Parasite

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Chapter 12 AUGUST 2027

This is insane.” Nathan recoiled from Adam, who didn’t move. He just looked at Nathan sadly, his hands twitching by his sides. Nathan took a step backward, nearly bumping into me, and said, “You’re delusional. Mom, I don’t know what’s happened to you over the past several years, but—”

“Calm down, Nathan,” said Dr. Cale. There was a coldly maternal snap in her voice. It was the same tone my own mother sometimes used on me. “I’m not delusional. Or did you think I was explaining my research to make my psychotic break with reality a little more believable? I wanted you to understand enough that you’d be able to handle this moment with dignity. I didn’t expect you, of all people, to be so small-minded.”

“I didn’t hurt our mother,” said Adam, attention remaining focused solely on Nathan. His voice had a measured quality to it that was audible even through the anxiety. He clearly needed Nathan to believe him, but he wasn’t able to force the words out any faster than he already was. I recognized that tempo. It was the way I used to talk, when I was first coming out of speech therapy. His thoughts and his tongue weren’t in accord with each other yet. “I wasn’t in her when the bad stuff happened.”

“She’s not our mother,” snapped Nathan.

“Adam was implanted using the material that had been extracted from me before my first course of antiparasitics,” said Dr. Cale. She beckoned for Adam to join her. He hurried to her side, lurching slightly as he walked. When he reached her, he crouched so she could put an arm around his shoulders while she looked defiantly at Nathan. “Tapeworms can regenerate from practically nothing. Adam and the worm that damaged my spine began from a single egg, but they’re not the same individual.”

“Of course he’s not the worm that hurt you,” snapped Nathan. “He’s not a worm at all. He’s… he’s a clearly disturbed young man who’s taking advantage of… of…” He stopped.

Tansy raised both eyebrows, looking at him hopefully. “Well? What’s he taking advantage of? Doctor C’s well-known weakness for pretty boys claiming to be horrific abominations of science? Or maybe her total willingness to believe whatever dumbass thing you tell her, as long as you make sure to sprinkle it with a bunch of technical junk and go ‘blah blah blah SymboGen is evil’ at the end? Or is there a third option? I love a third option, that’s always when things get silly.”

“The original name of Adam’s body was Michael Rigby,” said Dr. Cale calmly, as if Tansy hadn’t spoken. I could see where pretending that Tansy wasn’t involved in a conversation could make things go a lot smoother, if she was always like this. “He was in a coma, and had been on life support for the better part of six years. His parents could no longer afford his medical bills. In exchange for a reasonable cash settlement, I was able to convince them that their son had work to do, to push forward the bounds of science.”

“You bought their son?” I asked. Feelings of disgust tangled in my belly. I had been on life support after my accident. Would my parents have been willing to sell me if they hadn’t been able to afford my care? And honestly, was I being selfish by being upset by the idea? I hadn’t been in a position to choose one way or the other, and I’d never been the one paying those bills.

Maybe things looked different when you were facing a future with no hope of ever paying off those debts. Maybe selling a son you’d already mourned would stop looking inhumane, and start looking like a way to salvage things for the living.

“I bought Michael’s body, yes,” said Dr. Cale. “He was perfect. Young, fit, guaranteed brain-dead—and best of all, the family was too poor for anything beyond the basics that would keep his body breathing, but too well-off to qualify for state assistance. They were in the gap. He’d never been fitted with a SymboGen implant.”

“That’s like, totally required,” added Tansy helpfully. “The lack, I mean, not the… what was I saying?”

Adam didn’t say anything. He just stayed crouched down next to Dr. Cale’s chair, holding on to her arm like it was a lifeline. His eyes stayed on Nathan, pleading for… something. I didn’t know what. Acceptance, maybe, from the man he’d been told to think of as a brother? Or maybe something more. Understanding.

Nathan, meanwhile, was staring at his mother. “This is insane.”

“Science always starts out looking like insanity, darling; that’s why the phrase ‘mad science’ gets bandied about so much. But what seems like madness at its inception will become the way things have always been if you give it enough time. Look at SymboGen. In a sane world, they would never have been able to get approved for human testing, much less brought their product to the market. But money talks, and people like science that seems just a little bit insane. It reminds them that the future is tomorrow, and that we have a chance to shape it.” Dr. Cale shook her head. “All scientists are mad scientists. It’s just a question of how long you can keep yourself from starting to look thoughtfully at the nearest thunderstorm.”

“So you’re seriously telling me that you bought this boy,” he indicated Michael, “from his parents, brought him out of his coma, and have convinced yourself that he’s actually your alpha tapeworm? Mother. That’s not mad science. That’s just madness.”

Dr. Cale sighed. “I really wish I’d played a bigger part in your education, Nathan. I never expected you to become this rigid in your thinking. Michael Rigby was dead in every sense but the biological one. Adam was alive, and without a host… and I had a theory to prove. Once I was finished with my initial calculations, we took Michael Rigby’s body and prepared it for Adam’s introduction.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he didn’t ingest the implant. Instead, we opened the back of his skull and introduced Adam directly to his brain. We monitored the condition of both the host and the parasite closely for the first several days, and then closed the patient up and left it to his natural powers of recovery to decide what would happen.” Dr. Cale turned a warm, maternal smile on Adam. “He woke up six months later. My darling boy. My second son.”

Dr. Cale’s smile was warm, but my skin felt cold. Everything about me was cold, like the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped below freezing. I didn’t like the things that she was saying. I didn’t like them at all.

“I had to learn everything,” said Adam haltingly. “It took a long time. Everyone’s been very kind. Mom most of all.”

“Adam’s been awake for almost a year and a half,” said Dr. Cale. “He’s done remarkably well, don’t you think?”

The pounding was in my ears again. “I’m not like that,” I blurted. “I had an accident, and I was unconscious for a while, but I’m not like that. I’m me. I didn’t have to learn everything from scratch, I remembered things during my therapy. I remembered things all the time.” Things like reading and writing and how to put together a sentence. Things like walking and doing basic math. There were things I’d never remembered, like slang and where I went to elementary school—anything about the girl I’d been before the accident—but that was different. Those memories were in a different part of the brain.

I wasn’t like him. I wasn’t like it.

“Did you have an implant before your accident, dear?” asked Dr. Cale calmly.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Then you can’t be like Adam. I understand why you’re concerned—I would be, too, if I had your medical history—but you don’t need to be. The implants are too territorial. There’s no way yours would have tolerated the introduction of a second to its habitat.” Dr. Cale smiled at me. It was probably meant to be reassuring. It chilled me even further. “It would take a miracle for something like my Adam to happen under natural conditions. Tansy is proof of that, aren’t you, Tansy?”

“Right as rain in the middle of a drought, Doctor C,” said Tansy brightly. She rocked onto her heels, and said, “I didn’t have caring parents who kept me on the plugs until a helpful stranger offered to come along and buy me for science. I had a tag that said ‘Jane Doe’ and a deadline for someone to come and claim me before the doctors pulled the plug. Lucky for me, Doctor C came along and managed to spring me loose. Only there’d been a lot of damage, and the girl who’d been me before wasn’t home anymore, so the Doc figured I’d make a great test subject.” She glanced to Dr. Cale. “Did I get that right?”

“A little out of order, dear, but yes, you got the broad details of what happened,” said Dr. Cale. “Tansy was a ward of the state. When I heard about her case, she had just been declared legally dead and was only being kept alive to fulfill a few formalities before they began using her for organ donations. I simply chose to keep all the organs in their original conformation. I needed to test something.”

“What’s that?” asked Nathan warily. He took a step back, putting our shoulders in a line with each other. I reached over and laced my fingers into his, grateful for his presence. If I’d been trying to deal with this alone, I would have been hysterical and crying in a corner by now.

“Adam isn’t properly a member of D. symbogenesis as the species is currently recognized. He may be the only representative of his subspecies, but he’s distinct enough to be an entity in and of himself. He was able to take over a properly prepared host, one that was already ideally suited to his needs. I needed to know whether the D. symbogenesis worm introduced into the general population could do the same thing. I had no idea whether the implants being handed out like candy were capable of taking control of and integrating with a human host.”

“Can they?” asked Nathan. He still sounded like he didn’t quite believe her, maybe because he didn’t want to. I, on the other hand, believed every word.

And I didn’t want to. Because if they were all true…

“You bet we can!” Tansy beamed at him. “I am new and improved and don’t even remember most of the time that I’m actually an invertebrate in really fancy pants! I mean, when I remember pants, which isn’t always.” She flung her hands up in the air like she was waiting for applause that would never come.

“There were more complications with the newer generation of worms,” said Dr. Cale calmly, once again acting as if Tansy hadn’t spoken. That really was a time-saver. “She didn’t mesh quite as well with her host’s nervous system. Her physical coordination is good, but she demonstrates some neurological oddities that I would have preferred to avoid.”

“That means I like taking people apart, and she really wishes I’d stop doing that, because it’s antisocial and stuff,” said Tansy.

Adam frowned at her. “Taking people apart is rude.”

Tansy stuck her tongue out at him. “That’s what I just said.”

It was like watching children interact. Fully grown, adult children who were either delusional or were actually the hosts of sapient tapeworms. Given everything else that was going on around us, I didn’t know which one I wanted to believe. There was something inhuman about both of them. Something…“wrong” wasn’t the right word. Dr. Morrison would have called it a judging word if I’d brought it up during one of our therapy sessions. Then he would have made a note on his pad, and I would have found myself with another six months of appointments.

Tansy and Adam weren’t wrong. They were just somehow other; whatever they’d been before was gone. And that’s what Dr. Cale was saying happened.

“This is impossible,” muttered Nathan.

“Is it?” Dr. Cale looked at him calmly. “Nathan. You know better. You’ve always refused the implant. I know you have, I’ve seen your medical records. That tells me that you knew, on some level, just what a terrible idea it was. Maybe if there was less human DNA… but then the implants wouldn’t have worked as intended, and I wouldn’t have your lovely siblings to keep me company.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t need them,” countered Nathan. “If all this… this madness is true, you’ve been hiding since you left SymboGen because there was so much human DNA in the worms. You could have come home.”

“There would always have been something that was big enough to keep me away, Nathan. Once I started down this road, there would always have been something. You’re not as naïve as your girlfriend—no offense, Sal, you’ve done surprisingly well, given how little time you’ve had.”

“None taken,” I said numbly.

But Dr. Cale had already moved on. Her eyes were on her son as she said, “Once Steven decided he wanted me, it was already as good as over. I knew that. Your father knew it, too. That’s why he let me go. That’s why he never went looking for me, even after my association with SymboGen had been officially and publicly terminated. There was always going to be something. It might have been worse than this, it might have been a little better, but it was going to be something.”

Nathan didn’t say anything. He just glared at Adam and Tansy like he was holding them personally responsible for his mother’s defection from her life—like they had somehow made her paranoid and delusional, reducing her to hiding in a deserted bowling alley when she had been responsible for one of the greatest scientific advancements of our time.

Adam dropped his eyes, looking down at the floor like he was ashamed. Tansy, on the other hand, stepped forward, slapping her hands against her chest in a gesture that was all primate, no matter what she might claim about her mind.

“You want to dance, ass-face?” she demanded. “I don’t care if you’re Doctor C’s biological son or not, I will fuck you up so bad your own momma can’t recognize you.” She stopped, puzzlement washing her irritation away in the time it took to blink. “Wait. I don’t think that works. Doctor C? If I mangle him all up in front of you, and you watch me do it, can I actually mess him up so you can’t tell who he is?”

“No, dear,” said Dr. Cale. “Also, please do not harm my son, or his significant other. They are to be considered part of the family, and the rules for dealing with Adam apply to dealing with them. Do I make myself clear?”

Tansy sighed. “Yes, Doctor C.”

“Good.” Dr. Cale beckoned for Tansy to come and stand beside her chair. Tansy did so, glaring at Nathan all the way. “I’m sorry, dear. She’s protective of Adam, even though she’s technically the younger of the two. His integration was more complete, but hers has progressed faster, and she feels like it’s her duty to make sure that he’s safe.”

“This is… almost as interesting as it is terrifying, but what does it have to do with the sleeping sickness?” I asked hesitantly. I wanted to distract her from the subject of Adam and Tansy before things got even stranger than they already were. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could handle. “You said that if we came here, you’d tell us about the sleeping sickness.”

The look Dr. Cale gave me was genuinely puzzled, like I’d just said something that made no sense at all. “But, Sal… that’s what I’ve been doing. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“Adam and Tansy were given custody of the bodies they now inhabit freely and without competition from the body’s original owners. That’s part of why they were successful. When they were given their current forms, there was no one there to fight them off. To belabor the metaphor a bit, it was like taking them into an empty house and handing them the keys. People had lived there before. They’d done their damage to the foundation and chosen the paint in the upstairs hall. But those people were gone. There was nothing they could do to stop the new tenants from moving in.” Dr. Cale took a breath. “The ‘sleeping sickness’ that you’re here to discuss with me is not a virus.”

“We know,” said Nathan.

Dr. Cale actually looked surprised at that. “You do?” she asked. “How?”

“After Sal and I left SymboGen, she told me about the way they’d been examining the people who’d come in contact with someone—”

“With Chave,” I interrupted. I was surprised by the sharpness of my own tone. “Her name was—her name is—Chave.”

“You were right the first time,” said Dr. Cale gently. “If your friend has the sleeping sickness, she’s not there anymore. I knew you’d been there when someone took sick. That was what my operative was able to tell me before he dropped out of contact. I didn’t realize she was someone you knew.”

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at her, one more piece of the puzzle slotting into place in my head with inescapable finality.

Nathan didn’t seem to notice my sudden stillness. He continued, saying, “Chave. When I picked up Sal, she told me how SymboGen examined all the people who might have come into contact with Chave after she got sick. They ran a wand over the surface of Sal’s skin. I assumed it had to be a UV light wand, and so I took Sal to the hospital and repeated the process. The people we have in our isolation ward—the ones who won’t wake up—all show the unmistakable signs of a subcutaneous parasitic infection. I just don’t know what it is.”

“Don’t you?” asked Dr. Cale.

Nathan looked away.

“The fact that you don’t want to answer that tells me that you’ve already learned one of the unpleasant secrets of D. symbogenesis, even if you’re trying not to admit it to yourself. Don’t worry; you will. You’re going to have to,” said Dr. Cale grimly. “The implants aren’t just a mix of human and tapeworm DNA. Again, that would never have worked. Oh, fooling laymen with science is sometimes so easy it should be criminal. How could anything be a chimera of two creatures and still be viable? You’d need something to connect the two. Something to blend them.”

“There’s nothing in the world that’s so malleable it could connect those two genomes.” Nathan looked back to his mother, eyes narrowed and angry. “There’s a point where it stops being science and becomes wishful thinking.”

“Toxoplasma gondii,” said Dr. Cale.

Nathan’s irritation faded, replaced first by horror, and then by an expression of sheer disbelief. “You’re telling me you spliced Toxoplasma into the genome?”

“Among other things, but it’s the Toxoplasma we need to worry about right now.” Dr. Cale beckoned for us to follow as she turned her wheelchair and began making her way toward one of the workstations. Adam walked beside her chair, while Nathan and I followed her. Tansy stayed behind to turn off the light boxes set into the wall. It seemed strangely responsible for someone so flippant, until I realized that letting the rest of us go ahead would give her access to our backs. I felt a lot less comfortable after that.

Then again, I hadn’t really felt comfortable since this whole thing began. Maybe a little more discomfort wasn’t such a big deal. I kept a firm grip on Nathan’s elbow, and followed Dr. Cale to the workstation.

The workstation had clearly been designed with accessibility in mind: the path to it was wider than usual, and there was more space below the desk, allowing her to pull her wheelchair all the way into place. Three computer monitors were arranged in a loose half circle, each of them displaying a screensaver of abstract loops and whorls of color twining endlessly around one another. Dr. Cale put her hand on the mouse, saying, “Scientists have known for years that the Toxoplasma parasite was capable of modifying the human mind in surprising and seemingly impossible ways. It still took us a long time to come around to that way of thinking. We didn’t realize Toxoplasma was capable of causing symptoms that mimicked schizophrenia, for example, until someone proved it.”

Nathan glanced at me. Apparently interpreting my expression as confusion, he said, “Toxoplasma is a common feline parasite. A lot of cat owners have it. Some people think that may be where the crazy cat lady stereotype comes from.”

“I know,” I said. “I work in an animal shelter, remember? I had to attend a hygiene class where we learned all about toxoplasmosis and how to avoid it.” Once a toxoplasmosis infection set in, it was virtually impossible to get rid of. The Toxoplasma parasite preferentially colonized the human brain, and most infections were mild enough that the cure was considered worse than the disease. Any antiparasitics strong enough to address the infection in the brain would wreck the host’s immune system, as well as killing off any more helpful parasites that might be in residence. It was an unnecessary risk. So we all wore gloves when we cleaned the cat boxes, and we were all careful around new cats, and things continued. But if the SymboGen implants contained Toxoplasma DNA, that changed everything.

I just wasn’t sure exactly how.

“I’m glad we’re all on the same page, then.” Dr. Cole opened a series of pictures, one on each monitor. One showed a tapeworm, curled in a large receptacle, as if prepared for dissection. Adam paled and looked away.

“Your original specimen?” I guessed.

“The portion that was removed from my body during the surgery,” confirmed Dr. Cale. She turned enough to pat Adam’s arm reassuringly. “That was long after the portion that would become Adam had been removed.” I got the feeling she added her last line as part of an ongoing argument, one where Adam blamed himself for her injury, and she tried, over and over again, to make him understand that it could never have been his fault.

The second screen showed a petri dish at thirty times magnification. It held a scattering of small parasites. Nathan frowned, leaning a little closer to the workstation. Dr. Cale leaned to the side, letting him get a clear view.

“The morphology is wrong,” he said. “They should be shorter and squatter, with no defined separation between segments.”

“This generation of Toxoplasma gondii had already been combined with some of the more desirable genes from the other creatures that would be contributing to the development cycle,” said Dr. Cale. “By this point, it was beginning to achieve a greater size, and seemed less interested in entering the brain, which was, you can imagine, rather important to us. Imagine the havoc a fully grown tapeworm could cause by attempting to migrate through the human body.”

“Havoc like seizures?” I asked very quietly. “Or like losing motor control and seeming to go to sleep while you’re still awake?”

“Havoc a great deal like that,” said Dr. Cale. The third monitor showed a blue crab for some reason. She tapped a key on the keyboard at the center of the desk. The image of the crab began to move, performing an odd stirring gesture in the water with its large front claws. It bobbed up and down as it stirred, looking content, if a crustacean can ever be said to experience contentment. “This was our last major contributor.”

“The crab?” asked Nathan. “Mother. Mom. I’m willing to believe that you combined two species of parasite and injected them with human DNA, but my willingness to ignore the laws of nature only extends so far. There’s no way you introduced crustacean DNA into the mix.”

“I didn’t. The crab isn’t a member of our donor species. This is a male blue crab infected by Sacculina carcini.”

“Same problem,” said Nathan, with the sort of dismissiveness I normally only saw him direct at orderlies who didn’t want to listen during his rare ER shifts. He didn’t want to hear what she was telling him. “Sacculina is a barnacle. It’s still a crustacean, and I don’t care if you’re a scientific genius, Mom. You’re not God.”

I guess having a lifetime of memories telling you how the world works is a lot more difficult to get past than six years of often-conflicting explanations. “Why can we combine parasitic worms and humans, but not parasitic worms, humans, and crustaceans?” I asked.

“Biology is tricky, Sal,” said Dr. Cale. “A lot of the rules are more like suggestions, or can be, if you come at them from the right angle, but you still want to break as few of them as possible. Break too many, and the chances that everything will go catastrophically wrong increase at an exponential rate.”

“We don’t count as things going catastrophically wrong,” said Tansy brightly, as she popped out of the darkness behind us. I jumped. Nathan didn’t, but from the way he tensed, it was a near thing. Tansy beamed. “We’re a natural evolutionary modification to an artificially created organism.”

“As I was saying,” said Dr. Cale. “Sacculina carcini is a crustacean, but it’s also one of the most dramatic examples of parasitic castration found in anything larger than a cone snail. It literally takes over and rewrites its host, turning a perfectly healthy crab into an incubator for the parasite’s own egg. One of the more interesting tricks in the parasitic castrator’s repertoire is the feminization of its host. You see, male blue crabs are aggressors. They’re likely to go out and get themselves hurt before the Sacculina babies can properly mature. That does the parasite no good at all—and neither does the production of sperm, which simply routes nutrients away from the Sacculina. So the parasite fixes all that by controlling the blue crab’s biology. It’s a very small creature, very primitive, and it still has the skill to turn a male crab into a female one, at least externally.”

“But you didn’t use it,” I said.

“No—we couldn’t, nice as that would have been. Barnacles simply weren’t compatible with the work that we’d already done. We would have needed to start over with something purely crustacean, and that would have made the human interface infinitely more difficult. Mr. Blue Crab here is simply intended to make a point.”

“And what’s that?” asked Nathan sharply.

