Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (12 page)

“You’re, um, on Dr. Cale’s security team, aren’t you? Only you were on assignment until recently, because I know you, don’t I? I’ve seen you at SymboGen.” It was the lab coat that did it. His face was memorable, but I didn’t like making eye contact with people when I didn’t have to. They had an unfortunate tendency to smile at me, and all those teeth made me uncomfortable. But I’d been around doctors and medical technicians for as long as I could remember, and I’d never forget a lab coat. “You worked in the phlebotomy lab, didn’t you? With Dr. Lo?”

The man—Fang—didn’t turn. Keeping his rifle trained on Nathan, he asked, “When would you have seen me there, if I had been there to be seen?”

It took me a moment to puzzle through his grammar, which seemed oddly recursive to me, like it was a snake biting its own tail. Finally, I ventured, “During one of my checkups? Dr. Banks made me come in a lot more often than I probably needed to. I always thought it was because he was worried about my well-being, but I guess now it was because he was monitoring my integration with the human brain, since it sort of sucks when all of your tapeworm-human hybrids just moan and try
to bite people all the time. Which, you know, speaking of that, one of them bit me pretty badly.” I held up my bandaged wrist like a macabre exhibit A. “I lost a lot of blood and the world’s still sort of spinny and I just walked all the way around the outside of the bowling alley which wouldn’t be a thing normally, but I haven’t lost a lot of blood normally, and I think I’m going to pass out soon. So I’d appreciate it if you’d put the gun down, or at least stop aiming it at my boyfriend, and go tell Dr. Cale that we’re here. This whole situation is wank.”

“Wack, Sal,” said Nathan, a nervous giggle underscoring his words. “The word you want is ‘wack.’ ”

“Oh,” I said. “So what does ‘wank’ mean?”

“It means ‘to masturbate,’ ” said Fang, adjusting his rifle so that it was pointed at the sky instead of at Nathan. The drums that had been pounding in my ears slacked off slightly, making it easier for me to hear. “Do you have everything you need out of your vehicle?”

The sudden change in topics threw me for a loop. It appeared to do the same to Nathan, because he just blinked at Fang, and for a moment the three of us stood there silently, everyone waiting for someone else to start making sense.

Finally, Fang sighed and explained, “I need to get rid of your car. If you have everything you need, I can do that now. If you don’t, I will escort you inside, come back out with some movers, and do it while you’re undergoing orientation.”

“What do you mean, get rid of my car?” Now Nathan sounded alarmed.

“Dr. Cale told me you’d have this reaction.” Fang smiled thinly. “She said to let you know that we’ll be issuing you a replacement vehicle from our motor pool, but that we can’t risk having a nearly new Prius sitting near what’s supposed to be an abandoned building. She also said to let you know that you’ll be receiving twenty percent of the sale price, so you shouldn’t fuss about it overly much.”

“Twenty percent of—you know what? No. I’m not going to get upset about this. If this is what needs to happen for us to be safe, then fine, so be it.” Nathan shook his head. “Sal and I both have things in the car. She needs medical attention, and that seemed more important than dealing with our suitcases.”

“All right,” said Fang. He held out his hand. “Give me the keys and follow me.”

It seemed like Nathan was going to argue. Then he glanced at me. I must have looked worse than I thought, because he paled, lips pressing tightly together, before digging his keys out of his pocket and slapping them down in Fang’s outstretched palm.

“Thank you,” said Fang, making the keys disappear into his lab coat. “Welcome home.”

We followed him into the bowling alley, Beverly straining at her leash as she tried to rush ahead into this world of exciting new smells, Minnie lagging behind and nearly tripping me as she looked for something to reassure her that the world wasn’t changing for the worse. I understood the sentiment, even as it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to put one foot in front of the other. The spots around the edges of my vision were back, chewing little moth holes in everything I saw.

The dark room connecting the bowling alley door to the main lab seemed even darker than usual, although that could have been a side effect of my clouded vision. Fang stopped in front of the interior door, holding up a hand as he motioned for us to do the same.

“If you’ll wait here, I’ll let Dr. Cale know that you’re back,” he said.

