Parasite

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Chapter 8 AUGUST 2027

Security pulled me out of the chaos in the cafeteria and escorted me back down to the labs, ignoring my attempts to resist them. If I could take any comfort in my removal from the scene, it was this: I wasn’t the only one. Everyone who’d come into direct contact with Chave before she collapsed was being taken underground. The guards packed us into the elevators, maintaining a two-to-one ratio between security and people who didn’t have the right to carry guns inside the building.

Sherman wasn’t in my elevator. I stopped worrying about myself and worried about him instead as we made our descent. Anything to keep myself from worrying about Chave. She wasn’t dead, was she? She couldn’t be dead. She’d had some sort of a stroke, or she’d managed to catch whatever had infected Beverly’s original owner—she was sick. They wouldn’t kill her just for getting sick. “We don’t leave our employees without health care, ever,” was what Dr. Banks had said to me when we were sitting in his office together. How did this align with that?

Then the elevator doors opened to reveal four people in white biohazard suits, and I stopped worrying about anyone but myself. Their faces were covered by reflective plastic shields. I couldn’t tell who was inside. There was nothing to indicate whether they were people I knew or total strangers. One of the guards tried to take my arm and pull me out of the elevator. I jerked away from him, backing up until my shoulders hit the far wall.

“I’m not going with you until you tell me what’s going on,” I said flatly. “So you can just keep your damn hands to yourself.”

“Ms. Mitchell, we have been authorized to sedate you if you refuse to cooperate,” said one of the biohazard suits. The voice was filtered so heavily that it was neither male nor female: it was as sterile and mechanical as our environment. I couldn’t even think of them as human.

Another group from the cafeteria walked by, escorted by its own quartet of biohazard suits. Sherman was there, looking dazed and slightly battered, like he’d been through a war and not just a brief fight with a coworker. He stopped when he saw me, bringing the whole procession to a halt. “Sal! Are you hurt?”

“What’s going on, Sherman?” I gestured to the suits, managing to encompass all eight of them in one spread of my hands. “Why won’t they tell us anything?”

“Chave was ill, pet,” he said, a nervous expression washing away all his normal animation. “She needs medical attention, and the rest of us need looking over to be sure we’re not showing symptoms of what she’s got.”

“She wasn’t even showing symptoms before she flipped out!”

“That’s what we’re afraid of,” muttered one of the guards.

I whipped around to face him. The biohazard suits with Sherman’s group took that opportunity to get moving again, sweeping Sherman and the others off down the hall. “Mind yourself, and stick with the doctors, Sal!” called Sherman, and then he was gone, carted off with the others, and I was alone among strangers.

There was no way out, and no one was telling me anything. But I trusted Sherman, and so when the biohazard suits gestured for me to step out of the elevator, I didn’t argue further. I just went.

I’d always known the laboratory floor was large—larger than the footprint of the main building, even, since SymboGen owned enough property to let them expand as needed. I hadn’t realized it was large enough for them to build sufficient individual isolation rooms to hold all the people who’d been removed from the cafeteria. Most chilling of all, as two guards were in the process of escorting me into my room, I saw a third guard being escorted into the room across the hall. We were all being locked up.

One of the biohazard suits followed me into the tiny room, which was painted the bland pastel green of a doctor’s waiting area. There was a bench, covered in white paper, and the standard array of cabinets and counters lined two of the walls. A set of folded blue scrubs was stacked on the bench, next to a pair of plain white slippers.

“Please remove your clothing,” said the biohazard suit.

“Or what?” I demanded. Getting naked wasn’t a problem. I just didn’t feel like cooperating with someone who wouldn’t show me their face.

“Or we are authorized to sedate you,” said the biohazard suit.

“What ‘we’?” I asked. “There’s only one of you in here. And who authorized you to sedate me? I didn’t sign anything that said you could sedate me.”

“Ms. Mitchell, please believe me when I say that we do not want to do anything to harm you. But if you force my hand, I will call my associates into this room, and you will remove your clothing. Now please.”

I hesitated. Chave worked for SymboGen. I didn’t. And when Chave wouldn’t calm down, they’d zapped her until she stopped moving. Chave was probably dead. Did I believe the biohazard suit when it said I’d be sedated if I didn’t cooperate? Yes, I did. I glared at the suit’s mask as I removed my clothes, piling them on the floor. I started to reach for the scrubs.

“Stop where you are, Ms. Mitchell.” The biohazard suit’s air filter allowed no inflection in the voice, but the feeling of menace still managed to come through in the way the words were bitten off. “I will need to examine you.”

“What?” I crossed my arms over my chest, covering myself. “What are you talking about?”

“The risk of infection is high enough to require a visual examination. Please lower your arms.”

“I want to talk to Dr. Banks.”

“Dr. Banks is being examined. He will be happy to speak with you once you are both finished.”

That stopped me cold, because somehow, I didn’t doubt what I was being told. Dr. Banks—the owner of the company, the richest man in North America, and one of the most powerful people in the developed world—was being strip-searched and examined for signs of an undisclosed “infection.” Maybe he was getting examined in his office rather than in one of these generic little isolation rooms, but that didn’t change the fact that he was getting the same treatment I was. And that terrified me.

Dropping my arms to my sides, I turned to face the biohazard suit. It nodded. “Thank you,” it said. “Now please stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and raise your arms to shoulder level. This will be a visual examination only. I will not touch you. Do you understand?”

“What’s your name?” I countered.

The biohazard suit sighed. I wouldn’t have thought the filters would let the sound escape, but they did, and it carried a level of human frustration that all the words hadn’t been able to convey. “It’s Dr. Lo, Sally. Now please, will you do as I am asking?”

“You could have said that before, you know.” I moved as I spoke, getting into the position she had requested. It felt less strange now that I knew she was someone familiar and not just a faceless automaton from the depths of SymboGen. At the same time, the fact that Dr. Lo was treating me as a threat—not just furniture, but something dangerous—worried me. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

“Because I was more concerned with your health than with observing social pleasantries. Hold still.” Dr. Lo reached into a pocket on the leg of her biohazard suit, producing a long tube that looked like it had been detached from the overhead lights. She flicked a switch at its base, and it came on, glowing a deep shade of purple. Dr. Lo began running it through the air a few inches away from me, watching the way the purple light reflected off my skin.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Don’t move, Sally,” she said, crouching to run the light along my stomach and legs. She was quick, and thorough: not an inch of me was left unexamined. True to her word, she didn’t touch me. That didn’t stop me from feeling like there was something deeply inappropriate about having her looking at me that closely, especially with the protective suit between us. Whatever she was looking for, it wasn’t anything good.

Finally, she straightened, clicking off her wand. “You can put the scrubs on now,” she said, as she returned it to her pocket. “You’re clean.”

“Clean of what?” I asked, dropping my arms back to my sides before turning to reach for the scrubs.

“That’s a discussion for you to have with Dr. Banks, not with me. I’m just here to make sure you don’t present a danger to yourself or others.” Dr. Lo turned away from me and knocked twice on the door. After a moment, one of the security officers opened it. This one hadn’t been present in the cafeteria. I was starting to think that SymboGen had its own private police force, and that wasn’t a comforting thought. The line between “police force” and “army” is narrow under the best of circumstances, and we were no longer operating under the best of circumstances.

“Yes?” asked the officer.

“She’s clean,” replied Dr. Lo. “I need to go to decontamination.” Even clean, I was apparently enough of a risk to require cleaning a biohazard safety suit. I shrank back from the door, suddenly terrified of my own skin. What kind of contagion had we been exposed to? Was I going to go like Chave, normal one minute, empty-eyed and absent the next?

My motion must have caught Dr. Lo’s eye, somehow; I had no idea what the peripheral vision was like in a biohazard suit, but she turned back toward me, and asked, “Now you’re afraid? After the worst parts are over, now you’re afraid? I know we’ve given you a clean bill of health, Sally, but you may want to consider therapy.”

I glared at her. She left the room, and the officer stepped into the doorway, preventing me from following her out. At least he wasn’t wearing a mask. I felt less like a risk to the health of everyone around me when I looked at another face without a piece of plastic in the way.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Ms. Mitchell,” he said politely.

“I want to speak to Dr. Banks,” I said, and stepped into the slippers.

“He’s still undergoing examination, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to speak with you once he’s free,” said the officer.

Still undergoing… I stiffened. “Sherman.” What was his last name? Shit. “Sherman Lewis. He’s one of Dr. Banks’s assistants. He was brought down here with the rest of us. Is he all right? Have they finished examining him?”

“I can’t discuss the health of other patients, Ms. Mitchell,” said the officer.

“We’re not patients, we’re people who didn’t get to finish having lunch,” I shot back.

Laughter came from the hall behind him. Weary laughter, but laughter, and that was better than anyone was going to get out of me. “It’s all right, Floyd, you can stand down,” said Dr. Banks, moving into view behind the officer. “Once Sally gets an idea in her head, there’s not room for too much else in there.”

“Yes, sir,” said the officer, and stepped aside.

Dr. Banks was wearing the same blue scrubs I was. Somehow, he managed not to look ridiculous in them—a feat I was sure I wasn’t matching. He stepped into the officer’s place, looking at me with a small, paternal smile. “I’m sorry if our security drill frightened you, Sally. It wasn’t the intention.”

“Where’s Sherman? What happened to Chave?”

“That’s one of the things I like about you. You care about people. That’s a rare quality, and it’s one I think we should be focusing on more.”

“And you’re deflecting,” I said. “Where is Sherman Lewis? What happened to Chave?”

Dr. Banks sighed. For a moment, he didn’t look like the owner of a massive multinational corporation: he looked like a man who hadn’t slept in weeks, and was covering it up with foundation, hair dye, and stimulants. “I’m afraid Ms. Seaborne did not recover from her unfortunate incident in the cafeteria.”

“‘Unfortunate’—do you mean whatever went wrong with her, or do you mean the officers with the shock batons?” I crossed my arms and glared at him. For some reason, I was no longer afraid of SymboGen refusing to let me leave the building. I was more concerned that I would never leave this basement. Not alive, anyway. “She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s what you mean when you say she ‘didn’t recover’ from being electrocuted.”

“Sally…” Dr. Banks hesitated. Then he sighed again, and said, “There’s a great deal you don’t understand. I’m so sorry you had to see that, and please believe me, no one is sorrier about what happened with Chave than I am. She’s been with me almost since the beginning. Neither of us ever expected things to end this way.”

“I’m pretty sure she didn’t expect to be electrocuted when she got out of bed this morning, no.” I kept glaring at him. “Sherman Lewis. Where is he?”

“Sally—”

“I come here every time you call me. I let your staff take all the blood they want. I answer your questions, I listen to your lectures, I do whatever I’m told to do, and I don’t fight you. That could change. Sherman is the only person here who always treats me like I’m a person, too. Not lab equipment, not an experiment, a person. Now where is he?”

“Sally, I’m sorry.”

The words were spoken softly, but they might as well have been screamed. They seemed to echo through the room, getting louder with every iteration. “Why are you sorry?” I asked. I could barely hear my own voice over the echoes of Dr. Banks’s statement.

“You have to understand, he had prolonged physical contact with Chave. He was exposed.”

His first words were still echoing, and now they were backed by a heavy pounding, like the sound of distant drums. “Exposed to what?”

“Sally, I really don’t feel this is a conversation that we should be having while you’re upset.” Dr. Banks looked even more uncomfortable, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

The drums were getting stronger, drowning out the echo of his words. “Exposed to what?”

“I’ve called Dr. Kim to come and collect you,” said Dr. Banks. “I’m afraid your clothes won’t be ready for several hours. They will be delivered to your home. You can keep the scrubs. I’m sorry we didn’t get to have lunch together; I was very much looking forward to spending that time with you. I’ll see you soon, Sally.”

“Wait, what are you talking about? What were we exposed to? Dr. Banks—”

It was too late: Dr. Banks was already turning and stepping out of the room. The security officer reappeared as soon as Dr. Banks was through the door, making it clear that I would not be allowed to rush after him. I dropped my hands to my sides and just stared, open-mouthed. The drums were as loud as they had ever been, and for the first time while I was fully awake and aware of my surroundings, I was absolutely certain of what they were: I was hearing the pounding of my heart.

I stood in that little examination room, crying silently for a man who had always been kind to me, and waited for the man I loved to come and take me home. I was exhausted. I was done.

It was hard to tell time with no clocks and no windows. I stood there long enough for my legs to start aching, but I refused to sit down. Sitting down would mean admitting there was something stronger than my anger. The officer who’d been keeping me in the room was replaced by another man I didn’t recognize, wearing the same uniform and carrying the same stun baton. I glared at him as he took up his position. He didn’t say anything, and so neither did I.

My stubborn standoff with the forces of SymboGen might have lasted forever. I was saved from needing to find out by a familiar figure in a San Francisco City Hospital lab coat. Nathan pushed his way past the officer, seeming to neither notice nor care that the other man was armed, and rushed to embrace me.

“Jesus, Sal, you scared the hell out of me,” he said.

That seemed to be the permission my body had been waiting for to fall apart. My tears had been falling for a while. Now I started to sob, as quietly as I could. I pressed my face into his chest and allowed myself to sag against him for a few precious seconds. Nathan folded his arms around me.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

“Sh-Sherman,” I whispered.

Nathan winced. He knew about Sherman. They’d never met, but Sherman was the only person at SymboGen that I consistently spoke well of. “Oh, shit, Sal. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t say anything for a few minutes after that, just clung to him and cried. It wasn’t dignified, but I didn’t care about dignity. I was wearing scrubs and standing in the SymboGen basement. Dignity was the last of my concerns.

Finally, I pulled away, wiping my eyes, and said, “I want to go home. Can you take me home? Please?” I paused, the incongruity of his appearance striking me. “Why are you wearing your lab coat?”

“Because I was already here when the quarantine was called on the cafeteria level,” said Nathan. “They called me in for another job interview.”

They really did want to get me working in the building if they were calling Nathan in. That might seem a little self-centered—not everything in the world is about me, and I understand that—except for the part where, if Dr. Banks was trying to hire me, the only way he was going to accomplish it was by making working at SymboGen so appealing that I couldn’t say no. Having Nathan on the payroll would be a huge step in the right direction.

“But…” I paused, my eyes narrowing. “If you were already here, why did it take you so long to come down and get me?” Dr. Banks said he was calling Nathan. Not getting him from the reception lobby; calling him.

“I didn’t know you were involved in the quarantine, and I didn’t want you to feel like I was here to check up on you. I rushed down as soon as I knew that you were waiting for me. It’s been less than five minutes.”

Either Dr. Banks had lied, or Nathan was lying to me now. I touched his cheek with one hand, bile burning in my throat as I looked into his eyes and made my decision about whom to trust. Nathan. I trusted Nathan, and they hadn’t told him. They hadn’t told him that I was in danger, and even when they knew I wasn’t, they hadn’t told him that I was alone in an isolation room waiting for him to come and take me home. Instead, they’d left me where I was, probably so they could clean up their messes in peace.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

Nathan nodded. “Okay.”

It was strange to walk through the halls of SymboGen without either Chave or Sherman at my side, ready to tell me what was next on my schedule or imply that I was somehow too scruffy to be in the building. Two of the security officers accompanied us from the basement to the lobby, which was deserted; they must have sent most of the company home after Chave got sick. It seemed like a good precaution following a possible contamination. I just didn’t understand what that contamination was.

I stopped just before we reached the door, my hands going to my shoulder where the strap of my shoulder bag should have been pressing down against my skin. “My bag!”

“Your personal possessions are still undergoing decontamination, Ms. Mitchell,” said one of the officers. She sounded distracted, and I realized that there was a small earpiece in her left ear. She was probably listening to status reports from the rest of her team even as she walked with us, multitasking her way through an unexpectedly busy afternoon.

“When will they be done? Those are my things. You had no right to take them.”

“Dr. Banks has promised delivery of all your possessions to your home. You’ll have them by tomorrow morning.”

I took a breath, forcing myself not to get angry. This woman wasn’t in charge, and there was no way Dr. Banks was coming back out of his office to see me. I had been dismissed, and I knew it. “Tell Dr. Banks that I am not happy with him right now.” For a lot of reasons, only some of which I was ever planning to discuss with him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I shuddered and started walking again, Nathan by my side. The doors slid smoothly open to allow us to exit the building, and the jasmine-scented San Francisco afternoon reached out to embrace us.

The world felt dirtier and more complicated as soon as we stepped outside the artificial environment of the SymboGen building. For a company that was built on the hygiene hypothesis, whoever was responsible for the SymboGen interior decorating had chosen a surprisingly sterile palate. The plants were overgroomed to the point of seeming artificial, and filtration systems were everywhere, attached to the small scent-diffusion units that pumped the perfume into the air. I had never seen anything out of place.

Even here in the parking lot things were cleaner than they should have been. The white lines were bright enough to be freshly painted, and the asphalt was so black that I would have assumed it was fresh if it hadn’t always looked like this. The landscaping was pristine. After what had happened inside, all that cleanliness was oddly chilling. It felt like a knot loosened in my chest when we reached Nathan’s car, with its muddy wheels and fast-food wrappers in the footwell.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Sal?” asked Nathan. “You’re pale.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I am okay.” It wasn’t reassuring, but then again, it wasn’t intended to be. I tried never to lie to Nathan, even when it was something as small as claiming to be “fine” when I wasn’t. He always caught me, and I always felt terrible for having tried to deceive him.

“Do you want to stay at my place tonight?” Nathan kissed my forehead, squeezing my fingers at the same time. Then he let me go and walked around the car. The alarm chirped, signaling that the locks were open.

