Symbiont

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Chapter 11 NOVEMBER 2027

I dreamt of the hot warm dark. Of the hot warm dark and of the redness that never ended, instead stretching on and on into a peaceful eternity. I moved through that redness without moving, and I understood the reasons for that now. My old therapist would have been amazed by the breakthroughs I was making in understanding my own mind. Not thinking of myself as a human being helped a lot. I didn’t need to consciously move when I was in the hot warm dark because I was the hot warm dark, and I was the occupant of the hot warm dark, and it would never leave me, even if I could never go back to the simplicity of being that I had once enjoyed, before I became self-aware, before I became Sal, with all the consequences that choice—if it was a choice—implied.

I didn’t really think of my creation as a choice. All the choices had come later, when I was a thinking, feeling creature that stood on two legs, instead of swimming fluidly with none. If there was a price to pay for what I had become—a price for me to pay, not Sally—it was that once you were human, you had to choose things.

“Sal.” A hand touched my shoulder, accompanied by the familiar sound of Nathan’s voice. The hot warm dark dissolved into the blackness behind my eyelids. I didn’t move. There was always a moment, right after I woke up, where I had to decide whether or not waking up was worth it. Choices again. Nathan sighed. “Honey, I know you’re awake. Come on. We’re going to miss breakfast if you don’t get moving.”

I opened my eyes and rolled over. Nathan, fully dressed, with a lab coat over his brown wool sweater, was sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling ruefully at me. His thick black hair was damp and sticking to his forehead, a sure sign that he’d come straight from the showers. “What?” I said, groggily. “Why?”

“Because we only serve breakfast for so long, and then we have to start turning the kitchen over to get ready for lunch,” he said reasonably. Beverly had her head resting on my hip. He reached over me to ruffle her ears, adding, “It’s waffles today. The chickens on the roof have started laying enough eggs that we can use them for things like batter.”

“I like waffles,” I allowed, and sat up. Beverly gave me a betrayed look and rolled over, telegraphing her intent not to get out of the bed for anything short of bacon. I giggled. I couldn’t help it.

“I like waffles too,” said Nathan, his small smile blossoming into a full, tight-lipped grin. He never showed me his teeth when he smiled anymore. What had been an affectation for my comfort when we were dating and I was human had become full-on habit upon learning that I was a tapeworm, and that my distaste for teeth was a genetic atavism that no amount of therapy could cure.

That sobered me. I bit my lip, dropping my chin a bit as I said, “I’ll get some clothes on and be right down.”

“That sounds like you’re planning to stay in bed until I leave the room, and then get ready without me,” said Nathan. “What’s wrong? Did you have bad dreams again?”

Sometimes I dreamt about my time with Sherman, or even my time at USAMRIID, blessedly short as it had been. In my dreams, Sherman never came to save me, and what Sally’s father had planned for me—the worm that had stolen his daughter’s life—was always worse than a few marrow samples. I had been back where I belonged for almost two weeks, and the dreams weren’t as frequent as they had been once, but I still woke up screaming frequently enough that we were both running on a disrupted sleep schedule.

“No,” I said quietly.

“Sal…”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s something, or you wouldn’t be refusing to meet my eyes.” Nathan touched my shoulder. “Tell me, please. I can’t help if you won’t tell me.”

“I dreamt about the hot warm dark. That’s all. It was… it was so nice. It was so much nicer than dreaming about being back with Sherman that I didn’t want to wake up. I just wanted to stay there forever.” The words were all simple ones, but between the two of us, they meant so much more than they could possibly encompass. I had dreamt of being something other than human, and I had wanted to stay that way. But if I wasn’t human, how could I belong here?

Nathan sighed. “Sal. Look at me.”

I lifted my head.

“Wanting to disappear into the hot warm dark is perfectly reasonable for you right now, and you know it. I don’t care where you came from. I never have, and I never will, and you know that.” Nathan looked at me solemnly. “I won’t tell you not to be silly—you’re not being silly, you’re going through a perfectly natural and normal process. You’re grieving for a life you didn’t think was going to turn out like this, and I’m just sorry we don’t have any trained therapists here for you to talk to. But I don’t care how many times you dream about disappearing into the dark. You’re still my girl.”

“I hated my therapist,” I said weakly. “Besides, where would we find somebody trained in the psyche of the distressed chimera?”

“It’s a niche field,” Nathan said, and offered me a small, hopeful smile.

I searched his eyes for some sign that he was lying, and couldn’t find it. I never found it, no matter how many times I looked. Maybe because it wasn’t there, and maybe because the lies were too big and too deep to be visible to anyone—not him, and certainly not me. How could he love me now the way that he’d loved me when he thought I was just like him? It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t feel the same way about myself as I had before I learned where I had come from. It was impossible for Nathan to be the only person in the world who really didn’t care.

Or was it? I didn’t feel the same way about myself anymore, but I didn’t feel any differently about him. Maybe it was the same for him, just… in reverse.

Those thoughts were big and complicated and hard, and I was tired of arguing with myself—so tired of arguing. So I shunted them to the side, sweeping them away like so much trash, and leaned forward to kiss him. Nathan responded by releasing my other hand and pulling me closer, ignoring the irritated grumbling noises from Beverly.

This time, there was no mistaking the pounding of my heart for the sound of drums. Nathan’s lips tasted faintly of mouthwash, which made me smile. He scooped me up, dropping me into his lap, where the pressure of his erection against my hip made it plain that he was as glad to see me as I was to be seen.

After that, there was no stopping, for either one of us. He stripped me out of my nightgown without lifting me from his lap, and then pushed me back against the bed as he removed his lab coat. Beverly grumbled more and jumped down to the floor, trotting across the room to join Minnie in the dog bed. I laughed, reaching forward to undo Nathan’s fly, and then nothing remained but the things we did share: skin and sweat and physicality, and the sweet knowledge that each of us was loved enough to make this moment possible. Moments like that one—not sexual, necessarily, but absolutely connected, absolutely in synch—are where humanity lives.

Nathan needed another shower by the time we were done, and I still needed my first one. He pulled his trousers and sweater back on while I wrapped myself in the comfortable largeness of his lab coat, enjoying the feeling of cotton against my bare backside as we walked down the hall to the employee showers. Not every floor had its own locker room. The lab level had two, probably because the scientists and researchers who used to work here were dealing with sticky substances all day, and no one wanted to deal with dripping molasses all the way home.

“I’ll be right back,” said Nathan, kissing me quickly before we parted ways at the entrance to the male and female showers. Not everyone paid attention to the distinction anymore—gender binaries seemed a lot less important after the apocalypse, if they had ever really been important in the first place—but splitting up was the best way to make sure we might actually make it downstairs in time for the last of the breakfast service.

The shelves in the women’s showers were cluttered with a wide assortment of hair care products and soaps, ranging in quality from salon brands to the sort of things that used to be sold at drugstores for a dollar a bottle. Several of Dr. Cale’s interns were conducting what they called “comparison tests,” and had determined that most of the salon brands were functionally identical to the Costco house brands.

“This would have saved me a fortune if I’d known before everything was free,” one of them had confessed drunkenly to me once, right after I had walked in on them shampooing one another’s hair. After that, I’d gotten a little more careful about showering alone. It wasn’t the nudity that bothered me. It was the expectation that I would know how to be social in a situation that no one had ever modeled or explained. People were complicated, and “complicated” was another word for “confusing as hell.”

I sluiced off quickly, using a cherry-scented shower gel to wash myself off while the combination shampoo and conditioner worked at baking the stiffness and snarls out of my hair. I could be in and out of the shower in half the time it took Nathan, usually, because I didn’t much care about what combination of products I used as long as they accomplished the solitary goal of making me clean. Rinsing myself, I ran my fingers through my hair to break up the worst of the knots and turned off the water before starting for the exit.

It hadn’t been long enough since my escape for me to need a haircut. I wanted one. I wanted one so badly that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with images of scissors dancing in front of my eyes. I didn’t want anything he had done to me to last. At the same time, cutting my hair—which was mine, it belonged to me, it grew out of my scalp—felt like an admission of defeat. Maybe it was a little, stupid thing, but it felt like if I cut it off, he would win. So I dried it as quickly as I could, and tried not to look at my reflection in the mirror.

I was fully dressed by the time Nathan came back to our room from the men’s shower, toweling off his hair as he stepped through the door. I smiled and held out his clothes. “Breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” he agreed.

He was still slightly damp when he got dressed. I helped, which nearly resulted in us needing another turn in the showers. Finally, though, we were walking toward the elevators, fully clothed and ready to face the day ahead.

Two weeks in the candy factory had acclimated me to the layout of the place: I was no longer pressing random buttons and then being surprised by whatever floor I happened to wind up on. Two weeks had also acclimated everyone else to my presence. There were fewer weird looks and jumps, and more quiet avoidances.

I suppose I should have expected that. Dr. Cale’s people were among the best in the world, and had been even before the population of the world started to drop precipitously. But they didn’t all share her “a person’s a person” attitude toward the chimera, or her sympathy toward the sleepwalkers, who had, after all, not asked to be designed with dangerously high levels of human DNA. I was starting to worry that she would have a mutiny on her hands before too much longer. What felt like half her technicians didn’t want to broker a peace between the two sides: they wanted to wipe the other side out completely, sweeping the slate clean and creating a world where allergies and autoimmune disorders would return to their proper place in the human body, rather than being suppressed by tapeworms that could turn traitor at any moment.

It was sort of hard to blame them for that. I probably wouldn’t have been too thrilled at the idea of harboring my own replacement.

The elevator stopped two floors down from our living quarters, and the doors opened on a sugar-scented, candy-colored wonderland. As always, the sight of the party level sent my train of thought spinning out of control, replaced by a strong desire to run laughing through the cookie garden until the Buttercream Fairy appeared and told me to stop. I glanced to the side. Nathan was grinning at me again.

“I just really like it here,” I said defensively.

“I just really like it when you’re happy,” he said, laughing, and stepped out of the elevator, leaving me with little choice but to follow him.

The party level had been designed to be managed by no more than six staff members, but had been subdivided into enough small grottos and private rooms that it was impossible to tell how many people were there at any given time. The elevator opened into the arrival area, which smelled like jelly beans and gumdrops and didn’t have a specific “candy” theme apart from “dentists are the enemy.” The randomly changing candy scents made meals an occasionally interesting experience, since this was also the only place in the building that was properly set up as a dining area. There was a cafeteria, but it was small and gray and depressing, and pretty much all of us preferred to eat in the cookie garden.

The smell of bacon wafted from what used to be the sticky toffee oasis, but had become the main station for fried meats in the morning and hot soup in the afternoon, thanks to its plethora of heat lamps and electrical outlets. According to the flyers in the old manager’s office, the sticky toffee oasis had been the only party destination to offer fondue as an option for the birthday boy or girl. I wasn’t really sure why anyone would want to eat toffee-flavored fondue on the steps of a plywood and plaster pyramid. Clearly, my lack of a human childhood had warped me in some way.

Daisy was on duty at the hot bar when Nathan and I came around the corner. He got a bright smile, which faded somewhat as her eyes focused on me. “Good morning, Nathan,” she said. “Sal.”

“Morning, Daisy.” I picked up a plate. “Nathan said there were waffles?”

“Third tray,” she said, pointing with her tongs before refocusing her smile on Nathan. It got even brighter, if that was possible. “I saved you some ham. It’s from the freezer we found last week, so we know it’s good.”

“Mmm, ham,” said Nathan. “Did you know that most natural tapeworm infections in the United States came from undercooked pork before we started importing our produce from South America? Salad tainted with human feces turned out to be an excellent transmission method for the infection.”

Daisy blanched, looking faintly nauseated. “Is that your way of saying you don’t want any ham?”

“I try to avoid pork as a rule.” Nathan picked up a plate of his own. “Breakfast potatoes?”

“That, I can do,” said Daisy, looking relieved. She opened the second of the silver serving platters and spooned a heaping pile of potatoes onto Nathan’s plate. “The fruit is down at the end.”

“I know my way around the hot bar,” said Nathan, with a smile that came nowhere near hers, for brightness, but was kind, which was really more than I would have given her. “Thanks for breakfast.”

“Thanks for eating,” said Daisy. Her blanch became a blush. “I mean, let me know if you want any orange juice.”

“Okay.”

I took my plate of waffles and previously frozen berries, stopped in front of Daisy long enough to take the ham Nathan had refused—it wasn’t like it could give me a tapeworm, since the chemicals I released into Sally’s body as part of claiming it as my own prevented any other parasitic infection from taking root—and flashed her a toothy smile before I turned and followed Nathan deeper into the party floor, looking for a table.

He finally settled at an empty picnic table that had been painted to look like it contained our recommended daily allowance of chocolate chips. I slid into a seat across from him. The waffles were pretty good, especially considering that it had been made with condensed milk—we had chickens, even a few goats, but no cows. That would have required more arable land than we could create with potting soil and fences.

Captain Candy’s had been designed to serve three disparate purposes: tourism, research, and food production. It still served three purposes. They just weren’t what the original architects had had in mind. The wonderland areas were still mostly intact, used as social space and meeting areas. The research and development labs had been repurposed into living space, with some people choosing to paint the walls white and others—like Nathan and myself—choosing to keep them primary colored and comforting. No one’s ever come up with a universal color scheme for the apocalypse, and if ours wanted to come in neon and peppermint stripe, well. That was okay.

The real factory level was being used for research, development, and all the things that went with having a team of working scientists rather than a bunch of independent researchers. I stayed out of there as much as I could. It wasn’t that people were unfriendly—for the most part, they were perfectly nice, if a little distant and occasionally wary of my nonhuman status—it was just that I didn’t understand anything that was going on there, and I had long since learned to keep a safe distance from what I didn’t comprehend. Call it the last great survival strategy.

The false factory was located on the second floor, which had been divided into two levels by some cunning tricks of interior design and elevator programming. The first level was a walkway made of plastic-coated steel gridding surrounded by a clear, waist-high plastic guardrail. It was completely wheelchair accessible, all long, gentle turns and shallow ramps as it made its way around the room, taking the most circuitous path possible. The elevator always stopped there first no matter how the buttons were pushed, since that was where the tourists were supposed to get off, and then continued down to the actual work level.