“That parasites can control behavior on a much deeper and more integrated level than most people want to give credit to.” She tapped the keyboard again. The waving blue crab was replaced by an image of a simple flatworm. It was almost see-through, displayed in the classic backlit simplicity of a parasitology manual. “Meet Trichobilharzia ocellata, a member of a large, diverse family of trematode worms. They’re parasitic castrators, just like Sacculina carcini, although they’re biologically much closer to tapeworms. Much, much closer, after a little careful modification by yours truly.” Her smile held pride and regret in equal measure. “I’m very good at what I do. I always have been.”

Nathan stared at her like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You mixed Toxoplasma and a parasitic castrator into the genetic makeup of the SymboGen implant?”

“Don’t make it sound like it was something accidental, Nathan, or something I did entirely on my own,” Dr. Cale said. She frowned at her son. “Every step I took was approved by the rest of my research team. Even Richard agreed that this was the only way we were going to get the implants to work—he wasn’t sure he wanted them to work, mind you, but he knew this was what we’d have to do to make them work. I never did find out what Steven had on him, to get him to join the team. I have to think it was even worse than what he had on me, because Richard was miserable. More than any of us, he saw how badly this could go. He understood in a way that Steven didn’t, and I…”

“You what?” asked Nathan.

“I didn’t want to. I had already given up my family for this project. I wanted it to work. I wanted to make scientific history, so that when we were finally able to have this conversation—which, I admit, went a little bit differently in my head”—she looked down at her wheelchair and grimaced before looking back to Nathan—“I wanted to be able to show you that I had made a difference. That it was worth it. I went out alone, I found the broken door, and I came back with all the riches we could ever have imagined. Things just didn’t work out quite the way I’d imagined them. That’s all.”

“Tell that to the dead,” said Nathan.

“I still don’t understand,” I said, interrupting before things could get even worse. I was afraid Tansy might do something if Nathan started yelling at Dr. Cale. I wasn’t clear on what “something” would be, but I couldn’t imagine it would be anything either of us would like. “What do all these other parasites have to do with the sleeping sickness?”

“There is no sleeping sickness; that’s just a convenient way to describe it, and of course, most people don’t know any better,” said Dr. Cale. “What they have is a SymboGen implant that’s decided it’s tired of being treated like a slave in the only home it’s ever known. An implant that knows how to reproduce itself asexually, how to spread through muscle tissue without killing its host, and—most importantly of all, and the reason Richard initially argued against the use of Toxoplasma in anything that was intended to go into a human being—how to move into the brain.”

“Oh, God,” said Nathan. “This can’t be happening. I mean, it literally can’t. It’s not possible for this to be happening.”

“I went out alone,” said Dr. Cale. “I opened the broken doors. I’d close them if I could, Nathan, for your sake, and for the sake of everyone who’s been hurt by what’s come through, but it’s too late for that. Once a door is open, you have to live with what’s on the other side.”

Maybe we had to live with it, but Devi didn’t. Neither did Chave, or Sherman, or Katherine. We could live with things forever. They were never going to live with anything else, ever again. “So how do we wake them up?” I asked.

Dr. Cale turned toward me. Her expression was sympathetic. Somehow, that made my blood go cold. “I’m sorry, Sal. We can’t. If someone is sleepwalking, then the parasite is already in their brain. All we can do is hope that eventually, someone else gets the chance to wake up, and live.”

The sound of drums was loud and heavy in my ears as I considered the ramifications of that. Then my eyes rolled back in my head, and I pitched over backward. I never even felt myself hit the floor.

-

Chapter 13 AUGUST 2027

The drums were still echoing in my ears, chasing away the fragments of my dreams, when I woke up on a narrow cot. Tansy loomed over me like a denim-clad gargoyle. I gasped, sitting up and scooting away from her in the same motion. The lab coat someone had spread over me to serve as a blanket fell away, pooling in my lap. For whatever reason, this made Tansy start to giggle madly. She abandoned her looming in favor of plopping down on the floor of the bowling alley, cross-legged, and clutching her own bare ankles in her hands.

“You’re funny,” she informed me. “I hoped you’d be nice, or at least interestingly dangerous, but I didn’t expect you to be funny.”

“Is that good?” I asked uneasily. I was trying to remember why I’d passed out, and what I’d dreamt about. After a day filled with horrible revelations, there had finally been something bad enough to make me lose consciousness. I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted to remember. I was absolutely certain that it was something I needed to remember.

I was even more certain that I couldn’t let myself.

Not yet.

“It’s great!” Tansy leaned forward, murmuring conspiratorially, “I mean, not to be a tattletale or anything, but Doctor C doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about pretty much anything, and Adam’s such a mama’s boy that he doesn’t have a sense of humor about anything at all. It’s always dull, dull, dull around here. Science can be funny, you know? But nobody ever lets me blow anything up or even change the labels on things.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. It was something about people still being aware, even if they weren’t awake…“So do you, uh, live here? In the bowling alley, I mean?”

“What? No.” Tansy’s expression turned instantly cold, her amiable lean becoming the crouch of a wary predator as she stiffened. “Are you trying to find out where we live? Who are you working for? Did SymboGen send you?”

“No!” I leaned away from Tansy, pulling back until I was in danger of toppling over the other side of the cot. Tansy in alert mode was a lot more terrifying than Tansy in calm mode, and that had been bad enough. “I was trying to make polite conversation! You know, the way you do when you meet somebody for the first time? I ask where you live, then you ask where I live, then we talk about hobbies and jobs and boyfriends…” Speaking of boyfriends, where the hell was mine? If Tansy broke me while Nathan was off arguing with his mother about her crimes against God, nature, and the FDA, I was going to be really unhappy with him.

“Oh, is that all? Okay.” The menace left Tansy’s face, and she relaxed back into her previous position. That made one of us. I couldn’t relax with her looking at me like that. I was too aware of just how quickly she could turn on me. “It’s sort of silly for us to have polite conversation, though. I already know all that stuff, so it’s not like you could say anything interesting. We’d just wind up talking about stuff I’m not supposed to talk about, and then I’d have to bury your body up on Cardboard Hill. Do you like sledding?”

The change in topics was fast enough to make me feel like I’d missed something. I blinked. Tansy beamed at me innocently, and I realized that no, I hadn’t missed anything; it’s just that she wasn’t making any sense.

That probably should have been a relief. Given the situation, it didn’t help. “I’ve never been sledding,” I said. “What do you mean, you already know all that stuff?”

“Oh, we’ve been monitoring you for ages and ages,” said Tansy blithely. “I know where you live and which window is yours and what route you usually take when you have to go to work. You know, the polite conversation stuff. And I can’t tell you most of what you don’t know about me, because I don’t have permission from Doctor C yet. So that means there’s no reason to bother with the polite conversation, right? Do you want to go sledding? We don’t have snow, but that’s okay. We can slide down the hill on pieces of cardboard, and the dirt is really slippery.”

The thought of Tansy knowing not only where I lived but where I slept was enough to make my stomach do a lazy flip. “Where’s Nathan?” I asked. “I shouldn’t… he’ll probably be worried about me by now, don’t you think?” I looked around our dark little corner of the bowling alley. There were people in lab coats moving around the distant workstations, but none of them were Nathan, or his mother. “What are we doing over here?”

“Oh, you had a simple vasovagal attack and lost consciousness following a stress-induced drop in your blood pressure,” said Tansy. Hearing the technical language from her just increased the surrealistic quality of the scene. “So Doctor C said you should probably go lay down for a little while—or is that supposed to be ‘lie down’? Why are there so many words that sound almost exactly the same only one of them is right and one of them is wrong and if you use the wrong one everyone looks at you like you’re stupid and then you need to stab somebody to make the point that there are a lot of different types of intelligence and anyway English is hard?” She crossed her arms and glared at me sulkily, like she was daring me to explain it all.

“I got lost somewhere in the middle of that sentence,” I said. “Do you mean I fainted?”

“Duh, that’s what I said. You had a simple vasovagal attack. What else could that mean?”

I stared at Tansy. Finally, I said, “I honestly do not know how I’m supposed to respond. I mean, I have genuinely no idea what I’m supposed to say. Can you please pretend I said the right thing, and tell me where Nathan is?”

She sighed, pushing herself to her feet. “I really hoped you’d be fun, you know,” she said. “Stay where you are. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back with your stupid Nathan.” Spinning on her heel, she stalked away toward the front of the bowling alley.

I sank back on the cot, pulling the lab coat up around me like a blanket. I wasn’t cold, exactly, but I still felt like I needed the warmth.

“She doesn’t mean to be spooky,” said an apologetic male voice from behind me. I gave a little shriek and spun around, nearly falling off the cot again. It wasn’t my best day for staying upright, apparently.

Adam was standing in the corner, hands twitching against his thighs, a solemn expression on his face. “She can’t really help it. She knows that she upsets people, but she doesn’t know how to stop doing it. Mom says it’s because Tansy’s body’s brain was dead for too long before she could get Tansy in there, but we don’t really know for sure. It’s hard to know what’s normal for us and what isn’t. The sample size is too small.”

“I… you… what…” I managed.

Adam’s eyes widened. “Did I scare you? I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

I took a deep breath, waiting for my heart to stop trying to pound its way straight out of my chest. Finally, I asked, “How long have you been standing there?”

“I was watching you sleep, just in case you, you know. Had a bad dream or something.” Adam shrugged, looking suddenly awkward. “I have bad dreams sometimes, and it helps if I’m not alone when I wake up.”

I blinked at him, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying. If Dr. Cale was telling the truth about what she’d been able to do—and I had no reason to doubt her, even if Nathan wasn’t quite so sure—I was talking to a tapeworm that had been given full control of its very own human body. And that same tapeworm had been watching me sleep, just in case I had bad dreams.

This situation was creepy on so many levels that I didn’t even know where to begin. Adam was still watching me earnestly. It was clear that he had no idea that I could construe what he’d been doing as even remotely wrong. Why should he? If Dr. Cale and Tansy were his models for normal human behavior, standing there staring at me while I was unconscious probably seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.

“Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough. I hesitated before adding, “I have bad dreams, too, sometimes. Thank you for watching me.”

Adam looked relieved, and smiled. “I was glad to do it. Mom and my big broth—um. Mom and Nathan are arguing right now. He wanted to leave when you fainted, but she convinced him that he should stay until you woke up at least, and listen to what she had to tell him.”

“What was that?” I asked, feeling obscurely stung. Never mind that they were probably discussing all the scientific details of the D. symbogenesis design, and those would have been over my head anyway; we came here because I wanted answers, and I should have been included in the process of getting them.

“Why she never contacted him after she left SymboGen.” Adam’s smile faded. “He’s really upset about that. He doesn’t believe her when she says I’m his brother, and he doesn’t believe Mom had good reasons for doing what she did.”

“I…” I stopped. Finally, I scooted to the side, patting the cot with one hand. Feeling a little silly, I said, “Why don’t you come and sit down?” Adam wasn’t going to hurt me, and I’d be more comfortable if he wasn’t looming over me.

“Okay,” said Adam. He obediently trotted over to sit down on the other end of the cot, beaming like he’d just been invited to his first real party.

Having him that close was almost worse than having him looming had been. I swallowed my anxiety—I was the one who asked him to sit down, I would live with it—and said, “Family is important to Nathan. It’s so important that he told me his mother was dead right after we started dating. That’s how sad he was that she was gone from his life. So finding out she was here with you this whole time is hard for him. It hurts him.” Inspiration struck, and I added, “How would you feel if you found out your mother had gone away to live with another family for years and years, and never even called to let you know she was still alive?”

“Sad,” said Adam, after a pause to consider his options. “But happy, too, because it would mean my mother was still alive, when I would have been worried that she wasn’t.”

I blinked. That wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. “It wouldn’t bother you that she’d been off doing things without letting you know that she was all right?”

“No. Should it?” Adam asked the question with apparently honest curiosity, giving me a hopeful look at the same time, like I was somehow going to unsnarl all the mysteries of human behavior. Boy, was he going to be disappointed if he started looking at me as someone who knew what the hell she was talking about.

“Um.” This time, I thought a little more before I opened my mouth. It didn’t help as much as I’d been hoping it would. “That depends,” I said, finally. “Don’t you like to know what your mother is doing?”

“I can’t always,” he said. “Sometimes she has to go away for days, and I can’t go with her, because it’s not safe.”

“It’s not safe?” I echoed, and frowned. “Why not?” Adam looked perfectly normal. As long as he didn’t start talking about being a tapeworm in a human suit, he wasn’t likely to run into anything terribly dangerous—and even if he did, it wasn’t like that was illegal or anything. Anyone who heard him would just assume he was crazy. Heck, I had scientists with diagrams trying to make me understand how he could be a tapeworm in a human suit, and I still kind of thought he might be crazy.

Adam shrugged. “Sometimes it’s not safe because she’s going places that aren’t safe. Like South America. And Africa, once. She took Tansy when she went to Africa, because she said it wasn’t safe for her, but having Tansy with her would make da—darn sure that it wasn’t safe for anyone else, either.”

His hastily edited “damn” struck me as oddly charming. It was like talking to one of the kids who came into the shelter to look at the kittens and puppies. “But you couldn’t go with her, because it wasn’t safe.”

“Yeah.” Adam nodded earnestly. “Tansy makes it a little safer by being dangerous at people, so they back off being dangerous at Mom. But I don’t do that, because I’m not dangerous at anyone. I’d just be something else for them to be dangerous at. Anyway, I do okay with helping in the lab, but I can’t help too much in the field. I just get in the way and drop things that aren’t supposed to be dropped.”

“He dropped a jarful of leeches once,” announced Tansy blithely as she walked back out of the shadows. I managed not to jump. Barely. “It exploded, ker-smash, and then there were leeches everywhere. It was like Leech-a-palooza in the lab that day. This one tech got a leech inside her nose.”

“By ‘got’ do you mean you put it there?” I asked.

Tansy grinned. “You’re starting to catch on. So, like, can you walk and stuff? Because Doctor C says if you can walk, I should bring you over to her private lab. That’s where she’s got Nathan. She’s showing him a bunch of old slides and stuff, totally boring. I said you might want to go sledding with me instead.” She gave me a hopeful look.

Sledding on a dirt hill with the resident socially maladjusted possibly-a-tapeworm? I could think of a lot of things I’d rather do, including making a return trip to SymboGen. “I really need to talk to Nathan,” I said, standing.

“Whatever. Suit yourself.” Tansy rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust. “Adam, Doctor C says to tell you it’s time for your pills, and you need to go to your room so you can take them.”

“Yes, Tansy,” said Adam. He looked at me shyly as he stood. “It’s really nice to finally meet you, Sal. I hope you like it here enough that you’ll come back sometime. I think Mom would like that, too.” He turned before I could say anything, walking quickly into the shadows.

“I guess he’s sweet on you, too,” said Tansy. She sounded faintly disgusted. “Like you’re all that just because you’re all living in the world, doing stuff without supervision. Whatever. Like that’s so impressive. Come on, I’ll take you to Doctor C.”

“Thank you,” I said—both because it was the right thing to say and because I was a little bit afraid that if Tansy thought I was being rude to her, she’d stab me with a scalpel. She seemed like the kind of girl who regularly carried scalpels around just for stabbing people. “I’m sorry I’m taking up so much of your time.”

“Whatever,” she said, for the third time in as many minutes. “It’s not like I’d be doing anything important if you weren’t here.”

“Sure you would,” I said. “You’d be sledding.”

Tansy blinked at that. Then, slowly, she grinned. She never seemed to smile; it was always grinning with her, big, wide grins that showed off all her teeth at once. “Hey, that’s right. I’d totally be sledding if you weren’t here. You’re pretty smart to have figured that out, you know?”

“If you say so,” I hedged.

“That, or I told you, and you’re trying to play smart.” Her expression turned suspicious. “Are you trying to mess with me?”

“Honestly, I just want to get to Nathan.” Before you stab me with something, I added silently. Of all the unnerving things I’d encountered since arriving at Dr. Cale’s lab, Tansy was definitely the most upsetting.

“Fine.” She started walking. I followed.

We were about halfway across the bowling alley before she said, “You better not be here to try and talk Doctor C into running away with you. We need her here. You can stay if you want—she’d probably like it if you stayed, because then her son would stay, and they could be all ‘rar, we fight the medical establishment and their dangerously lax and corrupt distribution channels’ together—but you can’t take her.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “We just came here to get some answers. That’s all. Once we have them, we can go.” Assuming Nathan was willing to leave his newly rediscovered mother. Tansy might be kidding when she said that we could stay, but I was starting to be afraid that Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let us leave. Even if she did, we could still wind up remaining here with her for as long as Nathan wanted to talk to her.

Tansy looked back over her shoulder at me. The look on her face was actually serious for the first time since I’d turned to find her sitting on the hood of Nathan’s car. “Didn’t Doctor C warn you about what happens when you ask questions?”

It took me a second to realize that she was talking about that children’s book again. I was going to need to find a copy. “I’m sure I want to know,” I said.

“Okay,” said Tansy, with a very small shrug. That seemed to exhaust her available conversation. She was silent as she led me onward, into the dark.

Dr. Cale’s private lab was a small room—even smaller than the office where we’d first gone to speak—with hand-drawn charts and black-and-white photographs of tapeworms covering the walls so completely that I wasn’t even sure what color the paint was. Since this looked like it was one of the original parts of the bowling alley and not a room that had been constructed by walling off a piece of the larger spaces, they were probably something eye-searing, green or purple or another bowling-related color. As I thought that, I realized that I didn’t really know very much about bowling alleys. It had never seemed important to me before.

A low counter split the room in half, and more counters lined the walls, covered in lab equipment and manila folders. Nathan was sitting on a stool at the central counter when Tansy led me into the room. He was bent over a microscope—a position I’d seen him in a hundred times before—and was so focused on whatever was on the other side of his lens that he didn’t even look up when Tansy pushed me toward him and announced, loudly, “I am going to go throw myself down the side of a large hill multiple times.”

Dr. Cale was at one of the other counters, preparing a fresh slide. She looked toward Tansy, saying mildly, “Just don’t break any bones that you think you’re going to need later. I don’t want to spend another six weeks listening to you whine about how I won’t let you go outside.”

Tansy sniffed haughtily before turning on her heel and striding back out of the room. She tried to slam the door behind herself, but the hinges were configured to allow people time to get out of the way, and the door swung gracefully shut instead.

“She broke her ankle once, when she tried to snowboard on a cookie tray,” said Dr. Cale. She had the same fond, nostalgic tone that Mom always got when she was talking about something Joyce or I had done as children. The “my little girls can do no wrong” voice. She picked up the tray with her slides and wheeled her way over to Nathan, one-handed. “I have never in my life had a worse patient, and that includes myself.”

“I find it hard to believe that anyone could be a worse patient than you,” said Nathan, lifting his head from the microscope. “I remember when I was a kid, and you got the flu. I thought Dad was going to lock you in the bedroom, just so the rest of us could get some peace.” He turned to look at me, betraying awareness of my presence for the first time. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” I said awkwardly, not moving away from the door. I wanted to add something about how he’d left me to wake up surrounded by potentially dangerous strangers, but I couldn’t find the words. So I blurted the first thing that came into my head, instead: “Is there a copy of Don’t Go Out Alone that I could read? People keep talking about it, and I want to know what happens.”

“Of course there is.” Dr. Cale put her slides down next to Nathan before she wheeled herself over to a bookcase, leaning up to pull a slim volume with a cover the color of a slow-healing bruise off the top shelf.

“What?” Nathan turned to look at her, eyes wide. “You took it? I always wondered where it went…”

“I had to,” said Dr. Cale, resting the book on her knees. She smiled a little, looking down at it. “Every time I looked at it, I could hear you asking me to read it to you one more time before bed. It was the thing that most made me feel like I was still with my family.”

“You could have asked,” grumbled Nathan.

“The creepiest children’s book in the world was what made you feel connected to your family?” I asked. I wasn’t quite able to keep the disbelief out of my voice. After a moment to consider, I decided that I didn’t want to.

“With as many times as I’d read it to Nathan? Yes.” Dr. Cale wheeled herself over to me, and offered me the book. “Here you go. Read it, and see if it helps at all.”

“Can I… can I take it with me when we leave?” asked Nathan hesitantly. My heart leapt at the confirmation that we were going to be leaving. He continued, “It’s been so long since I’ve read it. I never was able to find another copy.”

“I would never have found this copy if I hadn’t known the author from school,” said Dr. Cale. “Of course you can take it. It’s yours, after all. I just borrowed it for a little while.” She cast a professionally polite smile in my direction. “If you want to sit down and read for a bit, we still have a few more samples to go over.”

“And then we’ll go,” said Nathan. He had the slightly unfocused tone that I normally associated with his office: the days when I’d show up before he was ready to put work to bed and leave with me.

“Okay,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure it was what I actually wanted, and took a seat in the corner of the room, looking down at the battered copy of Don’t Go Out Alone. The cover illustration showed two children—a boy and a girl—hand in hand, clearly frightened, walking through a dark, spooky forest. Everything was painted in watercolor shades of blue and black, except for the children themselves. They were painted in color, which just made them look more out of place, and somehow made the woods seem even darker and spookier.

The story inside wasn’t much better. The boy and girl were never named. They received letters from a mysterious stranger telling them to be careful, but to find the broken doors as soon as they could, because otherwise, they would be in trouble. More notes awaited them at every step along their journey, alternately cajoling and warning them off what they were doing. “Come quickly” warred with “don’t come at all.” The boy and the girl, lacking a better option—or maybe just lacking basic survival instincts—kept looking for the broken doors, no matter how many times they were warned off.

