Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (35 page)

Instantly, Fishy and Fang began to move, Fishy getting Dr. Banks into a headlock while Fang produced a syringe from inside his jacket and drove it into the side of Dr. Banks’s neck. Daisy stepped forward, reaching for Anna.

A wave of panicked protectiveness swept over me. I grabbed Anna’s slightly curved hand in my free one, relieved when she allowed her fingers to part long enough for me to get a good
grip, and tugged her forward. She stumbled a little, but she came willingly enough.

“No,” I said, putting my free arm around Anna’s chest, so that I was holding her against me. She still put up no resistance, moving with me as malleably as a doll. “Don’t touch her. She doesn’t understand—she’s still so—don’t touch her. You need to leave her alone.”

“Sal, sweetheart, you’re going to have to let go of the new girl eventually,” said Dr. Cale. “She needs a full exam.”

“No,” I said again, turning to face her. Anna turned with me. If I hadn’t been able to feel her chest rising and falling with her breath, I would have suspected her of being a large, elaborate decoy—but no, that wasn’t possible, was it? I could
feel
her, a presence that had suddenly joined my overall map of the universe in an undeniably permanent way. Adam had done the same thing. He’d just taken longer, maybe because he was the first, and those channels in my mind hadn’t been open yet when he and I met.

Well, they were open now.

Dr. Cale looked at me thoughtfully, frowning. Her expression didn’t change when we heard the dull thud of Dr. Banks’s body hitting the elevator floor. Finally, she asked, “What if I let you come with her while we set her up for an examination, so that you can see that she’s safe, and then afterward we can talk about this like adults?”

It was the best that I was likely to get. It meant that I wouldn’t be leaving her alone; I could get her settled, and then go find Adam. I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Anna? Is that okay with you?”

Anna didn’t say anything at all.

D
r. Banks was removed to one of the secure holding rooms. Dr. Cale had prepared them knowing that eventually one of her people would go sleepwalker. Everyone who worked for her was supposedly clean, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything—the rules had changed as soon as the tapeworms began migrating through the bodies of their hosts, and we couldn’t count on things like asexuality or built-in obsolescence to keep people safe.

Anyone who wasn’t a chimera like me or free of implants like Nathan was a potential conversion risk. That fact had been driven home a week before Dr. Banks showed up, when one of the techs suddenly started seizing. She’d been infected all along. We just hadn’t known it.

Now she drooled and gnashed her teeth in the room next to the one where they were putting Dr. Banks. I hoped the smell
of him kept her snarling the whole time that he was there. He deserved it.

I led Anna through the facility, flanked by two guards who were supposed to make sure she didn’t try anything. If she was plotting against us, it didn’t show. She held my hand, docile and silent, until we reached a small examining theater, two of its four walls made of hanging white linen. When she saw the bed she smiled, the expression lighting up her pale face, and pulled her hand out of mine. She ran to climb up onto the bed with all the joy of a child on Christmas morning. Before any of us could do more than blink, she began shedding clothing, throwing it to the floor until she was stark naked. Then and only then did she lay back on the bed, arms flat at her sides with her wrists turned toward the ceiling, as if she was prepping herself for the inevitable IV.

She didn’t make a sound throughout the entire process. She just stripped and stretched in total silence, somehow managing to even keep the bed linens from rustling.

Nathan, Dr. Cale, Daisy, and I stared at her, equally silent, although our silence was born more of shock than anything else. Then, slowly, the three of them turned to look at me. I put my hands up, as much to ward off the comparisons as to ward off the questions.

“No,” I said. “I remember
everything
about the period immediately after I woke up, and I was
never
like that. I was compliant, yes, because I wanted to please the people around me, but I was never… never…” I shuddered, unable to put the wrongness of what I’d just witnessed into words. Finally, unable to think of anything else, I repeated, “No.”

“So we’re either looking at the result of conditioning, or at something that happens naturally in…” Dr. Cale stopped. It was rare to see her silent in the middle of a sentence. Her lips moved for a few seconds, struggling for the next word, before
she said, “Involuntary chimera. Oh, God. I never wanted to say those words.”

“I don’t see how you
can
, Mother,” said Nathan. “This is impossible. He has to be lying.”

“There’s only one way of finding out,” said Dr. Cale. Her gaze went back to Anna, and the rest of us followed it. “She has the answers. They’re locked in her blood, in the protein traces of her spinal column, in a hundred other locations on her body. Getting them out will hurt her. I wish we didn’t have to try.”

“So take him at his word,” I said, the need to protect her looming large once again.

