Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (25 page)

T
he grate in the changing room wall opened onto a snug vent that was at most two feet across and a foot and a half tall. I squirmed my way inside, grateful that the phobia instilled in me by the psychologists at SymboGen had focused on car crashes instead of on tight spaces. This would have been enough to make even a mild claustrophobe lose their composure, and that was while I was still close enough to the opening for a small amount of light to filter in and allow me to see. It was going to be all about touch from here on out.

At least it was too narrow for Sherman or Kristoph to come after me. Ronnie would fit, but it would take a while for whoever was watching the monitors to realize that I wasn’t emerging from the dressing room. No matter what, I would have a lead before he came after me, and that meant that I might
actually have a chance. Bracing my weight on my elbows, I began pulling myself inexorably forward into the dark.

The light faded within ten feet of the entrance. I was just starting to wonder how long this tunnel could go when my fingers hit the wall. I stopped where I was, feeling around for where the tunnel branched. There were openings to both my left and my right. They felt like they were roughly the same size, but there was more dirt and grit to the left, which implied that air normally flowed in that direction. Since air would flow from the outside, that meant I needed to go right. I shuffled back a foot or so, and then pulled myself cautiously around the corner, continuing my slow progress into the dark.

The slow pounding of my heart in my ears distracted me from the otherwise absolute silence in the vent: without the air conditioner or heater running, the only sounds were the ones that I made. That was good. It made it easier for me to listen for pursuit. I stopped every ten feet or so, cocking my head and trying to focus back through the dark for signs that I was being followed. There weren’t any, as yet. That didn’t mean that they weren’t coming. I needed to keep going as fast as I could.

The next section of the vent extended for what felt like about sixty feet before it dead-ended. I shuffled backward again, feeling the walls for turnoffs that I might have missed. There was nothing but solid, unyielding metal. I took a deep breath and held it until the panic that had been starting to writhe in my belly died down. If I had to go back, I’d go back. There were no pits between me and the last turn. It would be hard. It wasn’t impossible.

A faint breeze ruffled my hair as I prepared myself for backing up. I stopped. Then, cautiously, I lifted one hand above my head.

First it hit the metal roof of the vent. And then it hit nothing but empty air. I had found the ventilation shaft.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I can do this. I can do this. It’ll get
me home.” I squirmed forward again, until I could roll onto my back and reach up into the open ventilation shaft with both hands. It was square, rather than rectangular, and slightly narrower than the main vent. I would still fit, but it was going to be a tight squeeze, and I was much more likely to find myself stuck. I could die in there.

It would still be better than staying here with Sherman. I dug my fingernails into the joins between pieces of metal and began pulling myself up, bracing my feet and knees against the sides of the shaft for traction. All those laps around the mall were really paying off. Now all I had to do was hope that I would reach the top before my strength gave out completely, and that whatever was between me and freedom would be something I could easily move aside.

I didn’t know how good security usually was on things like “roof vents,” which struck me as a bad target for thieves. I also didn’t know how I was going to get down from the roof once I managed to get there. That was a problem for later; that was a problem for someone who was already free, and that meant that it couldn’t be a problem for
me
. Until I was outside, I was still Sherman’s captive.

With no other way of marking time, I started counting off seconds in my head, chanting, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” as softly as I could. The minutes blurred into an infinite number of Mississippis, leaving me no more certain of how long I’d been climbing than I would have been without the count. At least the act of saying the numbers aloud made me feel like I was doing something, and kept me from focusing on the increasing weakness of my arms. I’d never done anything like this before. If my grip slipped even the slightest bit…

As if the thought had created the action, my sweat-soaked palms slipped on the slick tin walls of the vent, and I slid abruptly downward for what felt like a mile before I managed to jam my feet hard enough against the vent’s sides to stop my
descent. My heart was hammering so hard that it felt like it was going to break clean out of my chest, and I could taste the bright copper penny burn of adrenaline on my tongue. What would have happened if I’d fallen all the way down to the bottom? It’s not like there was a pillow waiting there to soften my landing. I would have been lucky to get away with something as small as a broken ankle.

