The soldiers at the gate had walked with the truck as they led us to the front of the Coliseum. They had looked surprised and only a little confused when Fishy led them to the back and opened the door to reveal Fang, bent over Tansy’s unmoving form and checking the connections on her ventilator. It must have been an odd sight, from their perspective: an unmoving woman with a shaven head, lying unconscious on a gurney, while a man in a white coat worked to make sure that she was still breathing.
Then Fang had straightened, and turned, and said—in his most polite, most congenial tone—“I suppose you’d like me to move away from the equipment now. Is one of you a trained medical professional? If not, is there any way I could convince you to let me keep working until we have my patient inside and stable? It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that we’ve brought her this far, and we’d rather not lose her now.”
The soldiers hadn’t known what to say. Dr. Cale’s people tended to have that effect.
Their leader had taken custody of me. I wasn’t making any effort to run away. I hadn’t strayed from his side since he’d pulled me out of the cab, wrapping his vast hand around my upper arm so that I felt small next to him, reduced to the child I had never been. We stood some feet away, watching as his men—still puzzled, and somehow taking orders from Fang, however temporarily—helped Fishy and Fang get Tansy’s gurney down from the back of the truck.
“I never thought we’d be seeing you again,” said the soldier who was watching me.
I shrugged as best I could with my right arm effectively locked into position. “I wasn’t planning on coming back. But we need your help, and I’m pretty sure you need ours too.”
“There’s nothing you could offer us.”
“How long ago did you lose the quarantine zone?”
His hand tightened on my arm, clamping down almost hard enough to become painful, and I knew that I was right. “That’s classified.”
“It was almost a war zone in there while I was confined. It wouldn’t have taken many of those unexpected conversions for things to get really ugly. Did everyone die, or were there riots? Were you able to get anyone out?” I tried not to think about the people I’d known by name while I was there, the ones who’d shared the house with me and Carrie and Paul. The teenage mother, the little girl who’d never had a name… was my desire to let Juniper be nameless until she could name herself partially an attempt to honor that child? I sort of thought it might have been.
The rest of the soldiers walked past, pushing the gurney, Fishy and Fang among them. My companions had been disarmed but not restrained. I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed that. I wondered whether this was some sort of silent challenge. Let them try to run: They’d just be taken again.
My captor pulled on my arm and started after his companions. We left the truck and walked across what remained of the parking lot, heading for the loading-bay door in the side of the Coliseum wall. It wasn’t the door I’d escaped through twice before, thankfully: a building this size had multiple entrances and exits. Four more soldiers flanked the door, guarding it from interlopers. Each of them was holding a cattle prod.
My mouth went dry, and my feet stopped listening to my commands, instead digging into the gravel and trying to bring me to a halt. My captor ignored my stumbling as he dragged me forward, into range of those men.
One of them was my old “friend,” Private Larsen. He looked utterly surprised to see me, eyes going wide as the end of his cattle prod dipped toward the ground. I reached down deep and managed to muster a strained smile.
“Hi,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked—less a demand and more an exclamation of sheer, confused surprise. “You stole a car! You escaped!”
“And now I’m back,” I said. “My friend needs medical assistance, and I need to see your boss.”
“Colonel Mitchell is not taking visitors,” snapped another of the door guards.
Private Larsen looked toward him, and said, “Don’t you know who this is? That’s Sally Mitchell, man. That’s the Colonel’s daughter.”
“The Colonel’s daughter is on life support, you goon.”
“That’s my little sister, Joyce,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady. I felt like I was channeling my Sally-mode again, but not as a lie: as a way of getting what I needed. It was surprisingly easy, and even more surprisingly comfortable. I didn’t have to pretend to be her to use the lessons I’d learned from my time in her shadow. “I’m the older daughter. The bad daughter, the runaway daughter, the one people blame for killing a bunch of soldiers, even though I didn’t do that. And right now, I’m the daughter who needs to see her father. So if someone could go and tell him that we’re here, that would be awesome.”
The three guards who weren’t Private Larsen readied their cattle prods, apparently prepared to zap the insolence right out of me. Private Larsen looked to the leader of the group of soldiers who had accompanied us from the gate.
“Sir?” he asked.
The man nodded. “If you would.”
“Yes, sir.” Private Larsen snapped a quick salute before he turned, cattle prod still lowered, and trotted away down the hall.
