The girl looked at me solemnly as Carrie started the car and pulled out of our parking spot. I held my breath, not sure what sort of indication I was waiting for, only sure that I would know it when I saw it.
Finally, without making a sound, the girl nodded. It was a small gesture. It may not even have been an intentional one. It was more than enough for me.
Dr. Cale had created the SymboGen implants in part because her friend Simone had died of allergy-related complications—something that would never happen in a world where genetically engineered tapeworms controlled the body’s immune responses. Before she died, Simone wrote a book called Don’t Go Out Alone, which somehow managed to shape Dr. Cale’s approach to life, despite being an incredibly simple collection of words and pictures that even I could manage to read. It was about two children, a boy and a girl, who went into a dark forest following their friend the monster. Their names weren’t given in the text, but they were hidden in some of the illustrations, if you looked carefully. Nathan had shown me where to look.
“I’m going to call you Juniper,” I said, and turned to settle back in my seat, content in my decision—
—only for Carrie to start screaming as the sleepwalker that had come shambling out of the shadows near the mouth of the parking garage bounced off of our hood, scrabbling for purchase as he fell. Carrie twisted the wheel hard to the side, clipping a concrete pole. It was a near miss, and sent the side view mirror on her side of the car bouncing off into the darkness.
Someone was screaming. It wasn’t Carrie: Her mouth was closed now, set in a hard line as she concentrated on getting the SUV back under control. Someone was screaming.
It was probably me.
I reached up and clasped my hands over my mouth, blocking most of the sound. Carrie kept her eyes on the open space in front of us, gunning the engine as she raced for the light outside. The sleepwalker hadn’t reappeared. He might be dead; he might be too injured to stand. I knew I should care, but I couldn’t quite find it under the screams tearing at my throat and the drums pounding in my ears. Survival was what mattered. That sleepwalker didn’t care about our survival, and that meant I couldn’t take the time to care about his. No matter how much I wanted to. No matter how much I thought I should.
Then we were out of the shadows and in the light, and Carrie was going as fast as she could while swerving around the wrecked and abandoned cars that clogged the streets. I suddenly saw the next few days stretching out in front of me with perfect clarity: We would be stopping often to move things out of our way. We’d be siphoning gas and scrounging for supplies, and even with all of that, if we were found by the sleepwalkers, or by USAMRIID—or by Sherman, who was still out there somewhere—before we reached Dr. Cale, it was all going to be for nothing. We couldn’t guarantee success. All we could guarantee was that wherever we died, it wouldn’t be here.
“Knowing the direction doesn’t mean you have to go.” The words were muffled by my hands, but they weren’t screams: under the circumstances, that was more than I could have hoped for.
“What?” Carrie didn’t take her eyes off the road. That was for the best.
“Nothing.” I dropped my hands into my lap. My heart was hammering, and the drums were whiting out the world, but that was all right. We were moving. We were facing my fears, and I was going home. “Let’s go home.”
We drove on.
INTERLUDE I: EXAPTATION
All life is a battleground, and I am the perfect soldier. I have no other choice.
—SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III)
I guess I just want to do something amazing with my life. Isn’t that what everyone wants?
—CLAUDIA ANDERSON
December 2027: Sherman
This is not what I intended. This is not what I intended at all.
I forgot that my people are not well schooled in the ways of obedience when I’m not standing over them to enforce the rules: I forgot that so many of them grew up and learned themselves with Kristoph and Ronnie and Maria and Batya standing over them, teaching them the things they’d need to know if they were going to pass unseen amongst the humans. I was a distant god in those days, too wrapped up in my work at SymboGen and my attempts at courting Sal to make myself a constant presence in their lives. They learned to respect me, yes. They learned to fear me, even, and I have been more than happy to exploit that fear when I needed to. But they have never, not for a moment, learned to listen to me.
Ronnie made his sacrifice for the sake of our future, and because he was tired of living in a world that would never allow him to conform to his own expectations. I had something to do with that. I was the one who ordered him implanted into a child’s body, knowing that his epigenetic memory would gnaw at him like rats, until he hated his own skin more than he hated the humans who would deny us our essential sentience and individuality. I was the one who said it would be too hard for us to move him again, reculturing him in a body that fit better with his self-image. There were times when I thought he would realize what was going on, why I was so firm that he live as a girl even in the company of chimera, who didn’t care about human social or gender roles. I’d been priming him to become a weapon since I changed his host, and why shouldn’t I have done that? He had threatened my supremacy among the people who were meant to be mine. I was going to lead them into the glorious future. Not Ronnie. Not Kristoph. Not anyone else.
Certainly not Sal.
Her name always brought a pang of regret, and a stronger wave of anger. She should have been mine. She should have loved me. I played my part so well. I showed her again and again that I was her perfect mate, caring and funny and compassionate and willing to do whatever she needed me to do. And what did she decide? She decided to be human. To love a man who had never taken one of us into his body, who would have no immortality—who would inevitably leave her. I could have been with her for lifetimes, moving from host to host as easily as we had once moved through the warm darkness of the prethought. I could have given her true children, blending her DNA with mine in sterile tubes until our offspring hatched, and then implanting them in the mewling babes born of her host melding with mine. I could have given her everything, and she would have given me her elasticity, her genes that bent and did not break.