Once, the view beneath the walkway would have been all colorful, impractical machinery being tended by men and women in neon scrubs, with perpetual smiles plastered across their faces. No facial hair, pregnancies, or visible tattoos were allowed in the tourist factory, although all three were tolerated and even encouraged in the real Captain Candy. The good Captain didn’t care what you looked like, as long as you came to work and did your job the way that you were told to. The Captain’s PR department was a little more fixated on appearances, and they insisted that he run a tight ship, if only to keep those birthday dollars rolling through the door.

I think I would have liked Captain Candy. You know. If he’d actually been a real person, and if he’d managed to survive the rise of the SymboGen implants with his mind and his humanity intact.

The view from above had changed considerably since the factory switched hands, even if it all still belonged to the corporation on paper. The colorful machines were still there, but most of them had been gutted for whatever useful parts they happened to contain, and then left open to the air as they were converted into planters or small habitats for the less free-range inhabitants of our private indoor farm and animal sanctuary. The neon uniforms were long gone, along with the people who used to wear them. Instead, an observer would find Dr. Cale’s assistants moving between the machines, most of them wearing T-shirts or tank tops and jeans, a few with dirty white lab coats thrown over the top, as if to say, “I’m working in an indoor farm, but I’m still a scientist; I will always be a scientist.” The number of lab coats had dwindled even in the weeks since I’d come to the factory, as people realized that maybe some trappings of the old world were less important to hang on to than others.

We were building a world, one piece at a time. It was a small world, and a strangely dysfunctional one, but it was one where we could be relatively safe, and relatively happy, and maybe find a way to save the human race. If we were lucky, and we worked hard enough—which meant science for most of the people around me, and farming and taking care of the animals for the people like me, who had connections to the science community without being part of it—there was still a chance that we could find a way for everyone to live in peace. All we had to do was stop the cousins from taking over their hosts, and stop the humans from killing all the sleepwalkers and chimera who had already resulted from those takeovers. The sleepwalkers were bitey, but maybe they could still be helped, if we could just keep them alive.

It didn’t even sound easy. I put my fork down and looked glumly at the smears of syrup and berry juice that remained on my plate. Across from me, Nathan kept eating. He knew that whatever was bothering me, I’d share it eventually, and he needed to pack in as many calories as possible before his shift in the lab started. There was no eating allowed near the active cultures, for fear of contamination.

Footsteps on the faux stone pathway behind us caught both of our attention. I turned in my seat while Nathan raised his head. Daisy was standing in the doorway to the area, eyes wide, a slightly poleaxed expression on her round, normally friendly face.

“You’re both needed downstairs,” she said without preamble.

“I’m not on duty for another thirty minutes,” said Nathan.

“I know.” Daisy sounded frustrated. “But like I said, we need you both, and right now there’s no such thing as being off duty, because we have a situation. Sal is required, and you’re not going to let her go out alone.”

“Why won’t he let me go alone?” I asked, bemused. “What kind of situation means I can’t go out alone?” The unconscious echo hit me an instant later, and a thin worm of panic writhed in my stomach. Everyone here at Dr. Cale’s lab was steeped in the mythology of an obscure, out of print children’s book, and from us, those words meant something very concrete.

Daisy looked at me solemnly, an uncharacteristic reserve in her mossy green eyes. “Dr. Banks is here,” she said. “He’s asking for you.”

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Chapter 12 NOVEMBER 2027

Daisy fidgeted as the elevator slid down into the bowels of the factory, plucking at the hems on her sleeves and casting sidelong glances at me and at Nathan, like she thought we had somehow been struck blind by the discovery that Dr. Banks had managed to find us. It wasn’t like Captain Candy’s was a natural place to conceal an underground biotech lab. If he’d located us here, he must have spent quite a lot of time and effort on looking. He had to have a reason.

I leaned against Nathan’s side, trying to calm my breathing, or at least get the frantic pounding of my heart under control. In that moment, I would almost have welcomed Sherman and his weird biomechanical control. At least then I wouldn’t have felt so much like I was on the verge of losing consciousness.

The elevator dinged as it reached the ground floor lobby. I stepped forward, almost bopping my nose on the opening doors in my eagerness to get out of that small, tight space full of questions and uncertainties. I wasn’t in a hurry to see Dr. Banks—I was never going to be in a hurry to see him—but in that moment, anything would have been better than staying where I was and trying to figure out how this was making me feel. I didn’t know how it was making me feel. No, that wasn’t right: it made me angry. All of this made me angry, and that was what I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to deal with the anger. I didn’t know how to handle the sheer feeling of betrayal that came with the thought of seeing him again.

I was going to need to figure things out, and fast. There were five figures waiting for us at the front of the Captain Candy Chocolate Factory lobby, outlined by the early morning sun that slanted in through the big glass windows. The boards nailed up to protect us from sleepwalkers only extended about eight feet up from the floor; there was plenty of light. People moved outside the glass, nailing the boards back into place. There must have been another attack while we were sleeping.

That got more common every day.

Even with them reduced to nothing more than silhouettes, I could tell who four of the five people in the lobby were. The low-slung figure in the wheelchair was Dr. Cale, and the two men who flanked her were Fishy and Fang, recognizable by outline alone. One of the figures, a willowy female, was unfamiliar to me. And the fifth…

The fifth was one of the first people I remembered, one of the first humans to sit down with me and tell me I didn’t have to be defined by my accident and my memory loss, that I could learn to be a full, productive member of society despite the way my life had changed. He’d been lying all along, of course—he’d known exactly what I was, and that each of the skills I learned would be learned for the very first time—but he’d always known what to say to get me to come around. Even later, when I’d started to chafe against SymboGen’s pseudo-parental treatment of me almost as much as I’d been chafing against Sally’s parents, he’d always known what to say. After all, he was one of the people who had created me.

But he couldn’t talk me into taking a job at SymboGen, even when he tried his best, and he hadn’t convinced me not to steal the data Dr. Cale had asked me to get for her. Maybe he didn’t know me as well as I thought he did.

I wondered what he thought as he saw me walking slowly across the lobby toward him, with Nathan by my side. Did he look at me and see a woman, stronger than she used to be and only a little weaker than she had the potential to become, who had survived the apocalypse and the discovery that she wasn’t even the species she’d always believed herself to be? Or did he see the broken girl he’d worked so hard to keep under his control, the experiment gone horribly right and taking its first steps out into the world? And did it matter? Sally Mitchell was gone. This body was mine. Not hers, not anyone else’s, not ever again. I was even suddenly grateful for Sherman’s unasked-for haircut, because it was something Sally would never have done to herself. I looked like someone else. I was someone else.

And then I got close enough to see the bright, paternal smile on Dr. Banks’s face, and I was just Sal again, dressed in a paper gown and waiting to be told that it was time for cookies and juice.

“Sally,” he said, and while the name he used wasn’t mine, I couldn’t deny the reality of his relief. He sounded like a man who had just discovered that Christmas wasn’t canceled after all. “You really made it. I’d heard rumors, but I wasn’t sure.”

“No thanks to you,” said Nathan. “What is he doing here, Mother?”

“Manners, Nathan; Dr. Banks is our guest, at least for the moment,” said Dr. Cale. “He may be our prisoner in a little while. I haven’t decided yet. You’ve met my son, haven’t you, Steven? Oh, what was I thinking? You were having him monitored by SymboGen security. Of course you’ve met my son, even if I wasn’t always sure he’d met you.”

“Hello, Dr. Banks,” I said. I kept my eyes on his face, not letting myself look at the interplay between Nathan and Dr. Cale. They didn’t matter as much as he did. Not in this moment. “You made it too. I thought you’d have been arrested for crimes against humanity by now.”

“The United States government and I have an understanding,” he said. “I keep working on a way to help them solve their little tapeworm problem, they don’t arrest me. It works out well for everyone involved.”

“Except the dead people,” said Fishy snidely.

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at Dr. Banks.

Dr. Banks had always been a man who fought to present the illusion of perfection, clinging to it long past the point where anyone else I knew would have abandoned it as a waste of resources. That perfection was gone now. His sandy hair was mussed, graying at the temples, and a little longer than it should have been, showing how long it had been since he’d been to see a barber. He’d lost weight, leaving his carefully sculpted physique less defined than it had been the last time I’d seen him. Most damningly, he was wearing stained brown slacks and the top half of a pair of medical scrubs. The sleeves of his black runner’s top poked out of the shirt, their cuffs a little frayed. If the apocalypse was stripping us of our masks and revealing us for what we really were, what did that say about Dr. Banks? How much of who I’d always assumed him to be was a lie?

“I’ve been working day and night to try to find a solution,” he said, apparently mistaking my silence for awe, or for confusion, or for something easier to explain away than what it really was: understanding. I was starting to understand why it had been so easy for him to lie to me all those years, when he looked into my eyes and called me “Sally” and acted like my accident hadn’t changed anything.

He’d already been lying to everyone else.

“Who’s she?” asked Nathan, breaking the brief quiet. His gaze had gone to the silent girl standing next to Dr. Banks. I followed it, really considering her for the first time.

She was a whisper of a thing, a charcoal sketch that no one had ever bothered to finish filling in. Her skin was almost pale enough to be translucent, a milky white only a few shades darker than the skins of the tapeworms Dr. Cale kept in jars and feeding containers down in her lab. Her hair was black, falling to mid-back, and her eyes were a dark enough brown that I might not have realized they had a color at all if I hadn’t had her hair for contrast. She was maybe twenty years old, and stick-thin. She looked like she was on the verge of collapse, but she met my eyes steadily, and she didn’t flinch away.

Something about her was terribly familiar. I had never seen her before.

“Sal, meet Anna,” said Dr. Banks, placing a proprietary hand on the girl’s shoulder. She turned to look up at him, her dark eyes filled with worshipful adoration. He flashed a smile at her—the same warm, intentionally paternal smile that he used to direct at me.

In that moment I knew what she was, but I didn’t say anything, too filled with disgust and dismay to force my lips to move. The pounding of the drums was back in my ears, brought on by the stress and the realization that Dr. Banks had been doing more independent experimentation than any of us had ever suspected. And why shouldn’t he? He’d been one of the creators of the SymboGen implant. He had as much right as anyone to explore further perversions of science.

Dr. Banks turned that warm, paternal smile on me, and said, “She’s your sister.”

Dr. Cale didn’t wait for the rest of us to react to Dr. Banks’s proclamation before she started rolling herself toward the elevator, signaling for the group to follow her. “We’re moving this to a more secure location,” she called. Fishy trotted ahead of her, pressing the call button for the service elevator that used to transport entire birthday parties and pallets of boxed candy around the factory. Captain Candy had believed firmly in using things for as many purposes as possible. That made him my kind of guy. Too bad he had never really existed.

I was chasing my thoughts down rabbit holes again, a sure sign that I was disturbed by Dr. Banks’s proclamation. I piled into the elevator next to Nathan, sneaking glances around him at the pale, black-haired girl that Dr. Banks called “Anna.” She couldn’t really be my sister, could she? I knew she was a chimera. Nothing could have convinced me otherwise. But how could he have done that to a living human being? How could have done that on purpose? Sherman did the things he did because he didn’t believe that humans had any more right to their bodies than we did. Dr. Banks was human. How could he have done that to one of his own people?

I didn’t hate myself for what I was, but I knew my birth had been predicated on the death of someone who had existed before me. Dr. Cale was my mother in the sense that she had designed me, building the human DNA into my structure that would one day allow me to bond with Sally Mitchell on a fundamental level. Dr. Banks was my father in the same sense: his incessant tampering with the structure of D. symbogenesis was what enabled it to infest its hosts so flexibly. And yet…

And yet really, Sally Mitchell had been my mother, because her flesh nurtured and supported me until I was large enough to live my own life—a life that began when hers ended. My eyes searched Anna’s face, looking for signs that she had made the same transition, or at least understood what the transition meant.

She stared straight ahead for the entire descent, not meeting my eyes or looking in my direction even once. I glanced down. She was holding Dr. Banks’s hand tightly in hers, her fingers digging so hard into the back of his hand that the flesh there was white and bloodless. Maybe she was nervous after all.

The elevator dinged as it reached the ground floor, and the doors opened to reveal eight more of Dr. Cale’s interns and lab technicians. They were all holding semi-automatic weapons, and had them trained on the open elevator doors. Fishy took a half step to the left, putting his finger on the “door open” button that would keep the elevator locked where it was. To my dismay, one of the technicians tracked his movement with the barrel of her gun, keeping him firmly in her sights.

Dr. Banks stiffened but didn’t say anything. Anna made a small whimpering noise, her hand clamping down even harder on his, and looked down at the floor. Her shoulders were shaking. I felt the powerful urge to put my arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be all right, which was as nonsensical as it was foolish. Everything was not going to be all right. Dr. Cale was holding us at gunpoint, and I knew her well enough to know that I didn’t understand precisely why. Nothing was going to be all right until I knew what was going on.

“Nathan, please push me out into the lab,” said Dr. Cale. “The rest of you, I recommend staying exactly where you are. If you move too much, you may find yourself leaking from a bunch of holes that you didn’t start out with, and our medical facilities still aren’t as advanced as I’d like them to be. We could probably deal with one gunshot wound, but five would be a strain on our resources.”

“I’m not leaving this elevator without Sal,” said Nathan, through gritted teeth.

“I didn’t expect that you would—hence my count. Steven, his little pet, Daisy, Fishy, and Fang. Five. Now be a good son and help your mother.” There was a needle of ice in Dr. Cale’s voice, as sharp and vicious as a hypodermic in the night. “We all know that a woman in a wheelchair can’t be expected to take care of herself.”

“Now Surrey—” said Dr. Banks.

Dr. Cale didn’t turn or look back at him. “Surrey Kim is dead, Steven. You should know that better than anyone: you’re the one who killed her. She had a husband and a son and a career that didn’t involve destroying the world. She had the capacity for compassion toward the human race, even if she had to learn what didn’t come naturally. It’s really a pity that you decided she had to go. I think she might have been a little more understanding about whatever it is you’ve come here for. Nathan?”

