Chimera (Parasitology) (22 page)

I turned back to Carrie. “That’s Dr. Cale. I told you we were coming to her lab, and you agreed, remember? She’s my fiancé’s mother. She didn’t hurt anyone on purpose, and she isn’t going to hurt you, I promise.” Not unless Carrie kept shooting. If she managed to injure one of Dr. Cale’s people, then all bets were going to be off. “Please, put down the gun.”

“This is
her
fault!”

And there it was: the factor I’d been missing, the one I should have considered in more depth before asking Carrie to bring me here. The fact that I would never have been able to make it on my own was almost irrelevant; the fact that I had explained the situation, including where we were going, was maybe the only reason she’d come this far. To Carrie—to any human who understood the development of the SymboGen Intestinal Bodyguardor who had been exposed to Dr. Banks’s frantic after-the-fact spin—Dr. Cale was public enemy number one, the woman who had singlehandedly engineered the downfall of mankind and the rise of the invertebrate invader. She was the mother of monsters, and I had led Carrie straight to her.

It was understandable that Carrie was out for revenge.

“Oh, no,” I whispered, raising one hand to press over my mouth in horror. If Juniper hadn’t been in the car, I might have told Carrie to run, to hit the gas and flee. She would never be comfortable here, not with her personal nightmare running the lab. She wouldn’t go back to USAMRIID, and who else was there for her to tell? She could run until she died and never give us away… and even as I had the thought, I recognized that I was only allowing it to form because Juniper
was
in the car. Carrie couldn’t be allowed to run. Imagining mercy did nothing to endanger me, or the ones I cared about.

Carrie seemed to realize that her little gunshots weren’t getting her anything she wanted. She dropped the gun onto the seat beside her and hit the gas, sending the SUV lurching into life. It barreled toward me, moving impossibly fast, from my
perspective as a stationary object, and I realized that I wasn’t as afraid of being hit by a car as I was of being in one when it hit something else.

The realization was enough to root my feet to the pavement, until a body slammed into mine from the side and knocked me out of the way. The sound of gunshots split the air at the same time, and the SUV spun out of control as the rear tires were shot out. It was dark enough that all I really saw was the vehicle turning, no longer following Carrie’s commands. Juniper was still screaming, louder now than ever.

“Are you hurt?” demanded Fang.

“Let me up!” I pushed, and the security chief—who was stronger than I was, by a good measure, even though we were basically the same size—allowed me to move. I scrambled to get my feet back under me and ran for the SUV, which had stopped a few feet from the bowling alley entrance.

The rest of Dr. Cale’s security staff had already moved into position around the vehicle, guns drawn and aimed at the front seat, where Carrie slumped motionless against her seat belt, her forehead resting on the steering wheel. Through it all, Dr. Cale hadn’t moved once. She was still sitting in the open doorway, her hands folded in her lap, watching the scene in silence.

I wrenched the SUV’s back door open, ignoring the armed figures at my back. Juniper’s wails redoubled when she saw me, accompanied by her reaching her arms out in my direction, hands making small, unconscious grasping motions. I had only been in her life for a day, but she already knew that I represented comfort: Like all children, she wanted to know that there was something bigger than she was standing between her and the monsters.

My hands were shaking as I undid her seat belt and scooped her into my arms.
I
had been out of the SUV when it was shot to a standstill, but my little girl hadn’t. She could have been killed. I think that was the moment when I started hating Carrie.
Losing her senses could be forgiven, but endangering Juniper? That was a step too far.

“Good to have you back,” said Fishy as I passed him with Juniper in my arms. He blinked at the sight of her. Then he grinned. “Nice mission objective! See you inside.” He turned his back on me and began moving toward the SUV. The other figures followed him. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Carrie in that moment: If she had survived the accident, she was about to find herself on the receiving end of Dr. Cale’s darker brand of hospitality.

Dr. Cale herself gripped the wheels of her chair and rolled backward when I reached the door, looking at me, and at Juniper, who was clinging so tightly to my neck that separating us would have been virtually impossible. “We looked for you,” she said.