For one dizzying moment I hung there, suspended and afraid, and thought about climbing the rest of the way down before I could plummet. I would go back to the dressing room. I would crawl back through the grate before anyone noticed I was gone and came looking for me. I would go back to my bed and sleep off this headache, and when I woke up, I would be able to think of a better escape route. One that wasn’t so risky. One that didn’t carry so many consequences for failure.

You’re not going to do any of those things
, I told myself quietly. There was nothing firm or stern about my little inner voice: if anything, I sounded despairing even to myself. I wasn’t going to go back, and I wasn’t going to come up with another escape plan, because there
wasn’t
another escape plan. It was this or nothing.

Knees shaking with the effort of keeping me suspended in place, I pulled one hand cautiously away from the wall and wiped my palm dry on my sweater. Placing my hand back against the wall, I repeated the process with the other hand. Then, taking a deep breath, I began to climb again.

If it had been hard before, it was pure torture now. I was dead tired, lactic acid was building up in my muscles, and falling was no longer an abstract “maybe”: it was a thing that had happened once and could easily happen again. I dug my nails into the grooves between panels of tin, climbing ever higher, trying not to think about what awaited me if I slipped. I’d managed to catch myself once. I wasn’t going to be so lucky a second time.

My right hand quested upward for the wall, and struck empty
air. I trembled, forcing the rest of my limbs to remain rigid as I felt around, trying to find where the wall had gone. Finally, reaching down, I found the point where the vent curved. Hope surged through me, hot and red and burning. I was at the top. I had to be.

That, or the bend was going to lead me to a whole new tunnel system, and take me no closer to the exit. I pushed that thought aside. It was unproductive, and besides, I could feel the cool air flowing toward me. It was just a trickle, held back by whatever grating was on the front of the vent, but it meant that I was moving in the right direction, if nothing else.

With trembling hands, I pulled myself around until I was facing into the bend. There was still no light. Still, I hadn’t come this far to turn around at the first sign of trouble, and so I squirmed forward, working my way one inch at a time into the new leg of my journey.

The bend was barely the length of my body. Then it curved again, resuming its ascent—but the angle this time was more slope than sheer, and I was able to pull myself along without nearly as much fear of falling. My pulse was beginning to calm. There was something pleasantly familiar about moving through the dark this way, like it was part of what I had been made for. In a way, I suppose that was exactly the case. I was designed to live in dark, tight spaces, inside a human body. This was just life inside a building. Not that much difference, given the change in scale that I’d already undergone.

The slope ended at another bend, and as my head popped up over it, a new element introduced itself back into the world: light. Bloody, reddish sunset light, trickling in through the slits in a grate that was almost close enough for me to touch. I sped up, pulling myself forward until I could brace my hands against the grate and shove. This was the moment of truth. If it was bolted on from the outside, then I had traveled all this way for nothing.

To my relief, the grate shifted as soon as I pushed against it. I pushed again, and it gave way, dropping out of my field of view and hitting the roof with a loud clang. The noise should have worried me, but it didn’t. I had other things to focus on, like the sunset that was painting the sky in a thousand shades of rose. I climbed rapidly toward the opening, hungry for the light.

“That didn’t take you as long as I thought it would.” The voice was Ronnie’s, calm and almost disinterested. I barely resisted the urge to jackknife back into the vent. Instead, I gripped the edge and turned to see him standing some five feet away, his hands folded behind his back, one of them holding a gun, and his attention focused calmly on the sky. “You’re a fast climber. I guess desperation is a pretty good motivation.”

“How did you know?” My voice came out in a whisper. I didn’t move.

