Chimera (Parasitology) (43 page)

I hesitated. This was the hard part. This was the part that needed to get me inside. I glanced at Sherman, trying to project shyness through my eyes, and added, “And I missed Sherman. He was the only one who ever really
knew
me and was kind to me anyway. Everybody else either saw a lab specimen or a confused human girl. He saw a chimera. I didn’t realize how important that was until it stopped.”

Sherman put an arm possessively around my waist. “You see? She’s here for the right reasons, and I’m going to keep her. You know you can’t stop me, Bat. You might as well just step aside and let us in.”

“You’re going to get us all killed,” said Batya. She looked at me for a moment, and there was no warmth or welcome in her expression. I fought the urge to shiver. I’d been worried about running into Ronnie, who might not forgive me for coming back after he’d helped me escape. Maybe I should have been worrying about the people I didn’t know yet. They had less reason to trust me.

Then she stepped aside. Sherman’s hand went from my waist to the small of my back, and he propelled me into the mall.

The tracking device Fishy had installed in the heel of my shoe would be showing Fishy and the others that I was moving again: It would be flashing on their monitor with every step I took, keeping them apprised of my status. We hadn’t been able to find a way to wire me for sound without the risk that I’d be found out, but the tracker was small and virtually undetectable, unless Sherman decided to take my shoes apart. When I found the place where our people were being held, I was supposed to pace back and forth—five steps one way, five steps
back the other way, and repeat twice to show that it wasn’t an accidental pattern. Then they’d be able to come in without killing our people.

Not that it would help Adam or Juniper very much once the gas grenades started flying. I needed to find them and somehow tell them to get a filter over their mouths and noses, or I was going to watch them die. I didn’t think I could survive that.

The interior of the mall had changed since I’d been there last. There were more stacks of boxes pushed up against the walls. I couldn’t stop long enough to let my eyes focus on the letters, but some of them had helpful pictograms of their contents—pineapples and tomatoes and fish. They were stockpiling canned food. Water, too, and soft drinks, and juices—anything that wouldn’t spoil within the next year. We walked down the hallway to the main concourse. The small, buzzing sensation that always told me I was near another chimera was stronger than it had ever been before. I had a better hold on it than I’d had the last time I’d been in Sherman’s custody.

Sherman’s… I glanced at him, suddenly startled. “I can’t feel you,” I said, trying to make my voice a little petulant, like him hiding himself from me was rude but not terrifying. “Why can’t I feel you?”

“So you
are
one of the radar children!” Sherman beamed, first at me and then across me at Batya. “I told you she’d have interesting skills to bring to the table. Only one in four chimera is lucky enough to be so connected, Sal. I should have guessed that you could be one of them, if you bothered to work with your own abilities long enough to figure out what those feelings meant.”

“I was always drawn to y—I mean, to other chimera,” I said, and ducked my head, hoping he would assume that the redness in my cheeks was a blush, and not anger. “I can feel them when they’re near me. This building is
full
of us. I can even feel
her”—I gestured toward Batya—“and we only just met for the first time. But I can’t feel you. Why can’t I feel you, Sherman?”

“Because, my poppet, I can turn off that part of my broadcast when I need to. I find that I generally need to. It helps me do important things, like intercepting visitors in my parking lot.”

That explained how Sherman had been able to sneak up behind me without setting off any alarm bells: He’d been somehow suppressing that part of his pheromone signature. He really was the ultimate infiltrator. The thought came with a thin, jagged line of fear that raked its claws across my heart. Sherman was
built
to lie and cheat and work his way into places he didn’t belong. Even as a chimera, he was a parasite. I didn’t have those advantages. All I had was a lifetime of trying to play along and play by the rules, and that didn’t guarantee me anything. I was going to get caught. I was
going
to get caught, and the only question was whether they’d have time to start taking me apart before Fishy and the cavalry arrived to save whatever remained.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Why?”

