We didn’t have any option but to follow her. I clung hard to Nathan’s hand as we walked, refusing to let on how disturbed I was by the whole situation. This was… I didn’t even know what this was. I just hoped that we were going to survive it.
The second door led to a hallway where the lights were already on, and where things were considerably less grimy than in the first room. Things improved as we walked, until we reached a clear plastic sheet hung to block all forward motion. Tansy turned to face us again, and asked, in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, “Has either of you been sick in the last week? Any colds, viruses, unusual medical conditions, or fungal infections?”
“No,” I said.
“No,” said Nathan.
“Okay, that’s cool. Any injuries or other physical conditions such as asthma, migraines, insomnia…?”
“I get headaches sometimes,” I said.
“I’m myopic, but as long as you don’t take my glasses away, I’m fine,” said Nathan.
“That’s even cooler,” said Tansy. She tugged the sheet of plastic aside, revealing another sheet of plastic—this one cut into thick strips—hanging behind it. It was like looking into a human-sized car wash. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you.”
That was actually why I was worried, but I was smart enough—barely—not to say that out loud. Instead, I kept my grip on Nathan’s hand as we walked through the sheets of hanging plastic. There were five of them, each cut in the same thick strips. By the time we were through the last one, I was starting to feel like we’d walked into a strange kind of funhouse. One that wasn’t actually any fun.
There was another door past the plastic. Someone had written on it, in Sharpie, BROKEN. I reached out and tried the knob. It was unlocked. Taking that as an invitation, I pushed the door open, and together, Nathan and I stepped through. Then we stopped. It was the only response that made any sense, given what was in front of us. Not that anything else was worrying about making sense anymore.
We were standing in what had clearly once been the main room of the bowling alley. The bowling lanes were still marked off, bracketed by gutters that hadn’t seen a ball since before my accident. There was a structure at the back of the room that had probably been a snack bar originally, and a big mirrored ball, of all things, hung from the ceiling. That was where the original fixtures ended. I wasn’t hugely familiar with bowling alleys, but I didn’t need to be to know that the lab workstations were new, as were the massive plasma monitors that had replaced the screens where bowling scores used to be displayed. The lights were brighter here, almost industrial in quality. Shelves of books and scientific supplies lined the walls, all of them packed to capacity and occasionally beyond.
And there were people. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t people, at least two dozen of them, all wearing lab coats over casual shirts and jeans, moving between the lab stations with the casual intensity I normally associated with the underground levels of SymboGen. A few of them took note of us, glancing briefly our way before appearing to dismiss us completely. It was more than a little bit unnerving.
Tansy squeezed through the door behind us. She stepped into the room so that she could spread her arms wide, and proclaimed, gleefully, “Ta-da! Welcome to the lab!” She dropped her arms. “I keep telling Doctor C we should get a fancy name for it, but she says no, that’s silly, we don’t need a fancy name if no one’s supposed to know we’re here. La-ame. Anyway, it was super-nice to meet you both, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you really soon.” She turned and wandered off into the bowling alley, weaving her way between the people in the lab coats.
Nathan and I stayed where we were, both of us at a loss for what to do next. I looked around the room, trying to find someone who looked like they were in charge. We’d been called here. That meant somebody—probably “Doctor C,” whoever that was—had to be waiting for us.
A curvaceous blonde woman in a wheelchair was heading our way, wheeling herself deftly across the polished floor. She wore a lab coat over a blue blouse and a pair of gray slacks. Fingerless black leather gloves protected her hands. She was smiling, but it looked wary somehow, like she wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. She stopped herself a few feet away from us.
Nathan’s hand dropped away from mine as his fingers unlocked. I smiled nervously at the woman.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Sal Mitchell, and this is Dr. Nathan Kim? We’re supposed to be meeting someone here. Tansy already verified the password. Please don’t let her have us.”
“Tansy can be a little overly enthusiastic about the wrong things sometimes; I’m sorry about that,” said the woman. I recognized her voice from the phone. This was the person we had come to meet. She was still smiling, and she wasn’t looking at me. I blinked, following her gaze to Nathan. He was staring at her. He wasn’t saying a word. He was just staring.
“Um,” I said.
“I would have come out to meet you myself, but I avoid open spaces these days,” said the woman. “It’s dangerous for me to go places where I might be photographed. You’ve been scanned three times since you entered the building; I know that you’re clean. If you weren’t, you would never have made it this far. I’ll give you a memory stick to attach to your GPS when you leave here. It will create a set of false routes and locations for you, so that it looks like you went to a few perfectly reasonable places today. I do appreciate your coming. I know you’ve both had a difficult morning.”
“Who are you?” I said.
The woman smiled, and didn’t say anything.
But Nathan did. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead right now?”
“It turns out ‘dead’ can be a state of mind as much as it is a state of being,” said the woman in the wheelchair, closing the door to her office. It was a proper office, too, not a makeshift space like the others we had passed in the bowling alley. This had been the bowling alley manager’s space, back when there was a bowling alley to manage. Now it was hers. “Can I get the two of you anything?”
