Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

“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.

  And now I know.

  It’s funny, honestly: I have spent my whole life in the pursuit of knowledge, sometimes—often—when it would have been better to back away and leave my questions unanswered; there are things that man was not meant to know, and woman is not exempt from that prohibition. I’ve seen things, done things, that should never have been seen or experienced by a living human, and I’ve always come out the other side saying “what I paid to do that was worth it.” It’s always been worth it, because it’s always resulted in more knowledge, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. Forgive me, Nathan, if you’re ever unlucky enough to be reading this, but it’s the truth. Knowledge was worth anything to me. Even you.

  But sometime between the start of my exile and the day that my son came back into my life with his girlfriend—my creation—in tow, things changed. I began to realize that some things mattered more than knowledge. Family matters more than knowledge. He knew that. Oh, my poor girl. That’s why he used you against me.

  I am so sorry.

  –FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. SHANTI CALE, NOVEMBER 15, 2027

  Sal is strangely serene about this whole situation. I can’t tell whether it’s because she trusts Mother to fix things, or whether it’s because she’s holding her honest response in, waiting to see how the rest of us react before she allows herself to display any true emotion. I’m starting to worry about her. She’s trying so hard to be controlled that I’m afraid she’s not allowing herself to feel things the way she wants to. That’s dangerous. Too much repression leads to self-harm, either emotional or—on occasion—physical.

  I should know.

  Anna remains stable but sedated. Tox screens performed after Dr. Banks shared more details on her condition have shown signs of sedatives and anticonvulsants. We are continuing with both drugs, in the absence of a better course of treatment. If a better course of treatment does not present itself soon, I am not sure that she will survive. Her organs are struggling, and failure is a risk.

  How many more of these deaths will we be forced to witness? Because I’m just about done.

  —FROM THE NOTES OF DR. NATHAN KIM, NOVEMBER 2027

  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 ano
ther 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 controll
ing 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.