What?” I looked at Sherman. “I don’t—”
“I’m not a jealous sort,” he said, folding my hands around the handle of his gun. There was probably a name for it, something technical and deadly, but it was hard to think of it as anything other than the handle, the part I was supposed to hold while I pulled the trigger. “I don’t mind that you’ve had another lover. If anything, it’ll cast me in a better light. No human could ever love you like I will. But I refuse to let your loyalties be divided. You’ve already shown that you can be swayed, like a reed in the wind. That’s a good thing! Reeds don’t break. I just don’t see why I should make it easier for you to bend.”
“I’ve never killed anyone,” I said. My voice squeaked, breaking. And that wasn’t true, was it? I had killed before, but they had always been sleepwalker-throwbacks, people who were never going to remember themselves and come back into the world. How was that any more forgivable? I was already a murderer. No amount of pretty dancing around the subject would change that.
“So you can start,” said Sherman. “Oh, and in case this was some sort of trick, and you’re thinking about shooting me? You should be aware that two things will happen immediately if you try that. Batya will shoot you.”
“Happily,” said Batya.
“And then my people will take your precious boy there and crack him open and place me inside his skull, where I will make myself at home.” Sherman smirked. “I’ll miss this body. I like the things it lets me do. But I can get used to something a little more… scholarly.”
“Sherman, please stop trying to kill my biological son,” said Dr. Cale. She hadn’t looked away from her microscope. “I’m not going to love you any more than I do right now if you take away the other objects of my affection. I’m just going to be angry with you for taking my best lab technician away from me.”
“Thanks for the sentimentality, Mom,” said Nathan. He was staring at me and the gun in my hand, looking faintly ill.
“I don’t have time for sentiment,” said Dr. Cale. “Besides, your brother isn’t the sentimental sort. But he won’t like what happens if I get mad at him.”
“I…” I tried to make myself raise the gun, to at least pretend to be playing along, but this was it: We had found the limits of my pretense. I shook my head harshly, and started to pace.
Batya twitched like she was going to stop me. Sherman gestured for her to be still, and she held her position.
“I’m so tired of all of us trying to kill each other all the time.” Five steps and turn. “Why do we have to lower ourselves to their level? Why can’t we be better than they are?” Five steps and turn. “They made us, and that means we have to be better than them, or they might as well never have made us at all.” Five steps and turn. Five more steps, back to the place where I had started, and stop. I resisted the urge to look up at the skylights overhead. If the cavalry was coming, I didn’t want to give them away. Instead, I looked at Sherman, pleading. “We have to be better than they are. They made us. We have to prove that we’re not a mistake.”
“Oh, Sal.” Sherman reached over and plucked the gun from my hands. For a moment—just a moment—my fingers tightened, trying to keep him from taking it away. But I couldn’t defend myself from all his people. More and more of them were taking notice of us, stopping whatever they’d been doing to turn and look quizzically in our direction.
“I told you,” said Batya. “Didn’t I tell you? She’s never going to be on your side. She’s never going to be on our side. She’s just here because she wants her human fuck-toy back.”
“Don’t swear, Batya: The woman I got your body from wouldn’t approve. As for my Sal…” Sherman reached out and ran his fingertips down my cheek. His touch tingled like a mild electric shock. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, darling? I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think that you can.”
“Get your hands off her,” snarled Nathan. He grabbed the metal grate keeping him inside the store, pulling it inward until the whole thing rattled without effectively budging. “Sal, get the hell away from him!”
“He’s not the boss of you, is he, dear?” Sherman’s eyes narrowed. “Is he?”
I could feel the drums thrumming through his skin, trying to force my heart to beat in time with his. I reached for the dark, holding it close, and allowed my face to go slack. “He’s not the boss of me,” I said dreamily. “Also, that’s not grammatically correct. He should be grammatically correct if he wants people to listen to him.”
“My little pedant,” said Sherman, stroking my cheek again. “You can’t lie to me, can you, darling?”
“Are you lying to me?”
“No.”
“Are you here because you want your human lover back?”
“No.” I glanced to Nathan. I couldn’t stop myself. The stricken look on his face would follow me to my grave. He’d really believed that I was there to rescue him. I am here to rescue you, I thought—but of course, he couldn’t hear me. All he could hear were the lies I was telling to Sherman. And I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, we were all doomed, and then I would never be able to make it up to him. Everything depended on how good of a liar I had learnt to be.
Sherman wasn’t done. “Are you going to betray me?”
“No.” I already had. As soon as I’d triggered the tracking device in my shoe, I’d betrayed him.