The officer in charge snapped, “At ease, men,” and the other three guards lowered their weapons. I let out a slow breath, relaxing marginally, only to tense again as he turned to me and said, “You realize you’re not escaping for a third time. Once Colonel Mitchell sees you, it’s over.”
There was a warning in his tone that I couldn’t quite make sense of—at least not until I looked over to Fang and Fishy, and saw how open the route back to our truck was behind them. We could still run. For whatever reason, this officer was willing to leave us with an escape route, even as he held on to my arm… but his grip wasn’t as tight as it had been, was it? I could probably pull away, if I really tried.
Chave had been one of Dr. Cale’s people, embedded in SymboGen and kept in place by a combination of loyalty and the need to know what was coming. She had never been able to let me know who she was. And she had died without breaking cover. I looked harder at the officer, trying to remember whether I’d ever seen him before, either there or in the bowling alley, before things got bad. His face seemed familiar, but I had been a captive here twice already: I could have seen him through a fence, or passing in the hall. There was no way for me to know for sure.
But he was willing to let us run, and somehow, that made me feel all the more certain that we were making the right decision. “It’ll be okay,” I said, and touched his arm. He didn’t pull away. My conviction that he might be one of Dr. Cale’s people grew. “I just need to talk to the Colonel.”
“Soon would be good,” called Fishy. “Tansy’s not doing so well.”
“What?” My head snapped around. Fang was bending over one of the machines, his expression suddenly much more serious than it had been only a few minutes before. “What’s happening?”
“I’ll need to run some tests to be sure, but I believe her kidneys have started to fail,” said Fang. “This was always going to happen before too much longer. The body is not meant to survive indefinitely under these conditions.”
“But she can’t die.”
Fang looked up. The expression on his face was infinitely sad, and infinitely patient at the same time, like he was trying to convey a lesson he knew I wasn’t ready to learn. “We can all die, Sal. The last few months should have taught you that, even if they’ve taught you nothing else. We can all, no matter how clever, no matter how beloved, die.”
Private Larsen reappeared before I could answer. “The Colonel says we’re to escort them in,” he said stiffly.
“You heard the man,” said the officer. “Move.”
Fang and Fishy pushed Tansy on her gurney, and I stayed close to the commanding officer—as far away as I could be from those menacing cattle prods—and we moved onward, back into the belly of the beast.
Our escort saw us to one of the larger interrogation rooms and left us there, locking the door behind themselves. Under the circumstances, it was something of a relief. Fang and Fishy connected Tansy’s monitors to the wall outlets, sparing the portable generator from a little of the drain, and got to work stabilizing her.
There was a table, and chairs, but I didn’t feel like sitting—not after the day we’d had, and not with the specter of my father hovering over us like a knife about to fall. I stalked back and forth in front of the shoddily installed two-way mirror, wondering whether there was anyone on the other side, wondering equally whether the joints with the wall would stand up to a little battering. I knew how hard the glass was to break, but I was willing to bet the wood would give way if I hit it hard enough with a folding chair. Then I could see the people who were no doubt on the other side, monitoring us.
Of course, then they would know that I was dangerous, and would be able to justify anything they did to me—to us—as self-defense. I couldn’t risk it. I left the chairs where they were and continued to pace, shooting sour looks at the glass and waiting for the door to open.
Colonel Mitchell’s sense of dramatic timing hadn’t gotten any worse while I’d been away. As soon as Tansy’s monitors were all beeping steadily and without alarms, the door opened, and he stepped into the room. I stopped pacing, turning to face him.
He was still a mountain of a man, broad-shouldered and thick-armed and built like a monument to the idea of humanity overcoming the world. His hair was grayer than it had been before my escape, like he had managed to age years in just a few weeks. Soon, there wouldn’t be anything left but the gray. There were deep lines around his eyes. Those, too, had spread since my departure. He stopped in the doorway and just looked at me. That was all. That was all he needed to do. There was a depth of loss and longing and betrayal in his eyes that said more than words could ever manage.
This was it: This was the moment where we had to choose whether we were telling him the truth or continuing to lie, continuing the petty fiction that Dr. Banks had created to save his own skin. I took a step forward.
