Modifying these formulas to target other strains of parasite should be difficult, but not impossible. Given the damage that has already been done to the western United States, I don’t see why we shouldn’t seize this opportunity to kill off more of the rogue implants, thus creating a “clean slate” on which we can build a better, brighter, human future.
—FROM THE PRIVATE NOTES OF DR. STEVEN BANKS, JANUARY 15, 2028
I went to see my mother this afternoon.
She’s adapting surprisingly well to captivity. She asked if she could have her wheelchair back: I told her I would consider it, once I’d seen that she could continue to behave herself. I feel like we’ve achieved a good balance between us, where she understands her place and doesn’t push for more than she deserves, and I respect her human autonomy. It hurts me to see her stuck in one place, unable to move, but I can’t give her the chair unless she promises not to run over more of my people. She can be quite aggressive when she feels thwarted, and she feels thwarted a surprising amount of the time. She has a lot of anger in her.
I get that from her side of the family, I suppose.
I think that she will come to see my side of things, given time and sufficient incentive. She has never been foolish, and I know she still loves me. I’m her son, after all. On some level, she has to realize that I’ll be her only son sooner rather than later: She should be transferring all her love to me, where it will be safe, and still have someone to receive it.
We’re so very near the end of things. I can feel it in my bones.
—FROM THE NOTES OF SHERMAN LEWIS (SUBJECT VIII, ITERATION III), JANUARY 2028
Chapter 18
JANUARY 2028
Getting to the mall where Sherman and his people were holed up wasn’t an issue. It was near a major freeway, and accessible from several major and minor surface streets. We could easily roll up and knock on the front door, if that had been what we wanted to do. But that approach—that direct, aggressive approach—would have made it impossible for me to pretend to be alone. We had to do something else.
“Odds are good that he has eyes on the surrounding buildings, and on the freeway overpass,” said Fishy, with the manic good cheer of a man who had spent his entire life figuring out how to lay siege to ridiculous video game locations. “But if we take I-4 through Concord, and then approach up Monument Boulevard, we can probably get to the Oak Grove intersection without being close enough to attract attention. At that distance, movement is going to get ascribed to sleepwalkers or carrion birds, not an army convoy.”
“Okay,” I said. “What then?”
Fishy smiled brightly, lips barely staying closed over his teeth. “Can you ride a bicycle?”
I looked at him, aghast.
Twenty minutes later, I was riding a bright pink bicycle with tassels on the handlebars down the middle of Monument Boulevard. I was wobbling but I wasn’t falling over, thanks to the training wheels Fishy had attached to the base. He’d scavenged the whole thing from the Big Lots near where the convoy was waiting, producing it with the sort of flourish that told me he’d been dreaming of this moment for years. I wasn’t sure what that said about him.
One thing that could definitely be said about me: I had never learned how to ride a bicycle. It hadn’t seemed like a major priority, and even if it had, there was no way the Mitchells and SymboGen would have ever signed off on the idea, back when I was living by their rules and following their ideas of what my world should be. Buses were safer than bicycles. Bicycles got hit by cars, and stolen by bored teenagers looking for something to do with their time. They definitely didn’t belong with mentally unstable amnesiacs who had panic attacks when they tried to ride in private vehicles.
Still, the principle was simple, and even I could work a set of pedals. I wobbled down the street, trying to avoid potholes and abandoned cars, and watched the businesses and buses to either side as I went. Nothing moved but birds and one bored orange cat, which looked so much like Tumbleweeds—a cat I used to know in San Francisco—that I almost stopped. Only the knowledge that no domestic cat could have made the trip across the Bay on foot kept me from checking to see if it was Marya’s old pet.
Marya hadn’t survived the first wave of sleepwalker attacks. I was almost sure of that. But Tumbleweeds had always been allowed to roam freely, and I hoped he was all right. Maybe someday we’d be able to go back to San Francisco and find out.
