The bodies were relatively fresh, which explained why the smell of decay hadn’t slapped us when we stepped into the Old Navy; that, and the fact that all the air was flowing in, not flowing out. They must have crawled off here to die sometime within the last two days, collapsing in insensate heaps before they finally gave up fighting.
I stepped between the bodies, trying to ignore the whimpering sounds that Carrie was making behind me, and scanned their slack faces for any sign of what had happened to them. It was too dark for me to make out fine details, but I couldn’t find even broad strokes to point me in the right direction. Some of them had vomited before they died, while others were clean-faced and even serene-looking. The faint smells of bodily waste and decay drifted up from the floor. They smelled… clean, like they were supposed to smell, and not tainted by any outside source.
The pheromones were another story. They were a jumbled mess, some with the complexity I was coming to associate with “old” sleepwalkers, others as fresh and unrefined as the traces I’d gotten off of Paul before he died. It didn’t make any sense. Either I was so tired and shocky from my unplanned swim that I could no longer understand what my mind was trying to tell me, or something had caused the cousins inside these hosts to start double-producing the chemical tags that defined them.
“Sal, come back here,” said Carrie, her voice a harsh whisper through the dark. I knew she was right, that I should be taking care of myself rather than trying to make sense of things, but at the same time, I knew she was wrong. If something was killing the sleepwalkers, I needed to know what it was, and I needed to know now… because there was every chance in the world I was vulnerable.
Then something moved up ahead of me, and everything changed.
“There’s someone in here,” I said, taking another step forward.
Carrie moaned. It was a frustrated, agonized, human sound, not a sleepwalker’s inchoate hunger, but it still made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in uneasy horror. “No, no, no,” she said. “It’s one of those things. If something is killing them all off, then you should just let it. Don’t go looking for trouble. Don’t do this.”
It didn’t sound like she was coming any closer. That was good. If there was danger in the darkness, I didn’t want to pull her into it. I had used her to make my escape, but that didn’t mean I wanted her dead. “I have to,” I said, and kept walking.
There was a click behind me as she thumbed off the safety on her gun once again. “Don’t do this,” she repeated.
I stopped, looking back over my shoulder. With the light behind her, she was nothing but an outline of a woman, a dark shape against the windows. “Is that how this is going to be from now on?” I asked. “Every time I do something you don’t like, you’re going to draw your gun on me and threaten until I agree to go along with you? Because that’s not going to work for me, Carrie. I’m not your slave, and having a gun doesn’t put you in charge.”
“You’re going to get us both killed!”
“I don’t think so. But if you’re really worried about it, you can go wait for me outside. I need to see what’s going on.” I turned my back on her and took another step into the dark, heading for the motion I’d seen before. I could hear Carrie moving around behind me. I kept walking. If she wanted to shoot me, I couldn’t stop her. She had the gun. All I could do by turning back now was cement her position as “leader” of our little pairing, and I couldn’t afford that any more than I could afford a gunshot wound. I needed to find my way home. That meant Carrie wasn’t in control.
The shot didn’t come. The motion up ahead was repeated, and I picked my way through the bodies and over fallen clothes racks until I saw its source: a thin, huddled figure, probably no older than four or five, packed into a crevice between two of the fallen sleepwalkers. It was too dark for me to tell gender, or anything other than the fact that this was a person, this was someone who was alive and moving and capable of getting out of here.
The pheromones in this little corner of the store smelled subtly different. Not wrong, exactly, but different, like something had happened to modify them from within. “Hello?” I said cautiously, hanging back in case my survivor turned out to be a sleepwalker after all. They would eat dead bodies, and the more high-functioning ones wouldn’t usually go for targets they couldn’t take down, but I didn’t feel like taking the chance if I didn’t have to.
The thought was almost comical. If I didn’t feel like “taking the chance,” what the hell was I doing in a dark store, surrounded by corpses, trying to talk to the only person left alive?
