by Mira Grant
“Sir?” he asked.
The man nodded. “If you would.”
“Yes, sir.” Private Larsen snapped a quick salute before he turned, cattle prod still lowered, and trotted away down the hall.
The officer in charge snapped, “At ease, men,” and the other three guards lowered their weapons. I let out a slow breath, relaxing marginally, only to tense again as he turned to me and said, “You realize you’re not escaping for a third time. Once Colonel Mitchell sees you, it’s over.”
There was a warning in his tone that I couldn’t quite make sense of—at least not until I looked over to Fang and Fishy, and saw how open the route back to our truck was behind them. We could still run. For whatever reason, this officer was willing to leave us with an escape route, even as he held on to my arm… but his grip wasn’t as tight as it had been, was it? I could probably pull away, if I really tried.
Chave had been one of Dr. Cale’s people, embedded in SymboGen and kept in place by a combination of loyalty and the need to know what was coming. She had never been able to let me know who she was. And she had died without breaking cover. I looked harder at the officer, trying to remember whether I’d ever seen him before, either there or in the bowling alley, before things got bad. His face seemed familiar, but I had been a captive here twice already: I could have seen him through a fence, or passing in the hall. There was no way for me to know for sure.
But he was willing to let us run, and somehow, that made me feel all the more certain that we were making the right decision. “It’ll be okay,” I said, and touched his arm. He didn’t pull away. My conviction that he might be one of Dr. Cale’s people grew. “I just need to talk to the Colonel.”
“Soon would be good,” called Fishy. “Tansy’s not doing so well.”
“What?” My head snapped around. Fang was bending over one of the machines, his expression suddenly much more serious than it had been only a few minutes before. “What’s happening?”
“I’ll need to run some tests to be sure, but I believe her kidneys have started to fail,” said Fang. “This was always going to happen before too much longer. The body is not meant to survive indefinitely under these conditions.”
“But she can’t die.”
Fang looked up. The expression on his face was infinitely sad, and infinitely patient at the same time, like he was trying to convey a lesson he knew I wasn’t ready to learn. “We can all die, Sal. The last few months should have taught you that, even if they’ve taught you nothing else. We can all, no matter how clever, no matter how beloved, die.”
Private Larsen reappeared before I could answer. “The Colonel says we’re to escort them in,” he said stiffly.
“You heard the man,” said the officer. “Move.”
Fang and Fishy pushed Tansy on her gurney, and I stayed close to the commanding officer—as far away as I could be from those menacing cattle prods—and we moved onward, back into the belly of the beast.
Our escort saw us to one of the larger interrogation rooms and left us there, locking the door behind themselves. Under the circumstances, it was something of a relief. Fang and Fishy connected Tansy’s monitors to the wall outlets, sparing the portable generator from a little of the drain, and got to work stabilizing her.
There was a table, and chairs, but I didn’t feel like sitting—not after the day we’d had, and not with the specter of my father hovering over us like a knife about to fall. I stalked back and forth in front of the shoddily installed two-way mirror, wondering whether there was anyone on the other side, wondering equally whether the joints with the wall would stand up to a little battering. I knew how hard the glass was to break, but I was willing to bet the wood would give way if I hit it hard enough with a folding chair. Then I could see the people who were no doubt on the other side, monitoring us.
Of course, then they would know that I was dangerous, and would be able to justify anything they did to me—to us—as self-defense. I couldn’t risk it. I left the chairs where they were and continued to pace, shooting sour looks at the glass and waiting for the door to open.
Colonel Mitchell’s sense of dramatic timing hadn’t gotten any worse while I’d been away. As soon as Tansy’s monitors were all beeping steadily and without alarms, the door opened, and he stepped into the room. I stopped pacing, turning to face him.
He was still a mountain of a man, broad-shouldered and thick-armed and built like a monument to the idea of humanity overcoming the world. His hair was grayer than it had been before my escape, like he had managed to age years in just a few weeks. Soon, there wouldn’t be anything left but the gray. There were deep lines around his eyes. Those, too, had spread since my departure. He stopped in the doorway and just looked at me. That was all. That was all he needed to do. There was a depth of loss and longing and betrayal in his eyes that said more than words could ever manage.
This was it: This was the moment where we had to choose whether we were telling him the truth or continuing to lie, continuing the petty fiction that Dr. Banks had created to save his own skin. I took a step forward.
“I’m not Sally,” I said quietly. “I never was. I’m sorry I lied to you about that: I did it to save some people who were very important to me, and I would probably do it again if I had to, but that doesn’t make it right. I do think it makes us even, don’t you? You lied to me about who I was, and then I lied to you about who I was, and now the scales are balanced. We can start from equal ground.”
Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything. He just dipped his chin, very slightly. That was all the acknowledgment I was going to get.
I took a breath. “You understand why I ran before.”
“I do.” His voice was, if anything, even more revealing than his eyes. He sounded exhausted, beaten down almost to the point of breaking. This was a man who’d seen every inch of protection he thought he possessed pulled away, and was doing his best to hold the line despite it all. He was a good man, who’d been forced to make some bad decisions, first to protect his family and then to protect what he saw as the world. He had just been put into the position of so many good men before him: the place where there were no good options left, only the ones that did a little less damage than the rest.
