“I think it’s dangerous,” said Fang. “Sherman cut your head open once before, and you didn’t run away from him until after he did that. He had to know when he seized Nathan rather than shooting him, that you’d be inclined to follow. This whole thing could be a trap, and you could easily be its intended target.”
“If it’s a trap, it’s a trap that serves two purposes,” I countered. It was hard to keep looking at him, rather than at Joyce/Tansy. She was still asleep, sustained by machinery while Tansy got herself integrated. When would the changes start? When would her face stop being slack, and become tense with a new personality’s expressions? I wanted to see that moment. I wanted to avoid it at all costs. “He wanted Dr. Cale and her research. He’s always wanted her to be on his side, and maybe he thinks he can accomplish it now that the water isn’t safe for human consumption.”
“Or chimera consumption,” said Fang. “You have to consider that he may also have lost people, and is looking for a way to prevent that from happening again. There’s a very real chance that you’ll walk in and he’ll be waiting for you, because he knew this might happen, but doesn’t have the time to waste on making you want to be with him.”
“I know.” I shook my head. “But if we want to get in without killing the people we’re trying to save, we need to know what the internal layout is. Will they be holding their prisoners in the old department store where they kept me, or are they counting on us focusing on that as a goal, and putting our people in the area they figure we’ll attack first? We need information. This is a way for us to get it.”
“You think Sherman won’t realize that you’re wearing a wire?”
“I think it’s the best chance we have.” He wouldn’t be able to resist me. Anyone else, maybe, but not me: not if I walked up to his doors and said I had been wrong. Sherman suffered from the same problem I did, the same problem all the chimera except for Tansy and maybe Juniper did: He had been raised by humans, and he was human in many ways, heir to the hopes and dreams and vanities of his parent species. He wasn’t content with the sense of family that all chimera felt for each other. He wanted something that was his, and only his; he wanted me to belong to him. He might be suspicious if I suddenly walked up to his door with open hands—he would be suspicious, because he’d never been stupid—but he would want to believe that I was there for him. Colonel Mitchell had tried to believe it, and he’d had far less reason to do so.
“It’s a terrible plan,” said Fang. “You’re putting yourself in unnecessary danger, and since this isn’t the first time you’ve gone with a plan like this, I have to wonder if you might benefit from some therapy. Putting yourself in harm’s way over and over again is not the most effective means of committing suicide.”
“I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be the reason the people I care about die, either,” I said. “I want them back. I want them all back.” My eyes darted again to Tansy.
Fang followed my gaze and smiled. “You never want to let anybody go, do you? I suppose that isn’t part of your genetic makeup.”
“I think it’s part of my emotional makeup,” I said. “Those aren’t the same thing. You know Sherman, Fang. You worked with him at SymboGen. You’ve read Dr. Cale’s notes. Is this going to work? Will he fall for it?”
“He might,” said Fang. His voice turned solemn, all traces of his smile fading away. “He’s an arrogant man. A brilliant man, who picks things up far too quickly—I sometimes think he might have been a bit less quick to embrace the myth of chimera superiority if he hadn’t been so damn smart—but still, an arrogant man. He’ll want to believe that you’ve come groveling to his door. That’s part of what worries me. If he’s been keeping Nathan alive to lure you back, there’s every chance that having you there might make Nathan’s continued survival seem, well, unnecessary. Do you really want to risk hearing the gun go off while you’re standing in the doorway?”
“Every minute we’re not there is another minute where Sherman might get bored and pull the trigger anyway,” I said. “I don’t see a better choice. Do you?”
Fang hesitated. Then he sighed. “No,” he admitted. “But you know I can’t come with you. I have to stay here with Tansy, to monitor her integration, and—” He glanced at the door, which was open just a crack, and went quiet.