The figure scuffed one foot against the tile, lifting its head like it was trying to get a better look at me. It didn’t speak, and didn’t moan. It just sat there, small and still and frightened.
“My name’s Sal,” I said. “Do you have a name? Do you remember your name?”
The child—and it was a child, short and slim and small, even compacted on itself as it was—hesitated before saying, awkwardly, “Sal.” The word had an atonal non-accent, like the speaker had never heard language before. It lacked the moan sleepwalkers always had when they parroted speech.
I risked a small step closer. “That’s my name,” I said. “What’s your name?” Chimera were essentially fully integrated sleepwalkers. Maybe this child had a chimera parent, or a parent who had become a sleepwalker capable of functioning at a previously unknown level. It wasn’t impossible to think that a sleepwalker who was well fed could still have protective instincts. They were damaged, but they were still people.
Silence.
“Do you have a name?”
Silence.
I took another step closer. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” I kept my voice as low and soothing as possible. I didn’t want to frighten the child while I was trying to figure out what was going on. “Why are you hiding back here?”
“Sal!” The child moved without warning, pushing itself forward and flinging its arms around my calves. It clung hard, holding on like it was afraid I might cease to exist at any moment. It didn’t try to bite. I blinked, bending down to stroke the child’s hair… and froze.
Chimera put off pheromone tags just like sleepwalkers, but ours are thinner, subtler, less easily detected. Something about the way we slot into human brains slows production, replacing it with a sort of radar for one another, a strong pull toward unity. It was what had drawn me to Sherman, even before I had known what he was. It was how I had been able to accept Adam as my brother, even as I’d been rejecting the reality of my own origins. Chimera knew each other, and chimera cared for each other.
And the child clinging to my legs like it had just discovered salvation was a chimera. Somehow, it was a chimera. I stroked its hair automatically, staring into the dark, and wondered whether there was any way for me to resist the pull that told me that I had to take care of this new complication.
I had no idea what I was going to do now.
Carrie had retreated outside by the time I emerged carrying the child in my arms like a bundle of rolled laundry. It was a little girl: That had become clear when I carried her into the light, revealing her smooth brown skin and tousled black curls. Her eyes were closed, and had been since we reached the edge of the sunlit zone. I remembered how much trouble I’d had with light when I was first waking up, how strange and painful and unnecessary it had seemed. I wondered whether she was having the same issue, still trying to get her tapeworm brain, which was small but commanded a surprising number of instinctive reactions, to understand that her human brain was correct when it told her the light was never going to go away.
The adjustment wasn’t going to be easy. It hadn’t been easy for me, and I’d been in a hospital bed, surrounded by people assuring me that I was a human being with a name and an identity I could reclaim, if I worked hard enough. They’d done a lot of damage with those lies, but they’d helped me, too, because they’d given me a clear goal to work toward. I could be Sally Mitchell, if I worked hard enough.
Who was this little girl going to be?
Carrie whirled toward the sound of my footsteps, her expression washing with shock and suspicion when she saw the child in my arms. “What is that?” she demanded.
“It’s a little girl,” I said. “I mean, I think it’s a little girl. I guess she might want to be a little boy once she’s had time to think about it. It’s a kid. You’ve seen kids before. We were just living with one, remember?”
Carrie’s suspicion didn’t fade. “There’s no way she’s not one of those things,” she spat. “Put her down and get away from her.”
Technically, Carrie was right. The child was definitely one of “those things.” She just wasn’t a sleepwalker, and that distinction made all the difference in the world. “She’s not,” I said. “She didn’t try to attack me. She just grabbed my legs and held on, because she’s a kid. A terrified kid.”
“Why isn’t she talking?”
“Trauma? This freaked me out, and I’m a grown-up.” I adjusted my hold on the little girl. She wasn’t moving, wasn’t speaking; was just huddling against me, clearly trusting me to take care of her. In the absence of anything else, she was running off her biological programming, and it said that any other chimera was there to defend her.
