Parasite (Parasitology) (47 page)

“Fast enough that we need to be very, very concerned,” said Nathan. “According to my projections—”

I never did find out what his projections said. Two things happened before he could continue. Beverly’s head came up, lips suddenly drawn back in a snarl, and the doorbell rang. Nathan and I exchanged a look.

“Were you expecting company?” I asked.

“Just you,” he said.

We both turned in the direction of the front door. We couldn’t see it through the bedroom wall, but we were both all too aware that whatever was on the other side might not be friendly.

The doorbell rang again.

We shut the dogs in the bedroom before heading for the door. If Beverly was already growling, there was no telling what she’d do when she saw our unexpected guest. I didn’t want her to bite anyone—I knew all too well what happened to dogs that bit—and even more, I didn’t want her getting hurt if she was growling at, say, SymboGen security.

Nathan approached the door, pressed the intercom button, and said, “Who is it?”

“Your sister,” replied a voice. It was rendered anonymous by the intercom, genderless and filled with static. That didn’t matter. We knew who it was.

Nathan and I exchanged a look. “Tansy,” we said, in unison.

Tansy continued: “Did you know there are shrubs outside your building? I guess you’d have to, it’s your building, so they’re probably partially your shrubs, common-law landscaping or something, but anyway, they’re really funny-looking. I would complain if I were you.”

“I don’t actually get to vote on the greenery,” said Nathan.

“What?” Tansy demanded, through the intercom. “It’s not polite to talk about me when I’m not in the room, you know. Doctor C will be
really
mad at you when I tell her.”

Looking like he couldn’t decide whether he was amused or
annoyed, Nathan said, “I’ll take that under advisement, but as you’re the one who started it, I doubt she’s going to be too angry. Now take your finger off the button and I’ll buzz you in.”

“Okay,” said Tansy. The intercom cut off.

“I suppose that’s one solution to SymboGen following us if we tried to go to Mom,” Nathan muttered, and pressed the button that would allow Tansy into the building.

“Won’t they just follow Tansy?” I asked.

“Not if they don’t know that they need to,” said Nathan. “She’ll almost certainly need to be more careful after this visit, but right now, she’s just one more person they’ve never seen before. Anonymity has its perks.”

There was a knock at the door. Nathan leaned over and opened it, allowing Tansy into the apartment. Her overalls were gone, replaced by much less eye-catching jeans and a red tank top. Pink streaks still decorated her pale blonde hair, which she had pulled into short ponytails at the back of her head, but they were somehow less noticeable. And both her eyes were brown.

“What happened to your eyes?” I asked, before I could think better of the question.

“I like that better than ‘hello,’ ” said Tansy. “That’s how we should just all greet each other from now on.” She stepped into the apartment, glancing shamelessly around.

“What if nothing’s happened to the eyes of the person you’re talking to?” asked Nathan, closing the door behind her.

“That’s easy, silly.” She smiled, showing far too many teeth. “That’s when you
do
something to their eyes.”

“Um,” I said.

“Please don’t,” Nathan said.

“Spoilsports.” Tansy sighed extravagantly. “Colored contacts. One blue, one brown is really noticeable, but brown and brown isn’t, so much. So this is me, being incognito. You know what ‘incognito’ means, right? Is there any fruit punch? I like the Hawaiian kind.”

“I don’t think ‘incognito’ has anything to do with fruit punch,” I said dubiously.

“Ah, no, there isn’t any,” said Nathan. “We weren’t expecting you. Is everything all right?”

“Oh, no,” said Tansy. “World of no. All the no. The Tropics of Negative. Situation is not good, not peachy, and not keen.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess ‘no,’ here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Lots of things,” said Tansy. She cocked her head. “Which one did you want to know about in specific?”

I stared at her. Nathan came to my rescue, saying, “Whichever one was important enough that you’ve shown up here.”

“Oh. Well, why didn’t you just say so?” Tansy rolled her matching eyes. “Amateurs. Okay, so here’s the skinny: Doctor C sent me to let you know that now that Sal’s not at her house anymore, SymboGen’s probably going to move on her and try to take her into protective custody, like, soon, since the sleepwalkers are becoming more of a problem. Oh, and we cut a few of them up? I mean, it sucked to do it, since it wasn’t their fault and they’re technically like, cousins of ours and everything, but we needed to know what was in their heads, and that meant that we had to kill a few of them for the sake of science.” She looked pleadingly at me, like she was waiting for reassurance.

