Symbiont

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Chapter 9 OCTOBER 2027

The grate in the changing room wall opened onto a snug vent that was at most two feet across and a foot and a half tall. I squirmed my way inside, grateful that the phobia instilled in me by the psychologists at SymboGen had focused on car crashes instead of on tight spaces. This would have been enough to make even a mild claustrophobe lose their composure, and that was while I was still close enough to the opening for a small amount of light to filter in and allow me to see. It was going to be all about touch from here on out.

At least it was too narrow for Sherman or Kristoph to come after me. Ronnie would fit, but it would take a while for whoever was watching the monitors to realize that I wasn’t emerging from the dressing room. No matter what, I would have a lead before he came after me, and that meant that I might actually have a chance. Bracing my weight on my elbows, I began pulling myself inexorably forward into the dark.

The light faded within ten feet of the entrance. I was just starting to wonder how long this tunnel could go when my fingers hit the wall. I stopped where I was, feeling around for where the tunnel branched. There were openings to both my left and my right. They felt like they were roughly the same size, but there was more dirt and grit to the left, which implied that air normally flowed in that direction. Since air would flow from the outside, that meant I needed to go right. I shuffled back a foot or so, and then pulled myself cautiously around the corner, continuing my slow progress into the dark.

The slow pounding of my heart in my ears distracted me from the otherwise absolute silence in the vent: without the air conditioner or heater running, the only sounds were the ones that I made. That was good. It made it easier for me to listen for pursuit. I stopped every ten feet or so, cocking my head and trying to focus back through the dark for signs that I was being followed. There weren’t any, as yet. That didn’t mean that they weren’t coming. I needed to keep going as fast as I could.

The next section of the vent extended for what felt like about sixty feet before it dead-ended. I shuffled backward again, feeling the walls for turnoffs that I might have missed. There was nothing but solid, unyielding metal. I took a deep breath and held it until the panic that had been starting to writhe in my belly died down. If I had to go back, I’d go back. There were no pits between me and the last turn. It would be hard. It wasn’t impossible.

A faint breeze ruffled my hair as I prepared myself for backing up. I stopped. Then, cautiously, I lifted one hand above my head.

First it hit the metal roof of the vent. And then it hit nothing but empty air. I had found the ventilation shaft.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I can do this. I can do this. It’ll get me home.” I squirmed forward again, until I could roll onto my back and reach up into the open ventilation shaft with both hands. It was square, rather than rectangular, and slightly narrower than the main vent. I would still fit, but it was going to be a tight squeeze, and I was much more likely to find myself stuck. I could die in there.

It would still be better than staying here with Sherman. I dug my fingernails into the joins between pieces of metal and began pulling myself up, bracing my feet and knees against the sides of the shaft for traction. All those laps around the mall were really paying off. Now all I had to do was hope that I would reach the top before my strength gave out completely, and that whatever was between me and freedom would be something I could easily move aside.

I didn’t know how good security usually was on things like “roof vents,” which struck me as a bad target for thieves. I also didn’t know how I was going to get down from the roof once I managed to get there. That was a problem for later; that was a problem for someone who was already free, and that meant that it couldn’t be a problem for me. Until I was outside, I was still Sherman’s captive.

With no other way of marking time, I started counting off seconds in my head, chanting, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” as softly as I could. The minutes blurred into an infinite number of Mississippis, leaving me no more certain of how long I’d been climbing than I would have been without the count. At least the act of saying the numbers aloud made me feel like I was doing something, and kept me from focusing on the increasing weakness of my arms. I’d never done anything like this before. If my grip slipped even the slightest bit…

As if the thought had created the action, my sweat-soaked palms slipped on the slick tin walls of the vent, and I slid abruptly downward for what felt like a mile before I managed to jam my feet hard enough against the vent’s sides to stop my descent. My heart was hammering so hard that it felt like it was going to break clean out of my chest, and I could taste the bright copper penny burn of adrenaline on my tongue. What would have happened if I’d fallen all the way down to the bottom? It’s not like there was a pillow waiting there to soften my landing. I would have been lucky to get away with something as small as a broken ankle.

For one dizzying moment I hung there, suspended and afraid, and thought about climbing the rest of the way down before I could plummet. I would go back to the dressing room. I would crawl back through the grate before anyone noticed I was gone and came looking for me. I would go back to my bed and sleep off this headache, and when I woke up, I would be able to think of a better escape route. One that wasn’t so risky. One that didn’t carry so many consequences for failure.

You’re not going to do any of those things, I told myself quietly. There was nothing firm or stern about my little inner voice: if anything, I sounded despairing even to myself. I wasn’t going to go back, and I wasn’t going to come up with another escape plan, because there wasn’t another escape plan. It was this or nothing.

Knees shaking with the effort of keeping me suspended in place, I pulled one hand cautiously away from the wall and wiped my palm dry on my sweater. Placing my hand back against the wall, I repeated the process with the other hand. Then, taking a deep breath, I began to climb again.

If it had been hard before, it was pure torture now. I was dead tired, lactic acid was building up in my muscles, and falling was no longer an abstract “maybe”: it was a thing that had happened once and could easily happen again. I dug my nails into the grooves between panels of tin, climbing ever higher, trying not to think about what awaited me if I slipped. I’d managed to catch myself once. I wasn’t going to be so lucky a second time.

My right hand quested upward for the wall, and struck empty air. I trembled, forcing the rest of my limbs to remain rigid as I felt around, trying to find where the wall had gone. Finally, reaching down, I found the point where the vent curved. Hope surged through me, hot and red and burning. I was at the top. I had to be.

That, or the bend was going to lead me to a whole new tunnel system, and take me no closer to the exit. I pushed that thought aside. It was unproductive, and besides, I could feel the cool air flowing toward me. It was just a trickle, held back by whatever grating was on the front of the vent, but it meant that I was moving in the right direction, if nothing else.

With trembling hands, I pulled myself around until I was facing into the bend. There was still no light. Still, I hadn’t come this far to turn around at the first sign of trouble, and so I squirmed forward, working my way one inch at a time into the new leg of my journey.

The bend was barely the length of my body. Then it curved again, resuming its ascent—but the angle this time was more slope than sheer, and I was able to pull myself along without nearly as much fear of falling. My pulse was beginning to calm. There was something pleasantly familiar about moving through the dark this way, like it was part of what I had been made for. In a way, I suppose that was exactly the case. I was designed to live in dark, tight spaces, inside a human body. This was just life inside a building. Not that much difference, given the change in scale that I’d already undergone.

The slope ended at another bend, and as my head popped up over it, a new element introduced itself back into the world: light. Bloody, reddish sunset light, trickling in through the slits in a grate that was almost close enough for me to touch. I sped up, pulling myself forward until I could brace my hands against the grate and shove. This was the moment of truth. If it was bolted on from the outside, then I had traveled all this way for nothing.

To my relief, the grate shifted as soon as I pushed against it. I pushed again, and it gave way, dropping out of my field of view and hitting the roof with a loud clang. The noise should have worried me, but it didn’t. I had other things to focus on, like the sunset that was painting the sky in a thousand shades of rose. I climbed rapidly toward the opening, hungry for the light.

“That didn’t take you as long as I thought it would.” The voice was Ronnie’s, calm and almost disinterested. I barely resisted the urge to jackknife back into the vent. Instead, I gripped the edge and turned to see him standing some five feet away, his hands folded behind his back, one of them holding a gun, and his attention focused calmly on the sky. “You’re a fast climber. I guess desperation is a pretty good motivation.”

“How did you know?” My voice came out in a whisper. I didn’t move.

“You vanished from the monitors. There aren’t many places in the store that aren’t on the monitors, so I checked them all. You didn’t put the grate back in the changing room. Sloppy, Sal. Very sloppy.” Ronnie didn’t look at me. “You can come down from there. Hanging out in the air-conditioning isn’t going to change what happens next.”

“What is going to happen next?” I couldn’t figure out how to turn and put my feet out first, so I just pushed forward and toppled to the roof in an ungainly heap. My cheek landed on the fallen grate, and I felt it slice through my skin, adding the smell of blood to the eucalyptus and pigeon feather odors otherwise pervading the roof.

It should have smelled terrible. It smelled like freedom. Something tightened in my chest, and as I climbed to my feet, I decided that no matter what happened next, it wasn’t going to end with me going back into that mall. Either Ronnie would shoot me, or I’d get the gun away from him somehow… or I’d go over the edge of the roof. Whatever it took to keep myself out of Sherman’s hands.

I felt bad about the idea of dying before I got to see Nathan again. If he ever found out what had happened to me—what Sherman was planning to use me to do—he would understand why I couldn’t just go along with things. He would forgive me.

“Something,” said Ronnie, still sounding disinterested. “I don’t get you, Sal. Here you’ve got a guy like Sherman falling over himself to make you a queen, and all you can do is fight and try to escape. Lots of girls would die to be in your shoes.”

“And when he kills me by mistake during one of his little experiments? What happens then?” I glared at him, starting to pick bits of gravel out of my palms. “I didn’t volunteer to be a lab animal. Sherman of all people should know how much I hate having other people make my decisions for me, but he still thinks he has the right, just because he’s older than I am. Fuck him. I have my own life.”

“A life you stole.”

Ronnie’s words were mild, but they still stung. I snapped back, “Like he didn’t? We’re all thieves here. The only difference is that I decided to stop stealing once I had what I needed. He’s going to keep going until he has everything he wants, and that’s really different. That’s not okay.”

Ronnie finally turned enough to let me see the small smile on his face. “You’re a wimp,” he said, not unkindly. He made it sound like a statement of essential fact: we were on a roof, he was probably about to kill me or something, and I was a wimp. “You don’t act soon enough, and you don’t take risks when you really should. If I were you, I would have been out that vent weeks ago, and screw anyone who tried to stop me from escaping. You pretty much asked to be swept off the street and locked in a cage by somebody. Hell, if you want proof of that, look at where you are—trying to escape from a cage that you were put in by the man who took you out of the last one.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a wimp,” I said, picking the last of the gravel out of my left hand. The cut on my cheek was still bleeding sluggishly, but it didn’t feel like it was serious enough to worry about. I’d probably need a few stitches, assuming I lived long enough to get them. “The world can’t be made up entirely of leaders. Someone has to be willing to follow.”

“That sounds like something a wimp would say.”

I shrugged. The edge of the roof was about ten feet away. I couldn’t see the street from where I was standing, but the angle on the trees across from me made me think that we were standing on the third floor. That would mean a thirty-foot drop to the street, and I wasn’t going to survive that.

“Hey.” Ronnie snapped his fingers. I turned to face him. He looked at me flatly and asked, “What happens if you get away from here? Where are you going to go?”

“Back to my people,” I said.

“You gonna tell them where to find us? You gonna lead them straight back here?” He asked the questions like they were of no consequence, like he was asking whether I’d like cheese sandwiches with lunch tomorrow, and not asking about the potential fates of everyone he knew.