Getting to that someday started now. I pedaled faster, and tried not to think about the fact that I was riding on a rickety assortment of bolts and pink tubes. It was faster than walking. That was the only good thing about it.
The mall appeared in front of me, set off to the left and surrounded by some rather impressive traffic jams. I was close enough now that I was sure I’d make it, whether or not I had a vehicle. I got off the bike, walking it through the snarl of cars, and propped it up against a defunct traffic light, where anyone watching from the mall would be able to see and identify it, but wouldn’t necessarily see the training wheels. I wanted them to think I’d pedaled much farther than I actually had. I wanted them as confused as possible—and hence as focused on me as possible—for as long as I could manage it.
Walking across the parking lot felt like walking to my own execution. Every part of me strained to turn around and go back, to run for the promise of my own safety, my own survival. I kept going anyway. Survival would be meaningless if it came at the expense of everyone I’d ever cared about. That wasn’t the point of staying alive. I wanted my friends, and my family, and I wanted to get the hell out of here before things fell apart again.
“You can’t reach the broken doors without going through a bunch of trials, remember? You can do this,” I whispered, and squared my shoulders, and kept on going.
Like most malls, which were sort of pitcher plants for people, sucking them in and spitting them out again without the contents of their wallets, the mall on Monument had multiple entrances. Some of them were built into specific stores, including the old Kohl’s that had been my prison when I was here before. Others were built into the side of the mall proper. Those seemed like the best bet for getting inside. I angled for a door set between a health food store and a Hawaiian Barbecue. The glass was soapy and opaque, making it impossible to see more than the vaguest shadows filtering through from inside.
Had something just moved in there? I thought it might have. Sherman’s people had to know that I was here. They had to be watching their surroundings, because there were no sleepwalkers in the immediate vicinity. Riding a bicycle down the middle of Mission or Market would have triggered a swarm.
Unless the water had killed them all. For the first time since we’d arrived in Pleasant Hill, a trickle of doubt worked its way through my heart, twisting through the ventricles until it felt like it was going to block the blood flow altogether. What if we were wrong? What if Fishy’s careful logic and Colonel Mitchell’s detailed maps had led us to the wrong conclusion, and Sherman was somewhere else entirely?
What if we hadn’t found them after all?
I walked up to the door and knocked, quick and light. Then I stepped back, waiting for something to happen. Seconds ticked by. If I had seen motion from inside, it wasn’t repeated. I crossed my arms, trying to look annoyed, rather than anxious. Don’t make me wait, Sherman, I thought, projecting the concept into my face with every ounce of acting skill I possessed. It wasn’t much. I hoped it would be enough. You’ve made me wait long enough.
There was a sound from behind me, like a shoe scuffing ever so briefly against the pavement. I relaxed slightly. It wasn’t a sleepwalker. Sleepwalkers didn’t sneak. That meant that it had to be someone who wanted to come up behind me without being seen, and that meant…
“I guess you’ve probably been waiting for me,” I said, dropping my arms. “I missed you.”
There was a pause, long enough that I started to wonder if I’d guessed incorrectly. Then, sounding slightly bemused, Sherman said, “I think you m
ay be in the wrong place. There’s no one here for you to miss.” His incongruously British accent was as strong as ever, the result of some neurological tic triggered by his integration. I got dyslexia, he got an accent, Tansy got a misplaced sense of whether or not she was allowed to hurt people. I still didn’t know what Adam got. Or Juniper. If I wanted to find out, I had to play this precisely right.
I turned around. I didn’t smile. “I missed you,” I repeated, this time stressing the last word as I looked him in the eye. “I thought you’d come after me. But I knew that if I came back, you’d be here.”
Sherman blinked. His bewilderment was even clearer now that I could see his face, and it gave me hope: hope that this would work, hope that I could bluff my way through the encounter that all my other bluffs had been leading up to. Pretending to be Sally, pretending to be dutiful, pretending to be brave, they were nothing—nothing—compared to pretending to be the girl who could have missed this man.
