Chimera Read online

  No. Joyce couldn’t have known. But Colonel Mitchell had known from the beginning that I wasn’t his daughter. He had looked into the eyes of an alien creature, of a chimera born from the union of tapeworm and human, and he had decided that the appropriate thing to do was try to brainwash it into becoming human after all. Brainwash me into becoming human after all.

  And now I was his, to do with as he pleased. That had been the cost of saving Nathan, Fishy, and Beverly… and as I remembered the looks on their faces when I turned away from them, I realized I wasn’t sorry. I had lived the first six years of my life going along the path of least resistance and letting other people make my decisions for me. I’d been allowing my tapeworm nature to dictate my decisions. I was a tailored symbiont; I existed to be led. But I was here because I had stood up and said I would go if my friends could be set free… and that was an impulse from the human side of me, wasn’t it? That was me struggling to become a person who acts, a person who controls her own fate.

  I needed to be that person now. Because the person I had always been wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

  The men who had been assigned to watch me snapped to attention as the office door swung open. Colonel Mitchell stood framed in the doorway, holding his hands folded behind his back.

  “Who opened the door?” I blurted, before I could think better of it.

  Colonel Mitchell blinked at me. “That’s your first question? Not ‘What happens next’ or ‘Where are we going’ or ‘Did your friends make it back to their transport,’ but ‘Who opened the door’?”

  “You could lie to me if I asked you any of those questions, but the big thing right now is yes, who opened the door? You can’t have moved your hands that fast. You’d have to be a wizard, and there’s no such thing as wizards.”

  “That’s not what you said when you were a little girl,” he said, stepping into the room. Another soldier stepped in right behind him, answering my original question. Colonel Mitchell ignored him. All his attention was on me, even though it didn’t feel like he was looking at me at all. He was seeing Sally. Poor, dead, long-buried Sally.

  “You checked the mailbox for your Hogwarts letter every day for an entire year,” he continued. He walked toward me as he spoke, one hand dipping into his pocket. “You were so sure that your owl was coming, and you told me over and over about how you were going to be the greatest witch of your generation. Do you remember which House you hoped to be Sorted into?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I was supposed to be keeping up the pretense of being Sally Mitchell, somehow returned from the grave and reclaiming ownership of her own body. That didn’t mean that I could somehow recall family trivia and jokes that she had shared with her father long before I arrived on the scene. “We always lived in the same house.”

  If Colonel Mitchell was disappointed by my answer, he didn’t show it. “I’ll see about finding you copies of the Harry Potter books,” he said, moving behind me and taking hold of my wrists. I stiffened, but he was just undoing my handcuffs. They hadn’t been tight enough to hurt. There was still a feeling of glorious freedom as they fell away. “I know you’ve had trouble with dyslexia since your accident, but they’re available in audiobook form. You can listen to them, and then we can talk again.”

  I bit my lip to keep myself from laughing. The world was crumbling outside the building where we stood. People were dying by the thousands, maybe by the millions; cities were being deserted, and the two sides of my heritage—the humans and the tapeworms—were destroying each other at an unspeakable pace. The human tendency to focus on the inconsequential to avoid focusing on the traumas at hand could be completely ridiculous at times. It was a habit I’d picked up from the humans who’d raised me, but that didn’t mean I really understood it.

  The slow, constant beating of the drums in my ears reminded me to stay on guard, no matter how amused I was. They were my compass through a world that seemed determined to destroy me, and they weren’t going to allow me to relax. Not one bit.

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my voice meek and low. He seemed to be in good spirits; whatever Dr. Banks had said to him, it hadn’t been enough to make him lose his temper. I decided to risk another question. “Did my friends make it back to their transport okay?”

  He paused before walking in front of me, a solemn expression on his face and my newly removed handcuffs dangling from one hand. He held them up like they were a reminder that I needed to stay mindful of my position and the limitations it entailed. “I have no idea whether your friends made it back to their starting point, and to be honest, I don’t care. A group of my people escorted them into the streets, and maintained visual contact until they were approximately one mile from this location. Then my people came back here. The goals of this mission were to retrieve you and to harvest certain essential data from Dr. Cale’s research before she moved again. Both these things have been accomplished.”

  I frowned. “How did you get that data? We didn’t give Dr. Banks anything. Dr. Cale had him under guard from the time he stepped into the building. She even took his hard drive away, and we’re sure he didn’t have any tracers or trackers, or—”

  Colonel Mitchell was looking at me oddly. The soldiers who shared the room with us weren’t looking at me at all. I stopped talking. I was showing too much interest in the people I had allowed to leave me behind. That sort of thing would indicate that I wasn’t as committed to being his daughter as I was claiming to be.

  “I just, I talked to him, but I was still pretending, you know?” I made my eyes as big as I could, trying to sell the part. “To be Sal, and to think that they were on my side, not on the side of the parasites. So I know how thoroughly they searched him.”