I thought about Dr. Cale’s lab, and her small army of assistants and unpaid interns, most of whom probably didn’t know how to organize a siege. With Tansy gone, the security was reduced by at least half. Fang could probably take Ronnie in a fair fight. I didn’t believe Ronnie was a fan of fair fights. And yet lying to Ronnie didn’t seem like a good way to get off this roof alive—assuming there was any good way.

“Probably,” I said. “I’d at least tell Dr. Cale where to find you. She’s going to want to know. I think she feels responsible for Sherman. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to wipe out the human race. So probably.”

“That’s what I thought.” He pulled his hand out from behind his back, aiming the gun at me. “You’re a wimp, but you managed to outsmart me once. I didn’t even think to check the vents. That won’t happen again.”

I started to raise my hands in protest, but I was too slow. Ronnie pulled the trigger, and a small fletched dart appeared on the right side of my chest, followed almost instantly by the feeling of being stabbed. I grabbed it and yanked it loose, for all that it wasn’t going to do me a lick of good: I had enough experience with tranquilizers to know that the dart’s contents had already done their work.

“Please don’t take me back,” I whispered.

“I’m not going to.”

“Why…?”

“Because you’re the only person here who used the pronouns I asked them to use,” said Ronnie. He put the pistol away. “That buys you one ‘get out of jail free’ card from me. If you need another one, you’re going to be on your own.”

I took a step toward the edge of the roof, feeling a strange languor starting to seep through my limbs. Most tranquilizers don’t work instantly, but they don’t have to, because they’ll stop you before you have the chance to get away. Every step seemed to take twice as long as the one before, until finally my knees buckled and I pitched forward, my cheek hitting the roof for the second time. There was no pain. Unconsciousness closed over me like a Venus flytrap closing on its prey, and there was nothing left to hurt.

The sun was fully down when I woke up. I was lying on a couch in a living room I didn’t recognize. All the lights were out, and the air smelled stale, like the occupants hadn’t been around to move it in quite some time. I jerked upright and winced as the incision in my head reminded me that I had recently had surgery.

In a weird way, the persistence of pain was a relief. I didn’t know how much time had passed since Ronnie shot me with the tranquilizer dart—hours? Days? But the incision still felt raw enough that it probably hadn’t been that long. It could even have been the same night. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, listening for any signs that I wasn’t alone in the house and waiting for my head to stop its spinning. Once I felt like I could stand without vomiting on the floor, I did, and promptly collapsed back onto the couch as my abused legs refused to hold my weight.

The first giggle escaped before I knew it was coming. I clapped my hands over my mouth, trying to keep any additional giggles from breaking free, but I might as well have been trying to dam a river with Popsicle sticks. The giggles came in a wave before giving way to full-out laughter, leaving me doubled over and clutching my stomach in an effort to keep from hurting myself. I was a captive, and then I wasn’t! I was someone else’s captive, and then I got away! Only now I was alone in an abandoned house where the air smelled like dust and mold, and my legs hurt so much from my escape that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do anything useful with them ever again. My choices were laughter or tears, and laughter at least felt a little bit better.

Once I had laughed myself out I cautiously tried standing again, this time gripping the arm of the couch for balance. My legs wobbled but didn’t drop me on my ass a second time. They ached like they had never ached before, and my arms weren’t much better, all courtesy of my foolhardy ascent of the ventilation system.

“But it worked, didn’t it?” I said aloud, and giggled again—nervously this time—at the sound of my own voice. It seemed too big in this empty, dusty room. Big sounds were dangerous. I knew that instinctively, just like I knew that I needed to get out of here as soon as I feasibly could.

The living room boasted a large picture window covered only by gauzy curtains, and the clearly artificial glare from the streetlights outside came in through the sheer fabric, giving me enough light to see by, if not clearly or well. I peered around in the gloom, making note of the major articles of furniture and the two exits. One appeared to lead deeper into the house, while the other was close enough to the picture window that I was willing to bet it would lead me to an entryway and then to the front door. I wasn’t ready to go outside—not when I was this weak and this unsure of where I was—so I turned and shuffled deeper into the house, moving slowly to keep myself from falling down again.

The hardest part was crossing the wide-open center of the living room. Once I had reached the far wall and had something to brace myself against, things got easier, if not exactly pleasant. I shuffled along until my hand dipped into another room, one that both felt and sounded smaller than the first one. I felt around, my fingers finally brushing the cool edge of what felt like a sink. The bathroom. Good. I stepped fully inside, feeling blindly around until I hit a light switch.

This was it: the moment of truth. Turning on a light in the living room would have been like sending up a flare to notify anyone nearby that someone was in a house that was supposed to be empty, but the bathroom window wasn’t likely to be visible from the street. Now all I had to do was pray that the place hadn’t been empty for so long that the power had been cut.

As soon as I flipped the switch the room was flooded with soft white light from the low-emission bulbs above the sink. It didn’t hurt my eyes as much as normal lights would have after being in the dark for so long. That was a relief. I fumbled the medicine cabinet open without really looking at the rest of the room. The shelves were laden with all sorts of things both prescription and non, including a full bottle of ibuprofen. I struggled for a moment with the childproof lid before it came free, abruptly enough that little red pills went all over the room. I didn’t bother trying to pick them all up. I just shoved six into my mouth, swallowing greedily, before I turned on the tap and bent to drink straight from the faucet like a dog. For all I knew, ibuprofen was contraindicated after brain surgery, but since Sherman hadn’t exactly provided me with aftercare instructions, I was playing things by ear, and my ear said it would do a better job if it wasn’t attached to a skull that felt like it was full of wasps.

When I had swallowed away the last of the dryness in my throat I stayed where I was, bracing my hands against the edge of the sink and bowing my head as I watched the water swirl down the drain. My hair was still an unfamiliar distraction as it hung in my frame of vision, keeping me from seeing the rest of the sink. A single pill had landed in the basin, and was resisting the swirling water that threatened to pull it down the drain. It looked out of place.

Everything looked out of place. Something about that pill, red against the white, made me lift my head and really look at what was in front of me for the first time since I had turned the lights on.

The sink was laden with all the things that I would have expected to find in a bathroom—hairbrushes, straightening iron, toothbrush, toothpaste, and a dozen other grooming tools that Joyce would have been better equipped to identify than I was. There were framed pictures on the walls, and the medicine cabinet wasn’t just full, it was overfull, packed with bottles and creams and cosmetics. The house smelled abandoned, and no one had come to investigate the noises that I was making, but whoever lived here hadn’t moved away. They’d just disappeared.

Slowly, I turned to look at the rest of the bathroom. Everything I saw just confirmed my fears. The shower curtain was puddled in the bottom of the tub, having been ripped from its rod by someone who wasn’t being careful. They might not have been capable of being careful: the bathroom rug was almost entirely the deep brown color of dried blood, save for a few splotches around the edge where the fabric remained plush and white. I stared at the rug for a moment, trying to convince myself that I was just looking at a bad dye job. The little splatters of blood on the linoleum and the edge of the tub made that an impossible trial.

The drums were beginning to pound in my ears. Ronnie must have brought me here because he knew that the original owners of the house were gone, either killed by sleepwalkers or joining them. How far had the infection spread while I was locked away? How much time did the human race have left?

I walked carefully back to the bathroom door, trying to tread as lightly as I could. Not only did my legs hurt so much that running would have been impossible, but any sound I made would mean risking an attack.

The hall was still deserted. I stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway, listening to the house around me. I didn’t hear movement. That was good; that could mean that I really was alone. The real question was Ronnie. Would he have put me someplace safe, or would he have left me in a killing jar to see what would happen to Sherman’s prize specimen when faced with real danger?

Almost unconsciously, I rubbed my still-healing wrist, feeling the stitches shift beneath the gauze. I could handle myself if I had to. I just didn’t want to do it if I had any other choice.

A house this well lived in had probably been occupied for at least five years, which meant the occupants might have installed an emergency services landline. I turned to my left, heading still deeper into the house as I looked for the most logical place to find that sort of thing: the kitchen.

The carpet underfoot muffled my steps, which was a good thing, except for the fact that it would also have muffled the steps of anyone who followed me. I kept glancing over my shoulder, squinting through the thin light from the open bathroom door as I watched to see whether I was being followed. No slack-jawed shapes had yet loomed out of the darkness, but that sadly didn’t mean much of anything. Sleepwalkers weren’t clever—at least not if the ones we’d encountered thus far were anything to go by—but they moved slowly enough that they were basically ambushes waiting to happen, at least until the moment when they decided to attack.

My foot struck linoleum. I stopped, struck by the sliding glass door on the wall directly ahead of me. It was standing open, a bloody handprint against its surface like a tattoo. The drums in my head got even louder. That was how the sleepwalkers had been able to get into the house, or maybe that was how the original inhabitants had been able to escape after they lost themselves to their implants. Either way, it was a way out.

Would the sleepwalkers still be lurking in the backyard, unable to find their way past the fences? Or were they in the darkest corners of the kitchen, trying to make up their slow minds about what to do with me? I had to make a decision.

I chose safety. I crossed the kitchen floor as fast as my legs allowed, grasping the sliding glass door and yanking it shut. It squealed in its track, and I winced but kept pulling until it was snug against its frame. Then I flipped the lock, and froze, watching the foliage in the backyard for signs of movement.

There weren’t any. But nothing moaned behind me either, and so I did my best to set my paranoia aside as I turned and began searching for a working phone.

It was slow going in the dark. I didn’t dare turn a light on, not with the chance that the backyard was full of sleepwalkers, and so I worked my way around by feel. When I discovered the butcher’s block I pulled out a cleaver, holding it in one hand while I continued to feel my way along with the other. I’d be more likely to cut myself than anyone else, but it made me feel a little bit better to at least have the potential to defend myself.

Ten minutes later, I had found a bunch of half-rotten bananas and a loaf of moldy bread, but no phone. I made my way slowly out of the kitchen, walking past the bright haven of the bathroom to the front of the house, where that big picture window now seemed terrifyingly exposed to a night that contained who-knows-what. My search turned up no phone here either. I winced. Apparently, my choices were staying in the house, cut off but potentially safe, or going out into the world with no idea where I was or how far I would have to travel to get back to the bowling alley. I’d be able to see any sleepwalkers better if I waited for daylight, but sleepwalkers had to sleep too. Were they more or less active during the day?

I didn’t know. Nobody knew. That was the problem: I was standing in a safe place, trying to make plans that would mean leaving that safety for a whole new kind of danger. Maybe I really was a wimp, but that idea didn’t seem very appealing.

There was still one door I hadn’t tried. I stepped through the other exit from the front room, and stopped. It was an entryway, as I had suspected. It was also the access to the stairs. That was more of a surprise, and for a moment I just stood there, contemplating the seemingly impossible task of convincing my tired, strained legs to carry me to the second floor.

If the people who lived here had been killed by sleepwalkers, they wouldn’t have had time to take anything with them. Even if there wasn’t a landline, there could be cellphones in the dark upstairs, little electronic miracles just waiting for me to find them and use them to summon a rescue.

I took a breath, gripped the banister, and began pulling myself, one agonizing step at a time, toward the second floor.