“I believe you,” I replied.

“Welcome home,” she said, and then she smiled, and I smiled back, despite everything, because I had done it. I had made it back to where I belonged.

Whatever happened next was going to be easier, because I was going to be with my family.

E
ntering the bowling alley was like stepping into a dream. I had never expected to be here again. Dr. Cale was waiting for her people to get Carrie out of the car, so I walked through the familiar, purposefully decrepit antechamber alone, until I reached the door that would take me to the main lab. I hesitated in reaching for the doorknob. Was I ready for what was waiting on the other side? What if we had lost people? What if we had lost
Nathan
? A lot could have changed since I’d been taken into custody by Colonel Mitchell.

There was only one way I was going to find out. I closed my eyes for a moment, taking comfort in the distant sound of drums and the increasingly familiar weight of Juniper clinging to my neck. Then I opened them, and grasped the knob, and turned it.

My first impression of the lab was that nothing had changed.
The workstations were where they had always been; the lights were bright where they needed to be but otherwise dim, keeping the power profile low and the chances of detection even lower. People in lab coats moved like ghosts through the gloom, some carrying clipboards or tablet computers, others transporting biological samples from one place to another. The lab coats were dingier than they used to be, no longer quite so pristinely white, but everyone I saw was wearing one. If you had a lab coat, you were a scientist. More now than ever, these people needed to be scientists.

As I thought that, I blinked, and I realized that
everything
had changed.

The people who moved through the gloom used to do it with calm assurance, like they had all the time in the world. Now they scuttled, moving fast, to the point where two of them nearly collided as I watched. The lights were low in part because some of the bulbs appeared to have burnt out. The charts and diagrams I remembered from the first time we’d been living and working out of the bowling alley were back in place, but they were interspersed with new signs, written in large red letters and often illuminated by pin lights. I stopped in front of one of those signs, squinting as I tried to make the letters stop swimming around the paper. Whatever it was, I needed to understand it if I was going to understand the changes that had happened here in the lab.

Juniper whimpered. I stroked her back with one hand, squinting harder. Bit by bit, the shifting, twisting letters settled down, becoming words.

A chill slithered through my stomach. I had been right, and the worms were in the water. It was the only thing that made sense, and it explained everything. I was suddenly glad for the limited water rations back in the quarantine zone, and for the bottled water we’d taken from the diner.

Even sleepwalkers needed to drink. I remembered the desiccated teenage girl I had found dying in her own bedroom. She’d consumed the water from her fish tank before she got really dehydrated. After that was gone, it had only been a matter of time. There had to be faucets that had been left running, accessible toilet bowls still refilled by gravity. The sleepwalkers would have sought out those sources of water, following instincts more powerful than intellect, and then the very thing that had sustained them had killed them all.

“Sal?”

The word was little more than a whisper, familiar and frightened and heartbreakingly near. I was already smiling as I turned to face its source, my hand still stroking Juniper’s back, my eyes beginning to fill with slow and welcome tears.

“Hello, Nathan. I came home.”

My boyfriend slash maybe fiancé—he had proposed several times, and I’d said yes every time, so I guess that was the better word for him—stared at me like I was a ghost. He hadn’t been outside much recently. He was paler than he’d been when he walked away from me in the SymboGen building, although his skin was still several shades darker than mine, going with his black hair and dark eyes, which were wide with pain and hope behind the lenses of his wire-frame glasses. Like the other scientists around him, he was wearing a dingy lab coat over a plain T-shirt and jeans.

Nathan was Dr. Cale’s sole biological child, the result of her first and only marriage. He got most of his coloring and his height from his Korean father. He got most of his facial
expressions from his mother, although he was much more emotionally demonstrative than she was: Whatever had been left out of Dr. Cale when she was being put together was present in him, in spades. Never did that show more clearly than in moments like this one as he took a half step forward and raised his hand, like he was going to reach for me. Then he stopped, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.

“Nathan—”

“I’m so sorry.” The words tumbled out, jumbled together and barely intelligible. “I should never have left you there. I should have tried harder to find another way, to find a plan that let us all leave together, and I’m
so sorry
, can you forgive me? Please, can you forgive me?”

