wanted to design themselves a cosy little death trap to play happy families in. It had cost a lot to find him, and even more to encourage him to keep his mouth shut about it afterwards, but it had been worth it. It still cost, in fact. A monthly payment in excess of the annual operating budget of After the End Times, but worth every penny if it meant that we could live in peace.

Not that we paid it, we couldn't have, but presidential gratitude has its advantages, and neither George nor I had any qualms about taking every penny Ryman offered us. After all, we had paid in blood for his freedom and that of his family.

We sat back to back, leaning against each other as we edited our footage of the day. I had put a lot of thought into the design of our desks; where once we had been content enough, as long as we could hear each other, and had kept separate desks in our adjoining rooms at the Mason's house, my time without George had done its damage, and these days I tried to stay in physical contact with her as much as I could.

She handled my clingyness graciously enough, although she had never been particularly cuddly, and she hadn't complained when I'd created our huge, horseshoe-shaped desk, with a single circular seat in the middle where we could sit with our backs pressed together as we worked.

You think I don't know what you're doing?
"Of course you know," I muttered, "you're inside my head."
Only partly. Don't you think I know you well enough to have figured it out? Even the part of me which doesn't have the power to read your mind?
"Talking to me again?" George asked absently from behind me. "You know, that works better when I can actually hear what you're saying."

She knew I was talking to the other George, the one in my head, but she didn't seem to mind. Both Georges had begun to refer to each other as though they were one entity, and I had no idea how I should feel about that. Those doctors that I'd seen, in the first, awful months after George's death, had talked about integrating that rogue part of my mind which thought of itself as my sister. They had regarded integration as an essential step on the road to stability; I don't think this was quite the sort of integration they were talking about, though.

I could guess the reason that George was so intent on claiming my haunting as her own; she had never stopped worrying about that three percent, that missing jigsaw piece in her identity which I had come to terms with almost as soon as she had returned to me, but which I could tell still bothered her.

The George in my head - how much did she count for? A hundredth? A fiftieth? If the CDC had measured my brain, matched it against their perfect copy of my dead sister, the copy they had measured my George against, and given her a score of ninety-seven out of a hundred, would they find my phantom George in there somewhere? And if they did, how much space did she occupy? Could it be as much as three percent? If George accepted my phantom as a part of her, albeit a part not resident in her own mind, would that tip the scales and make her enough?

She had always been enough for me, but I was an Irwin, or had been. She was a Newsie, and truth had always held a different meaning for her. There was no such thing as 'enough'. She wasn't completely true, and she knew it, and the part of her that still saw the world in black and white, even after all this time, couldn't regard not-completely-true as anything except false.

I realised I hadn't replied to George, to either of her, and made a vague noise of agreement which would serve as a response to both her questions.

"What are we talking about?" George asked.
"You're telling me that I'm an idiot,"
"You are," You are, she said evenly, her voice in my head a scant half second behind the one in my ears.
"Thanks"
"Any particular reason why I'm pointing this out to you?"
"You're saying that I'm dumb for thinking that you haven't figured out why I'm so clingy these days."
"You mean, aside from my extreme irresistability?"
"I'm pretty sure that's not a word, George. Yes, aside from that."
"Shaun..." her voice was serious now, "yes. I know what you're doing. Or I think I do. You think that if we spend enough time in close proximity to each other, you'll be able to give me your immunity."
Told you so.
"You gave it to me in the first place, why shouldn't I return the favour?"
"That took years, Shaun. I developed retinal KA when I was a child. Besides, what if it only works on children? My immune system is only a couple of years old, but it lives in an adult body. Maybe it can't learn from outside antibodies the way yours did."
I felt my hands clench into fists, and realised with a curious detachment that I was angry. I'd never been angry at this George, not once since she'd come back.
Maybe this means we're finally getting back to normal.
"Shut up, George." I snapped, not sure which one of them I was speaking to.
"I'm not saying you shouldn't try -" she started, but I cut her off.
"Good, because I wouldn't listen if you did."
"I just don't want you to get your hopes up. If anything happens to me..." She didn't seem to be able to finish. I was glad, because even hearing her say that much made me feel like I'd swallowed a lump of ice.
If anything happens to me, I need to trust that you'll do what you did before, and make sure I can't hurt anyone.
"I can't do that again." George was used to my conversational non-sequiteurs by now, and it didn't take a genius to work out what I meant.
"The last thought I had before I died was how lucky I was to have you there to pull the trigger." I could hear tears in her voice, and I knew that if I dared to turn around and face her that I would see them on her cheeks.

I'd never made George cry before she'd died, and not just because she hadn't actually been able to then. We'd never really disagreed about much, except for the Masons, and I think she'd known that if I'd seen her crying over them, I would have done something drastic. If she ever did, she made sure I never saw it.
I said nothing.
"If it happens again, I need to know I can trust you."
"I guess you're not that lucky anymore."
"I'd do it for you."
"That's easy to say; you know you'll never have to."
"I still would."
"I killed you, George. I stood there, and I pulled the trigger, and I watched your blood dry on the walls of our van. You died, and I wanted to go with you, but I didn't. I made myself live for you, I made myself live each day without you so that your death wouldn't be for nothing, and then some pretty blonde doctor wearing Buffy's clothes told me that you would have come back to me, and I had to live with the knowledge that I'd murdered you."
"You did the right thing, Shaun."
"The right thing? I killed you!"
"Do you think I could have forgiven myself, or you, if you hadn't? You were trapped in the van with me, Shaun, and I was amplifying. Could you have held me off? You don't know how long it would have taken me to get better. If I'd woken up in that van with your blood on my hands knowing that you'd died because you hadn't loved me enough to put that bullet through my spine, I never would have forgiven you."
"But you'd have lived."
"I lived anyway. I'm right here, Shaun." I still wasn't facing her, but she had turned to face me. She wrapped her arms around me, and laid her head on my shoulder. I could feel her tears drying on my neck. "I couldn't have lived without you."
"I had to."
"I know, and I'm so sorry. I don't want to fight right now. Can we talk about this another time?"
"There's no point talking about it. I won't change my mind."
I could change it for you.
I didn't bother replying to that. Even if she could, George had too much integrity to do something like that. I was still angry; I had to force my fists to unclench so that I could get back to editing my footage. I wanted to storm off and be alone for a while, but I couldn't; she needed my antibodies too badly for me to spend time away from her when it wasn't utterly necessary.
I'll give you some space. George faded until I could easily ignore her presence in the back of my head, and the other George let go of me and turned back around to get on with her work. It was as much distance as I could stand, and I carried on editing my footage, letting the relative solitude soothe my temper.