Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

I sneezed again before sniffling and saying, “That’s really thoughtful of him.”

  “He’s a thoughtful guy,” said Nathan, starting for the nearest escalator—which was running, I noted. No matter how many buildings around here might go dark, this one had power to spare. The rail was shaped like a never-ending rope of licorice, which was a nice, if surreal, touch.

  Once we were both standing on the moving walkway, Nathan sobered and said, “Fishy’s been working with Mom for a while, but he wasn’t able to convince his wife not to get an implant. Mom says he experienced a profound disassociation from reality when she started trying to eat him—the wife, not Mom—and I think she’s probably right.”

  “Dr. Cale, not the wife,” I guessed.

  Nathan nodded. “Yeah. Fishy thinks of the rest of us as… well, characters in a uniquely immersive video game environment. That’s how he’s coping at this point, and as long as he isn’t trying to shoot people for extra points, we don’t press too hard. He’ll come around to reality when he feels like he’s ready.”

  “Assuming reality is any better,” I said softly.

  “Yeah.” Nathan sighed. “There is that.”

  We both quieted then, and I looked curiously around as the escalator carried us through the open-air lobby—where people in lab coats and sweaters were gathered in small groups, some clutching coffee cups like their lives depended on it, others gesturing wildly with empty hands as they tried to get some vital point of science across. I recognized some of them from Dr. Cale’s lab. Others were new. Members of both groups turned to watch as the escalator carried us onward, toward the second floor.

  I shrunk back against Nathan, who put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We’ve gained some people. Mom needed the labor, and they needed a safe place.”

  “Right,” I said weakly, and tried to focus on the faux Candyland furnishings and bright, juvenile murals on the walls. I’d never been here before, in either of my incarnations. Sally’s family had been too middle class and respectable to have taken her there as a child. All the family photo albums were focused on Disneyland and Hawaii and other places that were probably a lot of fun for her, even if she looked sullen and annoyed in more than half the pictures. Sally would probably have rolled her eyes at Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory. I was amazed. The thought that a place like this could exist had never crossed my mind.

  It had probably looked a little different before the disaster. Someone had nailed plywood sheets across the lowest of the lobby windows, and all the lobby doors, and only the fact that those sheets were painted in candy colors kept them from being glaringly out of place. The chandelier—a dizzying confection of giant peppermints and gumdrops—was draped in surveillance equipment and wireless boosters, keeping the entire building connected to whatever was left of the Internet.

  The lobby passed out of view as the escalator finally reached the second floor, passing through another cheerfully painted tunnel before terminating at a landing covered in carpet so wildly patterned in swoops and swirls that it made my stomach churn if I looked at it for too long. There was also an elevator, which Nathan walked toward and pressed the call button. Going down. I blinked at him.

  “Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory is a weird sort of hybrid building,” he explained, motioning for me to join him. “It was designed half as a working confectionary company, and half as a theme park that kept the rest afloat by selling tour packages and ‘birthday party extravaganzas.’ There’s a whole floor upstairs dedicated to the party rooms. They’re pretty ridiculous, and they make the rest of the place look like it has a subdued color scheme.”

  I blinked again. “I’m having trouble picturing that,” I admitted.

  “I’ll take you for a tour later on,” he said. “Anyway, the place is pretty clever in its use of space. There was a false factory set up for tours, so that people could see candy being made the way it is in the movies—one piece at a time, being hand-wrapped and put into whimsical boxes—and then there was the real factory floor, underneath the rest of the building. That’s where Mom set up her lab. She said it would help her get back to her roots. Also, it’s the only place aside from the cookie garden in the upstairs party rooms that’s fully ADA compliant, and she wanted to be able to get around her own lab.”

  “That makes sense.” The elevator arrived, and we stepped inside. I was obscurely relieved to see that it didn’t have glass walls. Our descent into children’s literature was not yet complete.

