By the time I pushed the dogs off, Nathan was already past the threshold. I sighed and straightened, whistling to bring Beverly to heel. Minnie followed her, and both dogs followed me as I made my way inside. I closed the door behind me.
Nathan waited until we were both safely in the bowling alley before turning and pulling me into a tight embrace, burying his face against my shoulder. “Oh my God, I was so worried about you,” he said, words only somewhat blurred by my skin.
I took a shuddering breath, locking my arms around him. Then I took another, and another, and before I knew what was happening, I was crying against him, all the terror and tension of the day leaking out through my eyes. He held me tighter as his own tears dampened my shoulder, and the dogs twined around our ankles, whining anxiously.
Finally, we let each other go. Nathan looked at me gravely. “Never do that again. Please. I don’t think my heart could take it.”
“I’m not planning to,” I promised him.
“Good.” He took my hand, and we walked, together, into Dr. Cale’s lab.
Dr. Cale herself was parked at one of the lab benches, flipping through a file of pictures that I didn’t quite see before she snapped the folder shut. I was glad of that. What little I had seen gave the impression of red, raw muscles, and I didn’t really want to be looking at autopsy photos just at the moment. She turned toward us, relief lighting her face. “You’re both all right,” she said. Then the relief slipped, replaced by puzzlement. “Where’s Tansy?”
“We ran into a mob of sleepwalkers,” I said. “She threw herself at them as a distraction.”
“Oh, that girl. Will she never learn?” Dr. Cale shook her head. “Well, it’s not the first time. I’m sure she’ll be fine. Did you get it?”
I produced the thumb drive from my pocket, holding it solemnly up for her to see. “I have a few questions before I hand it over.”
“Anything.” Dr. Cale spread her hands. “I am an open book.”
“Sherman.”
She grimaced. “Ah.”
Nathan, meanwhile, frowned at me. “Your friend from SymboGen?”
“He was a tapeworm,” I said. “Dr. Cale, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Honestly, Sal, it didn’t seem to matter, and I didn’t want to upset you more than I already had. Everything is going to come out in its own time. It seemed like a bad idea to drop it all on you at once.”
“Is there anything else you’re not telling me?”
“A great deal,” said Dr. Cale easily. “But you’re learning more all the time.”
The drums were pounding in my ears. “Why do you get to decide what I should and shouldn’t know?”
“There are a lot of reasons, Sal.”
Nathan took my hand, distracting me before I could say anything that I would regret. “Let’s do those blood draws while it’s still early enough to process them.”
“Blood draws?” asked Dr. Cale.
“Sal wants a course of antiparasitics,” said Nathan. “We’re going to check for implant protein levels in her blood first. Just so we don’t get the dose wrong.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Cale. She looked at me with sympathy. “Well. I’m sure it’ll all be taken care of by morning.”
“It will be,” I said. I touched my stomach again. “This thing isn’t staying in me any longer than I have to let it.”
She was still looking at me silently when Nathan led me away from her, toward the phlebotomy supplies.
The blood draw took five minutes; the analysis for site-specific parasite proteins took a little more than twenty. I hovered behind Nathan the whole time, trying to see what he was doing. Finally, he turned away from the computer, where a series of lines and graphs I couldn’t decode had been holding his attention.
“Well?” I demanded.
“You don’t need antiparasitics,” he said.
I stared at him. “Have you not been listening to me? I said—”
“You don’t need antiparasitics because there’s no sign of a tapeworm, bioengineered or otherwise, in your system. The implant isn’t there, Sal. Maybe it died. That happens, you know.”
He was right: it was rare, but it did happen, and inevitably resulted in a lawsuit against SymboGen when someone figured out that they had been essentially unprotected for however long. “That’s impossible.”
“But it’s true.”
“But… Nathan, that’s impossible.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m allergic to dogs.” I shook my head. “It’s in my medical file. Before I got my first implant, my family couldn’t have pets. My allergies made it impossible. Nathan, Minnie, and Beverly slept on the bed last night. I have to have an implant, or I wouldn’t have been able to breathe. So where did it go? Why isn’t it shedding marker proteins? Nathan, where is my implant?”
