Chimera (Parasitology) (41 page)

C
olonel Mitchell had the most detailed maps of the Bay Area I had ever seen. They covered the entire table in the conference room, and more spilled over onto the walls and floor. We had been able to reject a great many of them as clearly not being suitable: They showed neighborhoods that didn’t have indoor malls of the sort Sherman had been using for his base, or that weren’t close enough to the house where I’d been found to be a reasonable journey from the nearest such shopping center. Ronnie wouldn’t have wanted to be caught sneaking me off the property. He’d knocked me out before he took me out of the mall, but that didn’t mean he’d been able to take forever moving me.

“Do you remember anything else about this place, Sal?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

“There was a fountain,” I said. “Inside.”

“That’s not helpful,” said Private Larsen, who had somehow been drafted into this little planning session. I guess once you electrocute the boss’s wife, you become a lot more interesting to him. “A lot of malls built in the seventies and eighties had fountains, and that covers most of the indoor shopping malls in the Bay Area.”

“Didn’t you say you got up on the roof?” asked Fishy.

“Yes.” I had had to crawl through a series of air-conditioning ducts. It had been a surprisingly soothing way to make an escape—I like tight spaces—except for the part where I had been constantly afraid of falling.

“Were there mountains?”

I blinked. “What?”

“When you looked off the edge of the roof, were there mountains?”

I blinked again, more slowly this time. I had only been able to see the landscape for a few moments before Ronnie had been there to subdue me and take me away. Had there been mountains? I thought maybe there had been. “Y-yes,” I said hesitantly. “Off to the left. In front of me there was just parking lot, and a street, and the freeway.”

“So that means we have dedicated parking, visible from the rooftop, mountains, and no nearby residential housing.” Fishy pushed another three maps off the table. “Was it warm?”

“No. It was the middle of winter.”

To my surprise, he pushed another map off the table. “Means you weren’t in San Jose. Which wouldn’t make sense anyway—we picked you up in Pleasant Hill. Do you remember seeing a movie theater?”

“No,” I said. “I would have remembered that.”

“Good, because that was a trick question.” He pulled a map closer to himself. “So here’s a fun fact for you. Malls used to be a much bigger deal than they are now, and sometimes you’d get multiple malls built in the same city. Pleasant Hill, California,
for example, had two major malls for a long time. Sun Valley, which is here”—he tapped the map—“thrived. It was near a major freeway on-ramp, there was a nearby community college, a high school, lots of residential housing—basically perfect growing conditions for a mall. It never closed its doors.”

“So it’s not our mall,” I said gloomily, and reached for another map.

Fishy held up his hand. “Ah-ah-ah, my young student, you haven’t let me get to the cool part. I don’t get many awesome cutscenes. Give me this one, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

Colonel Mitchell scowled. “I don’t know what a cutscene is, but get to the point, son. We don’t have all day.”

“We owe it to the people Sherman is holding captive to get this right; give me my moment,” said Fishy. He tapped another section of the map. “The Monument Mall. It was never as big as Sun Valley, the stores were never as diverse, and the population was never as interested. It originally grew up around a big theater called ‘the Dome’ that got driven out by the local multiplexes and torn down in the teens. Even that wasn’t enough to save the place. It shuttered its doors about eight years ago. Total bankruptcy. They didn’t even clean out most of the stores.”

“And you know this how?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

“The maker group I was involved with used to do a lot of scavenging for materials. We broke in there a couple of times before somebody went and installed a better security system on the place. I sort of figured that was because they were going to reopen it, but that never happened.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“Four years,” said Fishy.

I thought back to the level of… well, entrenchedness I had witnessed from Sherman’s people. They hadn’t been squatting on the surface of the mall: They had been fully integrated with
the spaces they were planning to use, having long since converted them to their purposes. Four years would have been sufficient time for the changes I’d seen, and more, for Sherman to have surgically induced all of the chimera I had seen there. If he’d started with one or two, and then trained them to assist him with the medical procedures necessary to make more…

“That’s it,” I said. “At least, I think that’s it. Are there pictures?”