“We can’t, Sal,” said Nathan. I glanced to him, feeling obscurely betrayed. Yes, he frequently sided with his mother in matters of science, but not when it was something like this, not when a woman’s life was on the line. He shook his head. “If she’s a chimera who converted while the original personality was still conscious and aware of her own body, that means there might be a way for sleepwalkers to integrate successfully. You were the first natural chimera, but Sally was already gone when you made the integration. She wasn’t in the body to fight you. Anna…”

“The mind resists that sort of thing, as a general rule; that’s why brainwashing and sleep-learning don’t work,” said Dr. Cale. “We become entirely different people every seven years, and our minds let it happen because it’s slow, it’s graceful, and even then, we cling to childhood pleasures and high school goals like they somehow had more relevance just because they happened earlier in our developmental cycles.
Can
one of my children rewire a thinking mind completely and successfully without resulting in the sort of traumatic brain damage we see in the sleepwalkers? God help me, but we need to know.”

“Why?” I asked blankly.

“Because if my children can take someone over without
unconsciousness or brain damage, they can learn to make the transition almost invisible,” said Dr. Cale. “No real disruption. ‘Bob’s just tired,’ and then the other chimera remove their new brother or sister before anyone notices the change. Oh, all the memory loss will still apply, but it’ll be so much easier to relearn everything when you don’t damage the brain in the process of taking it over.”

“That’s why he brought her here,” I said. “He knew you’d study her. She’s a trap.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Cale. “I’m aware. So let’s set it off, and see what happens.”

“He’ll take everything you learn and run away with it.”

Dr. Cale’s smile was a terrible thing, and filled with teeth. “You’re assuming he’ll still have feet when we get done with him.”

Anna—who had to have heard every word we said, lying there on the bed with her eyes toward the ceiling and her nipples slowly hardening from the chill in the room—didn’t say a word or turn toward us even once. She just held herself perfectly still, a composed expression on her face, like Dr. Banks passed her off to strangers every day.

My fingers itched, and the only cure, I knew, would be grabbing hold of her and never letting go. I rubbed them together, trying to make the feeling stop. “I’m going to go find Adam,” I said. “He needs to know that this is happening, and that there’s another chimera in the building.”

“All right,” said Nathan. He bent to kiss the top of my head. I hugged him quickly, taking what pleasure I could from the contact. “We’ll be here.”

“I know,” I said, and turned to run deeper into the lab.

Adam and I were the yin and yang of Dr. Cale’s chimera research project, in more ways than one. He was created in the “traditional” way, when she introduced an immature
D. symbogenesis
directly into the brain of a subject in a persistent vegetative coma. The body’s original owner was already long gone, leaving an otherwise healthy habitat for the new tapeworm intelligence that would inhabit it. I was an accident, born of trauma, stress, and lucky chance. My memories began at the moment I fully integrated with Sally Mitchell’s brain, but according to Dr. Cale, the last act of my old life had been a panicked flight through her body, culminating with my burrowing into her skull and beginning the integration process. He was induced, I was natural; he was nurtured
as
a chimera, I “grew up” believing myself to be a human being. I had spent the last few months stumbling from one dangerous situation to another, while Dr. Cale kept Adam in the lab, as confined and protected as possible. She
said
that she hadn’t allowed me to spend so long outside of her care after my accident just so she could monitor our development under different types of clinical pressure, and I actually believed that she believed that.

At the end of the day, Dr. Cale loved Adam very much, and wanted him to be safe. I couldn’t blame her for that. She’d been his mother for the entirety of his life, while I was more like the child she’d helped someone else bear through egg donation: genetically connected, socially and emotionally very, very distant.

“Adam?” I slowed as I reached the edge of the lab hydroponics section, which was used mostly to grow herbs and local mushrooms. There was a large artificial bog filled with sundews, which I appreciated—Nathan and I had our collection, but he had “liberated” several more from florists and taxidermy shops when he was helping to collect hydroponic and preservation supplies. Sundews were bog plants, which made our old friend Marya’s admonition not to overwater them even funnier. She’d been trying to keep us from killing them with chlorine, of course, and the language barrier had simply been complicating her instructions.

Marya was probably dead now. She’d owned and operated a flower shop within the general footprint of San Francisco City Hospital. Even if she hadn’t had an implant of her own—and I didn’t know whether she did or not; I had never asked her, and it was too late now—there had been mobs of sleepwalkers in that area during the collapse. There was very little chance that she had survived.

I sometimes wondered how the rest of the people on Dr. Cale’s team could stand it. I had only had a few years to form connections with other people, and I could still be blindsided by the strength of how much I missed them.

But this wasn’t the time to dwell on what we’d lost. “Adam,” I called again. “It’s Sal. The duty roster says you’re supposed to be here, so where are you? Come on, Adam. I know you’re there.”

