Symbiont

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Chapter 4 SEPTEMBER 2027

The car pulling to a stop woke me, if “woke” is the correct word: I wasn’t sleeping in the traditional sense, just so deep in the hot warm dark that I had ceased to be aware of distance. I opened my eyes on a world without sunlight, the car lit only by the dim glow from the instrument panel. We were pulled off to the side of the road somewhere in the rolling hills that seemed to cover a third of the Bay Area. I blinked, trying to get my bearings, and then twisted in my seat to look at Nathan.

“Why are we stopped?” I asked.

“The dogs need a bathroom break, and according to the traffic reports, we’re in the clear from here on out,” he said, unfastening his seat belt as he spoke. “We made it over the bridge. No incidents. If the quarantine on San Francisco has been declared, no one’s told anyone this far from the city yet.”

“Anything on the news?” I sat up, rumpling my hair with one hand and yawning. I felt, if anything, even more limp and wrung-out than I had before we left the apartment. However much energy I’d been able to gain from the cookies and juice, it wasn’t going to last forever.

“They’re reporting fires in San Francisco, and advising travelers to either stay in their hotels or cars and await evacuation, if they’re already in the city, or stay at home, and as far from San Francisco as possible. There hasn’t been anything about a bridge closure yet. That may just be a media effort to keep people from rushing to see what’s going on. People love to gawk at accidents. They’re not quite as fond of being set on fire.”

“Right.” I reached for my seat belt. Nathan’s hand on my shoulder stopped me. I turned to face him, blinking. “What?”

“I want you to stay in the car,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Because your hands are shaking. They’ve been shaking since you woke up.” He pulled his hand away. “You need medical attention. I’m not going to risk you collapsing by the side of the road because you didn’t want me to walk the dogs by myself.”

Much as I hated to admit it, Nathan had a point. I sighed, sagging back in my seat. “Okay, but leave the keys? I want to listen to the radio.”

“You’ve got it.” He leaned over and kissed my temple before turning the key in the ignition, reactivating the car’s electrical systems. I reached for the radio and was starting to scan through the local stations when he got out of the car, slamming the door behind himself, and let the dogs out of the back. I was alone.

The first three stations were generic classic rock, all power ballads and songs about how awesome it was to be young forever. I skipped past them, looking for the news. I was so focused that I scanned right past a familiar voice, only realizing what I’d done two stations later. The drums beginning to hammer in my ears again, I rolled the scanner carefully back.

“—during a tragic break-in at our offices earlier today. I knew our competition was capable of a lot of things, but I had no idea they would stoop to corporate espionage, or that they’d be willing to involve someone who couldn’t understand what she was doing.” Dr. Banks sounded solemn and upset, like he was barely keeping himself under control. I’d always known he was an excellent liar, but as I listened to him talk, I started to understand how good he really was. “Sally Mitchell is a wonderful girl. I’ve enjoyed our time together immensely, and I think of her as a daughter, but it’s no secret that she’s not… well. She suffered some fairly severe brain damage in her accident, and she’s never fully recovered. She never will. Her family has been holding her in custodianship for the last several years, and she and I had been speaking about the virtues of transferring that custody to me. I think of her as a daughter, and her biological parents, well, they could never look at her without seeing everything she had lost. I love her. I know she’d never have done anything like this of her own initiative. Someone put her up to this. Someone exploited a poor, mentally handicapped girl for their own ends, and when I find out who did this, I swear, I am going to come down on them with the full force of the law.”

His tone changed, becoming ingratiating. I knew that most of the station’s listeners—if it was just this station; if this wasn’t going out nationwide—would take his words as paternal and loving, but I saw them for what they had always been: a trap. He was trying to trap me, just like he’d been doing for my entire life.

“Sally, if you can hear this, if you’re out there somewhere, listening to me, Sally, please, come home. The people who told you to steal from me, they’re not your friends. I don’t know what lies they’ve been feeding to you, but I only have your best interests at heart, I’ve only ever wanted to help you, and I can’t do that if you’re running from me. I’m not pressing charges against you for what you did. I’m not blaming you for the people who were hurt. I know that none of this was your idea. But Sally, please, please, I am begging you. Please come home.”

The quality of the sound abruptly changed, and an unfamiliar woman said, “That was Dr. Steven Banks at his press conference earlier today, discussing the break-in at the SymboGen headquarters that resulted in the deaths of three security guards, and the hospitalization of two doctors. It is widely believed that this break-in was made possible by the actions of Sally Mitchell, a patient of SymboGen’s. Miss Mitchell, as you may recall, was involved in a tragic accident—”

I gasped and turned off the radio before the woman could start telling me about my own past. I was still staring at it, my arms wrapped tightly around myself, when the car doors opened. Beverly and Minnie came bounding into the backseat, and Beverly shoved her nose under my hair, snuffling loudly, in case I had changed while she was away. The door closed, and the driver’s-side door opened. I kept staring at the radio.

“Sal?” Nathan put a hand on my arm as he slid back into his seat. I didn’t react. He pulled the hand away, closing his door, creating a safe, enclosed space around us. Only then did he try again, asking, “Sal, honey, what’s wrong? What was on the radio?”

“Dr. Banks.” I turned slowly to face him. “He did a press conference. He told everyone about the break-in, and said that people got hurt, and that it was my fault. But he’s not pressing charges, he says, he just wants me to come home.”

“Which may mean he’s offering a reward for anyone who turns you in, and trying to deflect people from suspecting SymboGen’s involvement in the sleepwalker outbreak at the same time. Dammit.” Nathan scowled, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “I guess that just means we’ll need to be a little bit more careful for the rest of the drive. Are you ready to go?”

“Fasten your seat belt,” I said.

Nathan fastened his seat belt.

“Is your mom going to let us back into the lab when there are people looking for me?”

“There have always been people looking for you, and there have always been people looking for her,” he said. “Maybe that doesn’t sound reassuring, but it is, because she’s always been willing to let you in. You’re her greatest creation, a chimera that formed entirely without human aid. I’m not going to let her use you as a lab subject, but darling, you have to understand how much leverage this gives you over her. She needs to study you. She’ll let us in.”

“The broken doors will still be open.”

“Yeah,” said Nathan, reaching for the wheel. “And while I find it deeply odd that my life is now defined by a children’s book, it’s also reassuring. As long as Mom keeps treating that thing like the newest book of the damn Bible, she’s not going to shut us out. The whole point of going to where the monsters are is that the monsters will always let you in.”

“Yay, monsters,” I said, leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes again. I liked riding in cars at night a little bit more than I liked doing it during the day. As long as I couldn’t see anything around us, I could almost pretend that we were sitting safely still. But other cars had a tendency to break the illusion, and with Nathan driving the way he had to in order to get us to safety, it was better for me not to risk it.

I heard the engine rumble to life, and then the faint jouncing as Nathan rolled from the shoulder and back onto the road.

The sirens started a few seconds later.

The sound was coming from directly behind us. I opened my eyes, and the cab of the car was filled with flashing red and blue lights. “Nathan…”

“I know. Just be cool, okay? I can handle this.” He pulled over again, leaving his hands resting on the wheel, while I stayed frozen in my seat and tried not to look like an inhuman thing wearing a girl’s skin. What if the cop could tell somehow? What if we were both arrested, and I was thrown into whatever sort of cell they reserved for creatures who dared to pretend to be people, and I never saw Nathan or the dogs again?

Beverly, sensing my distress, shoved her nose into my ear. I left it there, not trying to push her away, as Nathan rolled down the window and a flashlight shined into the car, illuminating first my lap, and then moving to my face, where it seemed like the glare was going to blind me. I squinted, recoiling. Beverly pulled her nose out of my ear and gave an inquisitive yip.

“Are these your dogs, miss?” asked the officer. The voice was male, but I couldn’t make out a face, thanks to that flashlight in my eyes.

I was silent for a few seconds, trying to find an answer that was both honest and unlikely to get me into trouble. Finally, I settled for the safest option: “Y-yes,” I stammered. “The big one is Beverly, and the little one is Minnie. They’re both friendly, and we have leashes for them.” I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to add that last part, except that I’d heard horror stories before of cops shooting dogs for getting too close to them while appearing “vicious,” a designation that seemed to mean “the dog had teeth in its mouth and I saw them at some point.” Since happy, friendly dogs were apt to show off their teeth in the process of panting, that made me worry about my girls.

“Any reason they were just outside the car without a lead on?”

Now Nathan spoke up. “I’m sorry, Officer. They were whining, and my girlfriend was asleep, and I took them out so that she wouldn’t have to. I never even thought to grab their leashes.”

“This is state land. It’s against local ordinance for dogs to be in the fields without leads.” The flashlight beam switched to Nathan’s face, finally allowing me to see the officer on the other side. He was a big man of African-American descent, thick around the middle, with a face that seemed inclined to be gentle, even as he was interrogating Nathan about walking the dogs. “Did you see any wildlife while you were out there?”

It smacked of a question that had a right answer and a wrong answer. I bit my lip as I waited to see which one Nathan was going to offer.

“I think we startled a duck,” he said. “It flew away when Minnie got close to it, and the dogs did their business—urine only, I had bags in case they decided to poop—and we got back into the car. My girlfriend was awake by that point, I told her what I’d done, and we started to get back on the road. That’s when you pulled us over.”

The flashlight beam switched back to my face, making my eyes water. I squinted, resisting the urge to raise a hand against the glare. Looking inoffensive was important when dealing with the police, never more than right now. “Miss, is this true?”

“I can’t say about the duck, because I was in the car, but all the rest is true as far as I know,” I said meekly. “I’m really sorry. I would have told him to put the leashes on if I’d been awake.”

“Miss, why is there blood on your shirt?”

The question was asked in the same mild, almost innocuous tone as the questions about the dogs, and for a moment, I didn’t realize how dangerous it was. The moment passed quickly. I swallowed hard before holding up my injured arm, showing him the bandage wrapped around my wrist. “I was making dinner, and I slipped,” I said. “I cut myself pretty bad, and I didn’t have a clean shirt, so we’re heading back to my place to get me a change of clothes.” It seemed odd to avoid using Nathan’s name, but he hadn’t used mine, and I had to assume that there was a reason for that. Maybe he just didn’t want to risk the cop guessing who we were… but wouldn’t the officer have run Nathan’s plates before he got out of his squad car? Didn’t he already know?

There were too many variables. I was drowning in them.

“I see.” The flashlight moved away from my eyes to my bandaged wrist, and hovered there as the officer considered my words. Finally, he asked, “Are you being held against your will?”

“What? No!” I was so startled by the question that I forgot to moderate my response. I wound up half squawking at the cop, my eyes going wide and round with surprise.

Maybe that was the right way to react. The flashlight finally pointed upward at the ceiling of the cab, where it illuminated the car without blinding anyone. “I don’t know if you were aware, but I just got the call that we’re closing down the bridge,” said the officer. “It seems there’s been some sort of outbreak in San Francisco, and we’re trying to contain it before it can spread to the rest of the Bay Area. You kids wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No, Officer,” said Nathan.

I didn’t trust my voice, and so I just shook my head, hoping that the policeman would take my silence as a sign of fear, and not a sign of guilt.

“You look like good kids, but it’s not safe out here,” he said. “Wherever it is you’re going, you want to keep going until you get there, you hear me? Don’t stop again, no matter how bad your dogs need to pee.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nathan. “Thank you.”

“I’m letting you off with a warning this time. Get your girl home.” Then the flashlight was turned away, and the officer was walking back down the shoulder toward his car. Nathan and I raised our eyes to watch him go, tracking his reflection as it got smaller and smaller, until he finally climbed into his squad car. The lights flashed once as he restarted the engine, and then he pulled out onto the highway and was gone.

Nathan groaned, leaning forward to rest his forehead against the wheel for a moment. I blinked at him, alarmed.

“Nathan?”

“This is how everything falls apart, Sal,” he said, voice slightly muffled by his position. “This is where everything breaks down. That man should have hauled us in—between the blood and the bridge shutting down, we’re too suspicious to be allowed to roam free. But he didn’t, because we looked like ‘nice kids,’ and you’re a pretty girl with big, sad eyes, and he didn’t want to do that to us. We looked too innocent.”

“That’s… bad?” I asked blankly.

“No one is innocent when you’re talking about infection, whether it’s viral or parasitic.” Nathan raised his head and started the engine again. “We’re not carrying SymboGen implants on the verge of going rogue, but we could be. There’s no way to look at a person and know. So if we were carriers, and if the goal were to shut down the sleepwalker plague in San Francisco, our friendly neighborhood state trooper would have just ruined everything.”

“Everyone’s a carrier,” I said. “You’re being really hard on him. He let us go.”

“Everyone’s a potential carrier. There will always be outliers, like you, but it seems like most sleepwalkers are triggered by getting near another sleepwalker. The pheromone tags put off by the worms in their new state excite and agitate the worms that are still in a resting phase. The change isn’t instant unless the second worm was already in the process of attempting to colonize the brain of their host—it takes time to chew and slither your way through a human body—but it starts with that pheromone tag. That’s why Sherman could form a mob by dropping one or two individuals in key neighborhoods. That’s why Mom was so worried about us going out in public. There’s no telling how many people are already out there, putting off the pheromone tags that say ‘it’s time to move,’ and haven’t yet started showing symptoms.”

“You’re making it sound like you wanted him to arrest us,” I snapped. “Because that would keep us and our scary pheromones away from the people who aren’t sick yet. Only you can’t be putting off those pheromones, since you never got an implant, and I…” I stopped, a sick feeling spreading through my stomach. “Nathan, are you saying this is all my fault?”

“No,” he said hurriedly. “No, I’m not saying that at all. I talked to Mom, at length, about the differences between chimera and sleepwalkers, because I knew I’d need to explain them to you—and I really think I should do as much of it as I can. Mom isn’t good at talking to people who aren’t geneticists.”

“You’re not a geneticist.”

“No, and sometimes she loses me. But you’re not giving off the pheromone tag that the sleepwalkers use to activate each other. She said it’s like comparing a can of spray paint to a master painter’s brush. You can get art out of either one, but one will tend to be much more focused and refined. The sleepwalkers are putting off a chemical stew that says everything from ‘hey, do what I’m doing, this is neat and you should try it’ to ‘eat here, here, eat.’ She’s still trying to analyze the specific pheromones that you and the other chimera put off. As near as she can tell, they say ‘listen to me, I am bigger than you, and you should listen.’ You may eventually be able to use them to accomplish just that. You may be able to make them listen.”

I looked at my bandaged wrist, the white barely visible through the gloom. “Are all the sleepwalkers going to listen with their teeth?” I asked glumly.

“Only the ones who are already too brain-damaged from the integration process to understand the message. I think they’re all going to want to be close to you. Some of them may even have the intelligence to obey when you give them simple orders, like ‘stop’ or ‘don’t eat me.’ But some of them are going to be too far gone, because the integration process involves far too much brute trauma to the host. They don’t have the superstructure necessary to process complicated information.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, hunching over in my seat. “This just keeps on making me feel worse and worse. Every time I think I’m okay with not being human, you come up with some new fun fact, like ‘hey, Sal, you’re basically a bug zapper for sleepwalkers, hope that’s okay with you.’”

“I’m okay with you not being human,” said Nathan. “However long it takes for you to be okay with it, I will wait for you. We’re going to figure this all out together.”

“But you still think that cop should have arrested us.”

“Yes,” admitted Nathan. “At the very least, he should have questioned us more about why we’d decided to load ourselves and the dogs into the car when you were clearly injured, instead of going to a hospital. I think…” He took one hand off the wheel as he reached up and adjusted his glasses, and I suddenly realized the car was moving: had been moving for some time. I’d been so distracted by arguing with him that I hadn’t even noticed. Finally, he sighed, and said, “I think things are getting very bad, very quickly, and I think that officer knew about it. He made a threat assessment. He decided we were not dangerous. As luck would have it, he was right, and it was definitely the choice we wanted him to make. I’m just worried about how many times people will make that same choice tonight, and how many times they’re going to be wrong. It’s too late to stop the outbreak. That doesn’t mean we need to help it spread faster than it has to.”

I bit my lip again, frowning. I couldn’t make out the details of Nathan’s face, and I was glad; I didn’t want to know whether he was wearing his mother’s look of calm resignation, like talking about leaving people locked in what was about to become a plague zone could ever be interpreted as a good thing. The landscape rushing by outside the car windows was a bruised blur that echoed my mood: purple and gray and somehow threatening.

It was nice to know that a good scare that had nothing to do with being in a car could distract me from the fact that I was in a moving vehicle. Maybe I just needed to get a portable DVD player and start watching horror movies whenever I had to go somewhere.

I wanted to let the matter lie—I really did—but there was one more question I needed to ask before I could do that. “How many people do you think are going to die?”

There was a long pause before Nathan answered me. “A lot,” he said, finally. “From both sides. I think a lot of humans are going to die, and a lot of the ones who don’t are going to take powerful antiparasitics and kill their implants—and they’d do it even if we had evidence that the tapeworms have achieved rudimentary sapience in their isolated state, and should hence be treated as thinking beings. People have fought long and hard to have the right to control their own bodies in this country. They’re going to view the implants as dangerous intruders. And the sleepwalkers… maybe there’s some kind of treatment that can give the tapeworms that have taken their hosts over a better existence, something closer to what you and Adam have, or at least closer to what Tansy has. But for right now, we have to treat them as if they were already dead.”

“Do you think that would work?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Most people—human people—are going to be very upset when they find out what’s going on. Even if there is a treatment, it might be a long time before it can be put into practice, if ever.”

I looked at him steadily, searching his face for signs of panic. “How are you so calm?” I asked. “I mean, I’m a tapeworm. I’ve been a tapeworm the whole time we’ve been dating. You’ve been having sex with a tapeworm. Your mother has been making more tapeworm-people just like me. Other tapeworms are eating the brains out of their hosts, and you’re still so calm.”

“I could ask you the same question, you know,” he said. “I’ve had days to come to terms with what you are and what that means about our future together. I already decided that it doesn’t matter, and that I want to marry you and be with you forever, no matter what species you technically are. You just found out tonight, and you’re already playing action girl across the Bay Area. It’s not a normal reaction.”

“Tapeworm,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. I failed. “We don’t know much about invertebrate psychology. Maybe what would be a normal reaction in a human isn’t a normal reaction coming from me.”

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But you’ve always seemed to be following a human template to me. It’s been a slightly odd one—more than a little weird at times—but it was recognizably human. I think that once you became fully bonded to Sally Mitchell’s brain, a certain amount of normal human response became inevitable. It’s the form defining the function, as much as the function defining the form.”

I had to laugh at that, a tight, gasping series of sounds that made Beverly push her head back into the front seat again, concerned and checking to see what was wrong. I put a hand on her muzzle, pushing her back, and said, “So you love me even though I’m not human, because I seem human because I’m living in a human body?”

“No. I love you because you’re you. The rest is all details.”

“Scientist,” I accused fondly.

Nathan smiled, the expression visible in the light coming off the dash. “Guilty as charged,” he said, and drove on.

The parking lot outside the abandoned bowling alley that Dr. Cale had converted into a lab was dark and empty, looking more like the setting of a murder mystery than a sanctuary. It was at least partially an illusion: I knew she and her team had security cameras hidden all over the place, making it virtually impossible for anyone to sneak up on the lab. That was good. We were going to need that kind of security if we were going to be staying here for a while.

Nathan parked behind the bowling alley, where his virtually new Prius stuck out like a sore thumb among the battered, rust-covered cars favored by the staff. Most of them looked newer than they seemed when I took a second glance; one more bit of visual chicanery to keep the local authorities from looking twice at the place.

“You get Minnie, I’ll get Beverly, and I’ll come back for the suitcases,” said Nathan, handing me a leash.

I nodded. “It’s a deal.”

Leashing two excited dogs who had been cramped up in the backseat of a car for the better part of an hour and a half wasn’t easy, but I’d been working at an animal shelter for years, and I’d never met the dog I couldn’t get onto a lead. Nathan struggled to get the leash on Beverly for a while before just handing it to me and letting me do it. I grinned to myself as I passed Minnie’s leash to him. It was nice to know that there was still something I could contribute to our partnership, even if it was as small and silly a thing as putting leashes on dogs. Everyone has their talents.

Nothing moved but us as we made our way across the parking lot to the bowling alley, which looked as locked and abandoned as it had the first time we had come here. All that was missing was Tansy, Dr. Cale’s bodyguard and effective head of security, sitting on the hood of a car and getting ready to shoot us if we looked at her funny. A knot formed in my throat. I never would have thought I could miss that little disaster waiting to happen, but it was wrong for her not to be here. She was supposed to be here, and she wasn’t, and that was because of me.

Nathan stepped in front of me when we got to the door, raising his hand and knocking briskly. Only silence answered.

“Do you think they left without us?” I asked anxiously.

“Not if Mom’s still in charge,” he said, and knocked again. When there was still no answer he started looking around, scanning the edge of the roof and door frame. “See if you can find a security camera.”

“I don’t know what your mother’s security cameras look like,” I protested. “It’s dark and I’m woozy and shouldn’t she have let us in by now?”

“Not if whoever’s manning the door is waiting for a sign that we’re actually us, and that we haven’t led half the police in the Bay Area back here,” he said. “Look for something that looks completely unlike what you’d expect from a security camera, and assume that’s probably what Mom’s security cameras look like. She’s been doing this for a long time.”

“Right. So I should go and start trying to attract a pigeon’s attention. Got it.” I turned and let Beverly start pulling me along the side of the building. She had her nose glued to the ground, taking in a whole new world of smells. I kept my eyes equally glued to the slight overhang of the roof, looking for something that didn’t look like a security camera.

It turns out there are a lot of things that don’t look like security cameras. Rocks, for example. Wasps’ nests. Pieces of the roof. I kept letting Beverly pull me along, and while I didn’t see anything that looked like a camera, I saw plenty of things that absolutely were not cameras. We went around a corner, and saw more of the same. The next two sides of the building didn’t yield anything new.

“This is hopeless,” I said to Beverly, who wagged her tail agreeably. If I wanted to tell her a thing was hopeless, why, she’d be happy to agree, because I was her people, and if I thought something was so, then I had to be right. Dogs are good like that. We were reaching the corner that would take us back to where Nathan had parked the car, and so I sighed, raised my voice, and said, “Hey, Nathan, nothing out here—”

I stopped as we came around the corner. The bowling alley door was open, and a man was standing there, aiming what looked like an assault rifle at Nathan’s chest. Minnie was standing stock-still next to Nathan’s right leg, her head up and her ears back as an almost subsonic growl echoed from her chest. It wasn’t her sleepwalker growl, which would have been followed by lunging and attempts to bite: it was just the growl of a good dog whose person was being threatened.