It was a good thing Sherman hadn’t found her first. He would have taken advantage of that, the same way he took advantage of everything else. Even if I didn’t want the responsibility of protecting something other than myself, I knew that I would do better than he would.
Carrie stared at me, clearly fumbling for something else to say, something that would make me understand what a mistake I was making. She couldn’t find it, so she threw down the only weapon she had: “You can’t bring her with us.”
“She’ll die if I leave her here. There’s no one to take care of her.” I was starting to think my guess about the girl’s age—somewhere between four and six—was correct: She was small enough for me to carry, but large enough that she was going to become too heavy before much longer. I wondered whether her host’s age would make a difference in how fast she learned things like walking and speaking. Her brain was more elastic than mine had been when I first took it over.
Maybe I should have felt guilty about how quickly I was dismissing the personhood of the human girl my newfound chimera had replaced, but I didn’t have time for that sort of wasted emotion. All the guilt in the world wasn’t going to bring back the lost.
“So let her die,” said Carrie. “She’s not coming with us.”
I blinked before I shrugged, and said, “I guess that means I’m not coming with you. Thanks for helping me get out of the quarantine. Good luck getting wherever you’re going from here.” I turned away. The sun would be fully down soon. We needed to get somewhere warm and dry, and start figuring out where we were going to go next.
“Wait!”
I looked back over my shoulder at Carrie, who had her hand outstretched, like that would stop me. “What? You said you wouldn’t go with the girl. I won’t leave her. That means we have to split up.”
“You can’t do this. You’re the one who made me steal that car.”
“You could have refused. You did it because you wanted to. You didn’t want to stay in a place where you were treated like a prisoner, where your husband had died, and I offered you a way out. You faked a seizure and stole a car because you wanted to.”
“I didn’t want to do this,” she said, and suddenly the gun was in her hand again, pointed at me. “Put her down and get back over here. You’re not leaving me.”
I sighed as I turned fully back toward her so that she couldn’t pretend the child in my arms was anything but that: a child, a living being. It wasn’t my fault if Carrie would take the girl as a member of her species rather than as a member of mine. “What are you going to do, shoot me? This is the third time you’ve drawn your gun on me since we got here. It’s been less than an hour. I can’t travel with you if I can’t trust you—and I can’t trust you if your response to not getting your way is going to be threatening to shoot me every single time. That makes you worse than USAMRIID. You know that, don’t you?”
Carrie’s chin wobbled, but her aim remained steady. “I don’t care. You’re not leaving me alone out here.”
“I don’t have to leave you alone out here. You could come with us.”
“You still haven’t told me where you’re going!”
“I’m going to find my family. My real family, the ones who care about me and want to protect me from people like the Colonel. I know they’re out here. I just have to figure out where they’ve gone.” And just like that, I knew where I was going to go next. Dr. Cale would have left a clue in the wreckage of the candy factory. I knew it. Even if it was something so small as to be virtually unfindable, it would be there, and it would be meant for me. USAMRIID would never have been able to use it to track her down. I would. I would find them.
All I had to do was get from Oakland to Vallejo, across miles of sleepwalker-controlled territory, evading USAMRIID patrols and gangs of human looters. If Carrie didn’t see the necessity of my plan, then I would do it on foot. I had done worse things in my time.
Carrie shook her head. “There’s no way. Your family can’t have survived this and stayed free. No one’s can.”
“Mine can.” Dr. Cale was smart and tenacious, and she was surrounded by good people. Fang, Fishy… Nathan. They would have been able to get her out of there before USAMRIID showed up to take her into custody. I knew Colonel Mitchell didn’t have hands on her. If he had, he wouldn’t have been bothering with me. He would have gone straight for the goose that laid the golden eggs, and I could have stayed in the quarantine zone to rot.
At one point he hadn’t been taking her in because he thought she did better work when she wasn’t under lock and key. Now… I seriously suspected he’d been telling the truth when he said he wasn’t bringing her in because he no longer knew how to find her.
