Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (38 page)

“Then it’s a good thing you’re not my brother,” said Nathan coldly.

Dr. Banks looked briefly surprised. He covered it quickly, but the flicker of confusion had been evident to all of us. When he came here, he hadn’t been expecting to find us working together in relative harmony. Whatever information USAMRIID had on the place, it wasn’t enough to give him a full picture. That was a good thing. We might still have a chance.

“Why would I want her body back?” asked Dr. Cale.

“Because she’s brain dead but on life support, and I know how much you love your vegetables,” said Dr. Banks. “Maybe you could cultivate yourself a replacement.”

I balled my free hand into a slow fist. I had hated people before—had even hated him before—but until that moment, I hadn’t known what it was to hate someone so much that I wanted to scratch their eyes out just for the pleasure of watching them stumble blindly through the rest of their life.

Luckily, Dr. Cale had more experience than I did at talking through her hate. She snapped her finger. Fang seemed to materialize out of the shadows behind her. He was carrying a portable, battery-operated bone saw, and it said something about how good a job Dr. Banks was doing of upsetting me that I didn’t bat an eye. If Dr. Cale wanted a bone saw, well. The only person she was likely to use it on definitely deserved it.

Dr. Banks did not share my serenity. He jumped to his feet,
pressing himself against the wall of his cell like he thought it was going to do him any good at all. “Now Surrey—”

“Two questions, Steven,” she said, sounding absolutely calm. I suppose she had reason to be. After all, she was the one who controlled the man holding the bone saw. “If you answer them both honestly and to my satisfaction, I promise not to cut off any of your fingers, or the hands those fingers are attached to. Lie to me, withhold information from me, and that promise goes away. Do you understand?”

Dr. Banks hesitated. Nathan sighed.

“My mother, whatever you want to call her, doesn’t fuck around,” he said. “She doesn’t make threats, because threats are meaningless. She makes promises, if you’ll forgive the cliché. Please, either tell her what she wants to know or tell her that you’re not going to, so that I can take Sal out of here before the fingers start flying.”

“Still protecting that girl’s delicate sensibilities? You’re going to have to stop one day.” There was no venom left in Dr. Banks’s voice: he sounded like a man who had looked into the depths of his own soul and found nothing there but dark inevitability. His gaze slithered back to Dr. Cale. He squared his shoulders, sitting up a little straighter, as if posture alone could somehow turn him into a noble, tragic figure. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s the plan that required you to make a chimera of your own? You can’t sell them. We don’t have enough people on life support to make them a viable consumer product, and it’s not like anyone is going to be buying anything from you in the near future anyway. The country’s on the verge of collapse.”

“It’s not as far gone as you might think, thanks to some fast thinking in the Midwest and on the East Coast. They dumped antiparasitics in the water, did some surgical interventions—fun times. It wasn’t enough. It could never have been enough. The country is falling to pieces. It’s just slow, and it’s leaving
smart men with resources the time to regroup, pull back, stay standing. Maybe we’ll bring America back someday, maybe not, but for now, the fall of this nation is not an issue and won’t cause us any problems,” said Dr. Banks. A thin runnel of satisfaction laced his smile. “Best of all, we’ve managed to convince the remaining government that the original implant design would never have done this. We have years of data to support our claim.”

Nathan lunged forward, slapping his hands against the clear plastic wall of Dr. Banks’s enclosure. Everyone jumped except for Dr. Cale. She just turned her face sadly away, her expression conveying her utter lack of surprise. She’d been expecting this.

“You
bastard
. How
dare
you,” snarled Nathan. “This is
your
fault. You took my mother away from me for money, and now you’re using her—”

“Kiddo, I’ve been using her since day one.” Dr. Banks sounded utterly unrepentant, and somehow that was the worst thing of all, the worst thing in a sea of terrible things. He wasn’t sorry. He might beg and plead for his freedom, and he might need us to help him, but he wasn’t sorry.

I’d been assuming Sherman and his people were the inhuman side of our conflict. They
weren’t
human, any more than I was. But they hadn’t started this fight, and now that it was happening, they were just trying to survive. Dr. Banks… I didn’t even know what he was hoping to accomplish anymore, aside from coming out on top of whatever world rose from the ashes of this one.