“Yes, Mom,” said Nathan, and gripped the handles of her chair, pushing her out of the elevator. He didn’t move much faster than she would have been able to go on her own. She sat with her back perfectly straight, like the mast of one of the ships that used to sail in the San Francisco Harbor, and I followed behind them, fighting the urge to glance back and see how the others were reacting. Fishy, Fang, and Daisy were being left in the line of fire for nothing more than the crime of being in the elevator when Dr. Cale declared it a holding pen. Dr. Banks had to know what he was walking into when he decided to come here—and why would he do that? He knew we weren’t friends. He knew we weren’t even allies. So what would bring him to Dr. Cale?

What, if not Anna?

I could almost feel her behind me, eyes on my back, a soft, warm presence like a beacon that said I should turn around, go back to the elevator, and refuse to leave her alone. It wasn’t an awareness that had anything to do with any of the senses; it was just there, inescapable, like gravity.

I stumbled a little, catching myself on the arm of Dr. Cale’s chair. She cast me a quick, concerned look, lips pursing as if to shush me. I nodded, just a bit, and kept walking, refusing to let my confusion show on my face. I knew Anna was there because I could sense her, a blind, deaf sense that pervaded everything—and I always knew Adam was there, didn’t I? I always knew when he was in the room, even if I didn’t know exactly where he was. It hadn’t been like that at first—he had managed to surprise me more than once in the early days—but the longer I’d been around him, the stronger that sense had become. I hadn’t even noticed it happening. It was just natural, unavoidable, like the tide.

My ability to sense other chimera was growing, and had been since Sherman held me captive in his mall. I didn’t know how far it was going to go. Apparently, it had already gone far enough for Anna to register immediately on my parasite radar.

Dr. Cale gestured for Nathan to stop when we reached the line of interns and assistants, and she gripped her own wheels, turning herself to face our visitors and abandoned associates, now virtual hostages to Dr. Banks’s good behavior. The line broke and re-formed, leaving the three of us strung at the center of it like a pendant on a chain. Dr. Cale refolded her hands in her lap, tilting her head so that her sleek blonde hair brushed against her cheek just so. She looked like a nursery school teacher, someone who could wait patiently forever until they received the answer they were looking for.

Fishy, Daisy, and Fang were still in their original positions, looking remarkably relaxed for people who might be shot at any moment. Then again, they were also all armed, and they knew that the folks with the rifles would be shooting at Dr. Banks and Anna, not at them.

“I really think you’re overreacting here, Shanti,” said Dr. Banks, stressing Dr. Cale’s chosen name. “I’m here as a friend, and as someone who needs your help. I don’t see any reason for you to have your people treat me like a common criminal.”

“Really? How many times did you try to have me killed, Steven? Two? Three? Oh, wait, there was that incident with the gas leak back at my first private lab—we never did figure out how that happened, but as there were no cameras on the location, we couldn’t rule out industrial espionage. That one almost succeeded, you know. I was still getting used to my wheelchair back then. So I’d say that ‘four’ is a low estimate, wouldn’t you?” Dr. Cale’s folded hands tensed and relaxed to a rhythm I understood: she was hearing her own version of the drums that followed me through my life.

Nathan kept his hands on the chair, more I think so that he wouldn’t have to decide what to do with them than anything else. Dr. Banks was the man who’d first conceived of the project that would lead to D. symbogenesis, the downfall of the human race, and the end of the world as we knew it. But he hadn’t done any of that on his own. When he needed help, he’d gone looking for the smartest, most ethically flexible genetic engineer he knew: Dr. Surrey Blackburn-Kim, Nathan’s mother. Dr. Kim had known that this path would lead them through the broken doors at last, and she’d tried to refuse—not too hard, I was sure; she’d been the same person then, even if she’d gone by a different name—and when Dr. Banks had produced information that he could use to force her to work on his project, she’d agreed, on one condition. Dr. Kim had to die.

There was a boating accident. Nathan buried his mother. Nathan’s father buried his wife. And Dr. Shanti Cale hung her newly minted degrees on the wall of a private lab in a San Francisco biotech firm, where she was going to change the world.

I couldn’t really say whether she’d done the right thing. All I knew about the blackmail material Dr. Banks had on her was that it was bad enough to make her walk away from her entire life… and that he had played on her ingrained desire to break the laws of nature without getting caught. “Every mad scientist secretly dreams of playing God,” was something she had said to me on several occasions, and from the way she and Dr. Banks were looking at each other now, I guessed that was true. He was trying to project a veneer of smug confidence over a thick inner layer of exhaustion. Dr. Cale was ice. She looked like she had never thawed, and never would.

“Now, Shanti,” said Dr. Banks. “Are we really going to let the past keep us from collaborating here and now, when we have a chance to save the future? We work well together. You know we do.”

“How many times?” she asked coolly.

“Eight,” he admitted, after a long silence. “Your little odd-eyed girl stopped two of my men before they could get anywhere near you, and you dropped off the grid not long after that. Where is she, by the way? I didn’t expect to be able to walk right up to your headquarters.”

“You shouldn’t have been able to,” said Dr. Cale, her glare briefly flickering to the other three people who shared the elevator with Dr. Banks and Anna. Well, that explained why she’d left them in there: they were all involved with our operational security, and the fact that he was in the building at all meant that they had failed, to some degree, at their jobs. “As for Tansy, she is on an extended leave of absence. We hope to have her back with us soon.”

“That means you lost her, doesn’t it?” Dr. Banks shook his head. There was a slight upward tilt to the corners of his mouth, like he was fighting not to smile. “You should be more careful with your human resources, Shanti. It’s getting harder to replace them.”

“It’s getting harder to replace biotech firms, too, but you’ve apparently allowed yours to be commandeered by the U.S. government,” said Dr. Cale mildly. “Do we really want to start playing the game of ‘who paid more to arrive at this point in time’? Because I’ll note that you’re standing there trying to make me feel sorry for you, and I’m sitting here wishing more than anything that I could walk over and knee you in the balls.”

I blinked. Dr. Cale’s paraplegia was a fact of life, something that the lab and her living quarters had been designed to accommodate. Sometimes I forgot that it was the result of her implanting the tapeworm that would eventually mature to become Adam in her own body, where it had compromised her spine to such a degree that she had been judged unlikely to ever recover, even back when she had access to better medical care than we could supply in a repurposed candy factory. The thought of her walking was surreal.

From the brief look of regret that flashed over Dr. Banks’s face, I was the only one who felt that way. “I didn’t ‘allow’ the government to commandeer my resources. They take what they want. And I never did tell you how sorry I was when I received the news of your injury.”

“Really, Steven? You were sorry? Because here I thought you’d take it as proof that you’d been right when you decided to sideline me.”

“You didn’t stay long enough to be sidelined.”

Dr. Cale sat up a little straighter, lifting her chin. “That’s true. I ran as soon as I saw the writing on the wall. You were in a position of power, and I knew what a man like you would do when he had a little power in his hands. Now here we are, and I’m in this chair, and yet for once, you don’t have any power at all. You’re just a man with no army at his back, standing here and asking for my help. So what is it that you want, Steven? What can my humble little underground lab do for someone with your resources and reach?”

“Sarcasm is a mode of speech used to convey mockery or even disdain without openly insulting the other person involved in the conversation,” said Anna.

Everyone stopped. Dr. Cale’s attention switched from Dr. Banks to the girl, her eyes crawling over Anna’s body with an almost visible avidity. Anna continued to stare straight ahead, not seeming to fully understand what was happening around her. Again, the urge to shield her from the situation swept over me, and again, I pushed it aside. She wasn’t on our side. That made her the enemy.

“How far along is her integration?” asked Dr. Cale.

“Two and a half weeks,” said Dr. Banks. “Ideally, she would still be hooked to her monitoring equipment, but she’s highly resistant to being separated from me. She becomes difficult to control.”

“How is she talking if she’s only two and a half weeks along?” asked Dr. Cale. “Language integration takes longer than that.”

Dr. Banks looked smug. “I found a new means of stabilizing the neural paths. It allows for a quicker, more seamless connection between the implant and the brain.”

“Building a better chimera,” said Dr. Cale. “I’m sure the government will be thrilled to hear that’s what you’ve been doing with their money.”

“We have to understand them if we’re going to defeat them.” Dr. Banks sighed, shaking his head. “All right, Shanti, what is it that you want me to say? You want me to apologize? Fine. I apologize. I’m sorry I brought you into this, and I’m sorry I created an environment where you felt like you had to remove yourself for your own safety, and I’m sorry I tried to have you killed. Although to be fair, you would have done the same in my position.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Dr. Cale. “You stole my research, Steven. You stole my life’s work, and you stole my family.”

“I didn’t steal them,” he protested. “You chose to give them up.”

“That’s not the family she’s talking about.” The sound of my own voice surprised me. Dr. Cale didn’t take her eyes off Dr. Banks, but the way her mouth curled upward at the corner told me that she approved of my interjection. I swallowed, the drums hammering loudly in my ears, and said, “You called Anna my sister. You did that because she’s… she’s like me. She’s a tapeworm in a human skin.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Banks, and beamed at me, like I was a slow child who had just managed to catch up to the rest of the class.

It made me itch to punch him, to feel my knuckles sinking into the soft flesh of his cheek or throat. I clenched my hands by my sides instead, and said, “That means you used the D. symbogenesis tapeworm on a human subject to get a chimera of your very own.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Banks again. His smile this time was more strained. He was clearly getting as tired of praising me as I was of being praised. Too bad that had never been enough to make him stop.

“That worm has human DNA in it. Dr. Cale’s DNA. You took her family away from her when you took us away from her.”

“Millions of children,” said Dr. Cale, a wistful note in her voice that I had only heard on a few occasions, usually when she was talking about her friend Simone, who had died of allergies before the development of the SymboGen implant. Simone had been Dr. Cale’s motivation for wanting to solve the hygiene hypothesis. Without that dead friend, Dr. Cale would probably have turned her terrible intellect on destroying the world in some other completely accidental way.

That’s the danger of genius. One way or another, it’s going to destroy the world.

“I don’t understand,” said Dr. Banks.

“I think you do,” said Dr. Cale. “I had millions of children, and you took them away from me. So what can you possibly offer that would make up for that?”

“Data.” He produced an external hard drive from inside his shirt, holding it up for all of us to see. “I have the full record of Anna’s conversion and assimilation here, and I’m willing to give it to you, if you’re willing to help us. There are things on there that you probably haven’t even considered yet, much less advanced to the testing stage. I can help you jump your research forward by a matter of years, and all I’m asking is room, board, and a little supervised access to your lab space. Anna still needs monitoring for signs of rejection, after all.”

Anna herself didn’t say anything. After her interjection about sarcasm she had returned to her previous silence, standing like a wan shadow next to Dr. Banks. I tried to meet her eyes. She looked away. Something about that made my stomach clench, although I couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Something was wrong with Anna.

“I have all that data,” said Dr. Cale dismissively. “I brought three subjects to full integration, and I monitored them every step of the way. You’re going to have to do better if you want me to find a space for you here, and not to just shoot you and dump you out back for the feral cats.”

Dr. Banks smirked. “Ah, but all three of your subjects started in a vegetative coma. Anna didn’t.”

My stomach clenched even harder, becoming a knot of ice in my abdomen. The sound of drums was suddenly deafening, pounding in my ears until it became the entire universe, until there was nothing but the drums and no need for there to be anything else, ever again. “What did you just say?” I whispered. I wanted to shout. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t make my lips or throat obey me.

Luckily, Nathan was close enough to hear what I had said. “What did you just say, Dr. Banks?” he asked, and the sudden chill in his own voice told me that he had looked at the situation and reached the same conclusions that I had.

“I said that Anna—not her original name, you understand—did not begin her transition in a vegetative state. She was alert and aware through the bulk of her crossover. I have the data.” He held up his hard drive again, as if reminding us of its existence. “I can help you, and all I’m asking is that you give me a little help in return.”

“Help is commonly reciprocal between equals, a matter of duty from inferiors, and a matter of obligation from superiors,” said Anna, in the same calm, barely inflected tone that she had used before. Her gaze didn’t waver, continuing to stare off into the middle distance like she was looking at something the rest of us couldn’t see.

All the cold in my body consolidated into a single freezing point. I strode forward, toward Dr. Banks, ignoring the guns that were now pointed at my back. I dimly heard Dr. Cale bark an order, but as it didn’t contain my name, I neither stopped nor slowed. All my attention was fixed on the man in front of me, who smiled that old paternal smile at my approach, seeming pleased to see me walking toward him willingly.

“Sally, my dear, I knew that you would under—” he said, before my fist collided with his jaw and he stopped talking. He staggered backward, eyes wide and wounded, like a feral animal’s. The shell of cold around me shattered with the blow, but I still raised my hand, getting ready to hit him again. He deserved it.

At the last moment, I changed my mind, and snatched the hard drive from his hand instead. He stared at me, too stunned to react, which just made me want to go back to punching him. Anna, who had in her own way been a motivating factor in the chaos, said and did nothing. She just stood there, staring blankly ahead, her hand still curved like she was holding on to Dr. Banks.

“I’m tired of this,” said Dr. Cale wearily, her words audible now that the icy shell was gone. “Take them.”

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

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

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

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

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

Well, they were open now.

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

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

Anna didn’t say anything at all.

-

Chapter 13 NOVEMBER 2027

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” I asked blankly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The scientific method works,” I murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d always assumed I would side with the humans, no matter what happened, because the sleepwalkers were destructive and terrible. So was Dr. Cale, in her own way, but at least she cared about saving lives, while Sherman didn’t seem to care about anything beyond himself. The possibility of living, active integration changed everything, and from the way Adam was looking at me, it changed everything for him, too.

I looked into my brother’s eyes, suddenly aware of just how deep that familial connection went, and had no idea what we were going to do next.

Adam was like me—a chimera of human and tapeworm, a dead body piloted through the world by an invertebrate. He was also unlike me, because he hadn’t happened naturally, and he had never believed himself to be a human being. When the war began, there had never been any question of which side he would be on: the only humans he knew were the ones who worked for his mother and fully accepted his existence. Liking it was something else altogether. Adam’s sheltered upbringing meant that he wasn’t quite as good as I was at seeing the way they sometimes looked at us, like we were a problem that needed to be solved after the bigger, more immediate problems—the sleepwalkers, all the humans who were dying—had been taken care of. But I could see it. I could see it all too well.