It took what felt like an hour for me to climb the twenty or so steps between the entryway and the upstairs hall. When I finally ran out of steps I collapsed forward, landing on my hands and knees on the plush carpet, and fought the urge to curl into a ball and cry until the pain stopped. Every muscle I had from the waist down felt like it was on fire. The drums were pounding so hard that I was beginning to worry that Sherman had undone the surgery that was intended to keep me alive. Worst of all, there was no light up here: either the curtains were drawn, or there were no windows in the hall, leaving me in absolute blackness. It was like being thrown back into the vent, only this time I had no destination in mind.

When the tremors in my thighs stopped I pulled myself to my feet, picking up the cleaver from the floor, and began shuffling forward into the dark. I moved like a sleepwalker as I tried to avoid running into anything. My hand found a wall. I followed it to an open door. A search of the room on the other side—which was slightly less dark than the hall, thanks to a small window looking out on the empty backyard—yielded nothing. The next room was much the same, as was the one after it, until I’d searched the entire back of the house without finding what I needed.

The first door on the other side of the hall was closed. I stopped before turning the doorknob, pressing my ear against the wood and listening for any signs that I wasn’t alone in the house. I didn’t hear anything. I turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open. The room on the other side was utterly destroyed, but what I could pick out through the light filtering in from the street below seemed to imply that it had belonged to a teenage girl: everything was frilly and pale, washed out so that I couldn’t tell its original color. Most of it was also broken, thrown to the floor and crushed by some angry hand. The tattered remains of posters still blanketed the walls, and what water remained in the fish tank near the bed was foul and dark with mold. I noted all this dispassionately, the bulk of my attention going to the room’s single largest fixture:

The window.

It was closed, rendering the room stifling and somehow septic-smelling, like something had been left in here to rot, but the light seeping in from below was strong enough that I knew it would give me a good view of the street. I could find out whether it was safe for me to leave the house and go looking for a pay phone. I stepped into the room, drawn to that window like a moth to a flame.

Something moaned in the dark. It was a small, weak sound, but it was still enough to bring me to an instant halt, my back going so stiff that it pulled at the wounded muscles in my thighs and made me want to start moaning. I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound and turned, as slowly as I could, to face the farthest corner of the room.

My eyes were adjusting to the dim light. As I peered into the corner, it began slowly resolving from an indistinguishable jumble into distinct shapes. That long, broken pillar was a piece of the bed. Those soft mounds were the comforter, humped up and caked with something foul. And the skeletal collection of joints and angles in the middle of it all was a human being, eyes sunk deep into a skull that was barely contained by a thin panel of tight-stretched skin, hair almost completely ripped from its scalp. I couldn’t tell its original gender: it was naked, but so huddled over that it could have been male or female. Not that it really mattered. The figure was clearly on the verge of death, having been locked in this room so long that its body had already cannibalized every useful bit of tissue that it could without shutting down essential systems. I didn’t know how long it took the average person to starve to death, or how big this one had been when the door shut and the food stopped coming, but regardless, they didn’t have much longer.

The sleepwalker—because there was nothing else it could have been; not with a closed, unlocked door being the only thing between it and freedom—opened its mouth and moaned again, weakly. It didn’t try to get out of its nest. I didn’t think it could have moved if it wanted to.

I bit my lip, staring at the figure in the corner. It didn’t moan again. I wasn’t sure whether that was because it was too weak, or because I had stopped moving and it could no longer tell where I was. Either way, it didn’t seem like it was going to come after me anytime soon. I turned my back on it and resumed my trek toward the window, looking out on the street below.

I’m not really sure what I was expecting after the situation at the hospital and the number of people who had been shoved into USAMRIID’s quarantine. Some part of me had still been holding out the hope that this would all just go away, and the world would return to a semblance of normalcy. I put a hand over my mouth, blinking rapidly to prevent the tears that were welling up in my eyes from clouding my vision. Normalcy was no longer an option, assuming it had ever been an option in the first place.

There were no cars moving on this suburban street, and the few lit windows on the houses around me were all on the second floor, meaning that anyone who was still awake and alive was staying as far from ground level as possible. That made sense.

The street belonged to the sleepwalkers.

There were only about twenty of them in my view, although that didn’t mean that there weren’t more hiding in the bushes or skulking in the long shadows down the sides of those same houses. They were of every age and race, from small children to a man I guessed had to be in his eighties. All of them shambled along with the same mindless lack of purpose, their hands held slightly out in front of them as if to ward away obstacles. While I watched, two of them bumped into each other, patted one another’s arms, and finally joined hands before shambling on in tandem. This neighborhood was no longer the property of the human race. Its successors had taken over.

There was a faint moan from behind me. I whirled, suddenly convinced that the sleepwalker in the corner had managed to get loose and come after me. The bright specks of its eyes glared from the exact spot where I’d seen them before. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my pounding heart. “It’s okay, Sal,” I whispered, earning myself another moan from the sleepwalker. “Unless you’re going to feed it, it’s not strong enough to come after you.” I felt bad about reducing the sleepwalker to an “it,” but that was technically true of the tapeworm part of the composite, and I wasn’t going to sex the human half just to get the proper pronouns.

Still. This room looked like it had been designed for a teenage girl. If she was the sleepwalker, she’d been locked in here when she converted. Either she had been able to shut the door before her parents could get to her or she’d been the first to go, transitioning while she was asleep or otherwise distracted. No matter what had happened, most of her belongings were probably in here with her, and teenage girls had cellphones.

I began feeling my way along the top of the dresser next to the window, moving cautiously in an attempt to keep from cutting myself on the broken glass that had been knocked from the empty picture frames still studding the walls. I found a charger plugged into the wall about halfway down the length of the dresser, its unconnected end seeming to taunt me. There had been a phone in this room. This dark, dangerous room with the watching sleepwalker still occasionally moaning from its place in the corner.

“Steady,” I murmured, as I disconnected the charger and stuffed it into my pocket. I knew the house still had power. If I could find the phone, I could call for help.

A rustling sound from the corner dragged my attention back to the sleepwalker. It was trying to work its way free of its nest, its withered, wasted limbs refusing to support its weight. As it moved, it revealed enough of its chest for me to identify it as the teenage girl whose room this had been. I felt a little better about that. She had already been robbed of her humanity and her future; the least I could do for her was think of her as the woman she had been before one of my cousins burrowed into her brain and destroyed her.

“I’m sorry about touching all your stuff, but I don’t think you could tell me where your phone is,” I said apologetically, and resumed feeling my way along the dresser. “I wish you could. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

She moaned again, even more weakly this time. It was sort of nice not to be alone, since I knew that she wasn’t going to attack me: if she’d been capable of getting to her feet, rather than just rustling around in her nest, she would have done it already. I had a body packed with nutrients and fat, and I could have kept her alive for a good long time if she’d been able to get to me. I felt bad about that too—it was like I was waving a steak in front of a starving man—but since the steak was what was keeping me alive, I wasn’t going to share. It was terrible that her fate and mine had taken such different directions, but it wasn’t my fault. I just wished that there was something I could have done to fix it.

Honestly, I wished I had any idea who could have fixed it, or whether anyone was going to try. Dr. Cale was hard to predict. USAMRIID was all about humanity, and Sherman was all about the tapeworms, but humanity made the tapeworms—humanity brought the whole situation down on their own heads—and the tapeworms were taking things that didn’t belong to them. No one was completely in the right. No one was completely in the wrong, either.

The sleepwalker in the corner moaned and shifted again, dislodging several small objects from her nest. One of them hit the floor with a clunk, the light from the window reflecting off its cracked screen. I stared in disbelieving wonder.

It was a cellphone. And it was less than a foot away from a sleepwalker.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to just let me have that, would you?” I asked, taking a tentative step forward. The sleepwalker’s face swiveled back toward me, and she moaned with weak menace. “No, I didn’t think so.”

I was the only thing in the room that she could eat: because of that, distracting her from my presence wasn’t going to be easy. I cast around until I found one of those long boards that had been broken off from the bed during her destruction of the room. Picking it up, I took another step forward.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “If you just let me have the phone, I can get out of your room, and you’ll never have to see me again.” That would mean leaving her to die alone, which might not have been a mercy, but which wouldn’t require me to actually be the one to kill her. I took another step forward.

Sometimes it’s bad to be wrong. I’d assumed that since she hadn’t left her nest, she didn’t have the strength left in her to do anything but shift and moan. As I leaned forward to grab the phone, she lunged, spending the last of her resources in a desperate bid for sustenance. Her hands latched around my wrist, nearly yanking me off my feet as she pulled me toward her frantically working jaws. The light from the window glimmered off her teeth, which seemed too large and too white for her face. Everything had shrunk but those teeth.

Swallowing my scream was one of the hardest things I had ever done. I backpedaled, trying to yank myself away from her. She didn’t let go. I was her last chance at survival, and no matter how reduced her faculties had been by time and trauma, some part of her still knew that getting my flesh into her mouth would save her. Everything she had left was going into the effort of holding on to me. As she pulled, I felt my feet starting to slip. Before long, I would topple, and she would have me.

What happened next was pure panic. I raised the board that I was holding, bringing it down on her skull as hard as I could. There was a brittle splintering sound, and she moaned, and I hit her again. She still didn’t let go, and so I kept on hitting her, hitting her over and over again, while the sound of drums rose in my ears and the world narrowed down to a single point: me, and her, and the sound of wood impacting with her head.

She released my wrist. I didn’t stop hitting her.

It was exhaustion that finally made me pause and take stock of the situation. She wasn’t moving anymore. She had collapsed to the floor in a broken heap, and while there wasn’t much light in the room, what there was allowed me to see the dents in her skull, and the dark stains that were dripping down her skin as she continued to bleed out. The bleeding was already slowing, thanks to coagulation. Bile rose in my throat. I dropped the board, snatched the phone from the floor, and ran out of the room. I didn’t look back.

It was a miracle that I made it down the stairs without tripping and breaking my neck. I stopped in the entryway, where no lights or windows would betray my presence, and tried to turn on the phone in my hands. I had killed for it. I ought to use it.

It didn’t respond. Not even mashing the power button got a flicker of life out of the cracked and blood-spattered screen. I swallowed the panic that was trying to writhe up my throat and take me over, forcing myself to stand perfectly still while I breathed slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth, counting to ten on each exhale. The pounding in my ears began to lessen as my heart rate returned to something closer to normal.

The phone didn’t work because it had been sitting on the floor long enough for its captive owner to wither away to skin and bones. That was all. Even if she’d been a thin girl to start with, she must have been locked in that room for at least a week—probably more like two—before she got to the condition that I’d found her in. Of course the battery was dead. When I no longer felt like I was going to panic or vomit at any moment I walked down the hall to the bathroom, guided by the light that I’d left turned on earlier. There was a socket in the wall next to the sink, one outlet already occupied by a hair dryer. I plugged the phone charger into the other outlet, connected the phone to the charger, and sat down on the toilet to wait.

It was hard to keep track of time sitting alone in a dark house surrounded by sleepwalkers. It felt like it had been an hour when the phone beeped to signal that it was charged enough to use. It had probably been more like fifteen minutes. I left it connected to the charger as I picked it up and carefully pushed the button to activate the screen.

