Symbiont

  “The scientific method works,” I murmured.

  Adam blinked but didn’t ask me what I meant. He was always good at ignoring things that didn’t make any sense. “I felt them bring her into the building,” he said. “It was like as soon as she was here, everything was whole again, instead of being broken the way that it has been for days and days. Do you think she took Tansy’s place?”

  “What? No.” That answered the question of whether or not he knew about our visitor. But he knew Anna was a “she,” and tapeworms are hermaphrodites: he was a boy and I was a girl because of the human bodies we’d grown to inhabit, and not because we were innately gendered creatures. “No, Adam. Tansy is… Tansy is our sister. I don’t know where she is, or whether she’s okay, but I do know that no one is ever going to take her place in our lives. We’re going to find her. We’re going to bring her home. I know it.” There was something wrong with that answer, something that gnawed at the back of my mind with sharp, unforgiving little teeth. Anna held the key to finding Tansy. I knew she did. I just didn’t know how I knew, or what that knowledge was going to mean.

  “I saw them bring Dr. Banks and the new girl in,” he said, taking a step forward, out of the trees. As sometimes happened with Adam, he looked infinitely younger than me in that moment. “I wasn’t supposed to be there, and Mom told me to get to work as soon as she realized that I was watching, and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to tell Mom no, because the new girl needed me so bad. It was like… it was like the need was just rushing off her, like water out of a hose. And I started to think that maybe that’s why you like me. Because need rushes off me, and you don’t know how to get out of the way.”

  “I think Dr. Cale was right when she theorized that we had a pheromone connection, just like the sleepwalkers do,” I said, choosing my words with exquisite care. “We’re their cousins, so it makes sense that we’d have some of the same systems in place to make sure that we stayed in contact with each other, and that we looked out for each other. And yeah, it was sort of a surprise to me—I always just figured I wanted you to be safe because I cared about you. Now it turns out that there’s also a chemical component, probably generated automatically when you’re under stress or whatever.”

  This wasn’t helping. Adam was starting to look more concerned, and if I didn’t change tactics soon, he was going to retreat into the avocado trees and I was never going to catch him. I sighed.

  “But Adam, that’s just the initial pang of alarm, that’s like ants leaving chemical trails for one another. We’re not ants. We’re not even sleepwalkers. We can think. We can feel, and we can form social bonds. I don’t care about that girl as a person. Yes, when I’m in the room with her I want to protect her and keep her safe, and I figure that’s probably a good thing from a species perspective, since it’s better if we want to protect each other and not kill each other.” I was babbling. But Adam wasn’t retreating anymore, and I’d take that. “Only see, I do care about you. I want you to be happy. I like it when we just sit and don’t talk to each other because we’re both doing stuff. You’re my brother and I love you, and she’s just some girl who happens to be the same species that we are.”

  “Really?” Adam finally stepped out of the shade of the avocado trees, his eyes so wide that I could have tripped and fallen into them. “You really think I’m your brother?”

  “Only one I’ve ever had.” Unless you counted Sherman—and he, like Anna, was just someone who happened to share my species. He didn’t deserve to be a part of my family. He didn’t deserve to be anywhere near my family.

  “What’s going to happen now that she’s here?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Dr. Banks says she integrated while her host body’s consciousness was still present and aware.”

  Adam’s eyes went even wider, the whites appearing all the way around his dark brown irises. “She’s a fully integrated sleepwalker?”

  Because that’s what we were all dancing around: that was why her existence was such a concern. If one tapeworm could integrate with a living, conscious host, so could another, and another, until the entire shape of the enemy changed. We could be looking at a fight that went from intellect against mindless hunger to intellect against intellect—and for me and Adam, it would be a fight against our own kind.

  I’d always assumed I would side with the humans, no matter what happened, because the sleepwalkers were destructive and terrible. So was Dr. Cale, in her own way, but at least she cared about saving lives, while Sherman didn’t seem to care about anything beyond himself. The possibility of living, active integration changed everything, and from the way Adam was looking at me, it changed everything for him, too.

