Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (2 page)

D
r. Cale’s lab might have been concealed in an abandoned bowling alley, but she’d clearly never seen that as a reason for her equipment to be anything less than state-of-the-art. The MRI scanner was kept in a private room, and was as elaborate and complex as anything they had at SymboGen. I tried to focus on how surprising it was to see a piece of machinery that complicated in a place like this as I shed my clothing on the floor and allowed Nathan to help me into the scanning bed. I’d been through this process before. It made it easy for me to lie still and close my eyes, pretending that none of the last few weeks had happened; that everything was still normal, that I was still
me
, and not the thing that I was desperately afraid I was becoming. Or worse, the thing I was even more afraid I had been all along.

The MRI came to life around me, the hammers and clangs
of the vast machine blending with the insistent pounding of the drums in my ears until there was nothing else: just sound, vibrating through my flesh, anchoring itself beneath my sternum.
My
flesh,
my
sternum. Ownership was so easy to claim, but did I have any right to it?

Please, please, it’s something else
, I thought, lying to myself one last time while the option was still open to me.
Please, it’s not what I think it is. Please, there’s another answer
…

The MRI gave one final pulse as it shut off. The sudden silence was deafening, only slightly lessened by the hum of the automated scanning bed sliding back out into the room, where the chill air raised goose bumps on my arms and legs. I grabbed a lab coat off the side of the machine, pulling it on as I climbed back to my feet. It didn’t do much to cut the chill, but I didn’t want to spend the time to pick up my clothes.

Nathan was seated at the monitor, the display reflecting off his glasses as he pulled up the first images of my insides. I stopped behind him, putting my hand on his shoulder. He put one of his hands over mine, using the other to continue working the mouse.

My abdomen should have been occupied by a lot of things: organs, scarring, and the pasty white mass of the SymboGen implant, which would naturally gravitate toward the base of my digestive system. It wasn’t there. The blood tests had been telling the truth: there was no residual tapeworm protein in my blood because there was no tapeworm in my digestive system. Nathan clicked to the next image. It wasn’t in my lungs, either. The image after that proved that my spinal cord was clean.

His fingers tightened on mine. I think that if I had told him to stop then, he would have, and we would both have walked away with the question unanswered. I didn’t tell him to stop. I needed to know. He did too, if only so that we would both be standing in the same place for once.

Nathan clicked the mouse. Everything changed.

The image showed the inside of a human skull, normal save for some small remodeling of the bone toward the back. The brain was there, lit up in bright colors that represented activity during the MRI. The tapeworm was there too, showing up as loops of nonreactive white against the bright neural map. It was deeply integrated, slithering in and out of brain tissue. But I’d known that before I’d seen the image, hadn’t I? I’d figured it out when I met Adam and Tansy, when I was faced with the reality of their existence. When I’d started to care about them, despite their monstrous origins.

Even knowing what they were hadn’t been strictly necessary, had it? Sherman was a tapeworm too, and I had always liked him best, out of all the people at SymboGen. From the moment I’d met him, I’d liked him. If I’d had even the slightest clue that he was a product of Dr. Cale’s lab, that would have given me the information I needed. When I met a tapeworm, when I met somebody like me, I liked them. I couldn’t help myself. Even if I’d wind up disliking them later, I started from a place of “you are family.”

So yes, I’d figured it out, and then I’d locked it away, because I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. Admitting it would make it real. Only I guess pictures could do the same thing, because I didn’t even try to deny that the image on the screen was me.

For the first time in my life, I was looking at who—at what—I really was.

I was never Sally Mitchell after all.

“The protein markers couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier in a detectable form,” said Nathan. His voice was soft, like he was afraid anything louder would startle me. He wasn’t wrong. “It’s why we couldn’t detect…” He stopped, obviously unsure how to finish the sentence.

