Parasite (Parasitology) (51 page)

“Not quite. I don’t care. I couldn’t stay there anymore.” I sniffled, ducking my head to check the thumb drive as I did. The light on top had changed from green to yellow. I hoped that meant it was done, and not that something had gone wrong with the file transfer process. I wasn’t going to be able to do this again.

I hoisted my backpack onto the desk with one hand, using the motion to cover the fact that I was extracting the thumb drive with my other hand. I shoved it into my pocket as I pushed my notebook carefully back into the bag, hoping that
Dr. Banks would be too distracted by the hand he could see to wonder what the hand under the desk was doing.

“They didn’t
say
anything,” I said. I closed my bag and tugged it back into my lap, “but they were looking at me like… like this was my fault somehow. Like if they hadn’t spent so much time and energy looking out for my health, Joyce’s health wouldn’t have been at risk. Mom even said that I wasn’t her daughter anymore. I was a stranger they’d been playing pretend with. That their real… that Sally died when she had the accident, and I’m just some other girl who took her body as my own. It wasn’t anything I haven’t thought before, when I was having a bad night. But it just hurt so much hearing it from her. It hurt so much.”

“She was right.”

My head snapped up without my willing it to, and I felt my eyes going wide with a strange combination of shock, anger, and raw terror. “What did you say?”

“I said, she was right.” Dr. Banks sat down in the chair that I had abandoned, looking at me gravely. “Sally, you have to know you are not the person you were before your accident. We are each of us the sum total of our experiences. We are shaped by our memories and by the moments we live through, and no two people are exactly the same, ever, because no two people experience exactly the same lives. Sally Mitchell died when her brain activity ceased. Sally Mitchell was born when her brain activity resumed. Maybe if the memory centers of your brain hadn’t been so profoundly damaged, you’d still be her, but they
were
damaged, and so you’re
not
her, no matter how much you might like to pretend you are. You’re someone entirely new, free of her sins and successes and emotional baggage.”

“There’s a chance my memory could come back someday,” I said, hating how weak my voice sounded, even under the steady pounding of the drums.

“And if it does, you’ll have the first Sally’s memories on top of the second Sally’s memories, and you’ll become a new person
all over again. For you, recall would be a form of suicide. Maybe not if it had happened right away—then, all this would have just been a strange gap in the memory of the girl you used to be—but it’s been long enough, and you’ve lived a different enough life, that you would die if she reclaimed herself. Would that Sally have loved Dr. Kim? Would she have worked at the shelter for so long?” His gaze sharpened. “Would she have been willing to go through the broken doors at the behest of a woman she’d never met?”

“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I didn’t have to feign my shock.

Dr. Banks smiled. “Don’t you?”

I gaped at him, not sure what else I could say. As I did, I realized that by putting myself behind the desk, I might have gotten access to his computer, but I had done so at the expense of my access to the door. Dr. Banks was between me and the only exit. The windows weren’t the kind that were intended to be opened. Even if I could somehow smash them before he stopped me, all that would do was allow me to plummet to my death more than twenty stories below.

“Did you really think that I wasn’t keeping a close eye on you? I’m fond of you, Sally, but you represent a huge investment in research hours and medical costs. I’m not going to let you run around willy-nilly without making sure that I have some idea of where you’re going. The shower trick was a good one, I’ll grant you that. Unfortunately for you, I’ve had that shelter bugged since the day you applied there. We got everything. Including a few key words that only one person I’ve ever known would think constituted a cypher.” Dr. Banks leaned forward in his seat, expression sharpening. “I hoped you’d lead us to her. You didn’t. And so I’m asking you: where is she, Sally?

“Where is Dr. Shanti Cale?”

I
don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said. My voice was level and calm. I was proud of myself for that. Really, I wanted to throw up.

“I think you do, Sally; after all, you mentioned her yourself not all that long ago,” said Dr. Banks. “Think hard. Blonde woman, curvy, fondness for lab coats and genetic engineering? Oh, and she’s your boyfriend’s mother, mustn’t forget that. Do you think he knows where she is, if you’re insisting you don’t? Do you think he’d tell me if we asked him?”

“Leave Nathan out of this,” I said, finding more strength now that I had something to defend. I sat straighter in my pilfered chair, trying to glare at him. It wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to. I was too terrified for that. “He has nothing to do with whatever you want from me.”

“Oh, no, believe me, he does. It was a stroke of amazing luck
when you met up with him. I knew all along that he was Shanti’s son. She always forgot that I was the one who had recruited her in the first place—just one more blind spot in a series stretching all the way back to the lab. It’s a good thing she’s so brilliant. If she weren’t, her tendency to focus on the science at the expense of the human element would have gotten her killed years ago. We’ve been trying to hire Dr. Kim for years. If he would just consent to an implant… we couldn’t change the rules without tipping him off. Ah, well. Water under the bridge. Where is she?”

“Couldn’t you just have changed the rules if you wanted him that bad?” I asked, dodging the question.

Dr. Banks laughed. “Oh, Sally. I do love your sense of humor. Rules are rules. If I’d changed them, everyone would have known something was up. But oh, I’ve wanted to know what my old friend was doing, and that meant keeping tabs on her son. There was always the chance that she might decide to make contact sometime in the future—which she did, through you. You’re apparently more important to her than her own son. Interesting implications, don’t you think?” He tried that old paternal smile again. It wasn’t working as well as it usually did. “His interest in you was something we couldn’t have predicted, but I’ll admit, we did nothing to discourage it. Keeping the two of you in one place—a package deal, so to speak—made surveillance so much easier.”