Please don’t be password protected, I prayed silently, unsure of who might be listening and even less sure that I cared. Please just give me that much. Please.

The screen flashed live, displaying the face of a smiling teenage girl wearing lipstick the color of bubble gum. There was no key pad. Relief washed over me. Her parents probably hadn’t allowed her to lock the phone, wanting to keep track of her activities. My parents had done something similar to me, although they had allowed Joyce all the privacy she wanted. That was the difference between adulthood and medical adolescence.

“Thank you,” I whispered, and touched the phone icon.

For one terrifying moment I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to remember Nathan’s number. Why should I? It was stored in my phone after all, and I had better things to remember. But it had been on a piece of paper first, pressed into my hand when we met at the hospital. Everyone kept telling me that I was using Sally Mitchell’s brain like a giant hard drive, storing information on it that couldn’t be contained in my original tapeworm neural system. That meant that everything I’d experienced since taking over had to be stored somewhere, if I just went looking for it.

Bit by bit, the image of a piece of paper formed behind my eyes. The numbers were blurry around the edges, but I could still tell what they were—I thought. I dialed quickly, trying to avoid cutting my fingers on the damaged screen, and raised the phone to my ear. It was ringing. That was a good sign: that meant the cell network was still up. Civilization couldn’t have collapsed completely if the cell network was still up.

The ringing stopped. Silence reigned. I waited a few seconds for the person on the other end to say something, and when they didn’t, I said, “H-hello? This is Sal Mitchell, looking for Nathan Kim. Please, do you know where he is?”

“Sal?” Nathan sounded almost confused, like he couldn’t believe it was really my voice. I didn’t care. Just hearing him say my name was enough to dull the drums that had been hammering in my ears, reducing them to a distant background hum. “Is it… oh, thank God, Sal, is it really you?”

“I think so,” I said, slumping against the cool porcelain of the toilet tank. “I’m really scared.”

“I—” Nathan stopped for a moment. I heard him take a deep breath. Then: “I’m sorry, are you telling me this is Sally Mitchell? Can you confirm your identity?”

Someone else had to be there with him: someone else had to be making sure he checked on me. That was okay. Better safe and making it home than sorry and alone. “I don’t like to be called Sally,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough, so I asked, “Are the broken doors still open? I want to come home.”

Nathan laughed. It was a gasping, unsteady sound, and the only way I knew it was laughter and not tears was because it stopped. “You can’t be serious. You can’t really think we’re that easy to fool.”

“I’m not trying to fool anyone. We went to the hospital to fix the arteries in my head and then we got separated in the parking lot when I ran away to distract the sleepwalkers from eating you—did Daisy and Fang make it to the car okay? I hope they did—and USAMRIID took me and they put me in this big bubble inside the Oakland Coliseum and there were a lot of other people there and Colonel Mitchell wasn’t telling anybody I was a chimera which seemed sort of weird but I didn’t want to call him on it in front of the men with guns and then…” I paused to take a deep breath, having run out of air somewhere in the middle of that long, gasping speech. Once my lungs were full, I continued: “Then Sherman was there and he broke me out and he’s been keeping me prisoner while he took samples from me all sorts of samples like blood and bone marrow and yesterday he cut my head open so I’m afraid he took samples of me, only one of his people helped me get out and I don’t know where I am but there’s sleepwalkers outside and I want to come home. Please come and get me and take me home.”

This time when I stopped talking, Nathan didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything. I could hear him breathing, and so I stayed quiet, trying not to pant as I waited to see what was going to happen next.

Finally, quietly, Nathan asked, “Why should I believe that you’re still Sal?”

I blinked at the phone. I had a dozen questions, and all of them seemed both equally important and equally frivolous. Finally, I asked, “Can Sherman do that? I know he’s been creating more chimera, and I’m not exactly sure how long he had me captive, but the first time I learned how to talk, it took like, years. Can he scoop people out of their heads and put new people in?” Belatedly I realized that I had just characterized tapeworms as “people.” I didn’t bother correcting myself. I was a person, regardless of my origins, and I was willing to extend that label to the rest of the chimera, regardless of theirs.

“You’ve been gone for over a month, Sal. We had to abandon the bowling alley after USAMRIID quarantined the area. Tansy never came back. Mom’s had Adam under constant surveillance since you disappeared. We didn’t know whether USAMRIID had you or whether you’d escaped, and there was too much chance you’d tell them where he was.”

As the first chimera—and the only one created from a first generation tapeworm—Adam would have been invaluable to anyone trying to figure out how we’d been created. I wanted to be offended, but I couldn’t muster the emotional response. Instead, I asked, “How are the dogs?”

“Beverly howled for about two days, which was a problem, since we were trying to dodge the quarantine vans at the time. Minnie just took it in stride, like she always knew that you were going to abandon her someday.” Nathan’s voice was starting to thaw. “Sal, is that really you?”

“It really is.” I sniffled, relief washing over me and leaving me almost dizzy. I hadn’t realized how afraid I was that Nathan would never accept me for who I claimed to be until the threat was lifting. “I don’t know where I am. Sherman was keeping me in an old mall, and I don’t know where that was either.”

“We’re working on that,” said Nathan. “Fishy started a trace on this call as soon as it came in. Not many people use my private cell number these days.”

“So Fishy’s okay?” I put my hand over my eyes, careful not to unplug the still-charging phone from the wall. “Who else is okay?”

“How about I tell you about the dogs until we have a fix on you, just so I don’t slip up and say something if you’re being monitored by someone else’s people?”

I smiled a little. “I’d like that.”

“Well, Beverly’s started eating shoes…” Nathan began, and I sat quietly and listened to him talk about what our dogs had been up to, and began to feel like maybe things were going to be okay after all.

-

Chapter 10 OCTOBER 2027

The sound of tires on the street outside made me stand and stick my head out of the bathroom, still clutching the fully charged cellphone in my hand like a talisman against all the bad things that were waiting in the dark. I’d been sitting silently since Nathan hung up, watching the phone’s battery bar slowly fill and wishing that he had been able to stay on the line. Apparently, it was unsafe to have too many connections going in or out of the new lab location; Fishy wasn’t the only person who knew how to trace a call. With the cell network on the verge of collapse thanks to neglect and a lack of callers, anyone who was still making calls was exposing themselves to all manner of tracking. By the government, definitely. But also, apparently, by SymboGen, which was still open and operational, and offering to “help” anyone who had been impacted by the sleepwalker plague.

According to what Nathan had been able to tell me during our short time on the phone, I’d missed the shit really starting to hit the fan by three days. That was the span between my disappearance and the first person to go into a sleepwalker frenzy on live television. That would have been a big deal no matter who did it, but that first victim was Paul Moffat, the mayor of San Francisco. He had been in the process of giving a speech about the crisis, one that was mirrored to the local public television station, less because anyone thought he had anything new to say, and more because he was a heavy contributor to their operating budget.

People started caring a lot more about what he had to say after he ripped somebody’s throat out with his teeth. That probably wasn’t the kind of attention he’d been looking for.

By the time somebody thought to shoot him, even CNN was carrying the footage of his conversion and subsequent attack. According to Nathan, that segment had aired on an almost constant loop for three days, and even Dr. Cale had put it on the main screen in her lab for a few hours, making sure everyone had the chance to see it. Then she’d turned off the screen and announced that while they were not abandoning the search for me and Tansy, they couldn’t hold off moving the lab any longer. Things were destabilizing too fast.

She was right about that, since by that point, no one really cared about the mayor who’d freaked out and eaten a few people. They were too busy worrying about their friends, their neighbors, their parents, their children… themselves. The warning signs had been there, and they had been ignored, one bellwether after another, until their weight became too great and everything came crashing down.

It took less than ten days for my cousins to incapacitate American civilization as we understood it, disrupting food chains, causing power outages and hospital shutdowns, and in some cases causing the evacuation of entire cities. There were still news feeds and Internet reports coming through, but they got scarcer each day as the people behind them fell. I guess maybe I should have been proud of that, except I was a tapeworm who thought of herself as a human, and they were tapeworms who thought of themselves as tapeworms. We were on different sides, and whenever there’s a conflict, somebody’s going to wind up on the losing one.

I just didn’t want it to be my side, even if I still wasn’t sure what side that was.

Footsteps on the walkway in front of the house snapped me out of my brief reverie, followed by the sound of gunshots. They came quick and efficient, one after the other, like someone running a hand along a typewriter. Then the shots stopped, and someone began hammering on the front door.

“I’m coming!” I still couldn’t run, but I could hobble quickly. Two more gunshots sounded in the time it took me to get to the front door, which I unlocked and opened to reveal the wild-eyed face of Nathan Kim. He was wearing a black uniform I’d never seen before, and had an assault rifle in one hand. It looked out of place against the backdrop of my gentle, scholarly boyfriend. So did the bodies that were littering the lawn. Fang and a man I didn’t recognize were standing back-to-back behind him, their own rifles slowly sweeping the area as they watched for more sleepwalkers.

Nathan stared at me. I stared back. The world seemed to freeze for a moment, narrowing to a single point that existed only in the space between us. I couldn’t move. From the hungry, hopeful expression on his face, neither could he.

“This is great and all, reunion, true love, blah blah blah, but can you confirm that it’s really your missing girlfriend so that we can get the fuck out of here before we get shredded like piñatas on a playground?” demanded the man I didn’t know. “We may have cleared this area, and my EMP blasts may have killed any bugs, but the gunshots are going to attract more playmates in no time at all. We need to roll.”

“Hi, Nathan,” I said.

Nathan swallowed hard, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching before he said, “Hello, Sal. Are you ready to go home?”

“More than ready.” I stepped out onto the porch, leaving the door open behind me. If any of the original occupants were still alive—if they had become sleepwalkers, rather than just being torn apart by them—at least now they could come home. The broken cellphone I tucked into my pocket. It had Nathan’s number in memory now. I wasn’t leaving that behind.

“Mom sends her regards, and asked me to tell you she always knew you’d find a way to stay alive,” said Nathan stiffly. Then the stiffness melted, and he was putting his arms around me and pulling me close, into an embrace that made me feel like everything was going to be all right after all. The world could end and Sherman could plot against humanity and I could beat the stolen body of a teenage girl to death in her bedroom, and still things would somehow find a way to be all right.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to get caught. I just wanted to keep you safe.”

“Never apologize,” Nathan whispered back. He turned, lifting me with me one arm so that we wouldn’t need to break off our embrace. The butt of his rifle dug into my back. I didn’t care. We were almost the same size, and he carried me easily as he stepped off the porch and turned to face Fang, the stranger, and the car. “Can you walk?”

“I’m sore and slow, but I can walk,” I assured him. He lowered my feet back to the ground. I left my hand against his chest as I looked around the area. We were in what would have been a normal suburban neighborhood once, although the gunshots hadn’t caused any of the other houses to turn their lights on; my worried impression of an abandoned city had been close to accurate. I could see shapes farther down the street, all of them turning and shambling in our direction. We weren’t going to be alone for very long. “Where are we?”