For every person like Nathan or Dr. Cale, who honestly didn’t care what species we were, there was someone like Daisy, who couldn’t relax around us, or Fishy, who saw us as one more symptom of the world’s devolution into a fantasy. We weren’t real to them. We weren’t people.

“It sounds like that,” I said. “I think she may be something else, though. I mean, aren’t sleepwalkers what happens when an implant just decides to take over? The way Dr. Banks was talking, she happened in a lab setting. So I don’t know for sure.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Adam. He slipped his hand into mine, looking at me hopefully. Once again, I was struck by how young he seemed. He was the first chimera, the oldest member of our race, and sometimes I felt like he was going to be my baby brother forever. “Can we go meet our sister?”

I had been coming to tell him about Anna, but I hadn’t been intending to take him to her. Going to see Anna could mean getting Adam involved in whatever Dr. Banks had come here to do. Everything in me rebelled at the idea of letting that man get anywhere near my little brother—but if I said “no,” I would be doing exactly the thing I was increasingly coming to resent Dr. Cale for doing. I would be sheltering him from the world, and the world wasn’t going to recuse itself just because he didn’t know what he was getting into. He would have to learn eventually.

“Sure,” I said.

We walked silently and hand in hand through the hydroponics garden, our footsteps echoing loudly. No one else was there. Adam tended to take his duty shifts when they wouldn’t require him to interact with anyone, and I wondered how intentional that was on his part: whether he understood on some level just how much distance there was between us and the humans here.

It was funny, in an awful way. I should have been excited by the thought of another chimera. There were days when I actually found myself missing Ronnie and Kristoph, who had helped Sherman keep me captive, yes, but who hadn’t been responsible for kidnapping me, and who had at least been the same species as me. They understood what I was dealing with as I walked through a human world, as I looked at the devastation wrought by creatures who were genetically my family. Adam was too innocent to really help me shoulder my fears. Anna could have been the answer…

But Anna was with Dr. Banks, and he was the thing I trusted least in the world. There were no easy answers here.

“Why do you think he brought her to us? I wouldn’t bring her to us if I were him. We might take her away and not let him have her back.”

That was pretty close to the actual situation. I nodded grimly. “That, and Dr. Cale doesn’t like Dr. Banks very much. He might have more trouble walking away from here than he expects.”

“So coming here was kind of dumb.” Adam frowned. “Is he dumb?”

That was the problem. “Not really,” I said. “He was smart enough to help her make us. That has to mean he’s smart enough not to walk into a trap without knowing that’s what he’s doing.”

“So why?”

I didn’t have an answer. I just shrugged helplessly, and kept hold of Adam’s hand as we kept on walking.

Adam seemed to be content with silence after that, maybe because neither of us knew what we were supposed to say. We had a new sister. We just didn’t know if we could trust her, or what form that trust would take. The elevator was waiting for us when we reached it, a sign that Dr. Cale had told the rest of the staff to lie low while we dealt with our unwanted visitors. Dr. Banks was in a cell, but she still didn’t trust him, and the less he knew about the scope of our operation, the better.

Adam seemed to think so, too. He frowned as we stepped into the open elevator, clearly understanding what its presence meant. “Dr. Banks is a bad man, isn’t he, Sal?”

Even the phrasing of the question was childish. I answered it all the same, without hesitation: “Yes. He’s a very bad man. I don’t know of anyone that he hasn’t been bad to, except for maybe himself. Everything he’s done has been about being good to himself.”

The elevator started to move downward, whisking us toward the lab as Adam asked, “But weren’t we designed to make things better for humans? So they’d be less sick, and have less to worry about?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think they meant to sign over ownership of their bodies in the process.” I squeezed Adam’s hand. “Dr. Banks skipped a lot of steps that would have made the implants safer for people to use. That’s why Dr. Cale had to run away in the first place—that’s why she stole you from the lab. If she hadn’t been forced to do that, maybe none of this would be happening.” And Adam and I wouldn’t exist. Instead, Sally Mitchell and whoever Adam’s host body had originally been would be walking around the world, ignorant of the future they had so narrowly dodged.

“Is it selfish that I like this world better than a world where we’re not real?” asked Adam meekly, his question so closely mirroring my thoughts that I glanced at him, startled. Then I shook my head.

“No,” I said, as the elevator stopped and the doors slid smoothly open. “I like being real. I don’t think I’d stop being real for anybody. Not even Nathan. It’s not selfish to want to exist. It’s a function of the survival instinct buried in all complicated organisms.” Even the sleepwalkers had it. That was why they ate so voraciously, following the deeply ingrained “this is how you survive” commands remembered by their tapeworm minds, even as they struggled against the complicated and unfamiliar wiring of the human brain.

We had taken about five steps outside the elevator when Adam stiffened, his head snapping up and his eyes going extremely wide, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. I frowned. I didn’t hear anything except for the faint buzz of the lab machinery and the low voices of the technicians who were still at work. Not everything could be shut down at the drop of a hat.

“Adam?”

“Tansy!” He pulled away from me and took off running, weaving between the workstations and darting down the aisles. I sprinted after him, trying to keep him in sight. He whipped around a pink-painted wall with me about eight yards behind. I heard Dr. Cale shout his name, and Nathan making a small, startled noise, like he had been shoved roughly aside. I kept on running.

When I came around the corner, I didn’t understand what I was looking at—not at first. Adam had pulled the curtain away from the tiny exam room set up for Anna, who was still lying naked and unmoving on the bed. Dr. Cale and Nathan were a short distance away, Nathan with his hands resting on the handles of Dr. Cale’s wheelchair, Dr. Cale with one hand clasped over her mouth in a classic expression of horror. Her eyes were wide and brimming with unshed tears, like she had just realized something so terrible that she was no longer capable of forming words. Adam was standing with his hand still on the curtain of Anna’s “room,” staring at her.

I trotted up behind him, only wheezing a little, and asked, “Adam, why did you run away from me like that?”

“She’s here,” he said, sounding horrified and puzzled at the same time. He turned to me, that same conflict reflected in his face. “Can’t you feel her? She’s here, with us, but she’s not here at all. Sal, what did he do to her? What did he do to our sister?”

“I don’t know what you’re—” But I did know, didn’t I? I knew the way I had known that Adam was in the hydroponics garden. I knew because we always knew when we were near each other. The pheromones we put off, however hard it was for our human bodies to detect them, were unmistakable.

Slowly, I turned to face Anna, who hadn’t responded to our presence in any way. She was still staring at the ceiling, her bare skin humping up into goose bumps as the air-conditioning rolled over it. She didn’t seem to know that we were there, or maybe it was just that she didn’t care.

My mouth was terribly dry, and the drums were pounding in my head. I licked my lips, trying vainly to moisten them, and whispered, “I didn’t think anyone could be this cruel.”

“What did he do?” moaned Adam.

Anna turned her head and looked at us.

I froze. Having her staring at me was like being eye to eye with an alligator, or some other ancient beast that didn’t care what I wanted and wouldn’t care if I ceased to exist completely. She didn’t blink. Maybe that was an optical illusion, something my increasingly baffled mind was adding to make the situation even more alien, but I didn’t think so. Dr. Banks had brought her to us. He said she needed to be monitored, but he could have done that at SymboGen; he wouldn’t have brought her here if there hadn’t been something terribly wrong with her, maybe with the interface between her tapeworm and human nervous systems. That was the most important connection a chimera had, and if it wasn’t working properly, then she wasn’t working properly.

Dr. Cale’s wheels squeaked softly as she rolled herself over to stop next to me. She was no longer covering her mouth, and her tears were no longer contained: they rolled down her face unchecked. Bit by bit, her expression transformed from grieving mother to furious scientist. It was a swift, terrifying change. “That bastard,” she said, tone almost wondering, like she couldn’t believe this was happening. “I don’t believe him. How could he do this? How could he come here, having done this, and expect me to help him?”

“I don’t understand,” said Nathan. He moved to stand behind me. I tilted my head just enough to see the furrowed line of his brow. He really didn’t get it. Just this once, I had reached a conclusion before he had.

I would have expected it to feel good, or at least to feel better than this. Instead, I felt sick. I would have given anything to have reached the wrong conclusion, but I hadn’t: I could see it in Dr. Cale’s face.

“This is Tansy,” I said quietly. “This is why we couldn’t find her. Because Dr. Banks had her the whole time. She never got away from SymboGen.” I indicated the pale, naked girl on the cot, who was still staring at us with her dead-looking eyes. “He took her, and he used her, and now he’s brought her back to us, but I don’t know why.”

“That’s not Tansy,” said Nathan. “Tansy looks completely different.”

“Not to a chimera she doesn’t,” said Dr. Cale. Her hand snaked out surprisingly fast, grabbing hold of my wrist. “Are you sure, Sal? It’s not just a culture, like the ones we took from you? It’s actually her core implant?”

“Yes,” said Adam. He darted forward, again moving faster than I could react, and grabbed hold of Anna’s hand. He held it the way that he always held mine, the way that he used to hold Tansy’s: tight and close and counting on the other person to cling tight, keeping him where he was.

Anna’s fingers stayed loose and open, not closing around his. He might as well have been grabbing for a corpse. In a way, that was exactly what he was doing.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head until my hair whipped against my forehead like a hundred tiny, stinging lashes. “I don’t… I’m not as good at picking up on that sort of thing as Adam is. But the minute I saw her, I wanted to protect her, even if it meant protecting her from you. I normally only feel that way about Adam.”

When Nathan and I had first followed a weird set of instructions to Dr. Cale’s old lab in the bowling alley, we’d been met by a girl with short blonde hair, heterochromatic eyes, and a tendency to make cheerful death threats every six words. That was Tansy. She was the experimental subject that came after Adam, grown and cultured in the lab just like he was, and she’d been his first sister, the one who kept him safe from the world back when most of the world had no idea that people like him, people like her, people like me could exist. Tansy had acted like a thug and reacted like a heroine, and if that wasn’t one of the best combinations I’d ever encountered, I didn’t know what was.

I hadn’t known I was a chimera then—she was gone by the time I’d admitted that to myself—but I’d come to trust her surprisingly swiftly, hadn’t I? She’d terrified me, and I’d trusted her anyway, because part of me knew that she was my kind. Deep down and under all the little complexities of my human mind, I’d known she was my sister. She should have been allowed to stay long enough for us to know each other.

I’d seen a lot of sleepwalkers and a surprising number of chimera since then, and I hadn’t connected to any of them as quickly as I’d connected to Anna. The only logical answer was that I wasn’t connecting to Anna at all: I was reconnecting to Tansy. Nothing else made sense.

“It’s her,” said Adam, finally abandoning his efforts to get Anna to respond to him clutching her hand. He turned to look at the rest of us, tears pouring down his cheeks. “Mom, please. You have to fix this. You have to make this better. You have to put her back where she belongs. Please.”

“I doubt Steven left Tansy’s original host intact,” said Dr. Cale. She was trying to be gentle, but there was a broken-hearted bleakness in her voice that telegraphed her distress as clearly as her tears. “Even if he did, the amount of damage he must have done digging her core out of the host’s brain… I can’t, Adam. I’m so sorry.” She looked at Anna and her breath caught, hitching her chest. She pressed a hand against her sternum, like she was trying to keep herself from losing her composure completely. Eyes on Anna now, she repeated softly, “I’m so sorry.”

“Wait—are we seriously assuming that Dr. Banks extracted Tansy’s implant from its original host and placed it in a new body?” asked Nathan. All three of us turned to look at him. Adam looked baffled, and I was willing to bet that my own expression was very similar. I spent so much time trying to think of myself as a human being that sometimes I forgot I wasn’t one. The corollary to this was that sometimes I did such a good job that I also forgot that we weren’t the same. Nathan didn’t know the things I knew. He didn’t understand the things I understood.

I could love him until the day I died, and we would never be the same species. No matter how hard I tried to pretend.

“It’s possible to remove a mature implant from its original host body and move it into a new host,” said Dr. Cale. “You know that. The implant has to be stable for the process to work, of course, but that’s not the primary issue.”

“That’s not…” Nathan’s voice tapered off, replaced by a brief, disbelieving burst of laughter. “That’s not the primary issue? You’re talking about cutting open a chimera and scooping them out of their own heads, and that’s not the primary issue? I knew it could happen, but come on, Mom! This is… I don’t even know what this is.”

“The tapeworm’s neural structures are not as advanced as a human’s,” said Dr. Cale. She sounded calm, but she was still crying. That was somehow worse. If she’d sounded angry, or even upset, her tears would have suited her better. “We discussed this when Sal was having her medical issues. The majority of her memories and thought processes are managed by the human brain she has attached herself to. It’s backup storage for what her tapeworm mind can’t manage.”

“Uh, could we not talk about me in the context of a tapeworm mind and a human mind?” I asked. “It makes me really uncomfortable when you talk about me like that.” The drums that were pounding in my ears skipped a beat before settling on a new, slightly irregular rhythm. My stomach clenched. I clung to those signs of physical distress as hard as I could, marking them as evidence that my body belonged to me, to Sal Mitchell and not to anyone else in the world. I wasn’t a human or a tapeworm. I was a chimera. A perfect marriage of the two.

“I’m sorry, dear,” said Dr. Cale. She even sounded like she meant it. Her attention remained primarily fixed on Nathan as she continued: “When a chimera has to be split, for whatever reason—when the implant is removed from the host—they lose everything that makes them the people that we know them to be. All the memories remain behind. They can’t carry them into their next incarnation.”

I stiffened, suddenly thinking of Ronnie. Tiny, violent Ronnie, who knew that he was male, even though his implant was genderless and his host was female. “What about the epigenetic data?” I asked, and was amazed by the words that were coming out of my own mouth.

Apparently, so was Dr. Cale. She twisted in her chair to shoot me a look that was midway between amazed and impressed, and said, “The sample set isn’t large enough for us to make predictive judgments about the epigenetic data. We don’t even know for sure that it’s a factor.”

“Ronnie—the chimera who let me out of Sherman’s mall—I told you about him, remember?” When the others nodded, I continued: “What I didn’t tell you was that he’s currently in a female host body, but had been in several previous hosts, all male. And he knows he’s supposed to be male. He hates his current host.”

“Maybe someone else told him about the previous hosts,” said Nathan hesitantly.