“I’d like some answers, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Who are you? Why did Nathan call you ‘Mom’? Are you his mother? Where have you been? Why did you contact me?”
“Do you have grape juice?” asked Nathan.
The woman smiled. “Always.” She wheeled her way toward the fridge. As she went, she said, “To answer your last question first, Sal, I contacted you because you seemed to want to know what was going on, and I felt it was time to begin trying to tell you. I waited this long because I needed SymboGen to trust you—no, I’m not going to ask you to play spy for me, I have better-trained people who take care of the messy aspects of the business, and frankly, you don’t meet my standards. But until they trusted you enough to let you out without a detail trailing you at all times, I couldn’t risk trying to reach out. You needed to be curious enough to take steps on your own, and free enough to keep going once you’d taken them. You needed, if it’s not too cutesy to say, to go out alone.”
“And the rest of it? Your name? Do you have a name? Are you Nathan’s mother?”
“I suspected it was you as soon as I saw the note,” said Nathan. “I couldn’t think of anybody else who would think to use quotes from Don’t Go Out Alone as a code.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” She opened the fridge, pulling out a bottle of grape juice. “There are glasses in the cabinet behind you, Nathan.” She glanced my way. “We use real glass. None of the dangerous chemical outgassing you can get from reusable plastic, and none of the ethically questionable waste you can get from using disposable.”
“Mom,” said Nathan. There was a warning note in his tone. “Sal’s asking you some pretty sincere questions. Can you maybe answer them?”
“I’m trying to work my way around to it,” she said. Then she sighed and turned, wheeling her way back to me. “I’m sorry, Sal. I really am. I’ve been thinking of this day for so long that I suppose I wasn’t ready for the way that i
t would make me feel. I don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t have the greatest social skills in the world. I never did, but after spending ten years underground, I’ve lost a lot of the fine edges I’d managed to develop. Forgive me?”
“If you’ll tell me who you are,” I said.
She smiled a little. “Ah. The biggest question of all. Well, Sal, when I lived with Nathan and his father, my name was Surrey Kim. I had a PhD in genetic engineering and parasitology, and I worked for a small medical technology firm. We were going to do great things, assuming we could ever get space and funding. There was a man I knew from school. He was very rich. He wanted to get even richer. And he had a dream. It was a big, crazy dream, one that could lead to a way of curing the ill effects of our overpurified environment. He approached me and asked if I was willing to help. It was a fascinating proposal. It was innately flawed, and it was going to make millions for him, and for his company, which he called ‘SymboGen.’ Maybe billions.
“But there were problems. The plan would require early and aggressive human testing, and there was a good chance we could all go to jail for the rest of our lives if things went wrong. My family needed the money. I needed to do the work. It’s hard to explain that in a way that doesn’t sound crazy, but it’s true—once I heard what he was doing, I needed to be part of it. It was all my work, all my theories, wrapped up in one big, beautiful possibility. So I agreed, as long as SymboGen could guarantee my family wouldn’t be hurt by my actions.” She smiled sadly, glancing toward Nathan, who was pouring himself a glass of grape juice. “Surrey Kim died in a boating accident that same year. Her body was never recovered. I had six months with my family while they got my new identity in order, planted the publications, created the academic credits. I have to give them this much. They knew what they were doing. No one ever questioned my validity.”
I stared at her. A blonde woman who worked in parasitology and genetic engineering, talking about working with SymboGen when it was still a small company, who worried about them finding her… there was only one person she could possibly be. “Dr. Cale?” I whispered.
“At the moment, yes.” Her smile broadened. “It truly is lovely to meet you, Sal. I’ve been waiting for a very long time. And yes, I am really Nathan’s mother. Can’t you see the resemblance?”
I frowned at her. She had wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, and a roundish face, with no hard lines or sharp angles. Nathan, on the other hand, had dark hair and eyes—both inherited from his father—and strong features. They couldn’t have looked less alike. And yet, when she turned her head, I could see something of him in the way she held herself, buried in the expectant half lift of her eyebrow and the curl of her lips.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I can see it. But how…?”
“I had been a bit wild in my youth,” said Dr. Cale, as calmly as she had offered us something to drink. “I didn’t always follow lab protocols, I didn’t always check my math before I moved forward, and some people got hurt. I thought that all of that was behind me, but when SymboGen wanted me onboard for the D. symbogenesis project, I found out my tracks hadn’t been covered quite as well as I always assumed.”
My eyes widened and I glanced to Nathan, alarmed. How would he be taking this?
With absolute calm, apparently. He was leaning against the counter, sipping his tumbler of grape juice. He smiled a little when he caught my look, a wry twist to his lips. “I knew she wasn’t dead,” he said. “I even knew she was Shanti Cale, and that she’d disappeared after leaving SymboGen. When she didn’t get into contact with either me or Dad, I figured it was because she knew something we didn’t.”
