She stared straight ahead for the entire descent, not meeting my eyes or looking in my direction even once. I glanced down. She was holding Dr. Banks’s hand tightly in hers, her fingers digging so hard into the back of his hand that the flesh there was white and bloodless. Maybe she was nervous after all.
The elevator dinged as it reached the ground floor, and the doors opened to reveal eight more of Dr. Cale’s interns and lab technicians. They were all holding semi-automatic weapons, and had them trained on the open elevator doors. Fishy took a half step to the left, putting his finger on the “door open” button that would keep the elevator locked where it was. To my dismay, one of the technicians tracked his movement with the barrel of her gun, keeping him firmly in her sights.
Dr. Banks stiffened but didn’t say anything. Anna made a small whimpering noise, her hand clamping down even harder on his, and looked down at the floor. Her shoulders were shaking. I felt the powerful urge to put my arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be all right, which was as nonsensical as it was foolish. Everything was not going to be all right. Dr. Cale was holding us at gunpoint, and I knew her well enough to know that I didn’t understand precisely why. Nothing was going to be all right until I knew what was going on.
“Nathan, please push me out into the lab,” said Dr. Cale. “The rest of you, I recommend staying exactly where you are. If you move too much, you may find yourself leaking from a bunch of holes that you didn’t start out with, and our medical facilities still aren’t as advanced as I’d like them to be. We could probably deal with one gunshot wound, but five would be a strain on our resources.”
“I’m not leaving this elevator without Sal,” said Nathan, through gritted teeth.
“I didn’t expect that you would—hence my count. Steven, his little pet, Daisy, Fishy, and Fang. Five. Now be a good son and help your mother.” There was a needle of ice in Dr. Cale’s voice, as sharp and vicious as a hypodermic in the night. “We all know that a woman in a wheelchair can’t be expected to take care of herself.”
“Now Surrey—” said Dr. Banks.
Dr. Cale didn’t turn or look back at him. “Surrey Kim is dead, Steven. You should know that better than anyone: you’re the one who killed her. She had a husband and a son and a career that didn’t involve destroying the world. She had the capacity for compassion toward the human race, even if she had to learn what didn’t come naturally. It’s really a pity that you decided she had to go. I think she might have been a little more understanding about whatever it is you’ve come here for. Nathan?”
“Yes, Mom,” said Nathan, and gripped the handles of her chair, pushing her out of the elevator. He didn’t move much faster than she would have been able to go on her own. She sat with her back perfectly straight, like the mast of one of the ships that used to sail in the San Francisco Harbor, and I followed behind them, fighting the urge to glance back and see how the others were reacting. Fishy, Fang, and Daisy were being left in the line of fire for nothing more than the crime of being in the elevator when Dr. Cale declared it a holding pen. Dr. Banks had to know what he was walking into when he decided to come here—and why would he do that? He knew we weren’t friends. He knew we weren’t even allies. So what would bring him to Dr. Cale?
What, if not Anna?
I could almost feel her behind me, eyes on my back, a soft, warm presence like a beacon that said I should turn around, go back to the elevator, and refuse to leave her alone. It wasn’t an awareness that had anything to do with any of the senses; it was just there, inescapable, like gravity.
I stumbled a little, catching myself on the arm of Dr. Cale’s chair. She cast me a quick, concerned look, lips pursing as if to shush me. I nodded, just a bit, and kept walking, refusing to let my confusion show on my face. I knew Anna was there because I could sense her, a blind, deaf sense that pervaded everything—and I always knew Adam was there, didn’t I? I always knew when he was in the room, even if I didn’t know exactly where he was. It hadn’t been like that at first—he had managed to surprise me more than once in the early days—but the longer I’d been around him, the stronger that sense had become. I hadn’t even noticed it happening. It was just natural, unavoidable, like the tide.
My ability to sense other chimera was growing, and had been since Sherman held me captive in his mall. I didn’t know how far it was going to go. Apparently, it had already gone far enough for Anna to register immediately on my parasite radar.
Dr. Cale gestured for Nathan to stop when we reached the line of interns and assistants, and she gripped her own wheels, turning herself to face our visitors and abandoned associates, now virtual hostages to Dr. Banks’s good behavior. The line broke and re-formed, leaving the three of us strung at the center of it like a pendant on a chain. Dr. Cale refolded her hands in her lap, tilting her head so that her sleek blonde hair brushed against her cheek just so. She looked like a nursery school teacher, someone who could wait patiently forever until they received the answer they were looking for.
Fishy, Daisy, and Fang were still in their original positions, looking remarkably relaxed for people who might be shot at any moment. Then again, they were also all armed, and they knew that the folks with the rifles would be shooting at Dr. Banks and Anna, not at them.
“I really think you’re overreacting here, Shanti,” said Dr. Banks, stressing Dr. Cale’s chosen name. “I’m here as a friend, and as someone who needs your help. I don’t see any reason for you to have your people treat me like a common criminal.”
“Really? How many times did you try to have me killed, Steven? Two? Three? Oh, wait, there was that incident with the gas leak back at my first private lab—we never did figure out how that happened, but as there were no cameras on the location, we couldn’t rule out industrial espionage. That one almost succeeded, you know. I was still getting used to my wheelchair back then. So I’d say that ‘four’ is a low estimate, wouldn’t you?” Dr. Cale’s folded hands tensed and relaxed to a rhythm I understood: she was hearing her own version of the drums that followed me through my life.
Nathan kept his hands on the chair, more I think so that he wouldn’t have to decide what to do with them than anything else. Dr. Banks was the man who’d first conceived of the project that would lead to D. symbogenesis, the downfall of the human race, and the end of the world as we knew it. But he hadn’t done any of that on his own. When he needed help, he’d gone looking for the smartest, most ethically flexible genetic engineer he knew: Dr. Surrey Blackburn-Kim, Nathan’s mother. Dr. Kim had known that this path would lead them through the broken doors at last, and she’d tried to refuse—not too hard, I was sure; she’d been the same person then, even if she’d gone by a different name—and when Dr. Banks had produced information that he could use to force her to work on his project, she’d agreed, on one condition. Dr. Kim had to die.
There was a boating accident. Nathan buried his mother. Nathan’s father buried his wife. And Dr. Shanti Cale hung her newly minted degrees on the wall of a private lab in a San Francisco biotech firm, where she was going to change the world.
I couldn’t really say whether she’d done the right thing. All I knew about the blackmail material Dr. Banks had on her was that it was bad enough to make her walk away from her entire life… and that he had played on her ingrained desire to break the laws of nature without getting caught. “Every mad scientist secretly dreams of playing God,” was something she had said to me on several occasions, and from the way she and Dr. Banks were looking at each other now, I guessed that was true. He was trying to project a veneer of smug confidence over a thick inner layer of exhaustion. Dr. Cale was ice. She looked like she had never thawed, and never would.