The room was small and gray, with a large mirror on one wall that was probably a window for the people standing on the other side. The table in the middle of the room came with two chairs, both bolted to the floor. I was seated in the chair that faced the mirror, giving me an unwanted view of my hollow cheeks and greasy hair. I looked like I’d just run through ten miles of hell and had another thousand miles to go.
I felt like I’d just run through ten miles of hell. The trip from Pleasanton to Oakland had been spent huddled in a corner of the truck, praying that the men who’d brought me here wouldn’t start hitting me again. There had been sirens outside when we were close to the quarantine fence, but after that? Silence. The absolute, unbroken silence of a wounded, uncomprehending world.
I might have been all right if I’d been allowed to stay with Lieutenant Robinson and his squad, but they had been called away as soon as we reached the main building, and their replacements had been neither friendly nor gentle with me. Why should they have been gentle with me? I was a killer in their eyes, after all. The bruises they’d left on my arms were already starting to blossom, and would continue to grow for days. My only solace was that we’d been in public the whole time. They hadn’t been able to do anything worse than grip me too tightly as they dragged me through the halls and threw me into the waiting chair.
I held myself as close to perfectly still as I could manage, keeping my eyes on the mirror that wasn’t a mirror. In an odd way, this little room, with its lack of decoration or ornamentation, was a relief. There was nothing here that could hurt me, although I was sure there was something that could hurt me on the other side of that “mirror.” Everything was contained and clearly defined, and I felt like I could breathe for the first time in weeks.
Maybe best of all, I wasn’t back at the little house we’d been assigned, trying to tell Carrie why Paul wasn’t coming back. She wouldn’t understand. I didn’t understand. Paul had been checked out as clean before he was allowed to enter the quarantine zone—all the civilians had. The only reason I hadn’t been checked was Colonel Mitchell, and he wouldn’t have pulled those strings for anybody else. So how had Paul, who should have been safe, wound up with a SymboGen implant burrowing its way into his brain?
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 anymore, 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.
It was difficult to describe the hot warm dark in words. Nathan could never wrap his head around the idea that it was hot and warm at the same time, that the two things were different states that could coexist without difficulty. There was no color there, because I had no eyes when I was there, but it was still a kind, red world, even when everything was washed away by blackness. Those contradictions didn’t seem contradictory at all. Not when I was there.
I moved through the hot warm dark, and time fell away, leaving me in an eternal, peaceful now. “Moved” wasn’t the right word; I knew I wasn’t moving. There wasn’t room inside the cathedral of Sally’s skull for me to do anything but sleep. Still, some part of me remembered what it had been to move through her body, free and twisting like a ribbon in the tissues of her flesh, and that was the part that ruled when I was in the hot warm dark.
As I moved, I tried to think. It was becoming increasingly clear that I needed to find a way out of here—I should have tried to find it the minute I was taken. The electrical prods the soldiers used as nonlethal prisoner control had frightened me so badly that I’d stopped moving forward, choosing instead to stay where I was and wait for the situation to change around me. Well, the situation had changed. I needed to go.
The quarantine zone was protected by fences and patrols. If there were weak spots in the fences, no one I knew was talking about them, and while there was a black market inside the fence, it seemed to be entirely based on selling things that had been scavenged from homes and businesses. I hadn’t heard anything, from anyone, about goods coming in from the outside. It was possible that my position as the Colonel’s daughter meant that no one wanted to talk to me, but I doubted it. Carrie, Paul, and the rest of my housemates had accepted me as one of their own. If they’d known anything, I would have known it too.
Trucks left from the Coliseum and entered the quarantine zone daily, carrying soldiers who swept the surrounding areas for survivors and supplies that were starting to run low inside the fence. It was government-sanctioned looting, and it might represent my best chance of getting out of here. If I could somehow get onto one of those trucks…
… which would be packed full of soldiers with guns and cattle prods. Soldiers who could legitimately claim that they hadn’t realized who I was before they shot me, or even worse, shocked me. The thought of dying was sad and scary. I wanted to make it back to my family. I didn’t want to die without them knowing what had happened to me. The thought of being shocked again was terrifying. Death was an end. Electrocution could leave me stranded and still aware in Sally’s body, but unable to control it ever again. No. The trucks weren’t the answer.
Unless I could steal one.