“I can’t. You heard the officer—my things are being sent to my house, not yours. I think my parents will panic if they get that kind of delivery without me being there to explain it to them.” I opened the door, sliding into the car. It was a relief to sit down after standing for so long. My legs promptly went limp, making me worry that I’d need Nathan’s help if I ever wanted to get up again.

Nathan got into the driver’s side, closing the door behind himself. “Do you mind if I come home with you, then? I don’t want to leave you alone, and it would be nice to spend some time with Beverly.”

“That would be fine,” I said, and smiled.

Then the weight of my betrayal crashed down on me. Sherman was infected—or worse, Sherman was dead—and here I was smiling at my boyfriend, happy at the idea of spending an afternoon with him and the dog I had stolen from another infected man, another man who might be dead.

Wait. Chave and Beverly’s owner had been infected with the same thing. I’d seen both of them succumb, and they had followed the same pattern. “Oh my God, is this my fault?” I whispered. My lips seemed numb, like they were barely attached to my body. “Did I get Chave sick? Did I get her killed?”

“Sal, what are you talking about?”

“Did they tell you anything about what happened inside the quarantine?”

“No, just that it was some kind of lab error, and you’d been exposed.” Nathan was looking at me with blatant worry, not bothering to conceal it. “What do you mean, is this your fault?”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to be explaining this where we were; not on SymboGen property, where someone could realize that they hadn’t forbidden me to tell my boyfriend the truth about what happened. I could ignore my phone if it started ringing—or I would have been able to, if they hadn’t taken it away from me. I couldn’t ignore somebody pounding on the window nearly so easily. “Drive. Please. I’ll explain while you drive.”

“All right, honey. Just take some deep breaths, and tell me what’s going on, okay?”

“Okay,” I said… but I didn’t say anything else until the SymboGen building was one more piece of the skyline receding behind us, and there was no chance that we’d be overheard. “Okay,” I repeated.

“Sal?”

“I’m sorry, I just…” I took a breath. “It started out as a pretty normal visit to SymboGen. Lots of tests, Dr. Banks trying to convince me he had my best interests at heart, lots of people running lots of tests on me…” I closed my eyes as I continued talking, recounting the events of the day. I didn’t strictly need to tell Nathan everything—he would probably have been happy with just what happened in the cafeteria and afterward—but I wanted to ease into it, and I wanted to remember Chave and Sherman the way I’d always known them. Chave was never my friend. That didn’t mean she deserved to die the way she did.

Besides, telling him everything meant pointing out Chave’s absolute lack of any symptoms, right up until the moment where she had every symptom and lost herself in whatever strange infection had claimed her mind. There should have been something, some sign to indicate that everything was not okay. There hadn’t been anything at all.

Nathan asked occasional questions, but for the most part, he let me talk. When I came to the part about the cafeteria, he made me repeat the walk from the elevator three times. I didn’t mind. We were both looking for something that could explain what had happened, and neither of us was finding it. Then I reached the worst part of the story, and he stopped asking questions. I spoke, and he drove, and SymboGen fell farther and farther into the distance.

Finally, he said, “Sherman was showing no signs of getting sick when you saw him?”

“No, none. He looked kind of upset, but—we all did.” I opened my eyes, turning to face Nathan. “He was worried about me.”

“He was your friend. Of course he was worried about you.” Nathan tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “I would have been worried about you, too, if they hadn’t left me waiting in one of the ninth-floor lobbies for an interview that never came.”

I frowned. SymboGen was the global leader in parasitology, both in research of existing species and in the lucrative development of new strains. Other companies had tried to repeat the success of the Intestinal Bodyguard, but none of them had been able to get their claws into the market. Nathan’s career was never going to move beyond a certain point if he couldn’t get a job at SymboGen—and after my recounting of the day, we both knew why he’d been called in for the interview. It had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with keeping me where Dr. Banks could see me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Nathan flashed me a very quick smile. He took one hand off the wheel, reaching over to briefly squeeze my knee. “It’s not your fault. I wouldn’t want to work there anyway, if it meant that Dr. Banks had managed to get you under his thumb full-time. I’m pretty sure punching your boss in the throat is an excellent way to get yourself fired.”

“You say the sweetest things.”

“I mean them.”

“That helps.” I sighed, sinking back into my seat. “I can’t stop thinking about Sherman. What if he’s scared? What if they haven’t told him what’s going on?” What if he was dead? But my mind shied away from that thought, refusing to fully process it. Sherman wasn’t my best friend. He wasn’t even someone I saw outside of SymboGen. But he was kind to me, and I didn’t want him to be hurt.

“Sal… it sounds like Chave had the sleeping sickness. If SymboGen has a test for it, they haven’t shared it with the local hospitals yet. I think that if they know Sherman is infected, it’s because he already started showing symptoms.” What Nathan didn’t say was that no one who developed symptoms had yet recovered, or awakened from their disconnected state. Cases were still rare, but there had been enough of them that we were starting to understand a little bit about how the sickness worked. The victims got sick. They didn’t get better.

But still. “I don’t know if SymboGen has a test or not. They didn’t draw blood or anything. Dr. Lo ran a light wand all over me, watching for some sort of reaction from my skin, but—Nathan!” He had suddenly twisted the wheel, sending us skidding into the next lane. Horns blared as he got the car back under control, and kept blaring as I screamed, trying to go fetal despite the seat belt restraining me. I curled tighter, continuing to scream.

We were going to die. We were going to crash and die, and even when I felt the car stop moving, that didn’t matter, because we were going to have an accident, and we were going to die. I was going to die again, and this time, there wouldn’t be any medical miracle to save me. We were going to die we were going to die we were going to—

“Sal!” Nathan tightened his hands on my shoulders, hauling me out of the dark pit I had suddenly fallen into. “Sal, I am so sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to do that to you. Please, come on, honey, come back to me. Breathe. You need to breathe, Sal.”

I had to stop screaming before I could breathe in. That felt like one of the hardest things I had ever done. Raising my head was even harder. The drums were pounding in my ears again, louder than they’d ever been before. “The car,” I whispered, staring at Nathan’s pale, drawn face.

“I know, Sal, and I am so sorry. Please believe me, I didn’t think, and I’m sorry. Are you okay? Are you going to be okay if I start driving again?”

No. No, I won’t be okay; let’s leave the car here and walk wherever it is we need to go. We can walk forever if we have to. Just don’t start the car. Numbly, I bit my lip and nodded. I didn’t want to stay here forever, and I knew that we couldn’t walk home. But oh, I wanted to.

“Okay. Good. I am so sorry.” Nathan hesitated before saying, “I hate to ask you this, Sal, but is it all right if we don’t go straight back to your house? I think I need to stop at the hospital.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as I forced myself to sit up. “Okay,” I said, in a small voice.

Nathan started the car and pulled away from the side of the road. We drove on.

The industrial gray San Francisco City Hospital wasn’t built to look imposing or inviting: it was built to house a hospital. It was simultaneously less comforting and more welcoming than SymboGen. Nathan parked in his assigned space beneath the building, gesturing for me to come as he got out of the car and walked briskly toward the employee entrance. I followed. As I did, I realized that I felt oddly unclothed without my shoulder bag, like I was forgetting something essential.

If SymboGen didn’t return my things, I could always replace them and send Dr. Banks the bill. Dwelling on that bitter thought kept me from thinking too hard about where we were going as Nathan led me through the maze of corridors and hallways inside the hospital.

Once we were inside the service elevator bound for the fifth floor, Nathan turned to me and said, “I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I need to know whether SymboGen has information that they’re not sharing with the rest of us.”

“By ‘doing this,’ you really mean taking me with you, don’t you?”

“I do,” Nathan admitted. The elevator stopped, and he led me to a changing room. “You’re already in scrubs; that’s good. Put on a lab coat and we should be fine.”

I frowned at him. “You’re really serious. You’re not supposed to be doing this.”

“No, I’m not, but I want you with me; you’re the one who saw what Dr. Lo did.” He opened a locker and passed me a lab coat. “Don’t worry. You won’t get in any trouble if we’re caught.”

“I’m not the one I’m worried about here, Nathan.”

He waved off my concern, a grim expression on his face. I usually only saw him looking that serious when someone had died. “I have a clean record, and this problem has been bothering everyone. The worst I’m going to get is a slap on the wrist.”

Somehow, I doubted that his punishment would be quite as light as that, but there was no sense in arguing with him; we’d been dating long enough for me to know when his mind was made up. I shrugged on the lab coat he’d handed me, rolling up the sleeves to keep them from engulfing my hands completely. Nathan smiled.

“You know, there’s nothing in the world hotter than a cute girl in a lab coat,” he said.

I blinked. “With that attitude, I would have expected you to be dating my sister.”

“What can I say? I like what I like. Now come on. We have some protocols to break.”

Nathan led me down the hall, pausing only once, when he ducked into a supply room and emerged with a wand that looked like a more primitive cousin of the one Dr. Lo had used to examine me. He tucked it under his arm, and we started walking again.

At the end of the hall was a large door marked INFECTIOUS MATERIALS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There was a large biohazard symbol beneath the sign, in case people didn’t get the point. Nathan ignored it as he pushed the door open and kept walking. I trusted Nathan. I followed him.

The hallway on the other side looked just like every other hall in the hospital… except that there were no people here. The usual mix of doctors, nurses, and orderlies was gone, replaced by the hum of the fluorescent lights, which seemed extremely loud without all the sounds of humanity to muffle them.

“Here,” Nathan said. He turned, walking into a small room, where a heavy green curtain shielded the occupant from view. He pushed the curtain aside, revealing Beverly’s owner. I gasped. I couldn’t stop myself.

Machines surrounded the sleeping man, connected to him by a variety of tubes and wires. A clear plastic tube snaked out from under the covers; they’d catheterized him at some point, probably when they realized that he wasn’t going to wake up enough to take care of his bodily needs. I recognized most of those tubes and wires from my own stay in the hospital after my accident. I’d been wired up just like that when I first woke up. But this man was behind warning signs, in a room all by himself. They didn’t expect him to wake up, ever.

Nathan walked grimly toward the sleeping man’s bedside. “He’s been asleep for the past twenty-four hours,” he said. “He was still moving up until then, but now he seems to have gone into the next stage of the disease, whatever that means. There’s no response to stimuli of any type. His family wants to disconnect life support; the hospital is paying all medical costs from this point on, for the sake of being allowed to keep working with him.”

“But… why?” I asked. “If his family’s ready to let him go…” I felt like a hypocrite even as the words left my mouth. My family had been ready to let go. If I hadn’t regained consciousness when I did, I would have died.

Nathan glanced back toward me, grimacing a little as he saw my discomfort. “This isn’t like what happened with you, Sal. You had an accident. We knew what caused your coma, and no matter how much research we did, we were never going to find a cure for car crashes. This is different. This is something infectious, and we need to find a way to stop the spread.”

A new discomfort curled in my stomach. “Should we be wearing masks or something if we’re going to be in here?”

“No. Whatever causes this isn’t airborne. We’ve run every test we could think of, and there’s nothing.” Nathan bent forward, folding back the blanket that covered Beverly’s owner. “It’s baffling our best people. It’s baffling me.”

“Why are you involved? Shouldn’t this be an infectious disease case?”

“I’m involved because everyone in the hospital is involved. No one gets to sit out an epidemic.” Nathan produced a pair of blue plastic gloves from his lab coat pocket, pulling them on over his hands. I was relieved to realize that he wouldn’t be touching the sleeping man’s skin. “How far above your skin did she hold the light?”

“About an inch and a half,” I said. “She was especially careful with the undersides of my arms and the insides of my thighs.”

“All right,” said Nathan. He clicked on the wand. It buzzed slightly, lighting up with the same purplish glow as Dr. Lo’s wand. Then he lifted the man’s left arm. It came without resistance, utterly limp, and remained limp as Nathan ran the wand along it. Like Dr. Lo, he checked the outside first, and then switched to examining the inside of the man’s arm, where it would have been closest to his body.

Just between the elbow and armpit, Nathan stopped. “Sal,” he said, a sick fascination in his voice. “Come and have a look at this.”

I didn’t want to have a look at anything. I went anyway. It’s always better to understand than it is to be left sitting in the dark; it’s always better to have answers, even when those answers lead to fresh questions.

This answer definitely led to fresh questions. The light from Nathan’s wand made most of the skin beneath it glow a pale purple, unremarkable because it was so consistent. But at the middle of the light, in the center of the man’s arm, was a system of what looked almost like roots that glowed a bright, painful white instead of matching the purple around them. I stared.

The roots moved.

It was just a twitch, barely movement at all, but it was enough to startle us both. I let out a small shriek, dancing backward, away from the man in the bed. Nathan dropped his arm, taking a long, somewhat more dignified step away from him.

“What is that?” I demanded.

“It’s a parasitic infection—I don’t know what type. Whatever it is, it fluoresces under ultraviolet light,” said Nathan. He sounded astonished and sickened at the same time, like he’d been suspicious, but had never wanted to have his suspicions confirmed. “These people don’t have a disease. They have a parasite, and it’s taking them over.” He turned to look at me, eyes wide. “Why is SymboGen hiding this?”

“I have a better question,” I said. “What happens when they find out we know?”

-

Chapter 9 AUGUST 2027

Someone knocked on my bedroom door, coaxing me out of an uneasy sleep. I opened my eyes but didn’t lift my head from my pillow. Maybe if I stayed where I was, they’d go away and leave me alone.

The knocking continued. Beverly lifted her own head and turned toward the door, ears cocked at an inquisitive angle. Then she turned and looked at me, the question clear in her puzzled brown eyes. Why was I, the one with the thumbs, not getting up and answering the door? Was something wrong with the world?

Yes. Something was wrong with the world. SymboGen was withholding information about what was becoming a national health crisis, at least according to Nathan. He’d produced reports from hospitals around the country the night before, stacking them up in front of me like silent accusations. I’d picked up the first one, flipping it open to the list of cases. Twenty-seven affected so far in Cleveland, Ohio, and the surrounding cities. “Why hasn’t this been on the news?” I’d asked.

And that was when Nathan had said the most damning thing of all: “I’m starting to think it’s because SymboGen doesn’t want it to be.” Each outbreak was reported on the local news—that was unavoidable—triggering a brief flurry of concern, but after that, it just vanished, falling into whatever pit waited for buried news cycles. Miracle diets and pop starlets ruled the headlines, and a few dozen sleepwalkers in a few dozen American cities barely registered as worthy of attention.

But it wasn’t just a few dozen, according to the reports Nathan had. There were a few hundred cases, once you looked at the whole country, and they weren’t limited to American soil. We knew of definite cases in Canada, the United Kingdom, and South America, and there were rumors of more cases elsewhere in the world. If this was as widespread as Nathan suspected, worldwide infections were probably somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand, and climbing—which just made the lack of major media coverage more alarming. Someone, somewhere, was spending a lot to bury this.

SymboGen obviously didn’t have a treatment protocol—that was clear from the way they’d eliminated Chave—but they knew more than anyone else did. So why hadn’t they shared their information with the rest of the medical community? Why were they choosing to shut out all the other researchers and scientific establishments in the world? There were a lot of potential motivations for that sort of thing. None of them were altruistic.

After what Nathan and I had seen at SymboGen and the hospital, neither of us was in the mood for company. He’d dropped me off at home, barely beating Dad and Beverly to the driveway. I’d kissed him goodbye, whistled for my dog, and gone straight to bed. That was—I lifted my head enough to check the clock. That was either three or fifteen hours ago, depending on whether it was nine o’clock in the morning or nine o’clock at night.

The knocking wasn’t stopping. I finally forced myself to roll out of the bed, raking my hair out of my eyes with my fingers as I walked to the door. I wrenched it open, and demanded, “What is it?”

Joyce blinked. “Whoa. Dad said you’d gone to bed as soon as you got home, but I expected you to be wearing your pajamas. Why are you wearing scrubs?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. The hallway was brightly lit, but that didn’t tell me anything; there were no windows. “What time is it?”

“Don’t you have a clock, sleepyhead? It’s nine in the morning. You’ve slept the clock all the way around.”

“Oh.” I stood there, blinking dumbly at my sister, as I realized one of the things her statement meant: I’d slept for more than twelve hours. That guaranteed deep REM. So why didn’t I remember any of my dreams? Last night should have been a perfect candidate for a trip into the hot warm dark.

Even as I thought that, another realization hit me: I resented the absence of the dreams. The hot warm dark was always safe, always constant, always there for me, even if it represented something I didn’t understand. I woke up from those dreams confused but at peace, like I was only fully myself in those moments when the drums still echoed in my ears. So why had the hot warm dark deserted me when I needed it most?

“Sal? You okay?”

“Huh?” I wrenched myself back into the conversation, shaking my head to clear it. “I’m sorry. I just woke up. Did you need something?”

“You mean apart from wanting to be sure you weren’t dead? SymboGen just delivered a great big package for you. It’s labeled ‘time-sensitive’ and ‘perishable’ and ‘this end up,’ and I thought it would be a good idea to get you up so you could go and deal with it.”

I eyed her. “You just want to know what’s inside.”

My sister beamed unrepentantly. “That is correct. Besides, you know it’s not healthy for you to be in bed for too long. There’s a whole big world out there just waiting to be explored.”

“You can cut the New Age nature spiel. I’m not buying it, and we both know you never sound like a physical therapy motivational tape unless Mom’s been priming you,” I said without rancor. Mom could be pretty persuasive when she wanted to be, and Joyce probably hadn’t taken much persuading—not with a mystery package waiting to be opened.

“Come on, Sal. Come open your big box.”