“No, but look.” Fishy tapped the map again. “Here’s Sun Valley. And here”—he moved his finger less than an inch, into the nearby residential zone—“is where we found you. He dumped you next to a different mall. That way, if you insisted that Sherman was in ‘
the
mall’ instead of ‘
a
mall,’ we’d be looking in the wrong place.”

His explanation worked, except for one small part. “It wasn’t Sherman who dumped me, it was Ronnie.”

Fishy shrugged. “Makes no difference.”

“Makes all the difference. Ronnie was trying to cover for his boss, even while he was letting me go. Sherman doesn’t know I had help getting away, unless this was some really complicated double cross that I still don’t understand. So as far as Sherman knows, I figured out where he was hiding forever ago, and then I didn’t bring people to his doorstep.”

“So?” asked Colonel Mitchell.

I took a deep breath. Sometimes it felt like I only had one plan, a plan that predated my existence as a thinking creature: infiltrate; invade; enter without permission. “If we can’t sneak up on him without risking our people, I think I know how we can get inside. It’s not going to be fun. But we can do it.”

Fishy looked at me with stunned approval. Colonel Mitchell, who didn’t understand yet what I was suggesting, just frowned.

“All right,” I began. “This is how we get in…”

Fishy liked my plan: He said it was the sort of stealth mission that would be included in the downloadable content, and
probably win some sort of award for clever use of the game mechanics.

Colonel Mitchell didn’t like my plan. He said it was an unnecessary risk, and that it smacked of martyrdom, like I had decided that the only way to prove my loyalty to the human race was to get myself killed trying to defend them. I considered telling him that I had no interest in dying for the human race, but that I’d be willing to die for certain humans. I decided against it. He wasn’t seeing nuance. The fact that he was willing to sit in a room and talk with the monster who had stolen his daughter’s face was nuance enough. He was
trying
.

Fang didn’t look up from Joyce-turning-Tansy’s chart as I explained that we had found what we believed to be Sherman’s hideout, and what I wanted to do. He just kept making notes and adjusting documentation, until I stopped talking. The silence stretched out for almost half a minute before he looked up, and asked, “Are you quite done telling me what I missed?”

“Yes,” I said, almost meekly.

“Are you here to ask for my permission? Or for my approval?”

“Not really.” Hearing the word “permission” made the drums beat harder and my stomach turn a little more to stone. I didn’t need anyone’s permission to save the people I loved. I might need help, but it was never about
permission
. “I wanted to know what you thought of the plan.”

“I think it’s dangerous,” said Fang. “Sherman cut your head open once before, and you didn’t run away from him until after he did that. He had to know when he seized Nathan rather than shooting him, that you’d be inclined to follow. This whole thing could be a trap, and you could easily be its intended target.”

“If it’s a trap, it’s a trap that serves two purposes,” I countered. It was hard to keep looking at him, rather than at Joyce/Tansy. She was still asleep, sustained by machinery while Tansy got herself integrated. When would the changes start?
When would her face stop being slack, and become tense with a new personality’s expressions? I wanted to see that moment. I wanted to avoid it at all costs. “He wanted Dr. Cale and her research. He’s always wanted her to be on his side, and maybe he thinks he can accomplish it now that the water isn’t safe for human consumption.”

“Or chimera consumption,” said Fang. “You have to consider that he may also have lost people, and is looking for a way to prevent that from happening again. There’s a very real chance that you’ll walk in and he’ll be waiting for you, because he knew this might happen, but doesn’t have the time to waste on making you want to be with him.”

“I know.” I shook my head. “But if we want to get in without killing the people we’re trying to save, we need to know what the internal layout is. Will they be holding their prisoners in the old department store where they kept me, or are they counting on us focusing on that as a goal, and putting our people in the area they figure we’ll attack first? We need
information
. This is a way for us to get it.”

“You think Sherman won’t realize that you’re wearing a wire?”

