Chimera

  It was difficult to describe the hot warm dark in words. Nathan could never wrap his head around the idea that it was hot and warm at the same time, that the two things were different states that could coexist without difficulty. There was no color there, because I had no eyes when I was there, but it was still a kind, red world, even when everything was washed away by blackness. Those contradictions didn’t seem contradictory at all. Not when I was there.

  I moved through the hot warm dark, and time fell away, leaving me in an eternal, peaceful now. “Moved” wasn’t the right word; I knew I wasn’t moving. There wasn’t room inside the cathedral of Sally’s skull for me to do anything but sleep. Still, some part of me remembered what it had been to move through her body, free and twisting like a ribbon in the tissues of her flesh, and that was the part that ruled when I was in the hot warm dark.

  As I moved, I tried to think. It was becoming increasingly clear that I needed to find a way out of here—I should have tried to find it the minute I was taken. The electrical prods the soldiers used as nonlethal prisoner control had frightened me so badly that I’d stopped moving forward, choosing instead to stay where I was and wait for the situation to change around me. Well, the situation had changed. I needed to go.

  The quarantine zone was protected by fences and patrols. If there were weak spots in the fences, no one I knew was talking about them, and while there was a black market inside the fence, it seemed to be entirely based on selling things that had been scavenged from homes and businesses. I hadn’t heard anything, from anyone, about goods coming in from the outside. It was possible that my position as the Colonel’s daughter meant that no one wanted to talk to me, but I doubted it. Carrie, Paul, and the rest of my housemates had accepted me as one of their own. If they’d known anything, I would have known it too.

  Trucks left from the Coliseum and entered the quarantine zone daily, carrying soldiers who swept the surrounding areas for survivors and supplies that were starting to run low inside the fence. It was government-sanctioned looting, and it might represent my best chance of getting out of here. If I could somehow get onto one of those trucks…

  … which would be packed full of soldiers with guns and cattle prods. Soldiers who could legitimately claim that they hadn’t realized who I was before they shot me, or even worse, shocked me. The thought of dying was sad and scary. I wanted to make it back to my family. I didn’t want to die without them knowing what had happened to me. The thought of being shocked again was terrifying. Death was an end. Electrocution could leave me stranded and still aware in Sally’s body, but unable to control it ever again. No. The trucks weren’t the answer.

  Unless I could steal one.

  The thought was shocking enough to pull me out of the dark and back into the bright, sterile light of the interrogation room. My eyes snapped open, the enormity of the idea sinking in. I could steal one. Not without help—I didn’t know how to drive—but there were people here who could help me. There was Carrie. She wanted out as badly as I did, and she was going to want out even more now that Paul was gone. The spontaneous infections would lend an element of randomness to the situation, but if I could get her brought here…

  They wouldn’t be keeping us in quarantine if they didn’t want to keep as many people alive as possible. I stood, walking over to the mirror. “Hey,” I said, raising my voice to make sure that it would be audible to the speakers I knew had to be present. “Hey, is someone there? I just remembered something. The man who got sick, his name was Paul. His wife, Carrie, is back at the house. And she wasn’t feeling good this morning, either.”

  I’m sorry, Carrie, I thought. Her boyfriend, lover, whatever he actually was to her was dead, and she might not even know it yet, depending on how quickly the patrol had removed me from the area. Paul was dead, and now I was having her yanked out of her home and thrown into isolation, and for what? So I could steal a truck and have someone to drive it for me?

  I was sorry, but that didn’t change the necessity of what I was doing. I needed a truck. I needed a driver. Who better to serve than the widow of a man who’d just been executed in cold blood by USAMRIID’s soldiers?

  There was a clicking sound from somewhere above me, and a female voice said, “Thank you for the information. Please step away from the door.”

  With dawning horror, I recognized the speaker as the woman from the shower, the nameless sergeant who’d threatened to make me eat my own vomit after she punched me in the stomach. I stepped backward, stopping only when my thighs hit the side of the table hard enough to add another bruise to my growing collection. The drums in my ears pounded harder than ever, almost dizzying me with their volume. She hated me. She hated me, and Colonel Mitchell was gone, and I didn’t know how she was planning to subdue me, I didn’t know, she could do anything—

  The door opened, and there she was, terrible in her uniform, a cattle prod in her hands. There were two more soldiers behind her, but I couldn’t focus on them: All my attention was claimed by the terrible thing she was holding.

  “Seems someone told the Colonel there was some question about how you’d been handled by his people,” she said in a low, dangerous tone. “Seems he’s concerned about how many bruises you’ve managed to pick up bumbling around out there. We pointed out that Pleasanton is a pretty dangerous place, but he was dubious. Seems like he wants to believe his precious little princess. So we’re going to have to be extra careful with you from now on.”

  “I won’t resist,” I said quickly. “Look, I’m not resisting. I’m not running I’m not fighting I’m not doing anything at all. Please. You don’t have to shock me. I’ll go willingly.”

  “Oh, I know you will,” she said, and smiled. “But no one’s looking just now, and you’re already denying us so much of our fun. You’ve got to admit that wasn’t very nice. Means we’ll have to be a little more creative.”