“How do you know?” asked a voice from behind me. I turned, but I didn’t see Adam, just the shapes of three large potted avocado trees. “Maybe I’m somewhere else. Maybe I’m nowhere near here at all.”

“Well, since we don’t have intercoms this good, and the cell system went down weeks ago, the part where you’re talking to me means that you’re here,” I said. “Apart from that, I know you’re there because I know you’re there.”

The leaves on the avocado trees rustled and Adam’s face appeared, pale through the gloom. I was paying attention now, brought to high alert by Anna’s presence: I didn’t feel the same drive to
protect
that I felt for her, but he wasn’t in danger, was he? I already knew that Adam was safe and well, and on the few occasions when I
had
been afraid he would be hurt, I’d had the same response to him that I had to her. Chimera, standing together. So no, I didn’t need to protect him… but I was aware of him. I always had been. I just hadn’t been able to consciously name that feeling before I had someone else to check it against.

“The scientific method works,” I murmured.

Adam blinked but didn’t ask me what I meant. He was always good at ignoring things that didn’t make any sense. “I felt them bring her into the building,” he said. “It was like as soon as she was here, everything was whole again, instead of being broken the way that it has been for days and days. Do you think she took Tansy’s place?”

“What? No.” That answered the question of whether or not he knew about our visitor. But he knew Anna was a “she,” and tapeworms are hermaphrodites: he was a boy and I was a girl because of the human bodies we’d grown to inhabit, and not because we were innately gendered creatures. “No, Adam. Tansy is… Tansy is our sister. I don’t know where she is, or whether she’s okay, but I
do
know that no one is ever going to take her place in our lives. We’re going to find her. We’re going to bring her home. I know it.” There was something wrong with that answer, something that gnawed at the back of my mind with sharp, unforgiving little teeth. Anna held the key to finding Tansy. I knew she did. I just didn’t know how I knew, or what that knowledge was going to mean.

“I saw them bring Dr. Banks and the new girl in,” he said, taking a step forward, out of the trees. As sometimes happened with Adam, he looked infinitely younger than me in that moment. “I wasn’t supposed to be there, and Mom told me to get to work as soon as she realized that I was watching, and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to tell Mom no, because the new girl needed me so bad. It was like… it was like the need was just rushing off her, like water out of a hose. And I started to think that maybe that’s why you like me. Because need rushes off me, and you don’t know how to get out of the way.”

“I think Dr. Cale was right when she theorized that we had a pheromone connection, just like the sleepwalkers do,” I said, choosing my words with exquisite care. “We’re their cousins, so it makes sense that we’d have some of the same systems in place to make sure that we stayed in contact with each other,
and that we looked out for each other. And yeah, it was sort of a surprise to me—I always just figured I wanted you to be safe because I cared about you. Now it turns out that there’s also a chemical component, probably generated automatically when you’re under stress or whatever.”

This wasn’t helping. Adam was starting to look more concerned, and if I didn’t change tactics soon, he was going to retreat into the avocado trees and I was never going to catch him. I sighed.

“But Adam, that’s just the initial pang of alarm, that’s like ants leaving chemical trails for one another. We’re not
ants
. We’re not even sleepwalkers. We can think. We can feel, and we can form social bonds. I don’t care about that girl as a person. Yes, when I’m in the room with her I want to protect her and keep her safe, and I figure that’s probably a good thing from a species perspective, since it’s better if we want to protect each other and not kill each other.” I was babbling. But Adam wasn’t retreating anymore, and I’d take that. “Only see, I
do
care about you. I want you to be happy. I like it when we just sit and don’t talk to each other because we’re both doing stuff. You’re my brother and I love you, and she’s just some girl who happens to be the same species that we are.”

“Really?” Adam finally stepped out of the shade of the avocado trees, his eyes so wide that I could have tripped and fallen into them. “You really think I’m your brother?”

“Only one I’ve ever had.” Unless you counted Sherman—and he, like Anna, was just someone who happened to share my species. He didn’t deserve to be a part of my family. He didn’t deserve to be anywhere
near
my family.

“What’s going to happen now that she’s here?”

“I don’t know, but that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Dr. Banks says she integrated while her host body’s consciousness was still present and aware.”

Adam’s eyes went even wider, the whites appearing all the
way around his dark brown irises. “She’s a fully integrated sleepwalker?”

Because that’s what we were all dancing around: that was why her existence was such a concern. If one tapeworm could integrate with a living, conscious host, so could another, and another, until the entire shape of the enemy changed. We could be looking at a fight that went from intellect against mindless hunger to intellect against intellect—and for me and Adam, it would be a fight against our own kind.