  The elevator counted off the floors: first the lobby we had passed through on our way to the elevator bay—not a very efficient building design—and then two lower floors before it binged reassuringly and opened its doors, revealing the latest incarnation of Dr. Cale’s lab. It was, as always, an oasis of chaos masquerading as calm. The various people who rushed back and forth with quick, meaningful steps all wore lab coats over scruffy jeans and T-shirts. A few of them glanced in our direction, nodding at Nathan before they continued on their way, having apparently written me off as a nonentity. I frowned as I stepped out of the elevator.

  “Has there been a total staff turnover?”

  “No, but most of the people who’ve been working with Mom for a while have moved on to heading their own research groups rather than doing grunt work,” said Nathan, following me out of the elevator. The doors slid shut behind him. “It’s amazing how many leads we have to follow, and how few of them are leading us anywhere. You’ll see more familiar faces when it gets a little later in the day. There’s not much motivation to keep really normal hours.”

  “Right.” I took Nathan’s hand, half automatically, and looked around. This had been the working factory level of the building: as such, industrial gray and sterile hospital white still had a place here, rather than being painted over with a hundred shades of candy swirl. The floor was uncarpeted tile, and posters covered the walls. I couldn’t read most of them, thanks to my dyslexia, but I knew enough to recognize the D. symbogenesis parasite. It was pictured at various stages of its life cycle, which made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, like I was seeing my own naked baby pictures held up for the perusal of strangers.

  Other posters blazed safety warnings in large red letters that swam in and out of focus when I squinted at them, accompanied by handy pictograms showing the right way to deal with a chemical spill or put out a lab fire. Still others were printed in blocks of dense text that blurred like fingerprints when I tried to make sense of them. I held tighter to Nathan’s hand, aware of how out of place I felt, and even more aware that this place should have grown up around me. I should have been here from the beginning, influencing the shape of the rooms, helping them hang those posters. I felt like I had missed out on something essential, a chance to finally be at the core of my own story, and I wasn’t sure that was the kind of chance that would ever come around again.

  We were halfway across the room when a narrow face topped by a roughly cut shock of disarrayed brown hair poked out from behind a filing cabinet, moving so slowly that it seemed like an attempt not to startle me. I stopped walking. Nathan did the same. I met the face’s eyes, matching their anxious look with an equally anxious expression of my own. The face’s owner inched hesitantly into view: a lanky, underfed young man in a lab coat, T-shirt, and jeans, but without shoes on, which made him seem faintly out of place even though he’d been living in labs like this one for as long as he’d been alive. Like me, he was a stranger even in the space that should have been his own.

  He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. In that moment, in that vast, negative space that had opened between us, neither one of us knew how to react.

  Nathan let go of my hand.

  Untethered, I could have frozen. I would have, once… but I had led an army of sleepwalkers away from the people I cared about. I had made a deal with the devil to escape from USAMRIID, and I had crawled through a vent system to win my freedom. I could do this. I took a step forward. “Hi, Adam,” I said.

  “Hi…” He stopped,
swallowed, and tried again: “Hi, Sal. Are you really you? You’re not somebody else using you like a car, and I can trust you, and you won’t go away again?”

  “I think I’m really me,” I said. “People seem to enjoy cutting my head open these days, but I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if they’d made it so that I turned into somebody else. Is that even a thing that people can do?” Adam was the second person to ask that same question, and it was starting to unnerve me.

  Adam’s whole face lit up. “Sal!” he cried, and flung himself bodily across the floor separating us, slamming into me with a force that nearly knocked me off my still-aching legs. I managed to clasp my arms around him, and Nathan put a hand against my back, lending some stability to our little heap of limbs and frantic embraces. Adam pressed his face into the side of my neck. There was nothing romantic about the gesture: it was the blind, desperate struggle of a rescued dog trying to connect with its pack mates. I understood the language his body was speaking, and mine spoke it in return, clinging all the harder as I realized that I had never expected this reunion to occur. Part of me had already mourned for Adam, for this lab, for any chance of having what I considered a normal life ever again.

