Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (32 page)

“I’m so sorry.” The words weren’t enough. Words never were. They were all I had to offer him.

“He was a good man, and he had a good life. I think he’d be happy to know I found Mom again, and that we’re at least trying to be a family. I know he’d be happy to hear that I found you again, that we somehow went through this horrible thing and wound up in the same place.” Nathan reached out and cupped my cheek with one hand. “He liked you a lot, you know. He used to ask me when you’d be his daughter.”

“I already said I’d marry you,” I said, blinking back tears.

“Fishy’s ordained,” said Nathan. “I think it would be a Jedi wedding—”

I couldn’t help myself. I broke out in giggles at the very idea.

Nathan smiled. “This is where we live now. This is where we’re going to find a way to save the world. Do you need anything?”

“Sleep,” I admitted. “Ronnie knocked me out before he moved me to the house where you found me, but that wasn’t real sleep, and I had…” The teenage sleepwalker, all life gone from her eyes, reaching for me out of the pure, desperate need to survive. “… I had a hard day. I just want to sleep.”

“Okay.” Nathan leaned forward and kissed my forehead before he started shrugging out of his lab coat. “I could use a nap.”

I didn’t say it, but I was grateful that he was staying with me. Good as it was to see my dogs again, I didn’t want to be alone.

It didn’t take me long to be ready for bed—all I had to do was squirm out of my bloody clothes, which Nathan whisked away and dropped into a sealed, dog-proof hamper. It took him a little longer, since he was somewhat more properly dressed. When we were both naked, we stopped and just looked at each other, me tracing the new starkness of his ribs and pallor of his arms and chest, where his slight tan had faded back to his natural light brown skin tone, him studying the bruises on
my arms, legs, and side, all the snipped-off bits of skin and the tracks left behind by Sherman’s needles. I was white as a ghost after a month without seeing the sun, and when he came to me, I felt like paper pressed against stone, devoid of anything but emptiness.

Nathan curled himself around me, and the dogs fitted themselves into the spaces we created with our bodies, and everything was finally right with the world.

October 2027: Tansy

S
till here I’m still here I’m still me I’m still here.

But only barely, I think. Every day I’m a little less me a little less here a little less Tansy. Pieces of me are going. He’s stealing pieces of me, one by one, and all he’s giving me in exchange is pain. So much pain. Pain like it’s air, pain that is breathing, so breathing stops seeming like a good idea. I try to stop I’ve tried over and over again to stop to let go to empty my lungs like flat paper boxes on a hill and why do I think of that over and over what is the hill what does it mean why do I want to go there what do those boxes do? I can’t remember anymore. So I try to stop breathing, over and over again I try, and every time I think I might succeed his machines grab me and bring me back again, returning me to the place where everything is pain.

It’s been long enough that I’m not sure the world has ever
not
been made of pain. Maybe that’s a thing I made up, like all the other things that I made up. Like running and jumping and firing a gun pow pow bang bang and being free and being happy and being home. Like Adam and Sal and Sherman. How could there be other people like me when I’m not even possible?

He’d said that to me more than once. “You shouldn’t be
possible,” and sometimes he said it like it was something remarkable, something to be celebrated, and other times he said it like he was angry with me, like I had broken a rule by not being something that was supposed to exist. It didn’t seem to matter how he said it. It always came with pain, and so I’d stopped really listening to his tone, and started listening for the silences between his words. If I could just fill my ears with silence, maybe everything else would go away.

I didn’t know how long I’d been where I was. I didn’t know anything anymore. All I knew was that I hurt. I hurt so bad.

There was a click as the door on the other side of the room swung open. I whimpered. I couldn’t help myself. I hurt so much, and I didn’t want him to hurt me again. I just wanted him to go away so I could practice not breathing. Maybe this time I would do it right. Maybe this time the machines wouldn’t realize what I was doing, and they’d let me go. Maybe.

Heavy footsteps approached me, every vibration sending shockwaves through the floor and into my raw, exposed nerves. I was glad I couldn’t see him approaching. I’d never considered that blindness could be a blessing.