Sherman leaned closer, until I could see the stretched-tissue pattern of his irises. Human poetry always compared eyes to flowers, but to me, they looked more like the blossoming mouths of tapeworms, brightly colored and filled with secret teeth. The eyes were the window to the soul. Maybe what you saw there said more about you than it did about the person you were looking at. “Are you going to stay with me this time?”
“Yes,” I whispered. He leaned in and kissed me fiercely, as much to make the claim in front of Nathan as to possess me for his own. I didn’t pull back or resist. I stood there, and I kissed him, and I knew that Nathan was watching, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it, because I was trying to save our lives.
Sherman pushed me away. He looked at me sadly, and shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”
Hands grabbed my upper arms. I twisted, and saw that Batya had me in a surprisingly strong grip. She was snarling at me without opening her lips, turning her face into a mask of malice. “What are you doing?” I demanded, trying to squirm away. “Stop it!”
“I’m sorry, Sal, but you’ve betrayed me one time too many,” said Sherman. “I still love you. You’re still my miracle girl. But that’s why we’re going to be together. Don’t you see? For us, there’s always a second chance to make a first impression.”
Just like that, his plan became clear. I screamed, high and shrill and angry, before redoubling my efforts to get away from Batya. “You bastard! I came to you because I wanted to be with you! You can’t do this to me! You can’t cut me open again!”
“When next we speak, you won’t remember any of this,” said Sherman, still perfectly calm. “We’ll open you up and slide you into a new host—a better host, I think, one that’s been through less trauma. You were already planning on using her, I’m sure. Otherwise, why would you have kept her so neatly isolated from the rest of your stock?”
Carrie. He was going to slice my skull open and pull me out of it like a prize in a box of cereal, and then he was going to put me inside of Carrie, who hated what I was more than anyone else I’d ever met. It was a horrible thing to do to her. It was a horrible thing to do to me. I screamed again, thrashing harder. Batya was shorter than I was, but she was also stronger, and her grip on my arms wasn’t wavering. Nathan was shaking the bars of his cage and yelling. Sherman rolled his eyes.
“You are so dramatic. It’s from all that humanism you absorbed while you were living with them. We’ll strip it right out of you, sweetheart, and then we’ll be together, and you’ll be the good, obedient helper you should always have been. There was never any need for things to be like this.” He reached out and grabbed my chin, forcing my head to be still. I stopped thrashing rather than risk wrenching my neck. “Never. Any. Need.”
The pounding of his heartbeat in my veins was almost irresistible, drowning out the drums that had been my anchor and absolute for so long. I took a breath, pulling the hot warm dark around me as much as I dared. The temptation to drop down into it was so strong. I could make all this go away. I could remove myself from the situation, and then when I woke up, I would be someone else, and all the hard choices and difficult situations would be over.
I would be dead.
I would be as dead as Sally Mitchell, as lost as Joyce; I would no longer exist. Epigenetic data might carry my essential core into the new body—hence Sherman’s insistence that he would still have me, that we could be in love despite my change of skins—but I would be gone forever. I would never come back.
I had worked too hard and fought too long to give up that easily. Holding the hot warm dark around myself like a shield, I whipped my head to the side and bit his hand.
Sherman yelped as he jumped back, eyes wide and wounded. He looked offended, like I had somehow violated the laws of the universe by daring to stand up for myself. “You can’t—” he sputtered.
“Fuck you,” I snapped. “I was never here for you Sherman, do you hear me? Never. I came for my lover and my friends and my family, and you are none of those things to me, you are nothing but the man who betrayed me, who told his goons to kill my sister, who tried to kill the entire world. You’re a murderer and a bastard and the only proof I ever needed that we’re no better than the humans! We may as well be humans for all the difference it’s made to us. I will never love you. You can cut me open a thousand times, you can slam me into a million different bodies, and I will never, never love you. I am not yours to control.”
“Now can I shoot her?” demanded Batya.
“You little bitch,” said Sherman wonderingly.
“Get your hands off her!” shouted Nathan.
The sound of glass breaking was almost obscured by the noise. My eyes widened. The assault had begun, and I still didn’t know where Juniper was.
I couldn’t save her if I couldn’t save myself. I took a deep breath of the hopefully untainted air, and held it, squinting my eyes closed as tightly as I could. The antiparasitics would be aerosolized and could potentially enter my body through my mucus membranes.
“What the fuck is she doing?” demanded Sherman.