“I don’t know!” Sherman’s whole face lit up when he confessed his ignorance, like this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened. It was… sweet. It made me remember the days when he’d been one of my best friends, and I’d thought that we would be friends forever. Too bad he’d turned out to be a murderous asshole. That really put a damper on our hanging out. “It’s something to do with the tailoring that my creators did. I’ve asked Mother to explain it to me, when she’s done reworking your children—you did find out about that, didn’t you? The children?”

“You mean the clones you cultured from my body? Yeah, I found out.” Juniper, he had Juniper, and I couldn’t let him know about her. I forced my face to stay neutral, but allowed
a sliver of disapproval to seep into my voice as I said, “You could have asked me, you know. That’s why I left the last time. I really don’t like it when people cut into my head without permission.”

“I’m sorry about that; it won’t happen again,” he said. I didn’t believe him, of course. I was willing to risk myself for my family. That didn’t make me a fool.

We had entered the main concourse while we spoke. The fountain was still going, the water trickling down in an endless shower of droplets. I wondered whether
that
water had been contaminated, or whether they had somehow managed to keep it clean. If it was connected to the taps somehow, it would eventually fill with antiparasitics from the general water supply. The thought was oddly entertaining, and quietly terrible.

People I didn’t recognize sat on the edge of the fountain or moved between the open shops, talking to each other, carrying things from place to place, doing the normal things that normal people did when they didn’t have anything more pressing at hand. Something about seeing them made my heart hurt. This was a civilization of chimera. It was small, yes, and it had done some terrible things, but as Colonel Mitchell had made clear, we were at war. Only one side of this conflict was going to walk away triumphant. Was I siding with the humans over my own species because of how I’d been raised, or because the humans were actually right about who deserved to inherit the Earth? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure that anybody did.

These people could have been my friends, if things had gone differently, if Sherman had actually been able to win me over to his side. He could have convinced me to make this place my home, and I would have been fighting with him all this time. The thought turned my stomach. We walk on the graves of our unborn selves, the futures we never got to live, and some of those people wouldn’t get along very well with the ones we actually decided to be.

“What brings you here
now
, Sal?” asked Batya. Her question had knives tucked inside, like terrible prizes.

“Someone decided to raid Dr. Cale’s lab while I was asleep in my quarters,” I said calmly, meeting her gaze without flinching. Next to Sherman, and Dr. Banks, and Gail Mitchell, she was nothing scary. She was just another chimera, and I knew how to deal with them. “I woke up and everyone was gone. So I realized that no one was going to be in a position to stop me. I stole a bike from the Kmart, and I got moving.”

“The Kmart,” said Batya. “Really. You mean the Kmart that was swarming with throwbacks?”

It took me a moment to realize that “throwbacks” was her way of saying “sleepwalkers.” It made sense, in a backward sort of manner. For a human, a sleepwalker was a person who had suddenly taken leave of their senses and fallen into a violent fugue state. For a chimera, a throwback was an implant that had failed to properly integrate with its human host and was thus unable to participate in a fully intelligent world. It was all in which direction you chose to look at the thing from.

I liked “throwback” better. It implied that they could someday find a way to stumble forward, and join the rest of us in the light.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “You mean you can’t communicate with them? I thought it was like the chimera-detection trick. I thought everyone could do it.”

Sherman frowned. “What are you saying?”

“They say my name a lot. The throwbacks. I think I have really good pheromones, because most of the time, they listen to me, as long as they’re not too hungry. When they’re hungry, they don’t really listen to anybody.”

“They say your
name
?” Batya sounded frankly disbelieving.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know why. No one’s ever been able to tell me why. Don’t you remember, Sherman? You’ve heard it. You were there when Chave got sick. She started saying my name right before she tried to kill me.”

“She knew your name because she was responsible for you,” he said, but there was doubt in his tone, like he was suddenly questioning a lot of things he had previously taken entirely for granted. “You can control the throwbacks. Really.”

“As long as they’re not hungry.” I could see the abandoned department store that had been my prison up ahead of us. I shivered. I couldn’t help myself. “Dr. Cale always made sure the throwbacks in the Kmart were well fed, since otherwise, she couldn’t keep them from trying to get out.”