Carrie frowned. Then, slowly, she lowered her gun. “What’s your deal, Sal? You’re the Colonel’s daughter, but you live in the mud with the rest of us. You’re a total pushover until you start planning escapes that involve driving cars into the water. And you’re not nearly as scared of a woman with a gun as you should be.”
“My father disowned me when he decided he didn’t like the people I was spending time with—my real family. They might not be biologically related to me, but they love me, and they respect my choices, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. His wife hates me for existing, and for not being her daughter.” Too late, I realized that I’d just made myself sound like the product of an affair. Well, that wasn’t too far off the mark. I decided not to try explaining myself. “I know Dr. Cale will have been trying to figure out how to get me out of quarantine. If she hears that there’s been an escape, she—”
“Wait, what?” Carrie’s gun was suddenly raised again, aimed at the center mass of my chest. The little girl I was holding didn’t react. She was too new to the world of physical things like guns and threatening gestures to understand what was going on, and I was grateful for that. “Who?”
Oops. “Dr. Cale. She’s the boss of the lab where I live.” I didn’t work there. I didn’t have the training, the experience, or the high school reading level necessary to observe lab-safety protocols. I helped in hydroponics, and took care of the animals that we kept for both research and food purposes, but actual lab work was beyond me, and attempting it would probably have resulted in somebody getting killed.
“Dr. Shanti Cale?” asked Carrie, sounding utterly appalled.
Again, oops. “Look, I know what you’re thinking, and this isn’t her fault. She wasn’t the one who decided to release the implants to the general public. She—”
“She created the damned things! How could this be anybody’s fault but hers?” Carrie waved her gun in a way that made me want to start moving backward. I knew better. Attempts to get out of range were going to end with me getting shot. “She’s the one who made this whole mess. How can you be working with her?”
“I told you, I don’t work with her, I just live with her. And she’s not the one to blame for everything that’s happened. That’s Dr. Steven Banks, at SymboGen, and honestly, that’s the people at USAMRIID. They knew there was something wrong with the implants years ago, and they didn’t do anything.” There might have been corporate protections for Dr. Banks to hide behind, but that didn’t mean the government had been forced to stay silent. They could have started sounding the alarm bells. Instead, they’d hung back, waiting for the perfect smoking gun, and had allowed the SymboGen implants to become entrenched in all levels of society, all over the world.
How many people would have lived if someone had decided to start telling the truth about the SymboGen implants? How many lives could have been saved if there had been an alternative?
Maybe that was a question I should have been asking Dr. Cale—but then, she’d never been in a position to show her hand. Not with the government playing nicely with Dr. Banks, and Dr. Banks gunning to have her taken out of the picture on a permanent basis. Her hands had been tied the minute the Intestinal Bodyguard went on the open market. It was the people who’d come after her who were to blame for what happened. Dr. Cale had followed the exact same imperative as her children: survival, at all costs. I couldn’t blame her for that without blaming myself, or blaming the little girl huddled in my arms, her sweet pheromone tags wafting through the gathering twilight. She had as much right to live as anyone else. It didn’t matter whether she’d been created in a womb or in a test tube. She was alive. She got to live.
“She’s a monster,” spat Carrie, and for a moment I couldn’t tell whether she meant Dr. Cale or the child in my arms.
It didn’t matter. Maybe it never had. “We’re all monsters,” I said. “Being a monster is not the same as being a bad person. It just means you’re willing to eat the world if that’s what you have to do to keep yourself alive. You really want to tell me that you wouldn’t eat the world if that was what you had to do? That you wouldn’t unhinge your jaw and swallow the sky if it brought Paul back? You’re no better than Dr. Cale. Maybe you’re even worse. You’re not willing to admit that you’re a monster too, and you should. You should just let yourself be the monster that you want to be. Maybe then you wouldn’t feel the need to hide behind a gun all the time.”
Carrie stared at me. “You’re insane.”