There was a clattering noise, as if metal objects were falling from the sky and landing on the mall floor. Someone shouted. Someone else screamed. The sound of hissing filled the air. I held my breath and kept my eyes closed, trying to keep the caustic medicines from entering my body.
“Sherman?” Batya sounded distressed. Her grip on my arms had weakened, ever so slightly, as she was overcome with surprise. That was my opening. I kicked back, slamming the heel of my shoe into her knee. She yelped and let go. Eyes still closed, I ran in the one direction I was sure was safe: toward the storefront where Nathan and Dr. Cale were confined.
My hands slammed into the metal grating. I latched on, holding tight. If I could just keep myself from needing to breathe; if I could just hold on…
“Sal, the gas!” Nathan’s voice, so close to my ear that I could have wept. I’d been so afraid that I would never see him again. Now I was going to die only a few feet away from him, and he wasn’t going to be able to save me. “Is it poison?”
I shook my head desperately, eyes still closed. He was safe. He needed to know he was safe. Humans might get sick from inhaling too much of this stuff—we had human DNA in us, anything designed to target us was by its very nature going to affect our creators—but they wouldn’t die. He was safe. Everyone who mattered to me was safe, except for Adam, and Juniper. And me. I wasn’t safe at all.
Maybe that was only fair. If I couldn’t save the people I loved, why should I be allowed to save myself?
“Is it something that’s going to hurt you but not us?”
This time I nodded vigorously, still clinging to the grate. Someone behind me was coughing, a steady, harsh sound. I hoped it was Sherman. I hoped he was going to cough his guts out before he died. Maybe then he’d realize that he had committed crimes that could never be forgiven.
“Sherman, come on!” Batya again. Her command was followed by the sound of stumbling footsteps, as if someone was running away. Oh, how I wanted to follow them, to cut them down and make them breathe deep of the consequences of their actions. Things had never needed to go this far. Sherman had forced the situation, and now there was no taking it back.
“Here.” Dr. Cale’s voice was surprisingly close. Something wet was shoved up against my face. “Nathan, hold this in place. Sal, go ahead and breathe. You’re turning red, and if you pass out, you’re not going to be able to help yourself. This should make things a little better.”
Cautiously, I took a breath. The cloth had a sharp, antiseptic taste to it. My lungs didn’t start burning. I hoped that was a good sign.
“You should be able to work it between the bars. Careful now. You don’t want to drop it.”
Bit by bit, pausing only to steal a little more air through the sodden cloth, I worked it through the grate and held it over my nose and mouth.
“Put out your hand again,” said Dr. Cale. I did as I was told. A sheet of what felt like cling film was pressed on my fingers. “Put this over your eyes. It’s supposed to protect us from splatter when we can’t wear goggles. It should keep you from going blind.”
Again, I did as I was told, opening my eyes at the last possible second. The thin, flexible film clung to the skin around them, making the world look a little distorted but clear. Nathan was right in front of me, pressed up against the grate. Dr. Cale was next to him, seated in her chair, a wan look on her face.
“Get us out of here,” she said. “We have to find my children.”
I nodded, not daring to speak through the cloth, and rushed to the lever that controlled the gate. I yanked it as hard as I could, putting all my weight into the action. It creaked. It wobbled. And finally, it dropped into place, triggering the mechanism that opened the store. I stepped back and watched as the grate retracted upward.
Nathan was the first out, ducking under the rising grate as soon as it was high enough. He rushed to me, embraced me, whispered, “I knew you would find us,” in my ear, and then he was gone, running away down the mall concourse, heading for the distant doors to the old department store.
“Go, go, follow him!” shouted Dr. Cale. The grate was still rising, but slowly: She was trapped until it was high enough to let her wheel her chair out. She looked frustrated, and almost anguished. It was the first time I’d ever seen her really limited by her circumstances, and it made me hate Sherman even more. How dare he put her in this position? How dare he put us in this position? “He’s trying to find Adam and the others! Here!”
She lobbed a stack of white towels soaked with whatever solution she’d mixed up to shield me out onto the concourse floor. It hit with a wet smacking sound. I grabbed the towels and ran after Nathan. He had a head start, but I was faster, and I had as much to lose as he did. In very little time, we were running side by side. Then I was pulling ahead, scanning the wall for the same lever setup that had allowed me to access the store where he’d been kept. If I could get the grate open…
The lever was almost ten feet away when I heard the gun go off. I staggered, almost dropping the towel I was breathing through, and looked back over my shoulder. Sherman was standing some twenty feet away, wearing a mask over the lower half of his face. Where had he been able to find a mask? Was he expecting this sort of attack?