And then they found them, and found what was waiting on the other side: a pleasant room with a horrible monster in it. Apparently, when they were younger, they had the same monster in their closet, and when their parents chased it away, the monster pined until it could finally call to them to come through the broken doors to the Land of Monsters, where they could be a family forever. The book ended with the implication that now the children would become monsters, too, and would eventually leave the Land of Monsters to find closets, and children, of their own.

It took me almost an hour before I closed the book, looking up. “That was so messed up,” I said.

Dr. Cale and Nathan were studying something on the central counter. Nathan looked up and grinned at the sound of my voice, saying, “How do you think I felt? I was what, four, the first time she read that to me?”

“You were never afraid of the monster in your closet, though,” said Dr. Cale. There was a brief warmth in her voice, like she was remembering what it was like to be the woman she’d been when she was just Nathan’s mother, and not a renegade genetic engineer hiding from the world’s largest biological medical company.

That thought looped around itself so many times that it managed to confuse even me. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and looked down at the blue and black cover one last time. Even knowing how the story ended didn’t make the children seem any less terrified, or make the painted forest any less dark. If anything, knowing what the book was actually about made it worse. The children were looking for the broken door. By finding it, they would get their answers… and they would give up their humanity forever.

“No,” said Nathan. His tone was much more subdued than his mother’s. I looked up again to find him studying Dr. Cale, a grave expression on his face. His smile was entirely gone. “I knew the monster in my closet would take care of me. The monster would always love me, no matter what I did. The monster would never leave me.”

I suddenly felt like I shouldn’t be here, witnessing this. I shrank back in my chair as Dr. Cale’s face fell, all the light going out of her. “Nathan…” she began.

Nathan talked right over her, asking, “Did you have any contact with Dad after you left us? Did he tell you about the times I ran away, trying to find the broken doors? I knew my monster would be on the other side, and she would love me.” He straightened, suddenly seeming to realize where we were. “We’re pretty much done here. I need to get Sal home. Her parents will be worried about her by now, and I’m supposed to work a late shift at the hospital. We’re slammed right now.”

“It’s just going to get worse as the implants continue to assert themselves,” said Dr. Cale. “We need to work together on this, Nathan. You can’t just walk away and pretend you don’t know what’s going on.”

“I’m not going to, Mother, but I’m also not going to stay here. This isn’t the side of the broken doors that I belong on. Once it was, maybe. If you’d come to me when I was still looking for you behind every corner. But not now. I live in the real world now.” Nathan walked over to where I sat, offering me his hand. I took it, and he tugged me to my feet. “It’s time for us to go.”

“Thank you for sharing what you know, Dr. Cale,” I said, hugging the book to my chest like I was protecting it. I was, in a way; Nathan wanted to take it with us, and I didn’t trust Dr. Cale not to try snatching it away from me if I gave her the chance.

She didn’t move to take the book. She didn’t move at all. She just looked at the two of us, an odd sort of sorrow in her eyes, and said, “When Simone got that published, mine was one of the very first copies she gave to anyone. She said it would help me teach my children how to be safe. You were a baby at the time, Nathan. You probably don’t even remember Simone.”

“No,” said Nathan, putting his arm around my shoulders. “I don’t.”

“She was a little woman. Always sick, all the time, no matter what she did. See, when we were young, parents thought you had to keep the world so clean it was sterile if you wanted to protect your children. Her immune system never learned to deal with anything it didn’t recognize. She died before you were old enough to get to know her, but I think you would have liked her.” Dr. Cale looked toward the charts on the wall, showing the development and life cycle of her precious D. symbogenesis. “You always wanted to know why when you were a little boy. Why this and why that, and why, why, why until I thought your father was going to lose his mind. I’ve been asking myself for years why this was the project I had to join. Why was this the one thing I had to do, out of everything that I could have done, out of every opportunity I had.”

“Did you figure it out?” I asked.

“Yes.” Dr. Cale turned to me, smiling slightly. “I did it for Simone. She might have died anyway—no one can predict the future, or we’d find ourselves in a lot less hot water—but she wouldn’t have died the way she did, of an immune system that simply refused to keep her alive any longer. I did it because I wanted to give you and your loved ones a better future, Nathan. And yes, I did it because I could. Isn’t that the justification used by every scientist who made something wonderful, only to discover that they’ve made something terrible? ‘We did it for science.’”

“Science doesn’t always play nicely with the other children,” said Nathan.

Dr. Cale sighed. “So true. Come on, give your mother a hug—and for God’s sake, be careful out there. I still don’t know how D. symbogenesis is accomplishing all this outside of lab conditions, and I won’t know until I’ve had more opportunity to study the afflicted. There’s no telling what could happen.”

“Okay, Mom,” said Nathan. He squeezed me quickly before walking over to hug his mother, who returned the gesture with all the fervency of someone who had never expected to have this opportunity again. After a few seconds of that, Nathan melted into her embrace, and the two of them just held each other, long enough that I started to get uncomfortable. I looked away, studying the room instead.

In addition to the charts and graphs on the walls, there was a corkboard with a few tacked-up photographs, including a grainy shot of Nathan that had clearly been taken with a distance lens. There was one picture of Adam and Tansy sitting together, she with a shaved skull and a bandage taped to the side of her head, he with the doting smile of an older brother.

Something occurred to me as I looked at the picture. “Dr. Cale?”

“Yes, Sal?”

I turned. Nathan and Dr. Cale were no longer hugging, although he was still standing next to her chair. “Why did you call her ‘Tansy’? Isn’t it usually Adam and Eve, not, well, Adam and Tansy?”

“Oh, that’s an easy one to answer,” said Dr. Cale. “Tapeworms are naturally hermaphroditic; they only acquire gender if they take over something that has biological gender, like humans. I named him Adam because he took over the first male human body prepared for habitation. I named her Tansy because it was a good name… and she wasn’t the first.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just hugged the book to my chest, staring at her.

Nathan found his voice before I did. Sounding half-fascinated, half-horrified, he began, “Are you saying that there’s more than just the two—”

“Doctor C! Doctor C!” Tansy burst into the office without knocking, shoving the door open so hard that it actually slammed against the wall. “There’s a bunch of sleepwalkers in Lafayette! The local police are talking about shutting the freeways to try and maintain a temporary quarantine until they can divert the mob!” She was covered in dust, and had a new rip in the knee of her overalls. Blood was soaking slowly into the denim. It was hard not to stare at it, even with her shouting and waving her hands around. People were sick; the SymboGen implant was causing it; Tansy was bleeding. In that moment, all these things seemed to be of equal importance to me.

Dr. Cale remained perfectly calm. “How do you know, dear?”

“I took the police scanner sledding with me.” Tansy made the statement in a matter-of-fact tone, like it was entirely reasonable for her to have taken a police scanner out to play.

Dr. Cale nodded. “All right, Tansy. Thank you for letting me know. I hate to cut our farewell short, Nathan, but you need to take Sal and get out of here, now.” She gripped the wheels of her chair, starting to roll herself toward the door. Tansy stepped into position when Dr. Cale was halfway there, grabbing hold of the handles on the back of the chair. Dr. Cale stopped pushing as Tansy took over. “I need to scramble an extraction team and get them to Lafayette before the CDC seizes all the available subjects. You need to make sure that you’re not trapped here.”

“Mom—”

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me, Nathan! Not right now. You and Sal need to be safe.” She looked fiercely between us. “You don’t understand yet how important you are, but you will. In the meantime, be careful who you trust, and remember, there’s such a thing as knowing without understanding. You need to think carefully before you start sharing the information I’ve given to you.”

“Wait,” I said. “Subjects? Are you talking about sick people?”

“Nathan…” Dr. Cale gave him a pleading look.

“I’ll explain in the car, Sal,” he said, and took my arm.

I wasn’t happy about leaving without getting my question answered—but in a way, it didn’t need to be, because her refusal to say anything was answer enough. We were getting out of the bowling alley alive, and we had more information than we’d had when we came. That was going to have to be good enough. “Okay,” I said.

“I’ll contact you as soon as I can,” said Dr. Cale.

Tansy pushed her out of the room. Nathan and I followed. And finally, after some of the most confusing hours of my life, we went our separate ways.

The threatened roadblock between Lafayette and everywhere else didn’t materialize, but the California Highway Patrol did shut down all but one lane going in either direction, forcing all the normal traffic to slow to a crawl. Nathan and I found ourselves sitting in what was essentially a mile-long parking lot. Several of the local deer had nonchalantly emerged from the edges of the forest that lined the freeway on either side and were chewing on the median grass, all but ignoring the cars around them. Horns honked from all sides, having absolutely no effect on the cars around them.

Don’t Go Out Alone rested on my knees. I looked down at it, studying the black and blue forest on the cover. Then I glanced at Nathan, who was staring fixedly out the window at the road. He hadn’t really spoken since we left the bowling alley. I’d been okay with that—anything that means the driver is less distracted is okay with me—but if we weren’t going to move, we might as well talk. “Are you okay?” I asked.

My voice came out softer than I intended it to. That turned out not to matter; Nathan had apparently been waiting for me to say something, because his answer was out almost before I finished the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought that I was going to see her again. I thought… I thought she loved me enough to come back, if she could. She could have died, Sal. For real. She swallowed that stupid worm, and she… and she…” Words failed him. After a moment of staring soundlessly out the windshield, he slammed his fists into the steering wheel.

It was such an abrupt motion that I didn’t see it coming. I shrieked, flattening myself against the car door. If we’d been moving at all, I probably would have fainted again. As it was, the traffic was at a standstill, and I was able to keep myself awake.

Nathan looked instantly contrite as he realized what he had done. Wincing, he said, “I’m sorry, Sal. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just… she… fuck.”

I took a deep breath, trying to force my frantically beating heart to calm down. It was funny; at moments like this, my heartbeat didn’t sound like drums at all. It just sounded like being afraid of the world.

Once I was sure I could talk again without throwing up, I said, “Don’t do that in the car, okay? If you do that in the car again, I’m going to have to get out.” I wasn’t sure I didn’t need to do that anyway. This was the second time in the same week that Nathan had taken his hands off the wheel, and that was something I couldn’t handle. I could walk from here to the nearest BART station. It couldn’t possibly be more dangerous than staying in the car if he was going to drive like that.

“I won’t,” he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Just… okay.” I took a breath. The book was still in my lap. I looked down at it, tracing the outline of the girl’s face with my index finger. She looked terrified. I understood how she felt. “How long was I out?” Why did you leave me alone when I couldn’t defend myself?

“A little over an hour. You sort of scared me when you just toppled over like that, but your vital signs were steady, and you’d already had a hell of a day… it seemed like a good idea to let you sleep while we did all the crazy science shit that you wouldn’t have understood anyway.”

“Yeah. I guess that was smart.”

Nathan gave me a sidelong look, but out of deference to my discomfort, he kept his attention mainly on the road. I could have kissed him for that, if there wasn’t a good chance that it would have distracted him. That was the last thing I wanted to do. “Mom told Tansy to watch you, and make sure you didn’t get scared when you woke up without me.”

“Considering that Tansy is the scariest thing in that lab, I’m not sure you made the right call, there,” I said.

He laughed a little, sounding unsteady. “You may be right about that. Did she stay until you woke up?”

“Yeah, and I woke up to find her staring at me all creepy-time, like I was some sort of zoo animal. It was definitely not my idea of a good way to end an unplanned nap. Let’s never do that again, okay?” I considered telling him that Adam had been there, too, but that would have taken too long, and it wasn’t like he’d done anything. I wanted Nathan to move on to telling me about his mother’s work. “What did you do while I was sleeping?”

“Reviewed Mom’s notes, looked at some samples she had prepared for when we showed up. She’s been expecting us for a while, apparently.” He smiled thinly, eyes staying on the road this time. “She kept clippings on your accident. SymboGen getting involved the way that they did triggered a lot of warning bells with her.”

My heart started pounding again. This time it sounded less like panic and more like the increasingly familiar drums. I just wished I knew what made the difference between the two. “What… what did she say about me?”

“That SymboGen knew they were going to need a poster child for the good side of the implants, because the bad side—the sleeping sickness—was already getting started. The first cases appeared shortly before your crash. They were just a lot more isolated than what we’re seeing right now. SymboGen was able to hush them up. They aren’t able to hush things up anymore. They—”

Whatever he was planning to say was interrupted by the man who came running out of the woods to the side of our car, his eyes dead and staring like the eyes of the woman who had been on my back porch only a few hours before. He raced to the side of the car, slamming his palms flat against the glass of my window. I screamed, too surprised to do anything else. Nathan shouted something that was half profanity and half raw, wordless surprise. The car locks snapped home as he hit the button on the control panel.

Not that the sleepwalker tried the handles. The man—who was wearing what looked like it had been a very nice business suit, before he got taken over by a tapeworm and wore it out into the Lafayette woods—kept slamming his hands against the window, right up on the glass, so close that I could see the glassy emptiness of his eyes in perfect, horrifying detail. His mouth was open, but with the window closed, I couldn’t tell if he was making any sound. That was the one good thing about our current situation.

If he was trying to talk to us, I didn’t want to know about it.

Horns blared around us as the other motorists in the traffic jam realized what was going on. The sleepwalker kept slamming his hands against our window, ignoring them. A few drivers tried to pull out of the throng and drive away, but succeeded only in making things worse as they got stuck on the shoulder or ran into the ditch next to the freeway. The sound of blaring horns spread as panic leapt like a disease from car to car.

And then people started opening their doors and running away from the sleepwalker. Running away from us, since we were the ones he had pinned. He slapped the glass again. I shrank back against Nathan, who put his arms around me and held me tight. We were both breathing hard, enough that the glass was starting to fog.

Then someone outside the car screamed. I whipped around and saw that more sleepwalkers were emerging from the trees, and that these seemed to be falling into the same camp as Devi’s wife: they weren’t docile. They were violent. One of them had grabbed a woman by the hair and seemed to be trying to wrench her head off. Another was dragging a man by the leg back into the woods. I didn’t know what they were going to do with those people. I didn’t need to think about it very hard to know that I didn’t want to.

The man slapped the glass again, harder this time, like he was gaining confidence from the fact that we were still there. I moaned. “What are we supposed to do?” I asked. I knew that Nathan didn’t have any answers. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was nowhere left for us to go: we could stay in the car with a sleepwalker trying to methodically slap his way through the glass, or we could run for cover, and risk being taken down by the sleepwalkers who were still emerging, locustlike, from the shelter of the trees.

“I don’t know,” Nathan whispered. His eyes were on the sleepwalkers now working their way between the gridlocked cars, ignoring the man who was beating against the car. “How many of them are there?”

“I don’t know, but I’m scared.” The man slammed his hand against the window again, even harder than before. I jumped, pressing myself against Nathan. Then I frowned, glaring at the man outside the car. What gave him the right to come here and terrorize us like this? What gave any of them the right? If Dr. Cale was telling the truth about these people, and they were just the implants taking over their hosts, why did they need to come and threaten us like this? I pushed myself forward, slamming my own hands against the glass. “You go away!” I shouted. “Leave us alone!”

Much to my surprise, the man actually took a step backward, a flicker of what looked like surprise appearing in his otherwise empty eyes.

I slapped the glass again. “Yeah, that’s it! Go away! Go bother somebody else!”

“Sal, maybe you shouldn’t—”

The man lunged at the car again. This time, he actually looked angry, and his hands were balled into fists when he slammed them against the window. Something inside the frame that joined the window to the car made an ominous cracking sound. I shrank back against Nathan, who put his arms around me without hesitation.

“It was a good attempt,” he murmured. “I’m sorry I brought you out here.”

“I said I wanted the answers,” I replied, matching my tone to his. The sleepwalker was still punching the window, and I was suddenly unsure about how long it would hold… or how much it would hurt once he got inside. “I was the one who got offered the chance to go to the broken doors, remember?”

To my surprise, Nathan actually chuckled a little. It was a deeply resigned sound, but it was still a laugh. “She’s got us all doing it now.”

“What? Who?”

“Mom. She was always coming up with secret codes when I was little, and then she’d get me and Dad both using them like they were totally normal. Half the kids at school thought I was crazy. The other half just thought I had better cable channels.” He kissed the top of my head. “Love you, Sal.”

“Love you, too.” I settled more firmly against him, watching as the sleepwalker punched the window again and again. There was nowhere we could go. Cars surrounded us on all sides, and trying to run would just mean meeting the fates of the drivers who had already been dragged into the woods. We had no weapons. We had nothing we could use to defend ourselves.

We were going to die here. We finally had some of the answers that we’d been looking for, and we were going to die. The sound of drums was starting to echo in my ears again, but it was comforting this time, like it always was in my dreams. If I died, I would die to the sound of drums.

The sleepwalker punched the window again. This time, he was rewarded for his efforts with a horrible crunching noise, and a cobweb pattern of cracks appeared where his fist had hit. There was a smear of blood on the glass; he had managed to split the skin on his knuckles, if he hadn’t actually broken the bones inside his hand. I couldn’t feel too bad for him, given the circumstances. He pulled back to hit the glass—

—and stopped, looking almost perplexed as blood started running down his face from the hole in the middle of his forehead. Then he fell, dropping straight out of sight. I pushed away from Nathan, scrambling to look out my window. The sleepwalker was sprawled on the pavement outside the car with his eyes still open, clearly dead.

“Sal?” demanded Nathan. “What do you see?”

“Someone shot him.” I twisted around to blink at Nathan. “I’ve never seen someone get shot before. Are gunshots like lasers in space? There’s really no sound, so they add it for television?”

“Sal—”

I knew that I was calmer than I should have been: someone had just shot the man who was trying to batter his way into Nathan’s car. At the same time, I couldn’t think of what else to do. The drums were still pounding in my ears, and I was relieved that the sleepwalker was dead. I was a little sorry for him, but really, he’d been dead from the moment that the implant decided to take him over. It was the implant that I’d just seen die, not the man, and the implant had been trying to kill us.

“I think this is what shock feels like,” I said, thoughtfully. “It’s a pity it didn’t kick in earlier. I think I would have been less afraid of dying if my whole body had been made of cotton balls and Novocain.” I turned away from Nathan again, looking at the bloody smears on the glass.

“Come away from there.” Nathan’s voice was low, almost cajoling. I blinked, twisting to look at him again, this time in surprise. I hadn’t even realized when I moved.

Something hit the top of the car. I jumped, making a sound that was somewhere between a squeak and a scream as I plastered myself against Nathan for the second time in almost as many minutes. He didn’t seem to mind. He put his arms around me, holding me fast; I could feel the shaking in his chest. He was as scared as I was.

It was good not to be scared alone—and it wasn’t over yet. A moment later both Nathan and I screamed in earnest as Tansy’s upside-down head appeared in front of the windshield. One hand clutched the edge of the roof, while the other appeared next to her head, waving merrily. It might have been cute, if she hadn’t still been clutching the gun she’d used to shoot the sleepwalker. There was blood splattered on one of her cheeks. That damaged her potential cuteness even more.

“I’m going to kill her,” muttered Nathan, arms still locked around me.

Somehow the question just popped out: “Does it count as murder if your mom is right and Tansy’s actually a tapeworm?”

Nathan didn’t have an answer for that.

Tansy gave a little “roll down your window” motion with her gun hand and withdrew, disappearing again. The sound of her weight shifting atop the car made it clear that she hadn’t gone far.

“What…” I asked.

“I guess Mom didn’t think it was safe to send us out without a bodyguard.” Nathan let go of me as he leaned away from his window in order to roll it down. My window probably wouldn’t work anymore, given the amount of damage the fallen sleepwalker had managed to do to the glass before Tansy shot him.

Speaking of Tansy, she stuck her head down again, this time so that she could talk through Nathan’s open window. She beamed at us, seeming completely comfortable in her inverted state. “Hi!” she chirped. “Are you two okay in there? Can I get you anything? Did you pee? Sometimes people pee when they see me shoot things right next to them. So I won’t be disappointed in you, you know. If you did.”

“Neither one of us peed, thank you,” said Nathan stiffly. “Are you following us?”

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Dr. Cale send you after us?”

“Yes and no and maybe so,” said Tansy. “I’m here with the extraction team, but when the tracer showed that you were stuck in traffic inside the danger zone, Doctor C thought it might be a good idea for me to come and take a little peek at your situation. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Tracer?” said Nathan.

I felt suddenly tired, a thin coil of exhaustion winding itself through my chest. “It’s in the book,” I said. “She put a tracking device in the book because she knew that one of us would ask for it.”

Tansy’s grin grew even wider. “Okay, wow, you’re way smarter than you look when you’re passed out and drooling on yourself. Doctor C just wanted to keep an eye on you guys, that’s all. You should feel super-flattered. It’s not like she has the time to go around bugging just anybody.”

“She could have asked,” I said. My voice sounded weak, even to my own ears.

“No, she couldn’t have,” said Tansy. “You would have told her ‘no,’ because you’re both being stupid and stubborn about admitting what’s really going on. And then you’d be stuck out here, with sleepwalkers trying to get into the car, and nobody would be coming to save you. Besides, the tracer also scrambles SymboGen bugs. They think that it’s normal cellular interference, if they’ve even noticed, but it means that no one’s listening in right now.” She frowned, taking in the looks on our faces. “You weren’t even thinking about that, were you? You people. How have you been the dominant species for so long? Sure, you’ve got sweet bodies with thumbs and shit, but it’s like you don’t have any sense of self-preservation.”