But I had been her once, hadn’t I? Before everything had gotten so strange, back when I was human and Sherman was my favorite SymboGen escort, I had been that girl. All I had to do was remember what it felt like in her skin, and pull it over me.
“You must be kidding,” he said. “Do you think I’m that stupid? We capture a bunch of your people and suddenly you’re on my doorstep claiming to miss me?”
“You mean you captured the human who put his hands on me and told me I should feel lucky that I’d taken over a body he liked? Or do you mean you captured the human who designed me and then told me I was a flawed experiment that was never supposed to get out of the lab? I’m sure you’re talking about one of them. Just tell me which one is supposedly ‘my’ people, and I’ll be happy to tell you how wrong you are.”
Sherman blinked again. Then, slowly, he reached out and cupped his hand against my cheek. I felt a jolt, like his fingers were buzzing with static electricity. The drums changed their tempo. Slowly at first, and then faster, until they were beating to an entirely different song.
I forced myself to keep breathing. This was what Sherman did. He manipulated the bioelectric fields of other chimera, bending us to his will. But he couldn’t do what I did: He couldn’t wrap the hot warm dark and the peace it brought around himself like a cloak, insulating himself from the world. I reached deep and pulled it as far up as I could, letting it engulf me.
“Do you mean what you’re saying?” he asked.
The word “no” struggled to form on my lips. He wanted to hear the truth; the rhythm of the drums that were my heartbeat told me that. He wanted to hear the truth, and I wanted to give it to him, because it would make him happy. But he would be happier with the lie, wouldn’t he? I pulled the hot warm dark closer. Yes, yes, he would be happier with the lie; the lie would give him everything he’d ever wanted, the lie would make him complete, while the truth would only make him empty.
“Yes,” I sighed, and my voice was the ghost of empty labs and abandoned buildings, places that were in the process of being forgotten by the world. There was no coming back from this lie. The course was set.
Sherman’s eyes widened, suddenly alive with hope. “Yes?” he echoed.
“I came here for you.” Not a lie, not quite. I was leaving a lot of things out, but I wasn’t lying. That was easier to do, with the hot warm dark to bolster me and his hand on my face, compelling me to tell the truth. Editing was so much simpler than outright falsehood. “I wanted to see you.” Also true. “I thought you’d come for me by now.” Also true: the stuff of nightmares, but true. I had lain awake waiting for him to come for me. I had woken up convinced that his hands were on my skin. But I didn’t have to tell him those things. No matter what he did, he couldn’t make me tell him.
His left hand came up to cup the other side of my face, so that he was holding me captive. I couldn’t have gotten away without stepping forcefully back and pulling my face out of his hands, and then he would have known something was wrong. I didn’t pull away.
Slowly, Sherman lowered his mouth to mine and kissed me.
He had only kissed me once before, when he was breaking me out of USAMRIID. Then, he had been doing it to rewire my bioelectrics. This time he was kissing me because he wanted to be kissing me, and I knew that my survival, and the survival of the people I loved, depended on my kissing him back. So I did. I kissed him like I was still that confused, desperate-to-please girl who wanted so badly to be normal, to be human, to be loved. I kissed him like she was still inside me, and like I wanted to be with him forever. I kissed him until I started to feel like it was a betrayal of everything I had ever wanted to be, and just as I was about to pull away, he pulled back and let me go, eyes wide and bright.
“Sal,” he breathed. “You really did come back for me. You little fool.” He made the words sound like “I love you.” He made them painful to hear.
I shrugged, managing somehow to muster a smile, and said, “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“So you came to me. You came to me.” He turned to the mall door, and called, “Stand down the snipers, open the doors. She came to me.”
The door swung open. There was a short, gently rounded woman standing just inside, wearing a snood over her hair and a scowl on her face. “Of course she came to you. Where else would she have gone? We stole her pet humans, and the military would cut her up as soon as look at her.”