I also wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. I looked toward Dr. Cale, hoping she would explain. She met my eyes and sighed.

“He’s blaming this all on me,” she said. “I’m the one who put the human DNA in the plan for
D. symbogenesis
, remember? I’m the one who handed it the key to the human immune system.”

“I thought that was the toxoplasmosis,” I said.

Dr. Cale laughed. It was a brilliant, broken sound, like light glinting off a shattered window. “See, right there, you’ve shown yourself more capable of critical thinking than most of the human race. Yes, Sal, it was the toxoplasmosis that made the implants capable of migrating through the body and successfully colonizing the brain. But that’s not going to make sense to most people. They want quick, easy answers. They want sound bites.”

“ ‘Discredited geneticist inserted time bomb in essential medical supplies,’ ” said Dr. Banks, practically purring. “The Intestinal Bodyguard isn’t finished, Surrey. It can’t be. Add the world’s dependence on the drugs our implants provide to the collapse of so many supply chains, and there’s just no way to take it out of the equation. We just need to repackage it to make sure that we retain our market share.”

Dr. Cale’s head swung back around. I quailed, taking a step backward. If she had ever looked at me like that, I would have run screaming from the room. “You know, Steven,” she said, voice low and dangerous, “I’d been wondering who I should be helping in all of this. My children or the human race. I can only save one side of the equation. You’re making it much easier for me to make my choice.”

“He hasn’t answered the question,” said Adam suddenly. We all turned to look at him. He didn’t take his eyes off Dr. Banks. “He’s trying to distract us. Didn’t you notice? He’s saying everything he can to keep from actually answering the question Mom asked him. Make him answer the question.”

“Yes, Steven.” Dr. Cale looked back to her former colleague, who looked suddenly dispirited, like his last chance at getting out of this alive had been taken away from him. “Answer the question. That was the agreement, was it not? Honest answers win you limbs that work.”

“You always were a liar, Surrey,” spat Dr. Banks, his eyes
fixed on her legs, just in case she missed his point. Once again, I balled my hands into fists, yearning for a free shot at his smug, terrible face. “I created my own chimera because I needed to understand how they worked. How the chemical bonds between the implant and the human host were formed, and how they could be disrupted—or encouraged to form more efficiently.”

Dr. Banks paused and sighed, shaking his head before he continued. “The chimera are
perfect
for certain jobs, Surrey. I’d say I was amazed that you hadn’t thought of it, but honestly, I’d be more surprised if you had. You would have to be able to step back and see the big picture. Imagine a world where the death penalty is carried out, not by lethal injection, but by termination of higher brain functions. The body would remain intact, ready to be put to work for the good of society. There are all sorts of functions that robots can’t perform yet. But a walking, thinking human body can accomplish all sorts of things.”

“You’re going to send my children to war,” said Dr. Cale.

Dr. Banks sighed again, deeper this time, like she just wasn’t getting the point. “They’re already at war. I’m just going to make it profitable.”

“Mm.” Dr. Cale’s tone was noncommittal, but her expression promised murder. “So that’s why you took my little girl. That’s why you took her
apart
. Because you wanted to learn how to build a better weapon. Well, Steven, your lesson has apparently been learned. What was so important that you had to bring her here? I know you like to gloat, but this is frankly irresponsible.”

“I’m here because I really do need your help.” He actually seemed to mean it this time. “I was able to transplant the worm from its original host into the body I had prepared, but I haven’t been able to fully stabilize it in its new environment. She’s not… she’s not doing well.”

“Rejection,” said Dr. Cale. She could have been smug in that
moment, seeing her former coworker run up against an obstacle she had already overcome. Instead, she just sounded tired. “Did you do tissue typing before you sliced my girl open? Did you try a reaction panel, to see whether the new host’s immune system would even recognize an implant that hadn’t been tailored to it as something that could be potentially helpful? Or did you barrel full speed ahead and figure that the universe would give you whatever you wanted because you were Dr. Steven Banks, and you deserved it?”

