Chimera

  The doorknob turned. I tensed, eyes darting toward the sound, and tried to cling to the drums beating behind my ears as I waited to see what would happen next. I didn’t have to wait for long. The door swung inward, and Colonel Mitchell walked into the room, his long face set in a mask of grim seriousness.

  He glanced in my direction as he walked to the table’s remaining chair, but that was all. He didn’t greet me or acknowledge my existence in any other way: just a flicker of the eyes before he sat. He was carrying a thick manila folder under one arm. Once he was settled, he placed it on the table squarely between us, turned so that I could see the label. I had to squint and struggle for several minutes to get the words to swim into clarity. Even then, they twisted and rearranged themselves, leaving me guessing at their meaning.

  PLEASANTON PROJECT: SPONTANEOUS INFECTION STATISTICS

  Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything as I struggled to read, so neither did I, not even once I was fairly sure I understood the words. We just sat there, both looking at the folder, until I realized I would have to be the one to break the silence. He couldn’t do this forever, but if I tried to make him, I was going to get him angry, and I didn’t want to deal with that. Sometimes the only way to win is to look like you’re losing.

  “What is this?” I asked, looking up. As always, I searched his face for some sign that he knew who I was, that he was willing to treat me as me, and not as a surrogate for his lost little girl. As always, I didn’t find it—but I didn’t find the affection he usually reserved for her, either. All I found was cold, military appraisal.

  “It’s a report,” he said. “Open it.”

  I squirmed. “You know I have reading issues.”

  “No, Sally, you don’t,” he said, and his voice was even colder than his face. “Your reading issues came on after your accident, and I don’t expect them to have continued.”

  “My reading issues were the result of physical brain damage,” I snapped. “You can’t just wish them away because they’re inconvenient. Sorry if that’s a problem, but it’s a biological reality. I’m dyslexic, I’m always going to be dyslexic, and if you want me to know what’s in this report, you’re going to have to read it to me.”

  Colonel Mitchell reached out and flipped the report around so that it was turned toward him. He opened the cover with a quick, angry motion, and read, “‘The first case was reported at zero eight hundred on December second, and involved Private Kelly, age twenty-three, Army Reserve. Private Kelly had been given a clean bill of health by USAMRIID doctors, and had completed two full courses of prophylactic antiparasitics to ensure that no eggs or cysts remained in her tissue.’ Do you know what eggs and cysts are, Sally?”

  “Eggs are eggs, and cysts are infant tapeworms that have gone into a sort of dormant state because conditions aren’t right for them,” I said.

  Colonel Mitchell nodded. His eyes were still so cold. The drums pounded ever harder in my ears, never quite making it difficult to hear but always making it impossible to forget that I was in danger. I was not safe here, no matter how it may have seemed before he came into the room. I was never going to be safe here.

  “In the case of the SymboGen implants, they were created to be territorial. We thought they were also asexual, but that turns out not to be true,” he said.

  I kept my mouth shut. Tapeworms weren’t asexual: They were hermaphroditic, capable of reproduction even if they never encountered another member of their own species. The tapeworms created by SymboGen were supposed to have been sterile. The tapeworms created by SymboGen were supposed to have been a lot of things.

  “When one of those worms spits out a bunch of eggs, they either lie dormant in the body, waiting for the original to die, or they hatch, realize they can’t take out the competition, and encyst themselves somewhere in their host’s brain or muscle tissue,” said Colonel Mitchell. He was still watching me with those cold, cold eyes, clearly waiting for me to offer some sort of a useful response. I didn’t have one. “We’ve cleared up to eighty cysts out of a single subject. That was eighty little time bombs, all ticking away, waiting for their opportunity to explode.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I knew about the life cycle of the implants: Dr. Cale had explained it to me when she was telling me how she protected her staff. As a chimera, I didn’t need to worry about cysts. Even if there were some hidden in my muscles or organs, none of them would hatch as long as I lived in Sally’s skull. The pheromone changes I’d caused when I took over would make sure of that. It was connected to the parasitic overgrowth that caused the “tendrils” of tissue that black lights revealed on the bodies of the sleepwalkers, and while I didn’t fully understand the science behind it, I knew enough not to have any questions.