The thought was shocking enough to pull me out of the dark and back into the bright, sterile light of the interrogation room. My eyes snapped open, the enormity of the idea sinking in. I could steal one. Not without help—I didn’t know how to drive—but there were people here who could help me. There was Carrie. She wanted out as badly as I did, and she was going to want out even more now that Paul was gone. The spontaneous infections would lend an element of randomness to the situation, but if I could get her brought here…
They wouldn’t be keeping us in quarantine if they didn’t want to keep as many people alive as possible. I stood, walking over to the mirror. “Hey,” I said, raising my voice to make sure that it would be audible to the speakers I knew had to be present. “Hey, is someone there? I just remembered something. The man who got sick, his name was Paul. His wife, Carrie, is back at the house. And she wasn’t feeling good this morning, either.”
I’m sorry, Carrie, I thought. Her boyfriend, lover, whatever he actually was to her was dead, and she might not even know it yet, depending on how quickly the patrol had removed me from the area. Paul was dead, and now I was having her yanked out of her home and thrown into isolation, and for what? So I could steal a truck and have someone to drive it for me?
I was sorry, but that didn’t change the necessity of what I was doing. I needed a truck. I needed a driver. Who better to serve than the widow of a man who’d just been executed in cold blood by USAMRIID’s soldiers?
There was a clicking sound from somewhere above me, and a female voice said, “Thank you for the information. Please step away from the door.”
With dawning horror, I recognized the speaker as the woman from the shower, the nameless sergeant who’d threatened to make me eat my own vomit after she punched me in the stomach. I stepped backward, stopping only when my thighs hit the side of the table hard enough to add another bruise to my growing collection. The drums in my ears pounded harder than ever, almost dizzying me with their volume. She hated me. She hated me, and Colonel Mitchell was gone, and I didn’t know how she was planning to subdue me, I didn’t know, she could do anything—
The door opened, and there she was, terrible in her uniform, a cattle prod in her hands. There were two more soldiers behind her, but I couldn’t focus on them: All my attention was claimed by the terrible thing she was holding.
“Seems someone told the Colonel there was some question about how you’d been handled by his people,” she said in a low, dangerous tone. “Seems he’s concerned about how many bruises you’ve managed to pick up bumbling around out there. We pointed out that Pleasanton is a pretty dangerous place, but he was dubious. Seems like he wants to believe his precious little princess. So we’re going to have to be extra careful with you from now on.”
“I won’t resist,” I said quickly. “Look, I’m not resisting. I’m not running I’m not fighting I’m not doing anything at all. Please. You don’t have to shock me. I’ll go willingly.”
“Oh, I know you will,” she said, and smiled. “But no one’s looking just now, and you’re already denying us so much of our fun. You’ve got to admit that wasn’t very nice. Means we’ll have to be a little more creative.”
“Please don—”
My words were cut off when the end of the cattle prod slammed into my stomach. Everything was static and pain, and then everything was gone.
The hot warm dark had become a haven since I had become a human, but there was a time when it had been my prison: when it had sketched out the boundaries of my existence, confining me to the spaces inside another’s body and refusing to allow me anything beyond the scraps she saw fit to throw my way. I hadn’t known resentment then, hadn’t understood what it was to yearn for what you couldn’t have; all I’d known had been survival, and some deep-coded impulse in my genetic code that had ordered me to swim up, out of the darkness, into the light.
Since the first time I had opened Sally’s eyes, I had regarded the hot warm dark as my special, secret place. Even Sherman had admitted what a strange thing it was that I could go back there at will—for most chimera, once they came out of the dark, its doors were closed to them forever after. I was a lucky girl.
And now I was trapped.
I moved through the hot warm dark like I was running from the monster in a horror movie, knowing the illusion of motion was just that—an illusion—but unable to make myself stop. I didn’t know whether Sally’s eyes were closed or whether the electricity had somehow managed to break the connection between me and her optic nerves, and the fact that I kept thinking of my body as her body told me just how cut off I was, how far removed I suddenly was from the existence that should have been my own.
Please, I moaned, and there was no sound, because I had no lips, or mouth, or throat. Was this what it had been like for Tansy when Dr. Banks split her skull open and started severing the connections that bound her to the body she controlled? Had she thrashed in nothingness, reaching frantically for any sign that her existence still had weight or purpose? She’d always been a little neuro-atypical, but most of that had been a consequence of the body she was in, which had suffered some damage before Tansy took it over. Had she felt her sanity melting away in the isolation, when what should have become a privilege became a prison?
Please. This time my moan was a whimper, and it was just as quiet as it had been before.