There was no kind way to do it. “Honey, you’re not human” isn’t a conversation either of us was equipped to have. “Mom was right,” I whispered. She’d called me a stranger, and it had
hurt, but it hadn’t hurt as much as it should have, had it? No, because I’d already figured out the same thing she had: that I wasn’t Sally. Her daughter died in the accident that put her in the hospital. I was a stranger living inside her baby’s skin. I was a stranger to the entire human race. “Oh, my God. Nathan. Do you see…?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said, suddenly fierce. He let go of my hand as he stood, pushing the chair out of the way before he turned and wrapped his arms around me. He pulled me against him, holding me so tight that I was almost scared he would crush me. I put my arms around him in turn, doing my best to hug him just as hard. Voice still sharp, he said, “Do you understand me? It doesn’t change
anything
.”

I raised my head and looked over his shoulder. Dr. Cale had parked her wheelchair in the doorway. She was sitting there watching us, an expression of profound regret on her face. I wouldn’t have believed that she was capable of looking so sad, but in that moment, she managed it, and in that moment, she looked like her son. Coloring and race didn’t matter, not when stacked up against that expression.

So much of the way she had always interacted with me made sense now. So much of it still needed to be made sense of. “No,” I said. “It changes everything.” The broken doors that Dr. Cale had spoken of so often were open now; I could no longer pretend that they were just a children’s story, something I could safely forget about or ignore.

I looked back to Nathan, raising my eyes to his face and searching for any sign of rejection or revulsion. I didn’t want to leave him, but I didn’t want to make him stay with me if he couldn’t deal with the reality of what I was. I wasn’t sure
I
could deal with the reality of what I was—the calm I was feeling was probably shock, and would pass, replaced by hysteria. Better to make my choices now, when I could trust myself, than to let it wait until I was no longer thinking clearly.

How was I thinking at all? A tapeworm, no matter how cunningly engineered, didn’t have the size or complexity to think human-sized thoughts—but I managed it somehow. I had to be… the tapeworm part of me had to be
driving
Sally Mitchell’s brain, using it as storage somehow, like a person uses a computer. The thought made my stomach clench, and so I focused back on Nathan, who was safe; Nathan, who had never known Sally, but had fallen in love with
Sal
, with
me
, with the girl who had helped her injured sister into his office. He’d never batted an eye at any of my idiosyncrasies. Sally’s family had learned to love me when I replaced their daughter. Nathan had never needed to forget a person I could never be. That had always been so valuable to me. I was starting to understand a little bit more about why.

He met my eyes unflinchingly, and all I saw there was concern, and hope, and yes, love. He looked the same as he always had: black hair, brown eyes behind wire-framed glasses, golden-tan skin, and a serious expression that could spring into a smile at any moment. I didn’t see any fear or dismissal, or even dismay, in that face. I blinked.

“You knew,” I said, bewildered. “How did you know?”

“I told him.” Dr. Cale sounded tired. I pulled away from Nathan and turned to face his mother, who was pale where he was dark, from her sun-deprived skin to the watery blue of her eyes and the ashy blonde of her hair. Her shoulders sagged as she looked at me, and she said, “Back in my lab, when you were asleep on Adam’s cot. I thought he should… I’m sorry, Sal, but I thought my son should know that his girlfriend wasn’t entirely human. You clearly weren’t ready to have the same conversation. Perhaps it was wrong of me.”

“I think maybe it wasn’t,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t ready to know this yet. I wasn’t
letting
myself know this yet.” I looked down at my hands. “But I was going to figure it out.” I had already figured it out, and then locked the knowledge away
from myself, as if that sort of thing had ever done any good. Once the signs had been placed in front of me, they had been too easy to follow. I would have followed them again, and maybe then, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself forget. “I needed Nathan to know before I did. I needed him to have time to come to terms with it. Because if he’d left me then…”

If Nathan had been having his own freak-out at the same time I was having mine, I don’t know how I would have gotten through finding out the truth about myself. Having him pull away from me then—even temporarily—would have devastated me. Here and now, in this lab, with Tansy missing and Sherman alive but suddenly my enemy, losing my humanity was a huge step toward the abyss. Nathan had been able to place himself between me and that long, final fall, and he’d only been able to do it because he’d already known what I was.

