Someone was knocking on the door.
I sat bolt upright, instantly awake, every nerve I had screaming that this was it: The patrol had found us, they were going to take me back to the quarantine zone, and they were going to take everything else with us. Beverly, her head dislodged from my knee by my sudden motion, looked at me and whined.
Inch by inch, I became aware of my surroundings. I was in a shabby, clean little apartment, with Juniper in my arms, and my dogs snuggled up to me, and Nathan sleeping, still fully clothed, on the couch beside me. His head was lolling, mouth open as he snored gently. The knock came again.
Now Juniper began to stir, lifting her head with a small noise of protest. I shushed her. From the smell, she had wet herself again while she was sleeping. Dr. Cale had the power on; I wondered whether she also had working washers and dryers, and whether it would be safe to wash clothes in potentially infected water.
“Shhh, honey, shhh, I just need to see who’s at the door,” I said. I set Juniper aside, bracing her against Beverly, who began sniffing her curiously. Either Juniper was too sleepy to cling, or she was distracted by the dog, because she let me get up without reaching for me.
I made my way to the door, grateful for having fallen asleep with my clothes on, and peered out the peephole. If it was a team from USAMRIID, I didn’t know what I was going to do—although if it had been a team from USAMRIID, wouldn’t they have knocked the door down already? They didn’t have any reason to be polite. They weren’t banging, either. Their knocking was insistent, but it wasn’t so loud that it would have woken us if we’d been asleep in the back of the apartment.
The warped glass of the peephole distorted the scene enough that I had to blink several times before I could see who was outside. Then I gasped, and undid the locks so fast that I broke a nail on the deadbolt, leaving it hanging there like a scrap of paper as I wrenched the door open.
Adam didn’t wait for me to say hello or invite him inside. As soon as the door was open wide enough for him to wedge his body through, it he was inside, flinging his arms around me and holding me so tight that it felt like he was bending my ribs. My injured rib throbbed with pain. I ignored it as I put my arms around him and held him just as tightly.
He bent to press his head against my chest like a much younger child. I felt the warm wetness of his tears beginning to spread through my grubby, travel-stained shirt. In so many ways, he was the youngest of us. Maybe he always would be.
“You came back,” he whispered. “You came back to me, just like you said you would. I missed you. I missed you so much. Don’t do that again, Sal. You can’t do that. You went away.”
“I won’t,” I said, and kissed the top of his head. His hair tasted like salt water and sandalwood. I realized I was crying too. That didn’t seem to matter. “I’m here. I’m staying here. I don’t ever, ever want to go away again. It’s all right, Adam, I’m here.”
“I thought you were gone forever.” His voice was anguished, filled with the cruel truth of his words. He really had thought that they had lost me.
Nathan was my lover. Dr. Cale was my creator. But Adam was my brother, and somehow letting him down hurt me most of all. I held him tighter, and he did the same to me, the two of us crushing against each other until there might as well have been no oxygen between us. We had been two things that became single, hybrid creatures: Now we were trying the same trick again, but with two human bodies that wanted to fuse into one. Adam was the calm one, the sweet one, the rational one, who had never had to run or defend himself. I was… I was me. Together, we might make a whole person.
“Sal?”
There was a depth of confusion, curiosity, and wariness packed into the single syllable of my name that I would have thought impossible. Adam pulled away enough to let me turn around, and we both looked toward the couch. Juniper’s head had appeared over the back of it, her hands clutching the cushion for balance, her eyes filled with questions.
“Who…?” Adam paused, and then let me go so that he could take a step toward Juniper without dragging me along. “Hello. Who are you?”
“Sal,” said Juniper warily.
Adam looked at me, looking so confused that it was all I could do not to laugh. It wasn’t really funny. It was deadly serious, like everything in our lives seemed to be most of the time. But I still wanted to laugh, and that was nice. It was nice to want to be happy.
“Adam, meet Juniper. I found her while I was on my way home. She’s—”
“She’s a chimera, like us,” he said, sounding excited. “A natural chimera, like you. Hello, Juniper! I’m Adam. I’m your brother.”