  But not for Nathan. I had never mourned for Nathan, because the part of me responsible for managing the boundary line between the human world and the hot warm dark knew that losing him on top of everything else would have thrown me so deep into the darkness that I would never have come up again. I admired my own ability to care for myself, and I clung to my brother, and I cried.

  Finally, after enough time had passed that each of us was confident that the other person would continue existing even without skin contact to keep them in the world, Adam started to unlatch his arms. I did the same, letting him go and stepping backward, into the comforting solidity of Nathan’s supporting hand. He wouldn’t let me fall. No matter how bad things got, Nathan would never, never let me fall.

  “Hi, Sal,” said Adam, reaching up to wipe the tears from his cheeks before he beamed at me. “You came back. I didn’t think you were going to, but you did.”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

  Adam shrugged, visibly dismissing the delay. It had taken a long time, but that was over now: that was done, and I was finally home where I belonged. That was all that really mattered as far as he was concerned. “Mom said you were coming, but I wasn’t sure whether she knew for sure that you would still be you. Or still be alive. You could have been like the cousins that they bring in from the field sometimes. They’re not here anymore.”

  I glanced at Nathan. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “We’ve been harvesting sleepwalkers from the local population,” Nathan said, and to his credit, he looked both sad and determined as he spoke. “We have to know how the implants are mutating, and unfortunately, that’s the only way for us to track what’s happening out there. We try not to hurt them more than we absolutely have to. But we don’t bring back live specimens.”

  Intellectually, I knew that was the right way to go about things. After all, sleepwalkers were irrationally hungry and capable of pushing their stolen bodies to dangerous extremes. Bringing them into the lab alive would endanger everyone. At the same time, these were my cousins, and I felt strange about the idea that we were going out and collecting them as scientific specimens when they weren’t actually hurting anyone.

  “Oh,” I said softly.

  Adam’s smile returned, weaker than before, as he moved closer and reached for my hand. I let him take it, appreciating the feeling of his fingers lacing through mine. He was smarter than me in some ways. Dr. Cale had been in charge of his schooling, and hadn’t been trying to make him think that he was human. He was better-read than I was, and educated at a much higher level overall. He understood science stuff that went straight over my head, leaving me puzzled and surrounded by people who might as well have been speaking Greek. In other ways, mostly having to do with social interactions, he was a little behind me. He liked to remind himself that he had skin. The best and easiest way to do that was with hugs and holding hands.

  Nathan took my other hand. I looked from one of them to the other, listening to the drums that pounded in my ears and considering how different they were, and how similar. Dr. Cale’s two sons.

  “This way,” said Adam, and—tugging on my hand—started leading me deeper into the lab. I let him, holding tight to Nathan so that he would come along with us as we stepped into the strangely familiar, strangely modified maze of free-standing work stations, cubicle walls, and tiny research bays that Dr. Cale and her people had carried with them from the lab back in Clayton. As we walked, I finally started recognizing people. Not everyone, but a researcher here and a lab assistant there would seem familiar, and then they would stop what they were doing to straighten up and stare at me like they were looking at a ghost. These were the people who had already written me off as lost forever, and were now faced with the fact that sometimes dead things aren’t so dead after all.

  We stepped around a corner and into a small “meeting room” carved out of the room’s wide expanse by the careful placement of filing cabinets, desks, and bright pink cubicle walls that had probably been stolen from the administrative offices somewhere in the building. Dr. Cale was there, transcribing something in a small notebook. We stopped. Nathan cleared his throat.

  “We found her,” he said.

  Dr. Cale raised her head. For a moment—no more—her expression was completely unguarded, and I could look into her unshuttered eyes and see just how exhausted she really was. There were small wrinkles in the skin around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there a month ago. Then the walls came crashing down, and it was smiling Dr. Cale once more, as inscrutable and untouchable as ever.