  Colonel Mitchell’s eyes narrowed. “If Private Kelly had no eggs or cysts in her body, and had already consumed a sufficient quantity of antiparasitic drugs, how did she get sick?”

  “Did she get sick?” I asked. “You didn’t say that. You just said ‘the first case.’ I didn’t want to assume.”

  “Yes, she got sick.” He flipped to another part of the folder, turned it back around, and shoved it toward me. “She got very, very sick.”

  I knew that if I didn’t look, I would be punished. I knew I didn’t want to see.

  I looked.

  The folder was open to a pair of glossy pictures, both large and clear enough that it was impossible not to see details. Private Kelly was a young woman of what looked like Vietnamese descent—or had been, anyway. In the first of the two pictures, she was strapped to a bed, her eyes rolled back in her head, her mouth open in a gesture that I knew all too well. She had broken two of her teeth, and blood covered everything. In the second picture, she was dead. Her skin had taken on a waxy sheen, and her eyes were clouded, staring into nothingness. The blood had dried around her mouth in a thick layer that looked almost like jam, as long as I didn’t think about it too hard.

  Colonel Mitchell reached out and turned the page, revealing two more pictures, these of a young man. His first picture was similar to Private Kelly’s. His second showed him with a bullet hole between his eyes.

  “Shall I keep going?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

  “Please don’t,” I whispered.

  “Four people under my command have succumbed to the parasites in the last twenty-four hours,” he said. Mercifully, he closed the folder as he spoke. I shivered, forcing myself to remain otherwise still. “That’s in addition to six civilians—seven now, including your friend. Why do you think that’s happening?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think is causing this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” He swept the folder off the table as he spoke, sending it crashing to the floor. I squeaked and fell back in my chair, but he wasn’t done. He stood, slamming his hands against the table, and leaned forward until his nose was only a foot or so from mine. “You ran off with that crazy bitch Cale, you were in her lab, you have to know what she was doing!”

  “Dr. Cale wasn’t doing anything like this!” I wailed. “She created the implants, but she didn’t distribute them, she didn’t modify them to contain unsafe levels of human DNA! That was all SymboGen! Ask Dr. Banks if you want to know what’s happening!”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I’m not!” I jumped to my feet, stumbling around the chair to get away from him, from the sight of his eyes and the whiteness of his teeth, which showed every time he yelled at me. “Dr. Banks is the one who modified the implants, not Dr. Cale! If they’re doing something they shouldn’t be able to do, blame him! It’s his fault!”

  It was all his fault. Even my existence was his fault. That man—that horrible, hateful man—was my father as much as Colonel Mitchell was. Each of them had contributed to one half of me.

  “Dr. Banks has been nothing but cooperative since this crisis began,” said Colonel Mitchell. He didn’t sit down, but he wasn’t yelling anym
ore, either. “He has provided research material and raw data that has proven exceedingly helpful in preserving civilian lives.”

  “He modified the implants from their original design. He added more human DNA than they were supposed to contain. And he didn’t listen to Dr. Cale when she told him what he was doing was dangerous,” I countered. “He knew the sleepwalkers were a risk. SymboGen was covering this up for months before it got too big. God, Daddy, when did you start believing his lies? You used to know what kind of man he was!”

  “Yes. He’s the kind of man who offered medical care to my daughter when she needed it, and the kind of man who has provided us with supplies of antiparasitics far in excess of what we had on hand,” said Colonel Mitchell. My calling him “Daddy” didn’t seem to have changed a thing. “He’s not a good man, Sally. I’m not foolish enough to think he is. His bottom line has always been his first priority. But when the cards were down, he stepped up and helped us. What did your precious Dr. Cale do? She ran and hid. She took data that could have helped us, and she kept it to herself.”