“I hardly think you’re one to lecture me about proper medical technique,” said Dr. Banks. His tone was stiff, and his gaze flicked to her legs again, making sure she knew what he was implying. “I did my tissue typing. I did the things I’ve always done when preparing an implant for its new host. As for anything else, I didn’t know what tests were necessary. It’s not as if you ever sent me anything detailing your research.”

“You kept trying to kill me. Forgive me if I didn’t feel much like sharing with you.”

I frowned slowly. “Rejection means Tansy’s new host doesn’t want to accept her, right? What does that mean for her? Is she going to be okay?”

“It means that the host is experiencing some fairly severe immune responses,” said Dr. Banks. As I had hoped, he once again fell into the gently parental “I am teaching you things you need to know, and you should listen, because I am smarter than you are” tone he had used with me so many times before. “The most distressing is swelling of the brain, and clouding of the spinal fluid. There’s a protein buildup going on there that I can’t quite source. It’s inflaming her nerves. She’s been in a lot of pain, almost constantly.”

“You mean she’s drugged?” I asked. “You made her walk across Vallejo drugged, while her brain was swelling? She could have collapsed! She would have been helpless!” The image of
Tansy as she had been rose unbidden in my mind—the wild grin, the mismatched eyes, the casual willingness to throw herself into the path of danger, because she knew that whatever happened to her, it would be interesting. Anna had none of those traits. Anna was a flat surface on which nothing had been painted. The drugs would explain at least a little of that, and I felt a traitorous worm of relief uncurl in my belly. Maybe Anna was more like Tansy than we thought she was. Maybe there were epigenetic tags for violence and randomness and sliding down hills on pieces of cardboard, just like Ronnie had the epigenetic tag for knowing that he was really supposed to be a boy, and when the drugs worked their way out of Anna’s system, she’d still be somehow Tansy. Just a little bit. Just enough that we could love her.

“Well, Sally, it was that or deal with her having seizures every hundred yards, and that would have been more of a problem.” Dr. Banks returned his attention to Dr. Cale. “Here’s my proposal, Surrey, and you’ll want to listen nice and close, because I’m only going to make it once: you help me stabilize my Anna so that I can take her back to the United States government as proof of concept. I give her to them, and they see that the chimera can be useful things—they already know they can be taught, thanks to Sally here, but now they’ll know they can be
controlled
. That we can have our useful biological machines without giving up anything that hasn’t already been lost. And I tell them you were able to get the drop on me after we’d finished stabilizing her, and you run off to safer pastures.”

“What’s to stop you from double-crossing us? Or me from killing you?” asked Dr. Cale.

“Nothing.” Dr. Banks spread his hands. “You trust me, I trust you, and we see who’s making the bigger mistake.”

Dr. Cale looked at him silently for a moment. Then she turned to Nathan and said, “Push me out of here.”

Nathan blinked. “What?”

“We’re leaving. Push me out of here.” She folded her hands in her lap, leaning back in her chair.

Nathan dutifully moved to stand behind her, wheeling her back, away from Dr. Banks. Adam and I moved to flank them. We didn’t need to be told; we knew what was expected of us in a moment like this. A unified front would count for so much more than divisiveness, at least in this moment.

Dr. Banks jumped to his feet when he realized what we were doing. “Hey!” he shouted, suddenly enraged. “Don’t you turn your backs on me! Don’t you understand what I can do to you? Don’t you understand your position here?”

“Yes, Steven,” said Dr. Cale, with the utmost calm. “I don’t think you do, however. Nathan?”

“Yes, Mother,” said Nathan, and turned her chair around and walked away, pushing her in front of him. Adam and I followed. Dr. Banks kept shouting behind us, his words of protest quickly devolving into a muddled stream of fury and profanity that didn’t mean anything coherent.

Then we stepped out of the room, and the door swung shut behind us, cutting him off in mid-tirade. Nathan kept pushing Dr. Cale forward. I glanced at her face.

She was crying.

I didn’t know how to respond to that, and so I didn’t say anything as the four of us kept on walking, back toward the place where Anna was waiting, back into the light.