No, no, he couldn’t have been. There was a sporting goods store in the mall, and he’d been stockpiling medical supplies for who knew how long. He must have had it already, and come back for his revenge when he realized that he’d been set up. He shook his head as he looked at me, the gun in his hand still raised. I stumbled onward, trying to put more distance between us. He’d missed me once. He could miss me again.
Then the men broke through the skylights, and the sound of machine gun fire filled the air. Sherman’s attention was instantly wrenched away from me. He turned to fire on them, and they shot back, and he fell, he fell, his body bloomed red, like the hot warm dark was finally coming up into the light, and he fell, and I turned, and I ran for the lever.
Nathan was already rolling up the metal shielding when I hit the lever to retract the grate. As soon as he had enough of an opening, he slid inside, and I realized—with dawning hope—that if USAMRIID hadn’t thrown any grenades into the department store itself, they might still be safe. There were no skylights in the store. There would have been no way for the gas to get inside.
The men in their black armor were on the ground now, unclipping themselves from the cords they’d used to jump down. I wondered how many of them I knew. I wondered how many were men like Private Larsen, who had been able to accept me as a person, if not a human being; I wondered how many were women like his sergeant, who had been so happy to bury her fists in my stomach. There was no way of knowing. They were faceless behind their helmets, and their hands were full of rifle barrels and electric prods.
I ducked and followed Nathan under the grate. The towels were soaking my clothing, making everything wet and warm. I kept running. We had passed the point where there were any other choices left for me.
“Sal!”
The shout came from the direction of the stairs. I turned, and there was Nathan, standing above the level of the creeping gas, with the terrified faces of our friends and colleagues behind him. Adam was there, and he was holding Juniper in his arms. She squealed when she saw me, a screeching, inhuman, beautiful sound, reaching out her hands like she could somehow seize the distance between us and throw it away.
“Coming!” It was hard to yell through the towel; my voice came out muffled and strange. I ran for them. I seemed to be slowing down for some reason, but still, I ran, and pressed the extra towels into Nathan’s hands. “Your mom sent these.”
He looked at me, and his eyes went wide even as his face went pale. He turned, handing the towels to Adam. “Put one of these over your face, and one over Juniper’s. They’ll protect you from the gas. Close your eyes. Everyone else, take a towel if it makes you feel better, but you don’t need to worry as much. The gas is an antiparasitic, it shouldn’t hurt you if you’re human.”
Towels were passed around. Juniper reached for me and made that high keening noise again, her hands starfishing in the air as Adam pressed a towel over her mouth and nose.
Nathan reached for me, taking my arm. “Sal, focus on me.”
“What?” I blinked at him. He was getting fuzzy around the edges. Maybe I’d breathed in more of the gas than I had thought. “Nathan. We did it. We got you back.”
“Stay with me, Sal. You can’t go now, I’m not ready for you to go now. Close the broken doors. Just don’t look at them.”
“What? I’m not… I’m not going anywhere.”
He sounded more anxious than I had ever heard him before. I blinked again, more slowly this time, before looking down at myself, and at the large red stain that was spreading across my abdomen as the blood soaked my shirt.
“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding. “I’ve been shot.”
Saying the words seemed to unlock a whole world of displaced pain and weakness. My knees buckled. Nathan was there to catch me, and I smiled at him before I closed my eyes and let him hold me up. Juniper was keening, Adam and the others were shouting, and the broken doors were there. The broken doors were open, and I entered, and I was home.
I floated in the hot warm dark, where I had begun, where I had gone whenever I needed safety or comfort during my brief, confusing human life, and where I was apparently going to die. Everything was formless and safe, holding me in the warm embrace of weightless perfection. I moved with a thought, and there were no clumsy, unnecessary limbs to get in my way: I was evolution’s darling, a ribbon of flesh capable of reproducing without aid, of regrowing from even the smallest segment.
I wonder if they’re growing a new me, I thought. They could do it. One little snip and they’d have a whole new Sal, epigenetic data and core personality intact, but ready to learn and grow and have a second chance at everything. I’d thought of it as dying before, when Sherman was threatening me with a transplant. Now, in the hot warm dark, it seemed like a beautiful rebirth, as long as I didn’t have to leave. If they wanted to take a little piece and grow themselves a new friend and lover and companion, I was all right with that. But here…
I was finally home.
I was going to miss my friends and loved ones, but not forever. Their names were already fading around the edges, going soft as trauma worked on my brain. I would be down in the hot warm dark until the mind that sustained me shut down, and then I would be gone. My body would live, my epigenetics would live, but the memories and experiences and ideas I had stored in the tissue of Sally Mitchell’s mind would be lost.
