Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  “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.r />
  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.”