“I hate that word. All it means is ‘you don’t think like I do,’ and by that standard, everyone is insane. It’s a meaningless idea. If what you mean is ‘you’re dangerous,’ I got you out, Carrie. I made sure they told you about what had happened to Paul. I helped you get out of there before they could start taking samples to figure out why it hadn’t happened to you too. I saved you. I didn’t have to do that.”
“You can’t drive. How were you going to get out of there without me?”
I shrugged. “I would have found a way.” And I would have. I would have found a way, and if it hadn’t worked, I would have tried something else, and something else after that, until I either got out or got myself killed in the process of trying. My patience had already been worn almost to the bone when Paul got sick. I’d only been staying because I was afraid. Maybe part of me had hoped that I could do something for Joyce, even if it was nothing more than convincing her father that it was time to let her go. He’d been willing to unplug me once, when he thought that I was gone. I could have convinced him to do the same for her.
“You needed me.”
“Yes,” I said calmly. “I’m not denying that I needed you. But I don’t need you anymore. So you can shoot me, or you can walk away, or you can come with me. I’m not going to stay with you if you’re going to insist on drawing a gun every time you want to get your way. I’m not stupid, Carrie.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Could’ve fooled me. You walked into a nest of those things.”
“I went to investigate a bunch of corpses. I came out with a little girl who needed my help.” I looked up at the darkening sky. “It’s going to be night soon. If there are any sleepwalkers left around here, that’s when they’ll start hunting. We need to get out of the open. Are we doing it together, or are we doing it in opposite directions? I’ll let you pick first, if you want to separate. You can have whatever direction you want.”
Carrie lowered her gun again, visibly shaken. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean that. You don’t need me. I can find a way to get where I’m going without you.” Traveling from Oakland to Vallejo on foot, with a newborn chimera who hadn’t figured out how to walk, while trying to read maps that might as well have been written in Latin… it wasn’t going to be easy. It was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done, and that included coming to terms with my own biology. I was still going to do it. My survival depended on it.
So did the little girl’s, and part of me resented the fact that I had so quickly slaved my survival to hers. This was one quirk of biology that I hadn’t been prepared for. It was going to take me some time to get used to it.
Carrie hesitated. Then she shoved the gun back into the waistband of her pants. “I want to stay together.”
I looked at her warily. “If you pull that on me one more time, I’m gone. You understand that, right? If you pull it on me, or on her,” I indicated the chimera girl with my chin, “I will take her, and I will leave, and I will not come back.”
“I understand,” she said quietly.
“I need to get to Vallejo. I know you were picked up in San Francisco. Is anyone else waiting for you there?”
This time she shook her head. “No. Paul and I worked for the same company—that’s why we were together when the Army picked us up. Everyone else in that building can fend for themselves. I don’t owe anything to any of them.”
“All right,” I said. “We stay together. Now, let’s get under cover. It’s going to get cold soon.”
We wound up taking refuge in a diner that had no broken windows, and smelled only faintly of dust and spoiled food. I wouldn’t have wanted to open the refrigerator, which was probably dripping with rot, but the booths were padded in red vinyl, and there was no one else there with us.
Carrie found the diner’s earthquake kit behind the counter and set up a pair of lanterns in the back of the dining room, where the light wouldn’t be visible from outside. Even then, we wound up bracing cardboard from the supply cupboard next to the bathroom over the windows to prevent leakage. We didn’t talk while we worked. We might not be friends, but we were allies, and capture wouldn’t do either of us any good.
I settled the chimera girl in one of the overstuffed booths, getting her comfortable while we secured the diner. When I returned, she had pulled herself into a sitting position and was watching me with wary, curious eyes.
“Hello,” I said.
“Sal,” she said, and opened her mouth like a baby bird, leaving it hanging for a few seconds before she closed it and looked at me expectantly. She was hungry, and the same instinct that told me she was my sister told her that I would take care of her.