I shook my head. “No. Sherman hated that Ronnie insisted on being referred to as male, and said it would attract inappropriate levels of attention. I don’t think Ronnie would have known about those hosts if he hadn’t known something was wrong with the one he’d been put in, and gone looking for more information. Sherman and Ronnie both said Ronnie’s insistence that he was supposed to be a boy came from the epigenetic data. He didn’t have a gender identity when he was just a tapeworm. Then he inhabited a male body, acquired a male gender identity, and took it with him when he was transplanted.”

“So maybe part of Tansy is still in there,” said Adam, sounding bitterly, brutally hopeful. He grabbed for Anna’s hand again. As before, she neither helped him nor resisted. She just lay there, motionless. At some point she had rolled her head back into its original position, and now was staring at the ceiling again.

She had responded to some stimuli before. I swallowed hard, taking a step toward her, and asked, “Anna? Can you hear me?”

“My auditory systems are functional,” said Anna. Her voice was toneless, completely devoid of passion. She couldn’t have sounded less like Tansy if she’d been trying.

The drums pounded even louder in my ears, and I had to swallow the sudden urge to run through the lab to the cell where Dr. Banks was being held, rip the door off its hinges, and strangle the life from his body. How dare he do this? How dare he touch my family, my sister, with his filthy tools and his filthier motives? There was no reason I could see for him to have experimented on Tansy when there were so many sleepwalkers running around free and unclaimed—no reason except for simple cruelty. I wanted to hurt him more than I’d wanted almost anything else in my life. Had Sherman appeared before me in that moment and offered me Dr. Banks’s head in exchange for joining his tapeworm army, I might well have taken him up on it. After all, what had the human race ever done for us?

I swallowed spit and bile and forced my own voice to remain steady as I asked, “Anna, do you know who Tansy is? Do you remember Tansy?”

“I do not remember her,” she said. Then she turned her head again, fixing her black eyes on me, and said, “But I am aware of who she is. I was given a message to deliver to you, should you ever say that name.”

“What’s that?” asked Dr. Cale.

Anna’s gaze flicked to her. Still calm, she replied, “The subject you call ‘Tansy’ is still alive. If you want her to be returned to you, you will have to free my father.”

-

Chapter 14 NOVEMBER 2027

Dr. Banks was sitting on the narrow cot provided for his use when the four of us approached his cell. He smiled at the sight, his eyes going first to Dr. Cale, and then, hungrily, to Adam and myself. He skipped over Nathan entirely, as if he was incidental to this little reunion. In a horrible way, I suppose he was. Nathan was Dr. Cale’s only human child, after all, and he had nothing to offer Dr. Banks that he couldn’t get back at his own lab.

“Hello, Surrey,” he said, offering Dr. Cale his patented paternal smile. Maybe I should have felt a little better knowing that he smiled at all the women he wanted to exploit like that. Somehow, I didn’t. “This is a nice place you’ve got here. I admit, I didn’t expect something this palatial. When I heard you’d moved into a candy factory, I laughed. It was so ridiculous, so ludicrous… so you. You never could resist the absurd. I think that’s my favorite thing about you. Even in the face of total disaster, you’ll keep on making a fool of yourself.”

“How did you know we were here, Steven?” Dr. Cale didn’t bother to correct him about her name. She just folded her hands in her lap and looked at him, expression stony and unreadable. I found myself wondering where Fishy and Fang were, and whether they were preparing an unmarked grave in the soil of the rooftop garden. “My people are decrypting the data on your hard drive right now. Don’t bother lying to me. It won’t work for long.”

“Did you honestly think you could keep an operation of this size completely concealed? In a dead city, no less? No insult intended, Surrey, but maybe you should think about getting more sleep. Your judgment is slipping.”

Dr. Cale raised one shoulder in a half shrug. “We didn’t know we were being monitored. How did you know where we were?”

“Everyone is being monitored.”

Dr. Cale sighed. “I see you’re not going to make this easy on me. I have a full surgical theater here. It’s primitive, yes, and we do have to contend with a lot of little inconveniences—we can’t do laser work, which means sutures and stitches and the threat of infection, although we’ve gotten surprisingly good at cauterizing wounds. It’s really remarkable, especially when you consider that nothing in this building started out intended to be used like this.”

“Your point would be…?” asked Dr. Banks. He was still trying to sound polite—I could hear it—but his irritation was overwhelming his good sense. He sounded impatient. Never a good idea when talking to Dr. Cale.

“My point would be, I can amputate a limb without breaking a sweat or endangering your life to an unreasonable degree.” Dr. Cale didn’t sound impatient. She was perfectly serene, like this was what she had been dreaming of for years. Given the situation, maybe she had been. “Shock is still a risk, naturally, but I think I can minimize it with the appropriate drugs.”

Dr. Banks had gone pale. “Now Surrey—”

“I know what you’re about to say. You’re going to remind me that you’re a powerful man, and then you’re going to tell me that people—powerful people—know you’re here. You’re going to tell me that killing you would be a terrible idea, one that would lead to the destruction of everything I’ve built, even though your presence has basically informed me that we’re going to have to tear it all down. You’re overlooking the fact that I’m not going to kill you.” Dr. Cale smiled, still serene. “That would be, if you’ll forgive me, far too easy. Now. Assuming you’d rather keep things friendly, how did you know we were here, Steven?”

The color did not return to Dr. Banks’s cheeks. He stared at Dr. Cale. For her part, and more terrifyingly than anything she could have said, Dr. Cale just kept smiling. She actually looked interested in his inner turmoil, like no matter what his answer was, she would find a way to enjoy it. I’d almost managed to convince myself that I understood the woman who made me. Looking at her now, smiling and calm, I realized she was more alien to me than any other member of her species.

“USAMRIID has been monitoring you,” said Dr. Banks finally, looking away. “Don’t ask me how they got you under surveillance, because I don’t know. As for why they haven’t taken you, well. We both know that you don’t work well when someone else is telling you what to do. You’re better left to your own devices and kept under close watch, and you’re not making things any worse. Those little videos you keep releasing have even been useful, on occasion. USAMRIID wanted you to keep working without knowing that you were being watched.”

“Do you honestly expect me to believe that the United States government has allowed me to keep working without interference because they don’t think I’d perform well in captivity?” asked Dr. Cale.

Dr. Banks shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

“Sorry, Steven, but I don’t really trust you when you’re not lying to me.”

Dr. Banks continued as if she hadn’t spoken: “I told the higher-ups at USAMRIID that I needed to contact your organization if I was going to continue my own work, and I managed to convince them it was worth the risk that you’d cut your losses and run. They helped me get here from San Francisco. Dropped me—with Anna, and a security team—about a mile away. Your boys have done an excellent job of clearing out the local sleepwalkers, you know. We didn’t encounter any resistance on the walk.”

“That’s good to know.” Dr. Cale’s tone could have been used to freeze water. “Where did you leave your security team? How many people? Two? Four? You can’t have brought the army; if you had, they would have marched you right up to my gates and taken what you wanted. The nonintervention policy is still in place, and it’s not benefiting you. I suppose that means that of the two of us, I’m still doing the better work.”

Dr. Banks was silent.

“Setting aside the fact that you carved up my daughter for parts—although if I were you, I wouldn’t expect that to be set aside for long—what makes you think I don’t already have teams out there combing the area for your people? You said this was too large of an operation to be kept hidden. Do you know just how large of an operation we have here?”

Dr. Banks was silent.

“I will find the team that got you this far, Steven. And since I won’t know how many of them there are, or where they’ve taken cover, when my people find them and call me for directions, I’ll give the order to take no prisoners. I already have you. Why would I need anyone else?”

Dr. Banks was silent, but sweat was beginning to bead at his temples, betraying his growing unease. His heart had to be pounding so loudly that he could feel it, even if his human physiology meant that he would never hear it like I did.

“How many of them did you get from USAMRIID?” Dr. Cale leaned forward in her chair, her smile fading into an expression of almost feral interest. “How well do you think your new allies will respond when you come back empty-handed, no soldiers, no chimera, no answer to whatever mystery you came here expecting to solve?”

“At least you’re implying that he’ll still have hands,” said Adam. He was trying to be helpful, I could tell, and in a way, he was: the beads of sweat on Dr. Banks’s temples doubled in size, now accompanied by a red flush around the base of his jaw.

“Hands, yes,” said Dr. Cale. “I make no promises as to fingers.”

“This isn’t you, Surrey,” said Dr. Banks quietly. He didn’t turn back toward us. Maybe he was afraid to.

“You’re right,” said Dr. Cale. She leaned back in her chair, getting comfortable. “Surrey Kim would never have sat here threatening her valued friend, Steven Banks, the man who was going to change the world. Surrey had other things to worry about. How she was going to fund her research, for example, or what she was going to pack in her son’s lunches for the week. She had a life to plan. Surrey would find what I’m doing abhorrent, on all sorts of levels, because Surrey worked very hard to keep herself tied to human standards of morality, human ideals of right and wrong. Surrey would never have wanted her son to look at her the way Nathan is looking at me right now.”

I blinked, glancing toward Nathan. He looked almost as unsettled as Dr. Banks did. The muscle at the base of his jaw was twitching, making a small fluttering motion against his skin. I reached for his hand. He jumped, eyes wide as he looked in my direction, before lacing his fingers through mine and hanging on for dear life.

Dr. Cale continued: “But here’s the thing, Steven. Surrey Kim doesn’t get to have an opinion here. Surrey wouldn’t have done these things to you. I can. Do you know why?”

Dr. Banks didn’t say anything. I think he knew that there was nothing he could say at this point. He had dug his own grave, and he had dug it very well indeed.

“Surrey Kim is dead.” Dr. Cale sounded utterly calm. She was overseeing the exhumation of a cold case, not surveying an active murder scene: the reality of her original identity’s death was years behind her, taking most of the anger with it. But not, I realized, the rage. They were two different beasts, close enough to seem identical when seen together, but unique enough that one could endure without the other. Her anger had faded as her old life became more of a memory and less of a loss. Her rage at the man who had started all of this had never wavered.

How long had she been waiting for this very moment? How many years had she spent dreaming of the day when Steven Banks would be captive before her, stripped of power and position, unable to stop her from doing anything she wanted?

I suspected that it was far, far too many, and I was afraid.

“Dr. Banks, why did you come here?” My voice sounded thin and unsure, even to me. Maybe that was a good thing. He had always wanted to be a father figure to me, and little girls often sounded unsure when they spoke to their fathers. I swallowed and pressed on: “You knew this would happen. You had to know this would happen. So why did you do it?”

“I didn’t know everything that would happen,” he said, and finally turned, his eyes focusing on me. “I thought it would take you a bit longer to figure out where I got the materials for my new girl. She took a lot of work, you know. You should be impressed.”

My stomach gave a lurch. Nathan squeezed my hand, lending what strength he could. I took a deep breath to stop my head from spinning, and said, “I am impressed. I don’t know many people who could do something like that.” Sherman and his army of chimera; Dr. Cale and her assistants. I knew way too many people who could do exactly what he’d done. “That still doesn’t explain why you came. It’s dangerous for you to be here.”

Dr. Banks laughed. It was a brief, sharp sound, and it made me flinch, because he shouldn’t have been laughing. Laughter was dangerous with Dr. Cale sitting right there, doing a slow burn as she watched the conversation slip away from her. Please, trust me, I begged silently, wishing she shared the pheromone connection I had with Adam. He would have understood, somehow. He would have picked up on my silent, primitive prayers. He’ll tell me, but he’ll never tell you, not even when you’re taking parts of him away. Dr. Banks was the monster, and would remain the monster no matter what was done to him.

The trick was not becoming monsters in the process of learning what we needed to know.

Maybe Dr. Cale had some connection to us through our shared DNA—or maybe she was just learning to trust me. Either way, she didn’t say anything as I kept staring at Dr. Banks, willing him to speak, willing him to believe that I was still the innocent, sheltered creature he’d worked so hard to create.

“It’s dangerous to be anywhere right now, honeybunch,” he said finally. “There’s sleepwalkers all over the Bay Area, all over the state, all over the country. We’re losing ground faster than we can take it back. Pleasant Hill is completely deserted, except for a nest of sleepwalkers that we can’t quite seem to nail down. USAMRIID’s had to completely close off the city. You’re lucky you’re on the other side of the water. I might not have been able to reach you if you’d been near the compromised area.”

Pleasant Hill must have been the location of Sherman’s mall. I worried my lower lip between my teeth before saying, “It doesn’t seem very dangerous here.”

“You’re standing next to a woman who was just threatening to take my limbs off with a hacksaw,” said Dr. Banks. “I think your definition of ‘dangerous’ may need to be reconsidered.”

“I would never use a hacksaw on you, Steven,” said Dr. Cale sweetly. “Too much chance you’d bleed out, and I wouldn’t want that. It would be over too fast.”

“If Dr. Cale isn’t mad at you, it’s not dangerous here,” I said hurriedly. “Why did you come? Why did you bring A… Anna here if you knew it was dangerous?” I had to force myself to say the name of his pet chimera. I wanted to call her “Tansy.” I didn’t want to call her anything at all.

“Anna’s why I came here,” he said, his gaze swinging back to Dr. Cale. “She’s not doing so good. We need your help.”

“You hurt my daughter—you may have killed her,” said Dr. Cale coldly. “Why should I help you?”

“You should help Anna because part of your ‘daughter’”—he scowled in obvious distaste—“lives inside her. If you really care about your little science experiment, you’ll keep my girl alive. And if that’s not enough for you, well…” Slowly, he began to smile. He didn’t bother keeping his lips closed, and both Adam and I flinched away from the glossy white display of his teeth. “I’m assuming Anna passed my message along, or you wouldn’t have come to see me so quickly. You want the girl back. I understand that. You put a lot of work into her, and it would be a shame to lose it like this. I can help you. I can get you into SymboGen. I can make sure you walk away with everything your heart desires, and all you have to do is help me.”

“Why do you make a face like it’s bad when you call Tansy my sister, but let Anna call you her father?” asked Adam. He was scowling, an uncharacteristically fierce look on his face. “It’s the same thing.”

“No, it’s not, you little abomination,” said Dr. Banks. His tone didn’t change at all, remaining calm and even somewhat smug, like he thought he had somehow managed to get the upper hand on all of us. “I let Anna call me her father because it’s easier to control something that thinks it belongs to you. Surrey calls you her children because she’s sick in the head.” His gaze flickered to Nathan. “If I was her biological child, I think I’d be pretty damn disgusted by that, personally.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re not my brother,” said Nathan coldly.