“Oh, Nathan.” Everything was suddenly clear, and there was only one thing I could do to make it any better. I stepped forward to meet him, putting my free arm around him and pulling him as close to me as possible. Juniper made a noise of protest and shifted positions, but she didn’t cry or pull away.

“I was never mad at you,” I whispered. “I never blamed you. I stayed behind because it was the right thing to do, to get the rest of you out of there. It was my choice, not yours, and I never, ever blamed you for letting me make my own decisions. That’s why I love you. Because you always let me be a person, no matter how dangerous it is.”

Nathan laughed shakily, the sound thick with stress and unshed tears. “I don’t think I could have stopped you if I’d tried.”

“Probably not,” I agreed, and buried my face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of his skin. It was soothing in more ways than one. This was
Nathan
, the man who’d held me through my night terrors and told me it didn’t matter that I was a tapeworm in a human skin. He didn’t love me any less because of my origins, and that meant more to me than I could put into words. But even more importantly, being this close
to him, breathing in the chemicals rising off his skin, I could confirm what I needed to know more than anything else in the world. I could confirm he was still clean: that none of the cousins now swarming in the tainted water had managed to find a way into his body.

Juniper made her small sound of protest again, and Nathan let me go. Now I was the one who wanted to protest. I swallowed the urge, stepping back to let Juniper get a better look at him. She was sitting upright in my arms, her eyes fixed on Nathan. She looked wary. It was a new expression for her, and I wondered how much of it had been born when Carrie started shooting, introducing Juniper to the idea that sometimes the people who fed and held her didn’t have her best interests at heart.

“Who’s this?” asked Nathan.

“This is Juniper. Juniper, I want you to meet Nathan. He’s my boyfriend. We’re going to get married someday.” Assuming marriages were ever performed again. Maybe Dr. Cale could do it. We could exchange dishes of ringworm, and promise to love, honor, and run like hell before we got captured by the government.

“Hello, Juniper,” said Nathan.

“Sal,” she said suspiciously.

Nathan blinked. “Sal?”

“She’s a chimera,” I said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “I found her at Jack London Square, in the middle of a mob of dead sleepwalkers. I think… I think that when she ingested a second implant, it somehow managed to destroy the original and take over the body. It had a better interface. She’s a person now.” Because the cousins weren’t really people, were they? They were my relatives, and they
mattered
, but they weren’t people. I wished I could do something to save them, but they didn’t think. They didn’t understand. All they did was act, and action wasn’t enough.

“Wow.” Nathan’s eyes narrowed as he studied Juniper, now
assessing her as a scientist and not as a surprised boyfriend. “Hello, Juniper. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“She hasn’t had time to pick up much English,” I said. “I only found her yesterday. I need to talk to your mom about how she taught Tansy and Adam to talk and write and stuff. I don’t think I can do it by myself.”

“Fortunately, you won’t have to,” said Dr. Cale. I turned to see her rolling up behind me. She reached out her hands. “Let me see her.”

I didn’t want to. Dr. Cale was my ally, and I trusted her more than I probably should have, but she was also the woman who’d cut me open once to serve her own scientific ends. It was impossible to swallow the fear that she’d do the same thing to Juniper. At the same time, she was the one who’d successfully tutored and raised three chimera, and she had never hurt them. I couldn’t stay here if I wasn’t capable of letting myself relax when she was near Juniper.

“She may not want to stay with you,” I cautioned, and unhooked Juniper’s arms from around my shoulders. The little girl gave me a reproachful look. “It’s okay. Dr. Cale is our friend. She just wants to hold you for a second, and see how healthy and happy you are.”
Please let that be true,
I thought, and handed Juniper to Dr. Cale.

“Sal?” said Juniper, looking back toward me as Dr. Cale settled her upon her lap. It was clear that Dr. Cale had substantially more experience with children than I did: She got Juniper settled in a matter of seconds, despite receiving no actual help from Juniper herself.