“Don’t move, Sal,” said Nathan, without looking at me. He had his hands up, and his attention remained focused firmly on the man with the gun. That seemed like a good idea. “I was just explaining to Fang here that we’re not trying to break in, we’re just trying to get back to my mother. Dr. Cale. Who runs this lab.” He pronounced “Fang” to rhyme with “long,” rather than like he was talking about a particularly sharp tooth.

He was of clearly Chinese descent, but taller than Nathan, with a shaved head and eyes that were narrowed in concentration. Only the lab coat he was wearing over his shirt and trousers broke the unrelenting blackness of his attire… and he looked familiar.

“You’re, um, on Dr. Cale’s security team, aren’t you? Only you were on assignment until recently, because I know you, don’t I? I’ve seen you at SymboGen.” It was the lab coat that did it. His face was memorable, but I didn’t like making eye contact with people when I didn’t have to. They had an unfortunate tendency to smile at me, and all those teeth made me uncomfortable. But I’d been around doctors and medical technicians for as long as I could remember, and I’d never forget a lab coat. “You worked in the phlebotomy lab, didn’t you? With Dr. Lo?”

The man—Fang—didn’t turn. Keeping his rifle trained on Nathan, he asked, “When would you have seen me there, if I had been there to be seen?”

It took me a moment to puzzle through his grammar, which seemed oddly recursive to me, like it was a snake biting its own tail. Finally, I ventured, “During one of my checkups? Dr. Banks made me come in a lot more often than I probably needed to. I always thought it was because he was worried about my well-being, but I guess now it was because he was monitoring my integration with the human brain, since it sort of sucks when all of your tapeworm-human hybrids just moan and try to bite people all the time. Which, you know, speaking of that, one of them bit me pretty badly.” I held up my bandaged wrist like a macabre exhibit A. “I lost a lot of blood and the world’s still sort of spinny and I just walked all the way around the outside of the bowling alley which wouldn’t be a thing normally, but I haven’t lost a lot of blood normally, and I think I’m going to pass out soon. So I’d appreciate it if you’d put the gun down, or at least stop aiming it at my boyfriend, and go tell Dr. Cale that we’re here. This whole situation is wank.”

“Wack, Sal,” said Nathan, a nervous giggle underscoring his words. “The word you want is ‘wack.’”

“Oh,” I said. “So what does ‘wank’ mean?”

“It means ‘to masturbate,’” said Fang, adjusting his rifle so that it was pointed at the sky instead of at Nathan. The drums that had been pounding in my ears slacked off slightly, making it easier for me to hear. “Do you have everything you need out of your vehicle?”

The sudden change in topics threw me for a loop. It appeared to do the same to Nathan, because he just blinked at Fang, and for a moment the three of us stood there silently, everyone waiting for someone else to start making sense.

Finally, Fang sighed and explained, “I need to get rid of your car. If you have everything you need, I can do that now. If you don’t, I will escort you inside, come back out with some movers, and do it while you’re undergoing orientation.”

“What do you mean, get rid of my car?” Now Nathan sounded alarmed.

“Dr. Cale told me you’d have this reaction.” Fang smiled thinly. “She said to let you know that we’ll be issuing you a replacement vehicle from our motor pool, but that we can’t risk having a nearly new Prius sitting near what’s supposed to be an abandoned building. She also said to let you know that you’ll be receiving twenty percent of the sale price, so you shouldn’t fuss about it overly much.”

“Twenty percent of—you know what? No. I’m not going to get upset about this. If this is what needs to happen for us to be safe, then fine, so be it.” Nathan shook his head. “Sal and I both have things in the car. She needs medical attention, and that seemed more important than dealing with our suitcases.”

“All right,” said Fang. He held out his hand. “Give me the keys and follow me.”

It seemed like Nathan was going to argue. Then he glanced at me. I must have looked worse than I thought, because he paled, lips pressing tightly together, before digging his keys out of his pocket and slapping them down in Fang’s outstretched palm.

“Thank you,” said Fang, making the keys disappear into his lab coat. “Welcome home.”

We followed him into the bowling alley, Beverly straining at her leash as she tried to rush ahead into this world of exciting new smells, Minnie lagging behind and nearly tripping me as she looked for something to reassure her that the world wasn’t changing for the worse. I understood the sentiment, even as it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to put one foot in front of the other. The spots around the edges of my vision were back, chewing little moth holes in everything I saw.

The dark room connecting the bowling alley door to the main lab seemed even darker than usual, although that could have been a side effect of my clouded vision. Fang stopped in front of the interior door, holding up a hand as he motioned for us to do the same.

“If you’ll wait here, I’ll let Dr. Cale know that you’re back,” he said.

“Okay,” I said dreamily. “I’m just going to take a little nap, all right?” The black spots were continuing to expand.

I didn’t even feel myself hit the floor.

This time, when I woke up, I was in a hospital cot in the middle of what looked like a makeshift operating theater, with two IV bags—one full of blood, one full of saline solution—attached to my left arm. I blinked at the tubes, and then twisted to look around the small room. The walls were just white sheets hanging from a pipe framework. A heart monitor beeped steadily, providing a treble accent to the drums that were beating softly in my ears. Another monitor was tracking… something. I assumed it was connected to the tangle of wires spilling off the bed. I reached up. There were sensors on my forehead, big round flat things held down with what felt like surgical tape. I frowned.

“Ah, good: you’re awake.” Dr. Cale’s voice came from the other side of the curtain. She pushed it aside with one sweep of her arm and came rolling in. “You gave us all quite a scare, young lady. It may be time to have a little talk about how you’re taking care of yourself. This can’t continue.”

“What?” I blinked at her blearily, trying to make sense of what she was saying. I’d been standing in the bowling alley with Nathan and the dogs—the dogs. “Where are Beverly and Minnie?”

“Your dogs are fine. I was prepared to be irritated about you bringing non-lab animals here, but they’ve already proven their value by distracting my son while you were having a seizure on my floor.” Dr. Cale’s frown deepened. “There are only a few human-tapeworm chimera in the world, Sal. You know that. As far as I’m aware, you’re the only one ever to arise without help. You’re a collector’s item, for lack of a better term, and you’re not taking the proper care to keep yourself in mint condition.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand. Where are my dogs?”

Dr. Cale reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Your dogs are with Nathan, who is getting them settled in the room you’ll be sharing until we relocate to a new lab space. Recent events have accelerated our timeline for moving slightly. We can’t risk being found.”

“Dr. Banks was on the radio,” I said. “He’s telling people I broke into SymboGen because somebody made me do it.”

“Well, that’s technically true, or close enough to true that I can’t be as angry at him as I’d like to be. But we’re getting off the topic.” She lowered her hand, looking at me gravely. “As I said before, you’re the first chimera to happen naturally. All of the others have had a team of experts standing by, bound and determined to make sure that our subjects had a successful melding with their hosts. Even then, it didn’t always go as well as we wanted it to.”

“Like Tansy?” I asked.

Dr. Cale nodded. “Yes. Exactly like Tansy. She had everything going for her when I performed the procedure. I had practiced on other subjects, the original damage to the host’s brain was minimal—it should have been perfect. It wasn’t. She caused seizures in her host, and damaged the brain in the process. All her neurological and cognitive issues stem from those seizures. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

I didn’t. I knew that my ignorance would show on my face, and so I didn’t even try to hide it: I just shook my head, wincing a little as the sensors attached to my forehead pulled, and said, “Not really.”

“When you entered Sally Mitchell’s skull, you exploited the damage that had been done by her accident,” said Dr. Cale. “It was a lucky break—literally. If her skull had broken in any other place, you probably wouldn’t have been able to get through. But in the process, you compromised some of the blood vessels that feed into the brain. They were partially repaired during the initial surgery. There should have been an additional surgery to suture and reconnect them properly, since those are your only source of nutrition now that you’re anchored in the brain, instead of in the digestive system. Unfortunately, Dr. Banks had taken over your care by that point, and he did not choose to order that operation.”

I stared at her. “But… why not?”

“Sal, I don’t know everything, all right? I can’t say for sure why he would have decided not to operate. Maybe you were too fragile at that time, and he didn’t want to endanger your integration. Maybe he was looking for leverage to hold over you later. There’s no way he missed this damage. I honestly don’t know why he didn’t correct it.”

“But you suspect.” The drums were starting to make a little more sense to me now. Of course they would seem louder than a normal human heartbeat: I wasn’t just hearing them with my ears, but with my entire body, which was wrapped into the pulse of the circulatory system in Sally Mitchell’s brain. There was no way I could have avoided hearing the drums. And at the same time… hadn’t they been seeming just a little too loud lately? Like they were pounding when they didn’t need to be? Like they were being played by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing.

Like my heart was beating too hard.

“I do.” Dr. Cale nodded. “You have to understand that… oh, God, how do I say this? I genuinely think of Adam and Tansy—and yes, you—as my children. You contain my DNA, and while a connection to a living human brain is required for you to achieve full sapience, I cannot question your right to exist once you have that connection. Do you understand? I wouldn’t kill a functional human being to give one of my babies a body, but I wouldn’t take that body away from them if they already had it.”

“Okay,” I said, confused.

“You were a miracle, Sal. For whatever reason, you not only took advantage of Sally’s accident, you found a way to complete integration without help. Sally’s brain is the computer that runs your consciousness, but you, only you, are the medical miracle here. You’re the one who evolved under pressure.” She smiled a little, like she expected this revelation to make me happy. It did not make me happy. “If Dr. Banks wanted to study a natural chimera, you were perfect. Tell me, those contracts that he had you and your parents sign, agreeing to allow SymboGen to handle your medical care. Did they say anything about what would happen to your body if you passed away for any reason?”

“Dr. Banks would get it for research purposes.” Dawning horror was coiling in my stomach. I tried to tamp it down, demanding, “But what good would that do? All he’d get would be a dead worm and a deader girl. There’s not much to learn from that.”

“Tapeworms are hardy, Sal. It’s true that your current body wouldn’t survive the loss of your human host; you’re too deeply integrated to be removed. But all he’d need is a single viable proglottid to grow a new worm with your exact genetic makeup. He could create another you under controlled lab conditions. He’s never had a chimera of his own—I’ve had people sabotaging his research every time it looked like he was getting close. Creating another iteration of you wouldn’t require the same level of research; you’ve made all the modifications necessary for a successful joining already, all by yourself. He could exploit that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were built with a DNA profile,” she said. “You found a way, instinctively, to modify it enough to let you take Sally Mitchell’s body as your own. That’s normal. Every baseline worm expresses itself differently. We could hatch a thousand eggs from the same batch that made you and get a thousand slightly different results—but your body is hermaphroditic, and every egg it generates will be a tiny, perfect clone of you, Sal. Banks could use that. He could grow a chimera of his own, and then figure out how to make the process easier… or how to stop it altogether.”

I stared at her, aghast. “Are you saying that Dr. Banks left weak blood vessels in my brain because he wanted me to have an aneurism and die?”

“So that he could take samples and culture eggs from your original body, yes, and possibly move it into a new host,” said Dr. Cale. “Observing you throughout the life cycle of your original host would have been a secondary goal. I admit, I can see the temptation. It would have been a perfect, untouched system, if only it had been a computer model instead of a living person.”

“I don’t think he thinks of me as a person,” I said.

“You may not be a human, Sal, but you’re a person. Anyone who can think and speak and be upset by someone’s plans for them is a person.” Dr. Cale wheeled herself closer. “Which brings us to the next matter at hand. Those blood vessels need to be repaired, or you’re going to keep having incidents like this one.”

“I thought I fainted because I lost too much blood,” I said weakly.

“You didn’t lose that much blood, but what you did lose was enough to strain your system,” she said. “That was really the problem. Once your body begins to worry about circulation, things will go downhill for you very quickly, because you don’t have much in the way of a reserve. We need to operate.”

The thought of being unconscious on a table while someone sliced into my head filled me with terror. I didn’t want them so close to my vulnerable body. I needed my skull to keep people away from it. But that wasn’t going to do me much good if the channels that carried the food I needed to survive were blocked. “Can we do that here?” I asked, inwardly amazed at how calm I sounded. Why, it was almost as if I weren’t asking someone to cut me open.

Dr. Cale shook her head. “No, we can’t,” she said. “I have excellent surgical facilities—I can even perform limited brain surgery, when there’s a need for it—but what you need is too delicate. It’s going to require a specialist, and equipment that’s much more advanced than I have access to here. We’re going to need to take you to a hospital.”

“Nathan has admitting privileges at the hospital where he works,” I said slowly.

“Yes, and that hospital is in San Francisco, and everyone there knows him.” Dr. Cale shook her head for the second time in under a minute. A look of deep regret transfused her features. Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better. “We’d be arrested before we even managed to get you on the table.”

“So what, then? I can’t just stay here and try not to get upset about anything. The sleepwalkers are getting worse. That sort of makes staying calm impossible.”

“I’m going to need you to trust me.”

I stared at her. “That’s what I’ve been doing since I called you.”

“No, Sal. You’ve been playing at trust, but what I’m about to ask you to do… you need to be absolutely sure that you believe I have your best interests at heart. Otherwise, we can wait. See if the crisis passes. Those blood vessels should hold for a while longer.” Dr. Cale looked at me, regret fading to leave her face a featureless mask. “I can’t say for how long.”

“Then I guess I have to trust you,” I said, trying to sound more sincere than I felt. I didn’t know if I would ever really trust Dr. Cale, but I didn’t have any options left—not unless I wanted to die. Choosing to live meant choosing to trust her, whether I wanted to or not. “Let’s open the broken doors all the way.”

Dr. Cale nodded. “I’ll set things up,” she said, and turned her wheelchair and rolled away, leaving me alone and wondering what I had just agreed to let her do to me.

-

Chapter 5 SEPTEMBER 2027

The plan was simple enough on paper. Fang and Daisy—another of Dr. Cale’s employees, a parasitologist by trade, before she had left SymboGen to work with Dr. Cale on the D. symbogenesis issue—both had admitting privileges at the nearby John Muir Medical Center, a vast, sprawling hospital complex where no one could be sure of knowing absolutely everyone else. They would sneak me into an unoccupied operating theater, program the machines that handled microsurgery to deal with the weakened blood vessels connecting to my brain, and keep watch while the surgical tools took care of the job. Fang was a licensed neurosurgeon, and both of them were blazingly loyal to Dr. Cale, for reasons I didn’t yet fully understand.

There were a lot of things that could go wrong with this plan, starting when we left the bowling alley and progressing from there. What if someone at the hospital recognized me? What if someone at the hospital recognized Nathan? He’d given speeches on parasitology at hospitals all over Northern California, and he didn’t usually attend random brain surgeries.

Not that there was any chance of his staying behind at the bowling alley. Even if I’d been comfortable with the idea—which I wasn’t—that wasn’t something he was going to agree to. His discussion with his mother had lasted less than five minutes, escalating in volume until everyone in the lab could probably have heard them. Her part of the conversation had consisted of reasonable arguments and rational cost/benefit assessments. His had consisted almost entirely of variations on the word “no.” I had snuggled down in my narrow cot, listening to the soft thudding of the drums in my ears and smiling a little. It was nice that Dr. Cale didn’t get everything she wanted.

I was still in that cot a little over an hour later when the sheet was pulled aside, allowing Nathan into my tiny, semiprivate room. “How’s your head?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” I said. “Did your mom put sedatives in my IV drip? The drums haven’t been as loud since I’ve been here.”

He nodded. “She did. Don’t worry; I’ve looked over your chart, and they won’t interfere with the surgery. We’ll be able to get you put back together tonight, better than new, since this time you won’t have a hidden time bomb in your skull.”

I smiled slightly. “You’re freaking out, huh?”

“Just a little.” He raised his hand, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. I raised my eyebrows. He spread his fingers farther apart before giving up and spreading his hand wide. “Okay, a lot. It’s been a long night, you know? First we’re fugitives, and then you’re having your arm ripped open, and then you’re passing out again—and suddenly that’s a good thing, since without all the fainting, we might not have looked at your MRIs closely enough to realize what was going on inside that head of yours before it was too late.”

“ ‘I like it when you lose consciousness’ is just what every girl likes to hear,” I said blandly.

“Hey.” Nathan walked across the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Try ‘I like it when you survive’ on for size, okay? We’ve come too far for this to be what ends things. Mom’s people are good. You know Fang from SymboGen, and I know Daisy.”

I blinked. “You do?”

“I do.” He nodded. “She went to grad school with me, believe it or not. I had an enormous crush on her for about a year, before I met her boyfriend, who is basically what you would get if you gave a grizzly bear a shave and a Brooks Brothers suit. But he’s a very nice man, and they got married a few years ago. I sent them a toaster for their wedding. I don’t know why people always put toasters on their registries, but they do, and I just wanted to buy one for a change.” He sounded oddly wistful as he talked about the toaster, like it had somehow become the symbol of a simpler time. We had to survive the tapeworm uprising, because otherwise, who would he buy toasters for?

I was starting to be quietly convinced that the time of toasters was coming to an end. Nathan looked so sad that I didn’t want to come right out and say that, so I tried a less dangerous question: “Does he work here too?”

“Who, Daisy’s husband? No, he’s working overseas. He’s in telecommunications, I think, or maybe software engineering—something to do with computers.” Nathan shrugged. “Once you take the ‘bio’ out, I lose interest in technology pretty quickly. It’s my shameful little secret.”

“It’s not that secret.” I sat up a bit straighter on the cot. “Where are the dogs?”

“Adam has them. They both like him a lot. Beverly’s made friends with half the staff, and Minnie’s been napping on every flat surface she could find. They’re going to be fine while we’re at the hospital.”

I nodded. “Good.” Carefully, I swung my legs around to point toward the floor. My feet dangled about a foot above the polished wood. “How are we getting me there?”

“Fang’s acquiring an ambulance.” Nathan said it with a completely straight face.

“Um, does ‘acquiring’ mean ‘stealing’?”

“I didn’t ask. I was afraid Mom would tell me.”

“You feared correctly,” said Dr. Cale, wheeling herself into the room. “Fang’s back, and Daisy has an ID badge for you, Nathan. I’ve got the admitting paperwork for Sal all prepared, and it links back to one of my less public identities, so if anyone calls to confirm that she’s a legitimate patient, I’ll be able to confirm. Fishy is altering hospital records as we speak. By the time you get to John Muir, you’ll have an insurance trail going all the way back to your first temp job.”

“Who’s Fishy?” I asked blankly. “Is that a person?”

“His name is Matthew, he’s a computer engineer, and he goes by ‘Fishy’ because when he first came to work for me, I had a Matthew and a Matt already in the office. He proposed using his old gaming handle, and I said it was fine, since it’s not profane or otherwise inappropriate. It’s easier to explain who’s been injured in the explosion when you don’t have to keep backing up and clarifying which of the five people with that name you don’t mean.” Dr. Cale’s tone was patient, but her hands locked together in her lap, tension showing in the way her fingers interlaced. “Once you get to the hospital, they’ll transfer you onto a surgical gurney. Now, Sal, it’s important you remember that you shouldn’t need to talk much, and it would be better if you didn’t, given the circumstances. You would normally be expected to answer questions before you could enter a surgical theater, but we’re shortcutting that process as much as possible, and anyone who checks your charts should see that you answered the standard questions before you had to be sedated to prevent seizure.”

“Do people really try to have conversations with patients who are in the hospital to have their heads cut open?” I asked blankly.

“They’re not going to cut your head open, exactly,” said Dr. Cale. “Most of the work will be done by lasers and by machines no bigger than the head of a pin. It’s not the nanotech that we were promised when I was in school, but I’ll take it.”

“Mom,” said Nathan warningly.

Dr. Cale held up her hand. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I just got distracted for a second there. The actual incision won’t even be as bad as that bite on your arm, Sal—which we flushed with saline and stitched up while you were unconscious, by the way. It should heal much faster and cleaner this way. You didn’t lose that much blood, thankfully. The problem seems to have been mostly related to the impaired blood flow to your brain.”

“Um, thanks,” I said, resisting the urge to rub my wrist. “I guess what I meant was, am I really going to have to answer questions? I’m there for brain surgery. Even if there’s not a lot of cutting going on, you’d think that might mean nobody would ask me things.”

“Actually, it may mean someone stops you on the way to the operating theater to make sure you’ve consented to the operation, and that the operation you say you’re having matches the one on your paperwork,” said Nathan. The grim note in his voice startled me. I turned to frown at him. He met my eyes and sighed. “You remember how there are some aspects of my job that I don’t like to talk about? Well, this is one of them.”

“Organ snatching was the big hospital bogeyman twenty, thirty years ago, before we had implants that could secrete anti-rejection drugs,” said Dr. Cale. She made the sentence sound almost upbeat, like the thought of someone cracking open her chest and scooping out her lungs was too funny to take seriously. “Now, of course, the rejection risk is lower if you have the right kind of implant readied. There are some people who have been using the anti-rejection implants as a form of preventative medicine—when their hearts finally give out from all their abuse, they already have the medication in place. It’s a terrible idea, of course, but I never thought that the implants should have been used for that purpose in the first place. Why—”

“Mom.” Nathan sounded more impatient this time. His interruption was accompanied by a glance at the old analog clock on the wall, where the second hand was busily ticking off our window of opportunity.

“Sorry,” said Dr. Cale again. “As I was getting around to saying, Sal, people today carry expensive pieces of medical equipment with them at all times, and there’s a black market for that sort of thing. It’s rare, but not unheard-of, for someone to go in for a minor surgical process and wake up with their implant missing—especially if they have one of the extremely tailored varieties. SymboGen has done an excellent job of controlling supply and demand, making sure supply never manages to outstrip demand. Unfortunately, that means that if you need a new insulin source right this minute, or a worm that supplies anti-rejection medication, theft may start looking like your best option.”

I stared at her. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Thanks for freaking out my girlfriend, Mom, that was swell of you,” said Nathan. He stood, offering me his arm. “Come on, Sal. Let’s get you to the ambulance.”

“I don’t have any clothes,” I protested. Pushing away the covers had revealed that I was wearing nothing but a plain white hospital gown, the kind that tied in the back and left virtually nothing to the imagination. I didn’t mind that much—I’ve never been shy about nudity—but I had been told over and over that it wasn’t socially acceptable to run around half clothed in front of strangers. Fang and Daisy counted.

“We’re going to a hospital,” said Nathan. “Not having any clothes is a good thing.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Dr. Cale. “Just tell anyone who asks you that you have problems with the veins in your head, and that Dr. Chu and Dr. Lee are going to fix it for you. If they press, tell them you don’t know how to pronounce what’s wrong. Daisy or Fang can take things from there.”

“What’s Nathan going to do?”

“Stand there being quiet and trying not to be recognized, while he remembers that I didn’t want him to go with you in the first place,” said Dr. Cale coolly, shooting a look at Nathan.

