Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (18 page)

“A holding pen?” I asked blankly. “What, so I can get ripped apart by sleepwalkers? No, you have to get me out of here. Just undo the straps. I’ll run, and you’ll never have to deal with me again.”

“But I want to be dealing with you, Sal my darling, and more importantly, you’re being intentionally obtuse, which is not a good look for you. Try using that fantastic brain that you’ve wired yourself into.” He tapped his touchscreen, apparently changing one of the notations on my chart. “We have the potential to be ten times smarter than our human hosts ever were without us, you know that? Our presence stimulates formation of new nervous tissue and enhances nerve transmission speed. I’m not sure exactly how yet—I never did manage to get a chimera on the operating table where I could take it apart—but science supports my claim. That means you have no excuse for being stupid. Now, why would I want you ripped apart when you’re ever so much more delightfully useful in one piece?”

I glared at him. “I’m not going to help you.”

“Yet,” he said calmly. “The word you’re looking for is ‘yet.’ And don’t let your stubbornness worry your pretty little head. I’m going to help you either way.” He blew me a kiss, and then turned and walked away, leaving me alone again.

I wanted to scream expletives after him—many of which were words that he had originally taught me, back when he was pretending to be a loyal, human SymboGen employee who had only my best interests at heart, rather than a dangerous chimera bent on the destruction of the human race. He’d been one of my two handlers, along with Chave, an icy African-American woman who had always made me uncomfortable by keeping me at arm’s length and treating me like a bomb that was about to go off. It was funny how much context changed things, because now I was sure Sherman was the reason the sleepwalking sickness was spreading so fast and so catastrophically, while Chave—who had died when her own implant went active and chewed its way up into her brain—had been working for Dr. Cale all along. Like Fang, she’d been there to gather information on Dr. Banks, and to protect me.

So many people had died or endangered themselves to keep
me safe, and almost none of them had been on the relatively short list of people that I had trusted at the start of this whole mess. Chave had been on my side all along. Sherman was on nobody’s side except his own. I was starting to seriously doubt my ability to judge human nature.

The echoing space around me grew silent as Sherman’s footsteps faded. I frowned up into the darkness. Wherever I was being held, it didn’t make
sense
. There should have been cots like mine on every side, occupied either by sleepwalkers or by other patients who had been collected and deemed to be clean. Instead, while the lack of light blocked off any extensive study, I was pretty sure there was no one to either side of me. Just more blackness, shadows reaching out and claiming everything that they touched as their own. It was… unnerving.

Was I the only person they’d managed to save from the hospital?

Two men came walking out of the gloom, both wearing lab coats and plain white masks over the bottoms of their faces. They didn’t say a word to me. One of them seized my arm, twisting it so that the inside was pointed at the ceiling.

“Hey!” I instinctively tried to pull away, only to find myself stopped by the straps that held me down. “Who are you? What are you doing? Let go of me!”

They ignored my cries. One of them produced a syringe from inside his pocket, uncapping it and jamming it into the soft tissue of my arm before I had time to frame a new objection. I squeaked. He pulled the needle free.

“What did you just inject me with? Answer me! You have no right to do this! I’m a United States citizen!” As long as I was legally human, I was pretty sure that was still true. “You need to answer me right now!” My vision was starting to go blurry around the edges. Not black this time, but gray and sort of wispy, like a fog was rolling in. I tried to frown. My face didn’t feel like it was responding. But I kept trying, because
anything else would have felt too much like giving up, and giving up would have meant that I was allowing them to win. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let them win. I couldn’t…

Most sedatives take a few minutes to kick in. Either this one worked faster than most, or it had started by distorting my sense of time, because my ability to fight faded, and it took me with it. For the second time in a day, I’d been drugged into unconsciousness.

I was starting to get really tired of these people.

Consciousness returned like someone had flipped a switch inside my brain. I sat up with a gasp, only realizing after it was done that I
could
sit up; nothing was holding me down anymore. I looked down at myself, checking for restraints or IV lines. There was nothing. All the medical equipment had been mercifully removed, although a familiar burn in my crotch told me that the equipment had included a catheter for some reason, which meant they’d kept me under for more than eight hours. That wasn’t a good sign.

My stolen clothes were also gone, replaced by mint green medical scrubs and soft booties with plastic treads on the bottoms. There was a plastic ID bracelet clamped around one wrist. I raised my arm and squinted at the type on the bracelet, forcing my eyes to focus. The words swam in and out, finally settling down to something I could read:

I didn’t know what that meant, but I could guess. According to Nathan, when I had migrated to Sally’s brain, the protein markers that would normally have indicated my presence in her body had vanished from her bloodstream. Any normal test that didn’t involve a full brain MRI would show that there was
no SymboGen implant in me. It was deceitful, but looking at the little plastic band on my wrist, I couldn’t feel bad about it. My freedom might very well depend on that deception.

Lowering my arm, I looked around the room where I had been put, only to realize that “room” was a generous description, even more generous than it had been for the little semiprivate space back at the bowling alley. I was on a medical cot, with a blanket, sheet, and thin pillow. That was all that shared the room with me. There was no other furniture, no medical equipment, no lavatory facilities… and depending on how I wanted to look at things, there were no walls. Instead, a thin plastic membrane separated me from the hall outside my room, curving gently as it rose to an exposed ventilation panel that was pumping air into the bubble. Yes: bubble. That was the best word for where I was. This was a bubble, and when I turned to either the left or right, I saw more bubbles, each with their own bed, their own occupant. A sick feeling started to coil in my stomach. I twisted around to look behind me.

Row upon row of bubbles stretched off into the distance, creating separate, sterile environments for the people inside them. None of them seemed to have doors.