“How’s my girl today?” He always started the same way. Even now that I couldn’t answer him—not even if I wanted to—he still talked to me like I was going to respond. Just one more thing I didn’t understand. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, darling. Do you remember when I told you that I was going to learn everything I could from you before I let you go? That was the day we talked about dying. Do you remember?”

I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember anything but pain. But I couldn’t tell him that without a tongue, with my mouth wired shut to keep me from biting at myself when the drugs wore off, and so I didn’t say anything at all.

“Of course you do.” A hand touched me lightly on my throat, on one of the few intact patches of skin that I had left.
“Well, my dear, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but that day has come.”

I had thought that I was past feeling anything but pain. I was wrong.

I could still feel relief. It was ending. It was ending.

It was e

I
dreamt of the hot warm dark. Of the hot warm dark and of the redness that never ended, instead stretching on and on into a peaceful eternity. I moved through that redness without moving, and I understood the reasons for that now. My old therapist would have been amazed by the breakthroughs I was making in understanding my own mind. Not thinking of myself as a human being helped a lot. I didn’t need to consciously move when I was in the hot warm dark because I
was
the hot warm dark, and I was the occupant of the hot warm dark, and it would never leave me, even if I could never go back to the simplicity of being that I had once enjoyed, before I became self-aware, before I became Sal, with all the consequences that choice—if it was a choice—implied.

I didn’t really think of my creation as a choice. All the choices had come later, when I was a thinking, feeling creature
that stood on two legs, instead of swimming fluidly with none. If there was a price to pay for what I had become—a price for
me
to pay, not Sally—it was that once you were human, you had to choose things.

“Sal.” A hand touched my shoulder, accompanied by the familiar sound of Nathan’s voice. The hot warm dark dissolved into the blackness behind my eyelids. I didn’t move. There was always a moment, right after I woke up, where I had to decide whether or not waking up was worth it. Choices again. Nathan sighed. “Honey, I know you’re awake. Come on. We’re going to miss breakfast if you don’t get moving.”

I opened my eyes and rolled over. Nathan, fully dressed, with a lab coat over his brown wool sweater, was sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling ruefully at me. His thick black hair was damp and sticking to his forehead, a sure sign that he’d come straight from the showers. “What?” I said, groggily. “Why?”

“Because we only serve breakfast for so long, and then we have to start turning the kitchen over to get ready for lunch,” he said reasonably. Beverly had her head resting on my hip. He reached over me to ruffle her ears, adding, “It’s waffles today. The chickens on the roof have started laying enough eggs that we can use them for things like batter.”

“I like waffles,” I allowed, and sat up. Beverly gave me a betrayed look and rolled over, telegraphing her intent not to get out of the bed for anything short of bacon. I giggled. I couldn’t help it.

“I like waffles too,” said Nathan, his small smile blossoming into a full, tight-lipped grin. He never showed me his teeth when he smiled anymore. What had been an affectation for my comfort when we were dating and I was human had become full-on habit upon learning that I was a tapeworm, and that my distaste for teeth was a genetic atavism that no amount of therapy could cure.

That sobered me. I bit my lip, dropping my chin a bit as I said, “I’ll get some clothes on and be right down.”

“That sounds like you’re planning to stay in bed until I leave the room, and then get ready without me,” said Nathan. “What’s wrong? Did you have bad dreams again?”

Sometimes I dreamt about my time with Sherman, or even my time at USAMRIID, blessedly short as it had been. In my dreams, Sherman never came to save me, and what Sally’s father had planned for me—the worm that had stolen his daughter’s life—was always worse than a few marrow samples. I had been back where I belonged for almost two weeks, and the dreams weren’t as frequent as they had been once, but I still woke up screaming frequently enough that we were both running on a disrupted sleep schedule.

“No,” I said quietly.

“Sal…”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s something, or you wouldn’t be refusing to meet my eyes.” Nathan touched my shoulder. “Tell me, please. I can’t help if you won’t tell me.”

“I dreamt about the hot warm dark. That’s all. It was… it was so nice. It was so much nicer than dreaming about being back with Sherman that I didn’t want to wake up. I just wanted to stay there forever.” The words were all simple ones, but between the two of us, they meant so much more than they could possibly encompass. I had dreamt of being something other than human, and I had wanted to stay that way. But if I wasn’t human, how could I belong here?