“Pleasant Hill, near the community college,” said Nathan. “There’s a mall nearby, but it doesn’t seem to be the one where Sherman was holding you.”

Of course they would have checked before they came to get me. Their safety would have depended on whether I was telling the truth, and whether I’d been left in this neighborhood as a trap. I nodded mutely, suddenly exhausted, and closed my eyes as I let Nathan guide me down the pathway to the car. I didn’t want to see the sleepwalkers staggering toward us; some of them might even be the parents of the girl I’d killed inside. The world was changing. We were all of us changing with it. That didn’t make it any easier to bear.

I opened my eyes when we reached the car. Nathan opened the door, motioning for me to get into the backseat. He must have seen my discomfort, because he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be riding with you. I just need to cover Fang and Fishy while they get back to their seats.”

That answered the question of who, exactly, the man I didn’t recognize was. I nodded and climbed in, scooting over until I was pressed against the door on the far side. Looking down the length of the backseat, I watched as Nathan raised his rifle and covered the other two men making their retreat. The pair split up when they reached the car, with Fang walking around to take the driver’s seat. Nathan got in next to me, and the sound of the door closing was the sound of coming home. I looked at him, eyes wide, unable to force myself to speak.

Nathan smiled a little. “I like your hair,” he said.

I laughed brokenly, and leaned over to put my head against his shoulder as Fang started the car and we drove away from the place where I had been abandoned, the place where I had been saved.

Nathan talked as we drove, explaining what had happened with the lab. I closed my eyes, leaned my head against his shoulder, and just listened. It was all I’d wanted to do for weeks: sit and listen to someone who would actually talk to me. He was constantly touching my hair or shoulder, like he was reassuring himself that I was real. I didn’t mind that either. It kept me from needing to be the one who moved.

The bowling alley hadn’t been Dr. Cale’s first lab. The first lab had been located in an old supermarket, and was moved when word came that the people who actually owned the property were planning to have it fumigated and then torn down. The second lab had been a closed-down Costco with the gas pumps still out back, and had been abandoned after Sherman defected. The bowling alley came third, and it had been her base of operations for longer than anything else. It was perfect in a lot of ways, isolated while still being close to civilization, and best of all, owned by a shell corporation that used it as a tax write-off and had no interest in either refurbishing or demolishing the place. It had become a lot less useful when USAMRIID started closing in.

The collapse of most of the local social norms—and the evacuations of any “nonessential” buildings, like the mall where Sherman had been keeping me, wherever that was—had created the perfect vacuum for Dr. Cale’s team. They’d smuggled themselves and all their equipment out of Clayton through a series of tricks and double blinds that Nathan didn’t explain very well, or maybe I just wasn’t quite listening anymore.

And then he said a name that actually caught my attention. I opened my eyes, tilting my head back until I could see his face, and said, “You can’t be serious.”

“But I am.” Nathan smiled a little, like he was perfectly aware of just how ridiculous he sounded. “We’ve moved the lab, and our living quarters, to the Captain Candy Chocolate Factory.”

I stared at him.

He smiled a little more. “I see you’ve heard of it. I wasn’t sure. I went there with a class field trip when I was in middle school, but you missed the whole ‘middle school’ experience.”

“Will used to leave the radio on when we were cleaning the shelter, and they advertised a lot during the afternoon,” I said. “It’s out in Vallejo, isn’t it?”

Nathan nodded. “That’s the one.”

“And it was just… empty?”

“It turns out that keeping a candy factory open isn’t a major priority when the world is ending,” said Fishy, twisting around in the front seat to look at us. “It’s a nice place. A little weird. Smells like chocolate. I hope you don’t have any allergies.”

“Just antiparasitics,” I said shyly.

“I guess that would be a problem for you,” he said, giving me a frank up-and-down look. “You don’t look like a tapeworm.”

“Surprise,” I said.

He grinned. It opened up his face like a flower, bright and honest enough that I didn’t even mind the fact that he was showing off virtually all of his teeth. The absence of malice in his expression was enough to rob them of their menace, making the expression as harmless as a grin on a dog.

Fishy was a short, stocky man with broad workman’s shoulders and a full head of riotously curly hair that was currently skimmed back into a ponytail to keep it out of his way. His eyes swam behind the lenses of his thick-framed glasses, which were seated so solidly on his nose that they looked like they would be impossible to dislodge. He was wearing a black outfit that matched Nathan’s in cut and construction, but couldn’t have looked more different on his frame.

“You seem more like a human being than Adam does,” he said. “He’s a nice guy, but he’s never really seemed like a functioning person to me.”

I blinked at him, casting an anxious glance at Nathan before returning my attention to Fishy and saying, hesitantly, “Maybe that’s because I learned how to be a human by living with humans, instead of learning how to be a human by sitting in a lab surrounded by people who never forgot that I wasn’t really one of them?”

“Maybe,” Fishy agreed. His gaze flicked to Nathan, smile fading. “We good?”

“We’re good,” Nathan agreed. Fishy withdrew back into the front seat. Nathan put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We weren’t expecting your call. Honestly, most of the people back at the lab had written you off as lost. I think that I was one of the only people who was still willing to believe that you were alive—well, me and Adam. Adam never gave up on you.”

“He wouldn’t,” I said.

“Neither would I.” Nathan tightened his arm. “Everyone’s going to be a little jumpy around you for a while. I just want you to be ready for that.”

“I can be ready for anything, as long as you let me stay with you.”

Nathan kissed the top of my head. “I’m never going to let myself be separated from you again.”

“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory was a Bay Area tradition, originally designed to compete with the better-known and more nationally established Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield. The Captain didn’t specialize in jelly beans; instead, he had made his name on chocolate and chocolate confections of all kinds, from cookies to ice cream. Instead of free tours, the Captain charged fifteen dollars a head, with a promise to make it up by providing ridiculous quantities of chocolate and candy at the end—a promise that he had apparently kept, since people kept coming back. Captain Candy never became a national brand, although I didn’t know whether that was a matter of economic necessity or a matter of corporate choice. There was a lot of competition in the national chocolate arena, but in Northern California, Captain Candy was king.

The factory was built to serve three purposes at once, and it needed to serve them all well before it could be considered a success. First, to offer a candy-coated wonderland that would invoke thoughts of children’s literature and impossible dreams, available for rent at a reasonable fee. Second, to create the illusion of a factory that Willy Wonka would have been proud to own and operate, even down to the brightly colored scrubs worn by all of the employees. Third, to host the actual Captain Candy’s factory, producing hundreds of pounds of candy daily on an assembly line that looked exactly like every other candy assembly line in the world.

The drive from Pleasant Hill to Vallejo took a little more than an hour, since we had to navigate a bridge choked with stalled-out and abandoned cars. Fishy and Fang got out at one point, pushing several of the cars out of the way with an ease that spoke of greased wheels and hidden levers. We drove through and they got out again, pushing the cars back into their original positions. “No one knows that we’re using this route for our supply runs, and we’re going to keep it that way,” said Fishy amiably, while Fang restarted the car.

“Good idea,” I said vaguely. It was hard to pay attention to them—the scene outside the car windows was too distracting.

We’d been passing abandoned cars and empty houses the whole time, but for the most part, the lack of light had kept me from really looking at what was around us. Now, the sun was rising, and there was no way not to see the wreckage of the world. Not without closing my eyes, and part of me felt responsible enough for what had happened that I couldn’t bring myself to do that. This was the world my species had made. It didn’t matter that I had never willingly hurt a human being, or that I had actually killed multiple sleepwalkers, thus putting myself firmly on the side of my creators. This was still my fault. Somehow.

The cars on the bridge weren’t alone. The streets of Vallejo were equally choked, although the vehicles had been carefully pushed to this side or that, creating open channels in the motionless traffic. A casual observer would have thought those channels were organic, arising naturally as the drivers had succumbed to their invertebrate attackers. From the way Fang swung the car from one clear path to the next, it was clear that they had been created to allow for occasions just like this one.

It might have been okay if the cars had been empty, or at least intact, but both those things were too much to ask. Windows were smashed, or smeared with streaks of long-dried blood, or both. Bodies were still belted into the seats where they had died, while others had fallen in the street, dried out by the elements or picked clean by predators. Every time we came around a corner it seemed like we dislodged another flock of crows, sending the urban scavenger birds flapping into the early morning sky. They’d clearly owned the streets long enough to turn bold, because they came back as soon as we rounded the next corner; I could see them returning to their prizes if I looked behind me. And I couldn’t stop looking back.

The lights were still on in half the city, with flickering streetlamps and incongruously well-lit storefronts on every street. Nathan saw me looking and said, “Not all systems fail at the same rate. Enough of the city is on solar or hydro power that it’ll be months before Vallejo is completely dark.”

“Even then, a few of the power stations are still pumping,” said Fishy amiably. “We could go around and shut everything off, but if this place goes dark before it stops being a bright spot on the grid, someone could figure out that we’re here, and we’d rather avoid that for as long as possible.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Doctor C is wanted for terrorism, naturally,” said Fishy.

Nathan didn’t say a word.

I twisted in my seat to look at him, eyes wide, and asked, “Is that true?”

“She did help create a creature that is now in the process of destroying the human race,” said Nathan. “Whether that was her intention or not, it doesn’t look good.”

“Oh,” I said, and then the vast, primary-colored shape of Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory came into view ahead of us, and conversation died, at least for the moment.

Fang drove across the largely empty parking lot and through an open gate into an underground garage that had probably been used to house delivery trucks, once upon a time, before the end of the world. Most of those trucks were gone now, except for a few parked against the far wall. Fang drove across the garage to the row of spaces right in front of a pair of sliding glass doors. Soft white light poured through the glass, bathing us in radiance, welcoming us home.

“You parked in the handicapped space again, asshole,” said Fishy amiably. He opened the car door, picking up his rifle as he slid out. “Dr. Cale’s going to have your head.”

“Dr. Cale doesn’t drive, and like I keep telling you, humanity is a handicap,” said Fang. “How else can you explain the things we’ve done to ourselves? Sal, I’m glad we were able to recover you. Now don’t get lost again.” He got out of the car, pocketing the keys, and went striding toward the door.

“Asshole,” repeated Fishy, and trotted after him.

I stayed where I was, my legs suddenly feeling like they were frozen to the seat. I’d wanted nothing more than to get back to the people I’d lost since I was taken, and now that safety seemed like it was within my grasp, I was terrified. What if Dr. Cale was angry with me for letting myself get grabbed? What if they tried to lock me up to keep me from going missing again? I couldn’t handle another cage. I just couldn’t.

“Sal.” Nathan’s voice was gentle. I turned to face him, and he reached out to rest the back of his hand against my cheek, smiling just a little. “It’s all right to be frightened. I’m pretty sure that I’d be scared too, if our positions were reversed. But you’re home now. Mom isn’t going to be mad at you. To be honest, she thinks you’re some kind of miracle. None of us thought we were ever going to see you again.” His voice broke a little on the last word. That, more than anything, told me that he was telling the truth.