  I looked into my brother’s eyes, suddenly aware of just how deep that familial connection went, and had no idea what we were going to do next.

  Adam was like me—a chimera of human and tapeworm, a dead body piloted through the world by an invertebrate. He was also unlike me, because he hadn’t happened naturally, and he had never believed himself to be a human being. When the war began, there had never been any question of which side he would be on: the only humans he knew were the ones who worked for his mother and fully accepted his existence. Liking it was something else altogether. Adam’s sheltered upbringing meant that he wasn’t quite as good as I was at seeing the way they sometimes looked at us, like we were a problem that needed to be solved after the bigger, more immediate problems—the sleepwalkers, all the humans who were dying—had been taken care of. But I could see it. I could see it all too well.

  For every person like Nathan or Dr. Cale, who honestly didn’t care what species we were, there was someone like Daisy, who couldn’t relax around us, or Fishy, who saw us as one more symptom of the world’s devolution into a fantasy. We weren’t real to them. We weren’t people.

  “It sounds like that,” I said. “I think she may be something else, though. I mean, aren’t sleepwalkers what happens when an implant just decides to take over? The way Dr. Banks was talking, she happened in a lab setting. So I don’t know for sure.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Adam. He slipped his hand into mine, looking at me hopefully. Once again, I was struck by how young he seemed. He was the first chimera, the oldest member of our race, and sometimes I felt like he was going to be my baby brother forever. “Can we go meet our sister?”

  I had been coming to tell him about Anna, but I hadn’t been intending to take him to her. Going to see Anna could mean getting Adam involved in whatever Dr. Banks had come here to do. Everything in me rebelled at the idea of letting that man get anywhere near my little brother—but if I said “no,” I would be doing exactly the thing I was increasingly coming to resent Dr. Cale for doing. I would be sheltering him from the world, and the world wasn’t going to recuse itself just because he didn’t know what he was getting into. He would have to learn eventually.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We walked silently and hand in hand through the hydroponics garden, our footsteps echoing loudly. No one else was there. Adam tended to take his duty shifts when they wouldn’t require him to interact with anyone, and I wondered how intentional that was on his part: whether he understood on some level just how much distance there was between us and the humans here.

  It was funny, in an awful way. I should have been excited by the thought of another chimera. There were days when I actually found myself missing Ronnie and Kristoph, who had helped Sherman keep me captive, yes, but who hadn’t been responsible for kidnapping me, and who had at least been the same species as me. They understood what I was dealing with as I walked through a human world, as I looked at the devastation wrought by creatures who were genetically my family. Adam was too innocent to really help me shoulder my fears. Anna could have been the answer…

  But Anna was with Dr. Banks, and he was the thing I trusted least in the world. There were no easy answers here.

  “Why do you think he
brought her to us? I wouldn’t bring her to us if I were him. We might take her away and not let him have her back.”

  That was pretty close to the actual situation. I nodded grimly. “That, and Dr. Cale doesn’t like Dr. Banks very much. He might have more trouble walking away from here than he expects.”

  “So coming here was kind of dumb.” Adam frowned. “Is he dumb?”

  That was the problem. “Not really,” I said. “He was smart enough to help her make us. That has to mean he’s smart enough not to walk into a trap without knowing that’s what he’s doing.”

  “So why?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I just shrugged helplessly, and kept hold of Adam’s hand as we kept on walking.

  Adam seemed to be content with silence after that, maybe because neither of us knew what we were supposed to say. We had a new sister. We just didn’t know if we could trust her, or what form that trust would take. The elevator was waiting for us when we reached it, a sign that Dr. Cale had told the rest of the staff to lie low while we dealt with our unwanted visitors. Dr. Banks was in a cell, but she still didn’t trust him, and the less he knew about the scope of our operation, the better.

