Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  That faint shabbiness that I had noticed when he first entered the factory was only highlighted by his helpless posture and utter lack of affectation. He didn’t know he was being watched, and so he didn’t bother putting on a show. That, more than anything, told me how dire his situation really was. I’d known that he had to be desperate to come to Dr. Cale, but I hadn’t known how desperate. Bit by bit, I was coming to understand.

  Bare feet silent on the tiled floor, I walked across the room and stopped a foot or so away from the plastic barrier that kept him contained. It had been intended as a quarantine zone, keeping the staff from catching anything nasty that we brought in from the outside. It was serving its intended purpose very well.

  I could only look at the man without speaking to him for so long. I lifted one hand and slapped it flat against the plastic. Dr. Banks jumped, his head snapping up. There was genuine terror in his expression, like I had somehow become the most frightening thing in his universe. I couldn’t decide how that made me feel.

  The terror cleared, replaced first by confusion and then by paternal warmth, the old, familiar masks sliding back into place and locking away whatever he was really feeling. “Sally,” he said, starting to smile. “I knew you wouldn’t turn against me. You’re a good girl. You always have been. You—”

  “Is Tansy really alive?”

  My question sliced across whatever he was saying and rendered him temporarily mute, capable of nothing more complex than staring at me. His smile twisted, turning into even more of a mockery than it normally was. Then it died completely, leaving him as blank-faced as one of the sleepwalkers he had helped to create.

  “I don’t see why you’re coming in here and interrogating me,” he said. “The woman who runs this place has already made it quite clear that she’s not willing to negotiate in good faith. I have to say, Sally, I thought better of you.”

  “Are you where she gets it?” I asked.

  He blinked at me, expression flickering again. He wasn’t adjusting well to my changes of topic. Good. I wasn’t here to make him comfortable. “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

  “Dr. Cale does that—she uses people’s names a lot, like she’s afraid that they’re going to forget who they are. I didn’t think about the way you always used to do that to me, but you did, and you still do. Are you where she gets that? Or did you get it from her?” They were like engineered organisms themselves, weren’t they? Every human was the result of social and cultural recombination, picking up a turn of phrase here, an idea or a preconception there, the same way bacteria picked up and traded genes. Nothing was purely its own self. Nothing would ever want to be.

  “I got it from her,” he said, still sounding wary, still examining the topic for signs that it was a trick. “Surrey used to have difficulty with names. She could identify a species of slime mold from a single cell, but damned if she could remember which of our TAs was Paul and which was Jeffrey. Someone told her that she could reinforce names in her head if she said them at least three times a conversation—said it would make people trust her more, too, since it came off as a personal touch. Like she actually gave a damn about them. She started doing it, and damned if it didn’t work. Everyone loved her. Sweet little Surrey, overcoming her difficulties to become the darling of the genetics department.”

  “So you started doing it because you wanted them to trust you,” I said.

  He grinned, showing me his teeth. I managed not to flinch. “I did, and damned if it didn’t work again. People like it when you seem to take an interest in them. All sorts of people. Powerful people. I could get anything I wanted, and all I had to do was remember names and children and anniversaries. You should have seen me in my element. You would have, eventually, if things hadn’t gotten bad on us. I was going to really enjoy showing you to the world, Sally.”

  Showing me to the world, not showing the world to me: I was an experiment to him, and I always would be, no matter how much I grew or how much my understanding of the world improved. I could save the human race and I would still be nothing more than a freak of science to the man who made me.

  “It might have worked on me, too, if you hadn’t messed it up,” I said. I couldn’t make this too easy. He wouldn’t believe it if it was too easy. “You’re not as good at this as you think you are.”

  Dr. Banks blinked at me. He looked briefly, utterly baffled, and I would have felt bad for him if I hadn’t known him so well. He deserved a lot of things from me. None of them were my sympathy. “What do you mean?”

  “My name isn’t ‘Sally.’ It’s never been Sally. She died. She was… she was like a canary in a coal mine. She died because if she hadn’t, I would never have been able to live.” Sally’s death had been as inevitable as my birth. Dr. Banks had known what I was from the beginning. He should have been sending up the alarm the day I opened my eyes. Instead, he stood by and let me make myself into an individual. Because of him, everybody applauded me, rather than recognizing me as the symptom that I was. They should have begun shoring their defenses the moment that I woke up. They should have been building dams and laying in supplies by the time I learned to walk. And they hadn’t done any of those things. Because of him.

  “Now you and I both know that’s not true.” His smile had too many teeth. “Do you really think that just because you’ve shut off all the pieces of you that remember who you were, that you’re not that girl anymore? You can’t buy a used pair of shoes and announce that they’re new just because you want them to be. They’ll always be used shoes. You’ll always be a girl playing at being something different, at least until you admit who and what you are.”

  I gawped at him for a few seconds, unable to formulate words, before I managed to stammer, “That—that’s not true! You know that’s not true! None of the doctors ever found any trace of Sally in my head. She flatlined, she’s gone.”

