“You’re not ready to start answering me either, I guess, because you’re not,” I said, giving another experimental tug against the straps. “Can you let me up? You just said that I wasn’t sick. I want to get up.” It was a funny twist of the infection: a sleepwalker would show parasitic “tendrils” throughout their bodies, lines drawn and held by the toxoplasmosis DNA that had been used to help the implants integrate with the human body. A chimera—like Adam, like me—wouldn’t show any of those traces. Our implants had relocated completely to our brains, abandoning the parts of themselves that would normally have been used to latch on to the body. A recent chimera might have shown up on an infection sweep, but not one that had been given the time to finish integration.
They could test and test, and they’d find the violent ones, the ones who were incapable of concealing themselves, and the ones who were too deep in comas to pose a threat. But they’d never find the ones like me without doing MRIs and lumbar punctures. They’d never find the ones who’d learned how to make themselves look human.
“No, I can’t,” said Dr. Huff. “You’re being relocated to a secure facility, and I’m afraid that patients can’t be allowed to move freely around the transport.”
I blinked at her. I hadn’t realized we were moving, and no matter how much I tried to focus, I couldn’t detect any motion.
She must have seen my confusion, because she said, “We’re waiting for the trucks to arrive. It will be easier to keep the afflicted and the unafflicted separate if everyone remains in their assigned place.”
“What?” I didn’t know which part of that upset me the most. I strained against the straps that held me down again. “No, no, you can’t put me with people who’ve started going sleepwalker. I don’t even want to be in a carrier with them. You don’t understand how easy it is for them to escape. You don’t understand—”
“We have taken every precaution,” she said crisply. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other patients to attend to.” She straightened up, her expression going blank and cold, and stalked out of my field of vision.
Sleepwalkers had cold, dead eyes, but they weren’t thinking creatures: they hurt you because they didn’t know how to do anything else, not because they harbored any malice or desire to harm the people around them. Dr. Huff… her eyes were the eyes of a sapient being, and when she hurt me—and I had every confidence that it was a “when,” not an “if,” given the circumstances that I had found myself in—it would be the full understanding of what she was doing. Dr. Banks had eyes like that. Dr. Banks never hurt me when he wasn’t trying to.
I relaxed as much as I could, trying to find signs of slack in the straps. There didn’t seem to be any: they were drawn as tight as they could possibly have been without hurting me, and even breathing all the way out and holding my breath did nothing to let me move. I could squirm down a few inches, and that was all. I was trapped.
The drums were starting to pound in my ears, a sure sign that I was panicking. I couldn’t tell whether they were louder than they should have been, and that just made them pound faster. Was it safe for me to experience this much excitement right after surgery? Was I going to have an aneurism on this cot and die never knowing what had happened to my friends?
No. No, I was not. I forced myself to breathe slowly, trying to bring my heart rate back down to something less alarming. Nathan and the others had reached the car: I knew that from the sounds of tires I’d heard behind me in the parking lot. They wouldn’t have been vulnerable the same way that I had been. They got away. They had to have gotten away. They would go back to Dr. Cale and tell her that USAMRIID had me, and she…
She would say she was very sorry, and that it sucked to lose such a valuable research subject. And then she would tell them to start packing, because if USAMRIID was in the area, she could no longer stay there. None of us was more important than the entire human race. Not one. It didn’t matter how much Nathan disagreed. Dr. Cale would make him go along with her. She was the one with the paid security, after all. All Nathan had was a pair of dogs. He didn’t even have the Prius anymore.
I closed my eyes. It was better than staring at the distant ceiling, waiting for the moment when someone would come and load me onto a transport. Maybe they’d put me in a room with a bunch of people who didn’t know what was going on, and I’d be able to escape. Or maybe they’d put me in with the sleepwalkers, and I’d wind up ripped to pieces before I had a chance to defend myself.
This can’t be how it ends, I thought. This isn’t fair.
Fair didn’t seem to be playing any part in things.
Footsteps approached from my right. I opened my eyes and rolled my head in that direction, calling, “Hello? My name is Sal Mitchell. I’m not sick. Can you unstrap me, please?” It was a long shot, especially considering that the stranger in the dark could easily have been Dr. Huff, but it was better than lying here, waiting to be moved.
“Is that your legal name?” asked a cool male voice that I didn’t recognize—not quite—although there was something halfway familiar about it. Like Fang. Whoever this was, I knew him in some other context.
“Not quite,” I admitted. “My legal name is Sally Rae Mitchell.” That was the name my body’s parents gave to it at birth, and the original Sally had never wanted to change it. The “Rae” was after some aunt I’d never met. Maybe changing my name legally to just plain “Sal” would be the honest thing to do, but I was starting to suspect it was already too late for that. We were standing on the razor edge of a national emergency. The department that handled name changes probably wasn’t going to be taking appointments for a while.
“Subject is confused about her identity,” said the man, his words accompanied by the sound of fingertips drubbing softly against a touchscreen.
“What? No! I’m not confused! I know who I am, I just never use the name ‘Sally.’ I don’t like it. It’s—” I was going to say “not me,” but I caught myself at the last second, twisting the rest of the sentence into “—it doesn’t suit me very well. I like ‘Sal’ better, so that’s what I always call myself. I’m not confused, I swear.”
“Subject is defensive,” said the man, accompanying his words with more taps.
“I’m not defensive!” I protested. “You try giving calm answers when you’re strapped to a table and nobody’s willing to tell you what’s going on! It’s not that easy. I don’t think you could do it.” Inspiration struck. “Unless you do think you could do it. Let’s trade places. You come strap yourself down and I’ll ask you questions, and we’ll see how calm you sound.”
The man chuckled. “Oh, pet. You always did like your little jokes, didn’t you?”
I froze.
The man with the touchscreen stepped out of the shadows and into my field of vision. He was tall and gangly, with limbs that seemed a little too long for his body, yet nonetheless moved with artful grace, like he had spent his time learning exactly how to present himself to best advantage. The heavy artificial tan he’d worked so hard to cultivate was gone, as were the neatly tailored clothes; he was wearing off-the-rack tan slacks and a blue button-down shirt under a lab coat with the USAMRIID logo on the breast. He’d even added black-framed glasses to his ensemble, completing the illusion that he belonged here. His hair was still cut in the latest style, brown with bleached tips and a spiky outline that could only be achieved through pomade and care, but it seemed less natural and more like an affectation when set against the rest of him. Whatever game he was playing, he had taken the time and put in the effort to play it well.