“Sal?” said Juniper, looking past him, focusing on me.
“She doesn’t talk yet,” I said. I stepped past Adam and picked her up, letting her get her arms locked around my shoulders. “She’s still learning most things. Like how to use the bathroom. She doesn’t get that yet.” The smell of her was something else. “How do we manage bathing if the water isn’t safe?”
“Chemical showers mostly, but we filter water for the hydroponics. I bet Mom can figure out a way to fill a bathtub.” Adam held out his hand toward Juniper, not reaching for her, but putting himself in reach. It was similar to the way that I would approach a skittish or unfamiliar dog, and I realized that it had a similar intent: He was letting her get a feel for his pheromones, which would confirm him as a member of the family, and someone to be trusted.
“I don’t want to put her in a chemical shower until I’m sure she’ll be able to keep her eyes and mouth shut,” I said. “She’s still figuring out the things her body already knows. So she sits upright and doesn’t fall off things, but it took her a while to start reaching for me. If it weren’t for muscle memory, I think we’d be in trouble.”
Adam nodded. “Can I hold her?” The question was small, almost meek, and reminded me—not for the first time—that he had gone in quick succession from having two sisters to having none. Not with Tansy on life support and me missing, maybe never to return. It hadn’t been fair to him, any more than it had been fair to the rest of us.
“That’s up to her, but let’s see,” I said. I tilted my body, trying to pass Juniper over to Adam. It was amazing how quickly that particular motion had become familiar, almost second nature. Soon, I wouldn’t even have to think about it.
Juniper looked at him suspiciously, her arms still locked around my neck. Then, to my surprise and relief, she let me go, and allowed herself to be transferred into the slightly taller man’s arms. She leaned back, her butt braced in his elbow, and looked at him gravely. Then, with no further fanfare, she slipped her arms around his neck, put her head against his collarbone, and closed her eyes.
“She’s amazing,” Adam whispered.
I smiled. “Yeah, she is. She’s a lucky little girl, too. If we hadn’t come along when we did…” The thought chilled me. How many children like Juniper were out there, chimera created when their second implant fought off the first, suddenly intelligent and aware, but unequipped to take care of themselves? Juniper had gotten lucky beyond belief when I had stumbled across her. A group of human survivors might have taken her confusion and apparent vacancy as a sign of trauma and taken her with them. Or they might have taken her for a sleepwalker, and killed her where she stood. It was impossible to say. Without me and Carrie escaping when we did, she would have starved to death.
The thought of food was a surprising one, and made my stomach, which had previously been silent, give an audible growl. I hadn’t eaten in too long. Juniper, leaving her head cradled against Adam’s collarbone, opened one eye and gave me a hopeful look.
“We need to eat,” I said. “Can you hold her while I go and change into something cleaner?” Getting Juniper herself changed would need to wait until she’d had a bath, or she would just dirty another set of clothes. I was sweaty from the road, but it was nothing I couldn’t remove with baby wipes and a dish towel.
Adam beamed like I had just asked him to be responsible for the most precious thing in the universe. “I can,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”
“Thank you. You’re the best brother.” I paused to kiss the top of Nathan’s head—he was still sleeping, the dogs now curled against him like none of them had been able to get any real rest while I’d been away—and then trotted down the short hallway to the bedrooms.
My clothing from the candy factory was in the larger of the master bedroom’s two dressers, and the items I’d taken from the Old Navy were piled on top of it. I shimmied out of my dirty things and put on a clean bra and panties, luxuriating in the feeling of having my own clothes next to my body, instead of shabby, boil-washed pieces of cotton handed out by a USAMRIID patrol truck. A shower would have been even better, but that could wait until we were more settled. Smelling like a human being wasn’t a problem for me, providing we could teach Juniper to wake people up when she needed to go to the bathroom.
