Chimera (Parasitology) (36 page)

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.