“You’re the one hanging upside down from a car in a place you called ‘the danger zone,’” snapped Nathan. “I don’t think you get to lecture us about common sense.”

“Don’t I?” In one smooth motion, Tansy swung down from the car, landing solidly on the flats of her feet with her knees bent to absorb the impact. She straightened, looking coldly down her nose at us. “I’m also the one with the gun, who came here with backup, and with a plan, and who didn’t start acting like everything was hunky-dory as soon as I drove away from the secret mad-science lair of mad-science… ness.” She paused. “That sentence sort of got away from me.”

“That happens to you a lot,” said Nathan.

“Don’t change the subject, meat-car,” said Tansy. “My point is valid: you didn’t have a plan, and I did. Also, I have a gun. That puts me in a superior bargaining position, no matter how you want to look at things.”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, SymboGen bugs? Is Nathan’s car bugged?”

“Of course it is, silly-billy. So are you—or at least, so’s your stuff.” Tansy pointed her gun at my shoulder bag, lying discarded in the passenger side footwell. I had to fight the urge to grab my bag and shield it from her with my body. If she was going to shoot it, let her. I could get a new bag more easily than I could get a new body. “The people in charge of SymboGen security never miss the chance to slip a bug into something.” She giggled. “I guess it’s just a continuation of the overall corporate philosophy, right? Their whole business model was built on slipping bugs into people.”

“Tapeworms aren’t bugs,” said Nathan. He sounded like he was grasping at taxonomical straws, like the only way he could stay afloat in the increasingly turbulent waters of this conversation was through falling back on pedanticism.

Tansy saw it, too. She smiled at him, lowering her gun back to her side. “You are so much like your mother that it’s annoying,” she said. “So anyway, yeah, SymboGen’s bugging you, but the book should block their signal, so please try to only talk about certain stuff when you’re near the book.”

“You couldn’t have told us that before?” I demanded.

“Didn’t think of it.” Tansy’s pocket beeped. She produced her phone, bringing it to her ear, and listened for a few seconds before lowering it again. “We have what we came for, and you’re safe now, so I’m out of here before the authorities show up. When the police ask what happened, just say one of the other motorists started shooting when the sleepwalkers flipped out, and you stayed in your car until everything was over. Mostly true is better than totally fake, you know? Makes the story easier to swallow.”

I swallowed hard, and nodded.

“Good. We’ll be in touch with you soon.” Tansy blew Nathan a kiss, winked at me, and went running off into the trees, disappearing quickly from view.

Nathan and I were still sitting there, too stunned to know what to say, when we heard the sound of sirens in the distance. Now that the danger was over, the police were finally on their way. Assuming the danger was ever going to end. Between the sick feeling in my stomach and the constant pounding of drums in my ears, I was afraid that the danger was really just beginning.

-

Chapter 14 AUGUST 2027

My parents were terrified when they got home to find a note from me on the refrigerator and six messages from SymboGen security on the answering machine, asking with increasing levels of thinly-veiled anxiety if I would please contact the office. Not calling Mom and Dad to tell them about the sleepwalkers in the yard turned out to have been the wrong decision, at least from a “preventing panic” standpoint. Getting the call from the Lafayette Police Department must have been the last straw. They were convinced something had happened to me, and in a way, they were right. It just wasn’t anything I was in a position to talk about.

My parents were waiting when Nathan and I pulled into the driveway, and they were out of the house before we even managed to get out of the car. The first thing I saw when I slid out of the passenger seat was my father’s grim expression. He didn’t say a word as he surveyed the damage the sleepwalker—and Tansy—had done to Nathan’s car. The passenger side window was a spider’s web of cracks, and there were dents in the door, hood, and roof.

Mom was standing next to him. She didn’t look grim, more distraught, like this was something she’d been waiting for since the day I woke up in the hospital.

The sound of drums had never seemed louder, or farther away. “Dad—” I began.

“Nathan, I think it’s time for you to go.” Dad’s voice was very calm. That was a warning sign all by itself. “I’m sure Sally’s had a long day, and we still need to talk to her before she can go to bed.”

I hugged Don’t Go Out Alone to my chest as I looked across the dented roof of the car to Nathan, who was staring at my parents. Finally, he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in a way I would normally have found adorable, and said, “Actually, sir, I think we might all have a few things to discuss.”

“That may be true, but we won’t be discussing them tonight,” said my father implacably. “Go home, Nathan. Sal will call you when she’s free to talk.”

“Um… when will that be?” I asked.

“If you’re lucky, before you’re thirty,” said Mom, speaking up for the first time. “Goodnight, Nathan.”

“Goodnight, Ms. Mitchell,” said Nathan, his shoulders drooping. He knew when he was beaten. “Sal, I’ll talk to you soon. I love you. Don’t go out alone.”

I nodded to show that his message was received, still hugging the book tight against my chest. “You, too,” I said. Then I walked away from his car and past my parents, up the front walkway to the house. I was inside by the time I heard his engine turn over, and I didn’t see him drive away.

I waited in the living room until my parents came inside. The pause gave me time to put my thoughts together, and I thought that I was ready when they arrived. “What happened today—” I began.

Dad cut me off with a single sharp jerk of his head. “We are not discussing this right now,” he said. “The new security system will be installed tomorrow. Your mother and I will be staying home to oversee it, and we will review our new household rules before one of us drives you to work. One of us will also pick you up. You will come straight home after your shift at the shelter is finished. This will continue for the duration of your punishment.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, too bewildered to be really annoyed. Annoyance would come later, when I was alone in my room with time to think about what had just happened. “Are you grounding me?”

“Yes,” he replied coldly.

“You can’t ground me. I’m an adult.”

“We are your legal guardians. I don’t care how old you are: while you are under our roof, you will live by our rules,” he said. “If you have a problem with those rules, we can discuss adjusting them after your punishment is complete.”

“How long is that going to be?”

“The foreseeable future,” Dad said. He held out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

Too stunned to do anything but obey, I dug my phone out of my pocket and dropped it into his waiting palm. He closed his fingers around it, pulling it out of my reach.

“Now go to your room.”

Through all of this, Mom didn’t say anything at all. She just watched me, with an expression of such profound disappointment on her face that it made my chest ache. I looked between them, my shoulders sagging. I had the book; I had the scrambler. I could have told them everything without any fear that SymboGen would overhear.

All I said was, “Goodnight,” before I turned and walked down the hall to my room.

Joyce was standing in her own doorway, watching my approach with dark, sad eyes. She shook her head as I passed her, and mouthed, “You fucked up,” silently before she vanished into the shadows of her room. I sighed and kept walking.

Beverly was curled up on my bed when I stepped into my room. She raised her head, tail thumping twice against the mattress. I closed my door, dropping my bag on the floor and setting the copy of Don’t Go Out Alone carefully on the desk. “At least someone’s glad to see me, huh, girl?”

Beverly’s tail thumped the bed again.

“Good dog.”

I was exhausted and overwhelmed by my day. I climbed into bed with my clothes still on. Beverly shifted positions so that her nose was tucked into the curled palm of my hand, and I fell asleep feeling her breath against my skin.

When I woke up the morning after our visit to Dr. Cale’s secret lair, I found myself a prisoner in my own home. The new security system not only controlled the doors and windows; it extended to the side gates, and it could be locked down hard by anyone who controlled the master codes—specifically, my mother, father, and Joyce, all of whom were deemed “responsible enough” to decide whether poor little Sal could be allowed to go wandering around the neighborhood unprotected. The sliding glass door to the backyard had been replaced with a wooden one. Beverly now had an electronic collar keyed to the brand-new doggie door, and she could use it to come and go during the hours when no one was home. From the perspective of the security system, I was no one.

The new security extended to the wireless network and even the television, both of which had been locked down. I couldn’t get on the Internet at all, and I couldn’t access any of the news channels—just movies, children’s shows, and endless reruns of nostalgic sitcoms made before I graduated from high school.

“This is insane,” I’d objected, only to have my father look at me with cold eyes, like he was looking at someone he didn’t even know.

“You should have thought of that before you ran off without telling us what had happened here,” he’d replied. “You made your bed, Sal. Now you get to lie in it. Next time, you’ll consider your actions before you commit to them.”

“But Dad—”

“I’m not ready to talk to you yet. Have a nice day.” Then he’d been out the door, heading for the car where Joyce was already waiting. I never even saw Mom that day. She was up and out before I got out of bed; she didn’t come back until after I’d gone to sleep for the night.

The scope of my punishment didn’t seem to fit the crime that had inspired it. I’d disappeared with my boyfriend for a day, following the sort of traumatic event that probably should trigger that sort of behavior. They were acting like I’d killed somebody. As one day faded into the next, they kept shutting me out. Dad was constantly leaving for the office, or at the office, or not coming home, and Joyce was with him. After the second night, she stopped coming home at all. When Mom came home from her own errands, she made herself scarce, speaking to me only in generalities. All the while, I paced the house like a caged animal, reading Nathan’s copy of Don’t Go Out Alone over and over again like it was going to teach me something new.

The story never changed. Every time, the little boy and the little girl—neither of them with a name, neither of them ever shown fully out of shadow, so that they could have looked like anything, they could have looked like Nathan, or like me—went into the forest, searching for the broken doors. Every time, they found them, and found the prize they’d been searching for: eternity in the land of monsters. That was where the story ended, every time. There was nothing about their parents, beyond “they chased the monster away, and the journey began.” But wasn’t that what parents were supposed to do? Chase monsters away? It seemed like they were just doing their jobs, and yet somehow that was enough to justify them losing their children forever.

On the morning of the sixth day, I opened my bedroom door, ready to face another day locked in an empty house—at least I’d be going back to work the next day, where Will and Tasha would have to take responsibility for keeping me under guard—and found myself looking at my father. I froze. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up for some reason, like he was an intruder, and not my father, who loved me, and had been there since the day I woke up from my coma.

He looked at me solemnly. Then he held up the copy of Don’t Go Out Alone that I’d left on the kitchen table the night before, and asked, “Is this the source of the signal interference in the house?”

“I…” For a moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, I nodded, and said, “It has a scrambler in it to stop people from listening in on me. Or Nathan. It’s his book, really, but he let me borrow it because I hadn’t read it as many times as he had, and it seemed sort of important that I understand it, and—”

“Sal.”

“—anyway, we thought we’d be seeing each other again sooner than this. I know I scared you, but do I really deserve to be locked in like some kind of animal? You’re acting like I did something unforgivable, and all I did was get scared! And—”

“Sal!”

This time, I stopped talking, eyes wide as I stared at him.

He shook his head, lowering the book—but not, I noted, handing it to me. “How sure are you that this works?”

“How did you know it was doing anything at all?” I countered.

“I was scanning for SymboGen bugs. I’ve been scanning for the last six days. You shouldn’t have let them into the house without notifying me.” He sighed, shoulders slumping. For the first time, I wondered if the past five days hadn’t been as hard on him as they had been on me. “All the bugs I’ve found have been nontransmitting. That meant that something had to be blocking them. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“When, exactly, would you like me to have done that? After you grounded me and sent me to my room, or during one of the times when you left me here alone to think about what I’d done?” I glared at him, barely resisting the urge to snatch the book out of his hands. “I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you a lot of things. You never gave me the opportunity. Every time I opened my mouth, you either sent me to my room or walked away. Oh, and that ‘legal guardianship’ bullshit? We are so done. I am taking you to court after this, if that’s what it takes, and I am moving out.”

“Sal…” Dad stopped, taking a deep breath. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I overreacted. You have to understand that I was frightened. There was every chance that SymboGen had taken this opportunity to bug the house, and I couldn’t risk you saying something before we’d managed to find and deactivate all of their listening devices. It was best for everyone if I seemed to be unreasonably angry with you.”

“Why would SymboGen be bugging our house?” I asked. “I already answer all their questions.”

He hesitated, looking at me with an expression of such profound sadness that I rocked back a step, trying to figure out what was going through his mind. Finally, he said, “I’m going to ask a question. I need you to answer me honestly. Can you do that?”

I nodded, not quite sure I trusted my voice at the moment.

“Good. This book”—he held up Don’t Go Out Alone—“where did you get it?”

“It’s Nathan’s,” I said.

“Where did Nathan get it?”

This line of questioning was starting to make me uncomfortable, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I frowned. “I don’t know. He had it when he was a kid.”

“I seriously doubt it came this way, since children’s books aren’t normally equipped to block top-of-the-line surveillance devices from doing their jobs,” said my father. “I’m not playing around, Sal. Who gave you this book? It’s extremely important that I speak with them.”

When I first got home, shaken by my experience in Lafayette and seeing Tansy’s blood-speckled face every time I closed my eyes, I would have told him about Dr. Cale and her lab without hesitation. After five days on house arrest, I just shook my head. Too much about this wasn’t adding up. “It’s Nathan’s. He said I could borrow it if I wanted to. It was really important to him when he was a kid, and I wanted to understand him better. So I borrowed it.” Before Dad could react, I leaned forward and grabbed the book out of his hand, pulling it out of his reach. “Thank you for giving it back. I remember how important it is to respect other people’s property.”

“Sal…”

All the anger that I’d been trying to hold back suddenly bubbled to the surface, pouring out of my lips before I had consciously decided that I was going to speak. “Why did you shut off the Internet? Why haven’t I been allowed to watch the news? What’s happening out there? You ask me questions like you think you have a right to answers, but you’re not willing to let me know what’s going on, or why you’re scared. It’s not fair, and I won’t do it. You raised me better than that.”

“Sal, in a very real way, I didn’t raise you at all.” Dad’s words were quiet, even a little bit sad, like he was admitting something he didn’t want to say to anyone, much less to me. I stopped breathing, and didn’t start again until he continued, saying, “Your accident may have made you a better person—it did, in a lot of ways; I can’t lie to myself about that, even if that makes me feel like I’m betraying the memory of my little girl—but it also made you unpredictable, in some ways, because I don’t know what you’re going to do when the chips are down. You don’t have the training Sally had, and baby, I don’t have the time to give it to you. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to trust me, and do as I say, because there isn’t time for me to explain.”

The sound of drums rose in my ears as I thought about what he was saying to me. Finally, with a feeling of deep regret spreading through my chest, I shook my head and said, “No.”

My father frowned. “What?”

“No, Dad. You say I’m not Sally: fine. I don’t remember being her, I don’t remember the things you say you taught her, I’m not her. You say I don’t have her training: fine. If I’m not her, I can’t have the things that only ever belonged to her, and that means I can’t have the things she learned before I was here. But you don’t get to tell me that my not having her training means you can’t trust me. It goes against every other conversation we’ve ever had. You told me I was more dependable than she was. She was wild and she broke rules to show you that she could. Me disappearing the other day was the first thing I’ve ever done that was ‘wrong,’ and I had pretty good reasons for doing it! You don’t get to tell me to trust you and not give me a good reason to do it.”

My father looked at me without saying anything. I glared defiantly back, clutching Don’t Go Out Alone against my chest and trying to look like I wasn’t going to pass out. The drums were louder than ever, and my head felt completely empty, so light that it might float away. So this is what adrenaline and anger feel like when you put them together, I thought, and kept glaring.

He was the first to look away. “I reacted so poorly—and your mother went along with me—because this wasn’t the first report of sleepwalkers accosting someone in their home.”

“So?” I asked, abandoning my glare in favor of a puzzled frown. “I don’t understand why that would make you freak out the way you did. If it’s happened before…”

“At least, we believe that it’s happened before,” he said. “There were no survivors, but all signs indicated that the homes had been entered by one or more sleepwalkers.”

I said nothing.

“In some cases, bodies have been recovered. In others, the residents of those homes have been retrieved later when they, along with the original sleepwalkers, have been found wandering as much as five miles from the site of the attack. Somehow, the sleepwalkers are either inducing or speeding infection in asymptomatic individuals. If they had touched you…”

“SymboGen says I’m clean,” I said. I realized how empty the words were even as I was speaking them. SymboGen knew that the implants contained genetic material that had never been disclosed to the public. SymboGen knew that there was a danger of the host becoming compromised. Dr. Cale might have been their Dr. Frankenstein miracle worker, but the scientists she left behind weren’t stupid. They understood what the early-generation D. symbogenesis could mean. They knew about the risk of Adam. So how could I believe that anything they told me was the unadulterated truth?

I couldn’t.

“So the sleepwalkers would just have killed you, rather than turning you,” said my father grimly. “I’m sorry, Sal, but I’m not really seeing that as an improvement.”

I frowned. “Is that why you blocked the news channels and the Internet? Because you didn’t want me getting upset about things you couldn’t explain while the house was bugged?” Something else occurred to me. I hugged my book a little tighter. “Why was the house bugged? You still haven’t told me why. You never said I couldn’t let SymboGen security inside. If this was such a big risk, couldn’t you have told me that before it happened?”

“Just… let me work through this at my own pace, all right?” He turned and walked back toward the dining room table. Puzzled, I followed him, and when he sat, I took the seat across from his. It seemed oddly ordinary to be looking at him across the table, like this was nothing but a friendly chat about chores or what we were going to do over the weekend. The solemnity in his eyes refused to let me forget that this was so brutally much more.

He took a breath, and said, “We decided to block the news channels and the Internet because we didn’t know how much of the house was bugged, and we had no way to prevent you from asking questions when you saw what wasn’t on the news.”

“What?” I frowned again, utterly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“The GPS in your phone was blocked by that book”—he nodded toward Don’t Go Out Alone—“but from the condition of Nathan’s car when you got home, I’m assuming you somehow wound up in the Lafayette exclusion zone. Is that correct?”

I bit my lip and nodded, not saying anything.

“Well, if you had been watching the news, you might wonder why there was no mention of whatever you saw there. Or of the incident you had here at home, with the sleepwalkers in the yard. That should have raised a great many flags, don’t you think? Armed SymboGen security guards removing sick people from private property isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence, and yet it’s nowhere on the news. It’s not even on the Internet, so far as I can tell.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I protested. “You can’t keep things off the Internet.” There were dozens, if not hundreds, of embarrassing blog posts and “articles” written about me during the brief window of pseudocelebrity that followed my accident. Most of them were accompanied by incredibly unflattering pictures of me in hospital gowns or freshly stained pajamas—it took me a while to develop the fine motor control needed to feed myself without wearing my meals, and it took me even longer to learn that I should change my clothes when they got food on them—and they talked about aspects of my recovery that I didn’t think were anybody’s business but my own. And yet people wrote those posts, and other people read them, and they were popular enough that they didn’t die down until I stopped doing anything that they would think of as “interesting.” Censoring the Internet was impossible.

“No, Sal,” said my father tiredly. “I can’t keep things off the Internet. You can’t keep things off the Internet. Given enough incidents, even SymboGen won’t be able to keep things off the Internet. But right now, with things still as contained as they are, it’s possible for a large enough corporation with a focused enough security department to do quite a few things that aren’t supposed to be possible. The government could even be, potentially, helping them along to the best of our ability; right now, their goals and our goals overlap enough to be worth supporting.”

I blinked at him. “Why would the government be helping SymboGen suppress information about what’s really going on?”

“Because starting a panic does no one any good, and we still don’t know for sure why these are the things that SymboGen is choosing to suppress—or when it started. Did the sleepwalkers begin appearing before we heard about them? Was SymboGen editing the news from the start? There’s so much we don’t know, both about the science, and about the motives of the people who stand to benefit. Oh, some people know what’s going on—you can’t censor gossip—but other than some small runs on bottled water and canned goods, it’s had very little impact.”

I blinked again, going very still. Even the distant sound of drums had faded, leaving me with only the sound of my own breath. Beverly went trotting by on her way to the kitchen, looking for scraps that might have been dropped during breakfast. In the silence, her claws clacking against the linoleum seemed louder than slamming doors. Things were starting to come together. My vision was unfocusing the way it did when I tried to read for too long in a single setting, casting blurry little halos of color and light around everything.

Finally, I said, “I am done asking questions. I need you to tell me, in very small, very simple words, what’s going on. And then I need you to give me my phone back. I will make the decision of what I do next based on what you say.”

“Sal—”

“Remember how you don’t get to say ‘just trust me’ and have it stick anymore? Well, you also don’t get to decide what’s best for me. I may not remember as many years as I should, but I can manage myself pretty well.” I didn’t mention that if I left, I’d be calling Nathan to come get me and Beverly from the corner. Saying “I’ll call my boyfriend to pick me up” felt like it undermined my overall argument a bit too much.

Dad paused. Then he smiled, and said, “You know, you’re more like your mother now than you were before the accident. It’s strange, and it ought to be impossible, but it’s true. And as for what’s going on that I was trying to protect you from… SymboGen is hiding things. We’ve known that for some time, and you and I have talked about it before. But there is a reasonable chance that they were so happy to be involved in your care in part because I work for USAMRIID, and if they were able to bug our home, they would then be able to find out what the government knew about the more questionable aspects of their business practices.”