I put on jeans and a clean tank top before returning to the living room, where Nathan was sitting up and rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. He had placed his glasses on Beverly’s head, and the big Lab was practically vibrating with joy at the thought that she was being somehow useful to one of her people. She offered me a doggy grin when I stepped back into the room, her tongue lolling and her ears perked in a “look at me” position.
Adam was still holding Juniper, who seemed content to cling to her newly discovered big brother for as long as he let her. I smiled at the scene. It was everything I had ever wanted. A home: a family. People who would accept me for what I was, and not what they thought they could turn me into.
Now all I had to do was make sure that we could stay together and that things could be like this forever. “Good morning, Nathan,” I said. “Did you sleep well?”
“My back hurts, my knees hurt, my butt hurts, and I haven’t slept that well in weeks,” he said, reclaiming his glasses and putting them on his face. The look he gave me then wasn’t happy or sad or anything so simple: It was pure contentment, tempered with a layer of understanding that we weren’t done fighting. This was an anomaly, a moment of happiness before everything inevitably fell apart again. “I always sleep better when you come back to me.”
“I hope you never sleep that well again,” I said, and he blinked at me and laughed, and everything was wonderful.
It couldn’t last. Nathan looked to Adam, and asked, “Did you just come to see Sal?”
“Oh!” Adam’s eyes widened, filling with sudden realization. It made my stomach twist. This was it: Our moment of peace was over, and it was time to get back to the business of surviving in a world that wanted nothing more than to destroy us all. “Mom sent me. She said to tell you all that we have a lot of work to do, and that she needs to give Juniper a full physical.” His voice changed, becoming soft with wonder. “I thought Sal had brought home another dog or something. I didn’t realize she’d managed to find us a sister.”
“Well, I did,” I said. I put a hand on my rumbling stomach, swallowing the urge to sigh. “Let’s grab a granola bar or something. Then we can go find out what’s going to go wrong next.”
Walking back to the bowling alley in daylight gave me the opportunity to look at our new neighborhood. Cars and debris choked the sidewalks, and someone had managed to tip a pickup truck onto its side in the middle of the street, creating cover and the illusion of total abandonment at the same time. If you looked closely at the broken and soaped-over windows, you might notice that a surprising number of the apartments had blackout curtains hanging inside, but that would require getting closer than any casual inspection was going to be.
“We can’t prevent heat-signature scans; if someone flies over looking for signs of life, we’re screwed,” said Nathan. He was walking alongside me, matching his strides to mine. “On the plus side, sleepwalkers show the same heat signatures as humans or chimera, so that isn’t really a valid means of finding either survivors or fugitives.”
“I don’t think they have those kinds of resources left,” I said, thinking of the teenagers in fatigues, their assault rifles and cattle prods shaking in their hands. “They’re sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel where personnel are concerned.”
“That’s good to hear,” said Nathan. “Fang will want to ask you about what you saw in the quarantine zone. USAMRIID has managed to pick up some of our people while they were out gathering supplies. We don’t think they know who they have, but Fang’s been planning a breakout for weeks. The only reason we hadn’t moved is because we didn’t have eyes on you, and I wasn’t willing to agree to anything that might get you hurt.”
A full assault on the quarantine zone would result in a lot of people getting hurt. Something stealthy might be able to get the folks they needed in and out without causing too much of a hue and cry, especially now that I was with them. I knew the lay of the land in both Pleasanton and Oakland.
“They don’t know,” I said. “If they did, they would have told me. Colonel Mitchell wanted me to help my—to help Sally’s sister, Joyce.”
“The one we treated with the antiparasitic drugs?” asked Nathan, sounding surprised. “Did they get the doses wrong? What did they think you could do for her?”
“Dr. Banks convinced them I was Sally. That my implant had somehow been able to keep me—to keep her—alive, just trapped, and that he’d been able to coax her to the surface.” I stepped around a large hole in the pavement. Adam and Juniper were about ten feet ahead of us, Beverly sticking to their steps like a big black shadow. She knew that I needed them to be safe, and she was being a good dog. Such a good dog.