A throat was cleared behind us. We both turned to see Dr. Cale sitting there, patiently waiting to be noticed. “Take her to the MRI scanner,” she said quietly.
Nathan and I exchanged a look. It felt like a hand was squeezing my heart. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know…
We went.
It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to discover that Dr. Cale’s lab was outfitted with a state-of-the-art MRI scanner. I still tried to focus on my amazement, rather than anything else, as Nathan helped me into the machine. It fired to life around me, all clangs and thrumming noises, and I closed my eyes, holding perfectly still.
The noise of the machine blended into the sound of drums, becoming a backbeat that filled the world. Please, I thought. Please, it’s something else. Please, it’s not what I think it is. Please, there’s another answer…
The machine shut off around me, and the automated bed slid back out into the open. I slid back to my feet and walked over to where Nathan was pulling up the first images of my insides.
In my abdomen, where the white mass of the SymboGen implant should have been, there was nothing; just normal organs and the residual scarring from my accident. I was clean. The blood tests had been truthful. I did not have a D. symbogenesis living in my digestive system. Or in my lungs. Or in my spinal cord.
It almost wasn’t a shock when Nathan pulled up the images of my head, where white spools of tapeworm wrapped themselves around the brightly colored spots representing the regions of my brain. The worm was deeply integrated. It had clearly been there for quite some time. And I’d already known, hadn’t I? I’d figured it out when I met Adam and Tansy. I simply hadn’t wanted to remember.
I’d never seen a picture of myself before.
“The protein markers couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier in a detectable form,” said Nathan quietly. “It’s why we couldn’t detect…” He stopped, obviously unsure how to finish the sentence. I suppose saying “you” would have been a little too on the nose.
“Mom was right,” I whispered. Her daughter—Sally Mitchell—really did die in that accident. I really was a stranger. I was a stranger to the entire human race. “Oh, my God. Nathan. Do you see…?”
“It doesn’t change anything,” he said, a sudden sharp fierceness in his voice. He stood, taking me in his arms, and held me so tightly I was afraid one or both of us might be crushed. In that moment, I wouldn’t have minded. “Do you understand me? It doesn’t change anything.”
I looked over his shoulder to where Dr. Cale sat in her wheelchair, watching us. So much made sense now. So much still had to be made sense of. “No,” I whispered. “It changes everything.”
The broken doors were open.
We had so far left to go.
TO BE CONTINUED…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book is written in a vacuum. I am fortunate enough to have a support crew that consists of some truly amazing people, ranging from medical professionals who work with both humans and animals to parasitologists, epidemiologists, and even civic planners. Parasite has been a labor of love from the very beginning, and as with al
l labors, there was some heavy lifting involved.
Let it be said, without question, that Michelle Dockrey went above and beyond the call of duty in pulling this book into shape, as did Brooke Lunderville and Diana Fox, who is probably the best agent a girl like me could possibly have asked for. Most of the Newsflesh Machete Squad carried over into this new series, and all of them have put in countless hours making sure that every detail was correct. They all have my thanks, always.
Switching gears between Newsflesh and a new series involved many challenges, and my new editor at Orbit, Tom Bouman, was there every step of the way. The cover, provided by Lauren Panepinto, took my breath away. I am very fortunate to have the support of Orbit, and all the talent that it contains, to back me up.
Finally, and once again, acknowledgment for forbearance goes to Amy McNally, Shawn Connolly, and Cat Valente, who put up with an amazing amount of “talking it out” as I tried to make the book make sense; to my agent, Diana Fox, who remains my favorite superhero; to the cats, for not eating me when I got too wrapped up in work to feed them; and to Tara O’Shea and Chris Mangum, the incredible technical team behind www.MiraGrant.com. This book might have been written without them. It would not have been the same.
To learn more about parasites, check out Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer. There are many, many books on the subject, but his is one of the most accessible jumping-on points you’re likely to find.
Welcome to the war.
Mira Grant, Parasite
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