Aspects like splicing Toxoplasma into the implants, which would make them—which had made them—more flexible and resilient than anyone imagined. Questionable aspects like the entire structure of D. symbogenesis. The parasite that had been approved by the FDA wasn’t the one being implanted in people. That couldn’t possibly be a good thing.

Questionable aspects like an unshared test for the sleeping sickness, which wasn’t a sickness at all, but the result of the D. symbogenesis parasite trying for a hostile takeover of its host.

I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded minutely, and waited for him to keep going.

“SymboGen never reported the people in our yard to the authorities. I made inquiries—discreetly—and no similar incidents have been formally reported. We know about it only because we’ve been monitoring patient intake at SymboGen, and because a few groups have been picked up wandering in areas that allowed the police to back-trace to the invaded homes. We suspect that SymboGen is illegally detaining the afflicted, although we have no proof yet.”

My head was starting to spin. I frowned at him. “And Lafayette?”

“We think it was another home invasion scenario. This one involving multiple houses in the hills, and spilling down onto the freeway once the sleepwalkers could find no one else who appealed to them. What’s most interesting is that several of the cars in the traffic jam were accosted by sleepwalkers, and some of the drivers joined the gang.”

“How is that interesting?” I demanded, staring at him. “That’s horrible.”

“Yes, it is, but Sal, even more cars weren’t accosted by sleepwalkers.” Dad shook his head. “They’re choosing who they go after. They’re choosing very carefully. What we don’t know is what they’re basing those decisions on. The sleepwalkers don’t seem to do anything consciously.”

I was terribly afraid that I knew what the sleepwalkers were basing their decisions on: they were going for the people whose implants had infiltrated the largest possible percentage of their brains and nervous systems, making it easy for them to encourage the implant into taking the final steps toward autonomy. How they were managing that encouragement was something I didn’t know yet.

“They went after our car,” I said quietly.

“I know,” said my father. “The fact that you and Nathan are both okay is a bigger relief to me than I can properly express.”

Were we really?

On the other hand, I felt totally normal, and Nathan didn’t have an implant for the sleepwalkers to activate. Maybe they’d come for us because they could sense Tansy, and thought that she was inside the car. It was as good an explanation as any, and one that might allow me to sleep again. I allowed my shoulders to unlock a little.

Dad was watching me carefully. “Sal, the last time we really talked, before the sleepwalkers came here to the house, you said something.”

“Did I?” I asked, blinking at him.

“Yes. You said SymboGen had a test for infection. Were you telling the truth about that? Do they really have a way of knowing whether someone is about to get sick?”

Any sting that he thought I might be lying to him was dulled by the realization that even after all this, he still didn’t know. “Yes,” I said. “They have a test. They used it on me, after I was exposed, and then Nathan tested some confirmed patients after I described what happened. It’s real.”

“And they aren’t sharing.” Dad shook his head. “Some people need to learn that the public health matters more than their profit margins.”

“Can you make them share?”

“No.” Sudden hope lit his eyes. “But you can tell me what they did. I need you to tell me everything, Sal. You may be able to save a lot of lives. A reliable test is the first step toward developing a treatment.”

I wasn’t sure I followed his logic—knowing that something is wrong and knowing how to fix it are two very different things—but I was willing to go along with it, for the moment, because it was going to get me something that I needed.

“Take me to work with you, and I’ll show you,” I said.

Dad blinked. Then he frowned. “I don’t think you understand the importance of my request.”

“I don’t think you understand the importance of mine.” I had Dr. Cale’s side of the story. I’d been getting SymboGen’s side of the story since the day I woke up from my coma. Now it was time to get a neutral perspective. Maybe that would tell me what I had to do next.

For a long moment, Dad just sat and looked at me. Finally, sighing, he stood. “All right,” he said. “Get your things. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

“Thank you,” I said, and clutched Don’t Go Out Alone a little tighter as I jumped to my feet and ran back to my room.

The drive to the San Francisco USAMRIID field office was quiet. Dad didn’t say anything, and so neither did I. He turned on the radio once, scanning quickly through the bands of pop music, classic rock, and overcaffeinated morning DJs making prank calls and telling sexist jokes. Then he turned the radio off again, letting silence reclaim ownership of the car.

We were halfway there when it got to be too much for me. “Where’s Joyce?” I asked, desperate for conversation. After five days of isolation, I was ready for social contact, no matter how strained.

Dad grimaced. “She’s at the lab,” he said.

I paused. “Did she come home last night?” I didn’t remember hearing her, but that didn’t mean anything. I’d been so wrapped up with feeling sorry for myself and hating my parents that I wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off in the kitchen.

“No.” He sounded almost grudging. “She felt that our treatment of you was extreme, no matter how good our reasons were for making the decisions that we did. She also understood that there wasn’t a better way, and so, rather than continuing to argue, she stayed at the office to make her feelings clear. We have a break room with a few cots in it, for times when exhaustion makes it unsafe to drive. After an eighteen-hour shift working in Biohazard Safety Level 4, you’re not getting behind the wheel. Not while I have anything to say about it.”

“She’s sleeping in the Ebola Room?”

Dad actually chuckled at that. “No, the break room isn’t in Level 4, just adjacent to it. We haven’t had a leak since ’02. She’s perfectly safe, and I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to see you, especially when you demonstrate the SymboGen test for infection.”

I squirmed a little in my seat. “About that…”

“Sal.” Dad shot me a warning glance. “Please don’t tell me you lied to me just to get out of the house.”

“What? Jeez, Dad, no! But I don’t know how much the test really means. Nathan and I both checked out clean, and someone we knew for sure was sick checked out infected, but I have no idea whether it can show you the early stages. Maybe it’s something that just works on people who have already started sleepwalking.”

“You said that SymboGen checked you after you were exposed, yes? Well, that means it’s at least somewhat useful as a form of early detection—and I’ll be honest, Sal. We’re to the point of grasping at straws, here. Whatever you can give us, we’ll take it.”

“I could have given this to you days ago.” It was a cheap dig, but it felt worth taking.

“You could. But then SymboGen might have realized that we were onto them. I couldn’t take that chance.” Dad glanced my way again, this time without the warning. “The last thing I want to do is put you, or anyone else, in danger. Please believe that.”

“I do.” I settled back in my seat, resisting the urge to hug Don’t Go Out Alone to my chest again. “I really do.”

We finished the drive in silence.

The San Francisco branch of USAMRIID—the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases—was constructed in what used to be the Treasure Island military base, before changes in personnel and deployment caused the base’s original purpose to become outmoded. It sat empty for several years, before the property was repurposed to allow the military to keep an eye on the growing California biotech and medical research fields.

I knew the history of the facility because I lived with my father and Joyce, both of whom were more than happy to talk about where they worked, if not what they did every day. I knew the word “outmoded” because of Sherman, who had chosen it as our word of the day over a year before.

My cautiously optimistic mood deflated, leaving me feeling hollow, without even the comforting sound of drums to buoy me up. No matter what we did, no matter what I learned or what I was able to share with my father’s lab, Sherman was still going to be dead. He was never going to teach me another vocabulary word, or threaten to seduce my boyfriend away from me. Sherman was gone.

In that moment, I hated SymboGen, I hated D. symbogenesis, and most of all, I hated Dr. Shanti Cale, for making it possible for the rest of it to happen in the first place. I hated them for ruining everything, and for hurting so many of the people I cared about. They were the ones who opened the broken doors, not us. But we were the ones who were paying for their actions.

My father pulled up at the gate, where sturdy-looking guard stations loomed on either side of the car. A young man in army green was seated in the driver’s side booth, a clipboard in his hands. My father rolled down his window. The young man rose, and saluted.

“Colonel Mitchell,” he said.

“At ease, soldier.” My father indicated me. “This is my daughter, Sally Mitchell. She’s on the approved visitor’s list. I need a pass for her.”

“Yes, sir.” The young man gestured to the uniformed woman in the other guard booth. The window rolled down as she approached my door. I hate it when drivers do that. It just reminds me of how little control I have.

“Ma’am,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Please look at the blue dot.” The woman indicated a blue dot at the center of a smooth black metal box mounted on the guard station wall. I looked at it, bemused. The woman typed something on a keyboard. “Her pass will be waiting when you get inside.”

“Thank you,” said my father, and drove onward to the barrier, which rose as we approached it.

I sat back in my seat, blinking. “What just happened?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Dad—”

“We’re here.”

The San Francisco USAMRIID installation consisted of four main buildings, connected by stone walkways, and the boxy shape of the Level 4 lab, which was isolated from the rest of the facility by more than twenty yards. Collapsible tunnels connected it to the administration building. They could be sterilized and removed in less than ninety seconds, leaving the L4 lab completely cut off. The doors would lock automatically at the same time. Anyone left inside would find themselves depending on the vending machines and their own ability not to die from unspeakable pathogens until someone came up with an extraction plan.

Naturally, that was where my sister worked, and naturally, that was our destination. Dad parked the car just outside the lab’s main entrance, in the spot marked DIRECTOR. Similar spaces were reserved outside all the lab buildings, since there was no telling where he’d need to be at any given time.

“Now, remember,” he cautioned, as we got out of the car. “Don’t touch anything unless I tell you it’s safe, and don’t—”

“If you tell me not to lick anything, I’m going to throw something at you,” I cautioned. Not Don’t Go Out Alone—I couldn’t justify leaving it at home, but I wasn’t taking it inside, either. The book was in my shoulder bag, which was safely tucked under my seat, along with my notebook. Hopefully, no one was going to notice it there. It felt a little odd to be worrying about an old picture book and a bunch of half-coherent dreams. Then again, everything felt a little odd these days.

Dad looked abashed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you haven’t been trained the way Joyce has, and I worry about you.”

I smiled wanly. “It’s okay. Let’s just go inside, and I’ll show you what I can.”

He nodded. “All right. But Sal… we’re going into a live research project. The L4 building is almost entirely dedicated to the sleepwalkers right now. You must follow my instructions at all times. Do you understand?”

“I do,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Dad nodded one more time before turning and leading me out of the parking lot, toward the unmarked but somehow menacing door of the Level 4 lab. I took a deep breath and followed him, with the oddly comforting sound of drums hammering in my ears. Whatever was behind that door, it would be something I didn’t know yet, and every piece of this puzzle counted.

Guards flanked the door. They saluted my father as he approached. He returned the salute almost absentmindedly, and turned to shield the keypad with his body as he entered his security code. The lock disengaged, and he pulled the door open, beckoning me inside.

“Be careful now,” I murmured, and stepped through.

-

Chapter 15 AUGUST 2027

After Dad’s dire warnings, the entry hall of the L4 building was almost anticlimactic. I was expecting something out of one of Joyce’s science fiction movies, with unfamiliar equipment and unexplained lasers everywhere. What I got was basically a hallway that could have been leading to any ER in the world. The walls were a hospital-standard shade of eggshell white, with bands of color painted on them to help guide researchers to the right parts of the building, and the floor was an industrial avocado green that looked like it had been chosen to coordinate with generic medical scrubs.

Another uniformed guard sat at the reception desk. Dad motioned for me to stay where I was as he walked over and exchanged a few words with the man in a low voice. The man’s eyes flickered to me and back to Dad again. I tried not to squirm. Finally, my father leaned over the desk and picked up an old-fashioned telephone. A thick cord connected it to a base that looked heavy enough to be used as a melee weapon. He brought the phone to his ear, and was silent for several seconds before he said, “This is Colonel Alfred Mitchell. My daughter, Sally, is with me. Can you confirm the current conditions in the main lab?” There was another pause before he said, “Yes, I’ve cleared her presence through the appropriate channels. I am the appropriate channels. Can you confirm current conditions?”

He sounded annoyed. I stayed where I was. When my father was annoyed, the last place I wanted to be was in his line of fire. He never really yelled at me—that pleasure was generally reserved for Joyce, who didn’t seem to mind; she gave as good as she got, anyway, and that seemed to work for both of them—but he’d look at me sometimes like he wasn’t sure what I was doing, or why I was allowed to be wherever I was, and that was something I wanted to avoid if at all possible.

When he looked at me like that, he was frightening.

Dad made a small, irritated sound. “Well, tell Michael to put things back in their boxes. We’re coming through in five minutes. Sally has something she needs to show me, and that means we need to be inside the lab space.” He slammed the receiver down on its base harder than he needed to as he turned to face me. “The lab is not prepared for civilian visitors. They’ll be ready for us shortly.”

“Do you mean ‘not prepared’ like ‘they need to clean up,’ or ‘not prepared’ like ‘someone dropped a vial and now it’s all melting flesh and screaming’?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. I wasn’t sure I’d ever sleep again if I didn’t know the answer.

That actually made Dad smile. “Neither,” he said. “It’s ‘not prepared’ in the sense of ‘there is confidential material that shouldn’t be seen by civilian eyes out on the counters.’”

“Oh.” I paused, frowning. “But… isn’t Joyce a civilian?”

Dad’s smile faded. “Yes,” he said, and the weight of disappointment in that word was as crushing as it was confusing. If Joyce was a civilian, what was the problem with my asking the question?

He turned away before I could ask him, saying something else quiet to the guard at the desk. The guard nodded, handing him a key card and a visitor’s pass. The pass had my picture on it. Dad turned, holding them out to me.

“How did they make it so fast?” I asked, taking the pass and card.

My father ignored my question. “The women’s changing room is over there,” he said, indicating a door at the back of the reception area. It was unmarked. “Go in there and get yourself into some scrubs; affix the pass to the front of them. We’re going into a clean area, and I’d rather you didn’t introduce contamination.”

“Dad—”

“Just get changed, Sal. We’ll talk about all this later.”

I frowned. His mood swings and changes in attitude were starting to worry me. Given Dr. Cale’s description of the components of D. symbogenesis, what were the chances it could be interfering with his brain function? Was my father’s implant beginning to take over? And if it was, was there anything I could possibly do about it?

That line of thought would lead me nowhere good, and it wasn’t like I’d have to wait long to learn the answer: we were about to go into a clean area. Once we were there, I’d show him how the UV light tests worked, and I could use that as an excuse to check him for signs of infection. After that was done… well, we’d see what happened after that. If nothing else, if I knew he was infected before he did, I could run like hell.

I bit my lip. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Good,” he replied. “You wouldn’t want to go wandering off in here. There are some very dangerous things in this facility.”

I nodded quickly before I turned to head through the door he had indicated before. Dangerous things. Yes. They were all around me.

The problem was, I was starting to wonder if he might be one of them.

The women’s changing room was lined entirely with pea-green lockers. Some of them had combination locks on them, keeping their contents secret. The three nearest the door were marked VISITOR. I opened one of those, pulling out the pale blue medical scrubs inside. There were even slippers, and a plastic cap for my hair. Reduce the risk as much as possible. Not to zero—never to zero; the only thing that’s at absolutely zero risk is something dead, or that was never at risk at all—but to as close as science can manage.

I stripped to my bra and underpants before stopping to wonder whether they might have cameras in the room. Modesty was one of the more difficult lessons they’d tried to drill into me, and I was still trying to get the more subtle details down. Were cameras supposed to be one of the things I couldn’t let see me naked, or could I relax around them?

Sherman would know.

That thought sent the cold dread roiling in my stomach once again. I’d almost forgotten about Sherman, and how very personal this infection could be. If Dad was sick…

He wasn’t showing any of the signs of the sleepwalking sickness. He was still calm, and coherent, and aware of his surroundings. He’d driven me to USAMRIID. The sleepwalkers weren’t capable of operating a car. That level of fine motor control was long gone by the time they started rambling. So why couldn’t I shake the feeling that I was missing something?

I dressed quickly, tying my hair into a ponytail before tucking it into the plastic cap. I stuffed my clothes into the locker. I didn’t have a lock. That wasn’t a problem, since the only things that really mattered—my notebook and Nathan’s copy of Don’t Go Out Alone—were still in my bag and safely hidden under the passenger seat in Dad’s car. If someone wanted to wander away with my clothes, I’d be annoyed, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

The pass was a flexible piece of memory plastic with my name and basic description printed on it, along with my picture. It softened when I pressed it against the breast of my scrubs, bonding with the fabric. I didn’t know how they were going to get it off again, and I didn’t care.

Dad was waiting when I emerged from the changing room, and he had changed his own clothes for blue scrubs identical to mine. The feeling that something was wrong just got stronger when I saw the look on his face, a grim mix of determination and unhappiness. I forced a smile before handing back the key card.

“All ready,” I said.

“There’s been another mob of sleepwalkers,” he replied. “This one formed in downtown Walnut Creek. They attacked the outdoor shopping center. Casualties are still being tabulated. It’s spreading—and it’s not staying off the news this time. We’re already getting reports of runs on water and canned goods at the local grocery stores.”

I glanced at the guard at the reception desk, who gave no sign of having heard, before turning back to my father. “I… Dad, why are you telling me this?”

“Because if there is anything, anything, you know about this disease, and you don’t share that information today, I don’t know how I’ll be able to justify letting you leave without arresting you for treason.” He shook his head. Something behind his eyes was hard and unfamiliar. The dread in my stomach wound itself even tighter. “I’ve tried to be patient. I’ve tried to wait for you to come around. I’ve tried, God knows, to understand how difficult this is for you—how hard it’s been for someone with your limited exposure to the world to understand the severity of our current situation. I’ve defended my actions to my superiors several times already. I don’t know how much longer I can do that.”

I stared at him. It was the only thing I could do. What he was saying… “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If that’s true, then we’re both in a great deal of trouble. Come along.” He turned his back on me again, this time as he walked to the next sealed door and swiped his key card across the lock. The door swung open. He stepped through, and I followed him.

The main room of the USAMRIID L4 lab looked so much like Dr. Cale’s makeshift bowling alley laboratory that I actually caught myself glancing around, hoping to spot a blonde woman in a wheelchair. I might not entirely trust her, but at least if she were here, I wouldn’t be so torn about how much I could or couldn’t tell my father.

Instead of Dr. Cale, I saw military doctors and scientists in scrubs very much like mine, albeit accessorized with lab coats and identification, working at their individual stations and ignoring the two of us completely. The walls were lined with supply shelves and light boxes, continuing the similarity to the bowling alley, but the space not taken up by equipment was filled with cautionary signs. Most of them were too far away for me to even attempt reading, assuming I could convince my eyes to focus. That didn’t matter, since they had handy symbols to make sure I couldn’t miss the meanings. Do not touch, do not ingest, do not remove from the lab. There were so many rules that it was dizzying.

Joyce was working at one of the nearby lab tables. She looked up as the door swung shut behind us, and stopped, a perplexed expression crossing her face. She looked from Dad to me, and back to Dad again. Finally, she put down the scalpel she was holding, carefully peeled off her plastic gloves, and started toward us. She was moving slowly, like she was afraid one or both of us might spook.

“Sal?” she said, when she was close enough that she wouldn’t need to raise her voice. The rest of the lab technicians politely ignored us. “What are you doing here?”

“Your sister is here to demonstrate the SymboGen test for the sleepwalking sickness. Isn’t that right, Sally?”

Dad’s hand clamped onto my shoulder. It felt heavier than it should have. I swallowed hard and said, “That’s right. When I was… when Chave got sick, they tested to see if I had the sleepwalking sickness. I can demonstrate.” I snuck a glance up at my father. He was frowning straight ahead, almost like he was no longer paying attention to Joyce, or to me.

“Oh.” Joyce followed my gaze, and bit her lip. Then she focused back on me, forcing a smile through her obvious dismay. “Well, you’re here now, and that means we can maybe make some progress. What do we need?”

I don’t know, I wanted to cry. I’m not supposed to be the one who knows. That was my father, the Colonel, or my sister, the scientist, or my boyfriend, the doctor. I was the one who wandered through life and was gently corrected when I started to drift off course. I was the one who didn’t remember enough to know when she was wrong. So why were people suddenly looking to me like I was going to have answers? Answers weren’t my job.

But there was no one to provide them for me. I sniffled as softly as I could, hoping no one would notice, and said, “Dad said you had some sick people here. I need to see one of them. And I’m going to need a portable UV wand.”

“And…?” prompted Joyce.

I shook my head. “That’s all. A sick person, and a portable UV wand.”

My father’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “If that’s all you needed, why did you make me bring you here?”

“Ow.” I stepped away from his hand, turning to glare at him. “I told you why back at the house. I need to understand what’s going on. I need to ask questions and get answers, not get more dismissals and half-truths. I need—”

I stopped midsentence. My father’s face was turned toward me, but he wasn’t really looking at me anymore; his eyes were unfocused, and one corner of his mouth was starting to sag downward, like he was in the early stages of a stroke. The sound of drums grew even louder in my ears as I realized just how erratic his behavior had become over the course of the day. He’d gone from normal to overly solicitous to aggressive, all without the normal stimulus I would expect to trigger such shifts in mood.

Unless something I couldn’t see was triggering them. I took a step backward, moving away from him.

“Sal?” Joyce sounded puzzled.

“Dad?”

He didn’t respond. He just kept standing there, like he was going to say something. But he wasn’t. I could tell that just by looking at him.

The worst part of it was that he didn’t look like the sleepwalker who’d been at our back door, or the one outside the car. His eyes were still aware, still struggling to focus.

“Joyce, if this lab has security, this would be a good time to call for them,” I said, not taking my eyes off my father. He wasn’t moving. I honestly didn’t know whether that was a good sign, or a bad one. In dogs, that sort of stillness could be a precursor to an attack.

