Parasite

years, and never even called to let you know she was still alive?”

“Sad,” said Adam, after a pause to consider his options. “But happy, too, because it would mean my mother was still alive, when I would have been worried that she wasn’t.”

I blinked. That wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. “It wouldn’t bother you that she’d been off doing things without letting you know that she was all right?”

“No. Should it?” Adam asked the question with apparently honest curiosity, giving me a hopeful look at the same time, like I was somehow going to unsnarl all the mysteries of human behavior. Boy, was he going to be disappointed if he started looking at me as someone who knew what the hell she was talking about.

“Um.” This time, I thought a little more before I opened my mouth. It didn’t help as much as I’d been hoping it would. “That depends,” I said, finally. “Don’t you like to know what your mother is doing?”

“I can’t always,” he said. “Sometimes she has to go away for days, and I can’t go with her, because it’s not safe.”

“It’s not safe?” I echoed, and frowned. “Why not?” Adam looked perfectly normal. As long as he didn’t start talking about being a tapeworm in a human suit, he wasn’t likely to run into anything terribly dangerous—and even if he did, it wasn’t like that was illegal or anything. Anyone who heard him would just assume he was crazy. Heck, I had scientists with diagrams trying to make me understand how he could be a tapeworm in a human suit, and I still kind of thought he might be crazy.

Adam shrugged. “Sometimes it’s not safe because she’s going places that aren’t safe. Like South America. And Africa, once. She took Tansy when she went to Africa, because she said it wasn’t safe for her, but having Tansy with her would make da—darn sure that it wasn’t safe for anyone else, either.”

His hastily edited “damn” struck me as oddly charming. It was like talking to one of the kids who came into the shelter to look at the kittens and puppies. “But you couldn’t go with her, because it wasn’t safe.”

“Yeah.” Adam nodded earnestly. “Tansy makes it a little safer by being dangerous at people, so they back off being dangerous at Mom. But I don’t do that, because I’m not dangerous at anyone. I’d just be something else for them to be dangerous at. Anyway, I do okay with helping in the lab, but I can’t help too much in the field. I just get in the way and drop things that aren’t supposed to be dropped.”

“He dropped a jarful of leeches once,” announced Tansy blithely as she walked back out of the shadows. I managed not to jump. Barely. “It exploded, ker-smash, and then there were leeches everywhere. It was like Leech-a-palooza in the lab that day. This one tech got a leech inside her nose.”

“By ‘got’ do you mean you put it there?” I asked.

Tansy grinned. “You’re starting to catch on. So, like, can you walk and stuff? Because Doctor C says if you can walk, I should bring you over to her private lab. That’s where she’s got Nathan. She’s showing him a bunch of old slides and stuff, totally boring. I said you might want to go sledding with me instead.” She gave me a hopeful look.

Sledding on a dirt hill with the resident socially maladjusted possibly-a-tapeworm? I could think of a lot of things I’d rather do, including making a return trip to SymboGen. “I really need to talk to Nathan,” I said, standing.

“Whatever. Suit yourself.” Tansy rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust. “Adam, Doctor C says to tell you it’s time for your pills, and you need to go to your room so you can take them.”

“Yes, Tansy,” said Adam. He looked at me shyly as he stood. “It’s really nice to finally meet you, Sal. I hope you like it here enough that you’ll come back sometime. I think Mom would like that, too.” He turned before I could say anything, walking quickly into the shadows.

“I guess he’s sweet on you, too,” said Tansy. She sounded faintly disgusted. “Like you’re all that just because you’re all living in the world, doing stuff without supervision. Whatever. Like that’s so impressive. Come on, I’ll take you to Doctor C.”

“Thank you,” I said—both because it was the right thing to say and because I was a little bit afraid that if Tansy thought I was being rude to her, she’d stab me with a scalpel. She seemed like the kind of girl who regularly carried scalpels around just for stabbing people. “I’m sorry I’m taking up so much of your time.”

“Whatever,” she said, for the third time in as many minutes. “It’s not like I’d be doing anything important if you weren’t here.”

“Sure you would,” I said. “You’d be sledding.”

Tansy blinked at that. Then, slowly, she grinned. She never seemed to smile; it was always grinning with her, big, wide grins that showed off all her teeth at once. “Hey, that’s right. I’d totally be sledding if you weren’t here. You’re pretty smart to have figured that out, you know?”

“If you say so,” I hedged.

“That, or I told you, and you’re trying to play smart.” Her expression turned suspicious. “Are you trying to mess with me?”

“Honestly, I just want to get to Nathan.” Before you stab me with something, I added silently. Of all the unnerving things I’d encountered since arriving at Dr. Cale’s lab, Tansy was definitely the most upsetting.

“Fine.” She started walking. I followed.

We were about halfway across the bowling alley before she said, “You better not be here to try and talk Doctor C into running away with you. We need her here. You can stay if you want—she’d probably like it if you stayed, because then her son would stay, and they could be all ‘rar, we fight the medical establishment and their dangerously lax and corrupt distribution channels’ together—but you can’t take her.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “We just came here to get some answers. That’s all. Once we have them, we can go.” Assuming Nathan was willing to leave his newly rediscovered mother. Tansy might be kidding when she said that we could stay, but I was starting to be afraid that Dr. Cale wasn’t going to let us leave. Even if she did, we could still wind up remaining here with her for as long as Nathan wanted to talk to her.

Tansy looked back over her shoulder at me. The look on her face was actually serious for the first time since I’d turned to find her sitting on the hood of Nathan’s car. “Didn’t Doctor C warn you about what happens when you ask questions?”

It took me a second to realize that she was talking about that children’s book again. I was going to need to find a copy. “I’m sure I want to know,” I said.

“Okay,” said Tansy, with a very small shrug. That seemed to exhaust her available conversation. She was silent as she led me onward, into the dark.

Dr. Cale’s private lab was a small room—even smaller than the office where we’d first gone to speak—with hand-drawn charts and black-and-white photographs of tapeworms covering the walls so completely that I wasn’t even sure what color the paint was. Since this looked like it was one of the original parts of the bowling alley and not a room that had been constructed by walling off a piece of the larger spaces, they were probably something eye-searing, green or purple or another bowling-related color. As I thought that, I realized that I didn’t really know very much about bowling alleys. It had never seemed important to me before.

A low counter split the room in half, and more counters lined the walls, covered in lab equipment and manila folders. Nathan was sitting on a stool at the central counter when Tansy led me into the room. He was bent over a microscope—a position I’d seen him in a hundred times before—and was so focused on whatever was on the other side of his lens that he didn’t even look up when Tansy pushed me toward him and announced, loudly, “I am going to go throw myself down the side of a large hill multiple times.”

Dr. Cale was at one of the other counters, preparing a fresh slide. She looked toward Tansy, saying mildly, “Just don’t break any bones that you think you’re going to need later. I don’t want to spend another six weeks listening to you whine about how I won’t let you go outside.”

Tansy sniffed haughtily before turning on her heel and striding back out of the room. She tried to slam the door behind herself, but the hinges were configured to allow people time to get out of the way, and the door swung gracefully shut instead.

“She broke her ankle once, when she tried to snowboard on a cookie tray,” said Dr. Cale. She had the same fond, nostalgic tone that Mom always got when she was talking about something Joyce or I had done as children. The “my little girls can do no wrong” voice. She picked up the tray with her slides and wheeled her way over to Nathan, one-handed. “I have never in my life had a worse patient, and that includes myself.”