I stopped trying to move through the hot warm dark and sank deeper, letting go of the motive force that had driven me to seek a way through, a way out. It was over. I had lost. I had taken this body when it hadn’t been mine, and now, finally, it had been taken away from me. I was going to die here. I might as well have been dead already.
Wait.
I had taken this body. I had been completely unaware of what I was and what I was doing, but instinct had been enough to let me make the connections between Sally Mitchell’s abandoned brain and my own boneless form. Her brain tissue and my body were essentially the same, when you really looked at them. They were both quivering tubes of protein, folded back on themselves dozens, even hundreds of times, until they formed something functional.
I had claimed ownership of this body when I couldn’t think, couldn’t make choices for myself, couldn’t do anything but follow the instincts that had been unwittingly built into me by the scientists who designed my genetic code. Even sleepwalkers could manage to do it, and the damage they did in the process was all a consequence of getting into the brain. I was already there. I had made myself a comfortable bed, and the tissue had folded itself around me, accepting me as a part of itself. I couldn’t damage anything if I was careful.
Where was the hot warm dark? The hot warm dark was in my memory, and in my original body, the one I had forgotten for so very, terribly long. It was in the smooth white flesh and flower-shaped head of a tapeworm, sheltered in the delicate folds of a human brain.
Tapeworms didn’t have eyes: I couldn’t open them, couldn’t do anything to make myself more aware of my environment. But I could accept myself. Bit by bit, I let go of the idea of myself as a human being, as a bipedal creature with hands and arms and eyes and teeth. Instead, I thought of myself as long and fine and ribbonlike, designed for dark places, created to survive no matter what. I thought of myself as I had once been without thinking about it, as the creature that had hatched from an egg created in a SymboGen lab.
Part of me still wanted to regard my origins as shameful, but why should I? Everything started from an egg, even human children. There was nothing wrong with the way I was born. I was alive now, and that was what mattered. I was alive, and I was going to stay that way, no matter what the consequences—no matter what the costs.
The hot warm dark seemed to fade around me, replaced by a new kind of awareness, like the world had contracted still further and somehow become bigger at the same time, maybe because I had become so unbelievably much smaller. The world was black now, not red, but the heat, the warmth, the reality of the hot warm remained. This was where I had begun.
So begin again, I thought fiercely. I felt myself twitch, a squamous, slick feeling that had little to do with the kind of motion that had become so familiar to me since the day I woke up in Sally Mitchell’s hospital bed. But this was me, too, and I needed to accept that, or I was never getting out of here.
Begin again, I thought, and the twitch repeated itself, my body responding to my commands without bothering to take the time to explain what it was doing—and that was all right, really, because I was so divorced from my original form that I couldn’t have understood if I’d tried to tell myself. There wasn’t time for that. There was only time to hope that this would work, that I had found the way out after all.
All I had to do was open my eyes.
All I had to do was open my eyes.
All I had to do—
I opened my eyes.
I was once again lying on a cold concrete floor. There was a vent set into the ceiling high above me. Plastic billowed down from it, belling out to form an umbrella shape. The quarantine bubbles. When I’d been taken by USAMRIID the first time, the time that Sherman came to break me out, they had placed me in a quarantine bubble for study before they decided what to do with me. There had been dozens of other bubbles visible from mine; they must have cycled the entire current population of Pleasanton through this facility.
I was so busy thinking about what the plastic meant that it took me a few seconds to realize I could see the plastic. My eyes were working again. I focused on the rest of my body, looking for the places where my limbs diverged from the mass of my torso and hips. Finding my fingers shouldn’t have required an effort, but it did; they were slightly numb, like they had gone to sleep and weren’t quite ready to get out of bed yet.
Too bad, I thought, and forced them to move, bending each of them in turn until I was sure that they were all present and accounted for. The numbness had faded by the time I finished. I turned my hands over, pressing them against the cold floor until my palms felt fully responsive. Then I pushed, and slowly, laboriously, worked my way into a sitting position.
“You’re alive.” The voice was dull, uninflected.
I turned slowly, still trying to wake up my sluggish muscles, and found myself looking at Carrie. She was sitting on the bubble’s single narrow cot, still wearing her coat over her slightly grimy sweater and jeans. Tears had drawn tracks through the dirt on her cheeks. I hadn’t realized how filthy she’d become until seeing her here, in a sterile environment.
“Did they hurt you?” I asked. There were no traces of sleepwalker pheromones in the air; Carrie was still unaffected by whatever was causing the spontaneous infections among the quarantine subjects and Colonel Mitchell’s men. That was a good thing. Sleepwalkers couldn’t drive.
