Mira Grant - Symbiont

At the end of the day, Dr. Cale loved Adam very much, and wanted him to be safe. I couldn’t blame her for that. She’d been his mother for the entirety of his life, while I was more like the child she’d helped someone else bear through egg donation: genetically connected, socially and emotionally very, very distant.

“Adam?” I slowed as I reached the edge of the lab hydroponics section, which was used mostly to grow herbs and local mushrooms. There was a large artificial bog filled with sundews, which I appreciated—Nathan and I had our collection, but he had “liberated” several more from florists and taxidermy shops when he was helping to collect hydroponic and preservation supplies. Sundews were bog plants, which made our old friend Marya’s admonition not to overwater them even funnier. She’d been trying to keep us from killing them with chlorine, of course, and the language barrier had simply been complicating her instructions.

Marya was probably dead now. She’d owned and operated a flower shop within the general footprint of San Francisco City Hospital. Even if she hadn’t had an implant of her own—and I didn’t know whether she did or not; I had never asked her, and it was too late now—there had been mobs of sleepwalkers in that area during the collapse. There was very little chance that she had survived.

I sometimes wondered how the rest of the people on Dr. Cale’s team could stand it. I had only had a few years to form connections with other people, and I could still be blindsided by the strength of how much I missed them.

But this wasn’t the time to dwell on what we’d lost. “Adam,” I called again. “It’s Sal. The duty roster says you’re supposed to be here, so where are you? Come on, Adam. I know you’re there.”

“How do you know?” asked a voice from behind me. I turned, but I didn’t see Adam, just the shapes of three large potted avocado trees. “Maybe I’m somewhere else. Maybe I’m nowhere near here at all.”

“Well, since we don’t have intercoms this good, and the cell system went down weeks ago, the part where you’re talking to me means that you’re here,” I said. “Apart from that, I know you’re there because I know you’re there.”

The leaves on the avocado trees rustled and Adam’s face appeared, pale through the gloom. I was paying attention now, brought to high alert by Anna’s presence: I didn’t feel the same drive to protect that I felt for her, but he wasn’t in danger, was he? I already knew that Adam was safe and well, and on the few occasions when I had been afraid he would be hurt, I’d had the same response to him that I had to her. Chimera, standing together. So no, I didn’t need to protect him… but I was aware of him. I always had been. I just hadn’t been able to consciously name that feeling before I had someone else to check it against.

“The scientific method works,” I murmured.

Adam blinked but didn’t ask me what I meant. He was always good at ignoring things that didn’t make any sense. “I felt them bring her into the building,” he said. “It was like as soon as she was here, everything was whole again, instead of being broken the way that it has been for days and days. Do you think she took Tansy’s place?”

“What? No.” That answered the question of whether or not he knew about our visitor. But he knew Anna was a “she,” and tapeworms are hermaphrodites: he was a boy and I was a girl because of the human bodies we’d grown to inhabit, and not because we were innately gendered creatures. “No, Adam. Tansy is… Tansy is our sister. I don’t know where she is, or whether she’s okay, but I do know that no one is ever going to take her place in our lives. We’re going to find her. We’re going to bring her home. I know it.” There was something wrong with that answer, something that gnawed at the back of my mind with sharp, unforgiving little teeth. Anna held the key to finding Tansy. I knew she did. I just didn’t know how I knew, or what that knowledge was going to mean.

“I saw them bring Dr. Banks and the new girl in,” he said, taking a step forward, out of the trees. As sometimes happened with Adam, he looked infinitely younger than me in that moment. “I wasn’t supposed to be there, and Mom told me to get to work as soon as she realized that I was watching, and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to tell Mom no, because the new girl needed me so bad. It was like… it was like the need was just rushing off her, like water out of a hose. And I started to think that maybe that’s why you like me. Because need rushes off me, and you don’t know how to get out of the way.”

“I think Dr. Cale was right when she theorized that we had a pheromone connection, just like the sleepwalkers do,” I said, choosing my words with exquisite care. “We’re their cousins, so it makes sense that we’d have some of the same systems in place to make sure that we stayed in contact with each other, and that we looked out for each other. And yeah, it was sort of a surprise to me—I always just figured I wanted you to be safe because I cared about you. Now it turns out that there’s also a chemical component, probably generated automatically when you’re under stress or whatever.”

This wasn’t helping. Adam was starting to look more concerned, and if I didn’t change tactics soon, he was going to retreat into the avocado trees and I was never going to catch him. I sighed.

“But Adam, that’s just the initial pang of alarm, that’s like ants leaving chemical trails for one another. We’re not ants . We’re not even sleepwalkers. We can think. We can feel, and we can form social bonds. I don’t care about that girl as a person. Yes, when I’m in the room with her I want to protect her and keep her safe, and I figure that’s probably a good thing from a species perspective, since it’s better if we want to protect each other and not kill each other.” I was babbling. But Adam wasn’t retreating anymore, and I’d take that. “Only see, I do care about you. I want you to be happy. I like it when we just sit and don’t talk to each other because we’re both doing stuff. You’re my brother and I love you, and she’s just some girl who happens to be the same species that we are.”

“Really?” Adam finally stepped out of the shade of the avocado trees, his eyes so wide that I could have tripped and fallen into them. “You really think I’m your brother?”

“Only one I’ve ever had.” Unless you counted Sherman—and he, like Anna, was just someone who happened to share my species. He didn’t deserve to be a part of my family. He didn’t deserve to be anywhere near my family.

“What’s going to happen now that she’s here?”

“I don’t know, but that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Dr. Banks says she integrated while her host body’s consciousness was still present and aware.”

Adam’s eyes went even wider, the whites appearing all the way around his dark brown irises. “She’s a fully integrated sleepwalker?”

Because that’s what we were all dancing around: that was why her existence was such a concern. If one tapeworm could integrate with a living, conscious host, so could another, and another, until the entire shape of the enemy changed. We could be looking at a fight that went from intellect against mindless hunger to intellect against intellect—and for me and Adam, it would be a fight against our own kind.

I’d always assumed I would side with the humans, no matter what happened, because the sleepwalkers were destructive and terrible. So was Dr. Cale, in her own way, but at least she cared about saving lives, while Sherman didn’t seem to care about anything beyond himself. The possibility of living, active integration changed everything, and from the way Adam was looking at me, it changed everything for him, too.