  “Coma patients still hear. People in clinical brain death still wake up. The human brain is a big, complicated thing, Sally, and one day you’re going to flip the wrong switch or press the wrong button and hand the whole thing back over to the girl you used to be. When that day comes, who do you think she’s going to trust? The people who loved a tapeworm wearing her skin like a suit, or the man who kept trying to reach her—the man who kept using her name?” His smile dimmed a bit, lips closing, and I was relieved. There was only so much I could handle. “I call you Sally because it’s your name. It may not make you trust me now, but it’s going to let me own you later.”

  What he was saying couldn’t be true. I had no memory of my life before the accident. Therapists and neurologists had searched for years for signs that Sally was still with me, and they hadn’t found anything, while Ronnie provided strong evidence that the implants carried memories of their own, however paper-thin and faded. I wasn’t Sally Mitchell. Sally Mitchell was dead. I was my own person. I was Sal. I was—

  I was doing exactly what he wanted me to do. I took a deep breath, bared my teeth in a smile that any chimera would have recognized as an outright threat, and asked, for the second time, “Is Tansy really alive?”

  “I think we’re getting off the topic here, don’t you?”

  “Since the topic I came here to discuss with you was Tansy, no, we’re not. We’re getting back on the topic, and I’m not going to let you distract me again.” I glared at him, trying to look fierce and confident and like the kind of person who couldn’t be thrown off balance by accusations of surviving memory buried deep in my brain. It wasn’t easy. For someone who wanders through life pretending to belong to a species that isn’t hers, I’m a surprisingly bad actress. “Is she alive? Yes or no.”

  “Surrey has been a very bad influence on you, hasn’t she? I really do wish you’d chosen to stay with me, Sally. We could have been an incredible team, you and I. Brains and beauty and a compliant little display model to convince the government to go along with the next stage of human evolution.”

  “Yes or no, Dr. Banks.
”

  He paused, tilting his head to the side and frowning. Then he sighed, and nodded. “Yes, she’s alive. Sedated and pretty beat up, but breathing, and both parts of her are there. My Anna girl is the result of transplanting some fairly mature proglottid segments. We had to remove a lot of material to get to them, since the proglottid segments near the tail of the strobila were basically just sacks of eggs. Useful for some applications. Not for this one.”

  Hearing him talk about Tansy’s anatomy—and hence my own—in such coldly clinical terms made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t quite define, only squirm away from, that horrible hot/cold slush still rocking in my belly until I felt like I was going to throw up at any moment. I forced myself to hold my ground, and demanded, “Where is she?”

  He smiled again. This time he didn’t show his teeth, but somehow, that didn’t make things any better. Not when his words contained all the teeth his smile was missing.

  “Haven’t you figured that out by now?” he asked. “She’s back at my office, waiting to die. And if you don’t tell me how to save Anna, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

  That was it: that was where my ability to cope came to an end. I almost felt it snap. I didn’t say another word. I just turned and fled the room, leaving Dr. Banks shouting after me, unanswered.

  Nathan pushed away from the wall when I came barreling into the hall, flinging myself into his arms and sobbing. He answered by closing his arms around me and holding me close, waiting for me to cry myself out. He didn’t say a word. Sometimes, words weren’t a good thing; they got in the way.

  Maybe the sleepwalkers had the right of it. All their communication was pheromonal. There was no room for confusion or misunderstanding, because there were no words. Sadly, Nathan was human, and I was close enough to human, and we couldn’t communicate unless I opened my mouth. I pushed myself away from him, wiping my eyes with the side of my hand, and said, “Tansy’s still Tansy.”

  “What?”

  “Anna was made using her genetic material, but he didn’t kill the original host, and I don’t think he extracted the entire implant from her brain tissue. Tansy’s Tansy. If we can get her back to your mom, she might be able to save her. She might be able to… to put her together again.”

  “Did he say where she was?”

  This was the bad part. I hesitated, and his face fell as he realized that whatever I was going to say next, it wasn’t going to make him happy. My next words only confirmed that: “She’s at SymboGen.”

  “Sal… SymboGen is in San Francisco. There’s a bridge and a bay between us and them, not to mention the quarantine. We had to stop supply runs weeks ago, because it’s too locked down. He was only able to get here because USAMRIID was helping him. There’s no way we’ll be able to get all the way into the city, evade the gangs of sleepwalkers in the streets, get into the building, find her, get her out, and get back here. There’s just no way.”

  “I know,” I said miserably. Then I took a deep breath, and continued: “But I still want to tell your mother. I think she should be the one who gets to decide whether or not this is a thing we’re going to do.”

  “You know what she’s going to say. She’s going to say it’s too dangerous.”

  Maybe that was what she would have done if it had been me in San Francisco. But if it had been me, it would have been Nathan advocating for action, saying that they could find a way to cross the Bay if that was the only thing keeping them from bringing me home. “Impossible” had a way of changing shapes depending on what was at stake. Dr. Cale had cried when she thought that Tansy was genuinely lost to us. Real tears, not the sort of thing that a person did for show.

  “Tansy is her daughter. She should have a say, and I want to tell her anyway,” I said. “I’m going to tell her anyway.”

  Nathan nodded, and together we turned and walked back across the lab, past the empty workstations, toward the place where Dr. Cale was struggling to save the future.