Nathan ignored her. “All right, Sal. Time for us to go.” He took hold of my IVs, wheeling them along. I was glad he was taking charge of that part of the trip. I would have snarled the tubes on something before we’d gone more than five feet.

Dr. Cale didn’t say anything as we walked away. She just watched us go, expression unreadable, hands still knotted white-knuckled in her lap. Then the curtain fell closed again behind us, and she was gone.

I leaned heavily on Nathan’s arm as we walked out of the semiprivate room and back into the main bowling alley. Most of the terminals were abandoned at this hour—it had to be almost midnight, and I wondered briefly whether that would make our “borrow a hospital operating theater” plan more dangerous. Probably not. My condition wasn’t immediately life-threatening, and if Dr. Cale was sending us to the hospital now, she had to have a reason. Maybe it was just “we’ll have more luck finding an empty room at this hour of the night.” Whatever her logic, I had made the decision to trust her, and now it was the only thing I could do.

Fang was waiting just outside the interior door, in the dark room where I had lost consciousness before. He looked me thoughtfully up and down, from my bare feet to my tousled hair, and finally said, “You’d look good as a redhead. Consider that for when we’re done at the hospital.” He had a faint accent, although I couldn’t have said from where. “Come on, both of you. Daisy is outside with the ambulance, and we should move before someone stops to make sure that she’s all right. This would be like Al Capone being busted for tax evasion.” His smile was swift and tight, like he had just made a very funny joke but didn’t want to be the first one to laugh.

“You never talked this much at SymboGen,” I said. Now that I was up and moving, the sedatives in my IV were starting to hit me harder, making the world seem just a little out of focus, like a movie played on late night TV.

Fang smiled. “I needed to keep a low profile. Not so much an issue, now that I’ve been extracted.” He turned and walked toward the door to the outside, clearly expecting that we would follow. Nathan still had my arm, and Nathan did follow, leaving me with no choice but to do the same.

Normally I would have objected to being pulled toward a destination I had little to no say in, but normally I wasn’t under the influence of a really impressive assortment of pharmaceuticals. “Your mom is good at drugging people,” I said dreamily. My lips felt numb. That was sort of funny. They weren’t my lips—I’d stolen them from Sally Mitchell—so why could I feel them? I giggled. That was even funnier; it required the use of so many purloined body parts that I couldn’t even name them all.

I was still laughing when we walked out of the bowling alley and into the parking lot. An ambulance was parked right outside the doors, and a short, solid-looking woman with broad shoulders and buzz-cut brown hair shot through with ribbons of gray was waiting for us, one hand resting on a gurney.

“About time you guys got out here,” she said, casting a nervous look back at the ambulance. Its doors were standing open, revealing the clean white interior. “We have about an hour before someone notices that the GPS chip on this baby’s been jiggered, so let’s get a move on, okay?”

“You must be Daisy,” I said, swallowing the last of my giggles. “I’m Sal.”

“Nice to meet you, Sal,” she said genially. “I need you to lie down on this gurney. Do you think you can do that, or do we need to pick you up?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Honesty seemed like the best policy, at least when it kept me from falling on my face. “I’m a little woozy right now.”

“That’s to be expected.” She looked to my left. “Fang?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He moved faster than I expected, somehow scooping me off my feet without tangling my IV cords, and deposited me on my back on the gurney before I could do more than squeak. I blinked bemusedly up at the starry suburban sky, feeling like I’d just been part of an involuntary magic trick.

“All right, Sal, I’m going to strap you down now,” said Daisy, all efficiency. “I know you probably won’t like that, but it’s necessary if we’re going to keep you from getting knocked around during the ride. Also, if your balance is anything to go by, those sedatives are going to knock you out any minute now, and you’ll be a lot more comfortable this way.”

“I don’t mind being tied down.” My eyelids fluttered shut, seemingly of their own accord, and no amount of coaxing would get them to open again. Maybe they were tired. The rest of me was. “Tight is good. Nathan, you should tie me down sometime. I think I’d like that.”

“We’ll talk about it later, honey.” He sounded oddly strained, like he didn’t want to talk about it at all. Oh, well. I could ask him about that after I’d had my nap.

Daisy started strapping me down with quick efficiency. I lay perfectly still, figuring that was the best thing I could do to help—and besides, moving just seemed like so much work. I dimly realized that I was drifting off to sleep, but staying awake would have been even more work than moving. I was already gone by the time they started loading my gurney into the back of the ambulance; the shaking and thumping that would inevitably accompany that kind of transfer was entirely absent, not even making a dent in my slow fade into unconsciousness.

It was sort of nice to go down like this, falling slowly instead of flipped off like a switch. I settled deeper into my own body, letting the hot warm dark wash over me, and listened to the quiet sound of drums.

The drive to John Muir could have taken thirty seconds or thirty years: I wouldn’t have noticed either way. A few times I was pulled back toward wakefulness by a sudden turn, but those disruptions were brief and quickly obscured by the simple comforts of the dark. My pulse seemed to be radiating from the points of my body, feet, hands, head, and crotch, bouncing in to the center of me and then flowing outward like a wave. It didn’t make a sound, exactly, but I thought that if it did, the sound would have been meditative and sweet, so I tried to listen for it, focusing as best I could through the pounding of the drums and the thumping of my heart.

I don’t like this, thought the small corner of my mind that was still clear and unaffected by whatever Dr. Cale had put in my IV. I want this to be over now. Can this be over now? Please?

My silent pleas didn’t do any good. The tidal motion of my pulse continued, and the darkness deepened, if anything, becoming absolute.

The gurney was lifted down from the ambulance. The wheels thumped hard against the concrete in the hospital parking lot. That did register with me, breaking through the haze for a few seconds. I tried to convince my eyes to open. They didn’t listen, remaining stubbornly closed, and the darkness closed in again.

Motion. The gurney was being pushed somewhere, and I was going with it, helpless to do anything to control my destination. This was what it was like to be just a part of Sally, said the clear corner of my mind, and the part of me that was aware suddenly flooded with both terror and relief. Terror at the accuracy of that comparison, and relief that this wasn’t my existence anymore. This had been me, once, but it wasn’t me now. I was just visiting the land of people who could neither move nor speak. I didn’t have to live there.

Dr. Cale had said the implants weren’t sapient until they integrated with a human brain, that they did all the things they did based on instinct and the desire to control their environments. I was glad for them. Nothing capable of thought should ever be trapped like this, helpless and marooned in the dark. Although I did wonder, just a little, whether she was right: whether they really were just reacting until they latched on to a human mind. Because if they had any shred of intelligence, they were taking over their hosts for two reasons she hadn’t considered: because they were desperate, and because they wanted revenge on the creatures that had given them life and then locked them in the dark.

Something moaned. A voice shouted—Nathan—and then the gurney was moving faster, pushed ahead of some unseen attacker. I struggled to control my body, and failed again. Terror lanced through me, cold and sharp as a razor blade. I didn’t mind going along with the people around me; they often knew more than I did, and I was all too aware that I was still learning to be a person. But the thought of being helpless with a sleepwalker closing in was enough to make my skin grow tight with involuntary terror.

The gurney moved faster. The sound of moaning dropped away, replaced by silence and the rattle of wheels. My sense of time seemed broken by the isolation. Finally, voices drifted through the gloom, unfamiliar ones first, and then Nathan and a woman I thought might be Daisy answering them in calm, professional tones. The motion had stopped. I tried again to pull myself out of the darkness, and succeeded only in driving myself further down. The voices went away.

Motion, and then no motion, and then motion again. A door slamming. The sound of voices. Pressure receding as the straps that held me to the gurney were undone. Hands moving me to a new surface. Something being fitted over my face, covering my nose and mouth, like the rebreather I used to wear for the gel MRIs. Maybe I was having a gel MRI. Maybe I was back at SymboGen, and everything that had happened since my last checkup was a dream, and when they flushed the tank and let me breathe again, Sherman would be there, and he wouldn’t be a tapeworm, and he wouldn’t be the enemy, and everything would be all right. I could go home. My parents would be my parents, because I would be their daughter, and they would love me, and everything would be fine forever and ever.

“—start the feed—”

“—all data has been—”

“—careful, the risk of compromising her structural integrity—”

The voices were only ghosts; they came and went without making any impact on the world. The mask that covered my mouth and nose began to emit a strange-smelling gas. I breathed it in anyway. There was nothing else I could have done. So I just breathed, until even the ghosts went away, and there was nothing. I was nothing.

I was alone.

When I was born, I was the size of a pinhead: an egg, expressed from the corpse of a tapeworm that had been intended as nothing but a breeder for more tapeworms. It had been my biological mother, and my biological father had been a syringe full of DNA and modified instructions for my growth. The actual process was probably more complicated than that, but I didn’t understand the science: when I tried to hold on to it, I just kept seeing a loop of film from an old cartoon about talking rats. The rats were normal rats until the scientists came along and poked them with needles. Then they got bigger, and stronger, and smarter, and started wanting more for themselves than cages and captivity. They started wanting to be free.

Dr. Banks and his team could have learned a lot from watching The Secret of NIMH a few times. Maybe it would have convinced them that modifying the genetic code of living organisms wasn’t as much fun as they thought it was. But Dr. Banks had wanted to make a lot of money, and he’d succeeded, hadn’t he? Whatever else my siblings and I might have done, we’d managed to make him a lot of money. He was probably still making money, even as the foundations started giving way beneath him.

Memories flickered against the edges of my mind. Waking up in the hospital with Sally’s grieving family standing next to my bed, staring up at the ceiling and not knowing what it was, or who I was, or what I was doing there. I’d been so eager to believe them when they called me their daughter, and why shouldn’t I have been? They were offering me an identity. They were offering me a home. I’d never had either of those things before. So I took them, because I was still a tapeworm at heart, still greedy for whatever I could grab, and I kept them, and when they stopped being enough for me, I’d gone looking for more.

This was all my fault.

No, no, no, I scolded myself, trying to swim through the black that had taken me, trying to pull all the splintered pieces of my mind back together. It’s not your fault. You didn’t do this. You didn’t make this. You’re just here, but you didn’t do anything.

If you really believe that, why are we having this argument? The question came from another corner of my mind, and I didn’t have an answer for it. So I did what felt right, and let it fall away from me as I sank deeper down into the dark. The dark didn’t demand that I do anything but exist. I could do that. I could do that very well.

So I did.

There was only one thing I really remembered from the operation after it was over: light. Bright white light that hurt my eyes so much it was almost like someone had stabbed me, lancing down from above and searing me. But my eyes were closed; the light had to be getting in through some other channel. It didn’t make any sense at the time. It was one more mystery piled onto the endless heap of them that had been coming together since I’d seen myself in the MRI film.

It was thinking of the film that gave me my answer. The light hadn’t been hurting my eyes, because I didn’t have eyes where the light was shining: it had been hurting my body, shining in through the opening in my skull and lancing through the waxy, ghost-white skin of my true, segmented form. I would have screamed if I could have, both from the pain and from the realization. But I had no voice, and so all I could do was sink back into the dark, away from awareness, away from sapience, and wait for it to be over.

Light.

This time, it didn’t hurt. It entered through the usual channel, flowing in as I opened my eyes and blinked, slowly, up at the distant ceiling. It probably helped that someone had dimmed the lights in this little room, which was—I turned my head slightly to the left, confirming—which was not at the bowling alley. The walls were painted white, but they were solid, rather than being made from hanging sheets and negative space. A machine was attached to my arm, beeping softly to itself. That was probably what had woken me up. It was the only noise in the room. As I realized that, I also realized that I could barely hear the drums. They had gone from a near-constant pounding in the background of my life to a soft tapping, almost inaudible, the way they used to be. This was how the inside of my head was supposed to sound, when I wasn’t so stressed out that my heart was racing all the time, and when the blood vessels in my brain weren’t threatening to give way at any moment.

“Are you awake, or just moving your head?” Nathan’s voice was barely louder than the beeping.

I rolled my head to the right, bringing him into view, and smiled. It was always nice to see my boyfriend first thing upon waking up. It reminded me of how handsome he was, for one thing, and of how much I loved him. No matter how much I enjoyed sleeping, the Nathan in my dreams was never as good as the real thing. “I think I’m awake,” I said. My throat was dry, and the words felt scratchy leaving my lips. “Are we still at the hospital?”

He nodded, faint smile fading into a much grimmer expression. He looked like his mother in that moment, and it worried me. Nathan and Dr. Cale had a similar bone structure, but they really only looked alike when they were upset about something. “We are,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“The drums are softer now. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I waited for Nathan to nod before I continued, saying, “Nothing hurts. Am I on a lot of painkillers?”

“Not as many as you might think,” he said. “We’ve already sealed the surgical incisions, and numbed the skin around the wound enough that it shouldn’t hurt for an hour or more, by which point the skin bonds should have started taking effect. You’ll be completely healed inside of the week.”

“So the operation…?”

“Was successful.” Nathan raked his hands back through his hair, and for the first time I realized how worried he looked, and how exhausted. As hard as this day had been on me, I’d been dealing with my own medical problems, and I hadn’t had a lot of energy to look outward. Nathan had been handling everything I couldn’t—including his mother—and he’d done it all without a word of complaint. “Daisy was able to program the surgical tools, and she and Fang sealed the damaged blood vessels so that they won’t be at risk of rupture anymore. You still shouldn’t take any blows to the head if you can help it, but you’re not at any more risk of an aneurism than anyone else.”

“Good.” I offered him my hand. “Thank you for everything you’ve done today. I would never have made it this far without you. I mean that. They’ve probably shut down the trains by now, and you’re not supposed to take dogs on the BART anyway, so I’d be stuck in San Francisco, waiting for somebody to eat me.” The thought was horrifying. I shuddered exaggeratedly.

Nathan smiled a little. “You’d have found a way. You’re a survivor, Sal. You survive things.”

“Is there any chance that’s going to include surviving pants sometime soon?” I gestured at the blanket that covered my lower body. “This is nice, but we should get back to your mom. She’s going to send an extraction team if we don’t come home soon. That, or Adam’s going to try to walk the dogs all by himself, and we both know that isn’t going to end well.”

Nathan’s smile faded. “I can get you some clothes, but we can’t leave.”

Somehow, that was what I’d been afraid of since I’d woken up to find myself still in the hospital, and not safely back in the bowling alley. “Why not?” Horror washed over me. “Did we get caught? Are we under arrest for misuse of a medical facility?”

“No,” said Nathan, shaking his head. “Actually, we sort of got the opposite. No one’s asked any questions about whether or not we’re allowed to be here, but Daisy and Fang have both been drafted into patient triage. The administration tried to make me go too. I was able to put them off by saying you still needed to be monitored, but I expected them back at any moment with a nurse’s aide that they plan to plunk down in a chair and make sure you don’t die. They need the hands, and they’re not being particularly picky about where those hands come from.”

“What happened?”

“There’s been another outbreak in Lafayette. This one was larger than the one we got caught in before, and the authorities have closed down the hospital in an effort to contain it. They still think quarantine zones help. They could, if we were able to filter out people whose implants are on the verge of going active and could be triggered by pheromone tags, but we don’t have that capacity yet, which means the quarantines are doing nothing but causing panic. Of course, try getting the people in charge to admit that.” Nathan looked, if anything, even grimmer than he had before. “They’ve also closed down most of the roads. The official cover story is that there’s been a gas leak—that’s what we’re supposed to tell patients who ask, or reporters who manage to sneak past the cordons. It’s a mess out there, Sal. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this building.”

“You’ll think of something,” I said, and then, because that didn’t seem quite right, I amended to “We’ll think of something. This is just more survival, right? We’re good at surviving. We can get out of this.”

“The ambulances are locked down.”

I frowned. “That’s bad,” I agreed. “But do we need an ambulance? I mean, I was on a gurney last time, because you needed me to be sedated, and because it made things more believable, but couldn’t we take a taxi or… or steal a car or something?”

Nathan paused, his eyes widening slowly as he absorbed my question. “There’s no one watching the parking lot at this point,” he said, after a long pause for thought. “All the available security has been pulled inside, to stop people who shouldn’t be here from getting in, and to prevent patients from escaping. They haven’t cracked down on the staff yet, and the security reinforcements are still an hour or so out.”

“Am I right to think that ‘yet’ is the important word there?” I asked.

“Yes.” Nathan stood. “I’ll be right back with some clothes, and with Fang and Daisy. We need to get out of here.”

I had never been so relieved to watch my boyfriend walk away from me. The danger in my head had been repaired, my wounds had been patched up, and we were getting out of here.

Things were finally starting to go our way.

-

Chapter 6 SEPTEMBER 2027

I waited anxious and alone in my purloined hospital room, jumping at every little sound and scuffle from the hall outside. If Nathan was right about my super-sleepwalker pheromones attracting sleepwalkers to me, there was every chance that a stray patient could stumble through the door at any moment, hands outstretched and mouth hungry for a piece of my flesh. It wasn’t the sort of thought that made me inclined to go exploring, even if I was having trouble sitting in the room alone.

What if Nathan couldn’t find me clothes? What if Daisy and Fang were so busy with the sudden influx of patients that they couldn’t get away, and we had to leave them? Dr. Cale was going to stop letting us borrow her people if we kept on not bringing them back.

The doorknob turned. I tensed, hunching down in the bed and trying to look like I was asleep. A fully turned sleepwalker wouldn’t be able to work the door, but a doctor would, and that would be just as bad. What if they decided that I didn’t need a private room, and moved me out to the hall? I’d have nothing to protect me then.

I was getting awfully tired of the words “what if.”

The door swung open, and I closed my eyes, playing dead. Footsteps approached me and Nathan said, “Sal, it’s me. I found you some clothes, and Daisy’s getting Fang out of the ER, but we need to hurry. We don’t have much time.”

There was a degree of urgency in his voice that was out of proportion with the trouble that we were in—something I wouldn’t have thought possible until I heard it. I opened my eyes and sat up, staring at him. “What’s going on?”

“I overheard two of the doctors who actually work here talking in the hall. The CDC is en route to lock this place down for good, and that means that USAMRIID can’t be too far behind. Mom’s going to get the news soon, if she hasn’t already.”

My eyes got even wider. “You think she’s going to move the lab?”

“I think she’ll have to. We’re important to her, but we’re not more important than the entire human race.” He gestured to the clothes on the foot of my bed: jeans, a heavy sweater, a lab coat in what looked like my size, and a pair of worn-out white canvas shoes that would mostly fit. “Get dressed, and let’s go.”

I was still wobbly—which was only fair, since I’d suffered major blood loss and had brain surgery all in the same day—and getting the clothing on was a little harder than it should have been. It felt eerily like my first days after waking up, when I’d been stranded in a body that had muscle memory and nothing else, making the easy things that everyone around me took for granted seem like minor miracles. Nathan helped me with the sweater, twisting it around until I could find the hole for my head, but I did the rest by myself while he watched the door, waiting for someone to burst in on us.

The door was still closed when I finished tying my shoes and shrugging on the lab coat. Nathan tossed me an elastic band. I used it to pull my hair back in a ponytail, concealing the bandages from my operation. “How do I look?” I asked, spreading my arms a little to give him the full effect.

“Like you belong here,” he said, and leaned in and kissed me—quickly, but with an intensity that spoke to his fear, and to our mutual, growing conviction that we weren’t going to make it out of here. I kissed him back, allowing the momentary closeness to distract from my terror. It was going to be okay. We were going to find a way to make this okay, and I was going to spend the rest of my life kissing Nathan, although preferably not in besieged hospital rooms.

The door swung open. Nathan and I pulled away from each other, our eyes going wide and our backs going tight as we prepared to flee. Fang looked at us disdainfully, tilting his chin up just enough to let him stare at us down the length of his nose. It was a surprisingly effective expression.

“Daisy’s already waiting for us in the parking lot, so if you two lovebirds are done celebrating the fact that we’ve made it this far, we’d like to make it the rest of the way,” he said mildly. “Come on.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, cheeks flaring red, and hurried out of the room. Nathan followed after me, and we plunged into the chaos of the hospital.

I’d believed myself prepared for anything, based on Nathan’s description and my own knowledge of what usually happened during a sleepwalker outbreak. I hadn’t been prepared at all.

There were bodies everywhere we looked. Some were on stretchers or strapped to gurneys like the one they’d used to bring me from Dr. Cale’s. Others sat propped against the walls, hands clasped over obvious injuries and shocked expressions on their faces. Those were actually the ones that bothered me the least. They were clearly upset about what had happened to them. Their wounds hurt. They could feel pain, and they were connected enough to their bodies to understand what that meant, to know that they needed to stop what they were doing and have it taken care of. Those people might be infected—the majority of them probably had implants, considering SymboGen’s saturation of the market—but they weren’t sleepwalkers yet.

The ones that worried me were the ones who weren’t clutching themselves. The ones who leaned against walls, staring into nothingness with the characteristically dead eyes of someone whose human mind has shut off, but whose tapeworm mind has not yet started supplying fresh instructions. The ones who seemed to have fallen asleep, but whose chests were still moving smoothly up and down, marking their continued life even as the worms within them worked their way toward a stronger integration. I stuck close to Nathan, trying not to look at those people. It was like I was afraid that eye contact was all it would take to make them come after me.

The air smelled like blood and vomit and human waste, a horrible mixture of urine, feces, and other things that I didn’t want to put a name to. People cried and screamed and shouted profanities, and that was all good, yes, that was all welcome, because those cries were human. The people who made them were still people.

The steady undercurrent of moaning was a lot less welcome.

Fang wove his way through the crowd like a man who’d spent most of his life moving in tight spaces, and Nathan and I followed him, taking advantage of the narrow openings he created in the brief seconds before they could close again. We were like a surgical laser: we didn’t wound the crowd, but we sliced it open and let it heal behind us, leaving no trace, creating no scar.

One of the dead-eyed men turned his head as we walked past, tracking my movement. I whimpered a little and walked faster, nearly stepping on Fang’s heels in my hurry to get out of range. If these people were far enough along to start picking up on my pheromones, we were in trouble. Real trouble, the kind that no clever plan or stolen car was going to get us out of.

Nathan produced a clipboard from somewhere, probably taking it off one of the hooks on the wall. He handed it to me, motioning that I should start consulting it. I ducked my head and pretended to do just that, watching as the letters seemed to shift and blur around the page. Sally wasn’t dyslexic before I chewed myself a place in her brain. Sorry, Sally. On the plus side for her, she didn’t have to live with the consequences of what I’d done, and I did.

Next time I’ll be more careful which part of the brain I eat, I thought, and barely suppressed an inappropriate giggle. The stress was getting to me. I was expecting to be attacked at any second, or stopped by hospital administration when one of them realized that no matter what I was wearing, I didn’t work there. None of us did.

A few of the people in lab coats looked up as we passed, but Fang moved with enough purpose for ten people, and I had a clipboard; as long as Nathan and I stayed close to him, we looked like a strange little research group, going somewhere important to do something essential. It was all props and posing. Maybe that was enough.

