Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

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

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

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

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

  INTERLUDE III: METAPHASE

  Oh, my precious children, what have I done to you? What kind of world have I created that you would do this to each other?

  –DR. SHANTI CALE

  We’re all going to wake up any day now, and this will all be a dream. Until then, why don’t we enjoy the chance to live in a science fiction novel?

  –DR. MATTHEW “FISHY” DOCKREY

  October 2027: Tansy

  Still here I’m still here I’m still me I’m still here.

  But only barely, I think. Every day I’m a little less me a little less here a little less Tansy. Pieces of me are going. He’s stealing pieces of me, one by one, and all he’s giving me in exchange is pain. So much pain. Pain like it’s air, pain that is breathing, so breathing stops seeming like a good idea. I try to stop I’ve tried over and over again to stop to let go to empty my lungs like flat paper boxes on a hill and why do I think of that over and over what is the hill what does it mean why do I want to go there what do those boxes do? I can’t remember anymore. So I try to stop breathing, over and over again I try, and every time I think I might succeed his machines grab me and bring me back again, returning me to the place where everything is pain.

  It’s been long enough that I’m not sure the world has ever not been made of pain. Maybe that’s a thing I made up, like all the other things that I made up. Like running and jumping and firing a gun pow pow bang bang and being free and being happy and being home. Like Adam and Sal and Sherman. How could there be other people like me when I’m not even possible?

  He’d said that to me more than once. “You shouldn’t be possible,” and sometimes he said it like it was something remarkable, something to be celebrated, and other times he said it like he was angry with me, like I had broken a rule by not being something that was supposed to exist. It didn’t seem to matter how he said it. It always came with pain, and so I’d stopped really listening to his tone, and started listening for the silences between his words. If I could just fill my ears with silence, maybe everything else would go away.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been where I was. I didn’t know anything anymore. All I knew was that I hurt. I hurt so bad.

  There was a click as the door on the other side of the room swung open. I whimpered. I couldn’t help myself. I hurt so much, and I didn’t want him to hurt me again. I just wanted him to go away so I could practice not breathing. Maybe this time I would do it right. Maybe this time the machines wouldn’t realize what I was doing, and they’d let me go. Maybe.

  Heavy footsteps approached me, every vibration sending shockwaves through the floor and into my raw, exposed nerves. I was glad I couldn’t see him approaching. I’d never considered that blindness could be a blessing.

  “How’s my girl today?” He always started the same way. Even now that I couldn’t answer him—not even if I wanted to—he still talked to me like I was going to respond. Just one more thing I didn’t understand. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, darling. Do you remember when I told you that I was going to learn everything I could from you before I let you go? That was the day we talked about dying. Do you remember?”

  I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember anything but pain. But I couldn’t tell him that without a tongue, with my mouth wired shut to keep me from biting at myself when the drugs wore off, and so I didn’t say anything at all.

  “Of course you do.” A hand touched me lightly on my throat, on one of the few intact patches of skin that I had left. “Well, my dear, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but that day has come.”

  I had thought that I was past feeling anything but pain. I was wrong.

  I could still feel relief. It was ending. It was ending.

  It was e

  STAGE III: ANAPHASE

  We do not negotiate with terrorists.

  –COLONEL ALBERT MITCHELL, USAMRIID

  You think you’re stronger than us because nature made you that way. Science made us. Which do you think is going to win?

  –SAL MITCHELL

  The bitch is gone. Ronnie decided to let the little idiot out of her cage after one sob story too many about how much she missed her family and how horrible it was for me to keep her here. I would be angrier about it, but honestly, I find myself somewhat relieved. I thought she would be my perfect mate, the one person in this world who could match me body and mind. I did everything I could to guarantee that she grew up mentally and morally elastic, capable of understanding the necessity of the things we do and the choices we make.

  Alas, what I got was a frightened little girl too attached to the idea of her own nonexistent humanity to understand what I was offering her. It’s a true pity. Sal could have been one of the great ones, but she allowed herself to be slaved to lesser minds.

  It doesn’t matter now. I have what I need.

  –FROM THE NOTES OF SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III), OCTOBER 2027

  The situation is continuing to deteriorate. I wish that were not the case: I wish I could claim we had reached some incredible turning point in our research, and unveil it for you now at what might otherwise be considered the eleventh hour. To admit the truth of what is happening here smacks of ceding to the enemy. It smacks of cowardice. It burns me, on every level, to do either of these things. I was taught that every problem has a solution, and that it is the American way to rise up and meet those problems head-on until the solutions are presented.

  Gentlemen, we have met the problem head-on. We have risen to the occasion, and beyond. We have continued our work despite personal tragedy, despite deaths and losses too great to be borne. The men and women under my command have been genuine heroes, and it is a crime that their names will not be remembered by future generations, because I no longer have any faith that those future generations will exist—or if, should their existence be assured, they will be anything we could recognize as human.

  My recommendations on this matter were made years ago, and were ignored. It is an unfortunate truth that the inconvenient, when ignored, tends to become worse rather than becoming better.

  The situation is continuing to deteriorate. There is nothing more that we can do.

  –MESSAGE FROM COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, TRANSMITTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE ON NOVEMBER 2, 2027

  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 neve
r 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.