“I knew it still wasn’t safe,” said Dr. Cale. “I always wanted to reach out to you, but there wasn’t a way to do it without endangering you.”
“Aren’t you endangering him now?” I asked, looking back to her. “And me? If being around you endangers people, aren’t you endangering me?”
“You’re part of what made it so dangerous to contact Nathan,” said Dr. Cale. “SymboGen was watching you, and that meant I couldn’t reach out to him until I knew whether you could be trusted. And before you ask the next question, no. No, Nathan didn’t know I was watching you; no, he didn’t get involved with you because I asked him to. He did it because he is a man, and you’re a very pretty girl. I like you. I’ve seen a great deal of security footage, and I approve of the way you treat my son.”
There was a clank behind me. I turned to see that Nathan had set his tumbler on the counter and was covering his face with his hand. “Mom,” he said, sounding embarrassed.
“What? I’m still your mother. I get to pass judgment on your dates. I admit, getting involved with an amnesiac is a little unorthodox, but your father was a teaching assistant in one of my math classes while I was in school, so I suppose being a little unorthodox runs in the family.” Dr. Cale’s resemblance to Nathan was much more pronounced when she grinned.
“Can we get back to the point, please?” asked Nathan, sounding put-upon.
“Where were we? Oh, yes—SymboGen was blackmailing me to get me to join their big secret project. More precisely, Steven was blackmailing me, and if I’m being entirely honest, he didn’t have to blackmail very hard. I loved my husband very much. I loved my son. But they were offering me the chance to do the research I’d been dreaming of for my entire life, and in the end, I wasn’t strong enough to refuse. Maybe that makes me a bad person. It certainly made me a bad mother. But I was always the woman who said, ‘Yes, I’ll go.’ I was always the one who went out alone, no matter how many warnings I got. No matter how many people reminded me that I couldn’t necessarily go back again.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “This is all really interesting, and sort of weird, since we’re in an old bowling alley in the middle of nowhere and everything, but what does this have to do with you calling me here? What is it you know that we need to know?”
“ ‘If you ask the questions…’ ” quoted Dr. Cale, a warning note in her voice.
“We want to know,” said Nathan.
She nodded. “All right. If you’re sure. Follow me, both of you.” She gripped the wheels of her chair, turning herself around before rolling toward the door. We followed Dr. Cale out of the office and back into the makeshift lab filling the bowling alley.
She talked as we made our way across the main room, explaining what the various lab stations were for and what the various lab-coated people were doing there. Some were technicians, working to keep other people’s research from collapsing in their absence. Others were doing research of their own, so caught up in their little worlds that they barely noticed us passing. One woman was milking a large brown snake into a jar, cooing sweet nothings at it as she pressed down on the top of its triangular head.
Dr. Cale caught me looking at the snake handler and said, “That’s Dr. Hoffman. She’s a herpetologist, specializing in reptile parasites. She’s been with me for about seven years now. The snake’s name is Kyle. He’s an Australian coastal taipan. She’s been doing some really remarkable things with his venom recently…” She began rambling again, talking about the neurotoxic properties of taipan venom and its effects on various types of tapeworm. I didn’t tune her out—I was listening as hard as I could—but it was like the days right after I first woke up in the hospital, when everyone around me was talking, and I couldn’t understand a word.
Dr. Cale led us to the far lane, where a light box the length of the wall had been set up, allowing for the display of a variety of X-ray films. She stopped near the middle of the lane. There was nowhere for Nathan and me to sit, so we stood, looking at her expectantly.
“I was, in a very real way, the reason the Intestinal Bodyguard was able to succeed. Steven was smart and ambitious, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The official literature says that he started work on Diphyllobothrium yonagoensis, a species of tapeworm that preferentially parasitizes fish.”
“But the Intestinal Bodyguard is based off… what yo
u just said,” I protested. I recognized the name from the lectures I’d been forced to sit through, even if I couldn’t pronounce it correctly. “They used a fish tapeworm.”
“No, dear,” said Dr. Cale, almost gently. “I used a fish tapeworm. They used Taenia solium, the pork tapeworm. I was able to keep very little of their research once I came on board, because they’d been using an inherently dangerous parasite. Not that any parasites are completely safe—the one we eventually went with had its dangers even before we started tinkering with the building blocks of its DNA. I think you’ll find that very little about the official history of D. symbogenesis is actually true. Most of it is pretty fictions and lies that can’t be disproven this late in the game. The Intestinal Bodyguard worked the way that it was supposed to, Steven Banks became a hero, and the rest of the development team became… expendable. We were a liability. Richard was consumed with guilt over what we’d done, and I was considered too likely to talk. By that point, you see, Steven had created this whole backstory for us. We met in college, we were the best of friends, and so on, and so on. So if he did anything to hurt my family, I could discredit him by revealing his lies. It was the nuclear option, for both of us. We quietly agreed that I would fade into the background.” She pursed her lips, looking unhappy. “Not that I intended for it to be quite such a long absence, but life does have its way of throwing you little curveballs when you let yourself get too cocky.”