“And to get ready to run if you have to,” I said, finishing the sentence for him. “I don’t think Colonel Mitchell is going to double-cross us, but he says we can’t be allies, and I think he’s right. There’s too much bad blood between my species and yours, and people like you are going to be looked at as traitors when the dust settles and the humans start looking for people to blame. I just hope Dr. Banks gets to be a traitor too. I don’t want him finding a way to land on his feet.”
“He always does,” said Fang. “Regardless of what the future holds, I’m stuck here until Tansy is stable enough to move, unless things change dramatically.”
“So we’re doing this without you.” I took a step forward, looking down at my sister’s sleeping face. Then I leaned forward and pressed a kiss against her forehead. Her scent was already changing as chimera pheromones bubbled through the mammalian sweetness of her skin. She was becoming one of us.
I blinked back sudden tears. Tansy was going to live, and that meant Joyce was really gone, forever. It was a wonderful, terrible thing, and I couldn’t stop feeling conflicted about it. I didn’t want to stop feeling conflicted about it. It was important that we never stop remembering that our actions had consequences, and that we were a species that existed in symbiosis with our creators, no matter how much we might want to be free.
Straightening, I flashed Fang the most reassuring smile I could muster, and said, “She’s integrating. She’s starting to generate mature pheromones. I think she’s going to be all right.”
“Good,” he said. “Now get to where you can say that about the rest of us, and we’ll be in pretty good shape.” He turned back to his machines. I had clearly been dismissed, and that was all right by me. He had work to do.
So did I.
Private Larsen was waiting for me in the hall, trying to look like he hadn’t been listening in on our conversation. I closed the door behind me and met his eyes squarely, waiting for him to begin squirming. It didn’t take long.
“Yes, Miss?” he said.
“If you were us—if you were a community of sapient tapeworms inhabiting human bodies that you didn’t mean to steal but can’t exist without—what would you do?” I asked. “If you didn’t have to be loyal to the human race, but you wanted to stay alive.”
“I would run,” he said without hesitation. “I’d do whatever I had to in order to convince the humans that I wasn’t a threat, and then I’d take my people, and I would run for the hills. I would go where no one would ever find me. I would never come back.”
“There aren’t many places like that in the world,” I said.
“Gonna be more, since so many people died,” he said, and shrugged. “I’d find a place that hadn’t been very popular before the outbreak, and I’d go there. Build myself a community. Get a reputation for not liking strangers. And never come back.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” I said.
Private Larsen looked at me sadly. “That’s because I really mean it.”
I cocked my head to the side. “You don’t have to mince words with me, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “I watched my superior officer beat the shit out of you, remember? I felt bad about it then, and I feel bad about it now. You’re not an enemy combatant, and you didn’t kill all those people. You’re just someone who wound up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body.”
“And yet, if I hadn’t been Sally Mitchell, I might never have been able to make it this far,” I said.
“True,” he said. “Or maybe you would’ve made it even farther, since you wouldn’t have been dealing with all this military bullshit. It’s pretty much impossible
to say. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”
“I hate hindsight,” I muttered, and held out my hand. “We’ve never had real introductions. Hi. I’m Sal Mitchell. I’m a sapient tapeworm in a girl-suit, and I didn’t kill anybody who wasn’t trying to kill me.”
“Private Sonny Larsen,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“I thought you didn’t like me,” I said, shaking his hand once before letting go. “You seemed pretty happy when I was bruised and wilting.”
“People talk,” he said. “People said a lot of crap about you when they heard you were back on base. Things like ‘she slit a bunch of throats last time she was here, let’s make sure she doesn’t do it again.’ But there was never any evidence of that, you know? And you’re nice and all, but you’re not a criminal genius. You wouldn’t have known how to commit that kind of crime without leaving some sign that it was you.”
“Thanks,” I said with a small smile. “That’s kind of you to say.”
“I didn’t say anything kind,” said Private Larsen, looking surprised. “I just stated the facts.”