“Fascinating,” said Sherman. “I hope you won’t mind if we test this. It could be useful in the months to come.” His hand was still nestled at the small of my back, keeping me from moving away from him. I wanted to shrug it off. I didn’t dare. If he needed me to stay in place, then I was going to stay, at least until he decided that he was willing to let me move.

“As long as you feed them first, I’m game for pretty much anything,” I said. “I want to understand myself better. I want to understand all of us better. I like the humans. Some of them have been kind to me. But they’re never going to know what it is to
be
me, and I need that. I need people who know.”

It wasn’t hard to make those words sound sincere. They came from the heart of me, from the place that died a little every time one of Dr. Cale’s lab techs looked at me like I was less than they were, the part that was still bleeding from the look on Gail Mitchell’s face. I needed my own kind to remind me that I wasn’t an aberration, I wasn’t a mistake: I was as worthy of existence as anyone else. I just didn’t need Sherman, or his assemblage of would-be monsters. I needed Adam, and Juniper, and Tansy. I needed
my
people, and I was going to get them back, whatever it took.

“You realize we can’t trust you right away,” said Sherman. He sounded genuinely apologetic. “You can’t waltz in here, say ‘I’m on your side now,’ and expect us to be all right with that.”

Batya snorted. I got the feeling she was never going to be all
right with that. I wasn’t clear what her job was, but she seemed to be filling the same bodyguard-slash-security-expert position that Ronnie held. Under the circumstances, it made sense that she wouldn’t be in a hurry to put her faith in me.

“I understand,” I said, and smiled, trying to look hopeful. “I figure we have time for everyone here to get used to me. But… where’s Ronnie? I expected to see him.”

“She sacrificed herself to contaminate the humans’ water supply,” said Sherman.

Hearing him misgender Ronnie so casually made me want to glower. I forced my face to remain smooth, betraying only my honest shock as I said, “He did what?”

“We had to get the eggs and infant worms into the water somehow, and they only mature properly in human flesh,” said Sherman. “It’s why the humans are so foolish to believe that we would wipe them out entirely. That has never been, will never be, the goal. Without humans, we’d have no place to properly incubate our young. Ronnie swallowed an entire test tube of eggs cultured from your DNA, and she went to the reservoir, and she let herself go for the greater cause.”

“Not just Ronnie,” said Batya. There was a heat in her tone that had nothing to do with me. I had stumbled across some ongoing argument between the two of them, and it was all I could do not to duck my head to get away from the force of her glare. “We lost five people in that action, and since it turns out that your babies aren’t selective about where they hang their hats, we’ve lost more people since.”

“They’re not my babies,” I said. “I didn’t volunteer.”

“You’re not still mad about that, are you, Sal?” asked Sherman. “It was for the greater good. You should appreciate that sometimes choices must be made that feel less than optimal for the individual. Or did Tansy manage to make a miracle return when you ran off and left her at SymboGen?”

He didn’t know about Tansy.
He didn’t know.
His spies, if
he had any remaining, had not managed to infiltrate the new, smaller SymboGen, and my sister’s survival was still a mystery to him. I managed to suppress my gasp of delight, transforming it instead into the glower I had been holding back for so long.

“Yeah, I’m still mad about that,” I said. “I’m not as ‘burn it down’ resentful, but you shouldn’t have cut me open. Not without my permission. You know it was wrong. You knew that it was wrong when you did it. It’s going to take me a while before I can trust you again, because you did that.”

“The needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.” We were almost to the department store. Was that where they were being kept? It only made sense if Ronnie had closed the avenue I used for my escape before he committed suicide for the cause. Otherwise, Sherman would have been locking people up in a box with a hole in the side. Not a good way to hang on to your prisoners. “You have to understand, Sal: It doesn’t matter how much I care for you, and it never will. I will always put the needs of our species ahead of what you may personally desire. If you can’t handle that, this is not the place for you.”