  “Please don—”

  My words were cut off when the end of the cattle prod slammed into my stomach. Everything was static and pain, and then everything was gone.

  The hot warm dark had become a haven since I had become a human, but there was a time when it had been my prison: when it had sketched out the boundaries of my existence, confining me to the spaces inside another’s body and refusing to allow me anything beyond the scraps she saw fit to throw my way. I hadn’t known resentment then, hadn’t understood what it was to yearn for what you couldn’t have; all I’d known had been survival, and some deep-coded impulse in my genetic code that had ordered me to swim up, out of the darkness, into the light.

  Since the first time I had opened Sally’s eyes, I had regarded the hot warm dark as my special, secret place. Even Sherman had admitted what a strange thing it was that I could go back there at will—for most chimera, once they came out of the dark, its doors were closed to them forever after. I was a lucky girl.

  And now I was trapped.

  I moved through the hot warm dark like I was running from the monster in a horror movie, knowing the illusion of motion was just that—an illusion—but unable to make myself stop. I didn’t know whether Sally’s eyes were closed or whether the electricity had somehow managed to break the connection between me and her optic nerves, and the fact that I kept thinking of my body as her body told me just how cut off I was, how far removed I suddenly was from the existence that should have been my own.

  Please, I moaned, and there was no sound, because I had no lips, or mouth, or throat. Was this what it had been like for Tansy when Dr. Banks split her skull open and started severing the connections that bound her to the body she controlled? Had she thrashed in nothingness, reaching frantically for any sign that her existence still had weight or purpose? She’d always been a little neuro-atypical, but most of that had been a consequence of the body she was in, which had suffered some damage before Tansy took it over. Had she felt her sanity melting away in the isolation, when what should have become a privilege became a prison?

  Please. This time my
moan was a whimper, and it was just as quiet as it had been before.

  I stopped trying to move through the hot warm dark and sank deeper, letting go of the motive force that had driven me to seek a way through, a way out. It was over. I had lost. I had taken this body when it hadn’t been mine, and now, finally, it had been taken away from me. I was going to die here. I might as well have been dead already.

  Wait.

  I had taken this body. I had been completely unaware of what I was and what I was doing, but instinct had been enough to let me make the connections between Sally Mitchell’s abandoned brain and my own boneless form. Her brain tissue and my body were essentially the same, when you really looked at them. They were both quivering tubes of protein, folded back on themselves dozens, even hundreds of times, until they formed something functional.

  I had claimed ownership of this body when I couldn’t think, couldn’t make choices for myself, couldn’t do anything but follow the instincts that had been unwittingly built into me by the scientists who designed my genetic code. Even sleepwalkers could manage to do it, and the damage they did in the process was all a consequence of getting into the brain. I was already there. I had made myself a comfortable bed, and the tissue had folded itself around me, accepting me as a part of itself. I couldn’t damage anything if I was careful.

  Where was the hot warm dark? The hot warm dark was in my memory, and in my original body, the one I had forgotten for so very, terribly long. It was in the smooth white flesh and flower-shaped head of a tapeworm, sheltered in the delicate folds of a human brain.

  Tapeworms didn’t have eyes: I couldn’t open them, couldn’t do anything to make myself more aware of my environment. But I could accept myself. Bit by bit, I let go of the idea of myself as a human being, as a bipedal creature with hands and arms and eyes and teeth. Instead, I thought of myself as long and fine and ribbonlike, designed for dark places, created to survive no matter what. I thought of myself as I had once been without thinking about it, as the creature that had hatched from an egg created in a SymboGen lab.

  Part of me still wanted to regard my origins as shameful, but why should I? Everything started from an egg, even human children. There was nothing wrong with the way I was born. I was alive now, and that was what mattered. I was alive, and I was going to stay that way, no matter what the consequences—no matter what the costs.

  The hot warm dark seemed to fade around me, replaced by a new kind of awareness, like the world had contracted still further and somehow become bigger at the same time, maybe because I had become so unbelievably much smaller. The world was black now, not red, but the heat, the warmth, the reality of the hot warm remained. This was where I had begun.

  So begin again, I thought fiercely. I felt myself twitch, a squamous, slick feeling that had little to do with the kind of motion that had become so familiar to me since the day I woke up in Sally Mitchell’s hospital bed. But this was me, too, and I needed to accept that, or I was never getting out of here.

  Begin again, I thought, and the twitch repeated itself, my body responding to my commands without bothering to take the time to explain what it was doing—and that was all right, really, because I was so divorced from my original form that I couldn’t have understood if I’d tried to tell myself. There wasn’t time for that. There was only time to hope that this would work, that I had found the way out after all.

  All I had to do was open my eyes.

  All I had to do was open my eyes.

  All I had to do—

  I opened my eyes.

  I was once again lying on a cold concrete floor. There was a vent set into the ceiling high above me. Plastic billowed down from it, belling out to form an umbrella shape. The quarantine bubbles. When I’d been taken by USAMRIID the first time, the time that Sherman came to break me out, they had placed me in a quarantine bubble for study before they decided what to do with me. There had been dozens of other bubbles visible from mine; they must have cycled the entire current population of Pleasanton through this facility.