“Batya, be nice,” said Sherman. “She is our guest.”
“She is a traitor to her species, and she’s already run away from you once before, or have you forgotten?” The woman—Batya—looked me up and down. Then she turned back to Sherman, shook her head, and said, “You can’t do this. We’re not stable enough for you to do this. Put her back where you found her.”
“I found her right here,” said Sherman. “Right here, because she came to me. She’s going to be our guest for a little while, aren’t you, Sal?”
“Forever, maybe,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “Hi, Batya. I’m Sal. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Oh my God give me strength,” muttered Batya. “I know who you are, Sal. I’ve been looking at your genetic material through a microscope for weeks, and I’ve watched your clones explode the brains of several of my friends. You’ve been a busy girl, haven’t you?”
I considered pointing out that it had been Sherman who extracted my genetic material and turned it into a weapon, not me, but realized it would be futile to even try. Batya was on Sherman’s side. All I could do was convince her that I was a backstabbing loser, and endanger my tenuous grasp on his goodwill. I needed that goodwill. I needed to get inside.
“I ran because you people were slicing my skull open without my consent, and I get a little squirrely about bodily autonomy and my right to not have my skull sliced open when I don’t want it to be,” I said. I didn’t try to moderate my tone. Batya might be a useful ally, but I wasn’t planning to be here long enough to need useful allies: I just needed Sherman on my side, as much as was possible during the time that I was in his custody. “Only then I got taken back by the humans, and you know what? There are worse things than a few cell samples. There’s being locked in a box and treated like a lab specimen. There’s people looking at you like you’re worse than dirt because you dared to pick up something they’d already thrown away. You people might have acted like I had fewer rights than you did, but you never acted like I wasn’t a person.”
I hesitated. This was the hard part. This was the part that needed to get me inside. I glanced at Sherman, trying to project shyness through my eyes, and added, “And I missed Sherman. He was the only one who ever really knew me and was kind to me anyway. Everybody else either saw a lab specimen or a confused human girl. He saw a chimera. I didn’t realize how important that was until it stopped.”
Sherman put an arm possessively around my waist. “You see? She’s here for the right reasons, and I’m going to keep her. You know you can’t stop me, Bat. You might as well just step aside and let us in.
”
“You’re going to get us all killed,” said Batya. She looked at me for a moment, and there was no warmth or welcome in her expression. I fought the urge to shiver. I’d been worried about running into Ronnie, who might not forgive me for coming back after he’d helped me escape. Maybe I should have been worrying about the people I didn’t know yet. They had less reason to trust me.
Then she stepped aside. Sherman’s hand went from my waist to the small of my back, and he propelled me into the mall.
The tracking device Fishy had installed in the heel of my shoe would be showing Fishy and the others that I was moving again: It would be flashing on their monitor with every step I took, keeping them apprised of my status. We hadn’t been able to find a way to wire me for sound without the risk that I’d be found out, but the tracker was small and virtually undetectable, unless Sherman decided to take my shoes apart. When I found the place where our people were being held, I was supposed to pace back and forth—five steps one way, five steps back the other way, and repeat twice to show that it wasn’t an accidental pattern. Then they’d be able to come in without killing our people.
Not that it would help Adam or Juniper very much once the gas grenades started flying. I needed to find them and somehow tell them to get a filter over their mouths and noses, or I was going to watch them die. I didn’t think I could survive that.
The interior of the mall had changed since I’d been there last. There were more stacks of boxes pushed up against the walls. I couldn’t stop long enough to let my eyes focus on the letters, but some of them had helpful pictograms of their contents—pineapples and tomatoes and fish. They were stockpiling canned food. Water, too, and soft drinks, and juices—anything that wouldn’t spoil within the next year. We walked down the hallway to the main concourse. The small, buzzing sensation that always told me I was near another chimera was stronger than it had ever been before. I had a better hold on it than I’d had the last time I’d been in Sherman’s custody.