Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (34 page)

My ability to sense other chimera was growing, and had been since Sherman held me captive in his mall. I didn’t know how far it was going to go. Apparently, it had already gone far enough for Anna to register immediately on my parasite radar.

Dr. Cale gestured for Nathan to stop when we reached the line of interns and assistants, and she gripped her own wheels, turning herself to face our visitors and abandoned associates, now virtual hostages to Dr. Banks’s good behavior. The line broke and re-formed, leaving the three of us strung at the center of it like a pendant on a chain. Dr. Cale refolded her hands in her lap, tilting her head so that her sleek blonde hair brushed against her cheek just so. She looked like a nursery school teacher, someone who could wait patiently forever until they received the answer they were looking for.

Fishy, Daisy, and Fang were still in their original positions, looking remarkably relaxed for people who might be shot at any moment. Then again, they were also all armed, and they knew that the folks with the rifles would be shooting at Dr. Banks and Anna, not at them.

“I really think you’re overreacting here,
Shanti
,” said Dr. Banks, stressing Dr. Cale’s chosen name. “I’m here as a friend, and as someone who needs your help. I don’t see any reason for you to have your people treat me like a common criminal.”

“Really? How many times did you try to have me killed, Steven? Two? Three? Oh, wait, there was that incident with the
gas leak back at my first private lab—we never did figure out how that happened, but as there were no cameras on the location, we couldn’t rule out industrial espionage. That one almost succeeded, you know. I was still getting used to my wheelchair back then. So I’d say that ‘four’ is a low estimate, wouldn’t you?” Dr. Cale’s folded hands tensed and relaxed to a rhythm I understood: she was hearing her own version of the drums that followed me through my life.

Nathan kept his hands on the chair, more I think so that he wouldn’t have to decide what to do with them than anything else. Dr. Banks was the man who’d first conceived of the project that would lead to
D. symbogenesis
, the downfall of the human race, and the end of the world as we knew it. But he hadn’t done any of that on his own. When he needed help, he’d gone looking for the smartest, most ethically flexible genetic engineer he knew: Dr. Surrey Blackburn-Kim, Nathan’s mother. Dr. Kim had known that this path would lead them through the broken doors at last, and she’d tried to refuse—not too hard, I was sure; she’d been the same person then, even if she’d gone by a different name—and when Dr. Banks had produced information that he could use to force her to work on his project, she’d agreed, on one condition. Dr. Kim had to die.

There was a boating accident. Nathan buried his mother. Nathan’s father buried his wife. And Dr. Shanti Cale hung her newly minted degrees on the wall of a private lab in a San Francisco biotech firm, where she was going to change the world.

I couldn’t really say whether she’d done the right thing. All I knew about the blackmail material Dr. Banks had on her was that it was bad enough to make her walk away from her entire life… and that he had played on her ingrained desire to break the laws of nature without getting caught. “Every mad scientist secretly dreams of playing God,” was something she had said to me on several occasions, and from the way she and Dr. Banks were looking at each other now, I guessed that was true.
He was trying to project a veneer of smug confidence over a thick inner layer of exhaustion. Dr. Cale was ice. She looked like she had never thawed, and never would.

“Now, Shanti,” said Dr. Banks. “Are we really going to let the past keep us from collaborating here and now, when we have a chance to save the future? We work well together. You know we do.”

“How many times?” she asked coolly.

“Eight,” he admitted, after a long silence. “Your little odd-eyed girl stopped two of my men before they could get anywhere near you, and you dropped off the grid not long after that. Where
is
she, by the way? I didn’t expect to be able to walk right up to your headquarters.”

“You shouldn’t have been able to,” said Dr. Cale, her glare briefly flickering to the other three people who shared the elevator with Dr. Banks and Anna. Well, that explained why she’d left them in there: they were all involved with our operational security, and the fact that he was in the building at all meant that they had failed, to some degree, at their jobs. “As for Tansy, she is on an extended leave of absence. We hope to have her back with us soon.”