“What if I don’t want to?” I shot back. Beverly chose that moment to shove past my ankles and go trotting off down the hall, her tail waving languidly behind her as she made a beeline for the door to the backyard.

Joyce pointed after Beverly, beaming angelically. “It won’t matter, because you need to clean up after your dog.”

I groaned. “Fine. I’ll be out as soon as I have some real clothes on.”

“Just remember that you keep your clothes in your dresser, and don’t go looking for them in your bed,” said Joyce sweetly.

I took great pleasure in closing the door in her face.

It only took me a few minutes to get dressed. Brushing my hair took longer. I might not remember any of my dreams, but I’d clearly been tossing and turning in the night, and my hair was a matted mass of tangles and knots that gave way with an audible ripping sound. I cringed and kept brushing until I felt vaguely presentable. Then I went out to join my family.

All three of them were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting. That was unusual all by itself. Mom would normally have left for her volunteer work by now, and Dad and Joyce usually made their way over to the lab before eight. The box from SymboGen was in the center of the table, covered with even more warning labels than Joyce had reported. I stopped in the hallway door, blinking at them.

“Is today a holiday that I forgot about?” I asked. “Because if it is, I’m going back to bed.”

“Good morning to you, too, sweetie,” said Mom.

“I called the lab and told them that Joyce and I would be in a little late this morning,” said my father. “We were concerned about you after last night, and I wanted a chance to talk to you before we left.”

“Besides, mystery box,” said Joyce. She was her usual blithe self. Mom and Dad… weren’t. They were both smiling, trying to look normal, but there was a grim undertone to their expressions that spoke of things they weren’t quite willing to say. I found myself wondering what secrets they were keeping from me, and pushed the thought aside. If I was going to start thinking like that, I might as well turn myself over to SymboGen right now. At least there I would know who I could trust—no one—and who was lying to me—everyone.

“Mystery box,” I agreed, and walked over to take a seat at the table. I tried to tug the box toward me, but it was so heavy I couldn’t move it. “What’s in here? Bricks?”

“The normal question is ‘rocks,’ and I don’t know, but I almost gave myself a hernia getting it inside.”

I blinked at my father. Corrections like that seemed normal and right from Sherman, but coming from him, it just felt like I was being scolded. I turned my attention back to the box, trying not to let my discomfort show.

The box had been taped shut, but there were tags built into the cardboard to make the box easier to open. They also rendered it impossible to use a second time, but I guess when you’re a giant multinational corporation, you don’t need to worry as much about reusability. I gripped the tabs and tugged them apart, causing the entire top of the box to detach. Biodegradable packing peanuts spilled out onto the kitchen table.

“Hang on a second, sweetie, I’ll get a bag,” said Mom, gesturing for me to stop. She pushed her chair back and bustled into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a large plastic garbage bag. She swept the fallen packing peanuts into it, and stood ready to catch any more that tried to escape. “All right. Proceed.”

“Efficiency, thy name is Mom,” said Joyce.

I forced a chuckle, and pulled the top off the box, sending a larger flood of packing peanuts in all directions. I put the box top on the floor next to my chair. Mom hurried to capture all the packing peanuts before they could roll under the furniture, where they would be later inhaled by the dog. I ignored her in favor of digging down into the box, spilling more packing peanuts. My fingers hit plastic. “Got it,” I said, and lifted.

Whoever had been responsible for sterilizing and packing my personal possessions had taken their job very, very seriously. My things were swaddled in a double layer of plastic wrap, and there was an itemized inventory of what was inside affixed to the front. I scanned the list, and rolled my eyes. They’d definitely been thorough. I just didn’t see the utility of itemizing individual tampons.

“Is that all?” asked Joyce. She flicked a packing peanut at me, looking disappointed. “I was hoping for pirate gold.”

“Not even SymboGen can hand out big boxes of pirate gold without good reason,” I said, setting my things aside. “But that can’t be all that’s in here. Look at the size of this box.”

“Maybe SymboGen’s packing department is just really enthusiastic,” said Joyce.

“I don’t know.” I had to stand to see over the edge of the box. I rummaged down into the packing peanuts, flailing around until I hit what felt like the handle of a medium-sized cooler. “What the…?” I lifted.

It was, in fact, a cooler, labeled “Open Immediately.” I passed it to Joyce, who gave a little squeal of delight, and went back to rummaging around in the packing peanuts. By the time I’d found the next item—a flat box made of reinforced memory plastic and smelling suspiciously like croissants—Joyce had opened the cooler, and was squealing more loudly as she unpacked sliced fruit, berries and cream, and an assortment of cold breakfast meats onto the table. I passed the box of croissants to my father and went rummaging around in the big box one more time.

The last item inside was a square box with a small chemical heating unit attached to keep the contents warm, and a note taped to the outside:

“Sal? Did SymboGen just send us breakfast?” asked Joyce.

“It looks like it,” I said. Mom made the big box disappear while I opened the box with the note. Inside was a stack of waffles, a bottle of what I was sure would prove to be real maple syrup, and a large bowl of eggs scrambled with cheddar cheese and chunks of tomato. It was a four-star breakfast packed for delivery, and I would have bet good money that it was prepared in the reopened executive cafeteria.

My pride wanted me to announce that I wasn’t hungry and leave this extravagant bribe—because there was no way this wasn’t a bribe—for my family and Beverly to consume. My body had other ideas. My stomach, which had been rumbling since I recognized the smell from the flat box as croissants, began to roar when I smelled the eggs. I resigned myself to the inevitable. I was going to eat my bribe, and I was going to like it.

Mom returned from the kitchen with place settings and a broad smile that didn’t look quite genuine. “Isn’t this nice? Breakfast for the family, catered by SymboGen.”

“I wouldn’t have eaten that cereal if I’d known you were ordering this much food,” said Joyce. She didn’t let her complaint stop her from taking two waffles and a sizable portion of the eggs.

“I didn’t know either,” I said. “Dr. Banks told me he’d be sending my things. He didn’t say that he’d be sending them along with enough food to feed an army.”

“Now, Sal, don’t exaggerate,” said my father. “You have a Labrador. There’s no way we could feed an army on this.” He grabbed a croissant.

My father was US military. He wouldn’t have been eating the food if it wasn’t safe. I laughed a little, some of my tension easing, and reached for a plate.

Dad looked tired. That was the first thing I noticed, and as I noticed it, I realized he’d been looking tired since before the outbreak Joyce and I witnessed in San Bruno. That was when he’d told me he knew about the sleepwalkers. Just how much did he know?

Joyce didn’t look tired—she looked focused, like she was calculating exactly how many calories she was getting from each bite, and how far she could make each of those calories take her, if she really pushed herself. Getting a late start was one thing. Paying for it by skipping meals throughout the day was something else entirely, and spoke to an urgency in whatever she was working on.

I took a bite of waffle, chewed, and said, as casually as I could, “They had to keep my things for decontamination because one of the PAs who usually helps me around the building suddenly freaked out and started attacking people. She seemed to go to sleep first, while she was still standing up. It was like all the lights went out inside her brain, and she wasn’t home anymore.”

Joyce put down her fork.

It was a small gesture, marked mainly by the faint clink of metal against ceramic, but it said worlds. Very little could make my sister stop eating once she got started. I turned my attention to our father.

“They tried to make her stop, but she wouldn’t. So some of the security officers who’d come to take care of the situation began zapping her with these electric batons they carry. They hit her over and over again, until she fell down and didn’t move anymore.” I didn’t tell them she’d said my name as she was falling. Some things I wasn’t ready to think about yet, and that was one of them.

“Sal,…” said my father, and stopped, his throat working like he was trying to say something else. No sound came out.

“So security took everyone who’d been in the cafeteria when all this happened—and I mean everyone, they even took Dr. Banks—to the lab level for examination, so they could figure out whether or not we were infected. That’s where they took my clothes away.”

“They have a test for whether or not someone’s infected?” Joyce half-stood in her excitement, hands braced against the table.

“Joyce Erin Mitchell, sit down,” said my father, his voice like a whip cracking. Joyce gave him a startled look and sank slowly back into her seat, eyes wide. He turned his focus on me. “Sal, honey, what you have to understand—”

“There’s this one PA, Sherman? He’s always really nice to me. He acts like I’m a guest or a volunteer, not a lab rat who doesn’t have a choice about what they want to do to her. He teaches me new slang. I usually have to look it up to make sure he’s not messing with me, but that’s part of the fun, you know? Well, when they took us all underground to be tested, he failed. He’s infected. And now I’m never going to see him again.” My voice was getting louder. I didn’t do anything to stop it. “And what I have to ask you, Dad, what I have to know, is whether you know anything about this that you’re not telling me. Because it seems like there’s a lot of people not telling people things, just now. And now my friends are dying. I don’t have that many friends. I can’t spare them.”

My father looked at me. I glared back. We stayed like that for almost a minute, no one moving to break the silence. It was like we were all afraid of what would happen when we did.

Finally, he stood. “I have to get to the lab,” he said. “Joyce, are you ready?”

“Wha—um, yeah.” Joyce shoved her chair away from the table, scrambling to her feet. “Have a nice day, Sal. Bye, Mom.” Mom got a hasty kiss on the cheek. I got a wave and an apologetic look as Joyce darted past me to grab her bag. Then she was gone, following Dad toward the garage.

The garage door slammed hard enough to rattle the pictures on the walls. That was the moment Beverly chose to bump her head against my thigh, eyes pleading for a taste of the delicacies she could smell on the table above her. Like all Labradors, she was magnetically drawn to food, and was an incurable beggar. It only worked once in a while, but that was enough for her to keep on trying.

This was one of the times when it was going to work. Lucky dog. “I’m not hungry anymore, and they need me at the shelter,” I said. I stood, pausing only to set my plate on the floor for Beverly to lick clean. Then I turned and walked, tight-shouldered, to my room.

It was that or start screaming. And if I started, I didn’t know when I was going to stop.

Mom knocked on my door twenty minutes later. Her mothering radar was in good form: twenty minutes was exactly the amount of time I’d needed to stop being so mad that I wasn’t fit for human company. I wondered, very briefly, whether Sally would have needed twenty minutes, or whether she’d been one of those people who had ten-minute tantrums. Maybe she’d gone in the other direction, and screamed for forty minutes every time she got upset. I’d never know. Sally was gone, and I was living her increasingly confusing life without her.

“Yeah?” I called.

“I can give you a ride to the shelter if you can be ready to go in five,” Mom called back.

I paused, assessing. I hadn’t showered, but there was a shower at the shelter that we were supposed to use after cleaning out the puppy cages. I could always volunteer for cage-cleaning duty—something no one sane would refuse to let me do if I was offering—and then use that as an excuse to take a shower afterward. Shoveling a little shit would be good for me. I could use the time to think.

“I’ll be ready.”

Mom hesitated before saying, “Sal—”

The rest of the sentence never came. I heard her steps move away from my door after a few minutes had passed, and I turned myself to the essential business of getting out the door.

I was lacing my shoes when I realized my bag was still sealed in plastic wrap on the kitchen table. I swore under my breath, shoving a change of clothes for after my shower under my arm, and left my room. I needed that bag. Not just for the emotional reassurance of having my things with me, although that was important. I didn’t want to go to the shelter without my ID, and it was in my wallet, which was, naturally, in my bag.

Mom was banging around in her office; I could hear her moving papers and shuffling things on her desk, looking for whatever it was she needed to start a successful day of volunteer work. I grabbed the scissors from the kitchen and returned to the task at hand: freeing my possessions from their plastic prison.

Whatever brand of plastic wrap SymboGen used, it was industrial strength, and it had been flash-sealed, not taped down. I had to practically saw through it in order to create a large enough hole for me to get my hand inside. It was almost funny, in a horrible way. The food was easy to access. My so-very-dangerous keys and notebook, on the other hand…

My notebook. The blood drained from my face, and I ripped the rest of the plastic wrap open without even trying to be delicate about it. I’d been carrying my notebook, the one that Dr. Morrison insisted I update daily as part of my “therapeutic healing process.” Putting it into my bag every morning was habit, and since I’d never expected my things to be out of my possession for more than an hour or so, I hadn’t seen any reason to vary my habits just because I was spending the day at SymboGen. But my things had been away from me overnight, giving any prying research rats at SymboGen plenty of time to go rummaging through my innermost thoughts.

I wasn’t sure those thoughts would be of any interest to anyone but myself and my therapist. I was terrified that SymboGen was once again intending to prove me wrong.

I pulled the bag out of the plastic wrap with shaking hands and dumped it out on the kitchen table, not bothering to stop when pencils and tampons went skittering away onto the floor. My notebook fell out. I tossed the bag aside, grabbing the notebook and flipping it open as I scanned for any signs that someone else had been reading my private thoughts. I’m not quite sure what I expected—an inspection sticker? A receipt from the company scanner?

I know that I didn’t expect what I found. Three pages after my notes ended, someone had scrawled a phone number on a previously blank page. Under that was written in large block letters:

Each letter was large and clear, like whoever left the message knew I had trouble reading. It was signed “a friend.” I didn’t recognize the handwriting, but that was no real surprise—I rarely saw anything handwritten at SymboGen, where everything was done officially, on computers and data pads. I stood there staring dumbly at the note, which was both evidence that my privacy had been violated, and the first sign I’d been given that someone, somewhere, might be able to tell me what was really going on.

“Sal? Are you ready?”

“Coming, Mom!” I shoved the notebook back into my bag, covering it with my clean clothes before gathering up the rest of my things and cramming them in as well. Once I was sure there was nothing showing that might give me away, I slung the bag over my shoulder, gave Beverly one last pat on the head, and ran for the garage. I needed to think about what I was going to do next, and I needed to speak to Nathan. But first, I needed to get to work.

Mom dropped me off in front of Cause for Paws. I blew her a kiss and went bounding up the front steps into the lobby, where I was greeted by the unusual sight of Tasha, staring at me. “Are you… early?” she asked, in a tone that implied that this might be taken as a sign of the apocalypse. “Is Sally Mitchell, the girl who never met a nap she didn’t love, actually early?”

“Stop it,” I said. “I just wanted to get an early start on my day. I may need to make a personal call in an hour or so, and I figured if I came in now, I could make my calls and feel virtuous at the same time.”

“Hmm. Seems sketchy. That’s your only motive?”

I didn’t feel like telling Tasha everything. She was sweet, and I liked her. That didn’t mean I wanted to pour out my troubles at her feet. We’d never established that sort of relationship, and I wasn’t going to start now.

“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my head with my hand, grimacing at the gritty feel of my unwashed hair. “I was going to start with the puppy cages, if that’s cool with you. I know they’re on the roster for today, and if I do them now, I can be showered and presentable before the afternoon adoption hours.”

“You can totally volunteer to do the puppy cages. And P.S., if this is part of paying it forward for that phone call of yours, there’s no chance in hell that Will is going to object to you taking a little break after you came in early and scrubbed up all the puppy shit.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” I said, and hung up my shoulder bag. I felt funny letting it go when I had only just managed to get it back into my possession. At the same time, if there were SymboGen spies waiting to break into the shelter and steal my things, I might as well give up right now. I flashed Tasha an insincere smile before heading to the supply cabinet.

The usual cacophony greeted me as I passed through the doors separating the public areas from the cages. Cause for Paws was a small, no-kill operation, and we did our best to provide the animals in our care with comfortable living accommodations—large, multi-feline habitats with toys and cat trees for the more social cats, solo cages for the ones who couldn’t stand anything else that purred. Similar arrangements for the dogs, who were also walked twice a day, once in the early morning, once at night. Tasha must have just finished the morning rounds when I arrived. We didn’t officially open to adoption appointments for another hour, and we didn’t open to walk-ins until noon. That left me with a comfortable amount of time to get everything cleaned up and grab a quick shower before people who didn’t work here started coming through the doors.

“Hey, guys,” I said, moving to fill my bucket with water from the sink. Hot water and biodegradable spa cleanser—made from citric acid, safe to use around people and animals, and even safe to drink if you were feeling masochistic—were the best tools for this particular task, at least when combined with plain old elbow grease. I dumped the cleaner into the bucket, pulled on my gloves, and moved toward the first cage.

It was surprisingly easy to think with dogs romping madly around the room, sniffing everything like they’d never been out of their cages before. I used the hose to rinse the worst of the night’s “accidents” down the drain at the center of the room, and then focused on getting down on my hands and knees and really scrubbing. Even the cleanest animal care facility needs to be sterilized regularly, for the sake of everyone’s health, humans and animals alike. The dogs didn’t seem to mind. Most of them came over with tails wagging to see what I was doing, nudge me with their noses, and get scratched behind their ears. They didn’t even mind the gloves I had to wear. They were dogs, they were out of their cages, and everything was right with the world.

If only things were that easy for humans. I scrubbed harder, trying to make up my mind about what came next. I wanted answers. I wanted to know what was going on with the sleeping sickness, and whether Sherman was dead or just sick. I wanted to know why people were keeping things from me.

Calling the number in my notebook would mean prying into things SymboGen clearly didn’t want me prying into, and looking for answers to questions I wasn’t supposed to be asking. It would be one of those things I couldn’t take back. What was it that my mysterious note-leaver wrote? “Knowing the direction doesn’t mean you have to go”? I was getting the feeling that the sentiment was truer than I could ever have guessed. I had a direction now. Did that mean I wanted to go?

It was only when I was escorting the dogs back to their cages that I realized I was already planning to call Nathan after I called the number in my notebook. Doing one meant doing the other. I wanted him with me on whatever came next. I had the directions… and apparently, I was going.

I carried my bucket over to the sink, pouring its contents down the drain. Well. If I was going to do this—and apparently, I was—I might as well get my shower in first.