  The sound of shouting reached us long before Anna’s bed came into view. I couldn’t make out any words at first, but it sounded like at least three people were yelling at each other, each providing slightly contradictory instructions. We came around the last corner and beheld what looked like a small, tightly controlled riot surrounding Anna, who wasn’t moving. Adam and Fang were both running IV lines, while Daisy was injecting something into Anna’s arm. Two more technicians I didn’t recognize immediately were doing arcane things with beeping machines. Dr. Cale was sitting back from the whole scene, her hands folded in her lap, somehow managing to effortlessly project the impression of absolute control. Not a one of the people in front of her would sneeze without her permission, and she knew it. This was her world.

  And I was about to disrupt it. I sped up, moving into her field of vision. She blinked at me, expression turning briefly perplexed. Then she waved for me to come closer. The others kept working, too preoccupied with the effort of keeping Anna alive to pay attention to anything that wasn’t a direct command.

  The hot/cold slush in my belly was beginning to melt, becoming a warm, solid mass of resignation. Resignation was the one emotion that could win out over everything else, because once it was fully formed, nothing else could get past it. Not even fear.

  “What’s going on, Sal?” she asked.

  “Tansy’s still in there.” I had tried to think of ways to soften the news while Nathan and I were walking across the building. I hadn’t managed to find any. This wasn’t the sort of thing that could be broken gently, or explained in a way that didn’t change everything. “Dr. Banks has her body on life support back at SymboGen, and he didn’t remove her primary segment. I want to go get her. Tell me I can go get her.”

  Dr. Cale stared at me, so stunned that even the pretense of serenity dropped away, leaving her slack-jawed and bewildered. I looked defiantly back, waiting for her to raise some objection that I could counter.

  Sure enough… “It’s too dangerous,” she said. “We don’t know where Sherman and his people are. They could decide to take you back, and we’d have no way of fighting them off. Or the army could step in. Or you could be attacked by sleepwalkers.”

  “So I take Fang or Fishy with me,” I said. “I wasn’t suggesting I go alone, just that I go. I don’t think you have anyone who knows SymboGen better than I do at this point. I understand the layout of the building, and I can find her.”

  “USAMRIID is there.”

  “USAMRIID is a risk to me no matter what we do, or don’t do. Dr. Banks as good as said that they were planning to raid this place. We need to move.” I felt terrible about that, and I was certain everyone else was going to feel even worse. I had been Sherman’s captive while they were turning an abandoned factory into a home, nesting like they were never going to be forced to move again. The gardens, the hydroponics systems, even the catering and food service equipment… we didn’t have the capacity to take all that with us when we left. Wherever we went next, we’d be starting over from scratch.

  Dr. Cale looked at me coolly, studying my face as if she could find the key to all her questions hidden there. Then, to my profound disappointment, she shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, Sal. I can’t let you do this.”

  “Am I your prisoner now?” The words came out louder than I had intended for them to, but they weren’t as loud as my anguished thoughts. I thought better of you, they screamed, and I thought you loved her. Adam stopped fiddling with Anna’s IV and turned to face me, his eyes wide and liquid in his pale, drawn face. He looked terrified. I understood the sentiment. “Are we back to this again? Are you going to be like Sherman and lock me up for my own good? Or like USAMRIID, putting people in their private zoo? Or maybe like Dr. Banks, doing whatever it is he did to Tansy in order to keep her quiet? You know she didn’t go with him willingly. She kicked and she fought and he took her apart one piece at a time because she wasn’t being convenient. She wasn’t being easy. They both took prisoners. Everyone in this game has
taken prisoners, except for you. Am I where you start?”

  She stared at me for a moment. I was aware that all activity behind me had stopped, all the workers joining Adam in his silent observation of the scene, but I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t dare do anything but look at Dr. Cale and wait for her to tell me whether I was about to run away from home.

  Tansy had come to save me when I needed her the most. Tansy had been willing to risk and even lose her own life to bring me and the information I carried home. Well, what kind of sister would I have been if I hadn’t been willing to do the same thing for her?

  “We don’t have a body currently suitable to play host to a fully mature implant,” said Dr. Cale, her eyes never leaving mine. “If Anna’s host dies, she’s going to die as well, because we can’t transplant her under the current circumstances. We may be able to harvest organs from the local sleepwalker population—assuming we can find a tissue type match and avoid shooting the possible donor in the wrong place in the process—and keep her alive for a while, but the stress of the additional surgeries is going to do her in just as quickly as the organ failure would. She’s dying, Sal. He took my daughter apart, he put her in a new shell like she was… like she was some sort of hermit crab he’d picked up at a pet store, and now she’s dying. Do you honestly believe him when he tells you that the original is still alive? This is a trap.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” I shook my head. “But if there’s even a chance that it isn’t, I still have to try.”

  “How are you going to get to San Francisco?”

  She wasn’t saying no anymore. That was a good sign, even if she was asking questions I didn’t know how to answer. To my surprise and relief, Nathan spoke up, saying calmly, “We’re going to steal a ferryboat.”

  Dr. Cale’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a reasonable approach, I suppose, but it might lead to interference from USAMRIID.”