“In a situation like the one we’ve been in, the facts are sometimes the first thing to go,” I said, and started walking back toward the room where Colonel Mitchell and Fishy were waiting for me. “Everyone gets wrapped up in what they think is going on, or what they’ve decided is going on, and they don’t look at what’s actually going on. The fact of the matter is, Dr. Cale designed something that could have been useful, but that needed more testing, and Dr. Banks released it anyway, because a decade of human trials was more trouble than he wanted to put up with. Colonel Mitchell knew Dr. Banks was moving a product that could hurt people—he had me in his house, as proof and collateral damage—and he didn’t do anything about it, because he was trying to study the phenomenon and protect his career at the same time. Dr. Banks knew Sally was epileptic, after all. Meanwhile, Dr. Banks didn’t check the credentials of his employees well enough, because Dr. Cale had at least two spies on his staff, plus Sherman, who snuck in all by himself. This whole situation is a big snarl of people ignoring facts. If Banks had responded to ‘We’re not ready’ with ‘Okay,’ I wouldn’t be here now, and you wouldn’t be worrying about whether or not you’ll have a species at the end of the day.”
Private Larsen blinked. “But you wouldn’t exist.”
“So? I wouldn’t miss existing, since I would never have started. Now that I’m here, I plan to survive: Survival is the main drive of any living organism. But I wouldn’t know to want survival if I hadn’t been made.” I considered telling him what Fishy had said, about not blaming babies for the things they did before they were born. Babies didn’t ask to exist, but once they did, they wanted to keep going.
I decided against it. The situation was complicated enough as it was.
At the end of the hall was a door. On the other side of the door there were people, talking. I stopped when a familiar voice drifted through the conversational din, caressing my ears in that old, paternal way.
“Sal? You all right?” Private Larsen sounded concerned. That made a certain amount of sense. I had gone pale, and the drums were hammering harder than ever, making me wobble slightly where I stood. “Should I go get a doctor?”
“No,” I managed to say. “No, that’s the problem.” And then I was moving forward, gathering speed with each step, until I slammed my palms into the slightly ajar door and sent it crashing against the far wall. Colonel Mitchell and Dr. Banks, who had been bent over the map of the Bay Area, looked up in surprise. Fishy, who was sitting on the counter with his shoulders slumped against the room’s rear wall, raised his head and gave me a feral grin. He wasn’t surprised by my reaction. Gauging solely from the look on his face, he had been counting the minutes until it came.
“What is he doing here?” I demanded, pointing at Dr. Banks. “This is his fault. He shouldn’t be standing here looking at the maps, he should be locked up.”
“Hello to you, too, Sally,” said Dr. Banks. “It’s good to see that all that poison Shanti poured into your ears has had a permanent effect on how you think of me.”
“Sal, please,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Dr. Banks has agreed to assist in this process, in exchange for certain considerations.”
“Money, or freedom? Because those are the only things he cares about, and only when they belong to him.” I narrowed my eyes. “He cut my sister open and dug around in her brain because he was curious about how she worked. He put her into the living brain of a conscious human.”
“Your so-called sister was an enemy combatant who attacked my property, and the subject I implanted her in was a volunteer who knew what was going to happen to her,” said Dr. Banks. “We were pushing forward the bounds of science.”
“You’re the monster here,” I said. “Not me. Not any of my kind. Not even Sherman. You. You’re the one who couldn’t leave the broken doors alone.”
“It’s adorable how your kind has imprinted on a second-rate children’s book as your Bible, but it’s just like any other holy book: It doesn’t actually change the world,” said Dr. Banks. “USAMRIID needs someone who understands these monsters if they’re going to succeed in taking them out. Since Dr. Jablonsky is not available, and Dr. Cale is not impartial, it’s going to be me.”
“Dr. Jablonsky shot himself because you let us out into the world without proper testing, and you’re not impartial either,” I snapped. “You’re on your own side. We can’t trust you.”