I leaned forward and kissed him. He kissed me back, and for a few minutes, all the rest didn’t matter: we were actually alone, and together, and no one was trying to pull us apart. That was worth everything in the world. So I kissed him, and he kissed me, and then he was undoing my seat belt and pulling me into his lap, and I was exactly where I was meant to be. Where I should have been all along, and would have been, if we’d been just a little bit more careful.

Nathan’s cheeks were flushed when he pulled away, and his glasses were fogged, making him look young and wild-eyed and a little lost. “I thought you were gone, and I was trying to make myself believe it,” he said. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry I was ready to give up on you.”

“You didn’t,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him one more time. “Let’s go see your mother.”

Nathan nodded, and undid his own seat belt as I slid out of his lap and back to my own side of the car, where I opened the door and climbed out into the cool air of the underground garage. It was actually chilly enough that I shivered a little, making me suspect that it would never really get warm down here; it would always be the perfect temperature for shifting pallets of chocolate, or—in the case of the new management—cases containing delicate scientific samples. The more things changed, the more they really stayed the same.

Nathan walked around the car to join me, offering me his hand. “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

“I hope so,” I said, lacing my fingers through his and stepping close enough that I’d be able to grab hold of his arm if things got too overwhelming inside. I felt suddenly shy, and more than a little sick to my stomach.

“I love you,” he said. “Now breathe.” With that last proclamation, he pulled me forward, and together we stepped through the sliding glass doors and onto the red and white tile floor beyond. It had been designed to look like a giant peppermint swirl, which went well with the gust of warm, mint-scented air that greeted us as the doors slid shut again behind us.

I stopped dead, blinking for a moment, before I passed judgment on the rush of artificial mint with a sneeze.

Nathan grinned. “Disabling the mechanism that ‘greets all visitors to our candy wonderland’ would mean dismantling half the air-conditioning system, and we don’t have the time or the manpower to waste on something like that. Fishy says that the scent will run out eventually, and in the meantime, anyone who has a chemical sensitivity should use the other door or cover their nose when they walk through here.”

I sneezed again before sniffling and saying, “That’s really thoughtful of him.”

“He’s a thoughtful guy,” said Nathan, starting for the nearest escalator—which was running, I noted. No matter how many buildings around here might go dark, this one had power to spare. The rail was shaped like a never-ending rope of licorice, which was a nice, if surreal, touch.

Once we were both standing on the moving walkway, Nathan sobered and said, “Fishy’s been working with Mom for a while, but he wasn’t able to convince his wife not to get an implant. Mom says he experienced a profound disassociation from reality when she started trying to eat him—the wife, not Mom—and I think she’s probably right.”

“Dr. Cale, not the wife,” I guessed.

Nathan nodded. “Yeah. Fishy thinks of the rest of us as… well, characters in a uniquely immersive video game environment. That’s how he’s coping at this point, and as long as he isn’t trying to shoot people for extra points, we don’t press too hard. He’ll come around to reality when he feels like he’s ready.”

“Assuming reality is any better,” I said softly.

“Yeah.” Nathan sighed. “There is that.”

We both quieted then, and I looked curiously around as the escalator carried us through the open-air lobby—where people in lab coats and sweaters were gathered in small groups, some clutching coffee cups like their lives depended on it, others gesturing wildly with empty hands as they tried to get some vital point of science across. I recognized some of them from Dr. Cale’s lab. Others were new. Members of both groups turned to watch as the escalator carried us onward, toward the second floor.

I shrunk back against Nathan, who put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We’ve gained some people. Mom needed the labor, and they needed a safe place.”

“Right,” I said weakly, and tried to focus on the faux Candyland furnishings and bright, juvenile murals on the walls. I’d never been here before, in either of my incarnations. Sally’s family had been too middle class and respectable to have taken her there as a child. All the family photo albums were focused on Disneyland and Hawaii and other places that were probably a lot of fun for her, even if she looked sullen and annoyed in more than half the pictures. Sally would probably have rolled her eyes at Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory. I was amazed. The thought that a place like this could exist had never crossed my mind.

It had probably looked a little different before the disaster. Someone had nailed plywood sheets across the lowest of the lobby windows, and all the lobby doors, and only the fact that those sheets were painted in candy colors kept them from being glaringly out of place. The chandelier—a dizzying confection of giant peppermints and gumdrops—was draped in surveillance equipment and wireless boosters, keeping the entire building connected to whatever was left of the Internet.

The lobby passed out of view as the escalator finally reached the second floor, passing through another cheerfully painted tunnel before terminating at a landing covered in carpet so wildly patterned in swoops and swirls that it made my stomach churn if I looked at it for too long. There was also an elevator, which Nathan walked toward and pressed the call button. Going down. I blinked at him.

“Captain Candy’s Chocolate Factory is a weird sort of hybrid building,” he explained, motioning for me to join him. “It was designed half as a working confectionary company, and half as a theme park that kept the rest afloat by selling tour packages and ‘birthday party extravaganzas.’ There’s a whole floor upstairs dedicated to the party rooms. They’re pretty ridiculous, and they make the rest of the place look like it has a subdued color scheme.”

I blinked again. “I’m having trouble picturing that,” I admitted.

“I’ll take you for a tour later on,” he said. “Anyway, the place is pretty clever in its use of space. There was a false factory set up for tours, so that people could see candy being made the way it is in the movies—one piece at a time, being hand-wrapped and put into whimsical boxes—and then there was the real factory floor, underneath the rest of the building. That’s where Mom set up her lab. She said it would help her get back to her roots. Also, it’s the only place aside from the cookie garden in the upstairs party rooms that’s fully ADA compliant, and she wanted to be able to get around her own lab.”

“That makes sense.” The elevator arrived, and we stepped inside. I was obscurely relieved to see that it didn’t have glass walls. Our descent into children’s literature was not yet complete.

The elevator counted off the floors: first the lobby we had passed through on our way to the elevator bay—not a very efficient building design—and then two lower floors before it binged reassuringly and opened its doors, revealing the latest incarnation of Dr. Cale’s lab. It was, as always, an oasis of chaos masquerading as calm. The various people who rushed back and forth with quick, meaningful steps all wore lab coats over scruffy jeans and T-shirts. A few of them glanced in our direction, nodding at Nathan before they continued on their way, having apparently written me off as a nonentity. I frowned as I stepped out of the elevator.

“Has there been a total staff turnover?”

“No, but most of the people who’ve been working with Mom for a while have moved on to heading their own research groups rather than doing grunt work,” said Nathan, following me out of the elevator. The doors slid shut behind him. “It’s amazing how many leads we have to follow, and how few of them are leading us anywhere. You’ll see more familiar faces when it gets a little later in the day. There’s not much motivation to keep really normal hours.”

“Right.” I took Nathan’s hand, half automatically, and looked around. This had been the working factory level of the building: as such, industrial gray and sterile hospital white still had a place here, rather than being painted over with a hundred shades of candy swirl. The floor was uncarpeted tile, and posters covered the walls. I couldn’t read most of them, thanks to my dyslexia, but I knew enough to recognize the D. symbogenesis parasite. It was pictured at various stages of its life cycle, which made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, like I was seeing my own naked baby pictures held up for the perusal of strangers.

Other posters blazed safety warnings in large red letters that swam in and out of focus when I squinted at them, accompanied by handy pictograms showing the right way to deal with a chemical spill or put out a lab fire. Still others were printed in blocks of dense text that blurred like fingerprints when I tried to make sense of them. I held tighter to Nathan’s hand, aware of how out of place I felt, and even more aware that this place should have grown up around me. I should have been here from the beginning, influencing the shape of the rooms, helping them hang those posters. I felt like I had missed out on something essential, a chance to finally be at the core of my own story, and I wasn’t sure that was the kind of chance that would ever come around again.

We were halfway across the room when a narrow face topped by a roughly cut shock of disarrayed brown hair poked out from behind a filing cabinet, moving so slowly that it seemed like an attempt not to startle me. I stopped walking. Nathan did the same. I met the face’s eyes, matching their anxious look with an equally anxious expression of my own. The face’s owner inched hesitantly into view: a lanky, underfed young man in a lab coat, T-shirt, and jeans, but without shoes on, which made him seem faintly out of place even though he’d been living in labs like this one for as long as he’d been alive. Like me, he was a stranger even in the space that should have been his own.

He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. In that moment, in that vast, negative space that had opened between us, neither one of us knew how to react.

Nathan let go of my hand.

Untethered, I could have frozen. I would have, once… but I had led an army of sleepwalkers away from the people I cared about. I had made a deal with the devil to escape from USAMRIID, and I had crawled through a vent system to win my freedom. I could do this. I took a step forward. “Hi, Adam,” I said.

“Hi…” He stopped, swallowed, and tried again: “Hi, Sal. Are you really you? You’re not somebody else using you like a car, and I can trust you, and you won’t go away again?”

“I think I’m really me,” I said. “People seem to enjoy cutting my head open these days, but I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if they’d made it so that I turned into somebody else. Is that even a thing that people can do?” Adam was the second person to ask that same question, and it was starting to unnerve me.

Adam’s whole face lit up. “Sal!” he cried, and flung himself bodily across the floor separating us, slamming into me with a force that nearly knocked me off my still-aching legs. I managed to clasp my arms around him, and Nathan put a hand against my back, lending some stability to our little heap of limbs and frantic embraces. Adam pressed his face into the side of my neck. There was nothing romantic about the gesture: it was the blind, desperate struggle of a rescued dog trying to connect with its pack mates. I understood the language his body was speaking, and mine spoke it in return, clinging all the harder as I realized that I had never expected this reunion to occur. Part of me had already mourned for Adam, for this lab, for any chance of having what I considered a normal life ever again.

But not for Nathan. I had never mourned for Nathan, because the part of me responsible for managing the boundary line between the human world and the hot warm dark knew that losing him on top of everything else would have thrown me so deep into the darkness that I would never have come up again. I admired my own ability to care for myself, and I clung to my brother, and I cried.

Finally, after enough time had passed that each of us was confident that the other person would continue existing even without skin contact to keep them in the world, Adam started to unlatch his arms. I did the same, letting him go and stepping backward, into the comforting solidity of Nathan’s supporting hand. He wouldn’t let me fall. No matter how bad things got, Nathan would never, never let me fall.

“Hi, Sal,” said Adam, reaching up to wipe the tears from his cheeks before he beamed at me. “You came back. I didn’t think you were going to, but you did.”

“I’m sorry it took me so long.”

Adam shrugged, visibly dismissing the delay. It had taken a long time, but that was over now: that was done, and I was finally home where I belonged. That was all that really mattered as far as he was concerned. “Mom said you were coming, but I wasn’t sure whether she knew for sure that you would still be you. Or still be alive. You could have been like the cousins that they bring in from the field sometimes. They’re not here anymore.”

I glanced at Nathan. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“We’ve been harvesting sleepwalkers from the local population,” Nathan said, and to his credit, he looked both sad and determined as he spoke. “We have to know how the implants are mutating, and unfortunately, that’s the only way for us to track what’s happening out there. We try not to hurt them more than we absolutely have to. But we don’t bring back live specimens.”