“I’m not Sally,” I said quietly. “I never was. I’m sorry I lied to you about that: I did it to save some people who were very important to me, and I would probably do it again if I had to, but that doesn’t make it right. I do think it makes us even, don’t you? You lied to me about who I was, and then I lied to you about who I was, and now the scales are balanced. We can start from equal ground.”
Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything. He just dipped his chin, very slightly. That was all the acknowledgment I was going to get.
I took a breath. “You understand why I ran before.”
“I do.” His voice was, if anything, even more revealing than his eyes. He sounded exhausted, beaten down almost to the point of breaking. This was a man who’d seen every inch of protection he thought he possessed pulled away, and was doing his best to hold the line despite it all. He was a good man, who’d been forced to make some bad decisions, first to protect his family and then to protect what he saw as the world. He had just been put into the position of so many good men before him: the place where there were no good options left, only the ones that did a little less damage than the rest.
“These are my colleagues—my friends. Fishy and Fang.” I realized I didn’t know their last names. I also realized that it didn’t matter anymore. They had their dingy, tattered lab coats and their willingness to work: Everything else was secondary. “The girl on the gurney is my sister, Tansy Cale.”
Was it my imagination, or did he flinch at the word “sister”? “I don’t understand why you brought her here,” he said. “Surely the medical care wherever you were hiding was sufficient to keep her alive.”
“It was, before some dick-wad decided to come in and trash the place and shoot a bunch of our people,” said Fishy, looking up from Tansy’s monitors. “That’s why we’re here.”
Right: It was time to stop beating around the bush. “Sherman Lewis, who was responsible for my first escape, and for the deaths of your people, found Dr. Cale’s lab. He raided it this morning. He got away with basically everything. All our people, all our research. Nathan. He took Nathan, and we have to get him back, because Nathan doesn’t have an implant, and Sherman doesn’t think humans have any place left in this world.”
Sherman would see Nathan as just one more host body waiting for a new owner. I loved my fellow chimera, I loved them, but could I ever forgive the worm that took Nathan away from me? Would I ever be able to make the jump from loathing to love? I didn’t think so… and just like that, I forgave Sally’s mother for rejecting me. It was all well and good to think of a chimera as just a new occupant in an abandoned home, and in my case, that was true: I had taken over when Sally left. But she didn’t really know that, did she? That was never going to be something she could accept, just like I was never going to be able to accept someone else driving Nathan around like his body’s original owner didn’t matter.
It made what I had to ask next even more difficult. I took a deep breath, and forced myself to continue anyway. Tansy’s life depended on it. “Sherman is responsible for the contamination of the water supply. I have some ideas about how we could maybe fix that, but we’re going to need to work together. We brought copies of the data we were able to salvage. Fang is one of the best neurosurgeons I’ve ever met, and he’s been with Dr. Cale for years. He can explain things to your scientists.”
“That doesn’t explain why you brought the girl,” said Colonel Mitchell.
No, it didn’t. I took another breath. Then I paused, and looked at him. “I would have been your daughter, if you’d allowed me to be myself,” I said. “Adoption is as important as biology. I tried so hard to be who you wanted me to be. I broke myself trying to become your little girl. All you ever had to do was say, ‘You are a stranger, and I love you,’ and I would have been yours forever. You know that, don’t you? I never wanted us to be on opposite sides.”
Colonel Mitchell glanced at the mirror. We were definitely being watched, then, and if the people on the other side of the glass hadn’t known about what I was before, they knew now.
Too late to take it back. “Your friend, Dr. Banks? He captured Tansy when she came to get me out of SymboGen. He took her apart. He pulled out parts of her brain, and I think you knew, because he was trying to make a chimera to show you. One of those ‘perfect soldiers’ he talked about. He broke my sister. He thought she’d be more useful in pieces, and he broke her. He broke both my sisters. He was the one who designed my implant, wasn’t he? He designed me. That’s why there’s no record in their systems. You paid him to delete all the traces that I was anything other than the standard, to keep your secrets, and he did it. He wanted something he could hold over you.”
Silence.
“He designed Joyce’s implant too, didn’t he? There’s no way he’d want a hold over one Mitchell girl when he could have a hold over both of them. He could have told you to yank her implant the day I opened my eyes in Sally’s body, but he didn’t. He killed her. He took one sister apart, and he killed the other one, and you still kept working with him, because he had the better PR.”