“These are my colleagues—my friends. Fishy and Fang.” I realized I didn’t know their last names. I also realized that it didn’t matter anymore. They had their dingy, tattered lab coats and their willingness to work: Everything else was secondary. “The girl on the gurney is my sister, Tansy Cale.”
Was it my imagination, or did he flinch at the word “sister”? “I don’t understand why you brought her here,” he said. “Surely the medical care wherever you were hiding was sufficient to keep her alive.”
“It was, before some dick-wad decided to come in and trash the place and shoot a bunch of our people,” said Fishy, looking up from Tansy’s monitors. “That’s why we’re here.”
Right: It was time to stop beating around the bush. “Sherman Lewis, who was responsible for my first escape, and for the deaths of your people, found Dr. Cale’s lab. He raided it this morning. He got away with basically everything. All our people, all our research. Nathan. He took Nathan, and we have to get him back, because Nathan doesn’t have an implant, and Sherman doesn’t think humans have any place left in this world.”
Sherman would see Nathan as just one more host body waiting for a new owner. I loved my fellow chimera, I loved them, but could I ever forgive the worm that took Nathan away from me? Would I ever be able to make the jump from loathing to love? I didn’t think so… and just like that, I forgave Sally’s mother for rejecting me. It was all well and good to think of a chimera as just a new occupant in an abandoned home, and in my case, that was true: I had taken over when Sally left. But she didn’t really know that, did she? That was never going to be something she could accept, just like I was never going to be able to accept someone else driving Nathan around like his body’s original owner didn’t matter.
; It made what I had to ask next even more difficult. I took a deep breath, and forced myself to continue anyway. Tansy’s life depended on it. “Sherman is responsible for the contamination of the water supply. I have some ideas about how we could maybe fix that, but we’re going to need to work together. We brought copies of the data we were able to salvage. Fang is one of the best neurosurgeons I’ve ever met, and he’s been with Dr. Cale for years. He can explain things to your scientists.”
“That doesn’t explain why you brought the girl,” said Colonel Mitchell.
No, it didn’t. I took another breath. Then I paused, and looked at him. “I would have been your daughter, if you’d allowed me to be myself,” I said. “Adoption is as important as biology. I tried so hard to be who you wanted me to be. I broke myself trying to become your little girl. All you ever had to do was say, ‘You are a stranger, and I love you,’ and I would have been yours forever. You know that, don’t you? I never wanted us to be on opposite sides.”
Colonel Mitchell glanced at the mirror. We were definitely being watched, then, and if the people on the other side of the glass hadn’t known about what I was before, they knew now.
Too late to take it back. “Your friend, Dr. Banks? He captured Tansy when she came to get me out of SymboGen. He took her apart. He pulled out parts of her brain, and I think you knew, because he was trying to make a chimera to show you. One of those ‘perfect soldiers’ he talked about. He broke my sister. He thought she’d be more useful in pieces, and he broke her. He broke both my sisters. He was the one who designed my implant, wasn’t he? He designed me. That’s why there’s no record in their systems. You paid him to delete all the traces that I was anything other than the standard, to keep your secrets, and he did it. He wanted something he could hold over you.”
Silence.
“He designed Joyce’s implant too, didn’t he? There’s no way he’d want a hold over one Mitchell girl when he could have a hold over both of them. He could have told you to yank her implant the day I opened my eyes in Sally’s body, but he didn’t. He killed her. He took one sister apart, and he killed the other one, and you still kept working with him, because he had the better PR.”
“What do you want from me, Sal?” asked Colonel Mitchell. Any joy I might have felt at hearing him use the proper name for me, hearing him use my name, died when I processed the weariness in his tone. His shoulders were even more bowed now than they had been when he first came into the room. I didn’t know how much more he could take before he broke, but wherever that line was, we were approaching it more rapidly than I cared to consider. “I can’t undo what’s already been done.”
“No, but you can help us set at least one piece of this right. You can undo a little of the damage you’ve enabled.” I looked him squarely in the eye. “Is Joyce’s body still on life support?”
Colonel Mitchell went perfectly still.
He must have known what I was working up to—I hadn’t been exactly subtle, and I’d conflated Joyce and Tansy several times in the lead-up to my question—but actually hearing the words seemed to cause him physical pain. He closed his eyes. Everything was silence, save for the beeping of the machines that were keeping Tansy alive.
Then he opened them again. “Yes, she is still on life support, and no, I will not hear what you are going to ask me next. This conversation is over.”
“Joyce’s life is over,” I said. I tried to make the words as gentle as possible, but they still fell into the space between us like stones. “She’s dead. She died. And I know she was an organ donor. We talked about it, when we talked about my… about Sally’s accident. How afraid she’d been that you’d keep Sally on life support until her organs failed. How much she’d loved her sister, and how much she’d wanted her sister’s death to mean something. I know she had the same conversations with you.”
Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything. But he didn’t leave the room, and he didn’t close his eyes again, and under the circumstances, that was about as much as I could have hoped for.