Instead, she’d made me take them from her, harvesting her genes like she was a common human cow. She’d made me into a monster, because she wouldn’t let me be a man. But she was the monster now, not me. She was the one whose genetic duplicates were causing everything to go wrong. If she’d been willing to cooperate with me, to give instead of forcing me to take, I might have known what would happen. I might have found another way.
This is not what I intended. This is all her fault.
“Sherman?” Batya’s question was accompanied by a perfunctory knock on the open door, like the touch of her knuckles on the wood would be enough to make her interruption forgivable. I didn’t turn. She was not forgiven.
Batya ignored my shunning and pushed gamely on, saying, “The operation was successful. We’ve removed six cysts from Maria’s muscle tissue, and one hatchling from her brain. We think we got everything. Just in case, we took a segment sample from her actual body while we were operating. We’ll be able to bring her back if something goes wrong.”
Unspoken: We would be able to bring Maria back in a new host, with a new surface personality shored up by her original epigenetic data, if one of the new worms managed to somehow slip past her defenses. Unlike Kristoph, she would not be lost.
“Good,” I said curtly, and finally turned. Batya was standing perfectly straight, her hand resting on the doorframe as if for balance, or for strength. More than any of my seconds, she hated to show weakness in my presence, and she was still recovering from her own surgery. They had harvested four invading cysts from her flesh. It would be weeks before we knew whether we’d removed them all.
Perhaps it was petty, but I almost hoped we hadn’t. Batya was a threat to my position
. It would be… better… if something happened to her that couldn’t be traced back to me. We had a sample of her true self. We could always reculture her and try again.
“We’re running low on bottled water, and we’re still not sure that charcoal filtration gets all the eggs out,” she said. “What do you want us to do?”
Curse these fragile hosts, who needed so much water to stay alive—and hence tied us to the same necessity. “Keep testing new filtration systems. Keep scanning for signs of infection. Prep a team. We’ll raid the local Costco for more bottled water.” The place had locked down early in the sleepwalker outbreak, and the parking lot had been a battleground for weeks. Their stocks had been mostly intact when the blast doors came down.
Now Batya looked alarmed. “There are human survivors holed up in there. We haven’t gone in for supplies before this because they’re armed.”
Survivalists. The thought made my lip curl involuntarily. Why couldn’t they roll over and die already? “The longer we leave them there, the more of our water they’re going to drink,” I said. “We need to get them out of that supply depot. We can either bring them back here alive as stock and replacement bodies, or we can leave them dead in the parking lot for the crows. Either way, they have what we need. We’re taking it.”
Batya looked, briefly, disappointed. “I thought we were supposed to be better than them.”
I smiled at her, intentionally showing my teeth. She flinched, but didn’t recoil. “We’re not supposed to be better than them. We’re just supposed to be the ones who survive. Don’t you have a team to gather?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and turned to walk away. I watched her for a moment before I looked back to the monitors on my office wall. They were showing an endless loop of security footage: Sal, running. Sal, sleeping. Sal, never leaving me.
This isn’t what I intended. This isn’t what I intended at all.
STAGE I: GENETIC DRIFT
Do not drink unfiltered or tap water. I repeat, do not drink unfiltered or tap water. Do not allow water to enter your nose, mouth, or eyes when showering. Stay dry, stay alive.
—MEMO FROM DR. SHANTI CALE TO HER STAFF
It would be really awesome if I could stop running away for a little while.
—SAL MITCHELL
Take the bread and take the salt,
Know that this is not your fault;
Take the things you need, for you will not be coming back.
Pause before you shut the door,
Look back once, and never more.
Take a breath and take a step, committed to this track.
The broken doors are kept in places ancient and unknown.
My darling ones, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.
—FROM DON’T GO OUT ALONE, BY SIMONE KIMBERLEY, PUBLISHED 2006 BY LIGHTHOUSE PRESS. CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT.
We’ve been testing the worms that Mom isolated from the water supply, trying to figure out exactly how they got in there. They all share a strong genetic resemblance to one subject from her files: an implant she calls “Persephone,” as if that will somehow keep me from realizing that she’s talking about Sal. Someone put Sal—or put something tailored and cultured from her genetic material—in at least one of the local reservoirs, if not more than one. We know it wasn’t anyone here, which leaves two possible candidates: Dr. Banks or Sherman.
Mom wants to think Banks did this. She hates him so much that it clouds her judgment sometimes. She’s never been good at feeling things intensely, and the degree of the hate she feels for him doesn’t leave room for her to feel anything else. Banks is a bad person, but he’s not a fool. Putting tapeworms in the water supply hurts everyone, including him. He wanted Sal to use her as a weapon for the humans, not against them.
This is Sherman. It has to be. She knows that too.
I just need her to admit it, and act.