I don’t want to go, I thought, and I am already gone, I thought, and both things were true at the same time, and I made my peace with that.
The hot warm dark that surrounded me was part real, part memory: I knew that. I couldn’t move weightlessly when I was tangled in Sally’s brain, but part of me remembered moving like a delicate ribbon through her digestive tract and then through her major arteries, tracing a pathway from her intestines to her brain. The human body was a miracle. Teeth always felt so big when you touched them with a tongue, and so small when you touched them with a finger. Everything was like that, a shifting scale of outside and in. As Sally—as Sal—my body had been the sum of the universe, so small and so fragile and so brutally defined. But before I had a name, Sally’s body had been the universe, so enormous that I could have wandered it until I died and never have seen all that it had to offer. Everything was a matter of scale.
“—me? Sal, can you hear me?”
There was no sound in the hot warm dark: even the distant, constant pounding of drums was more vibration than noise, echoing through everything without ever making itself heard. For a moment, I didn’t understand. I had no concept of sound, and thus had no concept of spoken words, or the meanings they were intended to convey.
“Don’t give up, honey, just hold on for me. Hold on. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. You’ll see. We’re going to get you out of here.”
The words continued, and began to carry meanings, little packets of information that burst like fireworks across the night sky of my mind. They were for me. I was Sal, and someone was telling me to hold on. Hold on to what? You needed hands to hold on, and I had no hands, not here, not down in the dark where the monsters lived.
You don’t have to stay here.
The thought was more interesting than the words were. I turned my full attention on it. I didn’t have to stay here? But here was where I existed: Here was where I had settled after running for so long. How could I not stay? Here was where I belonged.
You could belong somewhere else. You could belong with your family. We could belong with your family.
I recoiled from the thought. Sally?
No. Sally’s dead. Sally’s been dead since before we existed, but we’ll be dead too soon if we don’t do something about it.
Who are you?
I’m you, and you’re me. You’re the me that yearns for the hot warm dark, for vastness with limits. I’m the you that dreams of hands and fingers, of smallness that goes on forever. I’m your connection to the human brain where you store the person you have become, and I am that person, and we don’t have to let go yet. They’re trying so hard to save us. They’re fighting so hard to save us, and Sal, it’s up to you. You’re the part that endures. What do we do? What do we do? What do we—
“Just please, do something!”
The voice sliced through the thought, breaking it into a thousand pieces. I couldn’t forget sound now, and with that memory came the memory of sight: The hot warm dark went red around me, filling with the movement of blood through veins and bile through the stomach. I couldn’t be seeing any of this—I had no eyes—but I could see it all the same. My memory was good. I had looked inside so many animals when I helped Daisy with her necropsies. I had looked inside so many people when the sleepwalkers ripped them apart. I knew what I should be seeing.
“—to stop the bleeding. I need more cloths!” This voice belonged to Dr. Cale, which meant the other voice belonged to Nathan.
Nathan.
I didn’t want to leave him. He was so important to me, and it had been so long since we’d been able to just be together, existing together, figuring out the future together. He was all I wanted. He was sweet and kind and stable, and he would hold my hand while I decided what was going to happen next. I couldn’t leave him. Not like this.
Breathe, I replied.
I breathed. A great, sucking breath that required a mouth to take, and lungs to hold, and so I had both of those things. Pain crashed into me like a wave, and I let it fill me, because pain was better than serenity in this moment: Pain was more important than floating in the hot warm dark until everything ended.
With pain came gravity, and I was suddenly anchored to a body, pinned down to the surface I was lying on. I tried to force my eyes to open, but that was one thing too many; I couldn’t make my eyelids do more than twitch.
“I’ve got a pulse,” someone shouted.
Everything was jittering. I was in the back of a truck, I realized: We were driving away from the mall. Where were we going? Who was behind the wheel? Was I heading for safety, or for another disaster?
“Keep her head steady, Nathan, we don’t want her jostling around more than she has to.”
Nathan. The hands on the side of my face belonged to Nathan. Had I even realized that there were hands on the side of my face? It didn’t matter now. I tried again to open my eyes, and this time I succeeded, looking up into the wan, worried face of my boyfriend.
“Sal,” he said. The relief in his voice was painful. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Sherman shot you, but we have some of the best doctors left in the world, and you’re going to be fine.”
“Juniper? Adam?” I whispered.
“They’re okay, too.” He bent to kiss me. I closed my eyes again.
We were going to be fine.