It wasn’t until we reached the doors that one of the actual doctors seemed to realize where we were going. He turned away from the patient he’d been examining, fear flashing across his face, and raised a hand in a beseeching gesture. “Wait!” he cried. “Don’t go out there!”

It was too late. Fang had already hit the doors, never breaking his stride, and we were supposed to be his little research team. We followed him, only to stop dead as he ran out of room to move. It wasn’t that the lobby wasn’t large—it was enormous, as befitted a medical center of this size. It was that the lobby was even worse than the halls, so full that there was barely room to take a step.

People had spilled over from the ER and the urgent care, clogging the couches and chairs until no more bodies could be packed onto them. After that, they’d started sitting on the floor. They milled, almost mindlessly, even though most of them still had the bright-eyed awareness that meant a conscious mind was in control. Most—not all. I saw a young woman with a toddler in her arms, the baby’s mouth hanging slack, the baby’s eyes filled with the nothingness that meant that there was a tapeworm in the process of taking over that tiny body. Nathan followed my gaze and grimaced.

“Intestinal Bodyguards are rated for infants eighteen months and older,” he murmured. “I always thought that was a terrible idea. Now I see that I was more right than I ever knew.”

“Disgusting,” murmured Fang, and continued toward the exit… or tried to. A sudden living wall of humanity appeared in front of him, hands outstretched, mouths moving in a noisy chorus. It wasn’t sleepwalkers. That would almost have been easier to handle. Sleepwalkers were simple, wanting only to grab and hold and feed. No, this was something far worse, and infinitely more complex:

This was the living.

“We’ve been here for an hour! When is someone going to see us?”

“Where are the doctors?”

“Are you doctors?”

“Please, Kim won’t wake up, I don’t know what to do.”

“Please!”

Their voices blended together into an unearthly chorus of words—“seizure” and “won’t wake up” and “help us.” That was said more than anything else: “help us.” I quailed back against Nathan, and he put a hand on my shoulder, glaring at the people who were reaching for me. It didn’t help much. They kept coming.

“We’re not doctors!” I shouted. “We can’t help you!”

That didn’t do any good either. Anyone in a lab coat was better than nothing. Hands grabbed for my sleeves, buffeting me deeper into Nathan’s arms. The drums were back, but softer, pounding the way that they used to before the arteries in my head had begun to give way. I guess that was a small blessing. I’d lived long enough to be torn apart by the crowd.

And then the doors at the far end of the lobby banged open and the sleepwalkers surged inside, their arms as outstretched as their unturned kin, but grasping with terrible purpose. They were moaning, an eerie, discordant sound that was quickly answered from the halls behind us. People turned, crying out in dismay, and forgot to grab for us in favor of scrambling away from the tide now flowing through those open doors. There was nowhere for them to go. The mother with the sleepwalker baby was bowled over by her fellows as they fled, and she didn’t get up again. Neither did her baby. They weren’t the only ones to be trampled in that first panicked rush: anyone who couldn’t get up fast enough, who couldn’t get out of the way, was at risk of being crushed to death.

“Come on,” commanded Fang, grabbing my wrist and dragging me with him as he bolted in the exact direction that I did not want to go: toward the exit. Nathan chased after us, apparently deciding that it was better for all of us to die together than it was for any of us to die alone. I disagreed—I thought it was better if none of us had to die at all—but I was too busy running to argue.

A row of heavy potted plants created a space maybe three feet wide between the wall and the doors. Fang ran into that space, dragging me with him, and dropped my hand. I stared at him, starting to open my mouth and demand to know what was going on. He shook his head, motioning for me to be quiet, and pointed to the plants. I frowned. He gestured to the plants again, more urgently this time, like there was some secret he wanted me to catch on to.

My frown deepened. I looked over my shoulder to Nathan, who seemed as lost as I felt. That was something, anyway: I wasn’t the only one who had no idea what was going on. I turned and peered through the broad leaves of the plants, watching the sleepwalkers pouring into the lobby. That was when I finally realized what Fang was trying to show us.

The sleepwalkers weren’t smart. They could be destructive if they were frustrated or wanted to get somewhere, and they were definitely dangerous at close range, but they weren’t smart. Something in the interface between worm and human was too broken to allow them to be anything approaching smart. They would have come after us if they’d known that we existed—we were too close to ignore, and too defenseless to pass up—but they hunted primarily by sight, and the plants were blocking us from view. My pheromones would still have been an issue under normal circumstances. With this many people in a confined space, some of them with implants of their own that were starting to emit confused pheromone trails, the jumble of scents and instructions must have been throwing the sleepwalkers off. The plants were just one more layer, buying us a little time to let the crowd pass us by.

Fang crouched down, watching them through the space between the leaves. He was perfectly still in that moment, like he could have been a sleepwalker himself. Very softly, he said, “As soon as there’s a break, we’re going to run. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. If you’re afraid you’ve lost the rest of the group, keep going. Daisy is straight ahead of us in the parking lot, in the fifth row of cars. She nicked the keys for a red Corolla. If you don’t see her, keep running and test the doors of the cars you pass. See if you can find something that isn’t locked and shut yourself inside. We will come back for you.”

The moans of the sleepwalkers almost obscured his speech, but the gist of it got through, enough to make my stomach clench. I looked over my shoulder at Nathan. He looked even unhappier than I felt, and I realized that a lot of our relationship—not always, maybe, but ever since I’d first called his mother and said I was willing to go through the broken doors—was based on him protecting me. He couldn’t protect me now, and it was making him uncomfortable. The thought of him needing to protect me made me uncomfortable, but in a different way. I didn’t want to be coddled and kept like a specimen in a jar. I’d already had that life. I wanted something bigger and less confined.

And this wasn’t the time to think about that. I turned back to the row of ornamental plants, watching as the last stragglers of the sleepwalker mob shambled into the hospital lobby. The screams were starting to taper off. I was willing to bet it wasn’t because the screamers had decided that the sleepwalkers weren’t all that big of a deal.

“Now,” hissed Fang, and shoved through the plants, knocking two of them over and creating a channel for me and Nathan to pass through. True to his word, Fang didn’t look back, and so neither did I. I just ran.

The sleepwalkers weren’t that focused. I could see them turning as I ran past, their blank faces betraying no curiosity or confusion. Only their failure to grab and hold us gave their bewilderment away. They couldn’t react quickly to changes in their environment, and we could: that was our big advantage over them. We could run away and they didn’t know how to follow. They just knew that something was happening, and that they wanted to devour it, because they wanted to devour everything.

Nathan pulled up even with me, trying to grab for my hand. I shook my head and kept my hands close to my body, focusing on the act of running. I understood what he was offering, and I appreciated it more than I could have possibly said, but I couldn’t let him pull me along. If we were both taken because he slowed enough to help me, what good would that do?

Ahead of us, Fang began to slow. We caught up to him, and I finally glanced back, seeing the sleepwalkers that had made the decision to turn as they shambled after us. There weren’t many of them yet, but there would be soon. My pheromones would see to that.

So there was danger coming from behind. I turned back to the front, and gasped. I couldn’t stop myself.

The red Corolla was there, exactly as Fang had described it, and Daisy was inside. Whatever mechanism she had used to open the doors—stolen keys or jimmied locks—didn’t matter nearly as much as the small horde of sleepwalkers surrounding her. They clawed at the windows and slapped the glass, and if they were anything like every other sleepwalker in the world, they’d break through soon. She was trapped. They’d devour her, and then they’d go looking for something else to eat. Something else like us.

Fang muttered something in a language I didn’t understand. That didn’t matter. There aren’t any real language barriers when it comes to profanity. He looked at Daisy in the little red car like she represented the end of the world, and I realized what I had to do. I didn’t want to do it. Nathan wasn’t going to like it. I didn’t see any other choice.

It only took me a few seconds to shed my lab coat. The sweater that had given me so much trouble going on was just as much trouble coming off: it snagged on my ponytail, forcing me to dance in place in order to get it off. That was what finally caught Nathan’s attention. He turned, eyes widening behind his glasses as he saw what I was doing.

“Sal?” He sounded bemused. That was all right. Me stripping in a hospital parking lot was pretty weird. “What’s going on?”

“I’m exposing as much skin as I can,” I said, finally yanking the sweater all the way off. I dropped it on the ground. It was never going to find its way back to its original owner, and I felt bad about that, but it was for the greater good. “Pheromones come through skin, right? So exposing more skin should mean more pheromones.”

“Yes, but…”

“Fang?”

“Yes?” Fang looked at me, his expression of resigned despair lightening a little as he took in my bare arms and the sweaty V of exposed skin above my hospital gown. I think he realized what I was going to do. He’d been with Dr. Cale for a long time. He had to have dealt with situations like this, or at least in the same family.

“Make sure he runs.” The sentence came out calmer than I expected. I leaned up, kissing Nathan on the cheek before he could react, and then I bolted toward the car, waving my arms in the air and shouting. “Hey! Hey, sleepwalkers, hey! Hey, it’s your cousin! Sal! I’m right here and I think I’m better than you and what are you going to do about it, huh?”

My exact words probably didn’t matter, since the sleepwalkers were too far gone to understand what I was saying, but they understood that someone was yelling nearby, and as they turned and their nostrils started to flare, they understood that the someone smelled subtly appealing. They understood that they wanted me, more than anything else in the world, they wanted me. That wanting might have been the first thing they really understood since they’d eaten their way into the brains of their human hosts, and once they’d come to understand it, they couldn’t deny it. It was too powerful. One by one, the sleepwalkers that had been surrounding the car pulled away, deserting their captive prize in favor of shambling after me.

They didn’t run, thankfully; they weren’t coordinated enough for that yet, and they might never be. But they shambled with remarkable speed, and many of them were taller than me, which meant that for some of them, each of their unsteady steps was the equivalent of two of mine. So I kept running, and they kept following, their numbers growing as more sleepwalkers shambled over from the direction of the hospital, or from the back of the parking lot.

I heard Nathan shout something behind me—a prayer, a plea, it didn’t matter, because there was a horde between me and him, and I had to keep going. If I stopped, they’d catch me, and they’d rend me limb from limb in their eagerness to have me. I was the perfect meal, the ultimate prize, and the only consolation I had was that they’d probably hurt each other getting to me.

I’m sorry, I thought, as I ran. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but you wouldn’t even have been here if it weren’t for me. You should never have left the lab. I’ve been putting you in danger over and over again, and that means I have to get you out of it at least once. I have to be the one who saves you. That seemed so important, and it was enough to keep me moving. He’d be sad if he lost me. He’d still be able to help his mother save the world.

An engine roared to life in the parking lot behind me. Tires squealed against pavement, and hope rose in my throat like bile, burning everything it touched. Fang and Nathan had managed to reach the car. They were in the car, they were safe, and they were going to get out of here. They were going to back to the lab, and everything was going to be all right.

Then I realized that the screeching tires were getting closer, and the burning feeling of hope intensified, becoming even more painful than my increasingly strained breath. They were coming to get me. They were in the car, and they were on their way, and all I had to do was keep it together long enough for them to somehow open a door and pull me in. I’d probably have a panic attack after a stunt like that, but under the circumstances, that was okay. I was going to be okay. We were all going to be okay. We were—

Lights came on directly ahead, blinding me. I squeaked and kept running, all too aware of what would happen if I stopped while the sleepwalkers were this close on my tail. I was still running when the dart slammed into my chest, its feathered end sticking out like some sort of carnival game—pin the sedative on the chimera.

I kept running. I ran for as long as I could, and then the black spots on the edges of my vision were back, and my knees gave out under my weight, dumping me to the pavement. I clawed for consciousness, tired of letting it go, but my fingers found no purchase, and my last thought as I toppled down into the dark was that I had come to the hospital to make this stop happening.

This isn’t fair, I thought, and the world went black, and there was nothing.

I was down in the dark, in the hot warm dark where nothing hurt and nothing could touch me and nothing mattered but existing. I recognized the dream for the memory that it was now, and I let myself drift, wondering only abstractly how I could remember something that had happened before I had a mind to remember with.

You always had a mind, I scolded myself. You didn’t think like a human, but you thought. Beverly thinks. Minnie thinks. Everything with a brain can think. You just had smaller thoughts.

Small thoughts, hot thoughts, hot warm thoughts of redness and blackness and peace. It was strange to me, here in this place, that any of us would have chosen to leave it voluntarily. Being a human was hard. It was sharp and cold and filled with choices that had no good outcomes, just varying shades and shapes of badness. No matter what you chose, you were choosing wrong for someone. Better to stay down in the dark, where there were no choices and no challenges, just food and warmth and the contentment of simplicity.

But there was no Nathan either, was there? No love, no kisses, no anger born from the hard edges of two people rubbing against each other. There were no chances to change down there in the dark. There were no chances to grow. I’d enjoyed those parts of being human, and a lot of the parts that came with having a body. If I stayed down here in the dark, I wouldn’t get to enjoy those things anymore.

You’ll have to go back, then, I thought sadly, and I didn’t know whether I was talking to myself or to something outside myself, and it didn’t really matter, because I was right either way.

I opened my eyes.

“We’ve got movement!” shouted a voice I didn’t recognize. A woman in wire-framed glasses leaned over me, producing a small flashlight from the pocket of her lab coat and shining it into my eyes. I whimpered and screwed them shut again. Her voice followed a moment later, now announcing jubilantly, “Movement and pupil dilation! I think she’s okay.”

I cracked my left eye cautiously open. The woman was still there, but she was facing away from me, giving me a good look at her profile. She was pale-skinned, with hair that was either bleached or the palest blonde I had ever seen, and her lab coat…

Her lab coat had the USAMRIID logo on the sleeve. My mouth went dry and my stomach went tight, the drums suddenly pounding in my ears as I realized where the lights and tranquilizer dart had come from. I tried to sit up, and discovered that I couldn’t. As with the gurney from before, I was strapped to the surface that I was on top of. I opened both my eyes, making another attempt. Still nothing, and this time the motion attracted the woman’s attention. She turned to face me, plastering a smile so patently fake that it was almost painful across her face.

“Hello, Sally,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly. “My name is Dr. Crystal Huff. I was with the team that extracted you from the hospital. You may feel a little disoriented. That’s perfectly normal, and does not indicate infection. You have been checked thoroughly, and I am glad to be able to tell you that you’re not sick. Do you understand me, Sally? Nod if you understand me.” She stopped, smiling brightly down at me. It was like she was trying to make herself understood by a small child who didn’t understand English, and if my hands hadn’t been strapped down, I would probably have hit her.

My mouth was too dry to let me form words. I swallowed hard, trying to convince my salivary glands to do their job. Finally, after several seconds of silence and swallowing, I managed to croak, “Why am I strapped to this table?” How do you know who I am? I had still been wearing the ID bracelet with the fake name Dr. Cale used to get me into the hospital.

“It’s not a table, it’s a cot, but apart from that, I am very pleased by the recovery it took for you to recognize that you were strapped down,” said Dr. Huff, sounding pleased. “You’re strapped down for your own safety. We had to move you while you were unconscious, and we didn’t want you waking up with any injuries, now, did we? It took a lot of work for us to find you. We don’t want you getting hurt.”

I stared at her. Finally, when I was sure that I wouldn’t yell, I tried again. “Why am I strapped to this cot? I’m awake now. You know I’m awake now. Shouldn’t you be letting me up? I want to get up.”

Dr. Huff’s artificial smile dropped away. “Sally, I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to fully understand the situation. Now maybe that’s my fault—maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough when you first woke up—but we didn’t expect you to regain consciousness quite this quickly. Everyone reacts differently to the sedatives we’re using. You should have been out for at least another thirty minutes. So I’m very sorry that I was not prepared for you to start questioning me.”

“You’re not ready to start answering me either, I guess, because you’re not,” I said, giving another experimental tug against the straps. “Can you let me up? You just said that I wasn’t sick. I want to get up.” It was a funny twist of the infection: a sleepwalker would show parasitic “tendrils” throughout their bodies, lines drawn and held by the toxoplasmosis DNA that had been used to help the implants integrate with the human body. A chimera—like Adam, like me—wouldn’t show any of those traces. Our implants had relocated completely to our brains, abandoning the parts of themselves that would normally have been used to latch on to the body. A recent chimera might have shown up on an infection sweep, but not one that had been given the time to finish integration.

They could test and test, and they’d find the violent ones, the ones who were incapable of concealing themselves, and the ones who were too deep in comas to pose a threat. But they’d never find the ones like me without doing MRIs and lumbar punctures. They’d never find the ones who’d learned how to make themselves look human.

“No, I can’t,” said Dr. Huff. “You’re being relocated to a secure facility, and I’m afraid that patients can’t be allowed to move freely around the transport.”

I blinked at her. I hadn’t realized we were moving, and no matter how much I tried to focus, I couldn’t detect any motion.

She must have seen my confusion, because she said, “We’re waiting for the trucks to arrive. It will be easier to keep the afflicted and the unafflicted separate if everyone remains in their assigned place.”

“What?” I didn’t know which part of that upset me the most. I strained against the straps that held me down again. “No, no, you can’t put me with people who’ve started going sleepwalker. I don’t even want to be in a carrier with them. You don’t understand how easy it is for them to escape. You don’t understand—”

“We have taken every precaution,” she said crisply. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other patients to attend to.” She straightened up, her expression going blank and cold, and stalked out of my field of vision.

Sleepwalkers had cold, dead eyes, but they weren’t thinking creatures: they hurt you because they didn’t know how to do anything else, not because they harbored any malice or desire to harm the people around them. Dr. Huff… her eyes were the eyes of a sapient being, and when she hurt me—and I had every confidence that it was a “when,” not an “if,” given the circumstances that I had found myself in—it would be the full understanding of what she was doing. Dr. Banks had eyes like that. Dr. Banks never hurt me when he wasn’t trying to.

I relaxed as much as I could, trying to find signs of slack in the straps. There didn’t seem to be any: they were drawn as tight as they could possibly have been without hurting me, and even breathing all the way out and holding my breath did nothing to let me move. I could squirm down a few inches, and that was all. I was trapped.

The drums were starting to pound in my ears, a sure sign that I was panicking. I couldn’t tell whether they were louder than they should have been, and that just made them pound faster. Was it safe for me to experience this much excitement right after surgery? Was I going to have an aneurism on this cot and die never knowing what had happened to my friends?

No. No, I was not. I forced myself to breathe slowly, trying to bring my heart rate back down to something less alarming. Nathan and the others had reached the car: I knew that from the sounds of tires I’d heard behind me in the parking lot. They wouldn’t have been vulnerable the same way that I had been. They got away. They had to have gotten away. They would go back to Dr. Cale and tell her that USAMRIID had me, and she…

She would say she was very sorry, and that it sucked to lose such a valuable research subject. And then she would tell them to start packing, because if USAMRIID was in the area, she could no longer stay there. None of us was more important than the entire human race. Not one. It didn’t matter how much Nathan disagreed. Dr. Cale would make him go along with her. She was the one with the paid security, after all. All Nathan had was a pair of dogs. He didn’t even have the Prius anymore.

I closed my eyes. It was better than staring at the distant ceiling, waiting for the moment when someone would come and load me onto a transport. Maybe they’d put me in a room with a bunch of people who didn’t know what was going on, and I’d be able to escape. Or maybe they’d put me in with the sleepwalkers, and I’d wind up ripped to pieces before I had a chance to defend myself.

This can’t be how it ends, I thought. This isn’t fair.

Fair didn’t seem to be playing any part in things.

Footsteps approached from my right. I opened my eyes and rolled my head in that direction, calling, “Hello? My name is Sal Mitchell. I’m not sick. Can you unstrap me, please?” It was a long shot, especially considering that the stranger in the dark could easily have been Dr. Huff, but it was better than lying here, waiting to be moved.

“Is that your legal name?” asked a cool male voice that I didn’t recognize—not quite—although there was something halfway familiar about it. Like Fang. Whoever this was, I knew him in some other context.

“Not quite,” I admitted. “My legal name is Sally Rae Mitchell.” That was the name my body’s parents gave to it at birth, and the original Sally had never wanted to change it. The “Rae” was after some aunt I’d never met. Maybe changing my name legally to just plain “Sal” would be the honest thing to do, but I was starting to suspect it was already too late for that. We were standing on the razor edge of a national emergency. The department that handled name changes probably wasn’t going to be taking appointments for a while.

“Subject is confused about her identity,” said the man, his words accompanied by the sound of fingertips drubbing softly against a touchscreen.

“What? No! I’m not confused! I know who I am, I just never use the name ‘Sally.’ I don’t like it. It’s—” I was going to say “not me,” but I caught myself at the last second, twisting the rest of the sentence into “—it doesn’t suit me very well. I like ‘Sal’ better, so that’s what I always call myself. I’m not confused, I swear.”

“Subject is defensive,” said the man, accompanying his words with more taps.

“I’m not defensive!” I protested. “You try giving calm answers when you’re strapped to a table and nobody’s willing to tell you what’s going on! It’s not that easy. I don’t think you could do it.” Inspiration struck. “Unless you do think you could do it. Let’s trade places. You come strap yourself down and I’ll ask you questions, and we’ll see how calm you sound.”

The man chuckled. “Oh, pet. You always did like your little jokes, didn’t you?”

I froze.

The man with the touchscreen stepped out of the shadows and into my field of vision. He was tall and gangly, with limbs that seemed a little too long for his body, yet nonetheless moved with artful grace, like he had spent his time learning exactly how to present himself to best advantage. The heavy artificial tan he’d worked so hard to cultivate was gone, as were the neatly tailored clothes; he was wearing off-the-rack tan slacks and a blue button-down shirt under a lab coat with the USAMRIID logo on the breast. He’d even added black-framed glasses to his ensemble, completing the illusion that he belonged here. His hair was still cut in the latest style, brown with bleached tips and a spiky outline that could only be achieved through pomade and care, but it seemed less natural and more like an affectation when set against the rest of him. Whatever game he was playing, he had taken the time and put in the effort to play it well.

Sherman Lewis smiled at me coolly. I stared at him, unsure of what else I could do. He had been my handler for years, taking care of moving me around the building and keeping me out of trouble during my periodic visits to SymboGen. He had also been a chimera the whole time, another product of Dr. Cale’s lab. He was like Adam and Tansy, surgically created, rather than being natural like me, and the last time I’d seen him, he’d been in the basement at SymboGen, and I’d been running for my life.

“This is a fun situation, don’t you think? I always hoped you’d see the light and leave your stupid boyfriend so that you and I could get to know each other better, but I’ll admit, I never thought I’d convince you to try bondage.” Sherman leaned over me, invading the fragile bubble of my personal space.

“Your accent’s gone.” It was a stupid thing to say. I couldn’t think of anything better, and besides, it seemed important. Sherman had always had a thick British accent, even though he came from a California lab. That was why I hadn’t recognized his voice sooner, not until he called me “pet”: without the accent, he didn’t really sound like himself.

