Symbiont (Parasitology, #2)

by Mira Grant

The broken doors are open now, and I was the one who opened them.

But this worm, the third worm, burrowed from Paul Moffat’s digestive tract up into the largest vein in the body, the vein responsible for carrying life-giving oxygen to the rest of the organism.

Inside Paul’s body, the implant had reached the end of its long and arduous journey. Bit by bit, it forced itself through the small opening at the base of his skull, shoving and chewing its way into the space that would be its new home. With every bite it took, a little more of Paul Moffat—who he had been, who he had dreamt of becoming—was devoured, gone to feed the worm that he had willingly nurtured in his own flesh.

It made it easy for me to lie still and close my eyes, pretending that none of the last few weeks had happened; that everything was still normal, that I was still me, and not the thing that I was desperately afraid I was becoming. Or worse, the thing I was even more afraid I had been all along.

the hammers and clangs of the vast machine blending with the insistent pounding of the drums in my ears until there was nothing else: just sound, vibrating through my flesh, anchoring itself beneath my sternum.

Even knowing what they were hadn’t been strictly necessary, had it? Sherman was a tapeworm too, and I had always liked him best, out of all the people at SymboGen. From the moment I’d met him, I’d liked him. If I’d had even the slightest clue that he was a product of Dr. Cale’s lab, that would have given me the information I needed. When I met a tapeworm, when I met somebody like me, I liked them. I couldn’t help myself. Even if I’d wind up disliking them later, I started from a place of “you are family.” So yes, I’d figured it out, and then I’d locked it away, because I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. Admitting it would make it real. Only I guess pictures could do the same thing, because I didn’t even try to deny that the image on the screen was me.

For the first time in my life, I was looking at who—at what—I really was. I was never Sally Mitchell after all.

No, because I’d already figured out the same thing she had: that I wasn’t Sally. Her daughter died in the accident that put her in the hospital. I was a stranger living inside her baby’s skin. I was a stranger to the entire human race.

A tapeworm, no matter how cunningly engineered, didn’t have the size or complexity to think human-sized thoughts—but I managed it somehow. I had to be… the tapeworm part of me had to be driving Sally Mitchell’s brain, using it as storage somehow, like a person uses a computer. The thought made my stomach clench,

The words sounded faintly unreal, like she was quoting them from a book or movie, something that showed how an ethical mad scientist would behave.

The drums were back in my ears, and they grew louder as, with a great rushing roar like water pouring over a cliff, the dark crashed down and took me away.

So far as I was aware, he didn’t know either. It had never really mattered. That boy was gone, and Dr. Cale had never known him. She’d raised Adam without any shadows that wore his face to follow him around and make him feel bad for existing.

I blinked. “Wait—that’s a thing that Dr. Cale can do? She could just scoop you out of the body you’re in and put you into a different one?” “Sort of,” said Adam. “She says it becomes a question of nature and nurture, because memories don’t carry over, just core personality and epigenetic data, and—wait. Are you trying to distract me? Where’s Tansy, Sal? Why didn’t she come back here with you?”

I really should have seen it sooner. Neither he nor Tansy had ever upset me the way the sleepwalkers did, even though they should have. Especially Tansy, whose methods of communication were brusque

Curiosity is what it looks like when you’re in love with the world.”

you know someone is getting tired of living when they stop asking questions.”

History is the ultimate thesis review board, and unlike the board that reviewed my thesis, history doesn’t take bribes.

I kinda think she likes the fact that she has a damaged daughter to send into danger, because it means she can keep Adam home and safe without feeling bad about it, or feeling like she needs to start training him for the field. As long as I’m a broken doll, she can send me through the broken doors all she wants.

“Humans have been trying to clean up the world ever since they figured out soap and water. I think that’s what their Devil really taught them. There’s a lot of bollocks in the Bible about humans learning modesty and shame when they first sinned, but I don’t think they went ‘oh no, I’m naked.’ I think they went ‘oh no, I’m filthy.’ That was the true fall from grace. You can’t be a part of nature if you’re trying to be clean all the time.”

“She’s on her fourth body, and she doesn’t appreciate the fact that we implanted her in someone so small, even though the elasticity of the child’s brain has proven to be the missing factor. Her first three hosts were adult males, and while she preferred those bodies, they rejected her. Now she takes her aggressions out on whatever happens to be around.”