  “They didn’t search him for wireless sniffers, or for download signals,” said Colonel Mitchell. “If they had, they might have found out how much of their data he was copying. But that’s none of your concern. I’m glad to see that you can still care about people, even if you’re caring about the wrong ones. No matter. That will change soon enough. Gentlemen, prepare her for transport.” Then he turned, and walked back toward the door.

  He took the handcuffs with him, which meant I could put my hands up to ward the soldiers away when they started closing on me. Their faces were grim masks, efficient and cold. “No, please,” I said, not knowing what they were about to do, but knowing that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to enjoy it—not when they were looking at me like that.

  I was so focused on the ones in front of me that I never saw the one who slipped behind me with the Taser. Electricity arced through my body, stunning and scrambling everything, and then I hit the floor, and if the pain continued, I didn’t know about it anymore.

  Everything was warm and dark and perfect. The drums hammered ceaselessly away in the background, and I felt like I was floating on a hot tide of weightlessness and peace. Everything would be perfect forever if the world could just stay exactly the way it was, filled with comforting darkness and the sound of drums.

  Only no. Everything wasn’t perfect, because while I was warm and I was dark, this wasn’t the hot warm dark: this wasn’t the comforting sea that had buoyed me up since before I knew what it was to be a person. This was something different, and “different” was another word for “dangerous,” especially now that things were changing again, now that I was back in the hands of people who would use me for their own ends and not allow me to be who and what I really was. Dr. Cale was a scary woman, and the things she wanted weren’t always things it was safe or reasonable to want, but she’d never tried to force me to be anything other than myself, whatever that was. She wasn’t safe. She was safer than this.

  With comprehension came the return of consciousness, and with the return of consciousness came the slowly growing awareness of my body, coming back to me an inch at a time, like the power being turned on in an office building. It wasn’t the worst comparison. The connections between me and the body that had
been Sally Mitchell were strong, built by science and reinforced by biology, but they weren’t as natural as a human brain’s connection to its own body. Sometimes things were slower than they were supposed to be. I’d attributed that to my accident, right up until I learned that it was really a case of mind over matter—my mind, Sally’s abandoned matter.

  When enough of the power had come back on, I opened my eyes and blinked up at a dark, oddly shaped ceiling. There were lights there, uncovered bulbs that were so bright they hurt, yet somehow didn’t manage to illuminate most of what was around them. It was a senseless design. I didn’t understand it, and so I closed my eyes again, willing myself to return to the weightlessness and the dark.

  Something nudged me in the ribs. “You dead, girl? Or worse, you turning into one of those things? We’ll kill you before you can hurt any of us, so don’t you even think about jumping up and going for our throats.”

  “I don’t think you can reason with monsters, Paul,” said a female voice. It was farther away than the first voice; wherever we were, it was large enough to include things like “distance,” even if there wasn’t all that much of it. “If she’s going to rip your throat out, she’s going to do it no matter how much you kick her. Hell, maybe she’s going to do it because you kicked her. I’d go for your throat if you kept prodding me with your filthy-ass foot.”

  “Shut up,” said the man. The nudge to my ribs was repeated. Based on what the woman had said, he was nudging me with his foot. I tried to decide whether I cared, or whether caring would be too much work. Part of me still felt like I was floating, disconnected from myself.

  I’d never been hit with a Taser before. I decided I never wanted to be hit with one ever again. The electricity had been enough to disrupt me in ways that were terrifying and invasive at the same time, and I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I felt like myself again. Too long. Even one minute would be too long.

  “Look, lady, we don’t actually think they’d throw you in here with us if you were getting sick or some such shit, but we’d really, really appreciate it if you’d do something to indicate that you’re not actually a mindless killing machine getting ready to feast on our tasty flesh, okay? It’s the polite thing to do.”

  “Don’t lecture the semiconscious woman on how to be polite,” said the woman.

  “Shut up, Carrie,” said the man.

  My jaw seemed to be working again. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, reacquainting myself with the motion, before I took the deepest breath my chest could contain and forced it out, resulting in a thin squeaking sound, like a bike tire in need of air. That didn’t seem like enough, so I did it again, squeaking with a bit more vehemence.

  “The zombies moan, she’s squeaking, she’s fine,” said the woman.

  “They’re not zombies,” said Paul. “Zombies exist in movies and in Haitian folklore. They don’t wander around the streets of San Francisco attacking people.” I tensed, expecting another prod to my ribs. It didn’t come. Instead, a hand was slipped gently under my shoulder while another gripped my wrist, tugging me into a sitting position. “Poor kid’s been zapped.”

  “Those soldiers are animals,” said the woman—Carrie, Paul had called her Carrie. Both of them had names. There was something comforting about realizing that, like they had just become real people. And since they were talking to me like I was a real person, that meant their reality was transitive: They existed, and so did I.

  Electric shocks were definitely bad for me, if this was how they left me feeling. I moved my jaw again, trying to tell them my name, and succeeded only in making another squeaking sound. My eyes were still closed. I willed them to open. To my sublime relief, they did, and I found myself looking at a skinny woman with bright green hair, folded in on herself like a piece of origami as she sat on the long bench that ran the length of the wall behind her. No, it wasn’t a wall: We were moving. The feeling of weightlessness was coming from the vibrations that passed up through the floor.