I was sorry for the thought as soon as I had it. There was being practical, and then there was being inhumane. I didn’t want to allow the first to make me become the second.
“They shoved me around, but they didn’t hurt me,” said Carrie. A tear ran down her cheek, drawing another line through the dirt. “Is it true what they said? About Paul? Did he really become one of those… those things?”
“Carrie, I’m sorry.” I gathered my limbs, pushing myself away from the floor again until I was standing, unsteady as a newborn puppy. I felt like I was a little numb, a little distanced from myself. That would pass with time… or, if it was the cost of reconnecting with my original body, it wouldn’t. It had still been worth it, to claw my way back up out of the dark, to find my way back to a world where there was light, and motion, and the chance that I could still find a way home.
She looked at me for a moment, lower lip wobbling like she was trying to keep her feelings inside and failing, one escaping tear at a time. “How is that even possible?” she asked. “He was clean. We were both clean. The Army made sure of that before they locked us up. He can’t have become one of those things.”
“But he did,” I said. I risked a step forward, toward the bed. It felt clunky, disconnected, and I nearly fell when my foot hit the floor bent wrong. I managed to turn it into a stumble, and took another step. “I’m so sorry. He was already almost gone when I found him.”
“I should’ve gone with you,” she whispered, and ducked her head, bracing her chin against her chest. “I shouldn’t have let you go alone. He deserved… you shouldn’t have been… I should have gone with you. I should have been there for him.”
“I don’t think he would have wanted you to see him like that,” I said. I took another step forward before allowing myself to half fall onto the bed. Carrie blinked at my impact, but she didn’t move away. She still didn’t know about me. That was for the best, for both of us. “Paul was almost gone when I found him, and it would have taken longer for the two of us to get there, if we’d been traveling together. Just remember him. Remember why you loved him. And be glad you didn’t have to see.”
Carrie shook her head. “Maybe it wasn’t Paul.”
“It was.”
“Maybe it wasn’t!” The sheer force of her denial raised her voice, and the gently curved walls of our bubble bounced it back at us, making it seem loud enough to fill the whole world. Carrie came out of her curl and turned to me, her eyes blazing with the need to make me see, to make me understand. “Maybe it was somebody else, there are lots of people in the quarantine zone, and it could have been somebody else, somebody who just looked.… looked sort of like him, enough like him to fool you but not enough to fool me. He could still be out there!”
“Carrie…”
“All those things look alike, they’re all hungry and snarling, how could you be sure? How could you really know that it was him? Maybe it wasn’t.”
“I knew it was him because he wasn’t all the way gone when we found him,” I said. The memories were fresh and raw. I felt even worse for him now than I had then. How quickly had the cousin burrowing into his brain wiped away human consciousness? Had Paul become a passenger in his own body, trapped the way I had been? “He spoke to me, Carrie. He knew who I was. And then he was just gone.”
“Before the bastards shot him?”
Nothing I could say was going to ease her pain, and so I said nothing at all. I just nodded, watching her eyes for some sign that she understood me, that she was following what I had to say.
Carrie’s eyes filled with fresh tears. “God,” she said. “God.” She punched the bed with both hands, slamming them down so hard that I worried, briefly, that she had broken a finger. That might make it more difficult for her to drive. “He died, and I wasn’t there. I sent a stranger. And now I’m in here. Why am I in here?”
“Didn’t they tell you?” I asked anxiously.
Her laugh was short and bitter, the laughter of a woman who had given up on hoping for the best from the world and was now resigned to expecting nothing but the worst. “Since when have these assholes been in the business of telling us anything, Sal? A bunch of men in camo showed up on the doorstep, grabbed me, informed the rest of the house that they’d be getting three new roommates, and dragged me back to their truck. We were halfway here before they told me Paul was dead. How is any of this happening? This can’t be the real world. It just can’t be.”
“I’m sorry.” It was a useless comment, and I wasn’t fully sure what I meant by it. I hadn’t created this world. I hadn’t created the cousins. But I could apologize for all of it, and if that was what Carrie needed me to do, I was going to do it. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“They wouldn’t even let me see his body.” She dragged the heel of her hand across her cheek, smearing the grime. “We used to joke about what we wanted to have done with our bodies after we died. Paul wanted to go to the Body Farm and help the FBI study the effects of exposure on the human body. He thought it would be great to just hang out in the government facility, rotting. And now I g-guess he got his wish…”
That seemed to be the last straw. Carrie buried her face in her hands and sobbed, curling in on herself like she could shut out the rest of the world. I pulled back, not touching her. She needed to come through this on her own. If she seemed to be rendered insensate by her grief, I could find another driver. I wasn’t sure where, or how, but I would do it if that was what I had to do.