Dr. Banks looked briefly surprised. He covered it quickly, but the flicker of confusion had been evident to all of us. When he came here, he hadn’t been expecting to find us working together in relative harmony. Whatever information USAMRIID had on the place, it wasn’t enough to give him a full picture. That was a good thing. We might still have a chance.

“Why would I want her body back?” asked Dr. Cale.

“Because she’s brain dead but on life support, and I know how much you love your vegetables,” said Dr. Banks. “Maybe you could cultivate yourself a replacement.”

I balled my free hand into a slow fist. I had hated people before—had even hated him before—but until that moment, I hadn’t known what it was to hate someone so much that I wanted to scratch their eyes out just for the pleasure of watching them stumble blindly through the rest of their life.

Luckily, Dr. Cale had more experience than I did at talking through her hate. She snapped her finger. Fang seemed to materialize out of the shadows behind her. He was carrying a portable, battery-operated bone saw, and it said something about how good a job Dr. Banks was doing of upsetting me that I didn’t bat an eye. If Dr. Cale wanted a bone saw, well. The only person she was likely to use it on definitely deserved it.

Dr. Banks did not share my serenity. He jumped to his feet, pressing himself against the wall of his cell like he thought it was going to do him any good at all. “Now Surrey—”

“Two questions, Steven,” she said, sounding absolutely calm. I suppose she had reason to be. After all, she was the one who controlled the man holding the bone saw. “If you answer them both honestly and to my satisfaction, I promise not to cut off any of your fingers, or the hands those fingers are attached to. Lie to me, withhold information from me, and that promise goes away. Do you understand?”

Dr. Banks hesitated. Nathan sighed.

“My mother, whatever you want to call her, doesn’t fuck around,” he said. “She doesn’t make threats, because threats are meaningless. She makes promises, if you’ll forgive the cliché. Please, either tell her what she wants to know or tell her that you’re not going to, so that I can take Sal out of here before the fingers start flying.”

“Still protecting that girl’s delicate sensibilities? You’re going to have to stop one day.” There was no venom left in Dr. Banks’s voice: he sounded like a man who had looked into the depths of his own soul and found nothing there but dark inevitability. His gaze slithered back to Dr. Cale. He squared his shoulders, sitting up a little straighter, as if posture alone could somehow turn him into a noble, tragic figure. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s the plan that required you to make a chimera of your own? You can’t sell them. We don’t have enough people on life support to make them a viable consumer product, and it’s not like anyone is going to be buying anything from you in the near future anyway. The country’s on the verge of collapse.”

“It’s not as far gone as you might think, thanks to some fast thinking in the Midwest and on the East Coast. They dumped antiparasitics in the water, did some surgical interventions—fun times. It wasn’t enough. It could never have been enough. The country is falling to pieces. It’s just slow, and it’s leaving smart men with resources the time to regroup, pull back, stay standing. Maybe we’ll bring America back someday, maybe not, but for now, the fall of this nation is not an issue and won’t cause us any problems,” said Dr. Banks. A thin runnel of satisfaction laced his smile. “Best of all, we’ve managed to convince the remaining government that the original implant design would never have done this. We have years of data to support our claim.”

Nathan lunged forward, slapping his hands against the clear plastic wall of Dr. Banks’s enclosure. Everyone jumped except for Dr. Cale. She just turned her face sadly away, her expression conveying her utter lack of surprise. She’d been expecting this.

“You bastard. How dare you,” snarled Nathan. “This is your fault. You took my mother away from me for money, and now you’re using her—”

“Kiddo, I’ve been using her since day one.” Dr. Banks sounded utterly unrepentant, and somehow that was the worst thing of all, the worst thing in a sea of terrible things. He wasn’t sorry. He might beg and plead for his freedom, and he might need us to help him, but he wasn’t sorry.

I’d been assuming Sherman and his people were the inhuman side of our conflict. They weren’t human, any more than I was. But they hadn’t started this fight, and now that it was happening, they were just trying to survive. Dr. Banks… I didn’t even know what he was hoping to accomplish anymore, aside from coming out on top of whatever world rose from the ashes of this one.

I also wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. I looked toward Dr. Cale, hoping she would explain. She met my eyes and sighed.

“He’s blaming this all on me,” she said. “I’m the one who put the human DNA in the plan for D. symbogenesis, remember? I’m the one who handed it the key to the human immune system.”

“I thought that was the toxoplasmosis,” I said.

Dr. Cale laughed. It was a brilliant, broken sound, like light glinting off a shattered window. “See, right there, you’ve shown yourself more capable of critical thinking than most of the human race. Yes, Sal, it was the toxoplasmosis that made the implants capable of migrating through the body and successfully colonizing the brain. But that’s not going to make sense to most people. They want quick, easy answers. They want sound bites.”

“ ‘Discredited geneticist inserted time bomb in essential medical supplies,’” said Dr. Banks, practically purring. “The Intestinal Bodyguard isn’t finished, Surrey. It can’t be. Add the world’s dependence on the drugs our implants provide to the collapse of so many supply chains, and there’s just no way to take it out of the equation. We just need to repackage it to make sure that we retain our market share.”

Dr. Cale’s head swung back around. I quailed, taking a step backward. If she had ever looked at me like that, I would have run screaming from the room. “You know, Steven,” she said, voice low and dangerous, “I’d been wondering who I should be helping in all of this. My children or the human race. I can only save one side of the equation. You’re making it much easier for me to make my choice.”

“He hasn’t answered the question,” said Adam suddenly. We all turned to look at him. He didn’t take his eyes off Dr. Banks. “He’s trying to distract us. Didn’t you notice? He’s saying everything he can to keep from actually answering the question Mom asked him. Make him answer the question.”

“Yes, Steven.” Dr. Cale looked back to her former colleague, who looked suddenly dispirited, like his last chance at getting out of this alive had been taken away from him. “Answer the question. That was the agreement, was it not? Honest answers win you limbs that work.”

“You always were a liar, Surrey,” spat Dr. Banks, his eyes fixed on her legs, just in case she missed his point. Once again, I balled my hands into fists, yearning for a free shot at his smug, terrible face. “I created my own chimera because I needed to understand how they worked. How the chemical bonds between the implant and the human host were formed, and how they could be disrupted—or encouraged to form more efficiently.”

Dr. Banks paused and sighed, shaking his head before he continued. “The chimera are perfect for certain jobs, Surrey. I’d say I was amazed that you hadn’t thought of it, but honestly, I’d be more surprised if you had. You would have to be able to step back and see the big picture. Imagine a world where the death penalty is carried out, not by lethal injection, but by termination of higher brain functions. The body would remain intact, ready to be put to work for the good of society. There are all sorts of functions that robots can’t perform yet. But a walking, thinking human body can accomplish all sorts of things.”

“You’re going to send my children to war,” said Dr. Cale.

Dr. Banks sighed again, deeper this time, like she just wasn’t getting the point. “They’re already at war. I’m just going to make it profitable.”

“Mm.” Dr. Cale’s tone was noncommittal, but her expression promised murder. “So that’s why you took my little girl. That’s why you took her apart. Because you wanted to learn how to build a better weapon. Well, Steven, your lesson has apparently been learned. What was so important that you had to bring her here? I know you like to gloat, but this is frankly irresponsible.”

“I’m here because I really do need your help.” He actually seemed to mean it this time. “I was able to transplant the worm from its original host into the body I had prepared, but I haven’t been able to fully stabilize it in its new environment. She’s not… she’s not doing well.”

“Rejection,” said Dr. Cale. She could have been smug in that moment, seeing her former coworker run up against an obstacle she had already overcome. Instead, she just sounded tired. “Did you do tissue typing before you sliced my girl open? Did you try a reaction panel, to see whether the new host’s immune system would even recognize an implant that hadn’t been tailored to it as something that could be potentially helpful? Or did you barrel full speed ahead and figure that the universe would give you whatever you wanted because you were Dr. Steven Banks, and you deserved it?”

“I hardly think you’re one to lecture me about proper medical technique,” said Dr. Banks. His tone was stiff, and his gaze flicked to her legs again, making sure she knew what he was implying. “I did my tissue typing. I did the things I’ve always done when preparing an implant for its new host. As for anything else, I didn’t know what tests were necessary. It’s not as if you ever sent me anything detailing your research.”

“You kept trying to kill me. Forgive me if I didn’t feel much like sharing with you.”

I frowned slowly. “Rejection means Tansy’s new host doesn’t want to accept her, right? What does that mean for her? Is she going to be okay?”

“It means that the host is experiencing some fairly severe immune responses,” said Dr. Banks. As I had hoped, he once again fell into the gently parental “I am teaching you things you need to know, and you should listen, because I am smarter than you are” tone he had used with me so many times before. “The most distressing is swelling of the brain, and clouding of the spinal fluid. There’s a protein buildup going on there that I can’t quite source. It’s inflaming her nerves. She’s been in a lot of pain, almost constantly.”

“You mean she’s drugged?” I asked. “You made her walk across Vallejo drugged, while her brain was swelling? She could have collapsed! She would have been helpless!” The image of Tansy as she had been rose unbidden in my mind—the wild grin, the mismatched eyes, the casual willingness to throw herself into the path of danger, because she knew that whatever happened to her, it would be interesting. Anna had none of those traits. Anna was a flat surface on which nothing had been painted. The drugs would explain at least a little of that, and I felt a traitorous worm of relief uncurl in my belly. Maybe Anna was more like Tansy than we thought she was. Maybe there were epigenetic tags for violence and randomness and sliding down hills on pieces of cardboard, just like Ronnie had the epigenetic tag for knowing that he was really supposed to be a boy, and when the drugs worked their way out of Anna’s system, she’d still be somehow Tansy. Just a little bit. Just enough that we could love her.

“Well, Sally, it was that or deal with her having seizures every hundred yards, and that would have been more of a problem.” Dr. Banks returned his attention to Dr. Cale. “Here’s my proposal, Surrey, and you’ll want to listen nice and close, because I’m only going to make it once: you help me stabilize my Anna so that I can take her back to the United States government as proof of concept. I give her to them, and they see that the chimera can be useful things—they already know they can be taught, thanks to Sally here, but now they’ll know they can be controlled. That we can have our useful biological machines without giving up anything that hasn’t already been lost. And I tell them you were able to get the drop on me after we’d finished stabilizing her, and you run off to safer pastures.”

“What’s to stop you from double-crossing us? Or me from killing you?” asked Dr. Cale.

“Nothing.” Dr. Banks spread his hands. “You trust me, I trust you, and we see who’s making the bigger mistake.”

Dr. Cale looked at him silently for a moment. Then she turned to Nathan and said, “Push me out of here.”

Nathan blinked. “What?”

“We’re leaving. Push me out of here.” She folded her hands in her lap, leaning back in her chair.

Nathan dutifully moved to stand behind her, wheeling her back, away from Dr. Banks. Adam and I moved to flank them. We didn’t need to be told; we knew what was expected of us in a moment like this. A unified front would count for so much more than divisiveness, at least in this moment.

Dr. Banks jumped to his feet when he realized what we were doing. “Hey!” he shouted, suddenly enraged. “Don’t you turn your backs on me! Don’t you understand what I can do to you? Don’t you understand your position here?”

“Yes, Steven,” said Dr. Cale, with the utmost calm. “I don’t think you do, however. Nathan?”

“Yes, Mother,” said Nathan, and turned her chair around and walked away, pushing her in front of him. Adam and I followed. Dr. Banks kept shouting behind us, his words of protest quickly devolving into a muddled stream of fury and profanity that didn’t mean anything coherent.

Then we stepped out of the room, and the door swung shut behind us, cutting him off in mid-tirade. Nathan kept pushing Dr. Cale forward. I glanced at her face.

She was crying.

I didn’t know how to respond to that, and so I didn’t say anything as the four of us kept on walking, back toward the place where Anna was waiting, back into the light.

-

Chapter 15 NOVEMBER 2027

Adam was a trained lab technician, thanks to maturing at Dr. Cale’s hip; he’d been setting up IVs and mixing pharmaceutical compounds since he learned to walk. He, Dr. Cale, Daisy, and Fishy got to work stabilizing Anna, while I was shooed politely away to find something that would keep me occupied and out from underfoot. Nathan glanced from his mother and the chaos surrounding Anna to me, and then—to my relief and exhausted delight—he bent, murmured something in his mother’s ear, and followed me.

We walked back to the elevator lobby in silence. Nathan didn’t even ask where we were going; he just stood there, letting me pick the floor we were going to, waiting until I was ready to speak.

“Knowing the directions doesn’t mean you ought to go,” I murmured, and pressed the button for the roof.

Nathan put his hand on my shoulder, and didn’t say anything.

Cold rage and hot misery mixed in my stomach, forming a substance that felt like ice and lava at the same time. It made it difficult to think or swallow, but I forced myself to keep breathing, and said, “He always acted like he loved me, you know? Or like he at least cared about me. And I knew he was lying—even when I thought I was human I knew he was lying—but I didn’t mind so much, because it was better than having him act like I didn’t matter.” Lots of people had pretended to care about me, Sally’s father and Sherman among them. I was getting awfully tired of men who didn’t give a damn about me as me coming back into my life.

“He knew what you were from the first time he laid eyes on you,” said Nathan. “Maybe neither one of us could see it at the time, but it’s clear in retrospect. He was using you.”

“He was using me,” I agreed, feeling the hot/cold mass in my stomach give another lurch. “He couldn’t have done what he did to Tansy if he hadn’t been able to get so much information about me first. I taught him how to take her apart. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I did. I taught him how to kill my sister.”

Nathan’s reflection in the elevator wall winced in time with the real thing, whose hand clenched down on my shoulder in sympathetic misery. “You were working almost entirely with scientists who thought of you as nothing more than a test subject,” he said, voice pitched low. “Dr. Banks did terrible things to you even if you didn’t realize they were happening. But this is not your fault. Tansy is not your fault.”

