Mira Grant - Symbiont

I hadn’t answered him. I hadn’t been able to answer in days, not since he’d sent two of his flunkies into the room to rip out four of my molars, all without the benefit of painkillers or sedation. Knocking me out apparently messed with my reactions in a way that would slow down the all-important research. “You understand,” that was what he had said before and after every procedure. He always had the same smug little smile on his face, like he wasn’t doing anything wrong, but was doing so much right.

It hurt. I hurt. For the first time since I woke up in this body, with its wonderful hands and eyes and legs, I could feel both of my selves independently. The human half of me was numb and distant, filled with pains I didn’t have a name for. The invertebrate half felt like it was on fire, skin scored with a hundred tiny cuts, fluids leaking out into my human brain and making my thoughts even more muddled than usual.

The lights in the room never varied. They were always bright and burning, too white for my eyes. They hadn’t fed me once. All my nutrients came in through a tube, plunged deep into my arm and filling me until my veins felt swollen and tight, like they were becoming worms in their own right. I hoped that they would break out soon, and that they would be able to slither their way to freedom.

It was getting difficult to remember anything before the room. I had a name once—Sandy or Tammy or something like that. I had a family, a mother who was a brilliant scientist and a brother who was smarter than I’d ever be. I thought I remembered going sledding, but that couldn’t have been true, because I didn’t remember snow.

I remembered Sal. I remembered her running away and leaving me behind. I remembered being glad. I clung to that gladness as hard as I could, because I knew that if it ever managed to slip away, I’d only remember how much I hated her. She shouldn’t have left me behind. Not even if I told her to, not even if her survival mattered more than almost anything else, because she was the one who carried the data we’d infiltrated SymboGen to take. She left me, and I wanted to hate her, and I wanted to love her, and that meant remembering how her desertion made me feel.

There was a click from the far side of the room as the door swung open. I kept my eyes closed. Opening them wouldn’t have done me any good. I hadn’t been able to turn my head in what felt like forever.

“How’s my girl today?” asked Dr. Banks, as genial and fatherly as ever. “I see you’re not moving. That’s good. That means the nerve blockers we’ve placed on your spine are doing their job. It’s important that you keep still. I’m sure you understand that by now.”

I kept my eyes closed.

“I know you’re not dead, Tansy. I can see your chest moving, and the monitor tells me that your vital signs are still clear and strong. You’re a fighter. You’ve got a lot of fight left in you before you’ll even be able to consider giving up on us.”

His words filled me with more despair than I would have believed possible. It felt like I’d been his captive for weeks. It could have been days, or even hours. With the constant light and the lack of solid food, I had nothing to measure time by. The sadistic bastard could do whatever he wanted to me, for as long as he wanted to, and it wouldn’t matter. I was never going to get away.

“Kill me,” I whispered.

“I intend to,” said Dr. Banks, with amiable honesty. “After we’ve wrung every drop of useful data out of you, we’re going to take you apart and find the things we missed on the first pass. But you’ve got some time before that, and we’re going to spend it together, learning everything you don’t even know you have in you to teach.”

I didn’t think I had it in me to scream.

I was wrong.

Mom is sad all the time right now. She stays in her lab as much as we let her, looking at graphs and charts that show how the cousins are waking up, and sometimes she says bad words when she doesn’t know I’m there listening to her. It makes me feel funny when she does that, like she has a face I’ve never seen, because she’s always been so busy being my mother. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. She’s a super scientist and she’s going to find a way to save everybody, not just the humans. But she’s sad, and I can’t make her better.

Sal and Tansy are both still missing. I think that’s a lot of what makes Mom so sad. I miss them too. Tansy’s always been my best friend, and I like Sal a lot. She’s my sister, and that means I have to love her forever, but nobody gets to tell me who I have to like. I decided I would like her all on my own. Now I just miss her a lot.

Maybe I should go and find her. Mom would be happy again if I brought Sal home, and then Sal and I can go find Tansy, and we’ll finally be a family the way we should have been all along. I can do it. I’m smarter than anyone thinks I am.

I can bring my sisters home.

The subject has shown surprising resilience. I expected her to die when I introduced antiparasitics into her food supply, but she proved unexpectedly resistant. The subject reacted to the antiparasitics as if they were an infection, resulting in nothing more severe than a brief spike in the host body temperature, with no lasting damage to the subject.

Proglottids cultured from the subject have proven to be strong and healthy. Three have been introduced into the subject’s digestive system, to see whether the brain worm can tolerate the presence of competing parasites. Full documentation will continue.

All in all, this is an excellent way to test all current theories without endangering the life of any necessary or important personnel.

The grate in the changing room wall opened onto a snug vent that was at most two feet across and a foot and a half tall. I squirmed my way inside, grateful that the phobia instilled in me by the psychologists at SymboGen had focused on car crashes instead of on tight spaces. This would have been enough to make even a mild claustrophobe lose their composure, and that was while I was still close enough to the opening for a small amount of light to filter in and allow me to see. It was going to be all about touch from here on out.

At least it was too narrow for Sherman or Kristoph to come after me. Ronnie would fit, but it would take a while for whoever was watching the monitors to realize that I wasn’t emerging from the dressing room. No matter what, I would have a lead before he came after me, and that meant that I might actually have a chance. Bracing my weight on my elbows, I began pulling myself inexorably forward into the dark.

The light faded within ten feet of the entrance. I was just starting to wonder how long this tunnel could go when my fingers hit the wall. I stopped where I was, feeling around for where the tunnel branched. There were openings to both my left and my right. They felt like they were roughly the same size, but there was more dirt and grit to the left, which implied that air normally flowed in that direction. Since air would flow from the outside, that meant I needed to go right. I shuffled back a foot or so, and then pulled myself cautiously around the corner, continuing my slow progress into the dark.