“That means you lost her, doesn’t it?” Dr. Banks shook his head. There was a slight upward tilt to the corners of his mouth, like he was fighting not to smile. “You should be more careful with your human resources, Shanti. It’s getting harder to replace them.”

“It’s getting harder to replace biotech firms, too, but you’ve apparently allowed yours to be commandeered by the U.S. government,” said Dr. Cale mildly. “Do we really want to start playing the game of ‘who paid more to arrive at this point in time’? Because I’ll note that you’re standing there trying to make me feel sorry for you, and I’m sitting here wishing more than anything that I could walk over and knee you in the balls.”

I blinked. Dr. Cale’s paraplegia was a fact of life, something
that the lab and her living quarters had been designed to accommodate. Sometimes I forgot that it was the result of her implanting the tapeworm that would eventually mature to become Adam in her own body, where it had compromised her spine to such a degree that she had been judged unlikely to ever recover, even back when she had access to better medical care than we could supply in a repurposed candy factory. The thought of her walking was surreal.

From the brief look of regret that flashed over Dr. Banks’s face, I was the only one who felt that way. “I didn’t ‘allow’ the government to commandeer my resources. They take what they want. And I never did tell you how sorry I was when I received the news of your injury.”

“Really, Steven? You were sorry? Because here I thought you’d take it as proof that you’d been right when you decided to sideline me.”

“You didn’t stay long enough to be sidelined.”

Dr. Cale sat up a little straighter, lifting her chin. “That’s true. I ran as soon as I saw the writing on the wall. You were in a position of power, and I knew what a man like you would do when he had a little power in his hands. Now here we are, and I’m in this chair, and yet for once, you don’t have any power at all. You’re just a man with no army at his back, standing here and asking for my help. So what is it that you want, Steven? What can my humble little underground lab do for someone with your resources and reach?”

“Sarcasm is a mode of speech used to convey mockery or even disdain without openly insulting the other person involved in the conversation,” said Anna.

Everyone stopped. Dr. Cale’s attention switched from Dr. Banks to the girl, her eyes crawling over Anna’s body with an almost visible avidity. Anna continued to stare straight ahead, not seeming to fully understand what was happening around her. Again, the urge to shield her from the situation swept over
me, and again, I pushed it aside. She wasn’t on our side. That made her the enemy.

“How far along is her integration?” asked Dr. Cale.

“Two and a half weeks,” said Dr. Banks. “Ideally, she would still be hooked to her monitoring equipment, but she’s highly resistant to being separated from me. She becomes difficult to control.”

“How is she talking if she’s only two and a half weeks along?” asked Dr. Cale. “Language integration takes longer than that.”

Dr. Banks looked smug. “I found a new means of stabilizing the neural paths. It allows for a quicker, more seamless connection between the implant and the brain.”

“Building a better chimera,” said Dr. Cale. “I’m sure the government will be thrilled to hear that’s what you’ve been doing with their money.”

“We have to understand them if we’re going to defeat them.” Dr. Banks sighed, shaking his head. “All right, Shanti, what is it that you want me to say? You want me to apologize? Fine. I apologize. I’m sorry I brought you into this, and I’m sorry I created an environment where you felt like you had to remove yourself for your own safety, and I’m sorry I tried to have you killed. Although to be fair, you would have done the same in my position.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Dr. Cale. “You stole my research, Steven. You stole my life’s work, and you stole my
family
.”

“I didn’t steal them,” he protested. “You chose to give them up.”

“That’s not the family she’s talking about.” The sound of my own voice surprised me. Dr. Cale didn’t take her eyes off Dr. Banks, but the way her mouth curled upward at the corner told me that she approved of my interjection. I swallowed, the drums hammering loudly in my ears, and said, “You called Anna my sister. You did that because she’s… she’s like me. She’s a tapeworm in a human skin.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Banks, and beamed at me, like I was a slow child who had just managed to catch up to the rest of the class.

It made me itch to punch him, to feel my knuckles sinking into the soft flesh of his cheek or throat. I clenched my hands by my sides instead, and said, “That means you used the
D. symbogenesis
tapeworm on a human subject to get a chimera of your very own.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Banks again. His smile this time was more strained. He was clearly getting as tired of praising me as I was of being praised. Too bad that had never been enough to make him stop.