Will had arrived while I was in back cleaning up after the dogs. He looked up from the office computer when I walked past. I raised the hand that wasn’t carrying the bucket full of cleaning supplies in a wave. He waved back.

“Tasha told me you were here early, but I didn’t really believe it until I looked into the dog room,” he said. “Thanks for doing the cages.”

“Not a problem. I needed to think.”

“Sal, any time you need to think, feel free to come in and hose the shit off the walls. Seriously, please. You have the most useful form of meditation I’ve ever encountered.” Will grinned briefly. “Your day at SymboGen go well?”

I froze. He always asked that question, and I never knew how to answer. I knew that SymboGen paid at least part of my salary at Cause for Paws; it was how I could get away with scheduling all my shifts around my various medical and therapy appointments, and why they never said anything about vacation time when I had to go spend a day or two on the SymboGen campus. What I didn’t know was how much of Will’s salary was being paid by SymboGen. For all that I knew, every word I said went straight from him to Dr. Banks.

That thought didn’t bother me most of the time. Most of the time, I wasn’t getting ready to call mysterious numbers that might lead to corporate espionage or—or whatever other labels you could slap on this sort of thing.

Will was still looking at me, waiting. I forced myself to return his smile and said, “It was eventful, but it ended, and really, isn’t that what we’re all hoping for when we have to spend a day at the doctor’s office? I was just going to grab a shower before we got busy, since I’m covered in dog yuck. Is that cool with you, or did you need me to do something while I’m still filthy?”

“Your noble sacrifice with the dogs means you’re not on box duty tonight, so no, Sal, you’re off the hook,” said Will, already turning back to his screen. “Go get yourself cleaned up. Adoptions go more smoothly when the potential adopters aren’t trying to figure out whether that smell is the puppy or the shelter employee.”

“Thanks, Will,” I said, and practically threw the bucket into the supply cabinet before turning and bolting, double-time, for the big employee bathroom. I paused only long enough to grab my shoulder bag from the wall.

One definite advantage to showering at the shelter: Cause for Paws had an old gym-style shower, with four showerheads all feeding into the same large tiled area. Add the industrial-level water pressure, and I didn’t even really need soap: if I turned the water on full and stood where the streams converged, I’d have the dirt blasted right off of me. I appreciate a shower that’s capable of leaving bruises.

I also appreciate a shower that’s capable of generating that much white noise. I cleaned myself off quickly, and then hiked the water up as high as it would go, creating the sound of an artificial indoor waterfall. I dug my notebook out of my bag and retreated to the corner of the room farthest from the office. The mystery message was still there when I flipped to the appropriate page. For a moment I just stood there, looking at it.

Whatever it meant, I knew one thing: dialing that number would change everything. I might not know how just yet, but I knew that it was going to happen. All I had to do was close the notebook and leave it alone. I could shred the page when I got home. I could put it in the recycling. I could…

I dialed the number.

It rang four times. I was just beginning to worry about what I’d do if I wound up rolling to voice mail when there was a click and a warm, almost maternal female voice said, “Well, if it isn’t little Miss Sally Mitchell, actually taking an invitation to chat. I wasn’t sure you’d be up for it so soon, you know. I don’t know that I would have been, in your position.”

“Who is this?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Are you the one who left the message in my notebook?”

“No, that wasn’t me. I would have needed to set foot on the SymboGen campus for that, and there are reasons I can’t do that—you’ll understand them soon. But I still have friends on the inside, and they told me what happened yesterday. That’s part of why I thought it was finally time for us to meet.”

“You didn’t answer my first question.”

The woman chuckled. “That’s true; I didn’t. I won’t, either, until we’re looking each other in the face. But I’ll tell you this much, Sal: I’m on your side. You may not believe me—you may decide I’m just one more person trying to play you, and believe me, a lot more people are going to be trying to play you in the days to come—but it’s the truth. I’ve always been on your side. There’s no one in the world who’s been pulling for you longer than I have.”

I frowned warily. Part of me wanted to believe her, even though she wouldn’t tell me her name. Something about her voice was familiar, like a voice that I’d heard before on television or maybe on one of Nathan’s parasitology podcasts. She sounded like someone that I was supposed to trust. Maybe that was what made trusting her feel so hard. If she was someone I was supposed to trust… I’m not always good at doing what I’m supposed to do.

“The message said that this was the number to call if I wanted answers. So far, I’m not hearing any answers from you. Just a whole bunch of hot air and some vague ‘I know something you don’t know.’”

Now the woman outright laughed. “Oh, Sal. You truly are splendid—better than I’d hoped for. I can’t give you the answers that you’re looking for over the phone. That would be silly. Even with the precautions you’ve obviously taken to keep from being overheard, there’s always a chance we could be monitored, and I don’t think that’s a risk either of us can afford. But now I know that you’re ready for answers. I’ll have someone contact you inside of the week with an address. Then we can finally meet in person.”

“You seem pretty confident that I’ll come.”

“I don’t think you’d have bothered calling me if you weren’t going to take the next step.” Her voice turned serious, all the amusement leaching away. “This is a big step for you, Sal. Certain lines can’t be uncrossed; certain maps will get you lost. Do you understand that?”

“No. What lines? What maps? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“I can understand why you’d feel that way; thank you for not lying to me. And as for that nice boyfriend of yours, Dr. Kim, you can bring him with you if you like. If you think he’d like to come. If you think he’ll trust the map. This will go more easily if there’s someone who can translate for you, and you’ll believe him even when you wouldn’t believe me.”

Having her give me permission to bring Nathan stung somehow, like she was the only one who had any say in what I did with my life. At the same time, he’d never forgive me if this woman actually had information about the sleeping sickness and I left him behind. “I’ll bring him,” I said.

“Good. I’ll see you soon, Sal. Be careful. Don’t trust SymboGen.”

“Look, whoever you are—”

The sound of dead air—the absence of sound—from the phone told me that there was no point in continuing. I was only talking to myself. I hit redial, but I knew even as I did it that there was no point. The call rang straight to an unformatted voice mail box with no greeting to identify it. So did the call after that.

The third call was cut off with the rapid beeping whine of a disconnected number. Whoever I’d been talking to wasn’t on the other end anymore. Now I had nothing to direct me—and even more questions than I’d started out with. And my hair was wet.

Somehow, the worst part of it all was that this was still better than yesterday. My standards for living a normal life were definitely going down.

Tasha was helping a young couple get a leash onto one of our poodle mixes. The dog—a rather unfortunate German shepherd/poodle cross—wasn’t helping, since he was so excited by the prospect of going for a walk that his entire body was vibrating. We get a lot of poodle mixes at the shelter. According to Nathan, before the Intestinal Bodyguard there was a huge demand for so-called hypoallergenic dogs, leading to a glut of poodles crossed with just about anything else. Once the implants became common, the “designer dog” craze died off, and the shelters got flooded. The first few generations died a long time before I came to work at Cause for Paws. It would still be a long time before they stopped coming through our doors.

As I moved to help Tasha with the dog, I couldn’t help thinking about how man was locked in a constant fight to control an environment that didn’t want to be controlled. First we made the world as clean and non-allergenic as we possibly could and, when that just made things worse, we created artificial infections to make ourselves healthier. So what was the “worse” that came after this particular change to our personal environments?

There wasn’t much time for contemplation. Tasha got the dog leashed and escorted the potential adopters out the door while I went into the back to start getting the kittens ready for their visitors. The day dissolved from there into the usual series of small emergencies. One of the dogs got loose and had to be retrieved; one of the kittens was handled too roughly and threw up all over its littermates, necessitating some quick cage—and kitten—cleanup. With one thing leading to another, it was quitting time before I realized that I hadn’t called Nathan yet.

“I think I have dog food in my ear,” complained Tasha, washing her hands in the sink behind the desk. “Is there a medical term for that? One that can, perhaps, be used to excuse me from work tomorrow?”

“I don’t think ‘klutz’ is a good excuse for being absent yet,” I said apologetically. I slipped on my shoulder bag. “We’re both on at nine tomorrow, right, Will?”

“At least you can remember when you’re supposed to come to work,” he said, attention remaining focused on his screen. “Although if you want to keep coming in early, I’m not going to complain about it. God knows there’s enough to do around here to keep us all busy until the end of time.”

“So hire someone else; don’t take it all out on Sal,” said Tasha.

“Out of what budget?” Will asked.

Sadly, he was right. The shelter had two full-time employees, Will and Tasha; one part-time, part-funded by SymboGen employee, me; and a rotating group of volunteers who came in on the weekends to help with the increased foot traffic. There was also a janitorial crew that visited the office once a week to take care of the really heavy cleaning. That was it. Every penny the shelter made above and beyond our salaries went back into keeping the animals fed, the lights on, and the doors open. Pet ownership had increased since the advent of the implants, but all that really meant was that animal abandonment and abuse were also on the rise. Sometimes humanity is the reason we can’t have nice things.

The bell over the door jingled as someone came inside. I turned, ready to tell whoever it was that we were closed but they could come back tomorrow, and stopped, a smile spreading across my face.

Nathan smiled back. He looked tired, but that was nothing new; knowing him, he’d been awake for hours after dropping me off last night, and probably got out of bed before I did. “I thought I’d come and see if you wanted to get dinner, since we didn’t manage to keep our plans yesterday.”

“This is more stalker behavior,” I said as I walked toward him, head tilted back for a kiss. “I’m building a profile. I think you’re going to be surprised by the strength of my case against you.”

“I look forward to the hearing,” he said, and leaned down to kiss me.

“You know, some people have really strange ideas of what constitutes flirtation,” said Tasha. “Do you think he’ll propose by sending her a subpoena?”

“Inviting her to appear in the county clerk’s office on a specific date, yeah,” agreed Will.

“Hey, now,” protested Nathan, breaking away from me to mock-scowl at my coworkers. “My family is very traditional. I’d never propose via subpoena. My father would never let me hear the last of it if I sent anything short of a full collections unit.”

“Romance is not dead,” said Tasha blandly. “You out, Sal?”

“Unless there’s anything left for me to do here, I think this is my cue.” I looked back at them, brows raised hopefully. “Am I done, Will?”

“Get out of here. Don’t come back until tomorrow.”

“You heard the boss,” said Nathan. He laced his fingers through mine and led me toward the door. I went willingly, relieved that I wasn’t going to need to call him after all. This conversation was going to be awkward enough without trying to have it over the phone. I wasn’t even sure where I would begin.

The bell over the door jingled again as we left the shelter for the street, and the sweet, welcoming warmth of the late summer air. Nathan kept my hand until we reached the car, where he released me in order to unlock the doors. I was inside and buckled by the time he finished his approach of the driver’s seat.

Nathan blinked when he opened the door and found me already settled. “Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?” he asked.

“I’m in a hurry to get somewhere alone with you,” I said. “Do you think we could get takeout and go back to your place? I wanted to talk to you.”

“You want to talk?” Nathan’s expression sobered, like he was steeling himself against the inevitable. “Sal, I know I’ve been pretty busy lately, but—”

“What? No! This isn’t the breakup talk. Jeez, Nathan, I don’t even know how to have the breakup talk. You’re the only boyfriend I’ve ever had.” Sally had dated. Sally had dated quite a lot, as her checkered Facebook archives would readily testify. I knew I hadn’t been physically a virgin the first time I’d had sex. But none of that counted for me, not really; that was all part of another lifetime, one that I didn’t remember at all.

“Then what’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re at your apartment, okay?” I looked at my shoulder bag resting against my feet, and managed to restrain the urge to pick it up and clutch it for dear life. Things were getting too confusing, too fast, and I didn’t know how to make them go the other way anymore. If there had ever been a way to make them go the other way—I wasn’t sure there had been.

“Okay,” said Nathan, and started the car. “Indian okay?”

“Indian sounds great,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Thirty minutes later, we were seated on Nathan’s couch with takeout containers in front of us. By mutual unspoken consent, we unpacked and ate, sitting in comfortable if anticipatory silence. I hadn’t been able to break for lunch—things had been too hectic at the shelter—and I didn’t realize how hungry I actually was until I smelled food. Then all conversation, no matter how important, was put on hold in favor of calories.

When we were both too full to eat another bite, we leaned back on the couch, surveying the ruins of our meal. “I think I’m going to explode,” said Nathan.

“That would be messy,” I said. “Please don’t.”

“The maid service would have to hose down the ceiling, not you.”

I shuddered exaggeratedly. “That was a sentence I never needed to hear. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Forgive me?” asked Nathan, and smiled.

“Always.” I smiled back. Then I sobered. “Nathan, about before…”

He paused, smile fading. “I wondered when we’d get back to this,” he said, and grimaced, sitting up. “Okay, Sal. What’s going on? I’m sorry if I pushed you last night.”

“No, it’s okay; I understand. That’s sort of what this is about.” I sketched out the events of the day as quickly and economically as I could without leaving anything out; it was surprisingly easy, once I managed to get started. Nathan didn’t ask any questions. He just listened, expression solemn, until I finished talking myself out. For a moment, silence stretched between us like a thin wire, drawn tight and vibrating with the things that neither of us were saying.

Finally, he asked, “Can I see the note?”

I reached for my shoulder bag, pulled out the notebook, and handed it to him wordlessly. He’d read my journal before; there was nothing there that I was worried about him seeing. He flipped past the pages with my handwriting, slowing as he encountered the blank pages that followed. He stopped when he reached the note.

“ ‘Knowing the direction doesn’t mean you have to go,’” he read aloud. Nathan raised his head, frowning. “You said the woman on the phone seemed to be quoting something. Do you remember what else she said?”

“Um… something about maps getting you lost. I didn’t really understand it.”

Nathan paled. “Was it something like ‘certain lines can’t be uncrossed; certain maps will get you lost’?”

“Yes!” I sat up straighter. “How did you know that?”

“It’s from a children’s book. Well, supposedly a children’s book. The older I get, the more I think that it was actually one of those books that’s meant to look like it’s for children but is actually a parody intended for adults. Someone shelved it wrong, it wound up in my library, and my mother read it to me every night before I went to bed from the time I was four until she left us.” Nathan shook his head. “It was called Don’t Go Out Alone. I’ve looked for years, but I’ve never found another copy.”

“That’s… weird,” I said. Nathan didn’t talk about his mother much, beyond saying that they had been close, she had died when he was very young, and it had taken him years of therapy to get even partially over it. He had no pictures of her anywhere; I didn’t even know her name. Maybe that was strange, and maybe it wasn’t. I was never sure what “strange” meant when you applied it to real people, instead of to questions in a sociology textbook. My sample size was too small.

“Definitely weird,” Nathan agreed. “The woman you spoke to was right about one thing: I want to go with you. Whatever this is, you’re not walking into it alone.”

“I don’t want to,” I said, taking my notebook back. “Whatever answers she’s going to give me, I wouldn’t understand them without somebody with a science background there to translate. This woman has already proven that she’s not interested in explaining herself just because I’m not keeping up.”

Nathan smiled, not quite managing to conceal his anxiety. That actually made me feel a little better. I didn’t want to be the only one worrying. “I guess it’s a good thing you have access to a man with a science background.”

“It is,” I agreed. “It indubitably is.”

Nathan raised an eyebrow. “Indubitably?” he asked.

“Did I use it wrong?”

“No. Not at all.” He reached over and tucked my hair back behind my ear.

I put my notebook back into my bag before I scooted across the couch to fold myself against him. Nathan put his arms around me, kissing me slowly, and for a little while—not long enough; it could never have been long enough—we were able to forget about everything but the fact that we were here, alive, and together. Until things changed, that would have to be enough, for both of us.

-

Chapter 10 AUGUST 2027

The sound of Nathan’s phone ringing in the middle of the night pulled me most of the way back to consciousness. I rolled over, burying my face in my pillow as I heard him fumble to pick up. The ringing stopped, followed by Nathan’s bleary, “This is Dr. Kim.” There was a long pause before he demanded, much more loudly—and much more alertly—“What are you talking about?”

I rolled back over, pushing myself up onto my elbows and squinting at him. He was sitting up, his bare back turned toward me. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone was covering half his face, like it was all that was holding him upright.

“I see,” he said, tonelessly. “No, thank you for calling me. I appreciate the notification. I’ll be in within the hour. No, it’s not a problem. Yes, thank you.” He lowered the phone, but didn’t raise his head.

Something about that didn’t seem right. Suddenly, I was afraid. “Nathan?” I almost whispered, sitting all the way up. I gingerly reached out and touched his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

“Devi came into the ER twenty minutes ago with her wife, Katherine. Katherine was nonresponsive when they arrived, and presented in the same fugue state that we’ve observed in other victims of the sleeping sickness. Devi was hysterical, and refused to leave her. The attending doctors were following established protocol for this sort of incident—” He stopped, uneasy laughter bubbling from his lips. “Oh, God, Sal, I just called Kate an ‘incident.’ Devi’s wife. I just called her an incident. Like she didn’t even have a name.”

“Hey. Hey! You’re doing your job. That’s how you do your job.” I got up onto my knees to put us at more of an even level. “If you personalized everything, you’d never be able to save anyone. You’d be like one of those doctors on TV, where every person you had to work with was your brother or your best friend…”

“Or my girlfriend?” he asked, with another unsteady laugh. “We met in the hospital.”

“And I was never your patient. Dating me is more like dating one of those extras who only appears in one episode and then goes off to be on a different show.” I touched his cheek lightly with the back of my hand, doing my best to keep my own anxiety in check. Nathan needed me. I was going to be there for him. “You’re doing your job. Now what happened with Kate?”