  Adam seemed to think so, too. He frowned as we stepped into the open elevator, clearly understanding what its presence meant. “Dr. Banks is a bad man, isn’t he, Sal?”

  Even the phrasing of the question was childish. I answered it all the same, without hesitation: “Yes. He’s a very bad man. I don’t know of anyone that he hasn’t been bad to, except for maybe himself. Everything he’s done has been about being good to himself.”

  The elevator started to move downward, whisking us toward the lab as Adam asked, “But weren’t we designed to make things better for humans? So they’d be less sick, and have less to worry about?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think they meant to sign over ownership of their bodies in the process.” I squeezed Adam’s hand. “Dr. Banks skipped a lot of steps that would have made the implants safer for people to use. That’s why Dr. Cale had to run away in the first place—that’s why she stole you from the lab. If she hadn’t been forced to do that, maybe none of this would be happening.” And Adam and I wouldn’t exist. Instead, Sally Mitchell and whoever Adam’s host body had originally been would be walking around the world, ignorant of the future they had so narrowly dodged.

  “Is it selfish that I like this world better than a world where we’re not real?” asked Adam meekly, his question so closely mirroring my thoughts that I glanced at him, startled. Then I shook my head.

  “No,” I said, as the elevator stopped and the doors slid smoothly open. “I like being real. I don’t think I’d stop being real for anybody. Not even Nathan. It’s not selfish to want to exist. It’s a function of the survival instinct buried in all complicated organisms.” Even the sleepwalkers had it. That was why they ate so voraciously, following the deeply ingrained “this is how you survive” commands remembered by their tapeworm minds, even as they struggled against the complicated and unfamiliar wiring of the human brain.

  We had taken about five steps outside the elevator when Adam stiffened, his head snapping up and his eyes going extremely wide, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. I frowned. I didn’t hear anything except for the faint buzz of the lab machinery and the low voices of the technicians who were still at work. Not everything could be shut down at the drop of a hat.

  “Adam?”

  “Tansy!” He pulled away from me and took off running, weaving between the workstations and darting down the aisles. I sprinted after him, trying to keep him in sight. He whipped around a pink-painted wall with me about eight yards behind. I heard Dr. Cale shout his name, and Nathan making a small, startled noise, like he had been shoved roughly aside. I kept on running.

  When I came around the corner, I didn’t understand what I was looking at—not at first. Adam had pulled the curtain away from the tiny exam room set up for Anna, who was still lying naked and unmoving on the bed. Dr. Cale and Nathan were a short distance away, Nathan with his hands resting on the handles of Dr. Cale’s wheelchair, Dr. Cale with one hand clasped over her mouth in a classic expression of horror. Her eyes were wide and brimming with unshed tears, like she had just realized something so terrible that she was no longer capable of forming words. Adam was standing with his hand still on the curtain of Anna’s “room,” staring at her.

  I trotted up behind him, only wheezing a little, and asked, “Adam, why did you run away from me like that?”

  “She’s here,” he said, sounding horrified and puzzled at the same time. He turned to me, that same conflict reflected in his face. “Can’t you feel her? She’s here, with us, but she’s not here at all. Sal, what did he do to her? What did he do to our sister?”

  “I don’t know what you’re—” But I did know, didn’t I? I knew the way I had known that Adam was in the hydroponics garden. I knew because we always knew when we were near each other. The pheromones we put off, however hard it was for our human bodies to detect them, were unmistakable.

  Slowly, I turned to face Anna, who hadn’t responded to our presence in any way. She was still staring at the ceiling, her bare skin humping up into goose bumps as the air-conditioning rolled over it. She didn’t seem to know that we were there, or maybe it was just that she didn’t care.

  My mouth was terribly dry, and the drums were pounding in my head. I licked my lips, trying vainly to moisten them, and whispered, “I didn’t think anyone could be this cruel.”

  “What did he do?” moaned Adam.