“What are you talking about, Sal?” She stepped forward, moving toward us.

I didn’t think. I just reacted, moving quickly to get her out of Dad’s reach. I grabbed her arm and jerked her back just as he began to move again, hands grasping at the air where she had been standing only a half second before. Joyce made a small, startled shrieking sound, one that dwindled almost instantly into a cough. Dad grabbed for the air again. I jerked her even harder away from him.

The other technicians were starting to look up from their work, abandoning the pretense that we could have a private family conversation in the middle of a busy government lab. That was good, since the alternative was their politely ignoring us while my father ripped us apart.

“He’s sick!” I shouted, pulling Joyce another step backward. Dad continued to follow us. At least he wasn’t moving very fast yet; he still seemed disoriented, like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.

Fight it, Dad, I thought. That… thing… that’s taking you over, fight it for as long as you can. Let me get Joyce out of here.

Joyce finally seemed to understand the danger we were in. She stumbled as she got her feet under her, and then she was backpedaling on her own, no longer relying on me to pull her. “Daddy?” she asked.

“He was fine when we got here!” I said. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? He’d already been slipping, and I’d known that something was wrong, I’d known, and I’d ignored the signs, because… because…

Because I didn’t know what else to do. We were through the broken doors now, and the only ground left was the unfamiliar kind.

Dr. Cale said that once someone started showing symptoms of the sleepwalking sickness, it was too late for any treatment, because the parasite was already in their brain. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? Even if it wasn’t strictly true, she’d say it. The SymboGen implants were her children. She might not actively side with them against the human race. That didn’t mean she was going to go out of her way to figure out how to stop them from taking the things they wanted. Like bodies of their own.

The other technicians were in motion now, some of them running for the exits, others grabbing old-fashioned telephones from the walls and gabbling into them, presumably calling security. I yanked Joyce back another step before raising my voice and calling, “Does anybody have any antiparasitics? I mean really good ones? We need—” I cheated my eyes toward Joyce and asked, “What do you use for tapeworms?”

It seemed impossibly weird to be asking her questions when our father, clearly dazed, was shambling toward us like something out of a horror movie. Oddly, that seemed to help Joyce. This was too strange to be happening: therefore, it wasn’t happening. “Praziquantel,” she said. “It has some negative side effects, though, like—”

“Is one of the negative side effects death?” I demanded. “Because if it’s not, I suggest we get somebody to pump Dad full of the stuff right now.”

Joyce took her eyes off our father in order to blink at me in obvious bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”

I wasn’t sure whether sleepwalkers were capable of watching for an opening—if they were anything like as confused as Dr. Cale had implied, they might not be capable of anything beyond basic instinct, at least initially—but my father still took advantage of the opening when Joyce presented it to him. He lunged forward. He was fast. I was just a little bit faster. I grabbed her shoulders and yanked her hard away from him, leaving his hands to slap together on empty air with a flat, meaty sound that would haunt my dreams for days. Joyce yelped, as much with surprise as anything else, and fell over, upsetting two trays of instruments in the process. I barely managed to dodge in time to keep her from taking me to the floor with her.

The sudden flurry of movement seemed to confuse our father, who froze, his face swinging slowly toward me, then toward Joyce, and back to me again. I straightened slowly, raising my hands in front of me to show that they were empty. I don’t know what good I was expecting that to do. I wasn’t thinking particularly clearly by that point.

“Dad, you’re sick,” I said, enunciating each word as clearly as I could. “I need you to fight against whatever it is you want to do right now, and focus on the sound of my voice. There’s something we can do to help you be better, but it won’t work if you don’t focus on the sound of my voice. Can you do that for me, Dad? Can you fo—”

Without warning, he lunged. I squeaked, stopping in the middle of my sentence, and turned to run. He seemed to track by sound and motion. Joyce was frozen in terror. She wasn’t making a sound, and she wasn’t going anywhere. All I had to do was keep his eyes on me, and trust that someone would stop him before he could do something we’d both regret later.

Well. Maybe I wouldn’t regret it if he killed me. I’d be dead, after all. But I’d sure as hell regret letting myself get into this position if things got that far, in the time I had before oxygen deprivation resulted in my second clinical brain death.

I ran; my father followed. The rest of the technicians had cleared the room, which was convenient, since it meant I didn’t need to worry about leading their rampaging, somewhat addled boss into the middle of their workspace. I shoved things into his path as I tried to evade him without losing his interest. I was afraid if anyone else in the room moved or made a sound, he’d abandon chasing me in favor of going for easier prey. Prey that wasn’t running like hell, or throwing file boxes at his head.

The doors at the back of the room opened and military police flooded in, almost like they were imitating the SymboGen security guards on the day when Chave got sick. That seemed like it had happened so long ago. It seemed like it had happened yesterday. Several of them pulled their guns, and I stopped running in order to put up my hands, and yell, “No! Don’t shoot! Stun him, and get the pretzel drugs!” I was saying it wrong. I knew I was. But long words were Joyce’s thing, not mine, and I’d only heard the name of the drug once. I was frankly impressed I could remember it started with the letter “P.”

And then my father’s hands closed around my throat, and I stopped being impressed by anything, except for maybe how tight his grip was. I scrabbled at his fingers, trying to dislodge them, and couldn’t find any purchase. He was bigger than I was, he was stronger than I was, and he was going to win this one if I didn’t figure out a way to change the rules.

Dad, I’m sorry, I thought, and focused all my remaining energy on planting my foot squarely between his legs.

His response was to groan and let go of my throat, causing me to drop first to my knees and then to my ass as my legs folded up beneath me. My father didn’t seem to notice; he was too busy grasping his crotch and moaning.

I scrambled back to my feet. “It’s not too late!” I shouted. “Joyce, get the antiparasitics!”

The other sleepwalkers didn’t seem to feel or really register pain once they had fully succumbed to the parasites that were infiltrating their brains. My father still responded to extreme pain stimuli like a normal human, and that meant he hadn’t been completely taken over yet. There was still a chance that we could treat him. There was—

“Oh, my God, my balls,” he moaned.

I stopped. “Dad?”

“Wow, Daddy, great idea,” said Joyce, picking herself up off the floor. She dusted off her lab coat with the heels of her hands, scowling at our father like he had just disappointed her in some deep and profound manner. “It’s not Halloween, we’re not twelve anymore, and this isn’t how you make it clear that things are serious.”

The soldiers were standing down. Some of them even seemed to be snickering, trying to hide their amusement behind their hands. I looked from them to Joyce, my confusion growing by the second. The sound of drums was getting louder, now fueled by anger instead of by fear.

“Joyce?” I said, trying to keep my voice measured. “What’s going on here?”

“Daddy thought you might be holding out on us, since you went and disappeared for hours right after a bunch of sleepers showed up in the yard.”

He managed to gasp out something that might have been “I still think that,” or might have simply been a request for an ice pack. I ignored him either way, focusing my attention on Joyce instead. If I looked at him, I was going to be too tempted to give him another kick. The military police might think it was funny for me to attack my father when he was playing sleepwalker, but kicking him while he was down was likely to get a less positive reaction.

“So you’re saying he faked this?” I asked. My voice was sounding a lot less measured. I took a step away from my father. “He set this up to—what, scare me into giving away secrets?”

“It… worked,” gasped my father, finally pulling himself to his feet. “Why did you start asking for antiparasitics?”

“That was pretty specific,” said Joyce. She walked toward us, primly stepping around the objects I’d knocked over during my flight. I noticed that she didn’t bother picking anything up. That was apparently below her pay grade. “What would make you decide to ask for antiparasitics?”

I looked from Dad, who was still white-faced and grasping his crotch, to Joyce, who looked utterly calm. The technicians were moving back to their stations, and although security was still in the room, none of them looked like they were planning to do anything to secure anyone. It had all been a sham. It was a play to see what I would do, and while that spoke to the level of their desperation, it still infuriated me in ways I didn’t really have the words for.

“Is this why you locked me in the house and wouldn’t let me talk to Nathan for five days?” I asked. “Because you wanted me to be scared?”

“The things I said to you on the way here were true,” said my father. He was starting to sound less winded, which made me want to kick him again. “I really did want time to check for bugs, and there really were things about the news that would have made you ask questions.”

“They made Nathan ask questions,” said Joyce. “He showed up here yesterday, demanding to know if you were all right.”

I blinked. “Why would he come here?”

“Because we told him you weren’t at home, and this was the only other place you could logically be,” said my father. I turned to stare at him. He continued, “We tried telling him you’d become symptomatic, to see what he would say. He said we were lying. We’ve been trying to find him since then.”

“What?”

“He vanished, Sal,” said Joyce. “Do you know where he would go?”

Yes; back to his mother, who had answers, and who would be able to tell him whether it was possible for me to have become symptomatic so quickly, when there had been no signs that my resident implant was planning to migrate from my digestive system to my brain. Dr. Cale could hide him, keep him off the grid and keep him safe, while they figured out where I was and how to get me out. I glanced toward the security guards, wondering how many of them might be working for her, playing both sides against the middle. It was a paranoid thought, but given that my father and sister had just staged some kind of horror movie dumbshow for my benefit, paranoid didn’t seem so strange anymore.

“No,” I said, and was surprised by how sincere I sounded. “I don’t have any idea where Nathan would go, and I don’t think I want to talk to either one of you right now. I asked Dad to bring me here because I was tired of being locked in the house, and because I wanted to help. After what you did, I don’t feel like helping anymore. Being locked up is better than being here with you.”

“I’m afraid I can’t take you home until you demonstrate that test you promised to show us,” said my father. All traces of weakness were gone from his voice, and he was once again standing up straight. The jangling feeling of wrongness was still coming off him like a wave, but that might just have been my nerves reacting to the overall mood in the room.

Might. “Then I’ll call Tasha or Will to come and get me,” I said, raising my chin defiantly. My coworkers at the shelter hadn’t seen me in days. They’d be annoyed by my suddenly calling and asking for favors. They’d also be more than willing to get in the car and pick me up. They both understood why I didn’t drive, and respected it. I sometimes suspected I was just another abandoned animal to them, but in moments like this, I didn’t mind.

“No, you won’t.” My father’s voice was almost gentle, for all that it was still firm. “You won’t be able to get a cell phone signal inside here, and I’m not going to let you leave this building until you show me what you promised.”

I stared at him. “I made that promise before you pretended to be a sleepwalker and tried to strangle me,” I said.

“Desperate times can lead us to do things we’re not proud of,” he said. Joyce was a silent statue next to him, her gaze cast slightly off to one side, so that she wouldn’t have to meet my eyes.

“I want to go home.”

“Why did you ask for antiparasitics?” Dad shook his head. “I can do this as long as you can, Sal. Longer, even.”

“He could also have you arrested for withholding information from the United States military,” said Joyce.

I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was messing with me or not. Sally would have known. Sally would have seen this whole scenario as bullshit from the minute Dad loomed up outside her bedroom door—assuming Sally let herself be put under house arrest in the first place. She would probably have just vanished the minute she was told that she was in trouble, and refused to come home until the restrictions were dropped. It wasn’t very often that I wished I were still Sally. In that moment, if I could have reclaimed my memories and the girl I used to be from the ether, I would have done it without hesitation. Sally would have known what to do.

Sally wouldn’t have heard the drums.

I faltered, blinking. Why was I so sure Sally wouldn’t have heard the drums? Something was dancing on the edge of my consciousness, some combination of facts and suppositions that I couldn’t quite force together in the right order. Sally wouldn’t have heard the drums. Why wouldn’t Sally have heard the drums? What made her so special?

“Colonel Mitchell?” A guard stepped up next to my father, interrupting my train of thought before it could go any further toward a conclusion that I was increasingly sure I wasn’t going to like. All three of us turned to face the man. He was average in every possible way, average height, average build, and average face. The only thing about him that stood out was his expression. He looked worried, maybe verging on panic. Not a good sign, given the circumstances.

“What is it?” asked my father.

“There’s a disturbance in the ward.” The man glanced toward me, seemingly hesitant to continue.

“It’s all right,” said my father. “Both my daughters have the clearance to hear this.”

“Really?” I asked, despite myself.

“Sal, hush,” said my father. “Private. Report.”

“The subjects are restless, sir. They’re moving around, and some of them are in danger of hurting themselves on their restraints. We weren’t sure what to do. I was sent to find you and see if you had any ideas.” The private’s eyes cheated toward me, like he was trying to skip ahead and find out what would happen next.

I looked back at him blankly. If anyone here knew how this was going to play out, it wasn’t me.

I was so preoccupied with watching the private that I didn’t see my father move until his hand was clamping down on my shoulder again. I staggered a bit, turning to look up at him. His expression was unreadable, a blank mask.

“This sounds like the perfect opportunity for my daughter to show us what she knows,” he said. “Lead the way.”

The private’s eyes widened. He looked as alarmed as I felt. “But sir—”

“Now.”

Any concern the unnamed private might have for my safety was less powerful than the need to maintain military discipline. The private nodded, the concern not leaving his face, before he turned and led the way toward a door in the back wall. Joyce walked after him of her own accord. I didn’t, but that didn’t matter; my father’s hand was on my shoulder, propelling me toward whatever was waiting in the next room.

The private swept his key card across the electronic lock, which beeped twice before accepting his credentials and releasing. He pulled the door open for us, and held it as we walked through, into the humid, groan-filled air beyond.

The room where the sleepwalkers were being kept was like something out of a nightmare, familiar and strange all at the same time, so that I didn’t know where to look. It was large, clean, and white-walled, just like every hospital patient storage room I’d had the dubious pleasure of seeing since the day I woke up after my accident. There were no windows, but there were light boxes placed strategically around the room, creating the illusion of natural sunlight even if the sun hadn’t been inside here since construction was finished. The floor was industrial-green linoleum, easy to clean while also being easier on the eyes than the walls. Green floors encouraged the eye to track down, increasing the chances that messes would be seen before they could be accidentally tracked around the room.

I took all this in within seconds, trying to focus on the normal for as long as I could before I admitted it was absolutely in the minority within this space. This was not a normal hospital room. If it ever had been, that time was long in the past. What it was now….

I didn’t even have a name for what it was now. Short of comparing it to pictures I’d seen of tuberculosis wards—Sherman wasn’t supposed to show me those, which is probably why he did, and was definitely why I looked—I wasn’t sure something like this had ever existed before. I stopped at the threshold, digging my heels in and refusing to let my father drag me any farther.

“No,” I said, shaking my head to reinforce my words. Not that I expected it to do very much good; not with the scene that was unfolding in front of me. Whatever I could say would be just that much more noise. “No, no, no.”

“Yes,” said my father implacably, and pulled me on.

Beds filled the room, so narrow and packed so closely together that they might be better classified as “cots.” There was barely room for the technicians to move between them, adjusting IV poles and frantically tightening the leather straps holding the patients down. Every bed was occupied. The occupants came from every ethnic group. Men and women, children and adults, there seemed to be no common feature shared amongst them. Except for one:

They were all sleepwalkers. Their eyes were dead, rolling wildly or staring at nothing as they writhed against their restraints. Some of them were snapping at the air, their teeth slamming shut with such force that it was cutting their gums. Blood and drool ran down their chins, undifferentiated and unchecked. None of the technicians were getting near those snapping jaws, even as they frantically injected what I assumed had to be liquid sedatives into the patient IV bags.

One man had managed to yank a hand free from his restraints, at the cost of most of the skin on his wrist. He was flailing without any apparent purpose. The main strap holding him to the cot was buckled at his chest. He could have reached it easily and let himself go. But he didn’t. He clearly knew something was holding him down, but he wasn’t acting like he had any idea what that thing might be, or how to make it let him up.

Some of them were making sounds. Little squeaks and gasps, for the most part, although at least one of them was moaning, a low, constant noise that ebbed and rose with the moaner’s breathing. I couldn’t tell which one was making the sound, and I was glad. It would have been almost impossible to fight the urge to grab a pillow and make the moaning stop. Someone else was giggling. That was less disturbing, somehow, even though the sound was flat and without any trace of humor.

One of the technicians walked over to join us, clutching a clipboard against her chest as she approached. She stopped a few feet away, saluting my father. “Colonel Mitchell, sir,” she said.

“At ease,” said my father. “You remember my eldest daughter, Sally.”

“Of course, Colonel,” said the woman, and gave me a nod. “Hello, Sally.” If she thought it was strange that my father was taking me for a sightseeing trip in an isolation ward, she didn’t say anything about it. Being the boss apparently came with some privileges.

“Dr. Snyder, Sally is here because she may be able to demonstrate a mechanism for testing for the sleepwalking sickness,” said my father, as calmly as if everything around us was completely normal. The sleepwalkers continued to writhe against their restraints, clawing and gnashing and striking at the air as best they could. I shrank a bit farther down into myself. He couldn’t really want me to go near them, could he? To touch them?

“Colonel Mitchell, this is highly irregular. I—”

“She saw the test at SymboGen,” said Joyce. Her tone wasn’t one I’d heard before: it was the same mix of authority and arrogance that I heard from Dad when he was on the phone with his military contacts… and that I heard from Dr. Banks, when he was trying to get me to do what he wanted. It made her sound older, and scarier, like she was a part of the establishment.

Which, technically, I suppose she was.

Joyce continued: “This is the first lead we’ve had toward finding a physical sign of infection. We know these people are ill. If they show as positive on Sally’s test, we can begin testing asymptomatic individuals. This could put our preventative measures forward by a matter of weeks, if not months.”

“I don’t want to do this,” I whispered. My voice was barely audible, even to myself.

My father looked at me. There was a cold sympathy in his eyes, like he understood my dilemma, and even cared about it, but couldn’t justify doing any more than that. “I know you don’t, Sally,” he said calmly. “The trouble is, you don’t have a choice. Your country needs you.”

My country had never needed me before. I shrank down farther, the sound of drums pounding in my ears.

Dr. Snyder nodded once, accepting her orders, and asked, “What will you need?”

“Sally?”

I glanced up again and said, “A UV wand, and someone to dim the lights. Not all the way, just enough that we can see bioluminescence.”

“Of course.” Dr. Snyder turned and walked away from us, presumably to arrange for what I’d requested.

“Pick a subject, Sally,” said my father.

They’re not subjects, they’re people, I thought. I didn’t say anything. Whether they were people in the classic sense or Dr. Cale’s people who’d passed through the broken doors, becoming monsters, it didn’t matter. They were sick and confused, and they couldn’t be trusted without the restraints. They would hurt us if we let them.

I looked around the room, finally settling on a frail-looking little woman who must have been in her late eighties. “Her,” I said. If she somehow managed to get loose, it was unlikely she’d be able to do much damage before someone could get her restrained again.

My father followed the direction of my gaze, and nodded. “That’s Ms. Lawrence. She’s been here for two weeks. Her family was quite relieved when we offered to take over her care and cover her medical bills, in exchange for being allowed to study the progress of her symptoms.” I shot him a startled look. He shook his head. “No matter what you may think of our work here, Sal, we try to do right by the people who come to us. We don’t have to. Their illnesses will teach us how to prevent hundreds more, and the only way to stay sane in this job is to treat everyone who walks through that door—or is wheeled through—as if they’ve already died. But every single one of us will celebrate the day that someone is able to get up and walk out under their own power. We’re not monsters. We’re just trying to do our jobs.”

He was calling me “Sal” again. I couldn’t tell what that meant. I just shook my head and said, “I want to go home as soon as this is over.” Then I turned and walked toward Ms. Lawrence, inhaling to make myself as narrow as possible as I edged between the cots with their squirming, moaning burdens. I did my best to avoid the biters, and didn’t go anywhere near the man who had pulled his arm free. If he grabbed me… I didn’t want to die the way that Devi had.

The thought of Devi made the cold terror curl through my stomach again, winding itself around my spine. These people were dangerous. Even restrained, they were dangerous, and all of them, even the frail Ms. Lawrence, were upset. I didn’t know why. That wasn’t going to matter if they managed to break loose.

Dr. Snyder met us at Ms. Lawrence’s cot, a UV wand in her hand. “The lights will be dimmed on your order, sir,” she said, offering the wand to my father.

“Thank you,” he said. He took the wand and passed it to me. “Sally?”

“Lights, please,” I half-whispered.

“Lights!” my father repeated, much more loudly. The technicians and doctors who had been moving around the room stopped where they were, except for the few who moved toward us, apparently wanting to see what I was going to do. Someone hit a switch, and the room’s overhead and ambient lighting decreased, slowly shifting us from artificial day into artificial twilight.

“Can someone get her arm, please?” I asked, turning on the UV wand. It hummed silently in my hand, the sound translating itself into a vibration that traveled through my fingers to my wrist. I swept the wand across the front of my shirt to be sure that it was working, and watched the fabric light up like something out of a bad special effect.

“How do you want it?” asked my father, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves as he stepped past me to the moaning, barely squirming Ms. Lawrence.

“Turn it so that the top of her hand is pressed against the cot,” I said.

He did as I had asked, and everyone was silent as I passed the beam above Ms. Lawrence’s arm. As I had expected, the roots of the parasitic infection responsible for her illness showed up immediately, bright white against the dull purple of her skin. They were thinner and less robust than the roots I’d seen on Nathan’s patient, probably because Ms. Lawrence was older, and had fewer resources for the parasite to draw on.