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.

Break the mirror; it tells lies. Learn to live in your disguise. Everything is changing now, it’s too late to go back.

People started caring a lot more about what he had to say after he ripped somebody’s throat out with his teeth. That probably wasn’t the kind of attention he’d been looking for.

The warning signs had been there, and they had been ignored, one bellwether after another, until their weight became too great and everything came crashing down.

It took less than ten days for my cousins to incapacitate American civilization as we understood it, disrupting food chains, causing power outages and hospital shutdowns, and in some cases causing the evacuation of entire cities. There were still news feeds and Internet reports coming through, but they got scarcer each day as the people behind them fell. I guess maybe I should have been proud of that, except I was a tapeworm who thought of herself as a human, and they were tapeworms who thought of themselves as tapeworms. We were on different sides, and whenever there’s a conflict, somebody’s going to wind up on the losing one.

“This is great and all, reunion, true love, blah blah blah, but can you confirm that it’s really your missing girlfriend so that we can get the fuck out of here before we get shredded like piñatas on a playground?”

There is nothing truer in this world than the love of a good dog.

“a person’s a person” attitude toward the chimera, or her sympathy toward the sleepwalkers, who had, after all, not asked to be designed with dangerously high levels of human DNA.

The fifth was one of the first people I remembered, one of the first humans to sit down with me and tell me I didn’t have to be defined by my accident and my memory loss, that I could learn to be a full, productive member of society despite the way my life had changed. He’d been lying all along, of course—he’d known exactly what I was, and that each of the skills I learned would be learned for the very first time—but he’d always known what to say to get me to come around.

I wondered what he thought as he saw me walking slowly across the lobby toward him, with Nathan by my side. Did he look at me and see a woman, stronger than she used to be and only a little weaker than she had the potential to become, who had survived the apocalypse and the discovery that she wasn’t even the species she’d always believed herself to be?

he see the broken girl he’d worked so hard to keep under his control, the experiment gone horribly right and taking its first steps out into the world? And did it matter? Sally Mitchell was gone. This body was mine. Not hers, not anyone else’s, not ever again.

If the apocalypse was stripping us of our masks and revealing us for what we really were, what did that say about Dr. Banks? How much of who I’d always assumed him to be was a lie?

She was a whisper of a thing, a charcoal sketch that no one had ever bothered to finish filling in. Her skin was almost pale enough to be translucent, a milky white only a few shades darker than the skins of the tapeworms Dr. Cale kept in jars and feeding containers down in her lab.

I was chasing my thoughts down rabbit holes again, a sure sign that I was disturbed

“It doesn’t seem very dangerous here.” “You’re standing next to a woman who was just threatening to take my limbs off with a hacksaw,” said Dr. Banks. “I think your definition of ‘dangerous’ may need to be reconsidered.”

there are things that man was not meant to know, and woman is not exempt from that prohibition. I’ve seen things, done things, that should never have been seen or experienced by a living human, and I’ve always come out the other side saying “what I paid to do that was worth it.” It’s always been worth it, because it’s always resulted in more knowledge, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

I think we’re all expendable to her. We’re all part of the story, and the story needs to be finished more than she needs to be kind.”

It would be terrible to have an entire species with bellies full of mingled love and hate, anger and fear, walking around and thinking that they controlled the world.

Every human was the result of social and cultural recombination, picking up a turn of phrase here, an idea or a preconception there, the same way bacteria picked up and traded genes. Nothing was purely its own self. Nothing would ever want to be.

“What do you mean?” “My name isn’t ‘Sally.’ It’s never been Sally. She died. She was… she was like a canary in a coal mine. She died because if she hadn’t, I would never have been able to live.” Sally’s death had been as inevitable as my birth.

“Impossible” had a way of changing shapes depending on what was at stake.

It was like a strange and potentially fatal math problem: if yelling at the onrushing cannibal zombies makes them stop moving, but it only works for X percent, how many times will you need to yell before safety is assured? Show your work, and don’t get eaten.

Thank you for sailing with Oceanic Apocalypse: when the world ends, we get you there anyway.” The speaker clicked off.

I fell for a miracle, not a science project.” “Just keep telling yourself that,” said Dr. Banks, and he stepped inside.