  Anna turned her head and looked at us.

  I froze. Having her staring at me was like being eye to eye with an alligator, or some other ancient beast that didn’t care what I wanted and wouldn’t care if I ceased to exist completely. She didn’t blink. Maybe that was an optical illusion, something my increasingly baffled mind was adding to make the situation even more alien, but I didn’t think so. Dr. Banks had brought her to us. He said she needed to be monitored, but he could have done that at SymboGen; he wouldn’t have brought her here if there hadn’t been something terribly wrong with her, maybe with the interface between her tapeworm and human nervous systems. That was the most important connection a chimera had, and if it wasn’t working properly, then she wasn’t working properly.

  Dr. Cale’s wheels squeaked softly as she rolled herself over to stop next to me. She was no longer covering her mouth, and her tears were no longer contained: they rolled down her face unchecked. Bit by bit, her expression transformed from grieving mother to furious scientist. It was a swift, terrifying change. “That bastard,” she said, tone almost wondering, like she couldn’t believe this was happening. “I don’t believe him. How could he do this? How could he come here, having done this, and expect me to help him?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Nathan. He moved to stand behind me. I tilted my head just enough to see the furrowed line of his brow. He really didn’t get it. Just this once, I had reached a conclusion before he had.

  I would have expected it to feel good, or at least to feel better than this. Instead, I felt sick. I would have given anything to have reached the wrong conclusion, but I hadn’t: I could see it in Dr. Cale’s face.

  “This is Tansy,” I said quietly. “This is why we couldn’t find her. Because Dr. Banks had her the whole time. She never got away from SymboGen.” I indicated the pale, naked girl on the cot, who was still staring at us with her dead-looking eyes. “He took her, and he used her, and now he’s brought her back to us, but I don’t know why.”

  “That’s not Tansy,” said Nathan. “Tansy looks completely different.”

  “Not to a chimera she doesn’t,” said Dr. Cale. Her hand snaked out surprisingly fast, grabbing hold of my wrist. “Are you sure, Sal? It’s not just a culture, like the ones we took from you? It’s actually her core implant?”

  “Yes,” said Adam. He darted forward, again moving faster than I could react, and grabbed hold of Anna’s hand. He held it the
way that he always held mine, the way that he used to hold Tansy’s: tight and close and counting on the other person to cling tight, keeping him where he was.

  Anna’s fingers stayed loose and open, not closing around his. He might as well have been grabbing for a corpse. In a way, that was exactly what he was doing.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head until my hair whipped against my forehead like a hundred tiny, stinging lashes. “I don’t… I’m not as good at picking up on that sort of thing as Adam is. But the minute I saw her, I wanted to protect her, even if it meant protecting her from you. I normally only feel that way about Adam.”

  When Nathan and I had first followed a weird set of instructions to Dr. Cale’s old lab in the bowling alley, we’d been met by a girl with short blonde hair, heterochromatic eyes, and a tendency to make cheerful death threats every six words. That was Tansy. She was the experimental subject that came after Adam, grown and cultured in the lab just like he was, and she’d been his first sister, the one who kept him safe from the world back when most of the world had no idea that people like him, people like her, people like me could exist. Tansy had acted like a thug and reacted like a heroine, and if that wasn’t one of the best combinations I’d ever encountered, I didn’t know what was.

  I hadn’t known I was a chimera then—she was gone by the time I’d admitted that to myself—but I’d come to trust her surprisingly swiftly, hadn’t I? She’d terrified me, and I’d trusted her anyway, because part of me knew that she was my kind. Deep down and under all the little complexities of my human mind, I’d known she was my sister. She should have been allowed to stay long enough for us to know each other.

  I’d seen a lot of sleepwalkers and a surprising number of chimera since then, and I hadn’t connected to any of them as quickly as I’d connected to Anna. The only logical answer was that I wasn’t connecting to Anna at all: I was reconnecting to Tansy. Nothing else made sense.