“It’s a good thing for me that you don’t have a choice,” said Dr. Banks. He turned back to Colonel Mitchell and said, as if I had never interrupted, “Aerosol grenades would be an excellent approach. We can load them with a wide-spectrum antiparasitic gas and throw them through the mall skylights. There’s no way they’ll be able to kill or even incapacitate all the tapeworms in the building, but the degree of confusion they’ll create will be enough to let us enter without resistance. After that—”
I’d been listening with growing horror. Now I interrupted, putting out my hands as I said, “You can’t do that! Adam’s in there! And not all of Sherman’s people are evil, they’re just confused and following their creator! You can’t do this, you’ll hurt them.”
“Hurting them was the idea, Sally.” Now Dr. Banks sounded annoyed, like I was intentionally missing the point he was trying to make. “They’re enemy combatants.”
“They’re people.” I turned on Colonel Mitchell. “I don’t believe I’m having to tell you this again. I thought we had this conversation. I thought you understood. They’re people, and we’re going there to save them, not to kill them for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Sal, I don’t know what you expect me to do,” said Colonel Mitchell. “I have a responsibility to the American public, and to the human race above all. History is going to see me as a traitor and an ecological terrorist for what I’ve already done. I refuse to let history see me as a coward.”
I stared at him. “What about me?”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Is the plan still to send me in first, so that Sherman will open the doors? Because any antiparasitic broad enough to hurt Sherman’s people is going to affect me, and I can’t walk in there with a gas mask around my neck and expect not to raise some questions. There’s no way I’m going to be in and out fast enough for this plan.”
“You’ll know it’s coming,” said Colonel Mitchell. “You can cover your mouth and nose when you hear the glass break.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s going to have to be good enough. I know you want everything to go your way, and I respect it: It’s one of the only traits you share with the real Sally. She didn’t like to be told what to do either. But I am not a father speaking to his daughter. I am a colonel in the United States Army, speaking to a representative of an opposing force, and I am telling you that no, you don’t get your own way this time. Your own way is off the table. You can
go in knowing the attack is coming, or you can refuse to go in at all. At this point, we’re the only chance you have—and while you may not want to hear this, we don’t need you anymore. We know where the enemy is located. We know how to kill them. We’re offering to let you help us because you want your people back, and because we appreciate the service you provided by bringing us this information. But that doesn’t mean you’re running this operation. If anything, it means the opposite. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
Colonel Mitchell folded his arms as he stopped speaking, and looked down his nose at me like he was passing judgment on the entire world. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had locked up: Like having my own way, oxygen was suddenly off the table. I was going to die here, shocked into suffocation by one betrayal too many, one act of treason beyond what I could bear. I…
I saw Fishy. Fishy was winking so hard that it looked like he’d developed a nervous tic. When he saw me looking, he stopped winking and flashed a quick, secretive smile before returning to his previous, sullen pose. I was missing something. I was missing something, and for whatever reason, he wasn’t in a position to tell me what it was.
Suddenly, breathing was possible again. “I go in first,” I said. “You have to give me thirty minutes.”
“Fifteen,” countered Colonel Mitchell.
“Twenty,” I said. “Sherman’s going to want to have me searched before he does anything else, and I refuse to be naked and surrounded by armed guards when you decide to attack the place.”
“Done,” said Colonel Mitchell. “We roll out in an hour.”
“I’ll go tell Fang,” I said, and turned, and left them all—even Private Larsen—behind.
The formulas provided to USAMRIID by Dr. Cale’s people produce a very narrow spectrum antiparasitic, intended to target only those implants created by cloning the implant provided to Sally Mitchell. Adding this chemical to the waterways may result in some die-offs among amphibian and snail species, but the ecological impact should be relatively minor, and should be over within a three-year span. Additional water treatments may be necessary in the future, as eggs may have settled in the silt at the bottoms of ponds and streams. If this silt is stirred up for any reason, it’s possible that the infections could reoccur.