  “Hello, Sal. Did you enjoy your vacation?” she asked. “You could have sent a postcard or something, you know. Just to let us know that you were alive out there, and that we could stop worrying quite so much about you.”

  My hands were still full, with Nathan clasping one and Adam clasping the other, and so I just shrugged and said, “Sherman wouldn’t give me a stamp.”

  To my surprise, Dr. Cale laughed. “Oh, that’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that. What happened?”

  “Um. From the beginning, or from when I woke up in the empty house where I found the cellphone, or…? There’s a lot to tell, and I don’t really know where I’m supposed to start telling it.”

  “She’s tired, Mom,” said Nathan protectively. His hand tightened on mine. “Sherman’s been taking tissue samples from her.”

  “Both of me,” I interjected. Nathan and Dr. Cale both turned in my direction. I flushed red. “I mean, Sherman cut my head open, and he didn’t do the best job of sealing it back up, and the only thing I can think of that he might have wanted from in there is a tissue sample from my original body.”

  “He could have taken several segments from your posterior end without interfering with your synaptic interface with the human body,” said Dr. Cale. “Do you have any idea why he would want to do that?”

  “He said that he didn’t know what I was originally tailored to do, since there were holes in SymboGen’s records, and said that since most worms were designed to have a purpose—not just making their host healthier, but actually serving a purpose in their bodies—a lot of chimera can be something special. Like he can induce biological trances in chimera and sleepwalkers just by touching us.” Even saying that made me feel unsafe and unclean, like I could summon Sherman with the mere admission of what he’d done to me. To us—Ronnie wasn’t exactly thrilled by the way he’d been treated, and I suspected that he wasn’t the only one bridling at Sherman’s behavior. “So maybe there’s something in my genetic makeup that made it easier for me to integrate with Sally. Whatever that something is, he wants it.”

  “You need to tell her, Mom,” said Nathan, his gaze returning to Dr. Cale. He still didn’t let go of my hand. “If Sh
erman’s been taking samples…”

  “Tell me what?” I looked between them, frowning. “Is everyone okay?”

  “Not by a long shot,” said Dr. Cale. “Millions of people have died worldwide, and millions more are going to die before this is over. But I don’t think that’s what Nathan meant.”

  “It’s not,” he said flatly. “Tell her.”

  Dr. Cale took a deep breath, her ever-present smile fading. She looked down at her hands for a moment, and when she raised her eyes to me again, that sense of age was back, like she was growing older at an impossible rate. “I’m not going to apologize for what I told Daisy and Fang to do,” she said. “I will, however, apologize for acting without your full consent. Time was short, for a lot of reasons, and proved to be even shorter than I had feared. What we did was necessary.”

  Just like that, everything fell into place. I dropped both Nathan and Adam’s hands as I reached back to feel the bandages at the base of my skull, held down with strips of tape that would pull and tangle when I tried to remove them from my hair. Suddenly, that seemed very unimportant. “You took samples from me when you were repairing the arteries in my skull,” I said softly, the feeling of violation growing soft and warm in my middle. “That’s why you were so willing to help get me into a proper surgical theater. Because you wanted sterile samples of my body.”

  “It’s not the only reason,” said Dr. Cale defensively. “I wanted you to be safe. You’re my daughter and my future daughter-in-law all wrapped into one, and your health is important to me.”

  “Didn’t SymboGen have a slogan that sounded a lot like that?” I straightened, pulling myself as taut as a bowstring. “You touched me.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Your people work for you. You told them what to do. You gave the order. You touched me.” My voice came out so cold that it sounded alien to my own ears, like it was coming from someone else’s mouth. I turned to Nathan. “Did you know about this?”

  “No,” he said. “Not until we made it back to the lab, and by that point, you were missing and I was out of my mind with worry.” He glared daggers at his mother as he spoke. “I wasn’t really involved in the operation, since that isn’t my field. I didn’t realize what they were doing, or I would have stopped them.”