“Okay,” said Nathan slowly. It was clear that he didn’t quite understand, and I couldn’t blame him for that, because I wasn’t telling the story properly: I was laying it out in puzzle pieces, as if trying to explain the whole thing at once would hurt me somehow. Maybe because it would.
I took a gulping breath, and said, “She’s brain-dead. They killed the implant, but not before it had compromised her system so badly that she didn’t… they have her on life support. I don’t know how long they can keep her that way.” The image of my sister—because she was my sister; she was the only member of Sally’s family who had accepted me without question, without using my differences from the original as a measuring stick that I would always fail to live up to—rose unbidden in my mind. Joyce, laughing. Joyce, insisting I let her take me to the mall, because she needed sister time and I needed to get out of my own head. All the good, glorious things that had made her herself, and not just a piece of meat being sustained by computers… all those things were gone.
They weren’t coming back. Dr. Banks had peddled false hope to her father when he said that I had somehow been able to preserve Sally in her own mind with my intrusion. Sally was gone, and Joyce was gone, and Colonel Mitchell was a man who didn’t have any daughters at all.
“So if he’d known that he had some of Dr. Cale’s people, he would have been trying to get them to give her up, and he would have been using that to make me give him what he wanted,” I said. “He lost track of her after Vallejo. He wanted to know where she was. I guess the whole ‘she does better work when she’s free-range’ thing stopped looking so appealing when people started getting sick from drinking the water.”
“We didn’t do that,” said Nathan. It was a needless interjection—I had always known that Dr. Cale wouldn’t kill her own children that way—but I was still glad to hear it: The denial patched a little hole that had been opening in my heart. “It has to be Sherman’s work. He’s the only one with the reason and the resources.”
“What reason could he possibly have for doing something like this?” I asked. “I know he wants to destroy the humans, but this is hurting the sleepwalkers just as badly.”
Nathan hesitated. That brief silence was the most frightening thing he could have said. Finally, he spoke: “You need to talk to my mother. She’s going to explain everything.”
The drums were beating in my ears like warnings. Things weren’t better just because I was home. Having people around me that I cared about gave me more to lose.
“Oh,” I whispered.
Nathan squeezed my hand, clearly trying to be reassuring, and said, “He lost sight of us because we were smart in the evacuation. Lead-lined trucks to prevent radar penetration, movement underground when possible—the BART tunnels are pretty clear, and they haven’t been unmaintained long enough to become safety hazards—and a lot of evasive maneuvers. Fang wanted us to keep going east and get out of California, but he was voted down by the rest of us. We needed to stay where we could get you back, for one. We needed to be where we knew all the players, for another.”
“They probably have military of their own in Utah,” I said.
Nathan nodded. “And we won’t know who’s in charge or how they’re running their patrols. As long as we can stay out of USAMRIID’s sight, we’re safer here than we would be anywhere else.”
The bowling alley was in front of us now, familiar and decrepit in that carefully maintained way that Dr. Cale had always been so rightly proud of. It was oddly reassuring to know that we were here again, in the place where I’d first learned that I wasn’t human and that nothing was ever going to be the same.
The door was open: Adam, Beverly, and Juniper were already inside. Fishy was standing off to one side, an assault rifle in his hands, his eyes scanning the horizon. “I don’t mean to disrupt this homey little cutscene and infodump for the players, but if you could pick it up, that would be swell. The longer you’re out in the open, the higher your chances of a random encounter get. I, for one, don’t feel like wasting ammo today.”
“I missed you too, Fishy,” I said, walking past him.
“Glad you’re still in the game,” he called after me. Then he laughed, the high, delighted sound of a man for whom nothing carried any real weight or stakes. All of this was a fiction to him, and he was enjoying it a hell of a lot more than the rest of us were.
“Sometimes I miss lying to myself about the things that make my life complicated,” I said conversationally.
Nathan laughed, sounding surprised. “Really?”
