Parasite

rules to show you that she could. Me disappearing the other day was the first thing I’ve ever done that was ‘wrong,’ and I had pretty good reasons for doing it! You don’t get to tell me to trust you and not give me a good reason to do it.”

My father looked at me without saying anything. I glared defiantly back, clutching Don’t Go Out Alone against my chest and trying to look like I wasn’t going to pass out. The drums were louder than ever, and my head felt completely empty, so light that it might float away. So this is what adrenaline and anger feel like when you put them together, I thought, and kept glaring.

He was the first to look away. “I reacted so poorly—and your mother went along with me—because this wasn’t the first report of sleepwalkers accosting someone in their home.”

“So?” I asked, abandoning my glare in favor of a puzzled frown. “I don’t understand why that would make you freak out the way you did. If it’s happened before…”

“At least, we believe that it’s happened before,” he said. “There were no survivors, but all signs indicated that the homes had been entered by one or more sleepwalkers.”

I said nothing.

“In some cases, bodies have been recovered. In others, the residents of those homes have been retrieved later when they, along with the original sleepwalkers, have been found wandering as much as five miles from the site of the attack. Somehow, the sleepwalkers are either inducing or speeding infection in asymptomatic individuals. If they had touched you…”

“SymboGen says I’m clean,” I said. I realized how empty the words were even as I was speaking them. SymboGen knew that the implants contained genetic material that had never been disclosed to the public. SymboGen knew that there was a danger of the host becoming compromised. Dr. Cale might have been their Dr. Frankenstein miracle worker, but the scientists she left behind weren’t stupid. They understood what the early-generation D. symbogenesis could mean. They knew about the risk of Adam. So how could I believe that anything they told me was the unadulterated truth?

I couldn’t.

“So the sleepwalkers would just have killed you, rather than turning you,” said my father grimly. “I’m sorry, Sal, but I’m not really seeing that as an improvement.”

I frowned. “Is that why you blocked the news channels and the Internet? Because you didn’t want me getting upset about things you couldn’t explain while the house was bugged?” Something else occurred to me. I hugged my book a little tighter. “Why was the house bugged? You still haven’t told me why. You never said I couldn’t let SymboGen security inside. If this was such a big risk, couldn’t you have told me that before it happened?”

“Just… let me work through this at my own pace, all right?” He turned and walked back toward the dining room table. Puzzled, I followed him, and when he sat, I took the seat across from his. It seemed oddly ordinary to be looking at him across the table, like this was nothing but a friendly chat about chores or what we were going to do over the weekend. The solemnity in his eyes refused to let me forget that this was so brutally much more.

He took a breath, and said, “We decided to block the news channels and the Internet because we didn’t know how much of the house was bugged, and we had no way to prevent you from asking questions when you saw what wasn’t on the news.”

“What?” I frowned again, utterly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“The GPS in your phone was blocked by that book”—he nodded toward Don’t Go Out Alone—“but from the condition of Nathan’s car when you got home, I’m assuming you somehow wound up in the Lafayette exclusion zone. Is that correct?”

I bit my lip and nodded, not saying anything.

“Well, if you had been watching the news, you might wonder why there was no mention of whatever you saw there. Or of the incident you had here at home, with the sleepwalkers in the yard. That should have raised a great many flags, don’t you think? Armed SymboGen security guards removing sick people from private property isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence, and yet it’s nowhere on the news. It’s not even on the Internet, so far as I can tell.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I protested. “You can’t keep things off the Internet.” There were dozens, if not hundreds, of embarrassing blog posts and “articles” written about me during the brief window of pseudocelebrity that followed my accident. Most of them were accompanied by incredibly unflattering pictures of me in hospital gowns or freshly stained pajamas—it took me a while to develop the fine motor control needed to feed myself without wearing my meals, and it took me even longer to learn that I should change my clothes when they got food on them—and they talked about aspects of my recovery that I didn’t think were anybody’s business but my own. And yet people wrote those posts, and other people read them, and they were popular enough that they didn’t die down until I stopped doing anything that they would think of as “interesting.” Censoring the Internet was impossible.

“No, Sal,” said my father tiredly. “I can’t keep things off the Internet. You can’t keep things off the Internet. Given enough incidents, even SymboGen won’t be able to keep things off the Internet. But right now, with things still as contained as they are, it’s possible for a large enough corporation with a focused enough security department to do quite a few things that aren’t supposed to be possible. The government could even be, potentially, helping them along to the best of our ability; right now, their goals and our goals overlap enough to be worth supporting.”

I blinked at him. “Why would the government be helping SymboGen suppress information about what’s really going on?”

“Because starting a panic does no one any good, and we still don’t know for sure why these are the things that SymboGen is choosing to suppress—or when it started. Did the sleepwalkers begin appearing before we heard about them? Was SymboGen editing the news from the start? There’s so much we don’t know, both about the science, and about the motives of the people who stand to benefit. Oh, some people know what’s going on—you can’t censor gossip—but other than some small runs on bottled water and canned goods, it’s had very little impact.”

I blinked again, going very still. Even the distant sound of drums had faded, leaving me with only the sound of my own breath. Beverly went trotting by on her way to the kitchen, looking for scraps that might have been dropped during breakfast. In the silence, her claws clacking against the linoleum seemed louder than slamming doors. Things were starting to come together. My vision was unfocusing the way it did when I tried to read for too long in a single setting, casting blurry little halos of color and light around everything.

Finally, I said, “I am done asking questions. I need you to tell me, in very small, very simple words, what’s going on. And then I need you to give me my phone back. I will make the decision of what I do next based on what you say.”

“Sal—”

“Remember how you don’t get to say ‘just trust me’ and have it stick anymore? Well, you also don’t get to decide what’s best for me. I may not remember as many years as I should, but I can manage myself pretty well.” I didn’t mention that if I left, I’d be calling Nathan to come get me and Beverly from the corner. Saying “I’ll call my boyfriend to pick me up” felt like it undermined my overall argument a bit too much.

Dad paused. Then he smiled, and said, “You know, you’re more like your mother now than you were before the accident. It’s strange, and it ought to be impossible, but it’s true. And as for what’s going on that I was trying to protect you from… SymboGen is hiding things. We’ve known that for some time, and you and I have talked about it before. But there is a reasonable chance that they were so happy to be involved in your care in part because I work for USAMRIID, and if they were able to bug our home, they would then be able to find out what the government knew about the more questionable aspects of their business practices.”

Aspects like splicing Toxoplasma into the implants, which would make them— which had made them—more flexible and resilient than anyone imagined. Questionable aspects like the entire structure of D. symbogenesis. The parasite that had been approved by the FDA wasn’t the one being implanted in people. That couldn’t possibly be a good thing.

Questionable aspects like an unshared test for the sleeping sickness, which wasn’t a sickness at all, but the result of the D. symbogenesis parasite trying for a hostile takeover of its host.

I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded minutely, and waited for him to keep going.

“SymboGen never reported the people in our yard to the authorities. I made inquiries—discreetly—and no