How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella by Mira Grant Read Free Book Online Page A

to center myself.”
    “I understand that but good. I got the bug when I was still in school. The other kids would tease me for this or that, and I’d go sit in the library and write these long, angst-ridden blog posts about how no one would ever understand me, and how Australia was a benighted hellhole filled with barbarians and bastards.” Olivia’s grin was sudden, and broad enough for me to see that one of her incisors was slightly chipped. “It’s all still out there, although I was posting under a closed pseudonym back then, thank God. Australia’s very strict about preserving the Internet anonymity of minors, and I was never one of those girls who felt the need to drop clues about who she really was. I went online to get away from who I really was, not encourage the horrible kids at my school to track me down and give me hell.”
    “So what made you get into the news?” I asked. “Forgive me if this seems overly personal, but that’s the sort of background I expect from a Fictional, not a Newsie.”
    “I know, right? Trouble is, I can’t make shit up to save my life. I’m the worst liar you’ll ever meet. But telling the truth, see, that’s something I’m pretty good at. I was just finishing college when After the End Times went online, with this head Newsie who everyone agreed was just mad as a cut snake about the truth. If it even smelled of a lie, she didn’t want it anywhere near her. I looked at her and said that’s it. That’s who I want to grow up to be. All I had to do from there was sort myself out so’s I’d be good enough to get the shot.” Olivia smiled again, more subdued this time. “I really do wish I’d had the chance to meet her. Georgia Mason, God. What was she like?”
    I hesitated. There were a lot of easy answers to that question. I knew them all; I’d written most of them, one resentfully given interview at a time. It can be hard to see one of your closest friends go from person to icon to ideal over the course of your lifetime—not to mention her own. She became an icon when she died for the news. She became a strange platonic ideal of herself when she came back, whether or not she had anything to do with that eventual return. But Olivia was a member of the team, even if she’d joined up after Georgia, and she deserved something better than an easy answer.
    She deserved the truth.
    “Georgia Mason was the single most headstrong person I ever met in my entire life,” I said seriously. “Once she got an idea in her head, she wasn’t going to be happy until she’d run it to ground and, if necessary, beaten it to death. I once had to talk her out of doing a six-week series on irregularities in the manufacturing standards for energy drinks. Not because they were dangerous, not because they were going to get anyone killed. Just because they didn’t match up to the rules. She mellowed out about that somewhat once she got her teeth into some real stories, but when she didn’t have something to be focused on, she’d try to focus on the entire world, all at once, and she was always astonished when it didn’t work.”
    “Was she a good friend?”
    “The best,” I said, without thinking about it. “We never met face-to-face—I never met the original, anyway, and the clone that the United States government created, while perfectly pleasant in her own right, was never the same person. Chalk it up to the trauma of dying, if you’re one of those people who believe that clones share the souls of the people that they’re cloned from. Both versions of her were passionate in their defense of the people that they allowed to get close to them, and they’d stop at nothing to help a friend. Having Georgia on your side was like…it was like knowing that you were somehow privileged to be on a first-name basis with a natural disaster. You knew that one day it was going to rage out of control and destroy everything in its path, and until that day arrived, you didn’t have to