“Yeah. But only sometimes.” Life had been easier when I thought I was a human being. Not better, necessarily. I missed eating regularly and having access to a hot shower whenever I wanted one; I missed the routines of riding the bus and working at the shelter and generally living like a free person, not like a fugitive. But I didn’t miss the uncertainty that had come with it, the nagging feeling that I was somehow failing myself and the people around me by not being better at… well, everything. I was never going to be good enough at being human, because I had never been human in the first place. Having that weight lifted off my shoulders was worth any number of missed showers.
“I’m glad it’s only sometimes,” said Nathan. “I’m a lot happier having you happy.”
I blinked at him, and beamed.
Adam and Juniper were nowhere to be seen when we entered the lab portion of the bowling alley. I considered worrying about them, and decided that it wasn’t necessary. I had seen them go inside. I trusted Adam with my life, and that meant that I could trust him with her life, too.
Dr. Cale’s staff was everywhere. There seemed to be twice as many people here as there had been the night before, which made sense. Left to their own devices, some scientists will become nocturnal, but they’re not the majority: Most of her people had always chosen to work days.
Because these were the technicians and doctors and interns who hadn’t been in the bowling alley when I arrived, they all looked surprised to see me. Surprised and pleased, like they hadn’t been sure they were ever going to see me again. That was actually reassuring. Everyone here was on my side, not just the people I thought of as my family. We could make it through this crisis, because we would be making it through together.
Dr. Cale was waiting in her office. She looked up when Nathan knocked on the doorframe, then followed his arm down to our joined hands. She smiled, looking obscurely pleased. “Nathan. Sal,” she said. “Please, come on in.”
“Hi, Dr. Cale.” I stepped through the door, pulling Nathan along behind me. The office was small, converted from the old bowling alley manager’s space, and barely had room for the three of us and the equipment that it already held. “How have you been?”
“Oh, you know. Same old, same old.” She cracked a smile at her own joke, but it seemed to be more a matter of rote response than actual amusement. I have been funny; see, here is my smile; do you feel at ease with me now? Sometimes I felt like Dr. Cale was even worse at being a person than I was. “Did you and Adam have a chance to talk?”
Nothing I did could have suppressed the grin that spread across my face, or the warm feeling that uncurled in my stomach. “It was really good to see him again. I missed him.”
“You were probably experiencing mild withdrawal symptoms,” said Dr. Cale.
I blinked. “What?”
“Adam experienced the same thing when we lost Tansy. You didn’t, because you hadn’t been around her for long enough.”
I blinked at her again. “Uh, what?”
“I was able to monitor Adam after Tansy left—remember how depressed he got? Well, I monitored him again when we lost you, and watched the changes in his pheromone levels. I think that once chimera have bonded on a familial level, they become, for lack of a better word, addicted to the chemical signatures of their family group. You’re so accustomed to Adam’s pheromones that when they’re taken away, your system overcompensates, which can cause feelings of depression, lethargy, and hopelessness.” Dr. Cale shook her head. “It’s a complicated chemical system. I’m still trying to fully decode it.”
“You can compensate with over-the-counter antidepressants,” said Nathan, picking up on my distress where Dr. Cale did not. He gave his mother a sharp look. “I thought we agreed that you’d explain this to Sal after she’d had time to adjust to being back with us.”
“No, Nathan, you agreed. I said that she’d probably taken this long to escape because she was depressed from the withdrawal, and that on the off chance she was somehow blaming herself for being too slow, it would make her feel better if she knew this was natural for her.” Dr. Cale shrugged. “You’re the one who told me I couldn’t go around withholding information because I thought people weren’t ready for it. I’m just following instructions.”
“Wow, you know, I’ve really missed hanging out with science people and listening to them talk about me like I didn’t get a say in my own existence.” I pulled my hand out of Nathan’s and sat down in the chair across from Dr. Cale, doing my best to glare at both of them at the same time. “Is there anything else you thought I didn’t need to know? I’m ready to listen.”
Dr. Cale took a sharp breath, glancing toward Nathan. He nodded, closing his eyes for a bare moment, like he was trying to brace himself against whatever was going to happen next. That was unnerving.