It might be better that way, honestly. Carrie was emotionally compromised, and I didn’t know if I could trust her to get me out of here. She was also the only person I currently had access to. Sometimes you have to work with the materials at hand.
“I’m sorry.” I patted her, awkwardly, on the back before leaning as close as I could and whispering in her ear, “I told them you were sick too, so they’d get you out of the quarantine zone. I need your help.”
“What?” She whipped around to face me. Her eyes were so wide that I could see rings of white all the way around her irises, making her look almost cartoony. “But I’m not—”
I motioned frantically for her to shush. She stopped herself mid-sentence, and just stared at me.
I leaned forward, getting close to her ear once again, and murmured, “I know you’re not. The question is, do they know? Or did they put you in here with me to find out what would happen?” Even if Colonel Mitchell had been able to successfully convince himself that I was Sally—and I still didn’t know whether that was the case; he’d played a long game before, and he could have been doing it again. He knew I had a tapeworm inside my skull. Since I’d seen Joyce, there had been no more talk of surgery or making an effort to remove my implant. I was incredibly grateful for that, since removing the implant would have killed me instantly, but…
They had to know that sleepwalkers were triggered by the presence of other sleepwalkers. Implants that had integrated put off very different pheromone tags than implants that were still quiescent, and those tags seemed to carry a sort of… instruction manual for taking over a host. We still didn’t know whether chimera had the same effect. Dr. Cale didn’t know. We didn’t release the pheromones that triggered migration in sleepwalkers, but that didn’t mean we weren’t releasing other coded messages, silent, secret instructions for the cousins to follow. Maybe I hadn’t said “convert,” but I could have said “wake up.”
Had Paul gotten sick faster than he normally would have because he was sharing a house with me? I couldn’t deny the possibility. So had they put Carrie in my bubble to see whether proximity would make her get sick faster? What kind of game were they playing here?
Carrie shot me a horrified look before whispering back, “What do you mean, ‘What would happen’?”
I could tell her, or I could keep my secret a little longer. I didn’t like lying to her, not when I was about to try to convince her to drive me out of here, but telling her the truth could very easily result in her panicking and refusing to help me at all. I took a breath and answered, “The Colonel’s wife hates me. She says I’m not really her daughter. If you’re supposed to be getting sick, why would they lock me up with you, unless it was to see if you’d kill me?”
“That’s stupid,” she said, louder than I liked. She pulled away. “Why would anyone do that?”
“Why would anyone do any of this?” We were probably being monitored. I moved closer again, trying to use my hair as a veil to hide the motion of my lips. “Things were bad when they put us in here, and you know they’ve just gotten worse since then. Haven’t you noticed that there aren’t any new soldiers around? There’s no backup coming. There’s no support. Of course they’re going to start getting desperate, and doing whatever they can for data.”
“But you’re his daughter.”
“I’m his little traitor. And you’re the wife of a man who got sick when he shouldn’t have been able to. We’re both expendable in our own ways.” I wasn’t quite lying, not yet, but I was bending and eluding the truth, shaping it into my own creation. The thought made me feel nauseous, and set the drums pounding harder still in my ears. I didn’t want to be a liar. Sherman and Dr. Banks and my father, they were liars, and they weren’t the people I wanted to become.
“We have to get out of here,” said Carrie.
I had been trying to lead her to this conclusion. I restrained myself to a small nod as I agreed, “We do.”
“But how?”
That was where my plan fell apart. I had expected them to lock me and Carrie in a room, not in one of the quarantine bubbles. I sat up straighter and looked around. When Sherman had broken me out of here, he’d used a chemical compound to melt the plastic. I didn’t have that. There were no seams or openings, apart from the place where the bubble joined up with the vent; I had to assume that when the soldiers came to feed us or move us, they’d open the bubble in the same way.
I didn’t have a knife. I didn’t even have an underwire in my bra—and even if I had, using it would have assumed that we weren’t being watched somehow, and that the soldiers wouldn’t show up the second I started trying to puncture the plastic. We were in a completely exposed situation, with no weapons, no way to take the tactical advantage, and no combat training.
Well. I didn’t have any combat training. “Do you know how to fight?” I asked.
“Not really? I took a few years of self-defense in college. I can mostly handle myself in a fight, as long as running away is an option.”
I nodded slowly. “All right,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do…”