Dr. Cale nodded. “I’m glad you see it that way. That’s what I was hoping for.” She paused, watching me carefully before she continued: “I know you’re in shock right now, and I know we’ve all had a difficult day, but do you think I could have that thumb drive?” She grimaced. “I hate to ask you. I hate to even be here right now. You deserve this moment. But I need that data.”

My eyes widened. “I forgot.” I had been refusing to give her the thumb drive full of information stolen from the SymboGen computers until she gave me the answers I thought I wanted. But then I’d been distracted by the need for blood tests and MRIs and then… “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Now the glimmer of a smile touched her lips. “You had other things on your mind.”

The words sounded faintly unreal, like she was quoting them from a book or movie, something that showed how an ethical mad scientist would behave. I pulled away from Nathan entirely, bending to rummage through my discarded clothing until I found the thumb drive in the front pocket of my jeans.
I walked over and held it out to Dr. Cale, who took it without commenting on the fact that I was still wearing nothing but an unbuttoned lab coat. Between Tansy, Adam, and… and Sherman, she must have gotten used to people whose sense of modesty was somewhat less developed than the norm.

“Thank you, Sal,” said Dr. Cale, taking the little plastic rectangle gently from my fingers. “You have no idea how much we need this data.”

“What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Tansy said it would explain how some of the sleepwalkers were integrating more quickly with their hosts…”

“It’s easy to forget sometimes that Steven Banks is a genius,” said Dr. Cale, still looking at the thumb drive. There was honest regret in her voice. “He blackmailed me into working for him, but the only reason he could was because I knew I wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting alone—he’d be there to help, and to carry it on when I couldn’t go any further. It’s easy to sit here and say, ‘I did it, it was all my fault; I am Frankenstein and this is my monster,’ but
D. symbogenesis
is Steven’s baby as much as it is mine. Maybe more, by this point, at least where the commercial models are concerned.”

“Meaning what, Mother?” asked Nathan.

“Meaning he continued the work after I left; he continued altering the genetics of the different strains and families of implant, looking for that perfect mixture of form and functionality. He didn’t toss up his hands and say, ‘Well, Shanti’s gone, better throw in the towel and stick with what we have.’ He
innovated
. He
improved
. And what we have here, on this little piece of hardware, is a collection of those innovations.” Dr. Cale raised her head, and I almost recoiled. I wasn’t human, but neither was the light burning in her eyes: bright and cold and unforgiving. “Now that we know what he’s done, we’ll know how to undo it. So thank you, Sal. Thank you both. You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like. I recommend you
consider making your residency permanent.” On this grim note, she placed the thumb drive carefully in her lap, turned herself around, and rolled out of the room. She didn’t look back once.

Nathan put his hand on my shoulder, stepping up beside me. The warmth of his body was reassuring. “Are you all right?” he asked.

I tried to answer him—I honestly did—but all that came out was a high, anxious squeal of laughter, like the sort of sound a rat might make if it was caught in a trap. Something wet was on my face. I raised my hand to touch my cheek, and found tears there, flowing freely from both eyes. My narrow window of calm had apparently passed.

I tried again to answer him, and this time there was no sound at all. The drums were back in my ears, and they grew louder as, with a great rushing roar like water pouring over a cliff, the dark crashed down and took me away.

One advantage to passing out repeatedly in the same place: you’re more likely to wake up somewhere familiar. I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the ceiling of Dr. Cale’s lab, lying on the same narrow cot that had served as my bed the last time I had fainted. Only one light was on, and it was behind me, casting the room into the sort of deep shadow that never happens naturally. I sat up, dimly aware that I wasn’t alone.

“Hello? Who’s there?” I frowned into the darkness in front of me. “So you know, I’m having a
really
bad day, so I’d appreciate it if you could move straight to threatening me, or making weird noises, or turning out to be on the other side of some massive ideological divide that’s going to shape the future of the human race.”