It was nothing compared to what came next. Dr. Cale turned back to me, and asked, “Do you remember when Sherman took a sample of your primary body?”
Almost involuntarily, I reached up and touched the back of my head. There was a line of scar tissue there, left by Sherman’s tools. I hadn’t invited him to cut me open. He had done it all the same. “Yes,” I said, and I wasn’t ashamed when my voice cracked on the single syllable. He had violated me in a way more profound than I’d thought possible. Dr. Cale had also taken samples of my primary body—a violation I was still trying to forgive her for—but she had done it during a necessary and life-saving procedure. Without it, I would have been dead long ago. What Sherman had done…
I might be able to forgive Dr. Cale completely for what she’d done to me. I was never going to be able to forgive Sherman.
“I have analyzed the genetic material of a hundred and seventeen tapeworms cultured from the tap water,” said Dr. Cale. She was speaking slowly and clearly, in the way she had when she felt that it was vitally important to be understood. Each word felt like another rock being placed atop my chest, rendering me unable to move away. They were heavy. I was trapped.
Dr. Cale was still speaking. “They are not identical to any existing implant. They have been cultured from a scrubbed source, a sample that was reengineered to be compatible with as wide a range of human subjects as possible. The epigenetic data has been removed. These worms, were they able to successfully bond with a human host, would grow up as individuals, not as reproductions of their parent and original. But they were all cultured from a single tapeworm.”
“Me.” The word sounded distorted. The drums were pounding so hard that they were making everything echo and twist.
Dr. Cale nodded. “You,” she agreed. “When Sherman took that sample, he was looking for whatever it was that had made you able to bond with your host without medical intervention. He wanted to give the eggs he was introducing into the water supply the best possible chance.”
“The best possible chance at what?” I already knew—she had already told me—but I needed to hear her say it in so many words. I needed to be sure.
“At claiming a human host. At maturing into a chimera. People trust the water. It’s been filtered and purified for so long that no one questions what comes out of the tap, not even during a situation like this one—not that there’s ever been a situation like this one.” She laughed bitterly. “We are in a unique time. He wanted to infect the remainder of the human race. If he got one chimera out of every hundred warm bodies remaining, that would still be thousands. When he scrubbed the epigenetic data, he also removed the triggers that would prevent maturation in a body already containing a viable implant. He was hoping he might be able to infect a few sleepwalkers. Not many. He always had an overinflated opinion of how well the implants could defend themselves. I genuinely believe that he thought any worm strong enough to have taken over a human body would be able to fight off invaders.”
“He thought chimera would be immune,” I said.
“I can’t be certain, but yes, I do believe he thought that,” said Dr. Cale. “When Sherman was with me, he believed chimera were the pinnacle of evolution, that nothing would ever be able to match them for purity and power. I can’t imagine his time with Dr. Banks, seeing the worst of what the human race has to offer, would have done much to change his mind.”
“So… I’m doing this?” The drums had stopped. Everything was silence. “This is me, somehow?”
“No.” Dr. Cale’s answer was immediate, and left no room for argument. She shook her head, as if in punctuation. “He scrubbed the epigenetic data. Even if he hadn’t, he clipped a single segment of your core body. He didn’t dig out your core, the piece of you that actually interfaces with the human brain. If he had, you would be dead, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Transplanting a chimera from one human host to another requires the head of the original implant,” said Nathan. He seemed to be acting under the impression that his words would help. All they did was turn my stomach. “Mom calls it the ‘core segment’ most of the time, to differentiate it from the other parts of the implant’s body. There’s no way Sherman could have accessed your core without killing you.”
“Oh,” I said faintly.
“He wanted the antiseizure medications coded into your DNA,” said Dr. Cale. “Some people will react to them badly—I’d estimate that as much as point five percent of the population will have an allergic response to those medications, leading to convulsions and death. But the rest will have a higher chance of successful sleepwalker integration, and a greatly improved chance of successful chimera integration. It’s just that he didn’t consider the biggest problem with his little plan.”