Intellectually, I knew that was the right way to go about things. After all, sleepwalkers were irrationally hungry and capable of pushing their stolen bodies to dangerous extremes. Bringing them into the lab alive would endanger everyone. At the same time, these were my cousins, and I felt strange about the idea that we were going out and collecting them as scientific specimens when they weren’t actually hurting anyone.

“Oh,” I said softly.

Adam’s smile returned, weaker than before, as he moved closer and reached for my hand. I let him take it, appreciating the feeling of his fingers lacing through mine. He was smarter than me in some ways. Dr. Cale had been in charge of his schooling, and hadn’t been trying to make him think that he was human. He was better-read than I was, and educated at a much higher level overall. He understood science stuff that went straight over my head, leaving me puzzled and surrounded by people who might as well have been speaking Greek. In other ways, mostly having to do with social interactions, he was a little behind me. He liked to remind himself that he had skin. The best and easiest way to do that was with hugs and holding hands.

Nathan took my other hand. I looked from one of them to the other, listening to the drums that pounded in my ears and considering how different they were, and how similar. Dr. Cale’s two sons.

“This way,” said Adam, and—tugging on my hand—started leading me deeper into the lab. I let him, holding tight to Nathan so that he would come along with us as we stepped into the strangely familiar, strangely modified maze of free-standing work stations, cubicle walls, and tiny research bays that Dr. Cale and her people had carried with them from the lab back in Clayton. As we walked, I finally started recognizing people. Not everyone, but a researcher here and a lab assistant there would seem familiar, and then they would stop what they were doing to straighten up and stare at me like they were looking at a ghost. These were the people who had already written me off as lost forever, and were now faced with the fact that sometimes dead things aren’t so dead after all.

We stepped around a corner and into a small “meeting room” carved out of the room’s wide expanse by the careful placement of filing cabinets, desks, and bright pink cubicle walls that had probably been stolen from the administrative offices somewhere in the building. Dr. Cale was there, transcribing something in a small notebook. We stopped. Nathan cleared his throat.

“We found her,” he said.

Dr. Cale raised her head. For a moment—no more—her expression was completely unguarded, and I could look into her unshuttered eyes and see just how exhausted she really was. There were small wrinkles in the skin around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there a month ago. Then the walls came crashing down, and it was smiling Dr. Cale once more, as inscrutable and untouchable as ever.

“Hello, Sal. Did you enjoy your vacation?” she asked. “You could have sent a postcard or something, you know. Just to let us know that you were alive out there, and that we could stop worrying quite so much about you.”

My hands were still full, with Nathan clasping one and Adam clasping the other, and so I just shrugged and said, “Sherman wouldn’t give me a stamp.”

To my surprise, Dr. Cale laughed. “Oh, that’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that. What happened?”

“Um. From the beginning, or from when I woke up in the empty house where I found the cellphone, or…? There’s a lot to tell, and I don’t really know where I’m supposed to start telling it.”

“She’s tired, Mom,” said Nathan protectively. His hand tightened on mine. “Sherman’s been taking tissue samples from her.”

“Both of me,” I interjected. Nathan and Dr. Cale both turned in my direction. I flushed red. “I mean, Sherman cut my head open, and he didn’t do the best job of sealing it back up, and the only thing I can think of that he might have wanted from in there is a tissue sample from my original body.”

“He could have taken several segments from your posterior end without interfering with your synaptic interface with the human body,” said Dr. Cale. “Do you have any idea why he would want to do that?”

“He said that he didn’t know what I was originally tailored to do, since there were holes in SymboGen’s records, and said that since most worms were designed to have a purpose—not just making their host healthier, but actually serving a purpose in their bodies—a lot of chimera can be something special. Like he can induce biological trances in chimera and sleepwalkers just by touching us.” Even saying that made me feel unsafe and unclean, like I could summon Sherman with the mere admission of what he’d done to me. To us—Ronnie wasn’t exactly thrilled by the way he’d been treated, and I suspected that he wasn’t the only one bridling at Sherman’s behavior. “So maybe there’s something in my genetic makeup that made it easier for me to integrate with Sally. Whatever that something is, he wants it.”

“You need to tell her, Mom,” said Nathan, his gaze returning to Dr. Cale. He still didn’t let go of my hand. “If Sherman’s been taking samples…”

“Tell me what?” I looked between them, frowning. “Is everyone okay?”

“Not by a long shot,” said Dr. Cale. “Millions of people have died worldwide, and millions more are going to die before this is over. But I don’t think that’s what Nathan meant.”

“It’s not,” he said flatly. “Tell her.”

Dr. Cale took a deep breath, her ever-present smile fading. She looked down at her hands for a moment, and when she raised her eyes to me again, that sense of age was back, like she was growing older at an impossible rate. “I’m not going to apologize for what I told Daisy and Fang to do,” she said. “I will, however, apologize for acting without your full consent. Time was short, for a lot of reasons, and proved to be even shorter than I had feared. What we did was necessary.”

Just like that, everything fell into place. I dropped both Nathan and Adam’s hands as I reached back to feel the bandages at the base of my skull, held down with strips of tape that would pull and tangle when I tried to remove them from my hair. Suddenly, that seemed very unimportant. “You took samples from me when you were repairing the arteries in my skull,” I said softly, the feeling of violation growing soft and warm in my middle. “That’s why you were so willing to help get me into a proper surgical theater. Because you wanted sterile samples of my body.”

“It’s not the only reason,” said Dr. Cale defensively. “I wanted you to be safe. You’re my daughter and my future daughter-in-law all wrapped into one, and your health is important to me.”

“Didn’t SymboGen have a slogan that sounded a lot like that?” I straightened, pulling myself as taut as a bowstring. “You touched me.”

“I didn’t—”

“Your people work for you. You told them what to do. You gave the order. You touched me.” My voice came out so cold that it sounded alien to my own ears, like it was coming from someone else’s mouth. I turned to Nathan. “Did you know about this?”

“No,” he said. “Not until we made it back to the lab, and by that point, you were missing and I was out of my mind with worry.” He glared daggers at his mother as he spoke. “I wasn’t really involved in the operation, since that isn’t my field. I didn’t realize what they were doing, or I would have stopped them.”

And he wouldn’t have been watching for that sort of trickery: not on his mother’s part, and not with my life potentially on the line. My eyes narrowed as my attention swung back to Dr. Cale. “Was the operation necessary?”

“Yes,” she said, with what was clearly meant to be absolute sincerity. It was really too bad she’d spent so much time lying to me. I didn’t know what she sounded like when she told the truth. “The weakness in the arteries feeding your brain was real, as was the need to address it before one of them ruptured. We needed access to a functioning surgical theater. All that was completely true. As for the rest… I saw an opportunity, and I took it, for the greater good. You can’t blame me for that.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find that I can blame you for a lot,” I said, taking my hands away from the bandages on my skull and folding my arms across my chest. “What did you learn from taking me apart without my permission?”

Dr. Cale sighed. “It’s going to be like this now, is it?”

“Not forever,” I said. It pained me to admit it. This was enough of a violation that it should have been a deal breaker: it should have left me in the position of never letting myself trust her again. But I knew that she’d done what she’d done because she was trying to save us all. The fact that she hadn’t stopped to ask me for permission made me furious. But it wasn’t worth the end of the world. “We’re going to need some ground rules before I trust you again. But I still want to know what you learned.”

“I learned that Sally’s father was not exactly forthcoming about his medical history, probably because epilepsy is frowned upon when you’re working in Level 4 biosafety labs.” Dr. Cale’s expression was grim, but there was elation in her eyes, like she had finally cracked a complicated puzzle that had been bothering her for quite some time. “That’s why he paid to have top-grade implants tailored by SymboGen, instead of getting them through USAMRIID’s medical plan, which would have made more sense—and saved him quite a bit of money, I might add. But he couldn’t do that. Not if he was going to get the specific modifications he needed for himself and his eldest daughter. That also explains the holes in the records. He would have paid to have all his files expunged.”

I blinked. “Da—Colonel Mitchell isn’t epileptic, and neither am I,” I said. “The seizure Sally had right before her accident was the only one she’d ever had.”

“No, the seizure Sally had right before her accident was the only one she’d ever had on camera,” said Dr. Cale. “Colonel Mitchell couldn’t bury that one, since it was in the news, but it got mostly overlooked in the face of everything else that was unusual about your case. Sally was our canary in the coal mine, and you were our bellwether. You told us what was coming just by showing up. What’s more, you told us where we should be looking for more like you.”

I frowned. Nathan frowned. Adam, however, wasn’t so easily distracted by irrelevant points of science. “You took out part of Sal without her permission?” he asked, frowning deeply.

I glanced at him, surprised. He’d been quiet for long enough that I’d almost managed to forget that he was there.

Dr. Cale nodded, expression solemnly regretful. If there had been a competition for looking most sorry about something you weren’t actually sorry about, she would have won instantly. “I did, but sweetheart, I didn’t want to open up her skull twice, and we had to act quickly. There wasn’t time for a discussion.”

“Would you take part of me out without my permission?”

“No, of course not. But darling—”

“She couldn’t risk me saying no,” I said, in that cold, alien voice. “It would have ruined her plans, since then she couldn’t have used Nathan to help her work the samples. He would never have allowed her to do what she did, if he’d known.”

“That’s right,” said Nathan. “I wouldn’t.”

Dr. Cale turned to frown at both of us. “I told you, I needed—”

“No means no, Dr. Cale,” I said.

“Sal’s my sister,” said Adam fiercely. “You should be as good to her as you are to me, and that wasn’t very good to her at all. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“He’s right,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done it, and I’m never going to trust you like that again. But you learned what you needed to know?”

“Some of what I needed to know,” said Dr. Cale.

“Then I guess that makes it all better,” I said, putting a sarcastic twist on the last two words that actually made her mouth purse in something I didn’t recognize, but that I hoped was shame. I put a hand against my forehead, wishing I had some way to quiet the drums that were pounding in my ears. “I have a headache, and I miss my dogs. Can I go to wherever it is they are now, please? I just need to see them, and then you can tell me whatever else it is you’ve learned by taking pieces out of my head.”

“Come on, Sal,” said Nathan, slipping his hand back into mine. It fit perfectly. “This way.”

“Adam, I’ll come see you soon, okay?” I said. My brother nodded, still looking troubled by what his mother had done to me. Good. It was better if she didn’t start thinking this sort of thing was okay.

“It’s good to have you back, Sal,” said Dr. Cale.

“It’s good to be home,” I said, and let Nathan lead me away.

Nathan led me back to the elevator, this time pressing the button for the top floor. I leaned against him, feeling my entire body start to tremble. The events of the morning had been too much for me, especially after spending weeks in the mostly low-stimulus environment of Sherman’s mall. By the time the elevator stopped I was shaking so hard that I could barely walk. Nathan put his arm around me, holding me up as I half stumbled out of the elevator and into the hall.

“Do you need me to carry you?” he asked.