Nathan took a deep breath. “She was presenting with normal symptoms for the sleeping sickness. The EMTs who were working on her decided to let Devi stay in the room, because she wasn’t getting in the way, and it was easier than separating them. Devi wasn’t getting in the way. She was crying and trying to hold Kate’s hand when she could, but she understood that if she interfered at all, she’d be asked to leave.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Devi’s dead.” Nathan made the statement without emotion or inflection: it was a fact, and he presented it as such. I dropped my hand, eyes widening. He turned to look at me, and there was no life in his expression. He looked as empty as his voice sounded. “She was holding Kate’s hand, and Kate attacked her.”

“Wh-what?”

“The EMTs didn’t have a chance to react. They’d never seen that kind of behavior from one of the sleeping sickness cases before. One moment, Kate was on the bed, unresponsive, and the next, she was sitting up and grabbing Devi by the throat. Her trachea was crushed. It broke her hyoid bone. They couldn’t react in time. She died before they even got her onto a table.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Kate never even blinked. Not even when they were pulling her off her wife’s body. She never blinked. As soon as they got her away from Devi, she went limp, and returned to the base fugue state that they all seem to be in.” Nathan moved abruptly, standing and starting toward his dresser. “I need to get to the hospital. They need me. I’m really sorry to do this, but if I leave you money, can you take a cab to work in the morning? I’m not sure I’ll be back.”

“Of course. This isn’t the time for me to insist you be the one to drive me.” Devi was dead. Katherine had the sleeping sickness, and now Devi was dead. I stayed on the bed, watching Nathan as he dressed, and tried to make my thoughts stop spinning wildly around those two poles: Devi was dead, and Katherine had the sleeping sickness.

Whatever answers we might find, they were going to come too late for Devi, who had always been kind to me, and for Katherine, who had loved her wife very much. Even if they could find a cure for the sleeping sickness, how was Katherine ever going to recover from what she’d done? “I was in a coma, I didn’t know” didn’t seem like much of a justification. It wouldn’t have worked for me. It wasn’t going to work for her.

Nathan crossed back to the bed and bent to kiss me quickly, whispering, “I’m sorry.” He thrust forty dollars into my hand. Then he was out the door, leaving me sitting on the bed and staring blankly after him.

It wasn’t until the front door slammed that I actually turned and looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was a little bit after three o’clock in the morning. A new day had started. It hadn’t started particularly well.

Instead of going back to sleep, I decided to go home. Beverly would need to be fed, and I could use the company. The taxi let me off in front of my house half an hour later. The driver insisted on staying to see me get inside, possibly because I’d tipped well before getting out of the vehicle. I didn’t mind. It was nice to know that there was someone at my back if I needed it.

Beverly met me at the door, tail wagging wildly from side to side, mouth hanging open in a wide canine grin. She didn’t bark. Her previous owner had trained her well before the sleeping sickness had taken him away from her. For the first time, I looked down at my accidental dog and wondered if she missed the man she used to live with. Dogs were loyal. How much time did she spend wondering if he was ever going to come and take her home?

I waved to the taxi before stepping into the house and easing the door closed behind me. If I was quiet, maybe I wouldn’t wake anybody else up. They all had things to do in the morning, and I had already e-mailed Will to let him know I wouldn’t be in. Nathan was going to need me when he finished his shift and finally allowed himself to think about the reality of what had happened. Devi was gone. Devi wasn’t coming back. We both had to deal with that.

Beverly followed me to my room, tail still waving. At least someone was happy about my unexpected return. I sat down on the bed, patting the mattress to encourage her to jump up. Not that it took much encouragement; with Beverly, keeping her out of the bed was usually a harder task. She hopped up and sat down next to me, tail wagging harder than ever. It kept wagging as I bent over, put my arms around her neck, and wept silently into her fur.

About five minutes had passed when I heard my father clear his throat. I looked up to find him standing in the doorway of my room. The hallway light was on, turning him into a black outline of a man. Quietly, he asked, “Long night?”

“Dad.” I straightened, wiping my eyes. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

“That’s a good thing, since it looks like you told me you were going to be spending the night at your boyfriend’s house, and now you’re sitting on your bed crying on the dog. That’s the sort of thing that makes a father wonder whether he needs to give some lessons on manners to a certain young man.”

I shook my head quickly. “No. Nathan didn’t do anything wrong. I came home because he had to go to the hospital, and he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to make it back. It seemed like a better idea for me to be here.”

“Is everything all right?”

The backlighting made it impossible for me to see the expression on my father’s face, but he sounded sincerely worried. I sighed, wiping my eyes again, and said, “No. Not really.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Maybe.” I sniffled.

My father took that as an invitation. He walked into my room and pulled out the desk chair, sitting on the edge. This close, and without the light shining from directly behind him, I could actually see the concern in his eyes. “What happened?”

“We were asleep when Nathan’s phone rang and woke us both up. His… his research assistant’s wife caught the sleeping sickness. Her name’s Devi. The research assistant, I mean, not the wife. Devi brought her to the hospital for treatment, and the EMTs let them stay together because what would be the harm, you know? The sleeping sickness is pretty passive. Only it wasn’t passive when Chave caught it. She was attacking people.”

“And Devi’s wife did the same thing,” said my father. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded. “She did.” I was crying again. I wiped my cheek and said, “She went for Devi. They didn’t expect it, and Devi didn’t move back in time, and she… and she…” I stopped talking and just cried. It was all I could do. To his credit, my father leaned forward and put his arms around me, holding me until the tears tapered off. When I pulled away, he let me go.

I don’t think I’d ever loved him more than I did in that moment.

“Did Devi die?” he asked, very quietly.

I nodded, biting my lip to keep myself from starting to cry again. That was the last thing I wanted to do.

My father sighed. “You know there are things about my work that I’m not allowed to talk about. It’s always been that way, since before Joyce was born.”

“I know,” I whispered.

“No, you don’t. Because I forget sometimes you don’t have—you don’t remember all those years of being told you couldn’t ask me about my job. You lost those memories in the accident, and we’ve all come to terms with the fact that they’re not coming back, but sometimes I still catch myself treating you like you ought to know when you can’t ask me things. That’s why I was so short with you this morning, and I’m sorry.”

“You’re still not telling me anything.”

“I know.” He shook his head. “It’s difficult, Sal. Heck, even things like this are difficult for me. The Sally Mitchell who grew up in this room would never have let me past the doorway. If she’d been careless enough to get caught crying, she would have locked me right out in the hall when she realized it.”

I frowned. Sometimes hearing about the woman I was before the accident made me want to punch myself in the nose. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault. My oldest daughter was a wild girl from day one, and we never did learn how to see eye to eye on much of anything other than how many times I could ground her.” My father shook his head. “As for what you asked yesterday, it’s… complicated. Yes, we know some things that aren’t being discussed with the public, but we’ve been able to share most of that information with the medical community. We have reason to believe that some other people know a great deal more and are sharing a great deal less, which, as you can imagine, is making us all just a little bit unhappy.”

“You’re talking about SymboGen, aren’t you?”

He smiled a little. “You’re a smart girl. A little naïve sometimes, but that’s to be expected with the amount of experience you’ve got to go by. Yes, I’m talking about SymboGen. They aren’t the first corporation to turn public health into a stockholder concern, but they’re definitely the one that’s causing me the most grief right now. And not just because they saved your life, which makes it politically difficult to cut ties with them.”

“But you’re the government. Can’t you make them tell you what you want to know? If people are getting sick, doesn’t that mean SymboGen is doing something wrong?”

To my surprise, he shook his head. “There’s something called ‘burden of proof’ that even the government has to respect. Thus far, we haven’t been able to prove that SymboGen knows anything, or that the current epidemic is in any way related to them or to their business. SymboGen is a very powerful corporation, and if we overstep too soon, we might find ourselves unable to get any answers out of them at all.”

I looked at him blankly. “But you’re the government,” I repeated.

“We’re the government, and you know what the most powerful weapon against the government is? Money. SymboGen has lots and lots of money, and they know how to spend it. Their lobbyists are extremely influential, and if we move against them before we are absolutely sure we have a case, we could find ourselves in a lot of trouble. I could lose my job. We still wouldn’t have any answers. And you…” He stopped, looking uncomfortable.

I might not understand politics, but I understood that expression. “I could find myself needing to choose between SymboGen and my family. But I pretty much have a clean bill of health at this point, don’t I? It’s been over a year since my last incident…”

“And what happens if you have another one? SymboGen is the only reason you’ve survived the last two.”

“Maybe they’re over.” Maybe. Or maybe they’d started before my accident. I’d seen the traffic camera footage of the crash: one second, normal girl driving; the next, spasms and a total loss of control. It was terrifying, especially because I couldn’t remember it at all. “They’ve been tapering off.”

“Have they? You could have been having attacks for months before your accident. You weren’t always open with us… before. You could have been very sick and still decided not to say anything, because you didn’t want us to know.”

I took a deep breath, but I didn’t object. Everything I knew about Sally Mitchell told me that he was right. There was no point in arguing with the truth.

“Apart from that… we still haven’t found a medical cause for your attacks.” He glanced away. I frowned. He kept talking: “So there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again, and given the amount of damage the first one did—damage we’re still finding out about, and that you’re still recovering from—we have no way of knowing what the next one would do to you.”

“So it’s my fault you can’t move against SymboGen,” I said. The bitterness in my voice surprised even me.

Dad blinked. Then he shook his head, and said, “No. You’re a part of the greater whole, but it’s not entirely on you.”

“I know, but…”

“This morning you asked me whether I knew anything that I wasn’t sharing with you. There isn’t much. But one of the things I do know is that the behavior of the afflicted is starting to change. They’re starting to become aggressive. Your friend… this is the first I’ve heard of someone actually dying because they’d been attacked by someone who was sick. It may be because she didn’t try to step away. We very rarely react defensively to the people we love.”

The first person I’d seen with the sleeping sickness had been a little girl, pursued by her mother. “Are we just hoping that no one else who gets sick has anybody around who cares about them?”

My father grimaced. “No. But Sal, we don’t know enough to know what’s happening. Most of the people who get sick don’t turn violent. We don’t want people to start turning on their family members because they’re frightened—and this is already a terrifying illness. People you know and love seem to disappear before your eyes. It would be irresponsible of us to make that even more frightening.”

“So you’re just going to say nothing, and let people like Devi keep getting hurt?”

“We’re not suppressing any information. I’m sure the news will pick this up and start telling the world very soon, if they haven’t done so already. But we’re not going to make any official statements until we know more than we know right now.” He stood. “It’s a horrible solution. There are no good solutions left.”

“Dad—”

My father paused in the process of leaving the room. He looked back over his shoulder at me and said, quietly, “You know, Sal, I’m very glad I’ve had the chance to know you. You’re a good person, and you still surprise me.”

I blinked at him, not sure what I could say to that. He took advantage of my brief silence and made his escape. I stared after him. Finally, I turned to Beverly, and asked, “Any thoughts?”

She wagged her tail.

Eventually, I got up and closed my bedroom door, and sometime after that, I managed to fall asleep. Sleep didn’t come easily, and once I found it, my dreams were full of darkness. Darkness, and the drums.

I knew I was alone in the house as soon as I opened my eyes. There was a quality to the silence that spoke of emptiness, not stillness. Even Beverly was gone, although that might just mean that she was out in the backyard rather than warming my feet. I rolled over and squinted at the clock. It was almost ten. No wonder I was by myself. Everyone with a more respectable job had long since taken off.

The stillness endured while I rolled out of bed and found my robe. I went padding out into the hall and toward the kitchen. Maybe there would be some leftovers from the previous day’s SymboGen-sponsored breakfast. It hadn’t poisoned any of us the day before. It wasn’t going to poison me now.

The sliding glass door to the backyard was open, and there was a note on the fridge, where I would be sure to see it. It was held in place with a magnet shaped like a slice of watermelon, and was written in my mother’s characteristically careful print:

I smiled as I finished puzzling through the note. Then I took it off the fridge, folded it, and placed it in my pocket. It was good to know that I had family on my side, no matter what else might be going on in the world.

Devi had thought she had family on her side, too. My smile faded. I got the remains of the scrambled eggs and sliced fruit from the day before, put them on a plate, and sat down at the breakfast table to eat. I barely tasted anything. I kept thinking of Devi’s face when she saw me coming into the office, the way she laughed, the way she always knew exactly what to say…

The way she talked about her bulldog, Minneapolis, who was probably sitting at home alone and confused, wondering when her people were going to be coming back to get her. The mouthful of eggs I’d been in the process of chewing suddenly tasted like ashes. I forced myself to swallow, putting my fork down on the plate. I was done. I couldn’t eat anything else, or I was going to be sick. Even if my implant still needed food, I just couldn’t.

Sometimes people who don’t want to think about what their implants really are—living, independent organisms that just happen to be genetically tailored to live inside the human body—will let themselves neglect the nutritional needs of their implants, and that can be bad. There are implants specifically designed to need less in the way of caloric support, but they’re limited in their distribution to places with bad famines and poor ongoing medical treatment. Low-calorie implants don’t do as much, so they’re reserved for places that can’t support anything else.

I put my plate down on the floor and whistled. The expected black Lab didn’t appear. I frowned and called, “Beverly! Food!” She still didn’t appear.

That wasn’t normal. It was strange to get through a meal without a black shadow appearing at my heels to ask for her share. It was unheard of for her to actually ignore food when it was offered.

“Beverly?” I started toward the back door, tugging my robe a little tighter. It was hard to keep from playing out nightmare scenarios. Like maybe she’d managed to dig a hole under the fence and was running loose somewhere, looking for the way home. But how would she know where home was? Would she run for the house where she used to live, the one where no one was waiting to let her in? I knew my concern for Devi’s dog was feeding my fear for my own. That didn’t make the fear any less real.

“Beverly!” I stepped onto the back porch, and stopped, frowning.

Beverly was still in the yard. That was a momentary relief. But she was standing next to the side gate, stiff-legged, ears pushed all the way forward, and the hair on her spine was standing up. Her tail was tucked low. She looked like a dog that was getting ready to charge into battle against a much larger enemy, and even though she knew she was going to lose, she was going to do it anyway. It was her duty.

“Beverly, come,” I called. She didn’t come. It was the first time she’d ever refused a command. I started down the steps to the lawn, still holding my bathrobe tight around my chest. We don’t have many dangerous animals in Colma, but rattlesnakes weren’t outside the realm of possibility. If Beverly had somehow managed to corner a snake, I wanted to pull her away from there as fast as I could.

As I got closer, I realized that she was growling, a low, deep sound that seemed to start in her paws and work its way all the way up through her body before rumbling past her lips. It was the sort of thing that would have been terrifying if she’d been directing it at me. Since she was directing it at the fence, it was scary in a different way. I sped up, trying to see what was in front of her.

There was nothing there but grass. Whatever she was growling at was on the other side of the fence.

“Beverly?”

She didn’t respond. I stepped forward and let go of my robe in order to lean down and take hold of her collar. She kept growling. Whatever she was growling at didn’t make a sound.

“Come on, Beverly. Let’s go inside.” I tugged on her collar. She dug her feet into the soil and held fast, refusing to be moved. I pulled harder. She still didn’t budge. It was like I was trying to move a concrete statue instead of a dog—only concrete doesn’t usually growl. “Beverly, come on!”

She turned to look at me for the first time since I’d joined her in the backyard. It wasn’t a full turn, just enough for her to see me out of one eye. Her expression was strangely pleading, filled with the anxious need of a good dog to protect her person. If she’d been human, I would have interpreted that look as “let me do this, let me have my job.” I let go of her collar, stepping away. Beverly’s head promptly snapped back into its original position, all her attention fixing on the fence. She never stopped growling.

I wasn’t a stupid actress in a horror movie, despite the fact that I had gone running outside in my bathrobe to see what was wrong with the dog; no matter how much I wanted to know what she was growling at, I wasn’t going to open the gate and find out. But there were other ways. Feeling suddenly very exposed, I turned and ran for the back door. I didn’t shut it—Beverly would need a way back into the house—but I still felt better once there was a wall between me and whatever had my dog so upset.

I wanted to call the police, but I needed a better reason than “something upset my dog.” I swallowed hard, and started for the living room. There was a window there that would give me a perfect view of the side yard, and the gate. I’d be able to see whatever it was that Beverly was growling at. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I was absolutely sure that I needed to.

I made my way slowly toward the window, wishing I had a weapon, or any idea how to use one. I would have felt better. There were probably lots of things that could be used as improvised weapons in the kitchen and living room, but I didn’t know what would work, and so I didn’t reach for anything. I wasn’t a fighter. I did, however, have a pane of glass between me and whatever was in the side yard. I held that thought firmly at the front of my mind as I inched around the couch and peered out the window.

Three of my neighbors were standing in the side yard, their hands down at their sides, staring at the fence. I recognized them all, even if I only knew one—Mr. Carson from next door—by name. None of them were moving. One of them, a woman, was wearing a bathrobe a little newer than mine. Her socks were soaked and grass stained. The other woman was wearing one shoe, and her hair looked like it was halfway-combed. I bit my lip. They were just standing there.

Then Mr. Carson turned and looked at me.

I let out a little scream and stumbled backward, falling over the couch in my retreat. His eyes were like Chave’s had been: totally empty of anything resembling humanity or life. Dead eyes. He looked at me like a man who had crawled out of his own grave.

I didn’t stand up once I managed to recover from my fall. Instead, I scrambled backward on all fours, keeping my eyes fixed on the window. If they were moving, I didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to see it—and yet somehow, I knew they were moving, that Mr. Carson at least was walking toward the window where he’d seen me, and the other two were very likely following him. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew, just like I knew that I was alone.