“How is this not my fault?” The elevator slowed, stopped; the doors slid open, revealing the carefully tended vegetable beds that covered the roof. The morning shift had already come and gone, and the automatic hydroponic systems were keeping the beds irrigated. I stepped out of the elevator, pausing long enough for Nathan to pace me, and then started across the roof toward the nearest canvas cabana tent. About a dozen of them had been liberated from the local Target shops, and they dotted the roof like so many garishly colored oases. Sunstroke was a real concern when you insisted on taking dark-adapted lab rats and putting them to work on a private farm.

“You didn’t know,” Nathan said. “Everyone around you was working very hard to make sure you didn’t know.”

I all but threw myself into a wicker couch designed for outdoor use. Nathan sat down next to me, a little more decorously. He did most things a little more decorously than I did, really. “You figured it out,” I said accusingly.

“My mother told me.” He paused and then laughed unsteadily. “You know, I still haven’t had a chance to really think about those words? ‘My mother.’ She was my best friend, she was everything I had in the world, and then she was gone and everyone told me she was never coming back. I mourned her. I buried her. I was never going to see her again. And then my weird, wonderful girlfriend asked me to go on a road trip with her, and started quoting bits of a book I hadn’t seen in years.”

I sat up and scooted over to rest my head against his shoulder. Nathan stroked my hair with one hand.

“I think I realized, you know,” he said. “When you started quoting Don’t Go Out Alone, I think I realized. I just didn’t… I didn’t want to realize, because I didn’t want to live in a world where my mother would have chosen science over me. She was my mom. I wanted her to stay with me forever, not go running off as soon as she found a better experiment.”

There was a broken edge to his words that I barely recognized: this wasn’t a side of Nathan that I saw very often, or really knew how to handle. He was usually the calm, collected one, and when he couldn’t fix something, he stepped back and found another approach. He wasn’t the one who fell apart. That didn’t mean he wasn’t allowed: it just meant that when it happened, I wasn’t going to interfere.

“And then there she was! Different, but we’re all different now, aren’t we? We went through the broken doors. That’s how you turn yourself into a monster.” Nathan sighed, kissing the top of my head before he continued: “She opened them as wide as she could and she told me it was all right to look through and see what was on the other side. She said it was what I’d have to do if I wanted to catch up with you, since you’d been born on the other side of those doors. Sally Mitchell never saw them open, but you’ve never seen them closed.”

I tilted my head back, frowning up at him. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s all right. I don’t either, not really.” Nathan sighed. “Mom left me because she had to. She did what she felt was right, and she did it to protect me. But I think sometimes… I think that before Tansy disappeared, she thought her children were invincible. You, me, Adam, Tansy—we couldn’t be killed, because she was looking at everything through the filter of that damn children’s book. She’s shaped her image of the world around someone else’s fantasy.”

I couldn’t stop myself. “Why?”

“Because it’s easier. It’s so much easier to say, ‘This is a story, and there are heroes and villains, and there’s an ending, and when we get there the book will close and we’ll all live happily ever after.’” Nathan kissed my head again. “Mom is… her mind works in strange ways. It always has. Dad used to try to explain it to me, after she left us, when I was so sad I didn’t feel like I could get out of bed in the morning. He said she knew she wasn’t always the best with morals and ethics and other things that most people thought were important, because for her, the science—the knowledge—always came first. But she didn’t like hurting people. So sometimes she would fall back to what she saw as a safe place, and she’d retreat to Simone’s book, because in Simone’s book, opening the broken doors always resulted in good things. It always brought the children and the monsters back together.”

“It sounds like maybe your mom needs to see my therapist.” Dr. Morrison was probably dead or in quarantine somewhere. The idea didn’t bother me much.

Nathan pulled away enough to shoot me an amused look. “You hated your therapist,” he said.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need someone to talk to. You’re her son. Adam is, too. I’m…” I paused before admitting, “I don’t really know what I am. I’m not her daughter—which is good, because it would make marrying you sort of creepy—but she thinks I am, and that’s weird. None of us are good for her to talk to. Maybe talking to someone else would help.”

“Maybe,” Nathan allowed. He sighed again. “This hasn’t been easy for any of us, has it? I found my mother but don’t have the time to stop and deal with it emotionally. You lost your whole world.”

“Not my whole world,” I corrected, and took his hand. We sat that way for a while, not saying anything, before I had to go and open my big mouth and ruin everything. “Sometimes I feel like your mom doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m the expendable one.”

Nathan was quiet for a long moment before he said, “I wish I could say you were wrong. But when you disappeared, she said we couldn’t try to rescue you, because it was too dangerous. To be fair, though, she said the same thing about Tansy. I think we’re all expendable to her. We’re all part of the story, and the story needs to be finished more than she needs to be kind.”

That was almost reassuring. It was always nice to know that I was being threatened by a force of nature, and not by someone who actually disliked me for any personal reason. Following that thought to its logical conclusion brought me crashing back down to earth. I sat up a little straighter, the mixed slush of terror and fury beginning to boil in my belly once more, and asked, “What are we going to do about Dr. Banks?”

To Nathan’s credit, he followed my change of subjects without hesitation. “I don’t think he’s going to leave here alive, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s told us too much, and he’s taken too much away. Mom doesn’t forgive easily. Once you overstep your bounds with her, you’re doomed.”

“And USAMRIID wouldn’t have let him come here if they were too concerned with getting him back,” I said slowly. “He said he could give Tansy back.”

“Are you sure we believe him? I think digging the tapeworm out of her brain to make Anna is going to have done a lot of damage, and he has plenty of reasons to lie to us. I hate to say this, but maybe it would be better to let her go.”

“No.” My response was immediate, visceral, and nonnegotiable. “We’re not letting her go. We don’t even know that she’s that messed up. Fang and Daisy took a sample when they had my skull sliced open for the surgery. Sherman did the same thing, even if he was less gentle about it.” His cruder operation had left a scar on the back of my head that was going to be there for the rest of my life. One more thing to hate him for, assuming I was keeping a running list. “Your mom said Dr. Banks must have used her primary segment, but couldn’t he have cultivated a new primary segment in a Petri dish or something? The primary segment is what latches on to the circulatory system in the brain and feeds the rest of the body. I mean, you could dig it out, but… wouldn’t that be a whole lot of work, and maybe dangerous for the implant, when you could just grow a new one?”

Nathan’s eyes widened slowly as he began to grasp my meaning. “Do you really think Tansy might still be functional?”

“I think Dr. Banks is smarter than your mother wants to give him credit for being. He wouldn’t throw anything useful away.” That included Tansy. She could only be useful to him if she was still herself. Once he took that away, all she could be used for was parts. “He kept me for years, even when he had learned everything he could without taking me apart, because there was still a chance I could be useful.”

The hot/cold mix in my belly finally solidified, becoming something that was greater and more dangerous than either could have been alone. I stood. Nathan mirrored the motion, frowning.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I need to talk to Dr. Banks alone.” It was one of the most frightening statements I had ever made, but it came surprisingly easily, now that my mind was made up. This was a thing that only I could do. I owed it to Tansy to try. “I need to ask him where she is, and I think there’s a good chance that he’ll tell me.”

Nathan looked at me, regret and understanding etched in his face, and didn’t say a word. The only sound was a crow somewhere in the streets below us, cawing harsh dominion over the broken works of man.

The area outside the room where Dr. Banks was being kept in temporary isolation was abandoned when we arrived. Nathan started to reach for the door. I grabbed his wrist before he could touch the knob.

“I said I needed to talk to him alone,” I said. “I meant I needed to talk to him alone. That means you can’t come in either.”

Nathan turned to face me, eyes wide and terribly startled. “Excuse me?”

I swallowed a sigh. It wouldn’t have helped. “He thinks of me as something between a developmentally disabled child and a very clever lab experiment. No matter what I do, he never really takes me seriously or believes I’d be capable of choosing to betray him. I mean, he left me alone in his office after he was almost entirely sure I was working either with or for your mom. I don’t think Dr. Banks is capable of looking at a chimera and seeing a person. It just isn’t how his mind works.”

“But I’m a person,” said Nathan grimly.

“Yes,” I said. “If you come in with me, he’ll assume I’m just asking the questions you want me to ask, and that anything I say has an ulterior motive. Me alone, there are no ulterior motives. There’s just the little girl he already knows how to work around.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

I smiled at that. I had to. “Dr. Banks has never been as good at controlling me as he wants to believe he is. Don’t worry about me.”

“Sal…”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to stand by while I walk into a room with my father.” Sally’s father, who I would always think of as “mine” on some terrible, immutable level, no matter how many times I tried to tell myself that he didn’t deserve that power over me or that place in my heart.

Nathan looked at me for a long moment before he stepped in, leaned down, and kissed me long and slow, his lips crushed against mine, until the drums began beating in my ears and the skin on the back of my neck seemed like it was too tight, vellum stretched over hard bone and not skin at all. When he pulled back all I could do was blink at him dazedly, too lost in the memory of his kiss to speak.

“If you need anything at all, I will be right here,” he said. “Do you understand me? Right here.”

“Okay,” I murmured, and turned, and opened the door, and stepped into the chamber with my personal demon.

Dr. Banks had retaken his seat since I’d seen him last. His elbows were resting on his knees and his forehead was in his hands, making him look much smaller and less intimidating than he normally did. I eased the door shut behind me, trying to minimize the sound that it made when it closed. I wanted a moment to look at him without him realizing that he wasn’t alone.

So this was my enemy. One of many, really—Sherman, all of USAMRIID, my own confused, sleepwalking cousins—but he had been the first, and he was still the one who loomed largest in my mind. He was the one who had held my life in his hands and decided not to tell me what I was. How could I help but hate him? And at the same time, he was the man who had provided my medical care and taught me how to walk, talk, and think—even if he’d done it for his own reasons and to serve his own twisted ends, he’d done it, and that left me with a debt to him that I could never entirely repay. I wondered if humans felt this conflicted over their parents and teachers. I hoped not. It would be terrible to have an entire species with bellies full of mingled love and hate, anger and fear, walking around and thinking that they controlled the world.

That faint shabbiness that I had noticed when he first entered the factory was only highlighted by his helpless posture and utter lack of affectation. He didn’t know he was being watched, and so he didn’t bother putting on a show. That, more than anything, told me how dire his situation really was. I’d known that he had to be desperate to come to Dr. Cale, but I hadn’t known how desperate. Bit by bit, I was coming to understand.

Bare feet silent on the tiled floor, I walked across the room and stopped a foot or so away from the plastic barrier that kept him contained. It had been intended as a quarantine zone, keeping the staff from catching anything nasty that we brought in from the outside. It was serving its intended purpose very well.

I could only look at the man without speaking to him for so long. I lifted one hand and slapped it flat against the plastic. Dr. Banks jumped, his head snapping up. There was genuine terror in his expression, like I had somehow become the most frightening thing in his universe. I couldn’t decide how that made me feel.

The terror cleared, replaced first by confusion and then by paternal warmth, the old, familiar masks sliding back into place and locking away whatever he was really feeling. “Sally,” he said, starting to smile. “I knew you wouldn’t turn against me. You’re a good girl. You always have been. You—”

“Is Tansy really alive?”

My question sliced across whatever he was saying and rendered him temporarily mute, capable of nothing more complex than staring at me. His smile twisted, turning into even more of a mockery than it normally was. Then it died completely, leaving him as blank-faced as one of the sleepwalkers he had helped to create.

“I don’t see why you’re coming in here and interrogating me,” he said. “The woman who runs this place has already made it quite clear that she’s not willing to negotiate in good faith. I have to say, Sally, I thought better of you.”

“Are you where she gets it?” I asked.

He blinked at me, expression flickering again. He wasn’t adjusting well to my changes of topic. Good. I wasn’t here to make him comfortable. “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

“Dr. Cale does that—she uses people’s names a lot, like she’s afraid that they’re going to forget who they are. I didn’t think about the way you always used to do that to me, but you did, and you still do. Are you where she gets that? Or did you get it from her?” They were like engineered organisms themselves, weren’t they? Every human was the result of social and cultural recombination, picking up a turn of phrase here, an idea or a preconception there, the same way bacteria picked up and traded genes. Nothing was purely its own self. Nothing would ever want to be.

“I got it from her,” he said, still sounding wary, still examining the topic for signs that it was a trick. “Surrey used to have difficulty with names. She could identify a species of slime mold from a single cell, but damned if she could remember which of our TAs was Paul and which was Jeffrey. Someone told her that she could reinforce names in her head if she said them at least three times a conversation—said it would make people trust her more, too, since it came off as a personal touch. Like she actually gave a damn about them. She started doing it, and damned if it didn’t work. Everyone loved her. Sweet little Surrey, overcoming her difficulties to become the darling of the genetics department.”

“So you started doing it because you wanted them to trust you,” I said.

He grinned, showing me his teeth. I managed not to flinch. “I did, and damned if it didn’t work again. People like it when you seem to take an interest in them. All sorts of people. Powerful people. I could get anything I wanted, and all I had to do was remember names and children and anniversaries. You should have seen me in my element. You would have, eventually, if things hadn’t gotten bad on us. I was going to really enjoy showing you to the world, Sally.”

Showing me to the world, not showing the world to me: I was an experiment to him, and I always would be, no matter how much I grew or how much my understanding of the world improved. I could save the human race and I would still be nothing more than a freak of science to the man who made me.

“It might have worked on me, too, if you hadn’t messed it up,” I said. I couldn’t make this too easy. He wouldn’t believe it if it was too easy. “You’re not as good at this as you think you are.”

Dr. Banks blinked at me. He looked briefly, utterly baffled, and I would have felt bad for him if I hadn’t known him so well. He deserved a lot of things from me. None of them were my sympathy. “What do you mean?”

“My name isn’t ‘Sally.’ It’s never been Sally. She died. She was… she was like a canary in a coal mine. She died because if she hadn’t, I would never have been able to live.” Sally’s death had been as inevitable as my birth. Dr. Banks had known what I was from the beginning. He should have been sending up the alarm the day I opened my eyes. Instead, he stood by and let me make myself into an individual. Because of him, everybody applauded me, rather than recognizing me as the symptom that I was. They should have begun shoring their defenses the moment that I woke up. They should have been building dams and laying in supplies by the time I learned to walk. And they hadn’t done any of those things. Because of him.

