Row upon row of bubbles stretched off into the distance, creating separate, sterile environments for the people inside them. None of them seemed to have doors.
I slid off the bed, keeping my hands on the mattress as I tested my balance. My legs seemed willing to hold me, although there was a bone-deep weariness in all my muscles, making me feel like I’d been running marathons in my sleep. I wasn’t hungry. I closed my eyes and cleared my throat, trying to focus on the subtleties of that sensation. It was a little sore, like I’d been shouting. Since I hadn’t been shouting—that I was aware of; if they’d put me under twilight sedation at some point, I could have done all sorts of things I didn’t remember—that probably meant they’d used a feeding tube on me, in addition to feeding me intravenously.
All those things were medically necessary, under the right circumstances, but since I hadn’t agreed to any of them, I was starting to feel more and more violated. I let go of the bed and walked to the bubble wall, pressing my palms flat against it. It didn’t flex. It might look like a thin sheet of plastic, but whatever it was, it was strong enough to resist my exploratory efforts at getting it to yield. Hands still pressed against the plastic, I peered as far to the left and to the right as I could. Everything was very well lit, so it wasn’t hard to confirm that I was, for the moment, apparently unsupervised. Great. I drew back my left hand, made a fist, and punched the plastic wall as hard as I could.
The pain was immediate and intense. Whatever that stuff was, it was like punching brick. I squealed with pain, shaking my bruised hand and dancing back from the barrier like it had done something wrong, even though I was the one who had launched an unprovoked attack against it. The plastic wasn’t even dented. I wasn’t going to get out that way.
The drums were back, beating softly in my ears as my heart rate rose. I stopped shaking my hand and began to pace instead, looking for a seam or some other evidence of how they had managed to get me in here—whoever “they” were, wherever “here” was. There were at least five rows of bubbles, with me in the front. I couldn’t tell how many bubbles were in each row. I could see the curve of the row behind me well enough to count off eleven separate enclosures, but that didn’t get me all the way to the wall. That meant that a conservative estimate put fifty-five bubbles in this room, each of them representing a circle about twelve feet across. I wasn’t good enough at math to figure out what that meant in terms of actual space inside the bubble, beyond “a lot.” Wherever we were being held, it was massive.
I paced three times around the edge of the room, trying to work the weakness out of my legs. More and more of the people around me were waking up and getting out of their beds. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why they were here; I saw men and women, children and senior citizens, and all of them were in exactly the same sort of setup I was: total isolation without any hint of privacy. That was a little weird, and that worried me. Psychologically, wasn’t it stressful for people to be able to see each other and not reach each other? Little private rooms would have served the same purpose in terms of keeping us apart, but it might have done a lot to keep the people in those isolated bubbles sane.
Maybe that just meant we weren’t going to be kept here for long. But that didn’t make sense either, since a place like this, well… it couldn’t have been cheap to construct, and it couldn’t have gone up overnight. So they’d taken us, drugged us until we passed out, and then kept us drugged long enough to get this room ready for our arrival. Why? It didn’t make any sense, unless there was some plan that I wasn’t seeing.
Worst of all, I didn’t even know who had me anymore. It wasn’t Dr. Cale—this was way outside of her budget and available resources, unless things had changed a lot more dramatically than I suspected. Dr. Huff had identified herself as USAMRIID, and Sherman had been wearing a lab coat with a USAMRIID logo on it, but that didn’t mean they were actually the people controlling this facility. Things could change really quickly when you had traitors in your midst, and I couldn’t make myself think of Sherman as anything other than a traitor. Not at this point. Not after the things that he had done.
I was still pacing when I saw movement down the hall to my left. Actual, outside-the-bubble movement, not the milling aimlessness of my fellow prisoners. I ran to what I couldn’t help thinking of as the front of my bubble, pressing my face against the plastic and straining to get a better look.
A tall, weary-looking man in military uniform was walking toward my private prison, surrounded by a flock of people in lab coats. They surged around him like the sea, moving forward to present touchscreens or clipboards, and then falling back as another wave of scientists took their place. I stepped back from the plastic wall, letting my hands fall to my sides. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else to react.
The man in the uniform—the man I’d never been expecting to see again—was Colonel Alfred Mitchell. My—I mean, Sally Mitchell’s father. He was where she got her pale skin and middling brown hair. I looked at him and saw the jaw that greeted me every time I looked in a mirror. He was tall, broad in the shoulders and thick in the waist, and he walked like he knew that any obstacle he encountered would be clever enough to get out of his way. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing in front of USAMRIID’s San Francisco facility, watching me get into Nathan’s car and drive away. That was when we’d said what I’d thought would be our last goodbyes. What I’d hoped would be our last goodbyes, because I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore.
When I thought I was Sally reborn, memories lost to pay for my recovery, he’d been my father. When I started becoming Sal in thought and action—a new person, not the daughter that he’d lost—he’d still been my father, just a little distant, a little strained, like he didn’t know how to deal with me anymore. And then I’d started learning what I really was, who I really was, and it hadn’t been a surprise to him, because he’d known all along. He’d never been under any misconceptions about my nature. I’d been an in-home science project for him, something to study while he waited to figure out how to get rid of me and my entire species.
Alfred Mitchell had let me think that he loved me, and I didn’t know whether I was ever going to be capable of forgiving him for that. Seeing him again made me realize that I also didn’t know whether I was ever going to be able to stop myself from loving him. He was my daddy. Whatever else he was… he was always, always going to be my daddy.
He stopped outside my bubble, and his swirling array of scientists stopped with him, all of them turning in my direction. One of them read from her touchscreen, “Mitchell, Sally Rae. No traces of the protein that would indicate the presence of Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis were found in her bloodstream, and she came up negative on antigen tests. She’s clean.”
“She was recovered from the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek,” said another scientist, apparently eager to feel like he was contributing to the conversation. “A large mob of infected individuals was in pursuit when she was sedated and taken for further study.”