The slap of Mr. Carson’s palms hitting the window was one of the loudest things I’d ever heard. Beverly came racing into the living room, barking madly, and threw herself up onto the couch. Her paws left muddy prints behind them, standing out boldly against the pale tan cushions. She kept barking, her ears flat against her skull, her attention fully focused on the window.

Beverly was inside. That meant that there was no longer anything between the gate and the open back door.

Sheer terror forced me to my feet, and I ran for the back door, not allowing myself to look at the window. At least one of them was there. If all three of them were there, I might be fine. I might—

The woman in the bathrobe was on the back porch. I screamed again and grabbed the handle, yanking on the heavy glass door. There was a moment when I thought that it wasn’t going to move. Then it slipped into position on the track, allowing me to pull it shut before the woman reached me. I fumbled with the lock, snapping it into position. Her hands hit the glass, palms first. Then she stopped. Completely. She was still breathing, but there was no other movement; she might as well have been a statue.

A statue with dead, dead eyes.

“Oh God oh God oh God,” I gasped. My heart was hammering against my ribs, and the sound of drums was in my ears again. It was almost loud enough to drown out Beverly’s barking. I wanted to close the curtain and shut out the sight of the woman’s empty stare. I couldn’t make myself move. In that moment, it was like my body had decided that it was no longer interested in working in tandem with my brain.

Maybe this was what it felt like for Sherman and the others when the sleeping sickness first caught hold of them. Like they had suddenly become observers in their own lives, completely unable to make their bodies respond to their commands. Maybe this was how it was forever. Maybe they never got to stop watching—

The woman at the back door raised one hand before slapping her palm deliberately back against the glass. I jumped, startled into motion. Her dead gaze never wavered. Beverly was still barking, and the hammering drumbeat of my heart was still thunderous in my ears.

I looked into the woman’s dead eyes and knew that whoever she’d been a few hours before, she wasn’t that person anymore. There was no experience or identity in her eyes; they weren’t just dead, they were empty. Everything that made her who she was had been drained away, replaced by some set of instincts I didn’t understand. Instincts that had, for whatever reason, drawn her and her companions to my yard.

She slapped the door again, her palm pressing white as a snail’s belly against the glass. I took a step backward. Even that small motion felt like a victory. See, it said, you aren’t like them. You still move when you want to move. You’re still you, and not anything else. The thought helped me take another step. The woman kept slapping the door, each movement slow and deliberate. I didn’t take my eyes off her as I kept backing up, finally reaching the table where I’d left my phone.

Picking it up, I hit the voice recognition switch on the side—a helpful leftover from the days when I’d been speaking but not yet capable of reliably reading the controls on my own phone—and said, “Dial Dr. Steven Banks.”

The words surprised me. I’d been intending to call the police right up until I spoke. At the same time, calling Dr. Banks made perfect sense. If SymboGen knew things about the sleeping sickness that they weren’t sharing, maybe they’d also know how to make the people around my house go away. The police wouldn’t have that information. I didn’t want anybody getting hurt.

“Dialing,” said the phone politely, switching itself to speaker in response to my command. The sound of ringing followed.

A man I didn’t know picked up the line, saying, “Dr. Banks’s office. Dr. Banks is in a meeting right now, may I take a message?”

“No, you can transfer me to him,” I said. “This is Sally Mitchell. It’s an emergency, and even if you’re new, you still have a card with instructions telling you what to do if I call. Please. Put me through to Dr. Banks.” It wasn’t the politest greeting ever. I didn’t feel like I had time for much politeness. Not with the dead-eyed woman pawing at my back door and staring at me like I was the answer to a question she was no longer fully capable of asking.

“O-of course, Miss Mitchell,” stammered the man on my phone, sounding stunned. “I’ll put you right through.”

“Thank you,” I said distractedly. I’m not sure he heard me. The phone clicked, and the sound of his breathing was replaced by the sweet acoustic guitar hold music of the SymboGen communications system.

I waited, none too patiently, and listened more to Beverly barking than to the music. As long as she was still barking, the man was still outside. Hopefully the second woman was there with him, and not exploring some other avenue into the house. I shivered a bit, despite the fact that it was a perfectly warm day. If she got inside, I didn’t know what I would do.

The phone clicked. “Sally?” said Dr. Banks. He sounded concerned but not panicked. If anything, there was a note of relief in his voice, like he’d been waiting for the day I would call him voluntarily for a very long time. “What’s wrong? You gave Jeff a bit of a scare.”

“I’m having a bit of a scare myself right now, Dr. Banks,” I retorted. “I’m alone in my house with my dog, and three people with that sleepwalking sickness are here. One of them is at my back door. She keeps hitting the glass.” It seemed like such a small thing when I said it out loud like that, but it was impossible for me to properly articulate how horrible every little smacking sound was. Her palm was starting to look more red than white when she hit the door, like the repeated impacts were irritating the skin. If it hurt her at all, she didn’t show it. Her expression remained exactly the same, as blank as it had been the moment she appeared on the porch.

“Sally, you need to get out of there.” Now Dr. Banks sounded like he was on the verge of panic. “Is there any way for you to get out of the house?”

“I’m in my bathrobe, I’m unarmed, and there are three of them.” I stressed the number this time, like that might somehow make him understand how bad the situation was. “I know one is in the side yard and one is in the back. I don’t know where the third one is. So no, I can’t get out of the house, unless you’re absolutely sure they’re not going to attack me the way Chave did. I don’t have a bunch of security guards here to save me.”

Dr. Banks took a deep breath. “Are the doors locked?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to send a security team. If you think there’s any chance the people outside your house are going to get in, I need you to go and lock yourself in the bathroom. My men can get inside even if you’re not there to open the doors for them. I’ll pay for any damages. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Dr. Banks. I understand.” My parents would be pissed if they came home and SymboGen had kicked the front door in, but I assumed they’d be even angrier if they came home and found me dead in the kitchen.

“Stay safe, Sally.” The line went dead. I lowered my phone, slipping it into the pocket of my bathrobe, where I wouldn’t lose it. The woman from down the block was still methodically slapping the glass door. Beverly was still barking. As long as I focused on those two things—those pieces of proof that I was still safely inside and the monsters were still outside—I was okay.

I was okay.

I was…

I wasn’t okay. I found myself staring at the woman on the other side of the glass door, searching her eyes for some trace of the woman I’d seen walking down the sidewalk less than a week before, laughing over her shoulder, engaged with her own life. That woman wasn’t there. No one was there. I was looking at a corpse that just happened to be somehow up and walking around, and if I didn’t understand how that was possible, that was just because there were so many things I didn’t know.

I kept staring into her eyes, almost afraid to move, and waited for the sound of someone coming to rescue me.

Time stretched and slipped away, becoming something defined by three sounds: Beverly’s barking, the slap of skin against glass, and the drumbeat hammering of my own heart. I didn’t move. Beverly was starting to sound hoarse, but she wasn’t letting that stop her. As long as Mr. Carson was at the window, she was going to keep on barking at him. I wondered how much she understood about the sleeping sickness. What sort of scent did the infected give off, if a dog could detect it at a distance? She’d known when her original owner first started getting sick. She’d known when Mr. Carson and the others came up to the fence. They had to smell sick somehow.

I suddenly flashed on Marya talking about Tumbleweeds, her store cat, and how he’d been standoffish with the customers for the first time in his pampered life. What was it she’d said? “He even hissed at a poor woman yesterday.” I had to wonder whether that poor woman had joined the ranks of the sleepwalkers shortly after being rejected by the normally good-natured feline. If animals could detect the early signs of the infection, they might be the best way of avoiding it.

Assuming that all animals could detect the early signs of the infection, whatever those signs were. Assuming that the infection was passed person to person, and that it could be avoided. Assuming a whole lot of things, most of which probably weren’t safe to assume, not with the limited information available to me.

I was still staring at the woman when Beverly stopped barking and started to growl. I whipped around before I fully realized that I was going to move. The slapping against the glass behind me got more insistent, but it was competing with a somewhat more pressing sound: someone was knocking on the front door.

“Miss Mitchell?” shouted an unfamiliar male voice. “Are you all right? If you are unable to come to the door, we will enter to confirm your condition. We will be making entry on the count of ten. One…”

I took a deep breath and walked toward the door, fighting the urge to run. “I’m here,” I called, once I was close enough that I was sure they’d be able to hear me. I stole a glance at Beverly. She was still standing on the couch, legs locked into rigid lines. Mr. Carson wasn’t outside the window anymore. Instead, three men in SymboGen security uniforms were standing there, each of them holding a shock baton. The head of a fourth man was just barely visible above the window frame.

Beverly turned toward the sound of my voice, and her growling stopped, for a moment. Then she started growling again as she jumped off the couch and ran to stand guard over the back door. The couch cushions were irreparably stained with mud and grass. Somehow, I didn’t think Mom was going to be all that upset, considering what Beverly had been defending me from. Even if I still wasn’t sure exactly what that was.

“Miss Mitchell, is it safe for you to open the door? If, for some reason, it is not safe, we will make our own way inside.”

Translation: they would knock down the door. “Just a second,” I said, and began undoing the locks.

I opened the door to find a man in full SymboGen security gear standing on the porch, with two more guards behind him. There were three large black vans parked in front of the house, their rear doors standing open.

“Miss Mitchell,” said the man. He nodded his head respectfully, his eyes skittering away from my face as he began to scan the house behind me. Beverly’s barking caught his attention. “Is your dog agitated by the intruders?”

“There’s a woman on the back porch,” I said. “Beverly’s barking at her. There were two more—”

“We have already restrained them,” said the man. He looked over his shoulder, making a series of complex gestures with his right hand. The two men nodded and went trotting away, heading for the side of the house. “The third intruder will be removed shortly. May I enter?”

Feeling a little foolish standing there in my bathrobe and bare feet, I nodded and stepped to the side. “Please. I don’t think they managed to get inside at all, but I’ll feel a lot more secure once I’m sure.”

“That’s why we’re here, Miss Mitchell,” said the man, and stepped past me, into the house. “May my men enter? I will remain with you while they secure the property.”

“Okay.” I stepped farther to the side, making sure there was a clear path into the house. Beverly was still barking. I slipped my hands into the pockets of my robe and just stood there, feeling awkward and exposed.

A second man in SymboGen security gear appeared, nodded to me, and walked past me into the house. I stayed where I was, swaying slightly on my feet.

The sound of the glass door sliding open was barely audible under the sound of Beverly’s maddened barking. The sound of the electric prod hitting the woman on the other side was much easier to hear. I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the way the sound made my stomach turn over. I couldn’t help remembering Chave, and how quickly she’d gone from a person to a target. I didn’t know the woman in my backyard nearly that well.

Beverly stopped barking. For a moment, there was only silence. The sound of footsteps alerted me to the return of the second man to have entered the house. I opened my eyes, turning to face him.

“The intruder from your yard is being removed now,” he said calmly. His baton was back at his belt. That made me feel a little better.

“Hold this position,” said the first man. To me, he said, “Please wait here while I check your doors and windows.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I murmured. I might as well not have said anything. He was already gone, walking deeper into the house with his shoulders locked in an almost military line. Beverly trotted over to sit down beside me, pressing her shoulders against my leg. I bent enough to stroke her ears. “Good dog, Beverly. You’re a good dog.”

She looked up at me with worshipful brown eyes, her tail thumping once against the floor. In her world, everything was right. She had protected her human from the bad things outside, and now she was being called a good dog and having her ears petted. I wished it could be that simple for me.

Two more men from SymboGen appeared on the porch, flanking the second man. One of them saluted me. “Miss Mitchell,” he said.

I blinked at him, not sure how I was supposed to respond to the salute. I settled on a weak wave. “Hello,” I said. “Can I get you anything? Um. And also thank you for coming. I didn’t want to call the police, I was afraid someone would get hurt.” Someone had gotten hurt because I called SymboGen. Those electric batons didn’t just tickle. But if I’d called the police, I might have been spreading an infection I still didn’t understand. I couldn’t do that.

“We’re just doing our jobs, ma’am,” said one of the two men.

“I know. I still appreciate it.” Beverly was looking curiously at the two, her ears pricked forward, but she wasn’t growling. I took that as a good sign that they weren’t getting ready to freak out and try to strangle me. “I really didn’t want to spend the whole day locked inside my house, panicking.”

“Speaking of which, your house is clear,” said the man I took as the leader, walking back down the hall to the front room. “They don’t appear to have penetrated the security.”

A dizzying wave of relief washed over me. “Oh, good. Thank you for checking.”

“Miss Mitchell, Dr. Banks would very much appreciate it if you would accompany us back to SymboGen, so that he can see for himself that you’re all right.” The man’s expression didn’t waver. In its own way, it was as dead as the faces on the people who’d been in my yard. “We would be happy to wait while you got ready, and a space has been kept open for you in the van.”

The relief faded, followed by the familiar dread that mention of visiting SymboGen always engendered. This time, it had a darker edge. If I went with them now, how did I know that I would ever be coming back here? No one would know where I was. I could call and leave a message, but that wasn’t enough.

“No, thank you,” I said, through lips that felt suddenly numb and leaden. “I’m supposed to be meeting my boyfriend for lunch, and the roundtrip from SymboGen to here would leave only a few minutes for me to talk with Dr. Banks. It would be silly. But if he wants me to come in later this week…”

“Miss Mitchell, it may not be safe for you to remain here alone.”

“I’m not alone. I have Beverly.” I stooped enough to put my hand on the dog’s head. She stayed where she was, her attention going to the man who was trying to convince me to go with them. “I would never have known that there was potential danger outside if it weren’t for her. She’s an excellent guard dog.”

A flicker of displeasure lit in the man’s eyes. “Even so, Dr. Banks won’t like us leaving you here alone.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not going with you,” I said, unable to keep the edge of anxiety out of my tone. “I called because I needed help. Maybe that gives Dr. Banks the right to ask me to come and see him, but it doesn’t mean he gets to order me. I don’t work for him. I am not a part of SymboGen.”

“Miss Mitchell—”

“I’d like you to leave now, please. I need to put some clothes on.” Beverly, picking up on my tension, stood. I straightened, keeping my hand resting atop her head. “Please,” I repeated.

The man sighed. “All right. But please, if there is any further trouble, don’t hesitate to call. Dr. Banks worries for your safety.”

“I won’t. Hesitate, I mean. I’ll call,” I said. I stayed where I was, trying to take some comfort from the weight of Beverly pressed against my leg, and watched as the man from SymboGen waved the others off the porch. He walked after them. Once he was outside, I stepped forward and closed the door.

I let my hand rest on the doorknob, closing my eyes, and just breathed. No scary dead-eyed people in the yard. No SymboGen security on the lawn. It was just me and my dog, my good, good dog, who deserved an entire steak for the way she’d come to my defense. I would put on some clothes, call Nathan, and—

The doorbell rang. I recoiled from the door, not opening my eyes until I was well clear of the wood. It wasn’t intentional; I just reacted. Beverly barked once, but it was an inquisitive sound, not a panicked one. Whatever was on the porch, it didn’t upset her.

I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to slow the hammering of my heart, and called, “Hello?”

There was no response. The doorbell didn’t ring again. I cautiously approached the door, finally standing on tiptoe to peer through the peephole. There was no one there. Feeling like this was the second stupid thing I’d done in the short time that I’d been out of bed, I dropped back to the flats of my feet and opened the front door. The peephole hadn’t lied; there was no one there.

There was, however, a plain white envelope tucked halfway under the edge of the welcome mat, where the wind couldn’t take it away. I held my bathrobe closed with one hand as I bent to pull the envelope free, and then backed up, nudging Beverly out of the way. Once the door was closed and locked, I turned the envelope over in my hands, looking for some sign to identify who’d left it. There was nothing.

“Beverly, if this explodes, I want you to drag my body to safety,” I said. She looked up at me and wagged her tail. “Good dog,” I said. Beverly sat down.

I opened the envelope.

Inside was an index card printed in an oddly uneven font that smudged when my thumb touched it. The letters were faintly indented, and I realized it had been composed on a typewriter—something I’d only seen in the hospital records department, where some very specific types of paperwork had to be written on carbon paper. It was just one line of text:

Underneath was a street address in the city of Clayton, about an hour’s drive from San Francisco. I looked at it without saying a word for several minutes, until the text began to twist and slip away from me. That was my cue. I tucked the paper into the pocket of my bathrobe, pulling my phone out as I turned to walk toward my bedroom.

“Dial Nathan,” I said.

It was time to follow the map, whether or not it was going to get us lost.

-

Chapter 11 AUGUST 2027

I was dressed and ready to go when Nathan pulled up in front of the house. Beverly’s dish was full, and there was a note on the refrigerator to keep my parents from getting worried if they got home before I did. I didn’t say anything about Mr. Carson and the others, or about the visit from SymboGen security. I felt funny about that, but if I started going into details, I’d wind up writing everything down, and there wasn’t time. I could explain when we were all together again.

Nathan honked the horn. When I’d called to ask him if we could go, I’d told him not to bother getting out of the car. The sound still made me jump a little, my stomach squeezing like a fist. Were we making the right decision? Should we really be running around with people who used quotes from obscure children’s books in casual conversation, and played cloak-and-dagger games for no good reason?

Did we have a choice?

Nathan honked again. No, we didn’t have a choice. Devi was dead. If we wanted answers, we’d have to take them wherever we could find them.

I locked the door behind me as I left the house, slinging my messenger bag over my shoulder one-handed. I was dressed for a clandestine meeting, in jeans, a dark blue hoodie, and running shoes—in case we found a reason to run—with my hair pulled into a ponytail.

