Ringing silence answered me. I pulled my hand away from my face and sat all the way up. “George?” Still no answer. “You’re starting to freak me out here, George. What did I do to earn the silent treatment? I’m doing what you asked me to do. I’m actually stepping up to the plate. So could you stop fucking around?”

She didn’t stop fucking around. She was still there—I remember what sane felt like, and this wasn’t it; sane didn’t come with the constant low-grade awareness of George sitting at the back of my head—she just wasn’t talking. I scowled.

“Fine. If you want to play silent treatment, we’ll play silent treatment. See how you like it.” I scooched my butt along the mattress, eventually gettin to the point where my feet hit the floor. Every muscle in my legs ached. I could already tell I was going to be applying Icy-Hot and gulping aspirin like M&Ms all day. I guess that’s what you get when you go and outrun an outbreak.

“And yet somehow better than the alternative,” I muttered.

The mystery of how the door got open was answered by the stack of clothing and crap on the bookshelf just inside. I sent a silent thanks to Maggie’s in-house laundry service—silent because with her computer systems, I was vaguely afraid the program in charge of the laundry service might respond if I thanked it out loud—and began getting dressed. Even the things I’d left in the bathroom were clean, down to the rust on my ancient Swiss army knife. I shook my head. Sometimes it’s possible to be a little too efficient. It was unnerving to think of the house sending out tiny cleaning devices and using them to polish my thumb drive and pocket change to a mirror sheen.

At least nothing was missing. I shoved things into their respective pockets, fastened my belt, and sat down on the bed to put my boots on. That’s when the reality of my position finally filtered through my sleep-addled, George-less brain:

I was the only person in the room. Where the hell was Becks? I looked back at the bed, which didn’t offer any answers. From the way I’d been sprawled when I woke up, there was nothing to prove that anyone else had been in the bed to begin with. That was a little worrisome. If I’d gone even further over the edge and started hallucinating being seduced by random members of staff, the time remaining before I went totally insane was probably pretty low.