  As soon as I recognized why I felt so comfortably weightless, the feeling stopped. Sometimes awareness had its downside.

  The woman tilted her head, looking me thoughtfully up and down before she said, “Clean, looks well fed, decent haircut… where did they find you, honey? Were you in a closed-off survivor’s alcove? Why the hell did you leave?”

  “There could be a lot of explanations,” said Paul. “Don’t pressure her. Hey, I know you can’t talk yet, but do you think you could stand if I helped you? I want to get you off the floor. There’s no telling when they’re going to throw somebody else in here, and I don’t want them to land on top of you.”

  We were in a truck. This was a covered truck, like the ones the Army used for troop movements. I’d been in one of them once before, shortly after my accident, when they were in the process of transferring all my care over to SymboGen. Colonel Mitchell—who had been insisting I call him “Dad” back then, a habit that I probably needed to get back into if I wanted him to believe I was really his daughter returned from the dead, and not the genetically engineered tapeworm that had stolen her body—had commandeered one of the trucks from the USAMRIID base to move me and the machines that were dedicated to monitoring my health over to SymboGen’s San Francisco office.

  I had been younger then; I hadn’t possessed language yet, or fully grasped the complexities of what my newly human mind kept trying to tell me. But I’d been integrating faster than a human child, building on all the work Sally Mitchell had already done to grow neurons and form connections, and my recall of those early days never faded the way a human infant’s recall does. I remembered looking at the walls and finding them soothingly dark in comparison to the white ones at the hospital. I remembered wanting the light to go away. And I remembered Colonel Mitchell holding my hand, telling me it was going to be all right, that they were going to find a solution, that I was going to come back to him just as good as new.

  He hadn’t really talked to me that way after the move. I wondered whether that was when he’d learnt about who—what—I was, and that his daughter was never coming back to him. But that thought just conjured more questions. He knew I was a tapeworm. He knew I had shoved Sally out of her own mind, assuming that she’d been left to push aside: The accident had been bad enough, and the brain damage had been severe enough, that it was entirely possible she had been gone before I even managed to squirm through the remnants of her skull.

  If he knew those things, why was he asking me to pretend she could have come back?

  With Paul’s arms supporting me and pulling when my balance threatened to give way, I was able to climb shakily to my feet and be moved, one halting step at a time, to the waiting bench. By the time we finished the process, I was feeling more like I actually lived inside my own body. I moved my jaw again. This time, what came out was a croaky but distinct “Thank you.”

  “It’s no problem.” Paul let go of my arm and retreated to sit down next to Carrie, who unfolded herself just enough to hook one foot under his leg and place one elbow on his shoulder. It seemed less possessive than it was simply a means of seeking comfort in a bad situation, the way the dogs would sometimes pile together when there was a rainstorm. A mammalian instinct, written through the DNA all the way to the masters of the world.

  I wondered whether I would have learnt to offer comfort that way, given enough time, given the luxury of learning things on my own and not learning things for the sake of emulating the dead. I liked to snuggle with Nathan, but it was never a matter of comforting him: It was all about comforting myself. It was a way of being close, of allowing for the part of me that was always going to be a little unhappy in wide-open spaces. I was a mammal and I wasn’t a mammal, all at the same time. I still didn’t know what was natural for me and what was learned, and maybe I never would.

  “They picked us up down by the ballpark,” said Carrie, mistaking my contemplation for personal interest. “It was stupid. We should never have left the office, but we were runni
ng low on bottled water, and Paul remembered that the coaches kept a supply for the players. We both figured we’d be able to get in and get out without anyone noticing us.”

  “We didn’t count on an Army sweep happening in the same area,” said Paul wryly. “It didn’t make any sense. They’d cleaned out all the major hot spots last week. We should have been totally fine.”

  My heart sank. It made perfect sense, because the ballpark was only a few blocks away from the Ferry Building. We had made land there. We had stirred up the sleepwalkers there. If anything was going to trigger a response from the military, it was the arrival of an unauthorized vessel from the other side of the Bay. These people had been caught in a dragnet that I helped trigger, and nothing was going to save them now.

  “Do you know where they’re taking us?” My voice still sounded rusty, like part of me was still remembering how to talk.

  “A quarantine facility first, so they can triple-check us for signs of infection,” said Paul. “After that…” His expression turned grim. He glanced to Carrie before leaning over and placing a kiss gently on her forehead. She started to cry, burying her face against his shoulder. He looked back to me, and said, much more quietly, “They’re going to take us to the Pleasanton encampment. They’re going to put us with all the other ‘survivors’ of this little science experiment, and fuck us if we don’t like that idea.”

  I frowned. “Why don’t you like that idea?” Being under USAMRIID’s control didn’t sit well with me for a lot of reasons, but those reasons were entirely my own. Paul and Carrie seemed like reasonable people. I couldn’t imagine they had the same sorts of issues with my—with Sally’s—father.