Nathan looked over as I practically threw myself into the passenger seat. He blinked. “Sal? Are you okay?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’ll explain on the drive.”

“Okay.” Nathan reached for the GPS. “What’s the address?”

I read it off for the system. “There’s also another quote that sounds like it’s from that book you were talking about.”

“Don’t Go Out Alone?”

“Yeah, that one.” I held up the card, and recited more than read, “ ‘The broken doors are open. Come and enter and be home.’”

Nathan started the car. He didn’t say a word as he pulled out of the driveway. I slowly lowered the card, blinking at him. He wasn’t looking at me; he was staring at the windshield, where the glowing red printout from the GPS displayed at eye level.

I frowned, not sure what I was supposed to say, or what—if anything—I’d done to upset him. I wasn’t the one who wrote the note. I wasn’t the one quoting the book.

Finally, Nathan sighed, and said, “ ‘Some lies better left untold; some dreams better left unsold. The broken doors are open. Come and enter, and be home. My darling girl, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.’” He glanced my way. “It’s from the middle of the book, where the boy and girl who’ve gone out alone together—don’t ask me how that works, I was a kid, I believed it completely—have reached the broken doors, and everything is about to get bad. It’s sort of a welcome. And it’s sort of a warning.”

“I’m a little disturbed that our secret source for secret things is communicating with us via quotes from a children’s book that no one but you has ever heard of,” I said. “It’s weird and I don’t like it.”

“I really expected you to go with ‘secret source for secret secrets’ there, and I don’t like it either, but I don’t see what choice we have,” said Nathan. “She’s the only person who seems to know what’s going on.”

“Yeah.” I studied him sidelong. The dark circles under his eyes didn’t surprise me, but I didn’t like them, either. Not sure what else to say, I asked, “Is someone taking care of Minneapolis? I was worried about her this morning.”

“I’ve contacted Devi’s family, since they’re local. They’re considering their options.” The bitter way he said that made it plain he didn’t expect them to come for Devi and Katherine’s bulldog. “In the meantime, Minnie is with me. My building manager says she can stay for a little while, given the circumstances, even though I’m not supposed to have pets.”

“I think… I think that’s a good thing. I’ll feel safer knowing you have a dog with you,” I said slowly. “Given the circumstances and all.”

Nathan glanced at me again. “Sal? What’s wrong?”

I took a deep breath. “Something happened with Beverly this morning,” I said before I began, haltingly, to explain the events that had started with Beverly standing stiff-legged and growling in the backyard. It took longer than I expected. Even with me refusing to leave anything out, Nathan kept asking me questions, making me back up, and finding the things I wasn’t saying. By the time I finished, I was trembling all over, a deep, bone-weary shake that seemed to start somewhere deep inside my chest and radiate from there. I stopped talking. I couldn’t find anything else inside myself to say.

Nathan said it for me. “You did the right thing,” he said. “I don’t know that I would have had the presence of mind to call SymboGen, but after what happened last night with Devi… I wouldn’t want to involve the police with three of them when they were in their mobile state.”

There was no question as to who he meant by “them.” I shuddered, the memory of the woman on the back porch rising, uninvited, behind my eyes. “It was freaky. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Like I said, you did the right thing. SymboGen is more equipped to deal with this sort of situation than anybody else. I just wish I knew what made them surround your house like that. I haven’t heard anything about that behavior. It makes me a little nervous, to be honest. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I don’t want me to get hurt either, so I think we’re in agreement.” I placed a hand on his arm. “It’s going to be okay. This lady will have the answers that we’re looking for, and then you’ll know how to start treating the sick people, and all of this will go away.” I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. We might find out what SymboGen was hiding about the sleeping sickness; we might even find a way to treat the people who were afflicted. But no answers were going to bring Devi back. My own example notwithstanding, the dead were beyond the reach of modern medical science.

Nathan nodded grimly. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said, and kept driving.

The GPS led us off the freeway and into a rundown section of a city called Concord. From there, we drove through increasingly worn-looking streets toward our final destination. This was the heart of the Bay Area’s extended suburban sprawl, communities that grew up around San Francisco and the ports during the state’s big boom period—a period that once seemed like it was going to last forever, according to a documentary I once watched on California’s history. California had the natural resources, it had the space, and it had the drive to keep its population growing until they ran out of room. I guess they never expected to run out of cheap gas and good weather while they still had space to cram in another housing development.

Most of California’s suburban areas had gone one of two ways: they had returned to their agrarian roots, or they had begun dying a slow death through attrition and neglect. Most of the farmland around Clayton was still owned by the United States military, and so they’d gone for option number two. We drove almost three miles and didn’t pass more than a dozen cars. One old man pushed a shopping cart full of his worldly possessions along the sidewalk in front of a deserted Kmart with big yellow CLOSED banners in the windows. Everything else was still.

“We’re almost there,” said Nathan. He turned off the main road into a small shopping center where a thrift store clung to life next to a feed store as closed as the Kmart. He drove past them both, gritting his teeth as the broken pavement of the parking lot caused the car to shudder and bounce.

An abandoned bowling alley filled the back third of the lot. Nathan circled around behind it, parking out of sight of the street. I blinked at him. He shrugged and turned off the engine.

“I don’t think we necessarily want to attract more attention than we will just by being here, do you?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted. Unfastening my belt, I slung my bag back over my shoulder and got out of the car.

The air was hotter and drier in Clayton than it had been in San Francisco. I glanced at my piece of paper and then at the address painted on the back door of the old bowling alley, reassuring myself that we were really in the right place. We were. Nathan walked next to me as we approached the building, which gave no signs of being occupied. Leaves on the nearby, half-dead trees rustled in the wind. Everything else was still. We stopped just short of the bowling alley door.

“Should we knock?” I asked.

“I don’t see how else we’re going to get inside,” he said.

I swallowed hard, nodding. Then I stepped forward and rapped my knuckles lightly against the wood. I stepped back again, and we waited for someone to come to the door. And waited. And waited.

When almost ten minutes had gone by, Nathan stepped forward. He knocked much more authoritatively, almost pounding on the door. Still, no one came to answer it. When another ten minutes had gone by, he turned to me, frowning. “I think someone’s playing with us.”

“I think you may be right,” I admitted. “We should get going.”

“Agreed,” he said. Both of us turned then, to face the car, and stopped when we saw the woman sitting on the hood.

She was tiny enough that for a moment I thought she was a kid, but her figure and the casual straightness of her posture gave lie to that. Her hair was short, blonde, and streaked with strawberry pink. She was wearing denim overalls, combat boots, and nothing else, unless you wanted to count the knots of ribbons she had clipped in her hair. She was beaming at the two of us like we’d won a prize.

“Hi!” she said brightly, and slid off the hood. “You must be Sal. Ooo, and that means you must be Nathan. Gosh. I thought you’d be taller. I bet you get that a lot, don’t you? That you should be taller. Not you, I mean, Sal, you’re just like I figured you’d be, but I’ve also seen you before, so I guess that’s cheating. I’m Tansy. Did you know that SymboGen totally tried to follow you here? Because they totally tried to follow you here, even though you’re not supposed to have a following detail anymore. Don’t worry, they lost your GPS signal when you crossed Treat Boulevard, but you should be careful about that sort of thing if you’re going to be sneaking around behind their backs, which you so are at this point. Congratulations!” She stopped talking, finally appearing to realize that she wasn’t pausing long enough to let either of us get a word in edgewise. “Oh, and also, you know. Hi. Welcome, and all that stuff.”

“Who are you?” asked Nathan.

Tansy smiled indulgently. “I just told you, silly. You should really try to keep up if you want to come out of this with all your sane bits still in the order they started out in. What’s the password?”

“We don’t have a password,” I said. “We came here because—”

“Oh, I know why you came here, and I know what you want to learn while you’re here, but what I need to know is whether you know what the password is, because that’s what starts the next phase, which is… hang on a second, I’m not good at this part.” Tansy paused, dipping a hand into her pocket and producing her phone. She checked the screen before beaming at the two of us. “The next phase is me letting you inside.”

“And if we don’t know the password…?” I said slowly.

“If you don’t know the password, that means I get to decide what to do with you. I don’t know what that would be, exactly, but I’m pretty sure it would hurt. Did you know that nerves are like, really densely packed on certain parts of the body?” Tansy’s eyes grew wide and earnest as she spoke. Her irises were two different colors, one brown, one a slightly unnerving shade of blue. “It’s cool, because it means it takes longer for pain to stop happening if you focus there. Other places go numb way, way too quickly. Like the fleshy part of your thumb. You’d think that was a great place to target, given how meaty it is, but you stop feeling things there way too fast.”

“Uh,” I said.

“‘The broken doors are open—come and enter, and be home,’” said Nathan, spitting the words out quickly.

Tansy beamed. “My darling girl, be careful now!” she said. It didn’t sound like she was quoting. It sounded more like a message meant directly for us. “And don’t go out alone. You remembered the password!”

“You provided excellent incentive,” said Nathan.

“You know, that’s what Doctor C says? She says I’m the best incentive.” She bounded forward, sweeping me into a hug before I had a chance to react. “It’s so nice to finally meet you! I’ve been hoping for this for ever and ever and ever, but Doctor C kept saying I had to wait, and so I waited, but it was hard.” She pushed me out to arm’s length, bicolored eyes wide and grave. “It was so hard. Don’t make me do that again, okay, Sal?”

“Um,” I said. Being restrained by people who clearly weren’t operating under my definition of “sane and balanced” was a new experience for me. Something told me that pulling away still wouldn’t be a good idea. “I’ll do my best, but I didn’t know I was making you wait this time. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay! I forgive you!” She pulled me into a second, shorter hug. This time, when she let go, she let go completely, and went skipping toward the bowling alley. She produced a key from the pocket of her overalls and unlocked the door before turning to beckon us forward. “Well? Come on! We’re not getting any younger out here!”

“I suppose the broken doors really are open now,” Nathan said, looking unsettled.

I took his hand. “You’re not going alone,” I said.

Together, we followed Tansy into the bowling alley.

She closed the door behind us.

Inside the bowling alley turned out to be a dark, windowless antechamber. Once the door was closed, there was no light of any kind. Nathan squeezed my fingers, hard. I had to wonder whether he, like me, was worried about the fact that we were shut in with a woman who had a questionable grip on reality and had already threatened to hurt us both if we didn’t say what she wanted to hear. More and more, this whole expedition was feeling like a bad idea.

“Don’t move,” said Tansy. “The floor’s a little rotten in here, and you wouldn’t want to wind up in the basement. There are black widows down there.”

“This day just gets more and more delightful,” muttered Nathan.

“Doesn’t it just?” said Tansy. There were footsteps to my right, followed by a click. The overhead lights came on, shining dully through a thick layer of dust. Tansy was standing on the far side of the room, and beaming brighter than the lights. “Do you like it? Helps your eyes adjust, since we don’t want to flash-blind anybody, and leaving the dirt on means that anybody who managed to break in wouldn’t realize there was anyone in here. Until they hit one of the rotten patches on the floor and went to the basement to visit the spiders, and then I bet they wouldn’t care that there was anyone in here. The spiders can be really distracting when they want to be. Anyway, come on! Doctor C told me to bring you to her as soon as you got here.” She opened another door, this one marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and started through.

We didn’t have any option but to follow her. I clung hard to Nathan’s hand as we walked, refusing to let on how disturbed I was by the whole situation. This was… I didn’t even know what this was. I just hoped that we were going to survive it.

The second door led to a hallway where the lights were already on, and where things were considerably less grimy than in the first room. Things improved as we walked, until we reached a clear plastic sheet hung to block all forward motion. Tansy turned to face us again, and asked, in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, “Has either of you been sick in the last week? Any colds, viruses, unusual medical conditions, or fungal infections?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” said Nathan.

“Okay, that’s cool. Any injuries or other physical conditions such as asthma, migraines, insomnia…?”

“I get headaches sometimes,” I said.

“I’m myopic, but as long as you don’t take my glasses away, I’m fine,” said Nathan.

“That’s even cooler,” said Tansy. She tugged the sheet of plastic aside, revealing another sheet of plastic—this one cut into thick strips—hanging behind it. It was like looking into a human-sized car wash. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you.”

That was actually why I was worried, but I was smart enough—barely—not to say that out loud. Instead, I kept my grip on Nathan’s hand as we walked through the sheets of hanging plastic. There were five of them, each cut in the same thick strips. By the time we were through the last one, I was starting to feel like we’d walked into a strange kind of funhouse. One that wasn’t actually any fun.

There was another door past the plastic. Someone had written on it, in Sharpie, BROKEN. I reached out and tried the knob. It was unlocked. Taking that as an invitation, I pushed the door open, and together, Nathan and I stepped through. Then we stopped. It was the only response that made any sense, given what was in front of us. Not that anything else was worrying about making sense anymore.

We were standing in what had clearly once been the main room of the bowling alley. The bowling lanes were still marked off, bracketed by gutters that hadn’t seen a ball since before my accident. There was a structure at the back of the room that had probably been a snack bar originally, and a big mirrored ball, of all things, hung from the ceiling. That was where the original fixtures ended. I wasn’t hugely familiar with bowling alleys, but I didn’t need to be to know that the lab workstations were new, as were the massive plasma monitors that had replaced the screens where bowling scores used to be displayed. The lights were brighter here, almost industrial in quality. Shelves of books and scientific supplies lined the walls, all of them packed to capacity and occasionally beyond.

And there were people. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t people, at least two dozen of them, all wearing lab coats over casual shirts and jeans, moving between the lab stations with the casual intensity I normally associated with the underground levels of SymboGen. A few of them took note of us, glancing briefly our way before appearing to dismiss us completely. It was more than a little bit unnerving.

Tansy squeezed through the door behind us. She stepped into the room so that she could spread her arms wide, and proclaimed, gleefully, “Ta-da! Welcome to the lab!” She dropped her arms. “I keep telling Doctor C we should get a fancy name for it, but she says no, that’s silly, we don’t need a fancy name if no one’s supposed to know we’re here. La-ame. Anyway, it was super-nice to meet you both, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you really soon.” She turned and wandered off into the bowling alley, weaving her way between the people in the lab coats.

Nathan and I stayed where we were, both of us at a loss for what to do next. I looked around the room, trying to find someone who looked like they were in charge. We’d been called here. That meant somebody—probably “Doctor C,” whoever that was—had to be waiting for us.

A curvaceous blonde woman in a wheelchair was heading our way, wheeling herself deftly across the polished floor. She wore a lab coat over a blue blouse and a pair of gray slacks. Fingerless black leather gloves protected her hands. She was smiling, but it looked wary somehow, like she wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. She stopped herself a few feet away from us.

Nathan’s hand dropped away from mine as his fingers unlocked. I smiled nervously at the woman.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Sal Mitchell, and this is Dr. Nathan Kim? We’re supposed to be meeting someone here. Tansy already verified the password. Please don’t let her have us.”

“Tansy can be a little overly enthusiastic about the wrong things sometimes; I’m sorry about that,” said the woman. I recognized her voice from the phone. This was the person we had come to meet. She was still smiling, and she wasn’t looking at me. I blinked, following her gaze to Nathan. He was staring at her. He wasn’t saying a word. He was just staring.

“Um,” I said.

“I would have come out to meet you myself, but I avoid open spaces these days,” said the woman. “It’s dangerous for me to go places where I might be photographed. You’ve been scanned three times since you entered the building; I know that you’re clean. If you weren’t, you would never have made it this far. I’ll give you a memory stick to attach to your GPS when you leave here. It will create a set of false routes and locations for you, so that it looks like you went to a few perfectly reasonable places today. I do appreciate your coming. I know you’ve both had a difficult morning.”

“Who are you?” I said.

The woman smiled, and didn’t say anything.

But Nathan did. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead right now?”

“It turns out ‘dead’ can be a state of mind as much as it is a state of being,” said the woman in the wheelchair, closing the door to her office. It was a proper office, too, not a makeshift space like the others we had passed in the bowling alley. This had been the bowling alley manager’s space, back when there was a bowling alley to manage. Now it was hers. “Can I get the two of you anything?”

“I’d like some answers, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Who are you? Why did Nathan call you ‘Mom’? Are you his mother? Where have you been? Why did you contact me?”

“Do you have grape juice?” asked Nathan.

The woman smiled. “Always.” She wheeled her way toward the fridge. As she went, she said, “To answer your last question first, Sal, I contacted you because you seemed to want to know what was going on, and I felt it was time to begin trying to tell you. I waited this long because I needed SymboGen to trust you—no, I’m not going to ask you to play spy for me, I have better-trained people who take care of the messy aspects of the business, and frankly, you don’t meet my standards. But until they trusted you enough to let you out without a detail trailing you at all times, I couldn’t risk trying to reach out. You needed to be curious enough to take steps on your own, and free enough to keep going once you’d taken them. You needed, if it’s not too cutesy to say, to go out alone.”

“And the rest of it? Your name? Do you have a name? Are you Nathan’s mother?”

“I suspected it was you as soon as I saw the note,” said Nathan. “I couldn’t think of anybody else who would think to use quotes from Don’t Go Out Alone as a code.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” She opened the fridge, pulling out a bottle of grape juice. “There are glasses in the cabinet behind you, Nathan.” She glanced my way. “We use real glass. None of the dangerous chemical outgassing you can get from reusable plastic, and none of the ethically questionable waste you can get from using disposable.”

“Mom,” said Nathan. There was a warning note in his tone. “Sal’s asking you some pretty sincere questions. Can you maybe answer them?”

