Parasite

I was even more certain that I couldn’t let myself.

Not yet.

“It’s great!” Tansy leaned forward, murmuring conspiratorially, “I mean, not to be a tattletale or anything, but Doctor C doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about pretty much anything, and Adam’s such a mama’s boy that he doesn’t have a sense of humor about anything at all. It’s always dull, dull, dull around here. Science can be funny, you know? But nobody ever lets me blow anything up or even change the labels on things.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. It was something about people still being aware, even if they weren’t awake…“So do you, uh, live here? In the bowling alley, I mean?”

“What? No.” Tansy’s expression turned instantly cold, her amiable lean becoming the crouch of a wary predator as she stiffened. “Are you trying to find out where we live? Who are you working for? Did SymboGen send you?”

“No!” I leaned away from Tansy, pulling back until I was in danger of toppling over the other side of the cot. Tansy in alert mode was a lot more terrifying than Tansy in calm mode, and that had been bad enough. “I was trying to make polite conversation! You know, the way you do when you meet somebody for the first time? I ask where you live, then you ask where I live, then we talk about hobbies and jobs and boyfriends…” Speaking of boyfriends, where the hell was mine? If Tansy broke me while Nathan was off arguing with his mother about her crimes against God, nature, and the FDA, I was going to be really unhappy with him.

“Oh, is that all? Okay.” The menace left Tansy’s face, and she relaxed back into her previous position. That made one of us. I couldn’t relax with her looking at me like that. I was too aware of just how quickly she could turn on me. “It’s sort of silly for us to have polite conversation, though. I already know all that stuff, so it’s not like you could say anything interesting. We’d just wind up talking about stuff I’m not supposed to talk about, and then I’d have to bury your body up on Cardboard Hill. Do you like sledding?”

The change in topics was fast enough to make me feel like I’d missed something. I blinked. Tansy beamed at me innocently, and I realized that no, I hadn’t missed anything; it’s just that she wasn’t making any sense.

That probably should have been a relief. Given the situation, it didn’t help. “I’ve never been sledding,” I said. “What do you mean, you already know all that stuff?”

“Oh, we’ve been monitoring you for ages and ages,” said Tansy blithely. “I know where you live and which window is yours and what route you usually take when you have to go to work. You know, the polite conversation stuff. And I can’t tell you most of what you don’t know about me, because I don’t have permission from Doctor C yet. So that means there’s no reason to bother with the polite conversation, right? Do you want to go sledding? We don’t have snow, but that’s okay. We can slide down the hill on pieces of cardboard, and the dirt is really slippery.”

The thought of Tansy knowing not only where I lived but where I slept was enough to make my stomach do a lazy flip. “Where’s Nathan?” I asked. “I shouldn’t… he’ll probably be worried about me by now, don’t you think?” I looked around our dark little corner of the bowling alley. There were people in lab coats moving around the distant workstations, but none of them were Nathan, or his mother. “What are we doing over here?”

“Oh, you had a simple vasovagal attack and lost consciousness following a stress-induced drop in your blood pressure,” said Tansy. Hearing the technical language from her just increased the surrealistic quality of the scene. “So Doctor C said you should probably go lay down for a little while—or is that supposed to be ‘lie down’? Why are there so many words that sound almost exactly the same only one of them is right and one of them is wrong and if you use the wrong one everyone looks at you like you’re stupid and then you need to stab somebody to make the point that there are a lot of different types of intelligence and anyway English is hard?” She crossed her arms and glared at me sulkily, like she was daring me to explain it all.

“I got lost somewhere in the middle of that sentence,” I said. “Do you mean I fainted?”

“Duh, that’s what I said. You had a simple vasovagal attack. What else could that mean?”

I stared at Tansy. Finally, I said, “I honestly do not know how I’m supposed to respond. I mean, I have genuinely no idea what I’m supposed to say. Can you please pretend I said the right thing, and tell me where Nathan is?”

She sighed, pushing herself to her feet. “I really hoped you’d be fun, you know,” she said. “Stay where you are. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back with your stupid Nathan.” Spinning on her heel, she stalked away toward the front of the bowling alley.

I sank back on the cot, pulling the lab coat up around me like a blanket. I wasn’t cold, exactly, but I still felt like I needed the warmth.

“She doesn’t mean to be spooky,” said an apologetic male voice from behind me. I gave a little shriek and spun around, nearly falling off the cot again. It wasn’t my best day for staying upright, apparently.

Adam was standing in the corner, hands twitching against his thighs, a solemn expression on his face. “She can’t really help it. She knows that she upsets people, but she doesn’t know how to stop doing it. Mom says it’s because Tansy’s body’s brain was dead for too long before she could get Tansy in there, but we don’t really know for sure. It’s hard to know what’s normal for us and what isn’t. The sample size is too small.”

“I… you… what…” I managed.

Adam’s eyes widened. “Did I scare you? I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

I took a deep breath, waiting for my heart to stop trying to pound its way straight out of my chest. Finally, I asked, “How long have you been standing there?”

“I was watching you sleep, just in case you, you know. Had a bad dream or something.” Adam shrugged, looking suddenly awkward. “I have bad dreams sometimes, and it helps if I’m not alone when I wake up.”

I blinked at him, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying. If Dr. Cale was telling the truth about what she’d been able to do—and I had no reason to doubt her, even if Nathan wasn’t quite so sure—I was talking to a tapeworm that had been given full control of its very own human body. And that same tapeworm had been watching me sleep, just in case I had bad dreams.

This situation was creepy on so many levels that I didn’t even know where to begin. Adam was still watching me earnestly. It was clear that he had no idea that I could construe what he’d been doing as even remotely wrong. Why should he? If Dr. Cale and Tansy were his models for normal human behavior, standing there staring at me while I was unconscious probably seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.

“Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough. I hesitated before adding, “I have bad dreams, too, sometimes. Thank you for watching me.”

Adam looked relieved, and smiled. “I was glad to do it. Mom and my big broth—um. Mom and Nathan are arguing right now. He wanted to leave when you fainted, but she convinced him that he should stay until you woke up at least, and listen to what she had to tell him.”

“What was that?” I asked, feeling obscurely stung. Never mind that they were probably discussing all the scientific details of the D. symbogenesis design, and those would have been over my head anyway; we came here because I wanted answers, and I should have been included in the process of getting them.

“Why she never contacted him after she left SymboGen.” Adam’s smile faded. “He’s really upset about that. He doesn’t believe her when she says I’m his brother, and he doesn’t believe Mom had good reasons for doing what she did.”

“I…” I stopped. Finally, I scooted to the side, patting the cot with one hand. Feeling a little silly, I said, “Why don’t you come and sit down?” Adam wasn’t going to hurt me, and I’d be more comfortable if he wasn’t looming over me.

“Okay,” said Adam. He obediently trotted over to sit down on the other end of the cot, beaming like he’d just been invited to his first real party.

Having him that close was almost worse than having him looming had been. I swallowed my anxiety—I was the one who asked him to sit down, I would live with it—and said, “Family is important to Nathan. It’s so important that he told me his mother was dead right after we started dating. That’s how sad he was that she was gone from his life. So finding out she was here with you this whole time is hard for him. It hurts him.” Inspiration struck, and I added, “How would you feel if you found out your mother had gone away to live with another family for years and