Chimera (Parasitology) (44 page)

“But we’re not going to let you leave,” interjected Batya. “You know where we are now. There’s being generous with other members of our species, and then there’s being a fool. Only a fool would let someone with loyalties as fluid as yours step out that door knowing where we were.”

I blinked at her. My “loyalties”? “Fluid”? My loyalties had never wavered. I had always been loyal to my family—and while my definition of “family” had shifted from the Mitchells to Nathan, Dr. Cale, and my fellow chimera once I discovered what I was, it had been a natural transition. I hadn’t been fickle or fluid.

But then, I only knew that because I lived with myself every day. To someone on the outside, it could easily appear that I was just going from easy answer to easy answer. The Mitchells
to Dr. Cale; Dr. Cale to USAMRIID; USAMRIID to Sherman, and then back to Dr. Cale, at least according to the story I was feeding to Sherman. That story ended with my choosing to come back to Sherman—choosing the apparent winning side, just like I had all along.

The thought was sobering. How many people’s motives didn’t match up with what I’d taken for their actions? How many villains were the heroes of their own stories? I didn’t know, and I was terribly afraid that I was never going to find out.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” I said. “I’m staying here. Whatever I have to do to prove my loyalty, I’ll do it.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d say that.” Sherman stopped. We were standing in front of a shoe store, with metal sheeting pulled down to block it from view. He nodded to Batya, who moved to open the store’s first layer of protection from shoplifters. The second layer, a metal grate that served as surprisingly effective prison bars, remained in place.

It shouldn’t have been such a surprise to see Nathan and Dr. Cale inside, bent over workstations, their attention mostly focused on the tasks at hand. Nathan glanced toward the front of the store when the shield began to retract, whining and scraping all the while. His eyes went wide. He stood so fast he knocked over his stool.

“Sal!” he exclaimed. From the sound of his voice, he couldn’t decide whether to be relieved that I was in one piece or upset to see me in this place. I shared the sentiment. “You’re here!”

Nathan’s eyes flicked to Sherman, and to the hand still resting against the small of my back. His face changed then, becoming a mask of fury. Hands clenching into fists, he stalked toward us.

“Get your hands off her, you bastard,” he spat. “You don’t have the right to lay hands on my fiancé.”

“She came here of her own free will, Brother,” said Sherman.
“I told you she’d make the right choice if she had the opportunity to do it all over again. All she has to do now is earn the right to stay.”

“How do I do that?” I asked. I lifted my chin slightly as I spoke, hoping Nathan would remember me doing the same as I spoke to Dr. Banks, back when I had pretended to be Sally.
If I can pretend to be one kind of loyalist, I can pretend to be another,
I thought.
Don’t give up on me yet. Don’t let him convince you that I’m lost.

“Easy,” said Sherman. He took his hand away from my back and pressed a gun into my hand. I hadn’t even seen him draw it. “You kill him.”

Oh.

W
hat?” 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?”

“No,” I said.

“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.