  I was so busy thinking about what the plastic meant that it took me a few seconds to realize I could see the plastic. My eyes were working again. I focused on the rest of my body, looking for the places where my limbs diverged from the mass of my torso and hips. Finding my fingers shouldn’t have required an effort, but it did; they were slightly numb, like they had gone to sleep and weren’t quite ready to get out of bed yet.

  Too bad, I thought, and forced them to move, bending each of them in turn until I was sure that they were all present and accounted for. The numbness had faded by the time I finished. I turned my hands over, pressing them against the cold floor until my palms felt fully responsive. Then I pushed, and slowly, laboriously, worked my way into a sitting position.

  “You’re alive.” The voice was dull, uninflected.

  I turned slowly, still trying to wake up my sluggish muscles, and found myself looking at Carrie. She was sitting on the bubble’s single narrow cot, still wearing her coat over her slightly grimy sweater and jeans. Tears had drawn tracks through the dirt on her cheeks. I hadn’t realized how filthy she’d become until seeing her here, in a sterile environment.

  “Did they hurt you?” I asked. There were no traces of sleepwalker pheromones in the air; Carrie was still unaffected by whatever was causing the spontaneous infections among the quarantine subjects and Colonel Mitchell’s men. That was a good thing. Sleepwalkers couldn’t drive.

  I was sorry for the thought as soon as I had it. There was being practical, and then there was being inhumane. I didn’t want to allow the first to make me become the second.

  “They shoved me around, but they didn’t hurt me,” said Carrie. A tear ran down her cheek, drawing another line through the dirt. “Is it true what they said? About Paul? Did he really become one of those… those things?”

  “Carrie, I’m sorry.” I gathered my limbs, pushing myself away from the floor again until I was standing, unsteady as a newborn puppy. I felt like I was a little numb, a little distanced from myself. That would pass with time… or, if it was the cost of reconnecting with my original body, it wouldn’t. It had still been worth it, to claw my way back up out of the dark, to find my way back to a world where there was light, and motion, and the chance that I could still find a way home.

  She looked at me for a moment, lower lip wobbling like she was trying to keep her feelings inside and failing, one escaping tear at a time. “How is that even possible?” she asked. “He was clean. We were both clean. The Army made sure of that before they locked us up. He can’t have become one of those things.”

  “But he did,” I said. I risked a step forward, toward the bed. It felt clunky, disconnected, and I nearly fell when my foot hit the floor bent wrong. I managed to turn it into a stumble, and took another step. “I’m so sorry. He was already almost gone when I found him.”

  “I should’ve gone with you,” she whispered, and ducked her head, bracing her chin against her chest. “I shouldn’t have let you go alone. He deserved… you shouldn’t have been… I should have gone with you. I should have been there for him.”

  “I don’t think he would have wanted you to see him like that,” I said. I took another step forward before allowing myself to half fall onto the bed. Carrie blinked at my impact, but she didn’t move away. She still didn’t know about me. That was for the best, for both of us. “Paul was almost gone when I found him, and it would have taken longer for the two of us to get there, if we’d been traveling together. Just remember him. Remember why you loved him. And be glad you didn’t have to see.”

  Carrie shook her head. “Maybe it wasn’t Paul.”

  “It was.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t!” The sheer force of her denial raised her voice, and the gently curved walls of our bubble bounced it back at us, making it seem loud enough to fill the whole world. Carrie came out of her curl and turned to me, her eyes blazing with the need to make me see, to make me understand. “Maybe it was somebody
else, there are lots of people in the quarantine zone, and it could have been somebody else, somebody who just looked.… looked sort of like him, enough like him to fool you but not enough to fool me. He could still be out there!”

  “Carrie…”

  “All those things look alike, they’re all hungry and snarling, how could you be sure? How could you really know that it was him? Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “I knew it was him because he wasn’t all the way gone when we found him,” I said. The memories were fresh and raw. I felt even worse for him now than I had then. How quickly had the cousin burrowing into his brain wiped away human consciousness? Had Paul become a passenger in his own body, trapped the way I had been? “He spoke to me, Carrie. He knew who I was. And then he was just gone.”

  “Before the bastards shot him?”

  Nothing I could say was going to ease her pain, and so I said nothing at all. I just nodded, watching her eyes for some sign that she understood me, that she was following what I had to say.

  Carrie’s eyes filled with fresh tears. “God,” she said. “God.” She punched the bed with both hands, slamming them down so hard that I worried, briefly, that she had broken a finger. That might make it more difficult for her to drive. “He died, and I wasn’t there. I sent a stranger. And now I’m in here. Why am I in here?”

  “Didn’t they tell you?” I asked anxiously.

  Her laugh was short and bitter, the laughter of a woman who had given up on hoping for the best from the world and was now resigned to expecting nothing but the worst. “Since when have these assholes been in the business of telling us anything, Sal? A bunch of men in camo showed up on the doorstep, grabbed me, informed the rest of the house that they’d be getting three new roommates, and dragged me back to their truck. We were halfway here before they told me Paul was dead. How is any of this happening? This can’t be the real world. It just can’t be.”