I stared at him. “But why…?”

“Your father is the head of USAMRIID’s San Francisco office. We needed a way to watch him without it being suspicious. You were the perfect entry into his home.” Dr. Banks looked briefly apologetic. “We’re sorry to have disrupted your life as much as we did. If it makes you feel any better, we wouldn’t have done it if there had been any other way.”

“But…” I shook my head. “You couldn’t have planned this. I had an
accident
.” An accident I remembered absolutely nothing
about. I’d never even spoken to any of the witnesses. By the time I was out of recovery and able to really wonder about what had happened to me, they had already put the incident behind them, vanishing into the general population without a thought for the girl whose car kissed a bus.

“I admit, Sally, I’d hoped we could convince you to join our SymboGen family,” said Dr. Banks. “I wanted to be able to protect you. You’re a special girl, and you deserve better than the world outside these doors. But if we’d accomplished that, Shanti probably wouldn’t have contacted you. She’s always been canny. While she might have smelled ‘trap’ on your skin, she was willing to take the risk, and I doubt that would have been the case if you’d been on the payroll.”

“I had an accident,” I repeated, with less certainty.

“I was also a little disappointed when you decided to shut us out, rather than coming to me and asking who this woman was, slipping notes into your things and trying to lure you into the path of danger. She’s the real reason you were in Lafayette, isn’t she? That’s why you nearly got hurt in that mob of sleepwalkers. Because Shanti was careless with the lives of others once again.”

I looked at him solemnly, seeing the entire situation play out from that single-pointed comment. Dr. Banks was looking for a scapegoat. Whether it was nonexistent protozoa or the woman who’d helped to design the Intestinal Bodyguard didn’t matter: all he needed was someone or something to pin the sleepwalking sickness on, and he and SymboGen could walk away scot-free. All it would take was a story that people would believe—and which was more attractive, really? The idea that a trusted corporation responsible for the health and happiness of millions had made a huge research error, or the idea that one woman, embittered over her own relative obscurity, had done something to change that company’s good works?

He would turn Dr. Cale into a criminal. I might not object
to that as stridently as he’d expect me to—she was Nathan’s mother, and she meant well, but she’d created the implants and she valued the well-being of tapeworms as much as, if not more than, she valued the well-being of humans. I’d still object. If this was SymboGen’s fault, then SymboGen needed to pay for it. And that included the man who’d turned Dr. Surrey Kim into Dr. Shanti Cale in the first place.

“We went for ice cream.” My voice didn’t shake at all. I sounded utterly reasonable to my own ears. I hugged my backpack against my chest, still staring at him. “Nathan knew I was upset about that weird phone call from that… that woman, and so we went for ice cream. She never told me her name.”

For the first time, Dr. Banks looked unsure. “You knew Dr. Cale was Nathan’s mother.”

“Because you told me she was.” I shook my head. “I’m here because I didn’t know where else to go. The last time I was here, Chave tried to kill me, and you locked me in a little room in the basement with people who wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Do you really think I’d be here now if there was someplace else? I’m so uncomfortable right now.” I didn’t have to force tears to well up in my eyes. The churning panic in my gut brought them leaping to the surface. “I didn’t come here so you could accuse me of working against you. I had an
accident
, and now you’re acting like you’ve only been nice to me all this time because you thought you could use me. I thought you were different from my family, Dr. Banks. I thought you
cared
.”

That last part was a lie, but it came close enough on the heels of the truth that he didn’t appear to notice the difference. His face fell, and he rose from his chair, already reaching for me. “Sally, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Please, I never wanted you to think of yourself as just a tool…”

I shied away from his hands, putting my head down on my backpack and sobbing in earnest. It seemed easier than trying to talk to him. I didn’t know what else there was to say, and
his words were still careening madly around the inside of my skull, looking for things to knock loose. I had an accident. Sally Mitchell had an accident. Or did she? After all, the girl she left behind was never going to tell anyone any different. The girl she left behind wasn’t going to tell anyone anything at all about the last minutes of Sally’s life. That girl didn’t know.

I had forgotten something in Dr. Cale’s lab, hadn’t I? Something I wasn’t ready to remember yet…

“Sally, please.”

I kept crying. Joyce was sick. My mother didn’t want me anymore. My father was willing to lie to me if he thought it would help him learn more about the sleepwalking sickness. Even Dr. Banks was saying it had never been about me and my recovery at all: it had been about using me to get to the secrets he thought he might be able to weasel out of my father.

“Sally, I’m sorry.”

He sounded sincere. I raised my head, wiping away my tears as I looked at him. He looked back, hands spread in surrender.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “You know nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be. SymboGen is not the enemy here, but you were willing to let us be if it meant you didn’t have to trust people who weren’t always as comfortable as the ones you’d chosen to surround yourself with. No one has only your best interests at heart. Not me, not your parents… and not Dr. Cale. Whether you’ve met her or not, you should keep that in mind for when she does manage to catch up to you—and she is
going
to find you, Sally. She’s not the good to my evil. She’s not going to solve all of your problems with a wave of her hand and a cup of hot cocoa. You’re smart enough to know better than that. People like us… we don’t get easy answers like that.”