Nathan sighed. “Sal. Look at me.”

I lifted my head.

“Wanting to disappear into the hot warm dark is perfectly reasonable for you right now, and you know it. I don’t care where you came from. I never have, and I never will, and you
know that.” Nathan looked at me solemnly. “I won’t tell you not to be silly—you’re
not
being silly, you’re going through a perfectly natural and normal process. You’re grieving for a life you didn’t think was going to turn out like this, and I’m just sorry we don’t have any trained therapists here for you to talk to. But I don’t care how many times you dream about disappearing into the dark. You’re still my girl.”

“I hated my therapist,” I said weakly. “Besides, where would we find somebody trained in the psyche of the distressed chimera?”

“It’s a niche field,” Nathan said, and offered me a small, hopeful smile.

I searched his eyes for some sign that he was lying, and couldn’t find it. I never found it, no matter how many times I looked. Maybe because it wasn’t there, and maybe because the lies were too big and too deep to be visible to anyone—not him, and certainly not me. How could he love me now the way that he’d loved me when he thought I was just like him? It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t feel the same way about myself as I had before I learned where I had come from. It was impossible for Nathan to be the only person in the world who really didn’t care.

Or was it? I didn’t feel the same way about myself anymore, but I didn’t feel any differently about him. Maybe it was the same for him, just… in reverse.

Those thoughts were big and complicated and hard, and I was tired of arguing with myself—so tired of arguing. So I shunted them to the side, sweeping them away like so much trash, and leaned forward to kiss him. Nathan responded by releasing my other hand and pulling me closer, ignoring the irritated grumbling noises from Beverly.

This time, there was no mistaking the pounding of my heart for the sound of drums. Nathan’s lips tasted faintly of mouthwash, which made me smile. He scooped me up, dropping me
into his lap, where the pressure of his erection against my hip made it plain that he was as glad to see me as I was to be seen.

After that, there was no stopping, for either one of us. He stripped me out of my nightgown without lifting me from his lap, and then pushed me back against the bed as he removed his lab coat. Beverly grumbled more and jumped down to the floor, trotting across the room to join Minnie in the dog bed. I laughed, reaching forward to undo Nathan’s fly, and then nothing remained but the things we
did
share: skin and sweat and physicality, and the sweet knowledge that each of us was loved enough to make this moment possible. Moments like that one—not sexual, necessarily, but absolutely connected, absolutely in synch—are where humanity lives.

Nathan needed another shower by the time we were done, and I still needed my first one. He pulled his trousers and sweater back on while I wrapped myself in the comfortable largeness of his lab coat, enjoying the feeling of cotton against my bare backside as we walked down the hall to the employee showers. Not every floor had its own locker room. The lab level had two, probably because the scientists and researchers who used to work here were dealing with sticky substances all day, and no one wanted to deal with dripping molasses all the way home.

“I’ll be right back,” said Nathan, kissing me quickly before we parted ways at the entrance to the male and female showers. Not everyone paid attention to the distinction anymore—gender binaries seemed a lot less important after the apocalypse, if they had ever really been important in the first place—but splitting up was the best way to make sure we might actually make it downstairs in time for the last of the breakfast service.

The shelves in the women’s showers were cluttered with a wide assortment of hair care products and soaps, ranging in quality from salon brands to the sort of things that used to be
sold at drugstores for a dollar a bottle. Several of Dr. Cale’s interns were conducting what they called “comparison tests,” and had determined that most of the salon brands were functionally identical to the Costco house brands.

“This would have saved me a fortune if I’d known before everything was free,” one of them had confessed drunkenly to me once, right after I had walked in on them shampooing one another’s hair. After that, I’d gotten a little more careful about showering alone. It wasn’t the nudity that bothered me. It was the expectation that I would know how to be social in a situation that no one had ever modeled or explained. People were complicated, and “complicated” was another word for “confusing as hell.”

I sluiced off quickly, using a cherry-scented shower gel to wash myself off while the combination shampoo and conditioner worked at baking the stiffness and snarls out of my hair. I could be in and out of the shower in half the time it took Nathan, usually, because I didn’t much care about what combination of products I used as long as they accomplished the solitary goal of making me clean. Rinsing myself, I ran my fingers through my hair to break up the worst of the knots and turned off the water before starting for the exit.