“I think it’s the best chance we have.” He wouldn’t be able to resist me. Anyone else, maybe, but not me: not if I walked up to his doors and said I had been wrong. Sherman suffered from the same problem I did, the same problem all the chimera except for Tansy and maybe Juniper did: He had been raised by humans, and he
was
human in many ways, heir to the hopes and dreams and vanities of his parent species. He wasn’t content with the sense of family that all chimera felt for each other. He wanted something that was his, and only his; he wanted me to belong to him. He might be suspicious if I suddenly walked up to his door with open hands—he
would
be suspicious, because he’d never been stupid—but he would want to believe
that I was there for him. Colonel Mitchell had tried to believe it, and he’d had far less reason to do so.

“It’s a terrible plan,” said Fang. “You’re putting yourself in unnecessary danger, and since this isn’t the first time you’ve gone with a plan like this, I have to wonder if you might benefit from some therapy. Putting yourself in harm’s way over and over again is not the most effective means of committing suicide.”

“I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be the reason the people I care about die, either,” I said. “I want them back. I want them all back.” My eyes darted again to Tansy.

Fang followed my gaze and smiled. “You never want to let anybody go, do you? I suppose that isn’t part of your genetic makeup.”

“I think it’s part of my emotional makeup,” I said. “Those aren’t the same thing. You know Sherman, Fang. You worked with him at SymboGen. You’ve read Dr. Cale’s notes. Is this going to work? Will he fall for it?”

“He might,” said Fang. His voice turned solemn, all traces of his smile fading away. “He’s an arrogant man. A brilliant man, who picks things up far too quickly—I sometimes think he might have been a bit less quick to embrace the myth of chimera superiority if he hadn’t been so damn
smart
—but still, an arrogant man. He’ll want to believe that you’ve come groveling to his door. That’s part of what worries me. If he’s been keeping Nathan alive to lure you back, there’s every chance that having you there might make Nathan’s continued survival seem, well, unnecessary. Do you really want to risk hearing the gun go off while you’re standing in the doorway?”

“Every minute we’re not there is another minute where Sherman might get bored and pull the trigger anyway,” I said. “I don’t see a better choice. Do you?”

Fang hesitated. Then he sighed. “No,” he admitted. “But you
know I can’t come with you. I have to stay here with Tansy, to monitor her integration, and—” He glanced at the door, which was open just a crack, and went quiet.

“And to get ready to run if you have to,” I said, finishing the sentence for him. “I don’t think Colonel Mitchell is going to double-cross us, but he says we can’t be allies, and I think he’s right. There’s too much bad blood between my species and yours, and people like you are going to be looked at as traitors when the dust settles and the humans start looking for people to blame. I just hope Dr. Banks gets to be a traitor too. I don’t want him finding a way to land on his feet.”

“He always does,” said Fang. “Regardless of what the future holds, I’m stuck here until Tansy is stable enough to move, unless things change dramatically.”

“So we’re doing this without you.” I took a step forward, looking down at my sister’s sleeping face. Then I leaned forward and pressed a kiss against her forehead. Her scent was already changing as chimera pheromones bubbled through the mammalian sweetness of her skin. She was becoming one of us.

I blinked back sudden tears. Tansy was going to live, and that meant Joyce was really gone, forever. It was a wonderful, terrible thing, and I couldn’t stop feeling conflicted about it. I didn’t
want
to stop feeling conflicted about it. It was important that we never stop remembering that our actions had consequences, and that we were a species that existed in symbiosis with our creators, no matter how much we might want to be free.

Straightening, I flashed Fang the most reassuring smile I could muster, and said, “She’s integrating. She’s starting to generate mature pheromones. I think she’s going to be all right.”

“Good,” he said. “Now get to where you can say that about the rest of us, and we’ll be in pretty good shape.” He turned
back to his machines. I had clearly been dismissed, and that was all right by me. He had work to do.

So did I.

Private Larsen was waiting for me in the hall, trying to look like he hadn’t been listening in on our conversation. I closed the door behind me and met his eyes squarely, waiting for him to begin squirming. It didn’t take long.

“Yes, Miss?” he said.

“If you were us—if you were a community of sapient tapeworms inhabiting human bodies that you didn’t mean to steal but can’t exist without—what would you do?” I asked. “If you didn’t have to be loyal to the human race, but you wanted to stay alive.”