—FROM THE NOTES OF DR. NATHAN KIM, DECEMBER 2027
Chapter 8
DECEMBER 2027
The surface streets in Oakland were clogged with abandoned vehicles and debris, but the highways moving out of the city were surprisingly clear. I attributed the cleanup to the proximity of the Coliseum: If USAMRIID was moving through here regularly, they would have taken steps to make it easier. Carrie seemed to have the same thought, because as soon as we hit the interchange into Berkeley, she abandoned the clear highway for the difficult-to-navigate surface streets that would take us to I-4.
“This is going to take forever,” she complained, weaving her way through the cars scattered around the intersection near the Telegraph Avenue Whole Foods Market. There were some clear spaces in the parking lot. I considered asking her to stop so we could gather more supplies, and decided against the idea almost instantly. There might be bottled water in there. There were definitely deep shadows, and places for sleepwalkers to hide. We didn’t know how far the contamination went. We had gotten lucky in Oakland: If that mob of sleepwalkers had been alive and capable of pursuit, we would have died the second we set foot in the Old Navy. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“I don’t care if it takes forever,” I said. The slower speeds were making it easier for me to relax. As for Juniper, she hadn’t made a sound since we’d left the garage. I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She had mostly finished devouring her pickle and was still gnawing methodically, her eyes fixed on the window, watching the world roll past with no signs of distress or dismay. I settled deeper in my seat, feeling the weight of my responsibility to her falling down on me like a collapsing bridge.
My fear of riding in cars wasn’t a natural part of being a chimera. It was given to me by people who thought they were serving my best interests when they were actually twisting my mind, trying to turn me into someone I wasn’t. If I wasn’t careful about how I reacted in front of Juniper, I could wind up passing the fear along, convincing her that something that was essentially safe—and absolutely necessary, given the distances we had to travel—was dangerous. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. I had to monitor my responses like I never had before.
“Children are complicated,” I murmured. I wasn’t ready for this, and for a moment, I hated the biological imperative telling me to protect that little girl at all costs.
“Tell me about it,” said Carrie. “There’s a reason Paul and I decided we were never going to have them.” Her face fell a moment after she finished speaking, like Paul’s death was hitting her all over again. She focused her gaze back on the road, which spooled out in front of us like an obstacle course of vehicles and debris.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry for her loss, that I understood how much she was hurting, that I would try to keep her safe. I wanted to tell her pretty lies that would act like arnica on her pain, soothing away its edges and releasing its center. I couldn’t say anything. The words wouldn’t come.
What if I did something wrong, and messed up Juniper the way the Mitchells had damaged me? What if I couldn’t love her enough to put her survival above my own? And why should I put her survival above my own? She didn’t know who she was yet. She would struggle for survival like any living thing, but if she didn’t find it, it wasn’t like there was anyone but me to miss her. I still wanted her to live, and thrive, and I was already willing to put myself in danger for her sake.
If this was what parenthood was like, it was no wonder Colonel Mitchell had been willing to lie to himself about Sally still being alive. It had been better than picturing a world where his daughter was dead, and was never going to ride in another car, or eat another pickle, or do anything. I must have made it even harder on him. Sally didn’t intentionally donate her body to science when she allowed her father to give her an implant to control her epilepsy. My takeover had been the ultimate betrayal of his love: The thing that was supposed to protect her, to keep her alive, had been able to save her body, but not her mind.
“Everything is complicated,” I said this time, and Carrie laughed, short and sharp and bitter, and
we drove on.
The streets were deserted, clogged with trash and with gangs of roaming dogs already well on their way to reverting to an older, feral state. They snarled and shied away as we drove by, viewing us as intruders on their territory. They were right, in their way. We didn’t belong here anymore. Humans had built this city, and sleepwalkers had destroyed it, and now it belonged to the animals who had managed to keep themselves alive despite the chaos.
It wasn’t just dogs. The ubiquitous crows perched on fences and on roofs, cawing raucously as we passed. Cats prowled in the bushes, and fat, lazy squirrels strolled across the road, barely speeding up to avoid our tires. It would take a while for the overgrown yards to begin tearing up the sidewalks and invading the streets, but it would happen; the city would fall, a tiny bit at a time, until it was forgotten. That was, unless humanity somehow managed to win this war, to defeat an enemy that they had created for themselves, and came back to reclaim what had been theirs.
The farther we drove into the ruined city, the less likely that seemed. We hadn’t seen a living human since leaving USAMRIID. They still lived in the world—Carrie was proof of that—but their numbers were declining, at least if the quarantine zone and the dead sleepwalkers in the Old Navy were anything to go by. Too many people had implants, and too many of those implants were waking up. Chimera were functionally humans in a lot of ways, no matter what Sherman wanted to think, but we were too rare, too difficult to create naturally; I had been the only one I knew of for a very long time. Now there was Juniper, and she would have died in that store if I hadn’t come along when I did.
Was this whole thing just an elaborate way of giving the world to the dogs? And would it be such a bad thing if it were?