“You vanished from the monitors. There aren’t many places in the store that aren’t on the monitors, so I checked them all. You didn’t put the grate back in the changing room. Sloppy, Sal. Very sloppy.” Ronnie didn’t look at me. “You can come down from there. Hanging out in the air-conditioning isn’t going to change what happens next.”

“What
is
going to happen next?” I couldn’t figure out how to turn and put my feet out first, so I just pushed forward and toppled to the roof in an ungainly heap. My cheek landed on the fallen grate, and I felt it slice through my skin, adding the smell of blood to the eucalyptus and pigeon feather odors otherwise pervading the roof.

It should have smelled terrible. It smelled like freedom. Something tightened in my chest, and as I climbed to my feet, I decided that no matter what happened next, it wasn’t going to end with me going back into that mall. Either Ronnie would shoot me, or I’d get the gun away from him somehow… or I’d go over the edge of the roof. Whatever it took to keep myself out of Sherman’s hands.

I felt bad about the idea of dying before I got to see Nathan again. If he ever found out what had happened to me—what Sherman was planning to use me to
do
—he would understand why I couldn’t just go along with things. He would forgive me.

“Something,” said Ronnie, still sounding disinterested. “I don’t get you, Sal. Here you’ve got a guy like Sherman falling over himself to make you a queen, and all you can do is fight and try to escape. Lots of girls would die to be in your shoes.”

“And when he kills me by mistake during one of his little experiments? What happens then?” I glared at him, starting to pick bits of gravel out of my palms. “I didn’t volunteer to be a lab animal. Sherman of all people should know how much I hate having other people make my decisions for me, but he still thinks he has the right, just because he’s older than I am. Fuck him. I have my own life.”

“A life you stole.”

Ronnie’s words were mild, but they still stung. I snapped back, “Like he didn’t? We’re all thieves here. The only difference is that I decided to stop stealing once I had what I needed. He’s going to keep going until he has everything he wants, and that’s really different. That’s not okay.”

Ronnie finally turned enough to let me see the small smile on his face. “You’re a wimp,” he said, not unkindly. He made it sound like a statement of essential fact: we were on a roof, he was probably about to kill me or something, and I was a wimp. “You don’t act soon enough, and you don’t take risks when you really should. If I were you, I would have been out that vent weeks ago, and screw anyone who tried to stop me from escaping. You pretty much asked to be swept off the street and locked in a cage by
somebody
. Hell, if you want proof of that, look at where you are—trying to escape from a cage that you were put in by the man who took you out of the last one.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a wimp,” I said, picking the last of the gravel out of my left hand. The cut on my cheek
was still bleeding sluggishly, but it didn’t feel like it was serious enough to worry about. I’d probably need a few stitches, assuming I lived long enough to get them. “The world can’t be made up entirely of leaders. Someone has to be willing to follow.”

“That sounds like something a wimp would say.”

I shrugged. The edge of the roof was about ten feet away. I couldn’t see the street from where I was standing, but the angle on the trees across from me made me think that we were standing on the third floor. That would mean a thirty-foot drop to the street, and I wasn’t going to survive that.

“Hey.” Ronnie snapped his fingers. I turned to face him. He looked at me flatly and asked, “What happens if you get away from here? Where are you going to go?”

“Back to my people,” I said.

“You gonna tell them where to find us? You gonna lead them straight back here?” He asked the questions like they were of no consequence, like he was asking whether I’d like cheese sandwiches with lunch tomorrow, and not asking about the potential fates of everyone he knew.

I thought about Dr. Cale’s lab, and her small army of assistants and unpaid interns, most of whom probably didn’t know how to organize a siege. With Tansy gone, the security was reduced by at least half. Fang could probably take Ronnie in a fair fight. I didn’t believe Ronnie was a fan of fair fights. And yet lying to Ronnie didn’t seem like a good way to get off this roof alive—assuming there was any good way.

“Probably,” I said. “I’d at least tell Dr. Cale where to find you. She’s going to want to know. I think she feels responsible for Sherman. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to wipe out the human race. So probably.”