Feeling awkward, I gave her what she was looking for: “Sometimes we have to do things for science that we wouldn’t have done normally.” Also, I didn’t understand why SymboGen would want me in “protective custody,” but that didn’t feel like a Tansy question. That felt like a Dr. Cale question. One that was best asked in person.

“Yeah, exactly, just like that. Anyway, when we cut their heads up? Their brains were pretty much intact.” Tansy stopped, looking between the two of us like she expected an epiphany to shake us both, leaving us understanding her completely.

The epiphany didn’t come. “Isn’t reduced brain damage a good thing?” asked Nathan.

“Oh, totally—I wish I had reduced brain damage, or at least, I wish bananas didn’t taste like tangerines all the damn time—but this isn’t the good kind of reduced brain damage. This is the kind of reduced brain damage where the cousins are doing less damage burrowing into the brains of their hosts, which means a quicker adjustment and integration period, and maybe even some of them managing to take over without anybody noticing.”

Nathan blanched. “Ah. No, that’s not the good kind of reduced brain damage.”

“See, that’s exactly what I was saying! Well. Without the stuff about the bananas, but hey.” Tansy shook her head. “We’ve known for a while that this was possible without surgical intervention. You’d need just the right set of circumstances, and up until now, we thought you also needed just the right genetic template for the cousins. Only these are newer cousins—some of them haven’t been in their hosts for more than six months—and they’re managing to slide right in there, lickety-split. And that’s bad. They’re not seamless yet, but they’re gonna be, if we don’t figure out what’s changed on the genetic level.”

“As fascinating and horrifying as all this is, why are you here?” Nathan frowned. “Mom could have explained what you’d found when Sal and I managed to sneak away next. It shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

“She’s here because the implants are teaching each other, and that means that as more of them figure out how to get into the brain without killing or permanently damaging their hosts, they’re going to go on to teach even more,” I said. I barely recognized my own voice. “You only need a few pioneers. That means we need to know how they’re doing it, and we need to know sooner, rather than later.”

“Exactly,” said Tansy, beaming like I’d just done something exceptionally clever. I didn’t feel clever. I felt small and scared, and not even the distant pounding of the drums was helping me hold on to the scene in front of me. “That’s why we need you to go to SymboGen as soon as you possibly can.”

“We can’t just walk into SymboGen,” said Nathan. “They’d know something was up.”

“I’m sorry, was I unclear?” Tansy beamed at him. “I don’t mean ‘we.’ I don’t mean you, and I don’t mean me. Just her.” She pointed at me. “Sal’s going to go in alone, and she’s going to find out what they know and we don’t.”

“Wait,” I protested. “Didn’t you just say that SymboGen was going to be coming to take me into protective custody soon? Why in the world would I deliver myself to them? And why would SymboGen be
coming
for me? I’m not at home anymore. They can’t learn anything about what USAMRIID knows by monitoring me.”

Tansy’s smile faded, replaced by a look of profound sympathy. Something about it made me feel almost dirty, like I was being afforded a level of concern I hadn’t done anything to earn. “You mean you haven’t figured it out
yet
?” she asked. “I mean, I understand sometimes people have to learn things at their own pace, and sometimes people don’t want to learn things, so they don’t allow themselves to learn them, and all that, but there’s sort of a limit, don’t you think? We’ve been giving you all the answers. You’ve even gone digging for a few of them on your own. Shouldn’t you be a little further along than this?”

“Tansy, back off,” said Nathan.

“What?” Tansy turned to him, opening her eyes in a wide parody of innocence. “She asked.”

“It’s because of my accident, isn’t it?”

They both turned to look at me. Nathan looked worried; Tansy, expectant, like I was finally going to do the marvelous
trick she’d been waiting for since we met. Nathan spoke first, asking slowly, “What do you mean, Sal?”