“That worm has human DNA in it. Dr. Cale’s DNA. You took her family away from her when you took
us
away from her.”

“Millions of children,” said Dr. Cale, a wistful note in her voice that I had only heard on a few occasions, usually when she was talking about her friend Simone, who had died of allergies before the development of the SymboGen implant. Simone had been Dr. Cale’s motivation for wanting to solve the hygiene hypothesis. Without that dead friend, Dr. Cale would probably have turned her terrible intellect on destroying the world in some other completely accidental way.

That’s the danger of genius. One way or another, it’s going to destroy the world.

“I don’t understand,” said Dr. Banks.

“I think you do,” said Dr. Cale. “I had millions of children, and you took them away from me. So what can you possibly offer that would make up for that?”

“Data.” He produced an external hard drive from inside his shirt, holding it up for all of us to see. “I have the full record of Anna’s conversion and assimilation here, and I’m willing to give it to you, if you’re willing to help us. There are things on there that you probably haven’t even considered yet, much less advanced to the testing stage. I can help you jump your research
forward by a matter of years, and all I’m asking is room, board, and a little supervised access to your lab space. Anna still needs monitoring for signs of rejection, after all.”

Anna herself didn’t say anything. After her interjection about sarcasm she had returned to her previous silence, standing like a wan shadow next to Dr. Banks. I tried to meet her eyes. She looked away. Something about that made my stomach clench, although I couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Something was
wrong
with Anna.

“I have all that data,” said Dr. Cale dismissively. “I brought three subjects to full integration, and I monitored them every step of the way. You’re going to have to do better if you want me to find a space for you here, and not to just shoot you and dump you out back for the feral cats.”

Dr. Banks smirked. “Ah, but all three of your subjects started in a vegetative coma. Anna didn’t.”

My stomach clenched even harder, becoming a knot of ice in my abdomen. The sound of drums was suddenly deafening, pounding in my ears until it became the entire universe, until there was nothing but the drums and no need for there to be anything else, ever again. “What did you just say?” I whispered. I wanted to shout. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t make my lips or throat obey me.

Luckily, Nathan was close enough to hear what I had said. “What did you just say, Dr. Banks?” he asked, and the sudden chill in his own voice told me that he had looked at the situation and reached the same conclusions that I had.

“I said that Anna—not her original name, you understand—did not begin her transition in a vegetative state. She was alert and aware through the bulk of her crossover. I have the data.” He held up his hard drive again, as if reminding us of its existence. “I can help you, and all I’m asking is that you give me a little help in return.”

“Help is commonly reciprocal between equals, a matter of
duty from inferiors, and a matter of obligation from superiors,” said Anna, in the same calm, barely inflected tone that she had used before. Her gaze didn’t waver, continuing to stare off into the middle distance like she was looking at something the rest of us couldn’t see.

All the cold in my body consolidated into a single freezing point. I strode forward, toward Dr. Banks, ignoring the guns that were now pointed at my back. I dimly heard Dr. Cale bark an order, but as it didn’t contain my name, I neither stopped nor slowed. All my attention was fixed on the man in front of me, who smiled that old paternal smile at my approach, seeming pleased to see me walking toward him willingly.

“Sally, my dear, I knew that you would under—” he said, before my fist collided with his jaw and he stopped talking. He staggered backward, eyes wide and wounded, like a feral animal’s. The shell of cold around me shattered with the blow, but I still raised my hand, getting ready to hit him again. He deserved it.

At the last moment, I changed my mind, and snatched the hard drive from his hand instead. He stared at me, too stunned to react, which just made me want to go back to punching him. Anna, who had in her own way been a motivating factor in the chaos, said and did nothing. She just stood there, staring blankly ahead, her hand still curved like she was holding on to Dr. Banks.

“I’m tired of this,” said Dr. Cale wearily, her words audible now that the icy shell was gone. “Take them.”