I slid off the bed, keeping my hands on the mattress as I tested my balance. My legs seemed willing to hold me, although there was a bone-deep weariness in all my muscles, making me feel like I’d been running marathons in my sleep. I wasn’t hungry. I closed my eyes and cleared my throat, trying to focus on the subtleties of that sensation. It was a little sore, like I’d been shouting. Since I hadn’t been shouting—that I was aware of; if they’d put me under twilight sedation at some point, I could have done all sorts of things I didn’t remember—that probably meant they’d used a feeding tube on me, in addition to feeding me intravenously.

All those things were medically necessary, under the right circumstances, but since I hadn’t agreed to any of them, I was
starting to feel more and more violated. I let go of the bed and walked to the bubble wall, pressing my palms flat against it. It didn’t flex. It might look like a thin sheet of plastic, but whatever it was, it was strong enough to resist my exploratory efforts at getting it to yield. Hands still pressed against the plastic, I peered as far to the left and to the right as I could. Everything was very well lit, so it wasn’t hard to confirm that I was, for the moment, apparently unsupervised. Great. I drew back my left hand, made a fist, and punched the plastic wall as hard as I could.

The pain was immediate and intense. Whatever that stuff was, it was like punching brick. I squealed with pain, shaking my bruised hand and dancing back from the barrier like it had done something wrong, even though I was the one who had launched an unprovoked attack against it. The plastic wasn’t even dented. I wasn’t going to get out that way.

The drums were back, beating softly in my ears as my heart rate rose. I stopped shaking my hand and began to pace instead, looking for a seam or some other evidence of how they had managed to get me in here—whoever “they” were, wherever “here” was. There were at least five rows of bubbles, with me in the front. I couldn’t tell how many bubbles were in each row. I could see the curve of the row behind me well enough to count off eleven separate enclosures, but that didn’t get me all the way to the wall. That meant that a conservative estimate put fifty-five bubbles in this room, each of them representing a circle about twelve feet across. I wasn’t good enough at math to figure out what that meant in terms of actual space inside the bubble, beyond “a lot.” Wherever we were being held, it was massive.

I paced three times around the edge of the room, trying to work the weakness out of my legs. More and more of the people around me were waking up and getting out of their beds. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why they were here;
I saw men and women, children and senior citizens, and all of them were in exactly the same sort of setup I was: total isolation without any hint of privacy. That was a little weird, and that worried me. Psychologically, wasn’t it stressful for people to be able to see each other and not
reach
each other? Little private rooms would have served the same purpose in terms of keeping us apart, but it might have done a lot to keep the people in those isolated bubbles
sane
.

Maybe that just meant we weren’t going to be kept here for long. But that didn’t make sense either, since a place like this, well… it couldn’t have been cheap to construct, and it couldn’t have gone up overnight. So they’d taken us, drugged us until we passed out, and then kept us drugged long enough to get this room ready for our arrival. Why? It didn’t make any sense, unless there was some plan that I wasn’t seeing.

Worst of all, I didn’t even know who had me anymore. It wasn’t Dr. Cale—this was way outside of her budget and available resources, unless things had changed a lot more dramatically than I suspected. Dr. Huff had identified herself as USAMRIID, and Sherman had been wearing a lab coat with a USAMRIID logo on it, but that didn’t mean they were actually the people controlling this facility. Things could change really quickly when you had traitors in your midst, and I couldn’t make myself think of Sherman as anything other than a traitor. Not at this point. Not after the things that he had done.

I was still pacing when I saw movement down the hall to my left. Actual, outside-the-bubble movement, not the milling aimlessness of my fellow prisoners. I ran to what I couldn’t help thinking of as the front of my bubble, pressing my face against the plastic and straining to get a better look.

A tall, weary-looking man in military uniform was walking toward my private prison, surrounded by a flock of people in lab coats. They surged around him like the sea, moving forward to present touchscreens or clipboards, and then falling
back as another wave of scientists took their place. I stepped back from the plastic wall, letting my hands fall to my sides. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else to react.

The man in the uniform—the man I’d never been expecting to see again—was Colonel Alfred Mitchell. My—I mean, Sally Mitchell’s father. He was where she got her pale skin and middling brown hair. I looked at him and saw the jaw that greeted me every time I looked in a mirror. He was tall, broad in the shoulders and thick in the waist, and he walked like he knew that any obstacle he encountered would be clever enough to get out of his way. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing in front of USAMRIID’s San Francisco facility, watching me get into Nathan’s car and drive away. That was when we’d said what I’d thought would be our last goodbyes. What I’d
hoped
would be our last goodbyes, because I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore.

When I thought I was Sally reborn, memories lost to pay for my recovery, he’d been my father. When I started becoming Sal in thought and action—a new person, not the daughter that he’d lost—he’d still been my father, just a little distant, a little strained, like he didn’t know how to deal with me anymore. And then I’d started learning what I really was,
who
I really was, and it hadn’t been a surprise to him, because he’d known all along. He’d never been under any misconceptions about my nature. I’d been an in-home science project for him, something to study while he waited to figure out how to get rid of me and my entire species.

Alfred Mitchell had let me think that he loved me, and I didn’t know whether I was ever going to be capable of forgiving him for that. Seeing him again made me realize that I also didn’t know whether I was ever going to be able to stop myself from loving him. He was my daddy. Whatever else he was… he was always, always going to be my daddy.

He stopped outside my bubble, and his swirling array of
scientists stopped with him, all of them turning in my direction. One of them read from her touchscreen, “Mitchell, Sally Rae. No traces of the protein that would indicate the presence of
Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis
were found in her bloodstream, and she came up negative on antigen tests. She’s clean.”

“She was recovered from the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek,” said another scientist, apparently eager to feel like he was contributing to the conversation. “A large mob of infected individuals was in pursuit when she was sedated and taken for further study.”