“What do you want from me, Sal?” asked Colonel Mitchell. Any joy I might have felt at hearing him use the proper name for me, hearing him use my name, died when I processed the weariness in his tone. His shoulders were even more bowed now than they had been when he first came into the room. I didn’t know how much more he could take before he broke, but wherever that line was, we were approaching it more rapidly than I cared to consider. “I can’t undo what’s already been done.”
“No, but you can help us set at least one piece of this right. You can undo a little of the damage you’ve enabled.” I looked him squarely in the eye. “Is Joyce’s body still on life support?”
Colonel Mitchell went perfectly still.
He must have known what I was working up to—I hadn’t been exactly subtle, and I’d conflated Joyce and Tansy several times in the lead-up to my question—but actually hearing the words seemed to cause him physical pain. He closed his eyes. Everything was silence, save for the beeping of the machines that were keeping Tansy alive.
Then he opened them again. “Yes, she is still on life support, and no, I will not hear what you are going to ask me next. This conversation is over.”
“Joyce’s life is over,” I said. I tried to make the words as gentle as possible, but they still fell into the space between us like stones. “She’s dead. She died. And I know she was an organ donor. We talked about it, when we talked about my… about Sally’s accident. How afraid she’d been that you’d keep Sally on life support until her organs failed. How much she’d loved her sister, and how much she’d wanted her sister’s death to mean something. I know she had the same conversations with you.”
Colonel Mitchell didn’t say anything. But he didn’t leave the room, and he didn’t close his eyes again, and under the circumstances, that was about as much as I could have hoped for.
“We don’t need a kidney or a lobe of her liver. We need her, intact and breathing, because Tansy is dying. Please. Let us save Tansy. Let us give Joyce the meaning she wanted. She used to say that the accident was the best thing that had ever happened to me—and she was working with you that whole time.” I paused. The words made sense. I had said them to myself before, but now, hearing them aloud… almost wonderingly, I asked, “She knew, didn’t she? She knew I wasn’t Sally, and she loved me anyway.”
“Sally was always cruel to her little sister.” The words were halting, pulled from Colonel Mitchell’s mouth one at a time. “She didn’t understand why we’d want a second child when we had her, and she couldn’t forgive Joyce for taking up space that should have been hers. Joyce loved her, wanted to be friends, but Sally wouldn’t have anything to do with her unless it was because she was planning to cut Joyce down somehow. Joyce knew even before I told her. There was no way any version of Sally could have learnt how to be kind.”
“She loved me anyway,” I said. “She said the accident was a good thing. You know she would have agreed to this, if she’d been here.”
“If she were here, we wouldn’t have to do this,” said Colonel Mitchell.
I nodded. “True. If she were here, we would have stayed away, because there was no way we’d ask this if there were any way to save her. She’s gone. She left her body behind. Please. Please, let us save my sister.”
“You think her mother—you think your mother—will forgive me if I turn another of her daughters into a monster?” Colonel Mitchell’s head swung from side to side. It seemed to have become an impossible burden, too heavy for him to lift without an effort. “She gave birth to that body you wear so familiarly. Whether you like it or not, she is your parent.”
“I want to like it,” I said. “I remember loving her. I remember loving you. Before you both started treating me like an invader, like I’d done something wrong. I didn’t hurt your daughter, Colonel. I didn’t take her body until she left it behind, and I always did my best to be a good girl for you. I loved you. I loved my whole family. You rejected me first.”
“You were never ours,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him, and waited for him to pass judgment on whether my sister—both my sisters—would live or die.
“We never let you be ours,” he said, after a long pause. “What will you give me for my daughter’s body?”
“Fishy, I need the hard drive,” I said.
“On it.” He moved away from Tansy and Fang, pulling up his shirt to reveal a block of synthetic skin. He peeled it away. There was a small black rectangle taped to his side. The guards had missed it when they searched him; the synth-skin had confused the issue. Pulling the rectangle loose, he held it up for Colonel Mitchell to see before pressing it into my hand. “Nice to finally meet you, Colonel. I’ve heard a lot about you. Sure, most of it was pretty awful, but it’s still nice to put a face with a name.”
“I’ve heard absolutely nothing about you, Mr.…?”
“Fishy,” said Fishy, with evident delight. “If you’d heard of me, you’d be proof of bad AI. So hey, score one for the dev team.” Then he turned and walked back to Tansy’s side, leaving Colonel Mitchell staring after him.
