Chimera (Parasitology) Read Free

integrate with their human hosts. But I was made to prevent seizures, and I integrated with minimal physiological issues. For all intents and purposes, I
became
Sally Mitchell the first time that I ordered her body to open its eyes.
    For literally years, that’s what I believed I was. I thought I was a human girl suffering from traumatic amnesia, and not a tapeworm wearing a human body like a fancy dress. I let Sally’s parents and Sally’s doctors and Sally’s therapists try to make me into someone I had never been and had no real interest in being. Nothing any of them had to tell me about her made her seem like an appealing person to transform myself into, but still, I tried. I tried for their sakes, and because they said they loved me, and I believed them. How could I have done any different?
    They were my family. They were all I had. That’s what I’d thought for a long, long time, and now that I was finally starting to understand what they’d really been to me—what they had done to me, all in the name of trying to bring Sally back—I was right back in their hands.
    Or at least, I was right back in the hands of Sally’s father, Colonel Mitchell, and since he was the only member of the Mitchell family who had ever given signs of understanding what was going on with me, that didn’t make me feel any better. His wife, Sally’s mother, hadn’t known, I was sure of that, and I was almost as sure that his other daughter, Joyce, hadn’t known either. She would have told her mother. She would have told
me
. Instead, she had told me how much nicer I’d become since my accident, and how happy she was that we were finally friends, instead of just people who happened to be related.
    No. Joyce couldn’t have known. But Colonel Mitchell had known from the beginning that I wasn’t his daughter. He had looked into the eyes of an alien creature, of a chimera bornfrom the union of tapeworm and human, and he had decided that the appropriate thing to do was try to brainwash it into becoming human after all. Brainwash
me
into becoming human after all.
    And now I was his, to do with as he pleased. That had been the cost of saving Nathan, Fishy, and Beverly… and as I remembered the looks on their faces when I turned away from them, I realized I wasn’t sorry. I had lived the first six years of my life going along the path of least resistance and letting other people make my decisions for me. I’d been allowing my tapeworm nature to dictate my decisions. I was a tailored symbiont; I existed to be led. But I was here because I had stood up and said I would go if my friends could be set free… and that was an impulse from the human side of me, wasn’t it? That was me struggling to become a person who
acts
, a person who controls her own fate.
    I needed to be that person now. Because the person I had always been wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
    The men who had been assigned to watch me snapped to attention as the office door swung open. Colonel Mitchell stood framed in the doorway, holding his hands folded behind his back.
    “Who opened the door?” I blurted, before I could think better of it.
    Colonel Mitchell blinked at me. “That’s your first question? Not ‘What happens next’ or ‘Where are we going’ or ‘Did your friends make it back to their transport,’ but ‘Who opened the door’?”
    “You could lie to me if I asked you any of those questions, but the big thing right now is yes, who opened the door? You can’t have moved your hands that fast. You’d have to be a wizard, and there’s no such thing as wizards.”
    “That’s not what you said when you were a little girl,” hesaid, stepping into the room. Another soldier stepped in right behind him, answering my original question. Colonel Mitchell ignored him. All his attention was on me, even though it didn’t feel like he was looking at me at all. He was seeing Sally. Poor, dead, long-buried Sally.
    “You checked the mailbox for your Hogwarts