“You mean apart from all the other problems you’re talking about?” I stared at her. This was like something out of a horror movie. It wasn’t—it couldn’t be—real. At least before, we’d just been dealing with a single, world-destroying issue.
“Yes,” said Dr. Cale. She didn’t seem to recognize the irony in my question. Then again, when had she ever? “He didn’t consider reinfection. Everyone is vulnerable to this. Humans, sleepwalkers, chimera, everyone. And it doesn’t matter if someone has already been infected by the water. They can be infected again, and again. We’ve removed up to thirty cysts from a single body after exposure to the water. I don’t know if it’s going to be possible to fully sterilize the reservoirs in my lifetime—and I intend to live for a very long time. I still have a great deal of work to do.”
“Because of me.” My lips felt numb.
“It’s not your fault.” Dr. Cale frowned. “Haven’t you been listening? You aren’t the one who reengineered the DNA that had been built into you. You’re certainly not the one who introduced eggs into the water supply. We’re still not sure how Sherman accomplished that so quickly, or on such a wide scale. We’ve taken samples from three reservoirs, and found them all to have been contaminated.”
“I went with him willingly,” I said. “When he came to USAMRIID to break me out, I could have screamed. I could have refused to go. I could have done something, but I was mad at the humans for treating me the way they had, and I thought I would be able to escape from him more easily than I could escape from them. So I went with him willingly, and now he’s using… he’s using something that he got from me, something that he stole from my body, to kill people. This is my fault. If I hadn’t gone with Sherman, none of this would be happening.”
“And if I had refused Steven when he came to me and asked if I wanted to change the world, there would never have been implants in the first place. You wouldn’t exist. Neither would Sherman, or Adam, or Juniper. I might still be a married woman, and the world certainly wouldn’t be in the state it’s in right now.” Dr. Cale sounded calm, but there was a thin vein of agony in her eyes. She had thought about this a lot: She knew what she was taking responsibility for. “Steven is a brilliant man, but he isn’t as creative as he thinks he is. He would never have unlocked the genetic code of the worms without me. So should I take full responsibility for what he did with my work? Should I say, ‘Yes, someone else took good science and perverted it in the name of quick profits, but I still did it, so blame me’?”
“No, but—” I began.
She cut me off. “Sherman exists because I was trying to learn how the chimera were able to occupy their hosts. Adam may be the single most ethically questionable thing I’ve ever done, but I was trying to figure out how bad things could get, and I acted without regrets. Sherman… by the time I introduced him into his human host, I knew the process worked. I knew what chimera were, and that they could be healthy, stable people. So why did I have to do it again? He was hubris, pure and simple. I wanted another son. I was lonely. Does that mean that I am responsible for everything he’s ever done? Are the sins of the son vested on the mother, rather than the sins of the father being vested on the son?”
“No,” I said, and shook my head. “You’re getting me all confused. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“If you own a knife, and someone else steals it and uses it to kill a person, you are not at fault. Yes, it was your knife, but you didn’t buy it because you wanted to commit a murder. You bought it because sometimes you need a knife. I didn’t create the implants because I wanted to destroy the world. My science was sound—my knife was clean. Steven took my work and perverted it in the name of profit. He knew this could happen, and he did it anyway. He doesn’t care that the survivors will mistrust science and its gifts for generations. He cared about profits now and stock options later and coming out on top at every possible turn. Sherman did to you what Steven did to me. He stole something precious and turned it into a weapon. That doesn’t make you the bad one. It doesn’t transform your precious thing into something that is innately evil. Do you understand?” Dr. Cale looked at me, and this time, she was pleading. “You are not at fault here. All of the fault is on him.”
Nathan put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve never done anything you need to be ashamed of, and that includes going with someone you thought offered you a better shot at survival. You need to take care of yourself. How else are you going to take care of the people you care about?”
I looked at him. I looked at her. And then, very slowly, I nodded.
“All right,” I said. “This isn’t my fault, but it’s still everybody’s problem. What are we going to do?”
“That’s the real problem,” said Dr. Cale. “I have no idea.”