I didn’t want to leave her with Carrie, but I didn’t want to take her with me while I scavenged, either. I bit my lip, trying to decide which would be worse, and finally turned toward Carrie. “She needs to eat, and so do we,” I said. “I’m going to go check the kitchen for things that haven’t spoiled and don’t need to be cooked. Can you stay with her? Make sure she doesn’t fall down or hurt herself, or anything?” We hadn’t been in the kitchen yet. I didn’t know what I was going to find there, or if it would be safe.
Carrie frowned. “You’d trust me with her?”
“I don’t want to, but we need to eat, and I think I have more experience with scavenging for what I need.” We had scavenged at the candy factory, and I had done more supply runs than Carrie had during our time in the quarantine zone. We’d always known that nothing would really hurt me, not while I was under the Colonel’s protection. “Just make sure she doesn’t do anything. I’ll be right back.” With that, I seized one of the lanterns and strode toward the doorway to the kitchen.
The shadows were deeper there, and the smell of decay was stronger. There were no bodies on the floor, which was a relief; I’d been half afraid I would find another group of dead sleepwalkers, like a party favor no one wanted. Most of the stench was coming from the trash cans, which were fuzzed with mold and pulsed with maggots. Flies swarmed overhead, but seemed to give me a wide berth, either because they somehow recognized me as a fellow invertebrate—albeit one in a very fancy suit—or because they were so secure in their resources that didn’t see the need to risk getting swatted.
Flies weren’t intelligent. I knew that. I also knew that tapeworms weren’t capable of rational thought, and yet here I was, skirting the pulsing mounds of maggots with a mixture of professional courtesy and disgust. If Nature had been able to twist science to the point of creating me, who was to say that one day, the houseflies and larvae wouldn’t rise up and demand their piece of the sapience pie? It was better to treat them with something like respect, just in case.
Besides, the mindless hunger of the maggots reminded me too much of the sleepwalkers for comfort. It was better if I didn’t dwell on it. I kept moving.
The pantry didn’t smell of rot: It hadn’t been used for the storage of anything that could go bad that quickly. I found jars of prefabricated spaghetti sauce and gravy, and canned vegetables of every description. There was applesauce, and dry pasta, and even potatoes, which were shriveled and sad-looking. There was an attached door leading to the walk-in freezer. I cracked it open, peering cautiously inside.
The short-order cook who had been on duty when things went all the way wrong looked rigidly back, his face frozen in an expression of permanent regret. I blinked. I should probably have screamed, or jumped, or done something else human and visceral, but I couldn’t. He looked so sad, like he’d never expected this; like he had been so sure that humanity would find a way to fix things before he was forced to do the unthinkable.
There was no blood, and we’d seen no signs of sleepwalker incursion in the diner. I wondered what had driven him to freeze himself like this. Had his implant started to stir, causing him to realize that soon, he’d lose control of his own body? Had he chosen death before loss of identity, stepping into the cold and allowing hypothermia to steal his breath away? It seemed like the same ending, really, but with the added knowledge that someone else wouldn’t be using his body as a weapon after he was gone.
My breath plumed white in front of me, and I realized what else it was: It was proof that the freezer was still working.
I closed the freezer door, barely allowing myself to hope, and turned to scan the pantry wall for the switch I knew must be there. My lantern illuminated it when I had finished half of my turn. I kept going, verifying that there were no windows before I returned to the switch. I reached out, hand shaking slightly, and flicked it.
The light in the pantry came on.
My hands were still shaking as I opened the freezer door again and grabbed a box of premade hamburger patties off the nearest shelf. Maybe they were a sign that the diner had been relatively cheap back in the days when things like that mattered, but right now, they represented the kind of meal I hadn’t eaten since I’d left Dr. Cale’s. Protein, real protein, and as much of it as I wanted to stuff into my face. There was a bag of hamburger rolls on the shelf, and I grabbed that as well. I could thaw them out on the grill, assuming the grill actually worked, and then… and then…
And then we would feast.