“Oh, you mean this?” Sherman’s voice was suddenly plummy and thick again, full of subtly twisted vowels and lilting consonants. “I can suppress it if I need to, like when I’m working a different undercover identity. Never did figure out why I sounded British. Just woke up this way. Mom always said it was a sign that something interesting had happened during my integration, but she couldn’t say precisely what it was, and she had other things to worry about most of the time. Keeping Tansy out of trouble, keeping Adam from seeing anything that might upset his precious sensibilities—and you, of course. She would probably have come looking for me before too much longer, if you hadn’t decided that you were tired of living in this pretty little body’s gut, and moved on up to the big leagues.”

He put his touchscreen down on my stomach, where the weight of it was an unpleasant reminder that I was trapped. Leaning forward, he traced a finger along my clavicle and smiled. I squirmed. That just made him smile more.

“You really did get lucky. You’re nicely symmetrical, and you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Don’t laugh. The shape of the skull probably makes a large difference in the integration.”

I glared at him. “I nearly died because of that integration. No thanks to you.”

“Ah, is that what you were doing at the hospital? I had wondered what would possibly have possessed you to go someplace so patently foolish.” Sherman put his hand on the side of my face, trying to turn my head to the side. I struggled against him, and he scowled. “Be still, Sal. I’m not going to hurt you. Whether you believe me or not, I want you on my side, and damaging you now would just convince you never to work with me. I want to check your bandages.”

“How do you know I have bandages?” I demanded.

“You just as good as told me you’d gone to the hospital to have those faulty arteries in your head repaired, and you’re asking how I know you’ve got bandages on? Learn to remember what you said thirty seconds ago, will you? It’ll make a big difference in how the rest of this day goes. Now stop fighting me, or I’ll tell Dr. Huff you need to be sedated again for your own safety.”

I stopped fighting.

Sherman rolled my head to the side, his long, clever fingers probing down through my hair until they found the bandage concealed there. “It’s caught on the small hairs—they should have shaved your neck before they cut you open, the barbarians. Bite your tongue, Sal, this is going to hurt a bit, and I can’t have you making a sound.” That was all the warning he gave before he pulled the bandage loose. It took what felt like half the hair on my head with it, even though I knew that was anatomically impossible. I squeaked but managed not to shout; Sherman’s warning had been sufficient.

His fingers resumed probing almost instantly, not even waiting for the pain to fade. I stared into the dark, eyes watering, and wondered what he was looking for.

I didn’t have to wonder for long. “There’s a little mark, and anyone doing a truly detailed inspection would be able to tell you’d had surgery recently, but as long as you don’t tell anyone to look more closely, you should be all right.” Sherman pulled his hand out of my hair almost reluctantly, pausing at the last moment to swipe his fingers across my cheek. “I’m glad that little problem’s been fixed.”

“You knew, and you didn’t make them put me back together,” I said sullenly, still staring off into the darkness. I didn’t want to look at him. He was a traitor and a turncoat, and worst of all, he was a liar. He’d known my life was in danger, and he’d said nothing. I didn’t matter to him.

“Dr. Banks wouldn’t let me.” He pulled his hand away. “Chave and I both suggested it, on multiple occasions, under the guise of monitoring your well-being. That was part of our job, after all, so we thought we could get away with it. He eventually told us both to stop, and said that we’d be fired if we didn’t. He wanted you to have that inbuilt weakness, and it’s not that easy to perform surgery on someone whose medical power of attorney is controlled by someone else. Plus, any surgeon we could have found who was willing to perform the operation would have discovered your… little condition, and then I would have had to kill them. I’m not fond of killing people, Sal.”

“What?” I finally rolled my head back to its original place, frowning up at him. “You were talking about creating a world without humans. You’re totally okay with killing people.”

“One,” he said, holding up a long finger, “that doesn’t mean I like it. And two, you have perhaps made some mistaken assumptions about my desire for a world without humans. I’m not going to wipe out the species. That would be silly, and wasteful, and nigh impossible.”

I frowned. “Then what do you want to do?”

He smiled. That expression was the same as it had always been, and for just a second, it was like I was looking back through time to a moment when I almost understood things. “I want to round them up and put them in breeding camps, at least until we have enough stable chimera to breed our own babies,” he said. That broke the illusion. Instantly. “Integration is easier with younger subjects. We’ll be able to introduce implant to infant, tapeworm to toddler, and slide ourselves right into their skins without any need for trauma on any side. Imagine, Sal. There won’t be any displacement—you’re not kicking out the original owner if they never had a chance to develop. There won’t be the sort of dysphoria you and I and the others like us have had to live with, because we’ll grow with our bodies. We’ll grow into them, and they’ll be ours.”

I stared at him. “You want to replace humanity by becoming humanity?”

“In a controlled sense, yes.” He kept smiling, his lips tight and his teeth concealed. “We’ll be much better shepherds for this world, and after all, isn’t it the nature of things for children to replace their parents? They made us. We’ll take their place.”

“I don’t…” I stopped. There was no way to make him understand why replacing humanity would be wrong, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to try. It would give him the opening to keep explaining why replacing humanity was exactly right—and I was deeply afraid, on a level I didn’t want to think about too hard, that if he spoke, I would listen. Almost every human I’d known during my short life had lied to me. There were good ones, sure. I loved Nathan more than anything. But was that an argument for an entire species? They had created the sleepwalkers. They had killed their own people because they didn’t want to sneeze anymore. I wasn’t sure that was an endorsement.

Of course, if the fact that almost every human had lied to me was going to be a factor, I needed to consider the fact that every chimera had either lied to me or moved against me in some way. Neither side of my heritage was blameless.

“Good. You’re learning to stop and think.” Sherman picked up his touchscreen. When he spoke again, his accent was gone, leaving him sounding as neutral as a newscaster. “Here’s how this is going to work. I’ll tell my supervisor, Dr. Huff, that you’re lucid and coherent, and that we can probably move you to an unsecured transport. She’ll try to argue with me, and I’ll bat my eyelashes at her and remind her that the sooner we get you all processed, the sooner she and I will be able to get a little time for ourselves. I can’t guarantee that will work, but I’d say it’s got a good chance. Once you’re unstrapped, go with the men who come to escort you. They’ll take you to the holding pen. Wait for me there. I’ll come for you as soon as I can.”

“A holding pen?” I asked blankly. “What, so I can get ripped apart by sleepwalkers? No, you have to get me out of here. Just undo the straps. I’ll run, and you’ll never have to deal with me again.”

“But I want to be dealing with you, Sal my darling, and more importantly, you’re being intentionally obtuse, which is not a good look for you. Try using that fantastic brain that you’ve wired yourself into.” He tapped his touchscreen, apparently changing one of the notations on my chart. “We have the potential to be ten times smarter than our human hosts ever were without us, you know that? Our presence stimulates formation of new nervous tissue and enhances nerve transmission speed. I’m not sure exactly how yet—I never did manage to get a chimera on the operating table where I could take it apart—but science supports my claim. That means you have no excuse for being stupid. Now, why would I want you ripped apart when you’re ever so much more delightfully useful in one piece?”

I glared at him. “I’m not going to help you.”

“Yet,” he said calmly. “The word you’re looking for is ‘yet.’ And don’t let your stubbornness worry your pretty little head. I’m going to help you either way.” He blew me a kiss, and then turned and walked away, leaving me alone again.

I wanted to scream expletives after him—many of which were words that he had originally taught me, back when he was pretending to be a loyal, human SymboGen employee who had only my best interests at heart, rather than a dangerous chimera bent on the destruction of the human race. He’d been one of my two handlers, along with Chave, an icy African-American woman who had always made me uncomfortable by keeping me at arm’s length and treating me like a bomb that was about to go off. It was funny how much context changed things, because now I was sure Sherman was the reason the sleepwalking sickness was spreading so fast and so catastrophically, while Chave—who had died when her own implant went active and chewed its way up into her brain—had been working for Dr. Cale all along. Like Fang, she’d been there to gather information on Dr. Banks, and to protect me.

So many people had died or endangered themselves to keep me safe, and almost none of them had been on the relatively short list of people that I had trusted at the start of this whole mess. Chave had been on my side all along. Sherman was on nobody’s side except his own. I was starting to seriously doubt my ability to judge human nature.

The echoing space around me grew silent as Sherman’s footsteps faded. I frowned up into the darkness. Wherever I was being held, it didn’t make sense. There should have been cots like mine on every side, occupied either by sleepwalkers or by other patients who had been collected and deemed to be clean. Instead, while the lack of light blocked off any extensive study, I was pretty sure there was no one to either side of me. Just more blackness, shadows reaching out and claiming everything that they touched as their own. It was… unnerving.

Was I the only person they’d managed to save from the hospital?

Two men came walking out of the gloom, both wearing lab coats and plain white masks over the bottoms of their faces. They didn’t say a word to me. One of them seized my arm, twisting it so that the inside was pointed at the ceiling.

“Hey!” I instinctively tried to pull away, only to find myself stopped by the straps that held me down. “Who are you? What are you doing? Let go of me!”

They ignored my cries. One of them produced a syringe from inside his pocket, uncapping it and jamming it into the soft tissue of my arm before I had time to frame a new objection. I squeaked. He pulled the needle free.

“What did you just inject me with? Answer me! You have no right to do this! I’m a United States citizen!” As long as I was legally human, I was pretty sure that was still true. “You need to answer me right now!” My vision was starting to go blurry around the edges. Not black this time, but gray and sort of wispy, like a fog was rolling in. I tried to frown. My face didn’t feel like it was responding. But I kept trying, because anything else would have felt too much like giving up, and giving up would have meant that I was allowing them to win. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let them win. I couldn’t…

Most sedatives take a few minutes to kick in. Either this one worked faster than most, or it had started by distorting my sense of time, because my ability to fight faded, and it took me with it. For the second time in a day, I’d been drugged into unconsciousness.

I was starting to get really tired of these people.

Consciousness returned like someone had flipped a switch inside my brain. I sat up with a gasp, only realizing after it was done that I could sit up; nothing was holding me down anymore. I looked down at myself, checking for restraints or IV lines. There was nothing. All the medical equipment had been mercifully removed, although a familiar burn in my crotch told me that the equipment had included a catheter for some reason, which meant they’d kept me under for more than eight hours. That wasn’t a good sign.

My stolen clothes were also gone, replaced by mint green medical scrubs and soft booties with plastic treads on the bottoms. There was a plastic ID bracelet clamped around one wrist. I raised my arm and squinted at the type on the bracelet, forcing my eyes to focus. The words swam in and out, finally settling down to something I could read:

I didn’t know what that meant, but I could guess. According to Nathan, when I had migrated to Sally’s brain, the protein markers that would normally have indicated my presence in her body had vanished from her bloodstream. Any normal test that didn’t involve a full brain MRI would show that there was no SymboGen implant in me. It was deceitful, but looking at the little plastic band on my wrist, I couldn’t feel bad about it. My freedom might very well depend on that deception.

Lowering my arm, I looked around the room where I had been put, only to realize that “room” was a generous description, even more generous than it had been for the little semiprivate space back at the bowling alley. I was on a medical cot, with a blanket, sheet, and thin pillow. That was all that shared the room with me. There was no other furniture, no medical equipment, no lavatory facilities… and depending on how I wanted to look at things, there were no walls. Instead, a thin plastic membrane separated me from the hall outside my room, curving gently as it rose to an exposed ventilation panel that was pumping air into the bubble. Yes: bubble. That was the best word for where I was. This was a bubble, and when I turned to either the left or right, I saw more bubbles, each with their own bed, their own occupant. A sick feeling started to coil in my stomach. I twisted around to look behind me.

Row upon row of bubbles stretched off into the distance, creating separate, sterile environments for the people inside them. None of them seemed to have doors.

I slid off the bed, keeping my hands on the mattress as I tested my balance. My legs seemed willing to hold me, although there was a bone-deep weariness in all my muscles, making me feel like I’d been running marathons in my sleep. I wasn’t hungry. I closed my eyes and cleared my throat, trying to focus on the subtleties of that sensation. It was a little sore, like I’d been shouting. Since I hadn’t been shouting—that I was aware of; if they’d put me under twilight sedation at some point, I could have done all sorts of things I didn’t remember—that probably meant they’d used a feeding tube on me, in addition to feeding me intravenously.

All those things were medically necessary, under the right circumstances, but since I hadn’t agreed to any of them, I was starting to feel more and more violated. I let go of the bed and walked to the bubble wall, pressing my palms flat against it. It didn’t flex. It might look like a thin sheet of plastic, but whatever it was, it was strong enough to resist my exploratory efforts at getting it to yield. Hands still pressed against the plastic, I peered as far to the left and to the right as I could. Everything was very well lit, so it wasn’t hard to confirm that I was, for the moment, apparently unsupervised. Great. I drew back my left hand, made a fist, and punched the plastic wall as hard as I could.

The pain was immediate and intense. Whatever that stuff was, it was like punching brick. I squealed with pain, shaking my bruised hand and dancing back from the barrier like it had done something wrong, even though I was the one who had launched an unprovoked attack against it. The plastic wasn’t even dented. I wasn’t going to get out that way.

The drums were back, beating softly in my ears as my heart rate rose. I stopped shaking my hand and began to pace instead, looking for a seam or some other evidence of how they had managed to get me in here—whoever “they” were, wherever “here” was. There were at least five rows of bubbles, with me in the front. I couldn’t tell how many bubbles were in each row. I could see the curve of the row behind me well enough to count off eleven separate enclosures, but that didn’t get me all the way to the wall. That meant that a conservative estimate put fifty-five bubbles in this room, each of them representing a circle about twelve feet across. I wasn’t good enough at math to figure out what that meant in terms of actual space inside the bubble, beyond “a lot.” Wherever we were being held, it was massive.

I paced three times around the edge of the room, trying to work the weakness out of my legs. More and more of the people around me were waking up and getting out of their beds. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why they were here; I saw men and women, children and senior citizens, and all of them were in exactly the same sort of setup I was: total isolation without any hint of privacy. That was a little weird, and that worried me. Psychologically, wasn’t it stressful for people to be able to see each other and not reach each other? Little private rooms would have served the same purpose in terms of keeping us apart, but it might have done a lot to keep the people in those isolated bubbles sane.

Maybe that just meant we weren’t going to be kept here for long. But that didn’t make sense either, since a place like this, well… it couldn’t have been cheap to construct, and it couldn’t have gone up overnight. So they’d taken us, drugged us until we passed out, and then kept us drugged long enough to get this room ready for our arrival. Why? It didn’t make any sense, unless there was some plan that I wasn’t seeing.

Worst of all, I didn’t even know who had me anymore. It wasn’t Dr. Cale—this was way outside of her budget and available resources, unless things had changed a lot more dramatically than I suspected. Dr. Huff had identified herself as USAMRIID, and Sherman had been wearing a lab coat with a USAMRIID logo on it, but that didn’t mean they were actually the people controlling this facility. Things could change really quickly when you had traitors in your midst, and I couldn’t make myself think of Sherman as anything other than a traitor. Not at this point. Not after the things that he had done.

I was still pacing when I saw movement down the hall to my left. Actual, outside-the-bubble movement, not the milling aimlessness of my fellow prisoners. I ran to what I couldn’t help thinking of as the front of my bubble, pressing my face against the plastic and straining to get a better look.

A tall, weary-looking man in military uniform was walking toward my private prison, surrounded by a flock of people in lab coats. They surged around him like the sea, moving forward to present touchscreens or clipboards, and then falling back as another wave of scientists took their place. I stepped back from the plastic wall, letting my hands fall to my sides. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else to react.

The man in the uniform—the man I’d never been expecting to see again—was Colonel Alfred Mitchell. My—I mean, Sally Mitchell’s father. He was where she got her pale skin and middling brown hair. I looked at him and saw the jaw that greeted me every time I looked in a mirror. He was tall, broad in the shoulders and thick in the waist, and he walked like he knew that any obstacle he encountered would be clever enough to get out of his way. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing in front of USAMRIID’s San Francisco facility, watching me get into Nathan’s car and drive away. That was when we’d said what I’d thought would be our last goodbyes. What I’d hoped would be our last goodbyes, because I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore.

When I thought I was Sally reborn, memories lost to pay for my recovery, he’d been my father. When I started becoming Sal in thought and action—a new person, not the daughter that he’d lost—he’d still been my father, just a little distant, a little strained, like he didn’t know how to deal with me anymore. And then I’d started learning what I really was, who I really was, and it hadn’t been a surprise to him, because he’d known all along. He’d never been under any misconceptions about my nature. I’d been an in-home science project for him, something to study while he waited to figure out how to get rid of me and my entire species.

Alfred Mitchell had let me think that he loved me, and I didn’t know whether I was ever going to be capable of forgiving him for that. Seeing him again made me realize that I also didn’t know whether I was ever going to be able to stop myself from loving him. He was my daddy. Whatever else he was… he was always, always going to be my daddy.

He stopped outside my bubble, and his swirling array of scientists stopped with him, all of them turning in my direction. One of them read from her touchscreen, “Mitchell, Sally Rae. No traces of the protein that would indicate the presence of Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis were found in her bloodstream, and she came up negative on antigen tests. She’s clean.”

“She was recovered from the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek,” said another scientist, apparently eager to feel like he was contributing to the conversation. “A large mob of infected individuals was in pursuit when she was sedated and taken for further study.”

“General health is good, but it’s unclear what she was doing at the hospital, and her arms showed bruises and recent puncture wounds, in addition to a stitched-up human bite wound,” said the first scientist, slanting a glare at her competition.

I wanted to scream at both of them. I didn’t make a sound. Instead, I folded my arms and just watched them through the thin plastic wall, waiting for Colonel Mitchell to say or do something. At least I’d learned two things for sure: I was being held by USAMRIID, and sound could pass through these bubbles. I still didn’t know what they were made of, but every bit of information was going to be helpful if I was going to figure out a way out of here.

The scientists stopped speaking, leaving me and Colonel Mitchell to stare silently at each other. Even if my file didn’t say Sally was his daughter, there was no way anyone could look at him and then at me without seeing the traces of his paternity. Joyce—his other daughter, Sally’s sister—looked like her mother, and Sally looked like her father.

Finally, Colonel Mitchell said, “Hello, Sally.”

“Hi.” I didn’t call him “Dad,” because he wasn’t my dad, no matter how much part of me still wanted him to be, and I didn’t call him “Colonel,” because I didn’t want the scientists to figure out what I was, if they didn’t know already. They probably did. They might have picked me up thinking I was just another refugee, but he knew, and they worked for him. So they probably knew by now. Still, anything that could keep me off the dissection table for a little bit longer seemed like a good idea.

“You’re looking well.” He sounded uncomfortable. That was good. I didn’t want him to be happy and relaxed, not when I was being held captive in a giant plastic bubble and he was free to walk away at any time.

“I’ve had better days.”

He nodded, like that was an understandable answer. “Where have you been for the last week?”

“Has it been a week?” I didn’t have to feign confusion. As far as my memory was concerned, it had only been about two days since I last saw him. The other five days, if they existed, were missing, replaced by nothingness. “How long was I unconscious?”

“All healthy individuals recovered from Contra Costa County were kept sedated for a five-day period,” said one of the scientists, apparently relieved to have something that she could contribute to the conversation. “It allowed us to be sure you were as clean as you appeared to be.”

“The implants have shown the ability to go temporarily quiescent,” said Colonel Mitchell, shooting a warning look at the scientist. She flushed red, looking away. He returned his attention to me. “Someone who tests clean today can start showing protein markers tomorrow. Several of us have required multiple courses of antiparasitic drugs before we could be genuinely sure of being uncontaminated.”

Antiparasitics that couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier wouldn’t touch a sleepwalker, or a chimera. Antiparasitics that could cross the barrier would either be metabolized or cause anaphylactic shock, severe illness, and potentially, if the drugs weren’t discontinued quickly enough, death. It wasn’t a fun way to go, at least if my own brushes with antiparasitic reaction were anything to go by. “Congratulations,” I said. “It must be nice to not be scared anymore.”

Colonel Mitchell winced for some reason. I frowned at him with his daughter’s face, arms still folded. He looked away.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“A secure holding facility,” he said, without looking at me. “You’re safe here.”

“That wasn’t the question.” Several of the scientists were starting to look unhappy about the way that I was talking to their boss. I didn’t really care all that much about how they felt. I kept my attention on the Colonel, trying not to think about the nights he’d spent in my doorway, keeping the nightmares away with his presence, or the times he’d done things that were more fatherly than scientific. He’d taken me out for ice cream, just the two of us, and we’d eaten dripping cones on Fisherman’s Wharf while we laughed at the tourists. Those moments had never been common, but they’d been, and it was hard not to dwell on that as I watched him stand there in his uniform, with me in a scientific prison.

“I know you’re confused, and I know you’re upset, but this is protocol right now,” he said finally, looking back to me. “You should be grateful that you were located during the early stages of the outbreak. Right now, we can afford to space you out and give you a little room to move. By the time this is all over, that’s not going to be the case.”

“What? You’re going to start a zoo for unturned humans?” I uncrossed my arms in order to gesture in both directions at once, indicating the rows of bubbles stretching out in both directions. I wasn’t lying, quite: I still hadn’t claimed to be one of those precious unturned souls. “You can’t keep us in here forever. It’s inhumane. There are laws against this sort of thing.”

“A surprising number of laws can be suspended when it’s a matter of public health.” Colonel Mitchell looked at me gravely, his eyes searching my face like he was trying to find something he no longer believed existed. “This is a quarantine situation. Individuals without any sign of a SymboGen implant are relatively rare, thanks to the corporation’s increasing market saturation over the past few years. We need to isolate people long enough to be sure that they’re genuinely clean, and not Trojan horses looking to get into our protected populations. Once someone is fully cleared, they will be released into a less restrained setting. We’ve acquired a small town in Contra Costa County, relatively isolated by both geography and design. The inhabitants have either been restrained here or relocated elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll all find it quite comfortable there.”

I stared at him, momentarily at a loss for words. Some of the scientists were exchanging glances, like they weren’t comfortable with him telling me even this much. “Wait, you really are going to put us in a zoo?”

“An isolated environment where you can be protected from the current threat,” he corrected. “There’s no way of telling whether the SymboGen implant has become transmissible, and we need to protect the few individuals who have been confirmed as unaffected.”

This wasn’t working. He was feeding me a party line—maybe a little bit more of the line than he was supposed to feed me, but that could all be excused by the fact that I wore his daughter’s face. I dropped my arms to my sides, trying to look vulnerable, and asked, “How’s Joyce?”