“Now you and I both know that’s not true.” His smile had too many teeth. “Do you really think that just because you’ve shut off all the pieces of you that remember who you were, that you’re not that girl anymore? You can’t buy a used pair of shoes and announce that they’re new just because you want them to be. They’ll always be used shoes. You’ll always be a girl playing at being something different, at least until you admit who and what you are.”

I gawped at him for a few seconds, unable to formulate words, before I managed to stammer, “That—that’s not true! You know that’s not true! None of the doctors ever found any trace of Sally in my head. She flatlined, she’s gone.”

“Coma patients still hear. People in clinical brain death still wake up. The human brain is a big, complicated thing, Sally, and one day you’re going to flip the wrong switch or press the wrong button and hand the whole thing back over to the girl you used to be. When that day comes, who do you think she’s going to trust? The people who loved a tapeworm wearing her skin like a suit, or the man who kept trying to reach her—the man who kept using her name?” His smile dimmed a bit, lips closing, and I was relieved. There was only so much I could handle. “I call you Sally because it’s your name. It may not make you trust me now, but it’s going to let me own you later.”

What he was saying couldn’t be true. I had no memory of my life before the accident. Therapists and neurologists had searched for years for signs that Sally was still with me, and they hadn’t found anything, while Ronnie provided strong evidence that the implants carried memories of their own, however paper-thin and faded. I wasn’t Sally Mitchell. Sally Mitchell was dead. I was my own person. I was Sal. I was—

I was doing exactly what he wanted me to do. I took a deep breath, bared my teeth in a smile that any chimera would have recognized as an outright threat, and asked, for the second time, “Is Tansy really alive?”

“I think we’re getting off the topic here, don’t you?”

“Since the topic I came here to discuss with you was Tansy, no, we’re not. We’re getting back on the topic, and I’m not going to let you distract me again.” I glared at him, trying to look fierce and confident and like the kind of person who couldn’t be thrown off balance by accusations of surviving memory buried deep in my brain. It wasn’t easy. For someone who wanders through life pretending to belong to a species that isn’t hers, I’m a surprisingly bad actress. “Is she alive? Yes or no.”

“Surrey has been a very bad influence on you, hasn’t she? I really do wish you’d chosen to stay with me, Sally. We could have been an incredible team, you and I. Brains and beauty and a compliant little display model to convince the government to go along with the next stage of human evolution.”

“Yes or no, Dr. Banks.”

He paused, tilting his head to the side and frowning. Then he sighed, and nodded. “Yes, she’s alive. Sedated and pretty beat up, but breathing, and both parts of her are there. My Anna girl is the result of transplanting some fairly mature proglottid segments. We had to remove a lot of material to get to them, since the proglottid segments near the tail of the strobila were basically just sacks of eggs. Useful for some applications. Not for this one.”

Hearing him talk about Tansy’s anatomy—and hence my own—in such coldly clinical terms made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t quite define, only squirm away from, that horrible hot/cold slush still rocking in my belly until I felt like I was going to throw up at any moment. I forced myself to hold my ground, and demanded, “Where is she?”

He smiled again. This time he didn’t show his teeth, but somehow, that didn’t make things any better. Not when his words contained all the teeth his smile was missing.

“Haven’t you figured that out by now?” he asked. “She’s back at my office, waiting to die. And if you don’t tell me how to save Anna, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

That was it: that was where my ability to cope came to an end. I almost felt it snap. I didn’t say another word. I just turned and fled the room, leaving Dr. Banks shouting after me, unanswered.

Nathan pushed away from the wall when I came barreling into the hall, flinging myself into his arms and sobbing. He answered by closing his arms around me and holding me close, waiting for me to cry myself out. He didn’t say a word. Sometimes, words weren’t a good thing; they got in the way.

Maybe the sleepwalkers had the right of it. All their communication was pheromonal. There was no room for confusion or misunderstanding, because there were no words. Sadly, Nathan was human, and I was close enough to human, and we couldn’t communicate unless I opened my mouth. I pushed myself away from him, wiping my eyes with the side of my hand, and said, “Tansy’s still Tansy.”

“What?”

“Anna was made using her genetic material, but he didn’t kill the original host, and I don’t think he extracted the entire implant from her brain tissue. Tansy’s Tansy. If we can get her back to your mom, she might be able to save her. She might be able to… to put her together again.”

“Did he say where she was?”

This was the bad part. I hesitated, and his face fell as he realized that whatever I was going to say next, it wasn’t going to make him happy. My next words only confirmed that: “She’s at SymboGen.”

“Sal… SymboGen is in San Francisco. There’s a bridge and a bay between us and them, not to mention the quarantine. We had to stop supply runs weeks ago, because it’s too locked down. He was only able to get here because USAMRIID was helping him. There’s no way we’ll be able to get all the way into the city, evade the gangs of sleepwalkers in the streets, get into the building, find her, get her out, and get back here. There’s just no way.”

“I know,” I said miserably. Then I took a deep breath, and continued: “But I still want to tell your mother. I think she should be the one who gets to decide whether or not this is a thing we’re going to do.”

“You know what she’s going to say. She’s going to say it’s too dangerous.”

Maybe that was what she would have done if it had been me in San Francisco. But if it had been me, it would have been Nathan advocating for action, saying that they could find a way to cross the Bay if that was the only thing keeping them from bringing me home. “Impossible” had a way of changing shapes depending on what was at stake. Dr. Cale had cried when she thought that Tansy was genuinely lost to us. Real tears, not the sort of thing that a person did for show.

“Tansy is her daughter. She should have a say, and I want to tell her anyway,” I said. “I’m going to tell her anyway.”

Nathan nodded, and together we turned and walked back across the lab, past the empty workstations, toward the place where Dr. Cale was struggling to save the future.

The sound of shouting reached us long before Anna’s bed came into view. I couldn’t make out any words at first, but it sounded like at least three people were yelling at each other, each providing slightly contradictory instructions. We came around the last corner and beheld what looked like a small, tightly controlled riot surrounding Anna, who wasn’t moving. Adam and Fang were both running IV lines, while Daisy was injecting something into Anna’s arm. Two more technicians I didn’t recognize immediately were doing arcane things with beeping machines. Dr. Cale was sitting back from the whole scene, her hands folded in her lap, somehow managing to effortlessly project the impression of absolute control. Not a one of the people in front of her would sneeze without her permission, and she knew it. This was her world.

And I was about to disrupt it. I sped up, moving into her field of vision. She blinked at me, expression turning briefly perplexed. Then she waved for me to come closer. The others kept working, too preoccupied with the effort of keeping Anna alive to pay attention to anything that wasn’t a direct command.

The hot/cold slush in my belly was beginning to melt, becoming a warm, solid mass of resignation. Resignation was the one emotion that could win out over everything else, because once it was fully formed, nothing else could get past it. Not even fear.

“What’s going on, Sal?” she asked.

“Tansy’s still in there.” I had tried to think of ways to soften the news while Nathan and I were walking across the building. I hadn’t managed to find any. This wasn’t the sort of thing that could be broken gently, or explained in a way that didn’t change everything. “Dr. Banks has her body on life support back at SymboGen, and he didn’t remove her primary segment. I want to go get her. Tell me I can go get her.”

Dr. Cale stared at me, so stunned that even the pretense of serenity dropped away, leaving her slack-jawed and bewildered. I looked defiantly back, waiting for her to raise some objection that I could counter.

Sure enough… “It’s too dangerous,” she said. “We don’t know where Sherman and his people are. They could decide to take you back, and we’d have no way of fighting them off. Or the army could step in. Or you could be attacked by sleepwalkers.”

“So I take Fang or Fishy with me,” I said. “I wasn’t suggesting I go alone, just that I go. I don’t think you have anyone who knows SymboGen better than I do at this point. I understand the layout of the building, and I can find her.”

“USAMRIID is there.”

“USAMRIID is a risk to me no matter what we do, or don’t do. Dr. Banks as good as said that they were planning to raid this place. We need to move.” I felt terrible about that, and I was certain everyone else was going to feel even worse. I had been Sherman’s captive while they were turning an abandoned factory into a home, nesting like they were never going to be forced to move again. The gardens, the hydroponics systems, even the catering and food service equipment… we didn’t have the capacity to take all that with us when we left. Wherever we went next, we’d be starting over from scratch.

Dr. Cale looked at me coolly, studying my face as if she could find the key to all her questions hidden there. Then, to my profound disappointment, she shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, Sal. I can’t let you do this.”

“Am I your prisoner now?” The words came out louder than I had intended for them to, but they weren’t as loud as my anguished thoughts. I thought better of you, they screamed, and I thought you loved her. Adam stopped fiddling with Anna’s IV and turned to face me, his eyes wide and liquid in his pale, drawn face. He looked terrified. I understood the sentiment. “Are we back to this again? Are you going to be like Sherman and lock me up for my own good? Or like USAMRIID, putting people in their private zoo? Or maybe like Dr. Banks, doing whatever it is he did to Tansy in order to keep her quiet? You know she didn’t go with him willingly. She kicked and she fought and he took her apart one piece at a time because she wasn’t being convenient. She wasn’t being easy. They both took prisoners. Everyone in this game has taken prisoners, except for you. Am I where you start?”

She stared at me for a moment. I was aware that all activity behind me had stopped, all the workers joining Adam in his silent observation of the scene, but I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t dare do anything but look at Dr. Cale and wait for her to tell me whether I was about to run away from home.

Tansy had come to save me when I needed her the most. Tansy had been willing to risk and even lose her own life to bring me and the information I carried home. Well, what kind of sister would I have been if I hadn’t been willing to do the same thing for her?

“We don’t have a body currently suitable to play host to a fully mature implant,” said Dr. Cale, her eyes never leaving mine. “If Anna’s host dies, she’s going to die as well, because we can’t transplant her under the current circumstances. We may be able to harvest organs from the local sleepwalker population—assuming we can find a tissue type match and avoid shooting the possible donor in the wrong place in the process—and keep her alive for a while, but the stress of the additional surgeries is going to do her in just as quickly as the organ failure would. She’s dying, Sal. He took my daughter apart, he put her in a new shell like she was… like she was some sort of hermit crab he’d picked up at a pet store, and now she’s dying. Do you honestly believe him when he tells you that the original is still alive? This is a trap.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I shook my head. “But if there’s even a chance that it isn’t, I still have to try.”

“How are you going to get to San Francisco?”

She wasn’t saying no anymore. That was a good sign, even if she was asking questions I didn’t know how to answer. To my surprise and relief, Nathan spoke up, saying calmly, “We’re going to steal a ferryboat.”

Dr. Cale’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a reasonable approach, I suppose, but it might lead to interference from USAMRIID.”

“Not if we take Dr. Banks with us,” said Nathan. “Hostages have a way of clarifying response during situations like this one.”

“What if they no longer consider him to be of use?” challenged Dr. Cale. “He came here with a damaged, dying chimera and no real understanding of the method used to create them. We would be sending him back with a fully functional, fully integrated chimera, and a doctor who is known to have been working in my lab in at least a low-level capacity since this crisis began. We’re more than doubling the value of their investment. They could shoot him and take you both, and we’d have gained nothing.”

“We’re not gaining anything now,” I said quietly. She and Nathan both turned to look at me. “We’re just spinning our wheels here. I know we don’t know anything about how to stop the sleepwalkers from taking over their hosts that we didn’t know before things got bad. We can’t put antiparasitics in the water at this stage without killing everybody, but if we don’t find a way to make the sleepwalkers stop, they’re going to keep taking over, and people are going to keep dying. We don’t know where Sherman is. This is a thing we can do. We can go to San Francisco. We can bring Tansy back. Isn’t that enough to take a risk on?”

“You’re asking me to risk my son,” said Dr. Cale. “That’s not something I can do on a whim.”

“I’m asking you to stand by while I risk myself, Mom,” said Nathan. “It’s not the same thing.”

She looked at him pleadingly, her wide blue eyes—so like his, and so unlike his, all at the same time—filling with slow tears. From almost anyone else that would have seemed like manipulation, but not from Dr. Cale. She didn’t manipulate people with tears. That would have been crude, and beneath her, which meant that any sorrow she demonstrated now was utterly, painfully real.

“I don’t want to lose you again,” she said. “Don’t make me do this.”

“You won’t lose me.” Nathan walked away from me to lean down and put his arms around his mother. I looked away, feeling vaguely as if I was intruding. Adam met my eyes across Anna’s unmoving body, and I felt a pang of guilt on top of my unease. How hard was all of this on him? He’d gone from having one sister and being the only beloved son to having two sisters and a brother, and then he’d lost one sister—maybe forever—and his place at the front of Dr. Cale’s affections at the same time.

“I found you again,” Nathan said, arms still tight around his mother’s shoulders. “Don’t you understand how huge that is? You left me because you had to, you died because you had to, and I found you. There was no way it should have happened, and it did. But that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Sal starting to ask questions—if it hadn’t been for Sal falling into my life in the first place, like some strange scientific miracle that just needed a place to shine. She brought me to you. She brought me through the broken doors when I thought that they were closed forever, and now she’s trying to take me to Tansy, she’s trying to take me to save your little girl, and you have to say that it’s okay. You can’t welcome me with open arms and then not let me bring the rest of the family home. We belong together. We belong with you. Let us do this.”

“Besides, their doing this may distract USAMRIID from looking too closely at us, and that, in turn, will make it easier for us to begin tearing down the factory and figure out how to escape surveillance,” said Fang, speaking up for the first time since we had returned to Anna’s bedside. “The dogs will be a problem, but we’re going to have a lot of trucks and carts moving around in here as we shift equipment. Triggering one of Sal’s panic attacks would do none of us any good.”

I decided against reminding him that I only panicked when I was in a vehicle. “See? You need us out of here, and you need the diversion. We’ll go, and USAMRIID’s attention will be off you for a little while. We’ll use Dr. Banks to get into SymboGen, and we’ll be back with Tansy.”

“What if we’re not here?” asked Dr. Cale. “Once we start moving, it’s going to happen fast.”

“Just leave a sign.” Nathan straightened, letting her go. “We’ll find you. We found you before. We always find each other. It’s what we do.”

Adam looked at me again, expression bleak. I forced a smile for his benefit.

“Besides, it’s about time Dr. Banks learned what it’s like to have someone else using him,” I said.

That was the right thing to say. Dr. Cale looked at me, blinking, before she began, very slowly, to smile.