Carrie frowned when I returned with my arms full of food that needed to be cooked. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“The freezer works,” I said, dropping everything on the counter. I walked over to the windows, double-checking our cardboard coverings to be sure they covered the glass. There were blackout curtains, probably to keep people from looking in during morning setup and late-night cleanup. I pulled them tight before turning and scanning the walls.
The light switches were mostly concealed behind an artificial plant near the door, probably to keep customers from playing with them. I walked over to them, said, “Please cover her eyes,” and turned on the lights.
They blazed up white and vivid and impossible, like the last dying gasp of the empire that had built this place, filling it with red vinyl and kitschy 1950s memorabilia. Carrie gasped. The young chimera wailed. I hit the lights again, turning them off, plunging us back down into darkness.
“Hey!” yelped Carrie. “Turn them back on! We need those!”
“I told you to cover her eyes!” I shouted. I was furious. Not just furious: frightened. What if the child never trusted me again? I had allowed the light to hurt her. I should have moved more slowly, should have made sure Carrie was covering her eyes like I’d asked.
That little girl was one of the only members of my own species that I had ever met. Most of the others were already working with Sherman for the downfall of the human race—and he lumped me in with them, since I’d refused to help him when he’d asked. If I didn’t want to be alone in the world, I needed to find other chimera who hadn’t already signed on with his poisonous philosophy. And apart from my own selfish needs, she was too young and too inexperienced to take care of herself. She needed me. She needed me, and I had allowed her to be hurt. I was a terrible person. The fact that my need to keep her safe was at least half biochemical didn’t matter. She was my responsibility, by biology and coincidence, and I was damn well going to protect her.
“Forget the kid, turn the lights back on,” pleaded Carrie. “Please, please, turn the lights back on.”
“If you want me to turn the lights back on, you’ll cover her eyes,” I said, struggling to keep my words from devolving into a snarl. I couldn’t afford to start fighting with Carrie again. Our nascent peace was too delicate, and there were other things that needed our time and energy—things like calming the girl, and cooking the box of frozen hamburger patties that was waiting on the counter.
“Okay, okay,” said Carrie. There was a pause, and then, “My hands are over her eyes now, all right? Turn the lights back on. Please.”
“You’d better not be lying,” I said, and flipped the switches.
This time, when the lights came on, no one gasped or screamed or otherwise overreacted to what used to be such a simple thing. The world used to be defined by light, not by shadows. But we had changed all that, and now light, however fleeting, was a precious thing, to be celebrated whenever it appeared.
I turned back to the booth where Carrie and the young chimera sat. Carrie was staring at me, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. True to her word, she had her hands over the young chimera’s face. As for the girl, she sat silent and unmoving, either recovered from her surprise when the lights came on or already resigned to her inability to defend herself against what must have seemed like a huge, endlessly cruel world. If she couldn’t save herself, what was the point in trying to fight?
I could understand her resignation, even as I wanted to gather her close and tell her it didn’t have to be like this; that the world could be her friend, if she was willing to give it the chance. Giving up had seemed like the right thing to me, more than once. It was sheer luck that had gotten me through some of what I had experienced, and I wasn’t to the broken doors yet. I was still trying to figure out the way home.
“How did you…?” Carrie asked.
“The freezer was still on. There’s a lot more where these hamburgers came from. Fries, more patties, ice cream.” And a dead man, but I didn’t see reason to mention that just yet. I wanted her to eat, not repudiate my food as being somehow tainted. The clothes we were wearing had been a lot closer to the dead. “If the freezer was on, I figured there had to be electricity somewhere. If there wasn’t, everything would have shut down and thawed out.” Probably making the worst stench I had ever encountered in the process. It was a good thing on many levels that the power was working.
“Why does this building have power?”
I shrugged. “Private generator, maybe? I know you can get those, and it’s a big freezer. It would make sense for the owners to want to be sure that nothing would rot if the power went out.” I walked over to kneel in front of the young chimera, putting one hand on her knee. “You can take your hands away now.”