His face shut down. There was no other way of describing what happened. It wasn’t the muscular death of the sleepwalkers, or even the sudden loss of muscle tension that came when someone fell asleep or was knocked unconscious: this was a simultaneous tightening and smoothing out, until there was nothing left in his expression that could tell me how he felt. “She survived the course of intramuscular praziquantel that we gave her on Dr. Kim’s recommendation. There were some side effects, of course, but she’s still breathing. That’s more than I felt confident in hoping for when we began the treatment.”

The intramuscular praziquantel had been intended to target the SymboGen implant that was colonizing her brain. Nathan and I had known substantially less about the sleepwalkers when Joyce got sick. She hadn’t gone all the way into the “walking around, trying to kill people” stage, but she’d lost consciousness and been bad enough that USAMRIID had quarantined her. Dad—Colonel Mitchell, I reminded myself; he’d been Dad at the time, but that time had passed—had demanded that we help. We’d done our best, and it sounded like we’d saved her body.

It was a pity that I was pretty sure we hadn’t saved her mind.

I’ve never been good at concealing my thoughts. They played out on my face in real time, and Colonel Mitchell had had a lot of practice at reading me. “I doubt she’ll ever wake up,” he said. “The worm that chewed its way into her skull did a lot of damage in the process. The drugs did even more. She’s still on life support while we look for a miracle. Do you have a miracle for me, Sal?” He stressed the single syllable of my name, reminding me of who I was, who we were to each other. I stared at him, mouth falling briefly open in comprehension.

He was hiding me.

He’d known what I was all along, so he had to have known who Nathan’s mother was—he would have investigated Nathan as soon as we started dating. He probably knew we’d been with Dr. Cale, and how much information I had access to. He was hiding me from the rest of USAMRIID because he really hoped I had a miracle, that I could produce some magic equation from Dr. Cale’s lab that would mysteriously allow him to bring Joyce’s mind and body together again. He was a father who had already lost one of his two daughters forever, only to see a stranger put that little girl’s body on and walk it around like a suit. He would do anything to save the daughter he had left.

He was grasping at straws.

“I’m in a bubble, Daddy,” I said. Several of the scientists paused, eyes widening. Apparently, the nature of our biological relationship hadn’t been known to his entire team. Well, if he wanted that cat to stay in the bag, he should have said something sooner. “I don’t think I can produce many miracles from in here.”

“Think harder,” he said. He didn’t say goodbye: he just turned and resumed his walk down the row of bubbles. The scientists chased after him, so many fluttering, white-winged birds trying to keep up with the leader of their flock. I stayed exactly where I was, only turning my head to watch him walking away. The occupants of the other bubbles pressed themselves against the plastic as he passed, waving their arms and shouting to get his attention. The bubbles had to be proximity-permeable somehow, because I didn’t hear any of them.

When Colonel Mitchell and his entourage had passed out of sight I walked back to the bed, crawled onto it, and stretched out on top of the covers. It was time to wait and see what happened next. I had every confidence that it was going to be something interesting.

-

Chapter 7 SEPTEMBER 2027

I must have fallen asleep at some point. When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring up at a twilit ceiling, all the lights having been turned down sometime in the interim. I sat up, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand as I tried to figure out exactly what had woken me. It couldn’t have been the change in the light; a gradual dimming would have made me sleep more deeply, not wake up. That only left a few possible stimuli.

Something moved in the dim hall in front of my bubble. There was a thick, meaty noise, followed by the sound of something hitting the floor. I sat up straighter, brushing my hair away from my eyes. There was another movement, but I couldn’t quite see what it was; it was like the plastic had gone cloudy, turning everything on the other side into a series of undifferentiated blurs. Then the wall began to melt.

It didn’t happen all at once. Holes appeared in the plastic, seeming almost organic in their progression. It was like watching invisible caterpillars chew their way through a translucent leaf. Once the holes had spread far enough, they joined together, and sheets of gooey bubble wall fell to the floor of my enclosure with wet splattering sounds. I watched them fall, fascinated. They continued to dissolve after they hit the ground.

As the bubble fell away, the body of the guard became visible—slit throat and all. I swallowed hard, watching the sheets of bubble foam and fade. Only when the last of the pieces was gone did I raise my eyes to my murderous savior.

Sherman’s smile was more than halfway to being a smirk. He clipped the spray can of solvent he’d used to melt my bubble to his belt, leaving his hand resting on the spray trigger. “Hello, pet,” he said. His accent was back in full force, which was actually reassuring. He wasn’t pretending with me. I liked that. He was wearing a smoke gray bodysuit that was distinctly not USAMRIID issue, and he had somehow committed murder without getting a drop of blood on him. “Thought you might like an extraction.”

I stayed where I was, seated on the bed, and simply looked at him.

Sherman’s smile gradually faded. “You seem to think this is an open-ended offer, Sal. I assure you, it is not. It took a good bit of work to jam their cameras long enough to get to you. If you don’t move your pretty little butt in short order, I’ll have to leave you.”

“Fine,” I said. “Leave me. Let me tell them what you did. I didn’t ask you to save me.”

“No, you didn’t. I did this out of the goodness of my heart—and that’s not a thing I do for just anyone. Hear that? You’re special, Sal Mitchell, you’re the girl of my dreams and I have to save you or I’ll simply die.” He held out his hand, making a beckoning gesture. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? Now come along, we really don’t have time for this. And it’s not as if they’d believe you when you blamed me.”

When did I get so blasé about dead bodies? It must have been when I was taken captive by my host’s father, treated like a possession rather than a person. It wasn’t because I was adjusting to the idea of life as a different species. It wasn’t. “It would work better if you didn’t sound so bored while you were saying it,” I replied. “Where are we going? I’m safe here. I don’t think I’ll be safe wherever it is you’re planning to take me.”

“True enough, pet. I’m going to take you someplace where you’ll be poked and prodded and stared at by people who don’t like you very much. But you’ll have opportunities to try and escape, and none of my people will shoot you in the back for running—unlike the people who run this place”—he indicated the warehouse with a sweep of his outstretched hand—“we have respect for our own kind. We don’t kill chimera.”

I glanced again to the body on the floor. “Just humans.” My initial nonreaction was fading, replaced by the coldness and the distant sound of drums. I had never considered panic to be a relief before.

Sherman shrugged broadly. “Can you blame us? They’d mow us down like wheat if they knew that we existed. Now come along, Sal. I’m not going to ask again, and I do have ways of enforcing your cooperation.”

“You mean you’ll drug me.” I finally swung my feet down to the floor and stood. “I’m getting really tired of that, you know.”

“Then you should stop making people feel the need to do it.” Sherman tapped his foot impatiently. “Are you coming, or am I sedating you? I simply need your answer.”

“I’m coming.” My plastic-soled socks made no sound as I walked across the bubble and out through the hole he’d made; I stepped carefully around the blood pooling on the tile floor. “I’d rather be someplace where I won’t be shot if they figure out what I am. But I’m warning you, I am going to try to escape.”

“You wouldn’t be my best girl if you didn’t.” Sherman turned and started walking down the hall, clearly trusting that I would follow him. For a moment, I considered defying his expectations. I could turn and bolt in the other direction: my experience at John Muir had shown me that a stolen lab coat and an “I belong here” attitude could get me a long way. Maybe I’d be able to find the exit. Maybe I’d be able to get away.

And maybe I’d find myself gunned down by some guard with more testosterone than training, and wind up bleeding to death in an unmarked hallway in a building I didn’t know. It wasn’t worth the risk. Sherman was the devil I knew, and I believed him when he said he wouldn’t kill me. He wanted a chimera-dominant future. We were an endangered species, and he wasn’t going to go out of his way to endanger it further.

I followed him.

We walked along the row of bubbles, each with its own sleeping occupant, until we reached a door in the far wall. Sherman entered a code in the key pad and the door swung inward, allowing a rush of cool air to flow over us. The other side was a long tunnel of white, with gently billowing panels of what looked like vinyl sheeting connected by thick plastic joints. It was like a hose that someone had turned into a walkway for some reason. The lights were very bright, especially compared to the dim room where I’d been imprisoned. I glanced at Sherman, suddenly nervous and seeking the reassurance that he had always been so happy to offer me.

“It’s an umbilical,” he said, grabbing my arm and yanking me forward into the open doorway. “It’s what has us connected to the rest of the idiots. Now walk, Sal. I don’t have time for this crap.”

“Where does it go?”

“Away.” He pushed me this time, planting his hand between my shoulders and shoving me hard enough that I stumbled for several steps. That was enough to let him follow me into the umbilical. The door swung shut behind him, sealing with a clang. “Do you have any concept of what I risked to get in here, to get to you? You’re the only shot we have right now. I’m not going to let your neurosis be what stops me. Now move, or I’ll move you.”

His voice was cold, leaving absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would make me do what he wanted if I didn’t go along with it willingly. I started walking, and Sherman paced me, his longer legs eating up the distance with ease.

The air in the umbilical smelled of antiseptic and nothingness. It was the kind of non-scent that could only be achieved by feeding the ventilation system through so many filters that we would probably be safe from virtually any form of biological attack. Some of the rooms at SymboGen had smelled like that, and they had always been the ones that unnerved me the most. Their silence and their cleanliness had seemed oppressive in a way that could never have been achieved by good, honest noise and dirt.

“If God exists, He created everything in the world just to make a bit of a mess,” said Sherman, making me flinch. I hadn’t expected his thoughts to be such a close mirror of my own. His hand closed around my upper arm in a friendly hold that I knew could quickly become a trap. “Humans have been trying to clean up the world ever since they figured out soap and water. I think that’s what their Devil really taught them. There’s a lot of bollocks in the Bible about humans learning modesty and shame when they first sinned, but I don’t think they went ‘oh no, I’m naked.’ I think they went ‘oh no, I’m filthy.’ That was the true fall from grace. You can’t be a part of nature if you’re trying to be clean all the time.”

“You’ve read the Bible?” I asked, bemused.

“Not all of us got dyslexia from the integration, my poppet. I’ve been reading since I was eight weeks old.” He continued to pull me along. “You’re the only one of us to have that particular complication, actually, and I doubt you would have if you’d occurred under lab conditions. You probably chewed through something that you shouldn’t have before you knew any better. It’s really a pity we can’t midwife ourselves into being, don’t you think?”

We were halfway down the umbilical now, with white, faintly ridged walls stretching out in either direction. My stomach gave a lurch as I suddenly realized what the tube-tunnel really reminded me of: It was like being a parasite again. It was like we were walking through the gut of a giant, passing from one end to the other to be digested or excreted at the whim of our monstrous host. I didn’t say anything.

Sherman seemed to take that as an invitation to keep talking. “Tansy got herself a host of psychological issues, but the majority of them came with the body, I think—the brain was too far gone before she got in there to start stitching things back together. That’s important to remember. When we fight them to a standstill they’re going to try to placate us with their old and infirm, the people whose brains have already been damaged one way or another. We can work around some things—we’re clever, in our way, even before we have a fat mammalian brain to do our thinking for us—but we can’t rewire a busted engine. Can you imagine a world full of Tansys? All of them delusional and violent and running around with no one to restrain them? No, that won’t work at all. It’s healthy brains or nothing. Hence the breeding programs. It will be so much easier with infants.”

“They’ll try to make it nothing,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.

To my relief, Sherman seemed more amused than angry at my statement. “Oh, I know, I know. They’re going to keep fighting to the bitter end, because that’s what men do. What they’re going to refuse to realize is that the bitter end passed some time ago. They’ve already lost. All that’s left from here is the messy process of birth.”

I opened my mouth to answer him, and he swung around to press his raised index finger to my lips, shushing me.

“Shh, shh, my pet, it’s time to be quiet now.” We had reached the door on the far end of the umbilical. It gleamed, black and secretive against all of that nauseating whiteness. “I’m going to open this and let us out. You mustn’t shout or scream or carry on, and most of all, you mustn’t try to get away. If you do that, I can’t protect you. And I know you don’t believe me right now, Sal, but I am your best chance of getting through this alive. Do you understand?”

I had trusted Sherman for most of my life. Even considering his recent betrayals, the habit of trust was strong within me. I forced myself to nod, slowly at first, and then with gathering enthusiasm, until my head was bobbing up and down with surprising force.

Sherman’s hand caught me under the chin, stopping me in mid-nod. He smiled and said, “That’s my good girl. I promise, this is all going to start making sense soon. Too soon, maybe. I did so enjoy your ignorance.”

With that, he let go of me and turned to key his access code into the panel next to the door, which beeped and swung inward, causing us both to have to take a step back. Somehow during the motion, Sherman got his hand around my arm again, and he pulled me with him as he stepped out of the umbilical and into the control room on the other side.

The first thing to catch my attention was the blood. There was so much of it, and it was covering so much of the room, which was small and boxy and lined with monitors, each one tuned to a different bubble back in the room where I had been confined. There was a long, low desk, and three men in military uniforms were seated behind it, still in their chairs. Two of them were missing chunks of their skulls. The third—the bleeder—had had his throat slashed open, resulting in arterial spray that must have bathed the room in seconds. He was the only one who looked anything less than peaceful, although death had come before he had managed to do more than fumble for his gun and knock over a cup of coffee. The brownish dregs were barely distinguishable from the bloodstains around them.

Sherman’s eyes raked dispassionately over the three men before he nodded. “Sloppy work, but sometimes that’s for the best. Come along, Sal, we have places to be.” He continued across the room, ignoring the dead bodies. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They had been alive, and now they weren’t. They had been people, and now they were gone, just like Sally, just like whoever used to live in Sherman’s body—and also not, because at least Sally and Sherman’s host had left something behind. The ultimate organ donors. These men were just… gone.

I stumbled a little, but continued to let Sherman guide me. It was better than trying to figure out where to go next on my own. At least he’d been here before. That thought sparked something, and I turned to study him, frowning. He was clean. There were little smudges of dirt under his fingernails, and his skin had the healthy scent of a human male, rather than smelling of fresh soap, but he was clean, and his hair was dry. That third man had sprayed blood everywhere. There was no way Sherman could have killed him and made it to me without being drenched in the process.

“Who’s here with you?” I asked.

“What, you didn’t think I was working alone, did you?” Sherman flashed me a tight-lipped smile. “I haven’t been alone for quite some time. But it’s good to know that you care. Now come on. I don’t want to have to kill anyone else tonight.”

The little security room opened onto an airlock of sorts, filled with hanging plastic sheets and industrial gray lockers. There was no one there, and I was glad. I had no doubt that Sherman would kill anyone who happened to get in our way, and I didn’t want to be responsible for any more deaths tonight. Three was too many.

Then we left the airlock for what looked like a loading zone, and I realized that three was nowhere near the final number.

The floor was unpainted concrete, and the walls were bare metal, strung with bright, uncovered bulbs every ten feet or so. They cast an unflinching light over the eight bodies strewn around the room, all dressed in military fatigues, none older than their early twenties. One woman had fallen so that her eyes were aimed directly at the doorway where Sherman and I stood. I met her dead, clouded gaze and clapped a hand over my mouth, swallowing the urge to vomit. The drums were back, pounding loudly in my ears. In that moment, I welcomed them. I would have welcomed them even without the surgery. Better a clean death than whatever was waiting for me once Sherman got me alone.

A shadow detached itself from the wall and moved fluidly into the open, resolving into a slim, prepubescent girl in a bodysuit much like Sherman’s, although hers was a deeper shade of gray. She had deep brown skin and softly rounded features that would probably have been beautiful, if they hadn’t been set in a forbidding expression. Her eyes flicked to me, sizing me up and dismissing me in an instant, before her gaze returned to Sherman. “You’re late,” she said coolly.

“You’re messy,” he responded.

My eyes widened in horror as I realized what he meant. Her bodysuit wasn’t darker than his: there were still places, along the sides and at the top of her left shoulder, where it was exactly the same color. The blood that had soaked into the fabric had darkened it, turning it virtually black.

“I was bored,” she said. Her eyes flicked back to me. “This is it? This is your mighty ‘natural chimera’? She looks like she’s about to puke all over me.”

“Ronnie.” His tone grew a little colder. “Be polite. Sal’s our guest. Are we clear for extraction?”

“Do you mean, ‘have I killed everyone’? Yes. I have killed everyone who was supposed to be watching this part of the building, and Kristoph has disabled the security cameras. Are you sure you don’t want to pick up anything else on this little shopping trip? A few soccer moms who skipped their implants because they decided that tapeworms caused autism? A member of the City Council? They’re going to tighten security after this, and she”—her eyes raked me up and down one more time—“just doesn’t seem like she’s worth this much trouble.”

Sherman released my arm a split second before his hand caught Ronnie across the face, sending her rocking back several feet. I gasped. She spoke like an adult, but she looked like a child, and seeing him hit a little girl was unnerving in ways I didn’t have the words to express. Ronnie recovered quickly, training her venomous stare on Sherman. She didn’t rub the spot where he’d hit her. She left her hands down by her sides.

“Sal is more valuable than you are, and I will have no compunctions about transplanting you if you continue to cause me problems. Do you understand me?” Ronnie said nothing. Sherman raised his hand as if to strike her again. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she spat. “I understand that you’ve gone native. Enjoy your disgusting mammalian rutting, but don’t expect me to clean up the mess when you break her.” She turned, stalking toward the far end of the loading dock.

Sherman sighed, taking hold of my arm again. It occurred to me that this had been my chance to run. I dismissed the thought as quickly as it came. Freedom was impractical right now. I wanted it, but I didn’t know what kind of weapons Ronnie had, and she was clearly fast enough to have killed all these people—people who presumably had military training—before they could react. I already knew that Sherman was faster than me. All I could have accomplished by running was getting myself hurt.

Better to wait. Better to watch. Better to run when I could actually get away, to act with purpose, and not out of panic. And maybe if I kept reminding myself of that, I’d remember how to breathe.

“You’ll have to excuse Ronnie,” he said, guiding me between the bodies as he followed her across the room. “She’s on her fourth body, and she doesn’t appreciate the fact that we implanted her in someone so small, even though the elasticity of the child’s brain has proven to be the missing factor. Her first three hosts were adult males, and while she preferred those bodies, they rejected her. Now she takes her aggressions out on whatever happens to be around.”

Ronnie herself was waiting next to an open door, showing an intoxicatingly dark slice of the night outside. She scowled at Sherman. “I’ve told you before, I’m not a girl.”

“And I’ve told you that gender is a construct of the mind, but while we live among humans, we must blend in with the humans,” Sherman countered. “A white British man with a little black girl is strange enough without that girl insisting on being treated as a boy. It would attract too much attention. Once we’ve taken over, you can be whatever gender you prefer. We can even find you a host of your preferred gender, if you’re ready to develop again.”

To my surprise, Ronnie blanched, shooting Sherman yet another glare before she slipped out the door.

“I didn’t think so,” said Sherman smugly. “Come along, pet. We’re almost home free.”

My head was spinning, and so I didn’t fight him. He led me out of USAMRIID, leaving the dead soldiers behind, and into a parking lot that I recognized. We were in Oakland. The building where I’d been held…

“They were keeping us in the Coliseum?” I squeaked, unsure whether to laugh or be offended by the stupidity of it all. The Oakland Coliseum was an oversized monstrosity of a building, used primarily for sporting events, massive concert tours, and indoor festivals. The Cause for Paws animal shelter where I’d been working for the last few years used to exhibit at Social Justice Fest—where we’d try to pawn adult animals off on people who had more compassion than common sense, according to my boss—and the Hemp Fest, where blazingly stoned twenty-somethings would coo over puppies and kittens before deciding whether they wanted a pet or another hash brownie more. Weirdly, we always got more returns from the Social Justice Fest, while the happy stoners plastered our social media channels with pictures of their pampered cats and dogs. I always thought it was sort of awesome that it worked out that way. Human nature was too big and too diverse to be pinned to something as small as what kind of specialty events you liked to attend over the weekend.

Good memories of the Coliseum aside, learning that I’d been kept there made me feel oddly dirty, like I had somehow become one of those orphaned puppies or kittens, and Sherman was the man who had decided to take me home. The thought of him keeping me as a pet made me shudder. Sherman twisted to look at me, frowning, and gave me another tug as he tried to keep me moving.

“Where else would they have put that many people, that quickly? Learn to think, Sal. I know you have it in you, and while I’ve enjoyed your pampered innocence more than you can possibly dream, playtime is over. Now is when you grow up and join the war.”

I finally yanked my arm out of his hand. Sherman didn’t grab for me. If anything, he looked pleased, like this was something he’d been waiting for. “I’m not joining your war. I’m going with you because I don’t have any other options if I want to stay alive and make it back to my family, and I don’t want to be blamed for all the—” My throat seemed to close on the word “bodies.” I swallowed, hard, and continued: “All the dead people. You made those. They shouldn’t become my fault.”

Sherman moved.

His legs were longer, and he was the one who’d shepherded me through dozens of visits to SymboGen, holding my hand and guiding me from lab to lab. He knew what my responses would be better than I did. So when he was suddenly in my face, I didn’t know how to react. I froze, eyes going wide, as his hands cupped my cheeks and his mouth clamped down over mine, forcing me into a kiss.

His lips tasted like mint and honey. I could feel his pulse through his hands, and as he pulled me closer, it felt like the drums in my head synchronized with the beat of his heart, one slowing while the other sped up, until we were breathing in unison, him and me, me and him. I didn’t want to be kissing him. I didn’t want to pull away. This was wrong, it was wrong in every possible way, and that didn’t matter, because the drums were beating together, pulse matching pulse, forever.

Sherman was the one who broke away from me. He pulled back, a smug smile on his face, and said, “I told you a long time ago that you ought to leave that human boy you’re so besotted with and be with me. We’re the same, Sal. We’re survivors, predators, and you’re wrong, because you’ve always been part of this war. This war is all about you.”

There was nothing I could say to that. My mouth moved, and no sound came out as Sherman, still smiling, took my hand and led me into the waiting dark.

Sherman and his team had arrived in a black van with the USAMRIID logo on the side. It was a magnet: as we approached, Ronnie yanked it off and slapped up a cupcake store logo in its place. She shot me a glare, all but daring me to say something. I didn’t say anything. It felt like something had shorted out inside of me, leaving me mute and defenseless. I didn’t like it.

Ronnie’s glare softened into something like understanding before it was redirected on Sherman, hardening again. “You kissed her, didn’t you? God, you’re such an asshole, Sherman.” In that moment, she sounded almost like a preteen girl. She wrenched the van door open and tossed her magnetic sign inside before grabbing my hand and pulling me away from Sherman, who let me go without a fuss. He’d already gotten what he wanted. Ronnie peered at my eyes, apparently looking for something. Whatever it was, she found it, because she pulled away and shot one more glare at Sherman. “Asshole,” she repeated, before pushing me into the van.

Behind me, Sherman chuckled. “She didn’t say ‘no,’ Ronnie. You do know how much I love surprises.”