“Fishy has that effect on people,” I said, pulling the Colonel’s attention back to me. I held up the hard drive. His eyes locked on it. “Sherman’s people took most of the research, but we managed to save enough. Enough to get started. When he took me from your holding cells, it was so he could extract my DNA and use it to make a worm that would be able to interface with the human brain without surgical assistance. He was trying to destroy the human race. He’s managed to destroy a lot of the sleepwalkers in the process. But it means that all the worms currently in the water share a single genetic source. We can tailor antiparasitic drugs to kill them without poisoning the water for everybody else. We can fix this.”
I paused, taking a breath and gauging his reaction. It hurt to admit that Sherman had used me to make his perfect weapon, even though I had nothing to do with the creation of those tiny, uncaring clones. My epigenetic data was not included; they would never mature into me. But still, I should have found a way to stop him.
Colonel Mitchell frowned. “Are you telling us everything?”
“All the data’s here,” I said, giving the hard drive a shake. “Everything we were able to save. Dr. Banks and your people should be able to start work on a counter almost immediately. All we’re asking is that you let us take something you don’t need anymore, so that we can save one of our own.”
“Well, that, and we were rather hoping you would help us track down and destroy Sherman’s encampment,” said Fang, looking up from the monitors. “He’s a danger. He needs to be stopped. We’re not going to accomplish this on our own.”
“Joyce is not ‘something we don’t even need anymore,’” said Colonel Mitchell, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in his tone. “She is my daughter.”
“She’s gone,” I said. “If she’s still your daughter, then so am I. Don’t you think we’ll be happier together? There’s this thing Dr. Cale calls ‘epigenetic data.’ It’s sort of like… genetic memory. Maybe I am who I am because Sally’s DNA told me who to be. So I’m still a little bit her, even if I mostly never could have been. We put Tansy in Joyce’s head… maybe we get a Tansy who’s a little bit Joyce. Isn’t that better than losing her completely? Forever?”
“I could take your data and lock you up for treason,” he said. “You say you didn’t kill anyone. You have no proof.”
“You know me,” I said. “That’s your proof. The only lies I ever told were the ones you taught to me.”
He looked at me for a moment, eyes running over my face like he was trying to unlock something he couldn’t quite define. Then he turned and walked away, moving toward Tansy.
She hadn’t opened her eyes since we’d recovered her from Dr. Banks. A cloth covered her skull, concealing the ugly sutures and missing skin. She looked like a coma patient, which was a reasonably accurate impression: She was never going to wake up again, not in that body. She also looked frail, and defenseless—two things I’d never associated with Tansy before Dr. Banks took her away from us.
“Will she be kind to my little girl’s body?” he asked, directing his question to Fang. “Is she a good person?”
Fang smiled at the word “person,” like he hadn’t been sure he would ever hear it in conjunction with Tansy—at least not from this source. “She’s a spitfire and a half,” he said. “Always running for the hills and shouting when they don’t come to meet her. She loves her mother, and her brother, and her sister. She was the one who wanted us to contact Sal long before we did, because she didn’t think it was right for family to live apart. She can be passionate about the things she believes. She’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but she’s ours, and we love her.”
“Will she be kind?”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, sir, she’ll be kinder than you’re being right now. She’ll let your daughter’s body live again. Maybe not in the same way. Maybe not as the same girl. But alive.” Fang’s expression turned grave. “Isn’t that what a father wants?”
“Have you ever been a father?” asked the Colonel, voice hard.
“Once. But that was a long time ago, on the other side of the world, and all my restless dead have been mercifully buried.”
Colonel Mitchell looked at Fang for a moment longer. Then he reached over and gently touched Tansy’s cheek. She must have been cold. She looked so cold.
“Private Larsen,” said the Colonel without raising his voice. “Contact Dr. Caldwell. Tell her to prepare an operating room. We’re going to be performing surgery today.”
They wheeled in Joyce’s body on a gurney so much like the one Tansy was on that it hurt a little: the symmetry, and the knowledge that the symmetry was about to become even stronger.