“When I had my accident, I hurt my head. I mean, bad—the doctors said I was legally brain-dead, remember?” Nathan didn’t say anything. He just nodded. I continued, “So if SymboGen knows about the implants going wrong—and at this point I’m pretty sure they do; Dr. Banks isn’t stupid, and neither is anyone who works for him—then they have to be looking for ways to stop them. I have brain damage because of that accident. It’s not severe, but there’s scarring. That’s probably the sort of thing that would interfere with the implant taking over, don’t you think? Like a physical barrier against the process. SymboGen probably wants to keep me under observation because they’re trying to figure out how to keep the implants from taking anyone else over. If the implants can’t control their hosts, they’ll just go back to doing what they were designed to do, right?”

“We hope so,” said Nathan. He adjusted his glasses, the gesture seeming oddly relieved somehow, like he had been expecting a different answer. “SymboGen has definitely been tracking you since the accident. I didn’t realize just how dedicated they were to keeping tabs on you until I started talking to Mom, but—”

“Wait,” I said. “
Have
you been in touch with Dr. Cale since we went to her lab? I mean, other than today, when I called about medical treatment for Joyce. I assumed that was where you went when my father couldn’t find you, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Well, sure,” said Tansy. “I’ve had to let him into the lab twice. Three times, almost, except there was an outbreak and he wound up having to work. I
tried
to tell him there was no point, since those folks were already symptomatic, but you know Nathan.”

Nathan looked sternly at Tansy. “I don’t care whether you and Mom have written them off as failed integrations. They’re
people, and they’re sick. I took an oath to heal the sick when I chose to become a doctor.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” said Tansy. She looked at me. “He’s boring. Was he always boring, or did you suck all the interesting right out of him by being all you all the time?”

“What do you mean, ‘being all me’?” I planted my hands on my hips, frowning at her the way that Tasha frowned at recalcitrant animals at the shelter.

It didn’t seem to have any effect. “You know.” She waved her hands in my general direction. “All comfy jeans and slouchy shirts and boring hair and ‘no I don’t want to go out I don’t want to do anything I just want to stay home and talk and maybe watch a movie.’ You’re like the poster child for dull.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel like falling back into old bad habits. I’ve been ‘interesting.’ As far as I can tell, I didn’t like it very much.”

“What?” Tansy looked perplexed. “When the heck were
you
interesting?”

I didn’t feel like having this fight with her. Even more, I didn’t feel like summoning the ghost of Sally to float around our conversation, judging my every boring thought and action. Because Tansy was right—I might not remember the girl I used to be, but I knew enough about her to know that Sally Mitchell would have taken one look at Sal Mitchell and written me off as too boring to be tolerated. Sally liked action and adventure, fast cars and loud music, and all those other things that I just didn’t have the time for. And me?

I liked not being Sally. “Drop it,” I said shortly. “What did you mean before, when you said you wanted me to go to SymboGen? What can I possibly find out that we don’t already know?”

“Oh!” Tansy beamed, suddenly all business again. “Doctor C prepped this thumb drive for you. If you can just put it in one of their computers, it’ll totally harvest the data we need. Only
it has to be inside their firewalls, and it has to be connected to a computer that the network trusts, otherwise it’s a no-go. We’ll get nothing, and then we won’t be able to stop the cousins from trashing the brains of their hosts all willy-nilly and without asking them to dinner first. And let me tell you, a rogue tapeworm chowing down on your cerebellum? Will
not
respect you in the morning.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “What happens after I get the information? How am I supposed to get it
out
of SymboGen? From the way you two were talking, they’re not just going to let me walk back out with it. They’re not going to let me walk back out at all.”

“Let us worry about that,” said Tansy, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

The drums were suddenly pounding in my ears again, as loud and undeniable as they had ever been. “No,” I snapped. She hadn’t been expecting that tone from me; she dropped her hand and stared, looking utterly bemused. Even kittens have claws. Someone should probably have told her that before they sent her to talk to me. “I’m not going to let you worry about that. If you want me to walk into danger because you’re hoping it’ll get you something you need, I’m damn well going to worry about it
myself
. I’m the one whose neck is on the line in this little plan of yours. So don’t tell me not to worry. Tell me what you think is going to happen if I do what you want me to do.”