“Surprising people with neural shorts isn’t nice,” Ronnie snarled. She climbed into the van after me, slamming the door behind herself and leaving Sherman outside.

I didn’t even have time to hope before Sherman was opening the front door and sliding into the passenger seat. He waggled his fingers at me, drawing my interest, and then pointed exaggeratedly at the massive man who was sitting behind the wheel. I couldn’t see the new man’s face, just his long brown hair and broad shoulders. The hands that gripped the wheel were each individually large enough to have covered my entire face.

“This is Kristoph,” said Sherman. “He doesn’t talk, but he’s an excellent driver, aren’t you, Kristoph?”

As if in answer, the massive man turned on the engine. The van grumbled to life, and he carefully reversed out of the space where he’d been parked. I fumbled to get my seat belt on, feeling encouraged by the care he was obviously showing. Maybe he really was an excellent driver, and this was going to be okay.

Kristoph’s foot slammed down as soon as my seat belt clicked into place. The van lurched forward. My stomach leapt into my throat, and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe—

“Oh, damn,” Sherman swore. There was a thumping sound, and then his hands were grasping mine, clamping down and squeezing until the pain broke through the fugue state that had been threatening to overwhelm me. “Sal? Sal, can you hear me?”

I didn’t respond. It didn’t seem important. We were in a car, we were rocketing through the night, and I couldn’t control it, and I couldn’t stop it, and I was going to die. I knew it. There was no way out this time.

“It’s all right, Sal,” said Sherman, his voice pitched low and earnest. There was no trace of mockery or frustration in his tone: now that I really needed him, it was like things between us had never changed. “You don’t know Kristoph, but I promise you he’s a safe driver. We need to get away from here before someone sounds the alarm, and that means we can’t go slowly. But Kristoph will get us home safely. You’ll see. It’s safe.”

I forced myself to nod, trying to focus on the pressure of Sherman’s hands and the comforting repetition of the word “safe.” Once, when I was back at SymboGen, he had tried to explain why it was so nice to hear the same thing over and over again when I was upset, something about psychological conditioning and forcing the world to conform to an implanted expectation. I honestly didn’t care why it worked. Just as long as it did.

Sally Mitchell died in a car crash. I nearly did, too. The trauma of the impact damaged her body in ways that were nearly fatal for me, soft, unprotected thing that I was. Then, after I woke up, everyone was happy to tell me how traumatic it had been, how damaging and horrible and how it was responsible for all my lingering psychological problems, like the amnesia that everyone was convinced would eventually clear, leaving Sally Mitchell restored to her proper place once more. That didn’t happen, obviously, and I shouldn’t have been as terrified of car crashes as I was. The phobia was her christening gift to me, the one thing she could pass on to the stranger who had claimed her body. Her gift, and SymboGen’s—I spent my infancy and childhood, brief as they were, hearing about the terror of vehicular transit. Was it any wonder that the idea of being in another car crash was the worst thing I could possibly imagine?

Eyes still closed, I focused on the steady beat of my heart until it seemed to swell and fill the entire world, becoming the distant, reassuring sound of drums. I breathed slowly in and out, counting to ten each time, until the hot warm dark blossomed behind my eyes, and I was safe, and nothing in the world could hurt me, or would ever hurt me again. I was safe, down in the dark, surrounded by the comforting sound of the drums.

“What is she doing?” Ronnie’s voice was distant, confused, almost drowned out by the drums.

“Meditating,” said Sherman, keeping his hands clamped over mine. “This is how she deals with excessive stimuli. It’s a good short-term solution, even if it’s probably going to get her killed one day.” He sounded sad about that, or I thought he did, and it was nice to think that, so I let the thought remain. It was easy to edit things that way when I was down in the hot warm dark. It was only when I rose again that I would have to face reality.

I didn’t like that idea. I sank deeper, away from anything that could possibly resemble the physical world. The drums were beating too slowly, out of synch with themselves. That might have explained some of my fear and lassitude. I focused on them, encouraging them to beat faster, to return to normal. It would be good for me, I was sure of that much, even if I wasn’t sure exactly why.

Bit by bit, the drums responded, and the hot warm dark returned to the equilibrium it was supposed to have. I curled into it, content, and forgot that I had ever wanted to leave. This was home. This was where I belonged.

Sherman shook my shoulder gently, snapping me out of my reverie. “Much as I hate to disrupt what’s proven to be a fascinating exercise in biometric control, I need you to wake up now,” he said. “We have reached our destination.”

“That means move, or we’ll move you,” added Ronnie.

I opened my eyes.

We were still in the van: that was good. It was rare for me to sink so deep that I could be moved without noticing it, but after the night—or nights, I didn’t know anymore—that I’d had, I couldn’t count on that. The drums were quiet, although if I focused, I could hear the distant beating of my heart, which seemed to have resumed its normal speed and rhythm. I felt better, although it was hard to say whether that was a function of my heartbeat, or just the fact that the van wasn’t moving anymore.

Kristoph was gone, leaving the entire front of the van empty, since Sherman was crouched in front of me with a thoughtful expression on his face, like he was assessing my value every time he looked at me. Ronnie was still in her seat, arms crossed over her budding breasts, eyes narrowed.

“What the fuck did she just do?” she demanded. Her attention flicked to me. “What the fuck did you just do?”

“I… what?” I moved to unfasten my belt with shaking hands. I hadn’t been told to, but I wanted to get out of this van as soon as possible. I didn’t mind small spaces, normally. This one was different. It felt oppressive and dangerous, like it could start moving again at any moment. “I didn’t do anything. I went down into the dark to avoid the drive. Where are we?”

“What Sal fails to understand is that for most of us, ah, ‘going down into the dark’ is a difficult feat.” Sherman waited until my belt was off before opening the door and offering me his hand. Through the opening, I could see what looked like an ordinary parking garage, all gray concrete and emptiness. “Come along, pet. You make yourself more precious by the hour, and I cannot wait to start learning all the tricks you have to teach me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I took his hand. It seemed like the safest thing to do. “I don’t know any tricks. I don’t even know how I go down into the dark. I just do, when I need to.”

“I’m telling you, rehome her.” Ronnie stepped out of the van after me, pausing long enough to slam the door. I blinked at her. She sneered. “We know she adapts quickly. Train a new one who doesn’t have all these stupid hang-ups.”

“Ah, yes, because what one should absolutely do on the eve of war is take one of the best available weapons, break it down for scrap, and wait six months to have a new model on line.” Sherman shook his head. “Honestly, Ronnie, if you were in charge of this battle, the humans would defeat us handily.”

“Maybe, but a lot of them would die first,” she said.

Sherman sighed. “Come along, Sal. It’s time to introduce you to the people who will be your new family.”

“I don’t want a new family,” I whispered.

His smile was benevolent and terrible. “It’s adorable how you keep thinking that what you want has any merit.”

I didn’t say anything. I just glared at him. He might have me at his mercy right now, but he wasn’t going to make me believe that I was going to be helpless forever.

We crossed the parking garage to a large steel door, which Sherman accessed with a swipe of a plastic card and a scan of his left index finger. He didn’t bother to conceal either of these security measures from me, which made me sure that they couldn’t be broken, or at least couldn’t be broken easily. He would have made at least a little effort if he was worried about my getting away.

The door beeped, the locks disengaging with an audible click. Sherman smirked and pulled it open, letting go of my arm. “After you,” he said.

I was unarmed, effectively barefoot, and in an unidentified parking garage with no idea where I was. I went through the door…

… and emerged into a defunct shopping mall, obviously long since gutted and abandoned by its original owners, only to be rebuilt by the people who came to claim it as their own. There was a fountain directly in front of me, the water trickling merrily out of a sculpted concrete flower to cascade into the basin below. A few people were sitting on the fountain’s rim. One was eating a sandwich.

Stores extended in all directions, most still bearing the signs identifying what they had been before this place closed down. The shoe stores and shops selling scented candles were gone now, replaced by little swarms of people clustering around lab equipment. Unlike Dr. Cale’s makeshift bowling alley lab, which held to strict protocols, even if most of the technicians wore jeans under their lab coats, the people here could have just wandered in off the street and picked up a scalpel. I didn’t see a single lab coat or pair of scrubs, although some of the people were wearing gray bodysuits like the ones Sherman and Ronnie had on. As I stood there, trying to process the scene, a man walked by towing a pallet of caged chickens that clucked and fluffed their feathers at me. I blinked.

“Welcome, darling, to the revolution.” Sherman slipped his arm around my shoulders, holding me closer than I was comfortable with. “I’m sure you recognize this place.”

“No,” I said blankly. “I mean, should I? I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.”

Sherman glanced meaningfully over my head. I turned to see Ronnie standing on my other side. She rolled her eyes.

“Ugh, fine,” she said. “Your precious special snowflake is so sheltered that she’s not going to be a threat. I’m delighted to know that she can’t give us away. I’d be even more delighted if you’d let me cut her open.”

“I don’t want to be cut open,” I said hastily. “I’m not sure I get a vote in this, but I really think I should, since this is my life you’re talking about, and I don’t want to be cut open.” That didn’t seem like enough. I paused before adding, meekly, “So please don’t?”

“God, it’s like kicking a fucking puppy,” muttered Ronnie. She raised her voice as she said, “We’re not going to cut you open. Not right now, anyway. It’s not allowed, right, Sherman?”

“At last, you begin to learn,” said Sherman. “If you want any chance of a stable long-term integration with a host you’ll actually like, you’ll stop threatening Sal. Go get yourself cleaned up. You reek of dead human.”

“My favorite cologne,” said Ronnie, and swaggered away. She didn’t walk like a little girl: she walked like a grown man, all strutting and strength, and people got out of her way.

Sherman pulled his arm away from my shoulders as he transferred his hold back to my arm. “This way,” he said, starting to walk deeper into the mall. A few people cast curious glances our way, but most of them ignored us. They had their own business to attend to, and we were just so much background noise. That, or they had been with Sherman long enough to learn to stay out of his way. All my early experiences with him told me that I could trust him, that he was my friend and would protect me. He had been one of my handlers at SymboGen. He had been my friend.

And yet everything I’d experienced since my last visit to SymboGen told me he was the enemy, or close enough as to make no difference. It was his fault we’d lost Tansy. It was his fault I was here. But whether he was friend or foe, the only option I had was to go with him. If he was going to protect me, he’d do a better job if he knew where I was. If he was planning to hurt me, maybe he’d be gentler if I seemed to be playing along.

“Have you been keeping up with your linguistics, pet?” he asked. “I know I haven’t taught you any new words the last few times we’ve seen each other. I’m sorry about that. I did so enjoy expanding your vocabulary.”

“Did you always know I was a tapeworm?” It wasn’t the question I’d been planning to ask, but once it was out in the open between us, I realized that there were no other questions. Anything else I might have wanted to know was dependent on how he answered me.

“Oh, Sal. My pretty, innocent little creature.” Sherman kept walking, and I kept walking with him. We passed more people, none of them familiar, and none of them paused to ask where we were going. “I knew someone like you was going to come along eventually—knew it in my bones, you could say.” He chuckled like this was somehow hysterical. Maybe it was, to him. Tapeworms don’t have bones. “Mother always told us we could only happen under proper laboratory conditions, but what she didn’t count on was that I was the closest she’d yet come to perfection. Tansy was… well, you’ve met Tansy; there was no way she was going to bite the hand that fed her. Adam was always a momma’s boy, too devoted to doing exactly as he was bid to question anything. Whereas I was the snake in her garden. I read all her files, and when I ran across something I didn’t understand, I learned. It’s amazing what people will tell you when they don’t yet realize that they need to be wary.

“I asked her lab staff about biological interfaces and statistical probability. I asked her technicians about skeletal structures and backup functions and how often blood circulated through the brain. And I asked our mutual creator about the structure of my soul. She was very glad to tell me as much as I wanted to know, because she didn’t think I’d have the background to understand what she was telling me. She even taught me—albeit accidentally—how one went about creating a false identity for someone, and what it would take to get on Steven Banks’s good side.” Sherman cast me a sly, sidelong look. “You see what I did for you, Sal? I twisted the world into knots so I could make it a pretty bow to tie in your hair. Your human lover never did anything half so nice.”

Bile rose in my throat as I realized that he meant what he was saying. Some of this—not all, thankfully, but enough to be disturbing—had been intended as a form of courtship, like he could convince me to love him if he just spent enough time working on the problem. “You’re not answering the question,” I said. “People keep doing that to me. I don’t like it.”

“I do appreciate that you’ve started growing a spine. It’ll make this much more of an equal partnership, and much less of a burden.” Sherman shook his head. “Yes, I knew. I recognized you for what you were when they first rolled you into SymboGen and I thought, this is it. This is what fate looks like. This is the way destiny presents itself. With a brunette on a stretcher, wetting herself and staring dispassionately at the ceiling. You were the Holy Grail, Sal. A natural chimera in the process of full neural integration, yet awake through the entire process. Most of us didn’t get to wake up until a full six months further along. I honestly feel that it hampered our ability to completely inhabit our bodies. The protocols for integration as practiced here are based largely on your experience. We have so much to thank you for.”

We had reached the far end of the mall while he was talking. A metal grill was half-lowered across the mouth of what had clearly been a department store, once upon a time. Sherman ducked to get under the grill, not letting go of my arm, and so I bent to follow him. The grill creaked down and locked onto the floor as soon as we were through. Because that wasn’t disturbing or anything.

“You never told me.” My voice sounded small and betrayed, matching the slivers of ice that felt like they were piercing my heart. I knew Sherman was on the other side of this conflict. It didn’t matter. Part of me was always going to want him to be a good guy.

“What would I have said? ‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, dear, but not only are you not actually Sally Mitchell, you’re not even a human being. You’re something new, and better, and everyone you have ever loved is going to view you as a monster.’” He let go of my arm and stepped away, turning to face me. “Everyone but me, that is. You have never been a monster in my eyes, Sal. You have never been anything short of perfect. I doubt that you ever could be. You feel it, don’t you? The way your heart slows down to beat along with mine.”

I paused. “But… you can do that to anyone, can’t you?” Sherman’s startled, guilty expression was all the answer I needed. “Ronnie asked if you’d kissed me, and then she called you an asshole. What is it, some sort of biofeedback loop? Can you do that to all chimera, or am I just in a lucky subset of the population?”

“Sal…” He started to reach out, like he was going to caress my cheek. I slapped his hand away. His expression hardened. “Yes, if that’s what you wanted to hear: yes, I can do that to any chimera, and to any of the charmingly named ‘sleepwalkers,’ if the need strikes me. It’s a matter of controlling the pheromones I’m giving off. They tell you what to do on a level you simply weren’t engineered to fight. I could teach you to do the same thing, but why would I put such a useful weapon in the hands of a child? Because don’t misunderstand me, Sal: you are a child in this fight. I am romantically interested in you despite my better judgment, but that isn’t going to buy you the sort of lazy disregard that you’re accustomed to. You are a child and you are a weapon, and as we don’t let children play with weapons, I’ll be the one deciding how you are aimed and fired.”

I glared at him. “You can’t make me do anything.”

“Oh, but darling, as you’ve already seen, I can.” He smirked. “All I need to do is get skin-to-skin with you, and you’ll dance to any tune I play. Now make yourself comfortable: find something to wear, find a bed in housewares. I’ve got cameras on this whole place, and the front of the building is sealed off, so you’ll not be escaping. Aside from that, feel free to do as you like.”

“Where are you going?”

“Didn’t you hear me before?” This time when he smiled, he showed all of his teeth. I quailed away. “I’m going to go start a war.”

-

Chapter 8 OCTOBER 2027

It was hard to keep track of time in Sherman’s converted mall. There were no windows in the department store that was my home and my prison, and the metal plates that sealed the doors to the outside world were snug with the ground, preventing me from even figuring out whether it was day or night outside. I guessed at the time by how many people walked freely in the mall outside my cage, and tried to measure the days by the delivery of my meals. It was harder than I’d expected it to be. Every time I felt sure I’d cracked the code, the meal I thought of as dinner would be pancakes and sliced fruit, or the mall would empty out completely during what I’d assumed was the middle of the day. Before long, I was completely disoriented.

That was bad. I needed to know how long it had been. Shelter animals became dispirited and withdrawn after six weeks in cages. Sherman seemed to think I was too weak to stand up against him, and that meant he was probably waiting for that magic mark before he did anything he couldn’t take back. I just wanted to figure out their routines, and find the hole that would allow me to get away.

It would have been easier if anyone had been willing to talk to me, but no one was. They walked past the grill that kept me from getting out into the mall, chattering with one another or silently bustling from chore to chore, and the few people who even glanced in my direction did so with an odd mixture of contempt and pity that I couldn’t begin to decode. I still watched them, hungry for even the illusion of contact.

It was funny, but after a few “days” I started to think I could feel people coming, even started to be able to predict who would walk into view by the tingle at the back of my mind. It wasn’t completely dependable, but it was close enough that I began to wonder if it was real. Sleepwalkers communicated through pheromones. Maybe chimera did too, on some level.

Maybe I was learning.

So I was lonely and isolated, but I wasn’t completely alone. Sherman visited often, even when I wished he wouldn’t, even when it was inappropriate for him to do so, like when I was asleep or giving myself a sponge bath in the employee restroom. My burgeoning sense of “someone is coming” only worked with him about half the time, which made his unannounced arrivals all the more jarring. I would think I was safe and then he would just walk in on me, his eyes crawling across my nakedness in a way that made me profoundly uncomfortable, despite my general lack of a nudity taboo. He looked at me like he was trying to decide whether or not to eat me up. It wasn’t right. I started closing doors and hiding myself in closets, and he still kept coming. He seemed to enjoy the challenge of being forced to track me down.

Ronnie and Kristoph took turns bringing my meals. Apparently, having been the ones to collect me from USAMRIID, they were also cleared to interact with me—or maybe this was a punishment of some sort, and I was a chore they had to complete before they could be considered forgiven. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. All that mattered was that they weren’t Sherman, and every time they brought me a tray or came to draw another vial of blood, it wasn’t Sherman putting his hands on me again.

The meals were the best way I had of keeping track of time. I seemed to get one roughly every four hours, followed by a long period where I was supposed to be sleeping. But even that wasn’t perfect, since the first meal usually arrived about an hour after I woke up in the “morning.” Presumably, they could be feeding me six times a day. I wasn’t gaining weight. I was also running laps around the abandoned department store, which probably burned off as many calories as I was taking in. I’d even started doing push-ups in what used to be the perfume department, letting the acrid burn of the chemicals spilled on the floor motivate me to keep pushing myself away. Maybe if I’d been stronger, I would have done a better job of fighting for my freedom. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now.

I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

They had had me caged up like a lab animal for roughly three weeks, according to my best guess. I was running another lap around the store when someone fell into step beside me, keeping up easily. I turned to see Ronnie jogging next to me, his shorter legs pumping hard as he ran. Despite that, he didn’t look like he was in any distress. I was trying to get into shape. He was already there.

Ronnie caught me looking at him. He frowned, brows beetling together above dark brown eyes, and growled, “What?” He tried to pitch his voice low, but it came out in a soprano squeak, so distinctly feminine that it made me stumble for a moment. I’d been here long enough that I didn’t have a problem viewing Ronnie as male anymore—he said he was, and that was good enough for me. It was no more of a stretch than me saying I was human. But his voice always threw me.

“I was just wondering why you’re here,” I said, recovering from my stumble and continuing to run. “Is it time for more blood? I don’t think I’ve finished making new stuff to replace what you took yesterday.”

“I’m not telling you whether that was yesterday, today, or tomorrow, so you can stop fishing,” he said, with less open malice than he would have harbored at the beginning. He began slowing down. I did the same, continuing to pace him until we were both standing in housewares, facing one another. “I’m not here for blood. I’m here for you.”

I blinked at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“No, you never do, do you?” Ronnie shook his head. “Sherman wants you.” I must have looked as distraught about that idea as I felt, because Ronnie sighed and reached out to touch my elbow reassuringly. “He’s not going to take you apart. He just has some questions, and he’s hoping you can answer them.”

“I’ll go with you quietly if you’ll answer a question for me.” I’d been trying this gambit more and more of late. It didn’t always work—it didn’t even work very often—but when it did, it could teach me important things about the people who were holding me captive. Maybe eventually I’d hit on the right combination of important things, and be able to magically transport myself out of this mall and back into my real life.

Ronnie snorted. “What, this again? Okay, Sal, fire away, but remember, I won’t tell you how long it’s been since we brought you here, where the mall is really located, or what Sherman wants you for. That’s all between you and him. I’m not putting myself in the middle.”

“Why did they have to put you in a different body? I mean. It’s a pretty good body. It seems to work okay, even though I know you don’t like it very much. But if the body you had was working, you should have just kept that one.”

Ronnie didn’t say anything. I grimaced, a thin worm of panic uncurling in my belly. I’d been trying to figure out what the situation was with Ronnie and his current body for days—it seemed like it should connect somehow to what I was doing here. This was the first time I’d been able to work up the courage to ask, and I was suddenly unsure it had been a good idea.

Finally, Ronnie said, “Come with me,” and turned on his heel, stalking away into the housewares department. He wasn’t heading for the exit.

Either he was going to kill me or he was going to explain, and I was desperate enough for allies that it seemed like a chance worth taking. I followed him through the store, catching up quickly and then just pacing him in silence, letting him lead the way to the dining room sets that stood, slowly gathering dust, near the mattress displays where I’d been sleeping. He pulled out a chair and sat down, gesturing for me to do the same. Lacking any other options, I sat.

The silence stretched out for a little longer, seeming to twist in on itself and nip at its own tail, before Ronnie said, “Rejection can be an issue for those of us who weren’t tailored to specific hosts, or whose hosts were killed before we could finish the assimilation process.”

I blinked at him dumbly. He sighed.

“I was designed for a long-haul trucker, according to the records Sherman got from SymboGen. I secrete stimulants and energy boosters. I also decrease acid buildup in soft tissues. They made worms like me for athletes too, although that was illegal. That’s never stopped anybody, you know?”

I didn’t know, but I didn’t think that interrupting him to explain that would be a very good idea. I just nodded.

“Baseline human DNA in the implants is about three percent, or was before Sherman started getting to the lab rats. I was tailored, so I started with five percent, some of it taken directly from my host. It was supposed to keep his immune system from identifying me as an irritant and taking me over. Instead, it caused total immune collapse. Not fun for either one of us. I don’t really remember much about being him. I know I migrated to his brain during the shutdown, but he didn’t survive the process. We got hospitalized—this was in the early stages of the outbreak, back when there were only one or two of us at a time.” He was switching pronouns with dizzying speed, making it difficult for me to know exactly who “us” meant—him and his trucker, or sleepwalkers in general? “He died.”

I blinked. “Who died?”