“Okay,” I said dreamily. “I’m just going to take a little nap, all right?” The black spots were continuing to expand.

I didn’t even feel myself hit the floor.

This time, when I woke up, I was in a hospital cot in the middle of what looked like a makeshift operating theater, with two IV
bags—one full of blood, one full of saline solution—attached to my left arm. I blinked at the tubes, and then twisted to look around the small room. The walls were just white sheets hanging from a pipe framework. A heart monitor beeped steadily, providing a treble accent to the drums that were beating softly in my ears. Another monitor was tracking… something. I assumed it was connected to the tangle of wires spilling off the bed. I reached up. There were sensors on my forehead, big round flat things held down with what felt like surgical tape. I frowned.

“Ah, good: you’re awake.” Dr. Cale’s voice came from the other side of the curtain. She pushed it aside with one sweep of her arm and came rolling in. “You gave us all quite a scare, young lady. It may be time to have a little talk about how you’re taking care of yourself. This can’t continue.”

“What?” I blinked at her blearily, trying to make sense of what she was saying. I’d been standing in the bowling alley with Nathan and the dogs—the dogs. “Where are Beverly and Minnie?”

“Your dogs are fine. I was prepared to be irritated about you bringing non-lab animals here, but they’ve already proven their value by distracting my son while you were having a seizure on my floor.” Dr. Cale’s frown deepened. “There are only a few human-tapeworm chimera in the world, Sal. You
know
that. As far as I’m aware, you’re the only one ever to arise without help. You’re a collector’s item, for lack of a better term, and you’re not taking the proper care to keep yourself in mint condition.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand. Where are my dogs?”

Dr. Cale reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Your dogs are with Nathan, who is getting them settled in the room you’ll be sharing until we relocate to a new lab space. Recent events have accelerated our timeline for moving slightly. We can’t risk being found.”

“Dr. Banks was on the radio,” I said. “He’s telling people I broke into SymboGen because somebody made me do it.”

“Well, that’s technically true, or close enough to true that I can’t be as angry at him as I’d like to be. But we’re getting off the topic.” She lowered her hand, looking at me gravely. “As I said before, you’re the first chimera to happen naturally. All of the others have had a team of experts standing by, bound and determined to make sure that our subjects had a successful melding with their hosts. Even then, it didn’t always go as well as we wanted it to.”

“Like Tansy?” I asked.

Dr. Cale nodded. “Yes. Exactly like Tansy. She had everything going for her when I performed the procedure. I had practiced on other subjects, the original damage to the host’s brain was minimal—it should have been perfect. It wasn’t. She caused seizures in her host, and damaged the brain in the process. All her neurological and cognitive issues stem from those seizures. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

I didn’t. I knew that my ignorance would show on my face, and so I didn’t even try to hide it: I just shook my head, wincing a little as the sensors attached to my forehead pulled, and said, “Not really.”

“When you entered Sally Mitchell’s skull, you exploited the damage that had been done by her accident,” said Dr. Cale. “It was a lucky break—literally. If her skull had broken in any other place, you probably wouldn’t have been able to get through. But in the process, you compromised some of the blood vessels that feed into the brain. They were partially repaired during the initial surgery. There should have been an additional surgery to suture and reconnect them properly, since those are your only source of nutrition now that you’re anchored in the brain, instead of in the digestive system. Unfortunately, Dr. Banks had taken over your care by that point, and he did not choose to order that operation.”

I stared at her. “But… why not?”

“Sal, I don’t know everything, all right? I can’t say for sure
why he would have decided not to operate. Maybe you were too fragile at that time, and he didn’t want to endanger your integration. Maybe he was looking for leverage to hold over you later. There’s no way he missed this damage. I honestly don’t know why he didn’t correct it.”

“But you suspect.” The drums were starting to make a little more sense to me now. Of course they would seem louder than a normal human heartbeat: I wasn’t just hearing them with my ears, but with my entire body, which was wrapped into the pulse of the circulatory system in Sally Mitchell’s brain. There was no way I could have avoided hearing the drums. And at the same time… hadn’t they been seeming just a little
too
loud lately? Like they were pounding when they didn’t need to be? Like they were being played by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing.

