Feedback by Mira Grant

wasn’t frightened. I was… unsettled, and annoyed, and highly motivated to get the hell out of there. So I didn’t flee, but I did take the stairs two at a time, and I didn’t look back until I got to the bathroom and shut myself inside. The door auto-locked, beginning the mandatory post-field decontamination process.
    Our home security system was old enough that we’d all learned not to go to the bathroom just as someone was getting back to the house: If Audrey had been seized by the need to pee as my blood test was processing, she could have been caught in the decon cycle intended for me, getting locked in the downstairs bathroom until my checks came back clean. It had happened before, and while we were a lot more careful about it now than we used to be, none of us had any doubt that it was going to happen again. It was just part of the reality of living in our situation.
    Carefully, I stripped to the skin, dropping each article of clothing into the white biohazard hamper that fed directly to the washing machine in the basement. Even my bra had to go in, which was
hell
on my lingerie. Every female Irwin I knew participated in a twice-yearly bra drive to replenish our underwear drawers. Asking people to give us money for dainties was a little grubby, but otherwise, we’d have been holding our tits whenever we had to run, thanks to the total lack of elasticity.
    Before I closed the lid on the hamper, I twisted the dial to “delicate.” It didn’t make
much
of a difference, but at least the delicate cycle used color-safe bleach, and could extend the life of my average sundress by two or three washings—long enough for me to sew a replacement.
    Sometimes I wondered if male Irwins had these problems. Most of them seemed to default to the classic “tank top or muscle tee and khaki pants” uniform, and nobody was going to notice if those got a little bleach-stained or torn or had to be replaced in the middle of a video. Female Irwins, though—we all had to have our “gimmick.” If we didn’t, we weren’t really trying, and viewers might decide we weren’t strong enough or fast enough or clever enough, let’s go check that other guy, what’s his name,
he’s
a real journalist. There was no official ruling that said tits and ass were what sold the news, but we knew the score. Humanity had made a lot of changes since the Rising. It hadn’t become a completely new beast.
    The shower turned on as soon as I stepped inside, and the stall door clicked, locking behind me. I’d stay put through a full sterilization cycle, or… actually, there was no “or.” Unless I wanted to take a sledgehammer into the shower, I’d stay put through a full sterilization cycle. Hot water blasted me, just barely this side of scalding. I closed my eyes and turned my face into the spray, enjoying this brief moment of normalcy. It wasn’t going to last. It never did—and indeed, as I finished the thought, the bleach cascaded down, blanketing me, washing away any fomite traces of Kellis-Amberlee that might have somehow been able to find their way onto my skin.
    I’m a natural redhead. Maybe that’s a cliché, but tell it to my genetics, which decided I would look better with too many freckles and hair the color of a good tikka masala. Add regular bleaching and chemical treatments to try to repair my damaged follicles, and I usually look like I spend a lot more time in the sun than would be a good idea for someone with my complexion. Skin cancer isn’t a concern anymore, thankfully. Sunburn still is, and always will be.
    Decontamination showers last a minimum of six minutes, assuming you hit all your marks and rinse all your creams and soaps away with the maximum of efficiency. I’ve been doing this long enough that I have it down to a science, and by the time the shower beeped for the first exit window, I was long past clean and