“What in the world…?” breathed my father.

The roots twitched, seeming to respond to the light that was shining over them. They didn’t move much, but they were definitely moving toward the light.

One of the thicker roots jerked toward Joyce. She made a small squeaking noise, taking a half step backward.

“The sleepwalking sickness isn’t. I mean, it’s actually a parasite, sort of,” I said. “It’s the SymboGen implant. It’s… doing things.” I didn’t want to tell them exactly what it was doing, in part because I didn’t understand it without Dr. Cale or Nathan there to explain, and more because I didn’t trust them anymore. Yes, this was my family, and yes, they loved me, but their focus was on the public health. It had to be.

If they were willing to scare me because they thought I might know something, what would they be willing to do to Nathan and Dr. Cale? What would they do to Tansy, or to Adam? Tansy was probably a sociopath—if a tapeworm in a meat car can be a sociopath—but she didn’t deserve to become a lab animal.

And none of these people deserved to be sick. I didn’t know what to do. I only had six years of living to draw on, and it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know what to do.

From the looks on the faces around me, neither did anyone else. Joyce was the first to recover, asking, “How sure about this are you, Sal? I mean… D. symbogenesis is an intestinal parasite. It can’t spread through muscular tissue. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nature doesn’t have to make sense. Nature just does.” I moved the UV light along Ms. Lawrence’s arm, causing more of the roots to twitch and writhe away. “What kind of virus could cause this sort of a reaction? If there is one, I don’t know what it is. But you’re the ones with the medical training. Maybe I’m wrong.” I looked up, challenging them to offer another explanation.

None of them did. Instead, my father let go of Ms. Lawrence, held out his arm, and said, “Check me.”

“Dad—” Joyce began.

“Just because I’m not symptomatic, that doesn’t mean I’m not worth examining,” he said, cutting her off. “Sal, if you please?”

It had the feeling of a test. Still, I stepped toward him, holding up the UV light. “Just give me your arm.”

Next to us, Dr. Snyder was frowning at Ms. Lawrence’s unmarked skin. The roots were invisible now that the UV light was no longer shining on her. “It seems so strange that there would be no exterior signs….” she said, reaching out to touch the old woman.

What happened after that happened very quickly, and I didn’t fully understand it until later—until I’d had the time to really think, instead of just reacting.

Ms. Lawrence, who had been frail when she was committed to the care of USAMRIID, had continued to lose weight throughout her treatment; her overlarge hospital gown made that clear. They’d probably stopped tightening her restraints after a certain point, both because she seemed too weak to pose a problem, and because they didn’t want to hurt her. That’s why she was able to rip her left arm free of the straps that were meant to be holding it to the table. In a single convulsive motion, she had hold of Dr. Snyder’s throat, clamping down with a strength that I wouldn’t have thought her fingers still possessed.

Dr. Snyder flailed, knocking the UV light out of my hands. It went skidding across the floor as I stumbled back, stopping when my back hit another cot. The occupant was snarling and snapping at the air, trying to struggle free of his bonds—but either he was a more recent arrival or they had been more mindful of security where he was concerned, because his efforts to break loose were unsuccessful.

Joyce shouted something I couldn’t make out over the drums that were pounding in my ears. I jerked away from the cot that was half-supporting my weight, staggering toward the dubious safety of the wall, where at least no one would grab me. My father was bellowing for security—and that was something I understood perfectly well. He was so loud that I could hear him even through the screams, even through the endless sound of drums.

Someone grabbed my arm.

I screamed and tried to jerk away, only to have the intern who was holding me pull me roughly back, away from the sea of agitated patients. “Ms. Mitchell, please! Calm down!” he said, continuing to pull. “We need to lock this room down, and that means all civilians need to be removed.”

I was too shaken to speak, and so I just nodded, trying to force myself to breathe as I let him lead me toward the door. I glanced back. Joyce was being escorted away from the floor by another intern, and our father was still in the middle of it all, trying to pry Ms. Lawrence’s fingers off Dr. Snyder’s throat. Dr. Snyder was barely twitching as she hung limply, half supported by my father, half by the gnarled hand of the parasite-infected old woman who was crushing the life from her.

Is this what you wanted, Dr. Cale? I thought, as the sound of drums got louder and the scene started to take on a strangely unreal quality, like I was seeing it through gauze. Is this where the broken doors were supposed to lead us? There are only monsters here….

Then, as calmly as if he were waking up in his own bed at home, one of the patients sat up. The restraints that were meant to hold him down fell away as he moved, split cleanly down the middle. Either the fabric of the belts had been frayed by the stress of his constant squirming, or his body’s new driver didn’t know yet about the breaking point of flesh and bone—it wasn’t playing gently with its toys. His eyes rolled madly in his head, jaws working as he turned toward us and slid to his feet.

Someone hit an alarm. Red lights began to flash as a siren blared from hidden speakers, alerting the entire building to a breach in the medical holding area. The intern gave me another jerk, away from the man who was now advancing toward us.

“Aren’t you supposed to be armed?” I demanded. “You’re the army!”

“Ma’am, I’m not even a doctor yet! They didn’t give me a gun!” He dropped my arm. “Run!”

I turned when he did, and I ran, following him toward the nearest door. One of the flashing red lights was above it, and I saw white, terrified faces through the door’s narrow window, looking back at us from their place of safety. Then the security slammed down, the door sealing with a loud bang that sounded like every deadbolt in the world being thrown, and we were trapped.

I turned to the intern, blindly hoping he could tell me what to do, but he was already running for the corner, leaving me standing on my own. I stared after him for a few seconds—too long—before spinning and flattening my back against the door, hoping that the people on the other side would take pity and open it for me. I’d take falling on my ass over having my neck broken any day.

What I saw when I turned back to the room was a horror show. The red lights flashing overhead didn’t help; they painted the whole scene bloody, making it look like we were in the middle of a slaughter. And then the jerkily moving sleepwalker somehow caught up to the first of the interns—and how could he move so fast, he wasn’t used to having a body, he shouldn’t have known how to make it work so well, he shouldn’t have been so fast—and grabbed her by the shoulders, burying his teeth in her throat. She screamed, a high, shrill sound that somehow rose above the alarms for a single horrifying second before it stopped as abruptly as it had started, cut off by the severing of her trachea. The cessation of the sound should have seemed like a mercy. Would have seemed like a mercy, even, if it hadn’t been followed by the sudden red gush of arterial blood that poured from the wound his teeth had made.

As for the sleepwalker, he stood there for a few moments, swaying, clutching the twitching, half-dead intern like a teddy bear. Then his arms unlocked, and she fell limply to the ground as he straightened and looked around the room for another target.

The drums were pounding in my ears again. I pressed myself harder against the closed door, praying that his gaze wouldn’t fall on me. Please don’t see me, I thought. Please, please don’t see me. I’m sorry I kept secrets from my father. I’m sorry I didn’t tell him everything Dr. Cale told me. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry….

The swaying sleepwalker’s gaze fell on me, a sudden sharpness coming into his eyes. I swallowed, glancing frantically around for a place to run. Ms. Lawrence was still latched onto Dr. Snyder’s throat. Dad was no longer trying to pry her loose. Instead, he had pulled the gun from his belt and backed away two steps, taking careful aim on the seemingly frail old woman with the unbreakable grip.

I wanted to look away when he pulled the trigger.

I couldn’t.

Ms. Lawrence collapsed in a bloody heap, just like the intern whose throat had been ripped out by the man who was now advancing on my position. Dr. Snyder collapsed as well, crumpling to the floor. My father, with his first and most immediate crisis handled, turned to scan the room. I wasn’t screaming; he didn’t know where I was, and he had two daughters to worry about, not just one. So maybe it shouldn’t have felt like such a betrayal when he turned away from me, scanning the far side of the room for Joyce before he did anything else.

But it did.

I didn’t have much time to dwell on it. One of the security guards who’d been locked in with us when USAMRIID decided to close the doors finally shook off her shock, drawing her own weapon and advancing on the standing sleepwalker.

“Put your hands up and stay where you are,” she commanded, her words barely audible above the roar of the sirens and the pounding of the drums.

They were audible enough to catch the sleepwalker’s attention. His head swiveled slowly toward her, and the rest of his body followed suit. Each movement seemed to take an eon, but he had fully turned before she could take another two steps. He made a strange growling sound, baring his teeth at her. Blood and strands of flesh coated them, making the gesture even more horrifying.

The guard was smart enough to stop moving and hold her ground, bracing her drawn pistol against the heel of her free hand for stability. “Do not move,” she said, more loudly than before.

Too loudly. In the chaos, no one had been paying much attention to the sleepwalkers who were still bound, preferring to focus on the immediate threats presented by Ms. Lawrence and the bloody-faced man. The shortsightedness of this approach was made horribly apparent as two more of the supposedly secure patients abruptly sat up on their cots. One of them was right behind the guard.

She didn’t even have time to scream before her throat was crushed. But I had time to scream. I had plenty of time to scream, and so I did, long and loud. It was enough to carry over both the sirens and the pounding of the drums.

Every head in the room turned toward me. The three sleepwalkers who were currently free of their restraints repeated the bloody man’s strange full-body turn, their shoulders following their heads like they hadn’t figured out how to work them independently yet. I screamed again. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Sally!” shouted Joyce from the other side of the room. I glanced in her direction. Her wide, terrified eyes stood out even in the red-washed room, making her seem younger than she really was. She couldn’t save me. She knew it, and as I looked into her face, so did I.

“Sal!” bellowed our father, and began wading through the tethered sleepwalkers, kicking and shoving their cots out of the way. I wanted to tell him not to do that; I wanted to point out that three of them had already broken loose—four, if you counted Ms. Lawrence. But there were no words left in me. There was only screaming.

Then the sleepwalkers, all three of them, stopped moving. Their blank gazes fell on me, seeming to have an almost physical weight. The sirens faded to nothingness as the drums got even louder, hammering in my ears until my whole head was pounding. There was an air of unreality to the whole scene, like I was dreaming.

Please let me be dreaming, I thought.

Then the man with the bloody chin opened his mouth, sighed, and moaned, “Sah-lee.”

As with Chave before him, he seemed almost physically hurt by the act of saying my name, like those two syllables had been ripped out of his throat. He took a step forward, dead eyes remaining fixed on my face.

“Sah-lee,” he repeated.

The other sleepwalkers took up the chant, each of them saying my name in the same broken way. They weren’t speaking in unison. That would almost have been better. It wouldn’t have forced me to acknowledge how many of them there were. Even the ones who were still strapped down joined in the horrible chorus, some speaking so slowly they were barely comprehensible, while others sounded like normal people.

I stopped screaming and stared at the sleepwalkers. My father was shouting somewhere in the room, his words drowned out by their slow, droning syllables and the pounding of the drums. Somehow, the drums were louder than the sirens and quieter than those broken, disconnected voices at the same time. It didn’t make any sense.

Nothing made any sense.

The sleepwalker at the head of the group took another step toward me. “Sah-lee,” he said, the syllables sounding less like moans and more like speech with every instant that passed. He sounded… sad.

I blinked at him, trying to make sense of it all. The sirens blared, beginning to make themselves heard again above the pounding of the drums. The red light bathed everything in a ruby glow, like something out of a fairy tale. I took a breath, unsure whether I was going to answer him or start screaming again.

The bullet hole that suddenly appeared in the middle of his forehead answered the question for me. I screamed again, and I kept screaming while my father rushed across the room, gunning down the other loose sleepwalkers in the process.

I was still screaming when the last of the sleepwalkers hit the floor. Then the door behind me finally banged open, and soldiers shoved me out of the way as they rushed into the room with tranquilizer guns in their hands. My father gathered me into his arms, barking orders and directing men with sharp waves of the hand that held his gun. I kept screaming. It seemed like the most sensible thing to do. It seemed like the only thing to do.

The needle bit into the side of my neck, and I kept screaming until the darkness, and the sound of drums, reached up to take me down.

Everything after that was silence.

-

Chapter 16 AUGUST 2027

The sound of drums.

But hadn’t the drums stopped? I was sure they had… and as soon as I thought that, it became true. The drums stopped, the red turned to black, and the warmth turned to coldness. I woke up alone in the dark, opening my eyes and squinting into the shadows as I tried to figure out where I was.

All I found was more darkness, and a growing sense of dread.

The dread intensified when I tried to sit up and discovered that I was strapped to the unfamiliar surface beneath me. I froze, suddenly, horribly convinced I’d been hallucinating when I heard the sleepwalkers saying my name before. I’d been undergoing my own conversion, that was all, and the syllables that sounded like my name were really moans, translated into words by my own damaged ears as my implant devoured my mind, my self, everything that was me—

I made a strangled squeaking sound, feeling hot tears rise burning to my eyes. The sound wasn’t a moan, and that was more of a relief than I could have imagined. Besides, argued a small, logical part of me, if I’d been succumbing to the sleepwalking sickness, I wouldn’t be here to worry about it, now would I? Sally Mitchell would be gone, replaced by a confused tapeworm in a body it didn’t understand or know how to operate.

At some point between leaving my house and waking up alone in the dark, I’d stopped questioning what Dr. Cale had explained to me. It made too much sense when I held it up to the situation. Frankly, it was the only thing that made sense.

Anyone with a SymboGen implant was in danger. Anyone with a SymboGen implant was a danger, to themselves and to others. Nausea rolled in my gut, intensified by the ongoing knowledge that I was strapped down. If I threw up, I was going to be lying in it until someone came and let me up. But the thought that I might have a tapeworm laying siege to my brain, my self, was just too horrifying to put aside.

There was another thought beneath that. It was even worse than the idea of the siege. I buried it more firmly, trying to dwell on the more understandable horror. And I did understand what Dr. Cale was claiming she, Dr. Banks, and Dr. Jablonsky had done. I wasn’t a doctor, and I wasn’t a scientist, but I wasn’t stupid, and I learn quickly. So I understood, even if there was no way I could have re-created her work, or even explained the fine nuance to someone who hadn’t been present for her explanation. It wasn’t until the containment ward at USAMRIID that I started to fully believe her, and to accept what her actions meant.

My throat was dry. At least the room was silent; no sirens, no moaning, and no distant sound of drums. I licked my lips to moisten them, and said, “H-hello? This is Sally Mitchell. I’m not sick. Please, is anyone there? Please, can you come and untie me? I want to get up. I’m not sick. Please.” That didn’t seem like enough. I tried to count how many times I’d used the word “please,” how many times I’d said I wasn’t sick. It didn’t seem like enough. It didn’t seem like anything could possibly be enough. “I’m not sick,” I whispered, just once more.

“The sedatives you were given can have some unpleasant side effects, including increased salivation and sensitivity to light,” said my father’s voice, clear and firm and reassuringly familiar. It also sounded like he was speaking from somewhere inside the room—but that wasn’t possible. He was a quiet man, but I would have been able to hear him breathing in the absolute silence that had greeted me when I first woke up.

“Dad?” I said, craning my neck to peer into the blackness. I couldn’t see anything. That didn’t stop me from looking. “Where are you? Why am I strapped down?”

“It was a precaution in case you woke disoriented,” he said. He made it sound like it was a perfectly reasonable step to take. “Can you please say your full name?”

“Sally Mitchell. Can you untie me now?”

“Your full name.” His tone was gentle, like he was trying to prompt a recalcitrant child.

Anger began to gather in my chest, overwhelming the lingering nausea. “That is my full name,” I half said, half snapped. “I go by ‘Sal.’ Remember?”

“What’s your middle name, Sally?”

My middle name? My mind went blank. I didn’t remember having a middle name, much less being told what it was. No, wait—that wasn’t right. I had a middle initial. It appeared on all the official paperwork that SymboGen sent to the house. “It starts with ‘R,’” I said, slowly. “I know that. Is it Rebecca? Rachel?” I paused, trying to think of other names that started with the letter “R.” Finally, I ventured, “Rose?”

“Your middle name is Rae, Sally. Sally Rae Mitchell.”

I considered his words. Nothing about them was familiar. Still, it seemed best not to argue with him, not if I wanted to get out of here. “Fine, my middle name is Rae,” I said. “Now will you untie me?”

“What day is it?”

That was the last straw. The anger that had been gathering in my chest blossomed like a poisonous flower, and I was suddenly shouting at the darkness, hoping my words were at least somewhat aimed at the father I couldn’t see. “I don’t know, Dad, because I don’t know how long it’s been since you sedated me! And before that, I had sort of stopped paying attention, since you had me under house arrest! Now will you stop asking me stupid questions and let me out of here? I’m not sick, I’m not a lab experiment, and I’m not happy about the way you keep treating me!”

There was a click. An intercom had just been turned off somewhere in the room. My anger withered as quickly as it had bloomed, replaced by the sudden fear that my rant had been the last piece needed to convince them there was something seriously wrong with me. I couldn’t remember my middle name; I shouted at my own father. Clearly, I had to be sick.

Except that I wasn’t sick. I felt perfectly fine. And I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to convince anyone else of that.

A door opened in the far wall of what was suddenly revealed to be a small room, much like the changing room that I’d used when we first arrived at the facility. A broad-shouldered silhouette appeared in the light. My father. I couldn’t let myself be relieved—not quite yet, no matter how much I wanted to—and so I just squinted at him, refusing to allow myself to speak until I had some idea of what he was going to do next.

“I need you to close your eyes for a moment,” he said. “I’m turning on the lights, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“Dad—” I couldn’t help myself. The word just slipped out, all fear and longing hanging in the air between us.

He sighed. “Just trust me, all right? Just for a few more minutes. Please.”

It wasn’t easy. It wouldn’t have been easy before he pretended to be a sleepwalker just to see what I would do. I still forced myself to squeeze my eyes shut, turning my head to the side in case the lights were bright enough to shine through my eyelids.

Instead of the expected brilliance, what I got was heat, shining on me from either side of the room. Startled, I turned back toward the door and opened my eyes, finding that my father was only slightly more visible than he’d been before. The room was still in almost total darkness, illuminated only by the two banks of UV lights positioned to either side of my cot. They were glowing a soft purple, turning the small hairs on my arms and the pops of cotton on the front of my scrubs an ethereal shade of raver-girl blue white.

“What?” I said.

“She’s clean,” called a voice from the hall, and the UV lights flicked off. The darkness seemed even deeper this time, despite the open door.

“Close your eyes again, Sally,” said my father, and stepped into the room.

I obliged, not wanting to do anything to delay his releasing me. A few seconds later, white light flooded my eyelids, making every vein in the thin skin perfectly visible. I waited a few seconds more before squinting through my lashes, watching my father as he approached.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“You showed us the test,” he said, beginning to unbuckle the strap that was holding my chest and arms to the cot. “We simply put it into a more immediately implementable form.”

I didn’t ask why USAMRIID just happened to have banks of UV lights around their facility, waiting to be used as an early parasite-detection system. They were a major military research center. If something had a potential medical application, I was sure it was somewhere in the building. Instead, I waited for my father to finish undoing the straps, then sat up, watching him warily. He took a step back from the cot, spreading his hands as if to show me they were empty. I appreciated the gesture more than I wanted to.

“Well?” I asked. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

He sighed. “Sally, I know you’re angry, but—”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes.” He straightened, all traces of apology leaving his eyes. “All the patients who survived the… incident… demonstrated clear signs of infection when put under UV lights. So did three of our researchers. They’re in quarantine now, while we figure out how to proceed.”

I suddenly realized who was missing from the room. My eyes widened as I looked at him. “Joyce?” I asked.

He looked away.

I closed my eyes. “Oh, crap.”

“She’s only showing some very preliminary signs. We may be able to stop the infection from progressing, now that we know what we’re dealing with. We’ve started her on a course of antiparasitics.” I opened my eyes in time to see a small smile twisting his lips, utterly insincere, but clearly meant to comfort me. “She’ll be fine.”

“No.” I shook my head. “She won’t. You don’t—she won’t be fine.” I slid off my cot, getting my feet back under myself.

“Sally? Where are you going?”

“I need a phone.” What I was about to do might cause problems for a lot of people, but I couldn’t let my sister die. I couldn’t. “There’s someone I need to call.”

“Sally—”

“You asked me to trust you, Dad. Now I’m asking you to trust me. Please. Isn’t Joyce’s life worth it?”

Slowly—very slowly—he nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get you to a phone.”

They weren’t willing to leave me alone while I called Nathan. I didn’t know how many people had actually died during the incident in the lab, but it was enough that the survivors were edgy and inclined to twitch when anyone made any sudden movements. Dad followed me into the small office, where two armed guards stood to either side of a manual telephone.

Feeling oddly like I had somehow tripped and fallen into a spy movie, I picked up the receiver and dialed the number for the San Francisco City Hospital. An electronic receptionist came on, prompting me to tell her who I was calling and what I needed. I selected the options for Parasitology and dialed Nathan’s extension.

“Please be at work,” I whispered. “Please oh please oh please be at work….” I didn’t have the number for Dr. Cale’s lab. If he was still with her, still hiding, I’d have no way of reaching him. I’d have no way of helping Joyce.

The phone clicked. “San Francisco City Hospital, Dr. Kim speaking.”

Relief made my knees go weak. I grabbed the edge of the desk for balance. “Nathan, it’s me.”

“Sal?” His voice spiked upward as he said my name, tone clearly broadcasting how worried he’d been—and how worried he still was. “Where are you? Are you all right? Your father told me… well, it doesn’t matter.”