  “You knew where she was all along,” I said. “Dr. Banks even said so, when you sent him to us with his science project. Why are you mad at her when you could have gone and collected her any time you wanted to?”

  “Because she hid,” said Colonel Mitchell. “She hid, and she started sending her research out to anyone who wanted to use it—including the enemy. Why didn’t we take her? Because we knew she wouldn’t work for us. She made that perfectly clear in her videos. But we still needed her working. We needed her trying to find a solution to this problem, and that meant monitoring but not touching. And now we’ve lost her.”

  “What?” The word came out softer than I had intended, strangled by terror and hope, which were not easy bedfellows. “What do you mean you’ve…” Nathan was with Dr. Cale. My dogs were with Dr. Cale. Adam was with Dr. Cale. My entire family, my real family, they were all with her.

  “We’ve lost all contact with her lab,” he said. “The satellites are still up there, they’re still beaming down data, but we have fewer analysts every day. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Sally, but we’re fighting for the future of the human race out there, and we’re losing. Now your Dr. Cale may have doomed us all.”

  “You can’t think she did this!”

  “I can’t think she didn’t! Have you seen the videos she’s released so far? She openly states that she doesn’t know whether to side with the humans or the worms! She’s a traitor to her own species.”

  I stared at him. Then, gathering as much courage as I could find, I drew myself up to my full height and said, “If Dr. Cale is a traitor to her species, so am I. I don’t know anything about why people are getting sick. I wouldn’t have led that patrol to Paul if I’d known he was getting sick, I would have gone by myself and tried to make sure he didn’t suffer. He didn’t deserve to suffer. I haven’t got anything to tell you. But I have bruises on my arms from where your people grabbed me, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  Colonel Mitchell paused, visibly thrown off of whatever he had been about to say. “What?”

  “Look.” I rolled up the sleeve of my sweater until the fingermarks on my arm became visible. The newest ones hadn’t quite brightened yet, but that didn’t matter; there were plenty of older bruises to take up the slack. I looked like a child’s art project, all yellow and purple and black.

  “Look,” I said again, letting go of my sleeve and pulling up the bottom of my sweater, showing him the deep purple bruises on my stomach. “I think I have a broken rib, too, maybe, but I can’t show you that. My chest doesn’t come open.”

  “Lieutenant Robinson told me about the men who’d been harassing you when you were first located. If they—”

  “You’re not listening. I guess that’s not new.” I dropped my sweater and just looked at him, wondering when things had changed so profoundly, and so permanently. He had been the man who hung the stars, once, and I’d been his little girl, struggling to live up to a ghost, willing to do anything to make him happy with me. Now I was a monster in his eyes, and he was a monster in mine, keeping me captive when all I really wanted was to run back to my family—my real family, the one that didn’t say, “Pretend to be something you’re not, and we’ll pretend that you’re worthy of being loved.”

  “All these bruises, the ones you saw and the ones I didn’t show you, they all came from your men, because they think I’m the one who killed all those soldiers when Sherman and his people broke me out of here.” I wasn’t protecting Dr. Cale, because there was nothing to protect: She had been packing to move when I left the lab with Nathan and the others, and I had no way of finding her if she didn’t want to be found.

  I wasn’t protecting Sherman, because I hated him.

  Colonel Mitchell stared at me for a moment before shaking his head and saying, “You must be mistaken. The soldiers under my command know that you’re my daughter. They would never lay hands on you.”

  “The soldiers under your command know you won’t let me stay in the family quarters with your wife. They know that you have me out in the general population, where there’s no way you can possibly monitor me twenty-four hours a day. They know that you only have me here because you’re trying to save Joyce.” Her name was ashes in my mouth. I still loved her. Out of everyone in my family, she was the one who’d never turned against me, so of course she was the one who had been targeted by the cousins for conversion, because since when has the universe been fair?

  Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything, and so I continued for the both of us. “They did this. You never told them I didn’t orchestrate my own escape, and they did this. They’re going to keep doing it, too, until the day you either cure Joyce or give up on her, and then they’re going to do something worse… and you’re going to let them, aren’t you? You’re going to stop pretending you care about me, and you’re going to let them.”

  “Sally, please. Don’t be unreasonable.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Sally,’” I spat. He recoiled. There was something almost childishly shocked in his expression, like that had been the last thing he’d expected from me. “My name is Sal. My name has always been Sal, and you know that, none of the things you’ve done here will change that, and I don’t want to play this game anymore. Your people are hurting me while you look the other way. You’re letting your wife—”

  “Your mother,” he interrupted.

  “Oh, my mother, right. You realize that makes this worse, not better, don’t you? If she’s your wife, then she’s saying, ‘I won’t let the monster that took my daughter’s body as her own be in the safe place where I am.’ But if she’s my mother, she’s saying that about her own little girl. One of us has to be the monster here, Colonel! Is it her, or is it me? Pick carefully, because you can’t redeem us both!”

  He took a deep breath, visibly steadying himself, before he said, “Sally, I can understand why you’re upset, and I assure you that the men who hurt you will be disciplined. This sort of behavior is not befitting either USAMRIID or the United States Army, and I won’t stand for it. I’m not going to punish you for telling me lies about yourself, or about your mother, because I should have done more to protect you. For that, I am sincerely sorry.”

  I stared at him. “You’re sorry? That’s what you have to say? You’re sorry?” More and more, I was coming to realize that the human brain was capable of some amazing, illogical things. Fishy—an employee of Dr. Cale’s—had convinced himself that reality was a video game rather than live with the knowledge that his wife was dead. Dr. Banks had somehow managed to convince himself that he wasn’t a traitor to his own species. For a long time, I had convinced myself that I was human, even with all the evidence in the world staring me in the face, telling me that I was wrong. And now, despite all the evidence in the world, Colonel Mitchell was trying to convince himself, again, that I was still his daughter on anything more than a genetic level.

  “I should have
been more careful with you,” he said. “I was trying to teach you a lesson, and I was wrong. You won’t be going back to the general population. These spontaneous infections… whatever’s causing them, I can’t afford to risk you being affected.”

  “But you said it was affecting your soldiers too,” I said. The drums were pounding harder now, spurred by the terror of staying in a building filled with people who hated me. The only one who didn’t was Joyce, and she was in a coma she was never going to wake up from. “Why am I any safer in here than I would be out there?”

  “Because here, we can keep you in isolation,” said Colonel Banks. “We can make sure nothing touches you, and you can focus on your purpose here. You can help me save your sister.”

  “Nothing’s going to save her,” I said quietly. “I wish you could see that.”

  “You had best hope something does,” he replied. “That’s what’s going to save you, too.” He turned and walked back to the door, leaving me alone in the little room with the mirrored wall, and the pages of his report scattered across the floor like so many fallen leaves.

  There was no clock in the little room. There were few clocks left anywhere, and most of them were keeping their own time at this point, refusing to synchronize. Things were falling apart, one piece at a time, and telling prisoners how long they’d been locked away probably wasn’t high on the priority list.

  I walked circles around the room for a while, trying to let the exercise both stabilize and soothe me. When my legs got tired, I gathered up the pages of Colonel Mitchell’s report, careful not to look at the pictures, and put them back in the folder. I placed the folder itself on the table, where I wouldn’t step on it by mistake. Maybe my little effort at housecleaning would convince them that I was trying to play by their rules, and they would be kinder to me—or at least more inclined to treat me like I genuinely belonged.

  There was nothing else to do in this isolated little room, and I didn’t dare try the door. Either it was locked or it was a trap, and whatever waited on the other side wasn’t going to be kind, or gentle, or care how many bruises it left. I retreated to the corner and sat, pulling my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around my legs before doing what I had wanted to do since being put in here. I released my hold on the world of human sights and human senses and sank down, down, down into the hot warm dark, where nothing was going to hurt or trouble me again.