The Coliseum hadn’t been designed to serve as a hospital. It was meant for sporting events and concerts, not sterile procedures and surgical interventions. Everything USAMRIID had done to it since moving in had been makeshift, retrofit on top of retrofit, as they tried to twist it to suit their needs. That was why our “observation window” was tight-stretched clear plastic, of the same material as the quarantine bubbles. That was why the operating room walls were white sheets, and why the air flow was controlled by plastic sheeting. But somehow none of that seemed terribly important anymore, because there was my sister.
Joyce looked better than Tansy. She looked like she was just sleeping, with a respirator in her nose and tubes running from her arms to the IVs that the keepers rolled in with her. Tansy was already in place, already scrubbed down and sterilized.
Then one of the white-coated men took the kerchief off Joyce’s head, revealing her freshly shaven skull, and I knew that Joyce wasn’t sleeping. Joyce had been gone for a long time. If there had been anything left of her, she would have woken up as soon as they started to cut her hair.
I started to cover my eyes and turn away. Colonel Mitchell’s hand clamped down over my wrist, startling me. I lowered my hand, looking at him in confusion.
“You have to watch,” he said. “This is on you as much as it is on me, and you have to watch.”
“I don’t want to,” I whispered.
“It doesn’t matter. We pay our debts in this family, Sal. We look at the things we have built, and we acknowledge them for what they are. That means you look. That means you watch. That means you understand.”
“I don’t want to,” I repeated.
“Neither do I,” he said, and we both turned to the window.
Transplanting an implant into a human host was a fairly straightforward procedure, according to Fang. If the implant was tissue-compatible with the host body, then rejection and infection were both extremely unlikely. There was some necessary movement of brain tissue, but nothing needed to be removed save for a small piece of skull. The rest was easy, if anything about neurosurgery could ever be considered “easy.”
I knew more about medicine than I’d ever believed possible, thanks to the time I’d spent with Dr. Cale and her people, but even that wasn’t enough to make the scene on the other side of the window make sense to me. The first thing they did was the tissue typing: They had explained in detail how that would work. First they took a sample from Joyce, and then they took a sample from Tansy’s host body. When they confirmed that the bodies had similar blood types and antigen responses, they moved on to opening the back of Tansy’s skull and exposing the shattered remains of her implant. I looked away at that, and Colonel Mitchell didn’t stop me. He had already seen what I had seen: brain tissue that looked like it had been churned up with a heavy hand, and pale loops of tapeworm poking through it in disarray, nothing like the symmetry I saw when I looked at my own MRIs, or Juniper’s.
We were supposed to live comfortably within our hosts, not be used to destroy them once harmony had been achieved. I shuddered, forcing my panicked nerves back under control, and turned in time to see the response panels testing Joyce’s genetic compatibility with Tansy—the real Tansy, not the lost, lamented host—turn from neutral red to compatible yellow. My sisters were compatible with each other. They could coexist. They could share space, and they could both live, in their way, although each would have lost something precious forever.
One of the USAMRIID scientists held up a hand, signaling the rest of the room to stop what they were doing. They all did, even Fishy and Fang, as he turned to face the window. He looked at the Colonel, eyes grave behind his goggles, and waited.
“Please,” I whispered.
The Colonel closed his eyes and raised his hand in a thumbs-up. The procedure was approved.
They did not pull a curtain across their makeshift surgical theater: They left everything open and exposed for the world to see. I had already looked away once. I would not look away again. Colonel Mitchell was right. I owed them that.
Bit by bit, Fang extracted Tansy from the brainpan of her host, picking her free of the jumbled brain tissue an inch at a time, until the entire damaged length of her was visible. He sliced a piece of the host’s original brain loose along with her head, allowing her to keep her floral mouth clamped down on what she mindlessly believed to be a source of nutrition. The gender label was inaccurate at that point, I suppose—Tansy was no longer a “she,” not without the shell of her host to give her definition. But Ronnie had always been male, even when he was moved into a female body. I couldn’t make myself stop thinking of her as my sister, my sister, and to be honest, I didn’t want to. Only the labels were allowing me to look at the slick, pinkish-gray length of her with anything other than pity. She was so damaged. Dr. Banks had used her so cruelly.
That’s what you are too, I thought, and my stomach churned acid-hot and nauseous. I was a length of boneless tissue, somehow enhanced by science to the point where it could hijack an entire human body and make it my own. I was not a human being.