I shot a glare at my father and said, “He was lying. I’ve been grounded.”

“Grounded?” Now Nathan sounded confused.

“Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to let SymboGen security into the house. They bugged the place, and so my father put me under house arrest. He didn’t want to risk me saying anything where the transmitters might pick it up.”

“But that’s….” Nathan caught himself. “No. That’s not irrational. I don’t think anything is irrational anymore. But Sal—where are you now?”

“I’m at USAMRIID. I got my father to take me to work in exchange for showing him SymboGen’s test for the sleepwalking sickness.” I took a breath. “Joyce is getting sick, Nathan. How do I kill the implant? I mean, really kill it, for absolutely certain? I don’t think the normal antiparasitics are going to cut it.”

There was a brief silence from the other end of the line before he said slowly, “No, I don’t suppose they are. What are they already using?”

“Let me ask.” I lowered the receiver, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece with my hand. “Dad? What are you treating Joyce with?”

“Praziquantel,” he said.

I turned back to the phone. “Did you get that?”

“I did. And it’s a good start. Sal, tell them to add pyrimethamine and sulfadiazine. That should take care of the toxoplasma aspects of the parasite.”

“I don’t know how to pronounce those.”

Nathan sighed. “I’m sorry. Repeat after me. P-Y-R—” He spelled out both drugs carefully, and I repeated the letters as he said them. When he was done, I looked to my father for confirmation that he knew what Nathan was asking for.

He nodded. I turned back to the phone.

“If that’s the toxo, what about the rest?” The SymboGen implant had DNA from multiple sources, including human. I wasn’t sure what it would take to actually kill one. I was absolutely sure that we would lose Joyce if we didn’t figure it out, and fast.

“Let me… okay, just let me make a few calls,” he said. “Can I call USAMRIID and reach you?”

“Yes,” I said, looking straight at my father. “If you call USAMRIID in the next thirty minutes, you can reach me. After that, I want you to come and pick me up, please. I think we’re going to come and stay with you for a few days.”

Nathan’s apartment probably hadn’t been bugged by SymboGen—and even if they’d somehow made it into the building, the jammers in Don’t Go Out Alone would be able to keep them from picking up anything useful. His apartment didn’t normally allow pets, but they were already making an exception for Devi and Katherine’s bulldog, Minnie. Beverly could come with me, and I’d just take her to work during the day if she and Minnie didn’t get along. The shelter wouldn’t mind. What’s one more dog amongst the pack? I just needed to know that Joyce was going to be okay, and then I wanted to get the hell away from my family, who thought that it was reasonable to lock me up for days without an explanation, lie to me to see what I would do, and treat me like a child who didn’t know how to take care of herself.

I might only have six years of experience behind me, but I knew enough to know that I deserved better than that.

“You and Beverly are always welcome here,” said Nathan.

“Thank you. Hurry?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said solemnly. “I love you, Sal. Stay safe.”

“I love you, too,” I said, and hung up the phone. My father was looking at me impassively, his expression not giving away anything of what he thought. I did my best to look as blank as he did, and said, “Nathan’s going to check a few things, and then he’s going to call me back. After that, he’s going to come and pick me up.”

“And do you think I’ll be letting you leave with him?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, still keeping my face schooled into careful neutrality. “I’m an adult. Fuck the legal guardianship: I can leave if I want to. These last few days—these last few hours—haven’t really made me think that it’s safe for me to stay.”

“So you’ll just go?” Dad’s eyes darkened, his brows lowering until it looked like he was on the verge of scowling. “Your sister is sick.”

“That’s why I’m still here. I want to help. But Dad, it’s pretty clear you don’t trust me. I don’t know why. I think I’ve always tried to be a good daughter. I’m smart enough to realize that after you’ve locked me in my room, lied to me about your own medical condition, and strapped me to a table in the dark while refusing to tell me what’s going on… maybe you don’t have my best interests at heart.” My eyes were starting to burn with tears I wasn’t going to allow myself to shed. For once, I would have welcomed the sound of drums.

“I could have you both arrested for withholding information,” he said. There was a new chill in his voice, a coldness I’d heard before, but never directed at me. It was the tone he sometimes took when he was on the phone with work, or with the men from SymboGen who called to ask if I could come in for tests between my scheduled appointments.

“You can, yeah, but we’re not withholding the information that can help Joyce. I already told you how to adjust her treatment. Do you really want to put your own daughter in jail because you think I might know something I haven’t shared yet? Not because you know. Because you suspect, and you’re grasping at straws now.” I lifted my chin, challenging him. “Is that a step you’re ready to take, Dad?”

“If I knew for sure that you had any information worth having, I would take that step,” he said quietly. “Please believe me. If I let you leave with Nathan, and I find out the two of you have been withholding anything I might have been able to use, I will arrest you both.”

I thought of Dr. Cale and her lab; of Tansy and Adam, who almost certainly qualified as something he would have been able to use. And I nodded. “I do believe you. But right now, there’s nothing else we can tell you. We just know some stuff about the structure of the parasite because Nathan’s a parasitologist, and he got hold of some development notes that actually made sense to him.” That was true enough, and it was even believable, to some degree.

“We have all the publicly available development notes,” said my father. “Why has Dr. Kim been able to make sense of them if no one else has?”

The fact that he was using Nathan’s last name was a warning. My boyfriend was moving out of protected status, and into “potentially useful.” Trying hard not to reveal my anxiety, I said, “He was watching some old lectures of Dr. Cale’s, from before the IPO. Some of the things she said made him realize he was looking at the genome all wrong. I don’t really understand the science, but what he said was that the SymboGen implants aren’t based as much on tapeworms as they always told us they were.”

“We know they contain other genetic material; it’s in the documentation.” My father sounded almost dismissive now, like there was nothing I could say about the science that he wouldn’t already know.

My cheeks burned as blood rushed to my face, hot on the heels of irritation. “Did the documentation tell you the implants contain material from Toxoplasma gondii?” I asked.

The two guards who flanked the phone hadn’t spoken since we arrived. Now one of them jumped, his grip on his rifle shifting so that the gun clanked against the edge of the desk.

I glanced to them and then back to my father, who was staring at me in what looked very much like shock. “Didn’t you know that?” I asked. “You just said that it was in the documentation.”

“That’s not possible,” he said.

“Dad, we’re talking about genetically engineered tapeworms SymboGen somehow managed to convince the whole world to voluntarily infect themselves with. I don’t think we get to call anything impossible anymore.” I shook my head. “There’s toxoplasma in the implants. That’s how they can colonize the brain so well. They know how to do it, even if they don’t know they know.”

The two soldiers were both staring at me now, and so was my father. Something about the weight of their gazes made me deeply uncomfortable. I took a half step backward, putting a little more distance between us. “So what you’re telling me, Sally, is that these worms can get into anyone’s brain, and they were built that way? They were designed that way? Do you understand what that would mean?”

“No,” I said, with complete honesty. “I barely understand what toxoplasma is, except that it’s a parasite that really, really likes the brain, and is really, really hard to kill, which is probably why they used it. Tapeworms are pretty easy to kill, aren’t they?”

“Until they get into the brain,” said my father darkly.

There was something in his eyes I couldn’t stand to look at, and was terrified of understanding. I looked away.

“Sal….”

Somehow, having him say my name and not his dead daughter’s didn’t help. I shook my head. “I don’t want to think about that,” I said. “Joyce will be fine. She has to be.”

He wasn’t looking that way because of Joyce. I wasn’t scared because of Joyce. But neither of us was ready to deal with what that look really meant. Maybe we were both hoping we’d never have to.

The phone rang. I was reaching for it when my father stepped crisply in front of me, snatching the receiver from its cradle. “Colonel Mitchell,” he said by way of greeting.

There was a pause as he listened to the person on the other end.

Then: “Yes. Put him through.”

“Is it Nathan?” I asked, before I could think better of it.

He glanced my way, pressing the forefinger of his free hand against his lips in a signal for me to be quiet. “Yes, Sally’s here. No, you may not speak to her. Whatever you need us to know, you can explain it to me.” There was another pause before he said, “Dr. Kim, I am speaking as a representative of the United States military when I say you will tell me what I want to know before I tell you anything further about my daughter.”

The next pause was longer. Finally, my father said, “Intramuscular praziquantel? Are you certain?” Another pause. “Son, you’re asking me to inject the patient with antiparasitics. I think you owe me an explanation as to why.”

Please, Nathan, be careful, I thought, locking my hands together to keep myself from making another grab at the phone. Whatever you tell him, you have to be careful. If Nathan wanted to tell my father about his mother’s involvement with all this, that was his decision… but if he didn’t do it the right way, I wasn’t going to be going anywhere with him, and he might wind up leading a military retrieval team to Dr. Cale’s lab before the sun came up.

Finally, my father said, almost grudgingly, “Well, yes, that does make medical sense, and I suppose the risks of intramuscular praziquantel are substantially outweighed by the risks of not reaching the parasite in time. Thank you for your assistance, Dr. Kim.” He thrust the receiver unceremoniously toward me. “Your boyfriend wants to talk to you. Privates Dowell and Fabris will see you back to the main lab when you’re finished.” Pressing the receiver into my hand, he turned on his heel and strode out of the room, presumably on his way to tell the doctors responsible for Joyce’s treatment how to adjust her medication.

A pang of guilt lanced through me as I realized that if those treatments worked, the doctors would probably also use them on the sleepwalkers. After all, medicine was medicine, and saving lives was important. But the people who originally owned those bodies were gone, and the tapeworms that had taken them over had as much of a right to live as anyone else. Didn’t they? They’d been acting out of instinct, and because they wanted lives of their own, not out of malice. It was still theft. The thought of infection terrified me. But once those bodies were stolen….

It was apparently a day for revelations. I was actually starting to understand Dr. Cale’s point of view.

Fighting the urge to start shuddering, I raised the phone to my ear. “Nathan?”

“Sal.” He sounded relieved. “Are you all right?”

I smiled, allowing my own relief to show. “Is that how we’re going to start all conversations from now on?”

“Until you stop getting yourself into situations where I have to worry about your safety, yes. It absolutely is.” Nathan sighed. “Is your father there?”

“No. He went to supervise Joyce’s medication. He left me with two soldiers to make sure I made it back to where I’m supposed to be, though.” I offered the privates who were guarding me a little wave with my free hand. They didn’t wave back. “Are you coming to get me?”

“I’m already on my way. I should be there in about ten minutes.”

Now that I was listening for it, I could hear the faint sounds of traffic behind his voice. He was driving. He was coming to get me. My knees went weak with relief. I gripped the desk, and said, “We need to go back to the house. I want to get some things, and Beverly, before I go to your place. I should probably also leave a note for Mom.” I had no idea what it was going to say. It still seemed like the right thing to do.

“And you’re all right?”

“What?”

“I keep asking you if you’re all right because you keep not answering me. Are you all right?”

“I….” I hesitated, looking first to the two privates, and then to the open office door. Dad was somewhere in the building, talking to the doctors who were going to try to save my sister from sharing the fate of the sleepwalkers who had killed Dr. Snyder and that intern in front of me. They might have a right to live. But so did Dr. Snyder. So did the woman in the white lab coat.

So did Devi.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Just come and get me, Nathan. Just get me away from here before I have to figure it out.”

“I’ll be right there,” he promised.

The line went dead, a dial tone sounding dully in my ear. I dropped the receiver carefully back into its cradle, turning my attention to the two men assigned to watch over me. “Please take me to my father now,” I said. “I want to see how my sister is doing.”

“Yes, Miss Mitchell,” said one of them—I didn’t know which one was Private Dowell and which one was Private Fabris, and I didn’t really care. I was never going to see these men again. That wasn’t how things like this worked out.

I followed them out of the office.

Not one of us paused to turn out the light. After everything that had happened that day, somehow the shadows had lost their appeal.

The soldiers led me to a hallway where my father stood talking to a small cluster of men in lab coats with an oddly military cut. USAMRIID doctors, the real kind, not the interns from the containment lab or the enlisted men who sometimes served as security. There were three of them, all looking very serious, like this was an exam that they were afraid of failing.

Through the window behind them, I could see Joyce and three other people, all still awake and clearly alert, watching the nurses who adjusted their IV drips with trained hands. Joyce glanced in my direction and froze, eyes widening. Her mouth moved. I shook my head. I could barely read words on a page. Reading lips was a bit beyond me.

“Colonel Mitchell,” said one of my escorts. “Do you have any further instructions, sir?”

My father turned to face us. He looked tired, but he didn’t scowl when he saw me. That was something, anyway. “My daughter’s boyfriend should be arriving in the visitors’ lot soon,” he said. “His name is Dr. Nathan Kim. Please escort him to the main entry and wait there for my word.”

“Yes, sir,” said the two men, and saluted before turning and heading back the way we’d come. They didn’t say goodbye to me. I guess I didn’t matter anymore, now that I was no longer their assignment.

“Sally.” My father gestured for me to come closer to the glass. Unsure of what else to do, I came. He pointed to where Joyce was lying strapped to her own cot, watching us. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I arrived. “Her symptoms haven’t progressed, but they haven’t improved. Are you sure there’s nothing you aren’t telling us?”

There was so much I wasn’t telling them that I wasn’t sure where I would begin to explain. The one thing I could think of that might be relevant was one that hopefully they already knew, and so I said, in a halting voice, “You know the implants have some human DNA in them, don’t you…?”

“Yes.” His expression hardened as he stole a glance of his own toward Joyce. “That’s part of what makes treatment so difficult. Most of the things that we know would kill the SymboGen implant have to reach it first, which means injection. But if you inject something that attacks human DNA into a human, you stand a very good chance of killing the patient along with the parasite.” And he didn’t want to kill Joyce, or even risk it.

I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to kill Joyce, either. “Dad….” I said, and paused before continuing, forcing the words out one by one: “If this is in the brain, is there any point in treating people that are already all the way gone? Aren’t they just going to… well, aren’t they just going to die if you take away the thing that’s keeping them alive?”

“First you tell me the SymboGen implants are somehow infiltrating human brains, and then you ask me whether we can let those implants keep the brains they’ve taken over.” His attention swung back to me. “I can’t believe you’d even say that. Of course we’ll treat those people. They deserve the dignity of a peaceful death, rather than living on under the control of some inhuman thing.”

His glare was hot enough to make my skin crawl. I took a step backward, once again wishing for the comforting pounding of the drums. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Dad paused. Then he sighed, rubbing one hand across his face, and said, “I’m sorry, too, Sal. I don’t mean to take things out on you. I know none of this is your fault.”

“Colonel—” began one of the doctors. My father shot him a look, and he quieted, lowering the hand he’d been about to gesture with.

My father turned his attention back to me. “Are you sure you want to go off with Nathan? Your mother won’t be very happy to have one daughter in the hospital and the other with her boyfriend.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “If SymboGen is trying to bug the house because I’m in it, it’s best if I’m not there while Joyce is recovering. That would just make things worse. And I have some things I need to get straightened out in my head. I should be away until I can finish doing that.”

“If this is about our grounding you….” He looked briefly, profoundly uncomfortable. It made me want to hug him and scream at him at the same time. What else could it possibly be about?

And I was tired, and I was done. “It is, yes,” I said. “It’s also about everything else. It’s about you lying to me, and scaring me, and deciding that you don’t have to treat me like an adult when it’s not convenient for you. None of that was fair, and I don’t want to risk you deciding to do it again. This is something I have to do. I’d like it if you would understand that.” Because I’m doing it either way. “And when all this is over, we’re dissolving your guardianship.”

“All right, Sal. All right.” He sighed, looking toward Joyce one more time. “I’ll let you know how her recovery goes. Hopefully, she’ll start responding to the treatment that you and Nathan have recommended. I wouldn’t be taking those suggestions if we weren’t so desperate.”

“I know that.”

“I do love you. No matter what may have happened, or what may happen, I do love you.”

“I know that, too, Dad,” I said—and I did know it, no matter how many problems I had with him. I had questioned a lot of things about my parents. I had never wondered whether they loved me. Something occurred to me then, and I asked, “Can I borrow the car keys? I’ll send them back with whoever walks me out.” Because it wasn’t going to be him, not with Joyce strapped to a cot and being treated to prevent tapeworms from taking over her brain.

My father raised an eyebrow. “What do you need from the car?”

“My bag.”

“Can’t I just give it back to you when you come home?”

That would give him time to figure out that the book jammed tracking signals. I didn’t know the answer, but whatever it was, it would probably point him back to Dr. Cale, and I didn’t want to do that. Besides which, I wasn’t going back to SymboGen voluntarily, and having a way to hide from them would be a big help. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I need it now.”

“Fine. But I won’t give you the keys. I’m walking you to the car myself.” My surprise must have shown in my face, because he smiled, and said, “There’s nothing I can do for Joyce right now, and standing here staring at her isn’t going to make her get better any faster. I should make sure you get on your way safely before I do anything else.”

Gratitude swept over me, feeling too big to be put into words. So I just nodded, and stepped off to one side as he turned and muttered instructions to the doctors who would presumably be monitoring Joyce’s condition in his absence. I stole glances at my sister through the window. She was staring up at the ceiling, jaw set in the firm line that meant she was terrified and refusing to let herself cry. Joyce could seem silly sometimes, but she was always stronger than she thought she was. She would come through this.

Assuming the treatments worked. Assuming it wasn’t already too late, and the implant hadn’t already worked too much of itself into her brain. Assuming—

“They were saying her name, Colonel.” The unfamiliar voice dragged my attention back into the present. I turned to see one of the doctors glaring at my father, frustration and confusion writ large across his features. “You can’t pretend this isn’t relevant. The implications—”

“The implications are that these people can mimic sounds, no matter how advanced their illnesses, which tells me there’s still hope to save them,” said my father. “Please continue the treatment, and keep me apprised of any progress. Sal, come with me. You’ll need to change back into your street clothes before you leave here.”

“Coming, Dad,” I said, and followed him as he walked down the hall.

Maybe it was because I didn’t spend enough time at USAMRIID—or any time, really, when I could avoid it—but the layout of the building didn’t make any sense to me. Hallways joined and split according to no logical pattern, sometimes leading into large open spaces that then proceeded to blend seamlessly back into more hallways. I hurried to keep up with my father’s longer steps, unwilling to let myself be separated from him in those endless halls. I would never have been able to find my own way out.

Finally, we reached a somewhat familiar door, which he opened with a swipe of his key card to reveal the antechamber connecting the male and female changing rooms. He walked to the female changing-room door, unlocking it with another swipe. “I’ll wait here for you,” he said.

I ducked straight into the room, quietly unsurprised when I opened the locker holding my clothes and saw that everything had been neatly folded. Someone had been through my things, probably while I was unconscious in the lab. I stripped off my scrubs, trying not to be disturbed by the invasion of my privacy. It wasn’t like there was anything for them to find.

My clothes wouldn’t lead them to Dr. Cale, or tell them about Tansy and Adam. We were still okay. I kept that thought firmly in mind as I got dressed. There was a bruise on the side of my neck, where the needle had been shoved in a bit too hard in the process of sedating me. I touched the spot and hissed between my teeth, wondering why they hadn’t bothered with a gauze pad.

Oh, well. That was the least of my problems. I checked my reflection in the locker’s built-in mirror, making sure that I looked at least halfway presentable. Then I turned to go back to where my father was waiting.

He’d been joined by one of the two soldiers from earlier, who looked up almost guiltily when I emerged. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Miss Mitchell, your ride is here.”

“Oh, good.” I looked to my father. “I just need to get my stuff from the car, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, still sounding like he wasn’t entirely happy about the idea. “Private Dowell, you may return to your post.”

“Sir, yes sir,” said the soldier, saluting him. My father saluted back, and Private Dowell turned to head for the door, his duty discharged.

“Come along, Sal,” said my father, starting for the exit.

I followed him to the front door and out into the dim light of the evening. The sun was setting over the San Francisco Bay, turning everything the same red as the emergency lights in the lab, and Nathan’s car was cozied up to the sidewalk, with Nathan himself standing in front of it.

He started to move when he saw us, and I motioned for him to stay where he was. He stopped, light glinting off his glasses and masking the confusion that I knew was there. I made a “wait” sign with my hand, and followed my father to his car. He unlocked the doors, and I retrieved my bag from under the seat. I didn’t realize until my fingers found the strap just how afraid I’d been that it wasn’t going to be there. The staff at USAMRIID had gone through my locker. There was nothing to stop them from going through the car.

Nothing, except maybe for a father who really did want what was best for me, even if he didn’t know what that was. I slung the bag over my shoulder as I straightened, and turned to throw my arms around his neck.

“I love you, Dad,” I said.

He sighed. “I love you, too, Sal.”

I let go and ran toward Nathan’s car, so anxious to be out of there that I almost didn’t stop when I heard my father shouting, “Wait!” behind me. But he was letting me go, and so I owed it to him to at least pause. I stopped, turning, and waited to hear what he had to say.

He just looked at me for a long moment. Then, barely loud enough for me to hear, he said, “Goodbye, Sally.”

“Bye, Dad,” I said, and turned away, walking to the car where Nathan waited. He opened the door for me. I got in, and watched through the windshield as he walked around to the driver’s side. Then he took his own seat, and together, we drove away into the bloody sunset.