“My trucker.” Ronnie shook his head. “He crashed and he died and that should have been the end of me, but SymboGen was collecting all the dead sleepwalkers for analysis, in case they could figure out what was going on. Anything to protect the profit margin, right?”

I sort of suspected it was more about “anything to protect the public health,” but I kept that observation to myself, in part because I didn’t want Ronnie to stop talking, and in part because there was a good chance that I was being overly optimistic again. Dr. Banks had never shown any indication of caring about the health of the world, except when it could put money in his pockets. Keeping the sleepwalkers from eating his entire customer base had probably seemed like a pretty good idea, at least as far as the bank was concerned.

Ronnie took my silence as agreement, because he continued, saying, “Sherman found me in my trucker’s head. I was still alive, and he removed as much of me as he could. I don’t remember any of this—I mean, I didn’t have a brain to plug into at that point, so I wasn’t much of a deep thinker—but I’ve seen my medical records, and I believe things happened the way he explained them. He managed to get me out of the building, and he implanted me in my first stable host. His name was Francisco, and he was a mountain.” A little smile played across Ronnie’s lips. “Six and a half feet of solid muscle—damn. I couldn’t have asked for a better host, you know? I guess I should have known that it couldn’t last.”

“What happened?”

“Rejection.” Ronnie shrugged. “Same thing we’ve been telling you happens to a lot of us. My host’s body recognized me as an infection, and fought me off. I had to be moved to a new body. That’s where I got the name ‘Ron.’ Another big guy. I liked being Ron. He was strong. Too strong, I guess, since his immune system figured out I was new in the neighborhood and beat me off with a stick. That’s how I wound up in here.” He spread his arms, indicating his thin, immature, biologically female body with a bob of his chin. “And we don’t have bodies to spare, so until this one breaks or we come into a sudden wealth of unwanted humans, this is where I’m staying.”

“But… if we become who we are because we’re tapping into human brains, and they can process more information than we can handle with our little tapeworm brains, how can you remember being anyone before you were who you are right now? How can you be…” I stopped, not sure how I could possibly finish that sentence.

Ronnie finished it for me. “How can I be so sure that I’m supposed to be male? I don’t remember a lot about my first three hosts. No one who’s been through rejection remembers much. But there are little bits and pieces. It’s like… it’s like some of the traits of my original hosts got written into me. Sherman says it’s epigenetics at work, and that we’re all going to wind up mosaic individuals, hopping from body to body, bringing just these little pieces of who we’ve been onward with us.”

I blinked at him. Ronnie shrugged.

“Sherman says we’re going to live forever, once we figure out how to keep our hosts from rejecting us. We’ll have to learn a lot of shit new every time, but our core personalities will stay the same. We’ll stay the same. Humans have had stories about reincarnation and the afterlife for millennia. We’re finally going to prove it.” Ronnie stood. “Anyway, that’s how I know I’m a guy, no matter what this stupid body says, and since I want a new host sooner rather than later, it’s time for you to come with me.” He grabbed my arm.

I was bigger than he was, and stronger than he was, but I went without protest.

Sherman was waiting for us in the store that had been converted into his private office, a former photo studio now packed with lab equipment and computer monitors. He was sitting on a wooden stool that had probably come with the studio, peering through a microscope into a Petri dish. He looked up when he heard our footsteps, a wide smile spreading across his face.

“Sal! I’m so delighted that you were able to join me.” He slid down off the stool, stretching as he did. “Ronnie, thank you for passing my invitation along. You can go now; your services are no longer required.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think they would be.” Ronnie let go of my arm. “Later, toots. Try not to piss him off too bad today, okay? I don’t want to have to clean this place up again.”

I blinked. I hadn’t heard anything about needing to clean Sherman’s office. The claim was apparently true, however; Sherman glared at him as he turned and walked away.

“She’s getting ideas above her station,” he said mildly. “I think she likes you. I also think it might be a good idea if I didn’t let you spend any time with her alone for a little while, since you seem bound and determined to play the Disney Princess of this scenario.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Friend to all living things, my sweet Sal; friend to all living things. But what you fail to comprehend is that I don’t want you to be a friend to all living things. I want you to be a friend to me and me alone.” Sherman reached out and tweaked a lock of hair that had fallen in my face. “We need to get you a haircut. Something short and tidy and easy to care for. You’re starting to look a little unkempt, my dear, and we both know how little tolerance I have for that.”

I fought the urge to bat his hand away. He wasn’t touching my skin, which meant that the drums wouldn’t synchronize to his heartbeat, but having him touch any part of me felt like a violation. “I like my hair the way it is.”

“Ah, but appearances must be maintained. You know that. It’s how we fit into the world, snug as a needle fitting into an injection site. Nothing that attracts attention of the wrong sort.” Sherman delivered this little sermon with the pious air of a man who was preaching to the heathens, but knew they would catch on sooner or later. As always, it made me want to scratch his eyes right out of his head.

There was a time when I’d found his little life lessons endearing, attractive even. That was before I knew he was a tapeworm, and before I knew he was on the “kill all humans” side of the program, and most of all, before he was keeping me captive in an abandoned mall, with no way of reaching the people I loved most in all the world. “The only attention I’m attracting here is from you,” I countered. “All the attention I get from you is the wrong kind of attention, now that I know what you are.”

“You still don’t understand, do you?” He grabbed my arm. It was a swift motion: I had no opportunity to dodge or defend myself. Fingers sinking into my skin, he continued: “My attention is the only attention you will ever need. My approval is the only approval you should ever crave. I am your perfect other half, Sal, and the sooner you come to terms with that idea and begin making yourself over in my image, the sooner we’ll be able to move on to the next phase of our relationship.”

“Let me go!” I struggled against his grasp, but he held firm. The drums were pounding in my ears, slowing bit by bit to fall into synch with his pulse. As always, the feeling left me dizzy and confused, like someone was messing with my inner ear. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to… to…” The sentence seemed to slip away from me. I wobbled.

Sherman tightened his hand a little more. It was starting to hurt, and I would probably have a bruise the next day, something to commemorate our little encounter. “I do have to do this, because you make me do this,” he said apologetically. “Besides, anesthesia is expensive, and you’re so much more pliant when you’ve started seeing things my way. It’s truly a pity that it never seems to last.”

Still holding my wrist tight, he half dragged me across the room to a chair that looked like it had been stolen from a dentist’s office. I made one last feeble attempt to struggle. I knew that chair. It had started to feature prominently in my nightmares, swelling to hellish proportions with every new appearance. The real chair was smaller than the one in my dreams, made of plain green vinyl instead of burning human leather, but their meanings were exactly the same. They both meant pain.

“Down you go,” said Sherman, releasing my wrist as he shoved me into the chair. I tumbled helplessly, unable to resist the pull of my slowed, muddled pulse. Sherman immediately started strapping me down, putting restraints across my wrists, ankles, and chest. He stopped short of making it hard to breathe, but only barely; as long as he didn’t kill me, my comfort was not his concern.

“Still don’t know… how you do that,” I mumbled. My lips felt like they were made of lead, too heavy to operate properly and only technically grafted onto my body.

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams,” he replied, before leaning down to give me a peck on the forehead. “If I tell you how much I am your superior, will you finally cease this pointless attempt to rail against me?”

I couldn’t answer. I just looked at him.

Apparently, Sherman took silence as agreement—that, or he’d been waiting for the chance to tell me all about his brilliance for a while now, and this was enough of an opening that he couldn’t resist. He picked up a drill, giving its trigger an experimental pull. And then, after the sound had passed, he told me.

“We were all engineered for different things, you know. We each have different mechanisms of supporting and enhancing the human body.” His hands worked as he spoke, clever hands holding clever needles and making them do clever things. My throat ached to scream, but the numbing effect of my slowed pulse and confused flesh kept me from doing anything more extreme than whimpering. Any time it seemed like I was going to break loose, he would press a hand down against the exposed skin of my upper arm and yank me back down into the darkness, where my needs and desires mattered not at all. “I know you spoke with Ronnie about her enhancements. It’s why she can stay awake for so long, and move so fast, and have such a terribly bad temper without slipping over into Tansy territory. Tansy was designed to secrete antipsychotic medication, if you can believe that. Maybe she still does. That would explain why that damaged brain of hers doesn’t kick her out entirely. It will one day. Won’t that be something to see?”

He finished with the veins in my arm and moved on to the veins in my thighs. There was nothing sexual about it, for all that he was so fond of posturing and propositioning. I knew that Sherman would have taken me up on any offer I chose to make—taken me up on it enthusiastically and without hesitation. He’d said as much, and I remembered his assignations with the scientists back at SymboGen, back when our relationship consisted of more than needles and captivity.

“You, I haven’t quite figured out. No one has an exact genetic profile on you, which is odd, since I know you were of SymboGen design. Nothing off-market or back alley about you, Sal my girl, and still I don’t know what your chimeric interface has blessed or cursed you with. You’ll sort it out one day, probably when you least want to, and you’ll forgive me if I very much want to be standing by to point and laugh. Discovery is almost always traumatic for someone. That’s what discovery is for. If only they hadn’t hidden your files from me. I looked. I looked so hard. But alas. They had to make me do things the hard way.”

He put the syringe he’d been using aside, and I had time to breathe a sigh of disoriented relief before he picked up a scalpel, raising it high to be certain that I would see it.

“I was designed to regulate the heartbeat of a captain of industry, a man who did so love his indulgences. They might as well have called him Old King Cole for the way he carried on. He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he called for his fiddlers three, and when those proved to be too much for his feeble mammalian body, he called for his faithful tapeworm jester to come and bear the brunt of everything he’d ever done to himself. I’m a biological pacemaker. Can’t do much to humans, I’m afraid, and I can only slow a sleepwalker down if I can get them to stop biting me long enough to notice that they’ve been calmed past all reason, but give me a chimera and ah, you’ve given me the world.”

He brought the scalpel down. I think I surprised us both when I found another scrap of strength in my damaged throat and began to scream.

“Really, Sal,” chided Sherman, once he had his composure back—and he did not, I noted, look happy about having lost it in the first place. Sherman was not a man who liked looking foolish, no matter how good his reasons had been. “Flesh is an illusion, human flesh doubly so. You should be grateful that I’m teaching you that now, rather than your needing to learn it the way that Ronnie did.” He continued slicing small chunks of my underarm off. Every time he raised the scalpel, it was a little redder, as were his fingers. I could hear my blood dripping into the pan he’d positioned for just that purpose. I pictured a basin overflowing with pieces of me, things I had never agreed to give away or let him steal. How many pieces could I lose before I could never be put back together again? How many pieces did he want?

“You’ve been very good so far today, but it’s time you pull your little mental rabbit hole trick, because this next bit is going to be quite painful.” Sherman’s jovial tone was all the warning I really needed. I gathered my consciousness into a tight knot and plummeted down, down, down through the layers of self until I reached the hot warm dark, where everything was safe and warm and red, and no men with scalpels or inscrutable designs could touch or take me.

It was becoming increasingly easy to separate myself—my actual self, the part of me that was Sal, and had never been Sally Mitchell—from the human body that had always defined me. It was something I’d always been able to do when I was sleeping, whether I intended to or not, but since Sherman had started putting his hands on me, it had become a waking refuge as well, a place where I could know that my inner core would not be violated in any way. I didn’t know why I could do it, just like Sherman didn’t know why he couldn’t. I just knew that when I really needed to escape, everything except the hot warm dark and the sound of distant drums would go away.

Maybe that’s what they built into me, I thought, floating formless in the void that was the core of my self. Silence and meditation, instead of messing with people’s hearts or never being still. I had only heard the word “epigenetic” once before I was brought here. I still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I wondered if Dr. Cale would know. I wondered whether I would ever have the chance to ask her.

He’s never going to let you go, murmured one of the under-voices that lurked in the dark, more and more often these days, giving voice to things I knew but didn’t want to know. I felt fractured, fragmented, like I was splitting myself into pieces in my effort to remain whole.

I know, I answered myself miserably, and stopped trying to think about anything at all, letting myself fall deeper down into the perfect timelessness of the only place that had always been meant to belong to me.

I woke up with the worst headache I had ever had in my life. I sat up slowly, forcing down the nausea that threatened to rise up in my throat and overwhelm me. A lock of hair fell in my face and I jumped before reaching up with shaky fingers and pulling it in front of my eyes.

“That bastard,” I breathed. It was easier to focus on my hair than on my aching head, or on the bandages wrapped around my wrists and inner elbows. My formerly long hair had been cut into a bob, long enough to get in my mouth and eyes, too short to pull back in anything more elaborate than a ponytail. To add insult to injury, it was also about three shades darker and redder than my original chestnut brown, filled with auburn highlights that made it look like it belonged on someone else’s head. I dropped the lock of hair.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said. Hearing the words made me feel a little better, and so I raised my voice and called, “Do you hear me, Sherman? I’m going to kill you. You can use my body for your fucked-up experiments, but you had no right to cut my hair. It’s not yours.”

“See, he thinks everything about us is his, and that means everything about you, and that means he had every right,” said Ronnie, from off to my left.

I flinched away from the sound of his voice. That was a bad decision. “Ow!” I yelped, clapping my hands over the back of my head. They hit a thick gauze pad, covering the same spot as the incision Nathan and the others had used to repair my faulty arteries. My head spun, filled with a pain so profound that it seemed to be coming from inside and outside at the same exact time. I wanted to throw up. I was afraid my skull would explode if I did.

“Ow,” I repeated, this time almost in a whimper, and collapsed backward onto the mattress, pulling myself into a fetal ball. The pain didn’t subside. I had awoken it, and it was going to have its say before it left me in peace.

Footsteps to my left signaled Ronnie’s approach. There was a small clicking sound as he put something down on the display nightstand next to my current bed. “I brought painkillers and antibiotics,” he said. “Sherman’s proud of his surgical theater, but that doesn’t make it completely sterile. You need to take these pills to make sure you don’t wind up with an infection.”

I said nothing. I just stayed in my curl, clutching my head and fighting the urge to whimper.

Ronnie sighed. “You don’t trust us and you don’t like us and you don’t have to, because we’ve all basically been assholes to you. I’m not going to lecture you on getting along with people who’ve fucked you over. But we need you alive, so if you don’t want to wake up strapped down and attached to half a dozen IVs, you need to take your medicine.”

“Why do you need me alive?” The question was faint and reedy, but I forced it out word by word. The effort left me feeling wrung-out and exhausted. I needed to sleep. I needed to sleep forever.

“You can learn a lot from a necropsy,” said Ronnie. “You sometimes learn even more from a living being.”

This time, I didn’t swallow my whimper. When you dissect a human being, you’re performing an autopsy. When you dissect anything else in the world, intelligent or not, you’re performing a necropsy. By using the word “necropsy,” Ronnie made it clear that he wasn’t talking about cutting up the human body that I inhabited. He was talking about the actual me, the pound and a half of tapeworm that was wedged tight into Sally Mitchell’s skull, like a squatter that had taken over the house while the original owner wasn’t home.

Ronnie sighed. “We’re not the enemy, Sal. Those people out there, all they want to do is wipe us out. Kill us off, even though we’re their creation. We’re part of a healthier, hardier world, and you’re going to help us make that happen. So yeah, we’re going to keep you alive, whether you like it or not. You’re going to be a lot happier if you just go along with things.”

I was silent. A few seconds passed before Ronnie sighed again, louder this time, and I heard his footsteps moving away. I waited until I was sure he was gone before rolling over and opening my eyes. The plastic tray he’d placed on the nightstand contained a bottle of water and a little paper cup of pills. It was only a few feet away from me. It might as well have been a mile.

It took what felt like an hour for me to inch my way across the bed and catch the edge of the tray, pulling it closer to me. For one sickening moment it teetered on the nightstand, seeming to be in danger of crashing to the floor. I swallowed hard and forced myself to keep moving, pulling it inch by agonizing inch into reach. It didn’t fall. I emptied the little paper cup of pills into my mouth, dry-swallowing them one by one, holding the others under my tongue until they were needed. I nearly choked twice, the round edges of the pills seeming to become jagged and sharp as they rasped against the walls of my esophagus. Finally, though, the last of them was inside me, and I collapsed back into limp motionlessness, looking longingly at the water. I wanted it more than I could remember wanting almost anything. I knew that trying to drink it without sitting up would make a mess without slaking my thirst, and sitting up was off the table as long as the pain was raging in my head.

Sherman had cut a hole in my skull. He’d decided to break me open without access to the tools that Nathan and the others had used when they’d done the same thing—only what they did wasn’t the same thing, it wasn’t the same thing at all. They’d acted with my full, informed consent, while Sherman had simply put me under and taken what he wanted. The acts themselves might be virtually indistinguishable, but the motives behind them made all the difference in the world.

There were only two things inside my skull: my brain, and my real body, soft and segmented and hiding itself among the cortical folds of the tissue around it. I couldn’t imagine he’d gone in looking for a piece of brain tissue, since there was nothing special about it that he couldn’t also learn from the blood and bone marrow samples he’d been taking since he locked me up. That left only one target for his exploratory surgery: he’d been looking for me. He’d been taking samples from my real body for a change, and not the one I wore.

That was the greatest violation I could imagine. I was small and soft and vulnerable without my human skin to defend me, and he’d cracked open my bony shield and gone into my sanctuary. I didn’t know that he’d taken tissue samples from my tapeworm-self, but I couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t have, not after he’d gone to the considerable trouble of opening my skull and peering inside. The thought of a piece of me, severed from the whole, identity and intelligence cut off and lost forever, made me want to vomit. Was he going to implant some empty body with another me? Would there be enough epigenetic memory for that little slice of Sal to remember that it liked watermelon juice and walking dogs and learning new words, or would it be someone completely new?

Worst of all, if it worked—if he was able to successfully splice “me” into another body and learn whatever it was he wanted to know about how I’d been able to bond with Sally Mitchell—was he going to take the rest of me apart next? He didn’t need to keep the original. Not when he could make a hundred knockoffs, one little sliver at a time.

The pain in my head wasn’t getting any better, but time was running out. If Sherman had really removed a piece of my primary body, he’d learn what he wanted to know sooner rather than later. I had to get out of here.

I sat up slowly, fighting the spinning in my head every inch of the way, and reached for the bottle of water. Drinking it made me feel a little bit better: I was still in a lot of pain, but at least my mouth didn’t feel like a used litter box anymore. Still moving with the utmost caution, I slid my feet to the floor and stood. The motion was accompanied by another wave of pain that almost sent me crashing back down onto the bed. I gritted my teeth and held my ground until it passed. I needed to get out of here.

Maybe deciding it was finally time to make my escape when I was still dizzy and weak from nonelective surgery was a bad idea, but it was the only way to avoid more nonelective surgery, and so I was going to go with it. Besides, Sherman wasn’t going to be expecting me to try anything right now. I had trouble remembering that he was the enemy when he wasn’t directly in front of me with a scalpel in his hand and a smirk on his face: we’d spent too much time together as allies, and deep down, I wanted him to still be the man that he’d been then. Maybe that was true in both directions. He wouldn’t have hennaed my hair and cut it nicely rather than hacking it all off if he didn’t harbor at least a little genuine affection for me.

The Sal he’d known for years was pliable and obedient, and had no idea that she could ever be allowed to become anything else. So maybe he still thought of me like that. Maybe I could get myself out of here if I stopped thinking like a good little girl, and started thinking like a chimera.

Joyce used to love going shopping, even when neither of us had any intention of buying anything. She’d haul me through malls and department stores with equal enthusiasm, pointing out sales and commenting snarkily on fashions she didn’t think anyone should ever, under any circumstances, wear outside the house. Thanks to her, I knew quite a lot about how stores like the one that had become my prison were constructed.

I started for the escalators, pausing only long enough to grab fresh jeans and a clean, cable-knit sweater from the Lands’ End display. I could get underwear and a tank top to go with it once I was upstairs in the lingerie section. I tried to keep my movements as natural as possible, and allowed myself to wince every time the incision in my head sent another bolt of pain searing through me, which was often. If Sherman or one of his people was watching me through the security cameras, I needed to put on a good enough show that they wouldn’t send anyone in to check on me.

The escalator was slow enough that I was able to peel my shirt off and throw it back down to the first floor before I reached the second. There were bloodstains on the back of the collar, marking the places where the fabric had brushed against my surgical incision. I shuddered, turning my eyes toward my destination.

Most of the lights on the second floor were off, saving power, since I was the only one in here and usually stayed on the first floor. I didn’t bother looking for the switches as I made my way toward the distant glow of the fitting rooms, which were lit independently of everything else. That same glow allowed me to find a bra, tank top, and panties that would actually fit me. There were no non-high-heel shoes left downstairs—all the good running and hiking shoes had been looted by Sherman’s people before they locked me away in here—so I didn’t bother removing my thick, plastic-soled socks. They’d be better than nothing if what I was planning actually succeeded.

This had been a nice department store, and like all nice department stores, they had been more worried about the privacy of their customers than the possibility of shoplifting. I entered the dressing rooms with my armload of fresh clothing, walking along the row of open, slatted doors until I reached the very end and slipped into the private cubicle. It was located closest to what I guessed would be the store’s outside wall, rather than feeding back into the mall proper. Even more important, this dressing room stall boasted a large, white-painted air grate, used to pump in heat during the winter and cold during the summer. It was quiescent now, the California September providing no opportunities to either warm or chill. That was good. I didn’t want to freeze to death in my effort to escape.

There was a small bench inside the fitting room. I pushed it to the wall under the grate and stood, reaching up to rattle the grill. It didn’t budge, thanks to the screws that were holding it in place. That was a small problem at this stage. I knelt and took my fresh bra off its hanger. This was a nice department store. They used wood and wire hangers.

I smashed the hanger against the floor until it broke. Then I scavenged through the pieces until I found a splinter of the right thickness and flexibility to serve my intended purpose. “If they didn’t want me to learn to improvise, they should’ve kept the shelter better funded,” I muttered, and got to work.

It took less than five minutes to unscrew all but one of the bolts from the grate. It swung drunkenly down, revealing the empty black chasm on the other side. There was a chance that was exactly what it was: a hole, rather than a tunnel. I paused, looking into the dark, and asked myself if this was really the right course of action. It could get me killed.

Even killed was better than captive. I hopped down from the bench long enough to strip and put my new clothes on, taking care to tuck the tank top into my jeans before letting the sweater hang over it. Hopefully, it would be enough padding to keep me from getting seriously cut up on any sharp edges inside the vent.

This was it: this was the moment where I would have to decide whether I wanted to be the girl I’d always been, or whether I was ready to become someone new. Someone who was brave enough to crawl into the dark alone, and see where the risk would take her. Someone who was going to survive.

I was going to see my family again. I was going to get back to them. I was going to see Nathan again.

I was going to survive, and then I was going to find Tansy, and we were going to get through this.

I reached up, grabbing the open edge of the vent, and hoisted myself into the unknown.