“We don’t need a kidney or a lobe of her liver. We need her, intact and breathing, because Tansy is dying. Please. Let us save Tansy. Let us give Joyce the meaning she wanted. She used to say that the accident was the best thing that had ever happened to me—and she was working with you that whole time.” I paused. The words made sense. I had said them to myself before, but now, hearing them aloud… almost wonderingly, I asked, “She knew, didn’t she? She knew I wasn’t Sally, and she loved me anyway.”
“Sally was always cruel to her little sister.” The words were halting, pulled from Colonel Mitchell’s mouth one at a time. “She didn’t understand why we’d want a second child when we had her, and she couldn’t forgive Joyce for taking up space that should have been hers. Joyce loved her, wanted to be friends, but Sally wouldn’t have anything to do with her unless it was because she was planning to cut Joyce down somehow. Joyce knew even before I told her. There was no way any version of Sally could have learnt how to be kind.”
“She loved me anyway,” I said. “She said the accident was a good thing. You know she would have agreed to this, if she’d been here.”
“If she were here, we wouldn’t have to do this,” said Colonel Mitchell.
I nodded. “True. If she were here, we would have stayed away, because there was no way we’d ask this if there were any way to save her. She’s gone. She left her body behind. Please. Please, let us save my sister.”
“You think her mother—you think your mother—will forgive me if I turn another of her daughters into a monster?” Colonel Mitchell’s head swung from side to side. It seemed to have become an impossible burden, too heavy for him to lift without an effort. “She gave birth to that body you wear so familiarly. Whether you like it or not, she is your parent.”
“I want to like it,” I said. “I remember loving her. I remember loving you. Before you both started treating me like an invader, like I’d done something wrong. I didn’t hurt your daughter, Colonel. I didn’t take her body until she left it behind, and I always did my best to be a good girl for you. I loved you. I loved my whole family. You rejected me first.”
“You were never ours,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him, and waited for him to pass judgment on whether my sister—both my sisters—would live or die.
“We never let you be ours,” he said, after a long pause. “What will you give me for my daughter’s body?”
“Fishy, I need the hard drive,” I said.
“On it.” He moved away from Tansy and Fang, pulling up his shirt to reveal a block of synthetic skin. He peeled it away. There was a small black rectangle taped to his side. The guards had missed it when they searched him; the synth-skin had confused the issue. Pulling the rectangle loose, he held it up for Colonel Mitchell to see before pressing it into my hand. “Nice to finally meet you, Colonel. I’ve heard a lot about you. Sure, most of it was pretty awful, but it’s still nice to put a face with a name.”
“I’ve heard absolutely nothing about you, Mr.…?”
“Fishy,” said Fishy, with evident delight. “If you’d heard of me, you’d be proof of bad AI. So hey, score one for the dev team.” Then he turned and walked back to Tansy’s side, leaving Colonel Mitchell staring after him.
“Fishy has that effect on people,” I said, pulling the Colonel’s attention back to me. I held up the hard drive. His eyes locked on it. “Sherman’s people took most of the research, but we managed to save enough. Enough to get started. When he took me from your holding cells, it was so he could extract my DNA and use it to make a worm that would be able to interface with the human brain without surgical assistance. He was trying to destroy the human race. He’s managed to destroy a lot of the sleepwalkers in the process. But it means that all the worms currently in the water share a single genetic source. We can tailor antiparasitic drugs to kill them without poisoning the water for everybody else. We can fix this.”
I paused,
taking a breath and gauging his reaction. It hurt to admit that Sherman had used me to make his perfect weapon, even though I had nothing to do with the creation of those tiny, uncaring clones. My epigenetic data was not included; they would never mature into me. But still, I should have found a way to stop him.
Colonel Mitchell frowned. “Are you telling us everything?”
“All the data’s here,” I said, giving the hard drive a shake. “Everything we were able to save. Dr. Banks and your people should be able to start work on a counter almost immediately. All we’re asking is that you let us take something you don’t need anymore, so that we can save one of our own.”
“Well, that, and we were rather hoping you would help us track down and destroy Sherman’s encampment,” said Fang, looking up from the monitors. “He’s a danger. He needs to be stopped. We’re not going to accomplish this on our own.”
“Joyce is not ‘something we don’t even need anymore,’” said Colonel Mitchell, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in his tone. “She is my daughter.”
“She’s gone,” I said. “If she’s still your daughter, then so am I. Don’t you think we’ll be happier together? There’s this thing Dr. Cale calls ‘epigenetic data.’ It’s sort of like… genetic memory. Maybe I am who I am because Sally’s DNA told me who to be. So I’m still a little bit her, even if I mostly never could have been. We put Tansy in Joyce’s head… maybe we get a Tansy who’s a little bit Joyce. Isn’t that better than losing her completely? Forever?”
“I could take your data and lock you up for treason,” he said. “You say you didn’t kill anyone. You have no proof.”
“You know me,” I said. “That’s your proof. The only lies I ever told were the ones you taught to me.”
He looked at me for a moment, eyes running over my face like he was trying to unlock something he couldn’t quite define. Then he turned and walked away, moving toward Tansy.