It hadn’t been long enough since my escape for me to need a haircut. I wanted one. I wanted one so badly that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with images of scissors dancing in front of my eyes. I didn’t want
anything
he had done to me to last. At the same time, cutting my hair—which was
mine
, it belonged to
me
, it grew out of
my
scalp—felt like an admission of defeat. Maybe it was a little, stupid thing, but it felt like if I cut it off, he would win. So I dried it as quickly as I could, and tried not to look at my reflection in the mirror.

I was fully dressed by the time Nathan came back to our room from the men’s shower, toweling off his hair as he
stepped through the door. I smiled and held out his clothes. “Breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” he agreed.

He was still slightly damp when he got dressed. I helped, which nearly resulted in us needing another turn in the showers. Finally, though, we were walking toward the elevators, fully clothed and ready to face the day ahead.

Two weeks in the candy factory had acclimated me to the layout of the place: I was no longer pressing random buttons and then being surprised by whatever floor I happened to wind up on. Two weeks had also acclimated everyone else to my presence. There were fewer weird looks and jumps, and more quiet avoidances.

I suppose I should have expected that. Dr. Cale’s people were among the best in the world, and had been even before the population of the world started to drop precipitously. But they didn’t all share her “a person’s a person” attitude toward the chimera, or her sympathy toward the sleepwalkers, who had, after all, not asked to be designed with dangerously high levels of human DNA. I was starting to worry that she would have a mutiny on her hands before too much longer. What felt like half her technicians didn’t want to broker a peace between the two sides: they wanted to wipe the other side out completely, sweeping the slate clean and creating a world where allergies and autoimmune disorders would return to their proper place in the human body, rather than being suppressed by tapeworms that could turn traitor at any moment.

It was sort of hard to blame them for that. I probably wouldn’t have been too thrilled at the idea of harboring my own replacement.

The elevator stopped two floors down from our living quarters, and the doors opened on a sugar-scented, candy-colored wonderland. As always, the sight of the party level sent my
train of thought spinning out of control, replaced by a strong desire to run laughing through the cookie garden until the Buttercream Fairy appeared and told me to stop. I glanced to the side. Nathan was grinning at me again.

“I just really like it here,” I said defensively.

“I just really like it when you’re happy,” he said, laughing, and stepped out of the elevator, leaving me with little choice but to follow him.

The party level had been designed to be managed by no more than six staff members, but had been subdivided into enough small grottos and private rooms that it was impossible to tell how many people were there at any given time. The elevator opened into the arrival area, which smelled like jelly beans and gumdrops and didn’t have a specific “candy” theme apart from “dentists are the enemy.” The randomly changing candy scents made meals an occasionally interesting experience, since this was also the only place in the building that was properly set up as a dining area. There was a cafeteria, but it was small and gray and depressing, and pretty much all of us preferred to eat in the cookie garden.

The smell of bacon wafted from what used to be the sticky toffee oasis, but had become the main station for fried meats in the morning and hot soup in the afternoon, thanks to its plethora of heat lamps and electrical outlets. According to the flyers in the old manager’s office, the sticky toffee oasis had been the only party destination to offer fondue as an option for the birthday boy or girl. I wasn’t really sure why anyone would want to eat toffee-flavored fondue on the steps of a plywood and plaster pyramid. Clearly, my lack of a human childhood had warped me in some way.

Daisy was on duty at the hot bar when Nathan and I came around the corner. He got a bright smile, which faded somewhat as her eyes focused on me. “Good morning, Nathan,” she said. “Sal.”

“Morning, Daisy.” I picked up a plate. “Nathan said there were waffles?”

“Third tray,” she said, pointing with her tongs before refocusing her smile on Nathan. It got even brighter, if that was possible. “I saved you some ham. It’s from the freezer we found last week, so we know it’s good.”

“Mmm, ham,” said Nathan. “Did you know that most natural tapeworm infections in the United States came from undercooked pork before we started importing our produce from South America? Salad tainted with human feces turned out to be an excellent transmission method for the infection.”