Like my heart was beating too hard.

“I do.” Dr. Cale nodded. “You have to understand that… oh, God, how do I say this? I genuinely think of Adam and Tansy—and yes, you—as my children. You contain my DNA, and while a connection to a living human brain is required for you to achieve full sapience, I cannot question your right to exist once you have that connection. Do you understand? I wouldn’t kill a functional human being to give one of my babies a body, but I wouldn’t take that body away from them if they already had it.”

“Okay,” I said, confused.

“You were a miracle, Sal. For whatever reason, you not only took advantage of Sally’s accident, you found a way to complete integration without help. Sally’s brain is the computer that runs your consciousness, but you, only you, are the medical miracle here. You’re the one who evolved under pressure.” She smiled a little, like she expected this revelation to make me happy. It did not make me happy. “If Dr. Banks wanted to study a natural chimera, you were perfect. Tell me, those contracts that
he had you and your parents sign, agreeing to allow SymboGen to handle your medical care. Did they say anything about what would happen to your body if you passed away for any reason?”

“Dr. Banks would get it for research purposes.” Dawning horror was coiling in my stomach. I tried to tamp it down, demanding, “But what good would that do? All he’d get would be a dead worm and a deader girl. There’s not much to learn from that.”

“Tapeworms are hardy, Sal. It’s true that your current body wouldn’t survive the loss of your human host; you’re too deeply integrated to be removed. But all he’d need is a single viable proglottid to grow a new worm with your exact genetic makeup. He could create another you under controlled lab conditions. He’s never had a chimera of his own—I’ve had people sabotaging his research every time it looked like he was getting close. Creating another iteration of you wouldn’t require the same level of research; you’ve made all the modifications necessary for a successful joining already, all by yourself. He could exploit that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were built with a DNA profile,” she said. “You found a way, instinctively, to modify it enough to let you take Sally Mitchell’s body as your own. That’s normal. Every baseline worm expresses itself differently. We could hatch a thousand eggs from the same batch that made you and get a thousand slightly different results—but your body is hermaphroditic, and every egg it generates will be a tiny, perfect clone of you, Sal. Banks could use that. He could grow a chimera of his own, and then figure out how to make the process easier… or how to stop it altogether.”

I stared at her, aghast. “Are you saying that Dr. Banks left weak blood vessels in my brain because he wanted me to have an aneurism and die?”

“So that he could take samples and culture eggs from your original body, yes, and possibly move it into a new host,” said Dr. Cale. “Observing you throughout the life cycle of your original host would have been a secondary goal. I admit, I can see the temptation. It would have been a perfect, untouched system, if only it had been a computer model instead of a living person.”

“I don’t think he thinks of me as a person,” I said.

“You may not be a human, Sal, but you’re a person. Anyone who can think and speak and be upset by someone’s plans for them is a person.” Dr. Cale wheeled herself closer. “Which brings us to the next matter at hand. Those blood vessels need to be repaired, or you’re going to keep having incidents like this one.”

“I thought I fainted because I lost too much blood,” I said weakly.

“You didn’t lose that much blood, but what you did lose was enough to strain your system,” she said. “That was really the problem. Once your body begins to worry about circulation, things will go downhill for you very quickly, because you don’t have much in the way of a reserve. We need to operate.”

The thought of being unconscious on a table while someone sliced into my head filled me with terror. I didn’t want them so close to my vulnerable body. I
needed
my skull to keep people away from it. But that wasn’t going to do me much good if the channels that carried the food I needed to survive were blocked. “Can we do that here?” I asked, inwardly amazed at how calm I sounded. Why, it was almost as if I weren’t asking someone to cut me open.

Dr. Cale shook her head. “No, we can’t,” she said. “I have excellent surgical facilities—I can even perform limited brain surgery, when there’s a need for it—but what you need is too delicate. It’s going to require a specialist, and equipment that’s much more advanced than I have access to here. We’re going to need to take you to a hospital.”