I thought about the question seriously before I nodded and said, without a trace of shame, “Yes, please.” The idea of taking another step made the drums pound even harder, a sure sign that I was stressed beyond my breaking point.

Nathan bent and scooped me into his arms. I’d lost weight and he’d gained muscle, our respective paths through the apocalypse leaving their marks on our bodies: he couldn’t have carried me like this before we were separated. “This used to be the research and development floor,” he said, carrying me past door after door. Each of them was painted in a different, clashing candy color. “I don’t know why they put the labs here on the top floor. It may have been a ventilation issue, or maybe they just wanted the place to burn from the top down if there was ever an accident.”

I couldn’t help it: I laughed a little at the image of some architect seriously explaining that they’d put the fire hazards all in one place for insurance reasons.

Nathan smiled. “The labs are small enough that we’ve been converting them into living quarters. Most people are double-bunking it, but I was able to convince Mom that I should have a lab to myself until you came home, rather than having a temporary roommate. I didn’t want there to be any delay when you got back.”

“Thank you,” I said, leaning up to kiss his cheek.

“Don’t thank me yet; it’s another bachelor apartment for you to judge me by,” he cautioned, stopping in front of a violently magenta door. It was unlocked. I blinked, and he stopped with his hand still on the doorknob, explaining: “We keep all rooms unlocked when they’re unoccupied, to make it easier for the staff to find shelter in the event of a sleepwalker outbreak inside the facility.”

“That makes sense,” I said. I could hear snuffling noises around the base of the door, and the familiar sound of blunt claws clacking against the floor. “Are the dogs in there?”

“Yes.” Nathan lowered me back to my feet. “You may want to brace yourself.”

Grinning, I did exactly that, dropping to one knee in the hall and spreading my arms. Nathan chuckled and opened the door.

There is nothing truer in this world than the love of a good dog. Beverly and Minnie surged out of the room, both wagging their tails so hard that their entire rear ends were vibrating, and commenced to the essential business of licking every exposed inch of my skin. I laughed and folded my arms around them, letting them butt their heads against my middle and buffet me with their tails. Beverly shoved her cold, wet nose into my ear. I bit back a shriek.

“They missed you,” said Nathan, standing back and folding his arms as he watched this edifying scene. “Beverly’s been looking for you all over the building. Minnie just sulked a lot.”

“Who’s my little diva?” I asked Minnie, rubbing her jowls. She rewarded me with a cascade of drool and more tail-wagging. “Aw, that’s my girl. You don’t care that I’m a tapeworm, do you? You just want pettings and love and food and all that good stuff. It doesn’t change anything when I tell you I’m not human. You just want me to be here with you.”

With wagging tails and wiggling bodies the dogs agreed that yes, yes, I was quite right, they didn’t mind anything I wanted to do, as long as I would keep on loving them and being their person.

I glanced up. Nathan was frowning now, his joviality gone. “Sal…”

“I know you don’t care either.” I climbed slowly back to my feet. The muscles in my calves felt like they were on the verge of giving up completely. “It’s just that sometimes I feel like my life would have been a lot easier if SymboGen had been a veterinary medicine company.”

“You’d rather have been a dog?” asked Nathan.

I stepped into the welcoming circle of his arms, the dogs still circling my feet with tails wagging, and said, “They aren’t as complicated as people. I think I would probably have made a pretty good dog, if the option had been on the table.”

“I think you make a pretty amazing woman,” said Nathan. He embraced me briefly before letting go and tugging me into the room. “Welcome home.”

The dogs followed closely at my heels, making it easy for him to close the door behind us while I considered our new living space. It was obvious that this room had started life as a working lab: the room’s origins were visible in the industrial shelves bolted to the walls and the perfunctorily efficient kitchen that took up one wall completely, laid out in a straight line that would never have caught on with private homeowners. Everything else about it, however, was entirely new, and had clearly been designed to be entirely ours.

The room was divided roughly into thirds. Nathan’s side was taken up by bookshelves and a desk that looked like it had been scavenged from the nearest Ikea. His laptop was set up and running, displaying a slide show of pictures. Most were of the two of us, although there were a few of the dogs, and some of his friends from the hospital. A picture of Devi—Minnie’s original owner—flashed by. I winced. The rest of the desk was taken up by sheaves of paper, and by stacks of scientific equipment that I couldn’t identify or name. It all looked very important.

My side of the room was mostly empty shelves, although my throat tightened a little when I saw that my few belongings had been unpacked and placed carefully wherever they seemed to best fit. There was a small pyramid of dog food cans, and a basket full of squeaky toys and rawhide chews.

“I’m amazed Beverly hasn’t knocked that over yet,” I said faintly.

“Oh, she has,” said Nathan. “I just keep picking it up again. She’s mostly stopped making trouble for the sake of making trouble. She missed you a lot, Sal. We all did.”

There was a broken note in his voice that made me pause in my study of the room to twist around and look at him. He met my eyes unflinchingly. I’d never seen such a depth of pain in his dark brown eyes, not even right after Devi died. “I missed you too,” I said. “But I’m home now, and we’re never letting that happen again.”

“Good,” said Nathan.

I turned back to my study of the room, finally allowing myself to focus on the part that had interested me the most. In the portion of the room that was clearly intended for us to share, a garden was blooming. It wasn’t food or herbs or medicinal plants—although looking at Nathan’s cunning hydroponic systems, I had to wonder if we were growing them somewhere in the building, if part of Captain Candy’s had been converted into a working farm now that necessity was demanding it—but it was something better, and much more important, all contained in a raised bed with high Plexiglas walls to keep the dogs from going digging. I guessed that those walls would come up to my waist, making it easy to bend and get to the plants when I needed to.

Carnivorous flowers and sticky-leaved stalks twined in a riotous explosion of hungry color, reaching toward the grow lights and misters that were keeping their environment at the optimal levels of heat and moisture. I gasped a little, tears forming in my eyes. “It’s beautiful,” I sighed. Nathan and I had really started bonding as a couple over our mutual love of carnivorous plants. They were chimera too, in a way: they grew like plants and they ate like animals. The sundews in front of me might be some of the last ones blooming in captivity. It was a sobering, heartbreaking thought.

“We had to make several supply runs into San Francisco,” said Nathan, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Putting together a lab this size—we’re three times larger than the bowling alley now, so we would have been forced to move even if not for the quarantine, just because we couldn’t fit in the available space anymore—meant gathering equipment from anyplace we could. I made a few extracurricular stops while we were there.”

“You could have been killed,” I said automatically, still staring at the impossible garden.

“I know.” Nathan took his hand off my shoulder and stepped past me, walking toward the vast wooden edifice that was our bed. I stayed where I was, unsure of what to do next, until he looked over his shoulder, smiled a little, and said, “Come over here. Please.”

I bit my lip and nodded before walking across the room and sitting down on the edge of the mattress. The frame looked like it had been stolen from the same Ikea as the desk, and had drawers built into its base, providing more storage space. Beverly leapt up in a single easy bound, curling up next to me and dropping her head onto my knee like her skull had suddenly become the heaviest thing in the world. Minnie climbed up, using a set of steps fashioned from an old milk crate. She stretched out at my back, providing a warm, furry bolster.

“I thought you were dead,” said Nathan, without any more prevarication or pausing. “We lost you in that parking lot, and we knew that USAMRIID had you. Mom has some contacts in the military—not enough to break the quarantine, and don’t think that they wouldn’t betray her in a second if they thought they could take her—and she contacted them within the hour, saying that one of her lab technicians had been taken. They got back to her a week later, reporting that someone of your description had been there, but had been abducted by a person or persons unknown. Then they started asking her some fairly pointed questions, since whoever took you had killed a bunch of their men in the process.”

“That was Ronnie,” I said. “He’s one of Sherman’s chimera. He has impulse control problems.”

Nathan blinked slowly. “Impulse control problems don’t usually come with a body count.”

“From Ronnie, they do. He’s frustrated and angry, and I don’t think he likes humans very much.” We’d never really talked about it. I hadn’t wanted to upset him, not when I was trying so hard to get him to like me. Seeing Nathan’s frown deepen, I added, “What he did was wrong, but he’s the one who got me out of Sherman’s compound thingy, so I’m not really inclined to throw stones, you know? I owe him.”

To my great relief, Nathan nodded. “I owe him, too. He gave you back to me. But at the time, the news that you’d been kidnapped by people who didn’t care who they hurt… it was terrifying, Sal. We all knew that you were dead, or dissected, or worse. I kept Mom looking for you. I couldn’t stop. Stopping would have meant admitting defeat, and if that happened…” He took a deep, shaky breath. “I thought about killing myself. I decided not to, simply because I knew that I had work to do, and I knew that my death would do nothing to clear my family name. But I didn’t have anything left to live for.”

I bit my lip again. The world had ended while I’d been sitting in my nicely gilded cage. There was just one factor unaccounted for… “Your father?” I asked.

Nathan shook his head. “He stopped answering calls shortly after the primary outbreak started. He lived in Orange County, in a very densely populated area, and all the CDC and USAMRIID maps we’ve been able to purloin have shown high sleepwalker activity in that area. If he’s alive, it’s a miracle, and I’m not holding out much hope for miracles just now.”

“I’m so sorry.” The words weren’t enough. Words never were. They were all I had to offer him.

“He was a good man, and he had a good life. I think he’d be happy to know I found Mom again, and that we’re at least trying to be a family. I know he’d be happy to hear that I found you again, that we somehow went through this horrible thing and wound up in the same place.” Nathan reached out and cupped my cheek with one hand. “He liked you a lot, you know. He used to ask me when you’d be his daughter.”

“I already said I’d marry you,” I said, blinking back tears.

“Fishy’s ordained,” said Nathan. “I think it would be a Jedi wedding—”

I couldn’t help myself. I broke out in giggles at the very idea.

Nathan smiled. “This is where we live now. This is where we’re going to find a way to save the world. Do you need anything?”

“Sleep,” I admitted. “Ronnie knocked me out before he moved me to the house where you found me, but that wasn’t real sleep, and I had…” The teenage sleepwalker, all life gone from her eyes, reaching for me out of the pure, desperate need to survive. “…I had a hard day. I just want to sleep.”

“Okay.” Nathan leaned forward and kissed my forehead before he started shrugging out of his lab coat. “I could use a nap.”

I didn’t say it, but I was grateful that he was staying with me. Good as it was to see my dogs again, I didn’t want to be alone.

It didn’t take me long to be ready for bed—all I had to do was squirm out of my bloody clothes, which Nathan whisked away and dropped into a sealed, dog-proof hamper. It took him a little longer, since he was somewhat more properly dressed. When we were both naked, we stopped and just looked at each other, me tracing the new starkness of his ribs and pallor of his arms and chest, where his slight tan had faded back to his natural light brown skin tone, him studying the bruises on my arms, legs, and side, all the snipped-off bits of skin and the tracks left behind by Sherman’s needles. I was white as a ghost after a month without seeing the sun, and when he came to me, I felt like paper pressed against stone, devoid of anything but emptiness.

Nathan curled himself around me, and the dogs fitted themselves into the spaces we created with our bodies, and everything was finally right with the world.