Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (33 page)

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.”

D
aisy 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.