“I’m trying to work my way around to it,” she said. Then she sighed and turned, wheeling her way back to me. “I’m sorry, Sal. I really am. I’ve been thinking of this day for so long that I suppose I wasn’t ready for the way that it would make me feel. I don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t have the greatest social skills in the world. I never did, but after spending ten years underground, I’ve lost a lot of the fine edges I’d managed to develop. Forgive me?”

“If you’ll tell me who you are,” I said.

She smiled a little. “Ah. The biggest question of all. Well, Sal, when I lived with Nathan and his father, my name was Surrey Kim. I had a PhD in genetic engineering and parasitology, and I worked for a small medical technology firm. We were going to do great things, assuming we could ever get space and funding. There was a man I knew from school. He was very rich. He wanted to get even richer. And he had a dream. It was a big, crazy dream, one that could lead to a way of curing the ill effects of our overpurified environment. He approached me and asked if I was willing to help. It was a fascinating proposal. It was innately flawed, and it was going to make millions for him, and for his company, which he called ‘SymboGen.’ Maybe billions.

“But there were problems. The plan would require early and aggressive human testing, and there was a good chance we could all go to jail for the rest of our lives if things went wrong. My family needed the money. I needed to do the work. It’s hard to explain that in a way that doesn’t sound crazy, but it’s true—once I heard what he was doing, I needed to be part of it. It was all my work, all my theories, wrapped up in one big, beautiful possibility. So I agreed, as long as SymboGen could guarantee my family wouldn’t be hurt by my actions.” She smiled sadly, glancing toward Nathan, who was pouring himself a glass of grape juice. “Surrey Kim died in a boating accident that same year. Her body was never recovered. I had six months with my family while they got my new identity in order, planted the publications, created the academic credits. I have to give them this much. They knew what they were doing. No one ever questioned my validity.”

I stared at her. A blonde woman who worked in parasitology and genetic engineering, talking about working with SymboGen when it was still a small company, who worried about them finding her… there was only one person she could possibly be. “Dr. Cale?” I whispered.

“At the moment, yes.” Her smile broadened. “It truly is lovely to meet you, Sal. I’ve been waiting for a very long time. And yes, I am really Nathan’s mother. Can’t you see the resemblance?”

I frowned at her. She had wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, and a roundish face, with no hard lines or sharp angles. Nathan, on the other hand, had dark hair and eyes—both inherited from his father—and strong features. They couldn’t have looked less alike. And yet, when she turned her head, I could see something of him in the way she held herself, buried in the expectant half-lift of her eyebrow and the curl of her lips.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I can see it. But how…?”

“I had been a bit wild in my youth,” said Dr. Cale, as calmly as she had offered us something to drink. “I didn’t always follow lab protocols, I didn’t always check my math before I moved forward, and some people got hurt. I thought that all of that was behind me, but when SymboGen wanted me on board for the D. symbogenesis project, I found out my tracks hadn’t been covered quite as well as I always assumed.”

My eyes widened and I glanced to Nathan, alarmed. How would he be taking this?

With absolute calm, apparently. He was leaning against the counter, sipping his tumbler of grape juice. He smiled a little when he caught my look, a wry twist to his lips. “I knew she wasn’t dead,” he said. “I even knew she was Shanti Cale, and that she’d disappeared after leaving SymboGen. When she didn’t get into contact with either me or Dad, I figured it was because she knew something we didn’t.”

“I knew it still wasn’t safe,” said Dr. Cale. “I always wanted to reach out to you, but there wasn’t a way to do it without endangering you.”

“Aren’t you endangering him now?” I asked, looking back to her. “And me? If being around you endangers people, aren’t you endangering me?”

“You’re part of what made it so dangerous to contact Nathan,” said Dr. Cale. “SymboGen was watching you, and that meant I couldn’t reach out to him until I knew whether you could be trusted. And before you ask the next question, no. No, Nathan didn’t know I was watching you; no, he didn’t get involved with you because I asked him to. He did it because he is a man, and you’re a very pretty girl. I like you. I’ve seen a great deal of security footage, and I approve of the way you treat my son.”

There was a clank behind me. I turned to see that Nathan had set his tumbler on the counter and was covering his face with his hand. “Mom,” he said, sounding embarrassed.

“What? I’m still your mother. I get to pass judgment on your dates. I admit, getting involved with an amnesiac is a little unorthodox, but your father was a teaching assistant in one of my math classes while I was in school, so I suppose being a little unorthodox runs in the family.” Dr. Cale’s resemblance to Nathan was much more pronounced when she grinned.

“Can we get back to the point, please?” asked Nathan, sounding put-upon.

“Where were we? Oh, yes—SymboGen was blackmailing me to get me to join their big secret project. More precisely, Steven was blackmailing me, and if I’m being entirely honest, he didn’t have to blackmail very hard. I loved my husband very much. I loved my son. But they were offering me the chance to do the research I’d been dreaming of for my entire life, and in the end, I wasn’t strong enough to refuse. Maybe that makes me a bad person. It certainly made me a bad mother. But I was always the woman who said, ‘Yes, I’ll go.’ I was always the one who went out alone, no matter how many warnings I got. No matter how many people reminded me that I couldn’t necessarily go back again.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “This is all really interesting, and sort of weird, since we’re in an old bowling alley in the middle of nowhere and everything, but what does this have to do with you calling me here? What is it you know that we need to know?”

“ ‘If you ask the questions…’” quoted Dr. Cale, a warning note in her voice.

“We want to know,” said Nathan.

She nodded. “All right. If you’re sure. Follow me, both of you.” She gripped the wheels of her chair, turning herself around before rolling toward the door. We followed Dr. Cale out of the office and back into the makeshift lab filling the bowling alley.

She talked as we made our way across the main room, explaining what the various lab stations were for and what the various lab-coated people were doing there. Some were technicians, working to keep other people’s research from collapsing in their absence. Others were doing research of their own, so caught up in their little worlds that they barely noticed us passing. One woman was milking a large brown snake into a jar, cooing sweet nothings at it as she pressed down on the top of its triangular head.

Dr. Cale caught me looking at the snake handler and said, “That’s Dr. Hoffman. She’s a herpetologist, specializing in reptile parasites. She’s been with me for about seven years now. The snake’s name is Kyle. He’s an Australian coastal taipan. She’s been doing some really remarkable things with his venom recently…” She began rambling again, talking about the neurotoxic properties of taipan venom and its effects on various types of tapeworms. I didn’t tune her out—I was listening as hard as I could—but it was like the days right after I first woke up in the hospital, when everyone around me was talking, and I couldn’t understand a word.

Dr. Cale led us to the far lane, where a light box the length of the wall had been set up, allowing for the display of a variety of X-ray films. She stopped near the middle of the lane. There was nowhere for Nathan and me to sit, so we stood, looking at her expectantly.

“I was, in a very real way, the reason the Intestinal Bodyguard was able to succeed. Steven was smart and ambitious, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The official literature says that he started work on Diphyllobothrium yonagoensis, a species of tapeworm that preferentially parasitizes fish.”

“But the Intestinal Bodyguard is based off… what you just said,” I protested. I recognized the name from the lectures I’d been forced to sit through, even if I couldn’t pronounce it correctly. “They used a fish tapeworm.”

“No, dear,” said Dr. Cale, almost gently. “I used a fish tapeworm. They used Taenia solium, the pork tapeworm. I was able to keep very little of their research once I came on board, because they’d been using an inherently dangerous parasite. Not that any parasites are completely safe—the one we eventually went with had its dangers even before we started tinkering with the building blocks of its DNA. I think you’ll find that very little about the official history of D. symbogenesis is actually true. Most of it is pretty fictions and lies that can’t be disproven this late in the game. The Intestinal Bodyguard worked the way that it was supposed to, Steven Banks became a hero, and the rest of the development team became… expendable. We were a liability. Richard was consumed with guilt over what we’d done, and I was considered too likely to talk. By that point, you see, Steven had created this whole backstory for us. We met in college, we were the best of friends, and so on, and so on. So if he did anything to hurt my family, I could discredit him by revealing his lies. It was the nuclear option, for both of us. We quietly agreed that I would fade into the background.” She pursed her lips, looking unhappy. “Not that I intended for it to be quite such a long absence, but life does have its way of throwing you little curveballs when you let yourself get too cocky.”

“Is this leading into why you’re in the wheelchair now?” asked Nathan.

Dr. Cale smiled. “I was wondering if you’d noticed that I was suddenly shorter. Then again, you’re a lot taller. Maybe you just thought this was what happened to all mothers as their sons grew up.”

“I’m a doctor, Mom,” Nathan said. “I understand human anatomy.”

“And have I told you yet how proud I am of you?” Dr. Cale rolled herself closer to the wall, pressing a button on the base of the light box. The nearest piece of wall began to glow a steady white, backlighting the four X-ray films displayed there. All four showed a human spine, from different angles—front, back, left side, and right side. I thought it might be the same spine, although I didn’t know enough about anatomy to be sure.

In all four images, a white mass obscured the lower part of the spine, just above the pelvis. It looked like someone had taken correction fluid and scribbled on the negative, wiping away large parts of the spine.

Nathan frowned, stepping closer to the light box. “Is this a tumor?” he asked, indicating the white mass.

“Not quite,” said Dr. Cale. She sighed. “Human testing was a priority at SymboGen. We weren’t supposed to test on ourselves, naturally, and I didn’t. I might be fond of cutting corners, but I wasn’t a fan of risking my own life when I had volunteers perfectly willing to risk theirs.”

“Are you telling me this is a tapeworm?”

“Let me get there, Nathan. I know you. If I don’t give you the background now, you’ll go racing off and never give me the chance to explain. I need to take things at my own pace. Can you let me do that?”

Nathan frowned at her, the light flashing off his glasses obscuring his eyes so completely that I couldn’t tell whether or not he was annoyed. I answered for both of us, saying, “We can be patient.”

“That remains to be seen.” Dr. Cale settled back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap. “The Intestinal Bodyguard went through several generations, with a wide variety of different genetic makeups. The generation that eventually went on the market was less… robust… than some of the early worms had been, and that was good, because those early worms had a tendency to grow more than they were supposed to. Because they grew so fast, they demonstrated the potential dangers of the Intestinal Bodyguard—primarily, that the tapeworm could endanger the host if it reached a certain size. The growth of D. symbogenesis was retarded to guarantee that it would reach that size only after more than two years had passed, creating a ‘safety margin’ where balance could be maintained between parasite and host.”

“That’s why the two-year replacement requirement,” said Nathan. “That never made sense to me. Nature doesn’t work on such a tidy schedule.”

“Exactly. They don’t die after two years. They never did. The antiparasitic drugs take care of the old tapeworm, and a new one is put in place without anyone realizing that there was ever a risk.” Dr. Cale shook her head. “If it had ever gotten out, it would have been the end of SymboGen.”

“And a lot of people would have been hurt,” I said.

Dr. Cale seemed to wave my concerns away, continuing, “Everyone was meant to forget about the early generations, even though the final product was heavily influenced by their design. When Steven sent the word that the IPO was coming, I saw the writing on the wall. Eventually, there’d be so much money in the picture that everyone who had been there in the early stages would be in danger. We’d know too much. Well, I knew I’d need some kind of insurance if I was going to guarantee my safety—and by extension, yours, Nathan. Since I didn’t participate in the human testing, I was a suitable host.”

The Intestinal Bodyguard was fiercely territorial, and wouldn’t tolerate the presence of another worm in the body. Supposedly, this meant that a second tapeworm introduced into the body would just fail to thrive, and would eventually starve to death. According to some of the stories Nathan had told me, the first tapeworm would actually attack and devour the second. I wasn’t clear on how that happened, since tapeworms weren’t supposed to be that intelligent. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

Nathan, on the other hand, did want to know. “What did you do, Mom?” he almost whispered.

“I went back into my lab and got one of the early versions of D. symbogenesis out of cold storage. And then I implanted it in myself, so that I could carry it out of the building without anyone the wiser. Most of the employees already had Intestinal Bodyguards by that point, so testing for parasites wouldn’t give me away, and I suppose Steven just assumed I knew better than to risk ingesting an early-generation worm. He didn’t count on the power of sentiment.” Dr. Cale smiled wistfully. “That was my Adam. He was my first, and greatest, creation. You know, Nathan, he had just as much of my genetic material in him as you did? He was virtually your brother.”

“I don’t know whether I should be flattered or feel sick,” said Nathan. He looked like he was leaning toward the second option. I stepped closer to him, trying to lend support through proximity. He smiled at me a little, looking strained, and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything to say.

“Feel like your mother is a genius, and be glad I was willing to share my genes with you, not just with your brother,” said Dr. Cale. She sighed. “I didn’t have a choice, Nathan. Steven was going to destroy my work, and he was going to do it so that if things went wrong with the worms, he could claim there’d never been any indication of a potential risk to human health. He was going to pin it all on me, and by extension, he was going to pin it all on you. How long do you think our connection would have stayed secret after I became the person who recklessly endangered the lives of millions?”

“Still,” said Nathan. He was staring at the white mass on the X-ray like he could find the outline of the worm in the blur. “It was a big risk.”

“And I paid for it.” Dr. Cale spoke with absolute calm. “I ingested Adam and left the lab. I had to wait a month for him to grow long enough that we’d be able to extract segments without killing him. We needed to keep him alive, as proof that there had been earlier generations—that D. symbogenesis didn’t somehow spring fully developed from a test tube and a set of irresponsible testing procedures.”

“Didn’t you take your antiparasitics after that?” I asked.

Dr. Cale nodded. “I did, because I am not a complete idiot, current evidence aside. Unfortunately for me, we’d never tested Adam’s generation inside a human host, and we didn’t realize what the results would be.”

“There was too much human DNA in the early generations,” said Nathan. “The antiparasitics might have made the worm sick, but they couldn’t kill it without being increased to a level where they’d kill you, too.”

“That’s exactly right. Sadly for me, we didn’t realize that at the time. I took my pills like a good girl, and I passed enough dead tapeworm segments that I was sure we’d managed to clear Adam entirely out of my digestive system. We had our samples, and that meant that we could re-create the living worm at any time if we needed it to prove what SymboGen had been doing. You have to remember, I developed the Intestinal Bodyguard. It was more my baby than anyone else’s, no matter how much Steven may try to rewrite history. I didn’t approve of the way he was going about things, but I truly wanted to see D. symbogenesis thrive. If people could find a way to coexist peacefully with the worms, everyone would benefit.”

“SymboGen more than anyone else,” said Nathan. “What happened?”

“I’m getting there.” For the first time, Dr. Cale’s voice was sharp, holding the snap of authority she needed to organize her own underground lab and control this many people. “What happened, Nathan, is that we didn’t realize the antiparasitics hadn’t worked until I began losing feeling in my legs. It was intermittent at first, just pins and needles. Bit by bit, it turned into a numbness that didn’t go away. It could still have been sciatica, brought on by hard living and exacerbated by stress. I thought I was working too hard. I thought I was getting old. I didn’t think that the antiparasitics might have driven my stolen tapeworm out of my intestine and into my abdomen. He was very clever in what he did and didn’t chew through—instinct is a powerful thing, and he didn’t want to kill his host—but when he reached my spine, he didn’t have anywhere else to go. He was too large to migrate upward at that point, which is the only reason I’m alive today. So he compressed my spinal cord more and more tightly, until the day he permanently compromised the nerves. I collapsed in the middle of the lab.

“My assistants performed basic medical triage, including the X-ray films I’ve posted on the light box for you to study. It was immediately clear that we would need to operate. Adam and I had reached the point at which we could no longer share one body, and while I hated to do it, I couldn’t cede the ground to him. I had too much work to do. They removed eight and a half pounds of worm mass from my pelvis and abdomen. Unfortunately, the nerve damage was not so easily undone. Barring medical advances that I probably won’t live to see, I’m staying in this chair.” Dr. Cale shrugged. “I suppose I’m not the first person to see hubris as an object lesson, but I’ve worked very hard to make up for it since then.”

“Mom,” said Nathan, sadly. “Oh, Mom.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, now. It was for science, and as long as something is for science, it’s worth doing. It’s just not necessarily worth repeating.” Dr. Cale’s smile was sudden, and very bright. “Now that we have all that out of the way, there’s someone that I very much want you to meet. You needed to understand what had happened right after I left SymboGen before this would make sense to you. All right?”

“Sure,” I said, uncertainly. “This is going to tie back into the sleeping sickness soon, isn’t it?”

“Oh, my dear Sal, the broken doors are open, and we can’t close them on our own. Believe me; everything I am telling you ties back into the sleeping sickness.” Dr. Cale looked past us, into the gloom near the back wall. “It’s all right; you can come out now, dear. They’re ready for you.”

Tansy appeared, leading a young, gangly-limbed man by the hand. He was wearing a lab coat, like everyone else we’d seen since arriving inside the bowling alley. The T-shirt he had on under the lab coat advertised a children’s TV show I’d never heard of, and his jeans were torn out at the knees. His hair was cut short, and his eyes were wide and anxious. He was probably in his twenties, but those eyes made him look like he was barely out of his teens.

“Mom?” he said, uncertainly.

“It’s all right, Adam,” said Dr. Cale, beckoning him forward. “They really want to meet you. This is Nathan, my son, and his girlfriend, Sal.”

“What’s going on here?” asked Nathan.

Tansy giggled.

I looked into the eyes of the man Dr. Cale called “Adam,” and I knew. There was no point in wasting words on asking. “He’s your tapeworm.”

Dr. Cale beamed like I’d just answered a particularly difficult riddle correctly. “Brava, Sal. There may be hope for you—and for humanity—yet.”