“Aren’t you a strong girl?” asked Dr. Cale, looking at the side of Juniper’s face. Juniper turned toward the sound of Dr. Cale’s voice, and was rewarded with a bright, close-mouthed smile. “Hello, sweetheart. I’m Dr. Cale. I’m sort of your grandmother, I suppose. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“Where’s Carrie?” I asked.

“You mean the woman who drove you here?” asked Dr. Cale. I nodded confirmation, and she scowled. “She nearly shot Fang in the shoulder. If his reflexes had been a bit worse, we’d be performing emergency surgery right now. What in the world possessed you to choose
her
as your escape route?”

“Her husband checked out clean before he was put in the Pleasanton quarantine zone. Then he drank the water.” I jerked a thumb toward the sign behind me. “You know about the water. He got sick. He died. Carrie was the best option I had for getting out of there before the same thing happened to me. I didn’t realize how unstable she was until it was too late to find somebody else who might be willing to help me out.”

“Fishy and Daisy are bringing her in. We’re going to put her in one of the isolation rooms for now, while we figure out how we’re going to deal with her being here. You know we can’t let her leave.”

I’d always known that on some level. Hearing it from Dr. Cale just confirmed what I had already been pretty sure of. “I know. But being here is better than being there. Trust me.”

“Wait—you mean they actually put you in the general quarantine?” Nathan sounded horrified. “But the Colonel—”

“His wife didn’t want me in the military housing. He may be willing to lie to himself about who I am, but she’s not. She knows I’m not her daughter, and she’s not going to forgive me for taking Sally’s place. Ever.” I paused. “Dr. Cale, where’s Tansy? And…” Saying the name felt wrong. I forced myself to continue anyway. “Where’s Anna?”

“Anna’s host body experienced extreme tissue rejection when confronted with the implant,” said Dr. Cale. She handed Juniper a pen. The little girl looked at it quizzically before beginning to wave it around, looking fascinated by the existence of material space. “She was already going into organ failure when Dr. Banks brought her to us. Things went quickly after we lost you.”

“Oh.” Anna hadn’t been with us for long, but she had been a chimera, like me, or Juniper. I’d hoped that Dr. Cale would have been able to save her. “And Tansy?”

“You were right: They didn’t remove her primary segment from the host’s brain,” said Nathan. “She’s stable.”

“What he isn’t saying is that Dr. Banks is a butcher,” said Dr. Cale, expression darkening. “He sliced my little girl open like a side of meat. She’s on life support, and yes she’s stable, but if we have to move her again, we’re going to lose her. The damage to her host body’s brain was so extreme that even patching her back together isn’t going to save her—not the Tansy we knew. We can transplant her core segment into another host if we happen to acquire one. She’ll lose most of who she is, but she’ll survive. That’s the best we can hope for at this stage.”

Finding another host would mean finding a human being who was willing to donate their entire body to a tapeworm who needed it. It was an oddly abhorrent thought, even knowing that was the way that I’d been made. However involuntary Sally’s donation had been. “Aren’t there lots of people around? Maybe one of them has been injured enough to qualify.”

“I don’t have any brain-dead bodies in storage, if that’s what you mean, and I’m not Steven. I won’t place one of my babies in the mind of someone who’s still at home.” Dr. Cale stroked Juniper’s hair with one hand. “It’s also not that simple. Finding Tansy a new host will mean finding someone who’s at least a basic tissue match to her original host body. If we don’t do that, it’ll be Anna all over again. All our hard work will be lost. Tansy may be lost, too.”

“Isn’t there any other way?” I missed Tansy. I missed her more than I would have thought possible when I first met her. She was my sister. She’d been lost because of me. I wanted her back.

“I could rebuild the human portion of her genetic code from
the ground up. That’s what Sherman did when he put the eggs in the water supply: He was aiming for the best broad-spectrum compatibility with the people they might infect, rather than shooting for a specific person’s DNA.” Dr. Cale gave me an unreadable look. “If I did that, though, I would be wiping her epigenetic data. The parts of her that are Tansy wouldn’t carry over—she’d just be another chimera, assuming the procedure was successful.”