But the brain tissue left behind when Tansy was removed from her host’s brain didn’t look so different from Tansy herself, did it? It was soft and boneless and pinkish gray, without structure or form. She had fit into it so well because she was virtually the same thing. Maybe we had never been that different. Science hadn’t created monsters. It had just given brains the capacity to move from one body to another, to feed without dependence on the host, to masticate and chew, to live. We were made to live. We were survivors.
“Come on, Tansy,” I whispered. Colonel Mitchell shot me a surprised look, but all my attention was on the delicate surgery being performed on the counter behind Joyce’s comatose form. Fishy had covered Tansy’s host with a sheet; life support was ongoing, but that was more a matter of their not wanting to share the room with a corpse before they had to than it was anything else. Tansy was no longer a resident in that hollow shell, and the original owner, whoever she had been, had moved out years before.
Fang had stretched Tansy out in a Pyrex baking dish filled with agar solution, and was now carefully, delicately excising her segments from each other, bisecting them one at a time and moving them to different quadrants of the comforting jelly. Most would be frozen, assuming we could find a freezer that we were allowed to use; only the primary segment, that beautiful, terrible flower, would be placed inside Joyce’s unused brain. The rest were backups at best, and egg factories at worst—if we lost Tansy completely, Fang could culture a new head segment from her eggs, effectively cloning her. But I didn’t know how much of Tansy would carry over into that second generation, how much epigenetic data would be passed down, parent unto child, so that she could live again.
I was almost sure, watching him work, watching how much care he took and how deep the furrows in his forehead had grown, that it wouldn’t be enough.
Then he finished his work on Tansy, and turned away from the agar, and picked up the bone saw.
Colonel Mitchell’s hand clamped down on my shoulder, pressing so hard that I winced, although I didn’t pull away. He was allowing us to do this. He had granted us access to his daughter, against all better judgment, against all reason, because he wanted his daughters to be together, even if we had to be together as new people. His marriage was probably over. Mom—Gail—was going to leave him when she realized what he’d done. Slow understanding wormed through me, replacing the acid in my belly with wonder.
He’d given up any chance of saving his marriage because he wanted to make up for his actions toward me. He was giving me back my sister, both my sisters, because I mattered that much to him. I turned, looking up at his face as the bone saw bit into Joyce’s skull. He was watching Fang work, and while there were tears in his eyes, they weren’t falling. Not yet. Because he wasn’t watching his daughter die: he was watching the world give her another chance at survival.
“Thank you, Daddy,” I whispered, turning back toward the window. Fang had removed a small square of bone from the back of Joyce’s head. I couldn’t see her exposed brain from where we were standing, but I didn’t need to. Brains, as a rule, look basically the same from person to person—incredibly unique and utterly individual in the eyes of a neurosurgeon maybe, but to me still just slabs of pink-gray fatty matter, shot through with veins and furrowed with deep canals.
Fang reached into Joyce’s brain with forceps and scalpel. He worked in silence for almost a minute before he called, “Fishy, the sample.”
Fishy picked up Tansy’s primary segment with a pair of forceps and carried it gently over to place them in Fang’s waiting hand. I thought I saw Tansy thrash, once, and I clung to that motion, because it meant she was still alive. Then Fang was lowering her into the opening at the back of Joyce’s skull, and if Colonel Mitchell was going to call this procedure off, he was going to do it now, he would have to do it now, he wouldn’t have another chance—
His hand remained clamped hard on my shoulder, hard enough that it was going to leave a bruise, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t ask Fang to stop. He just let it happen.
Colonel Mitchell was crying, big, wet tears that rolled silently down his face, as he watched Fang close up the surgical site and suture Joyce’s skin back down. There would be some scarring, unfortunately; the facility just wasn’t equipped with the sort of stimulating lasers he would have needed to close her wounds without leaving any sign that they’d been there. But maybe that was for the best. Maybe this was the sort of thing that had to be remembered, just so you could believe that it was real.
I was crying, too, but unlike the Colonel, there was no grief in my tears. I had cried myself dry over Joyce enough: I knew that she was gone. Until this moment, I hadn’t allowed myself to really believe that Tansy could still be saved, that Tansy might make it back to the broken doors, and hence back home to us.
There was still hope in the world, and the proof of it was on the stretcher in front of me, being hooked back up to the machines that would keep her breathing until the integration was complete. Tansy was going to live again.
Now we just had to find a way to say the same about the world.