Looking unsure about the idea, Carrie pulled her hands away. The girl looked surprised before screwing her face up tight, wrinkling her nose and lips together until she appeared to have bitten into a lemon. She didn’t put her hands over her own eyes. She hadn’t figured out that she could do that yet.
If she couldn’t figure it out on her own, I would show her. “Here,” I said, gingerly taking hold of her hands and raising them to cover her eyes. I pressed on the backs of her wrists, helping to slide her fingers into place until they would block out the majority of the light. “Do it like this, and then the light won’t be able to hurt you.”
I took my hands away. Hers remained where they were, shielding her eyes from the unexpected brightness. I wondered whether she’d ever seen electric lights before. Depending on when she had taken over her host—which must have been recently, given where I’d found her—she might have spent her entire existence in the comfortable divisions of sunlight and shadow, with nothing like electricity to ever disrupt her understanding of the world. It was a daunting thought.
Slowly, the fingers on her left hand slid open just a crack, and she peered at me through the opening. There was no mistaking the intelligence or the confusion in her dark brown eye. I smiled at her.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry the light hurt you before. I didn’t mean for that to happen, and I’m going to be extra-special careful to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“She can’t understand you,” said Carrie. “There’s something wrong with her.”
Only by human standards. By chimera standards, everything about the girl was exactly right. “Do you know how to work a grill?” I asked. “I can probably cook the burgers, but I’ll ruin a bunch before I get it right.”
“I used to work at a McDonald’s—that’s part of why I stopped eating meat,” said Carrie. She looked relieved as she moved toward the box of frozen hamburger patties. “I don’t think we want to fire up the grease fryer right now, but I can manage a couple burgers. I’m hungry enough that I don’t give a crap.”
“Just don’t go in the freezer if you need more. Send me.”
There was a pause, during which Carrie’s not asking was practically audible. Finally, she bowed before the face of common sense, and said, “Got it,” before picking up the box and disappearing into the kitchen.
I turned my attention back to the chimera girl. “Food soon. There’s applesauce, so if you haven’t figured out how to chew, we can still feed you.” Chewing came automatically to sleepwalkers, but this was a chimera: Instinct wasn’t going to be her friend, and her body’s old muscle memory wasn’t going to be her gentle guide.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about who she used to be. Maybe her host had been a vegetarian, and eating hamburger patty, no matter how well cooked it was, would make her sick. Maybe she had allergies, and that was what her implant had been intended to suppress. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to find a convenient file with her medical history. She was going to have to muddle through, and so was I. If we were lucky, neither of us would be hurt in the process.
“I hope you like hamburger,” I said, brushing her hair back with my fingers. It was thick and soft, and needed to be washed. “I wish I knew your name.”
“Sal,” said the girl, still peeking at me through her fingers.
“No, sweetie, that’s my name. We can’t all be called ‘Sal’; it would get very confusing, very fast, and we try not to make things more confusing than they already are. Do you know any other words? Do you know a word that sounds like your name?”
“Sal,” said the girl again.
I sighed. “Okay, so that’s not going to work. We’ll figure out what your name is when you’re farther along in your language skills.” I was the one who’d decided my name was “Sal,” a nickname that Sally would never have tolerated. It was too short, and too curt, like someone clearing their throat. It hadn’t been a big decision—clipping one syllable from the end of a name I got from somebody else—but it had been my decision, and I treasured it, because it had taken someone else’s name and made it mine. I wanted my girl to have the same freedom. Even more, I wanted her to be able to name herself, to begin the process of forging her own identity. People would always be telling her who and what she had to be. At least this way, she could choose one of the things that would define her to the rest of the world.
The scent of seared meat drifted in from the kitchen. The little girl lowered her hands away from her eyes and sniffed the air, looking suddenly excited. I smiled, this time in relief.
“I guess you’re a meat eater after all,” I said, and squeezed into the booth beside her to wait for Carrie to come out with our dinner.