“You must be Dom?” she says in what’s probably a Zimbabwean accent, based on Jo’s diary and the woman’s profile on the science department website. “So lovely to meet you.” Her handshake is cool and dry, long elegant fingers made for playing the piano or scalpeling through delicate cerebral tissue. “Anything for Professor Kittinger. It’s so awful what happened.

  “So, I was about to do a fresh harvest.” She grins, full of mischief.

  “Of… brains?” Dom scrambles to keep up with her as she leads the way through a set of double doors and up a staircase, speckled cream with grooved edges, which feels very seventies, like Dom’s lita’s apartment in Arecibo with its yellow lights and crenellated balconies.

  She laughs. “Tapeworm larvae. It’s the leading cause of epilepsy in Africa, and we’re beginning to think India and some parts of South America too. Jo was really interested. I don’t know if you knew about her condition?”

  “Epilepsy since she was fourteen. But it was a straightforward brain cancer that killed her, from what I understand, nothing to do with worms.” Loading the emphasis there.

  “Oh no, definitely not. She hadn’t shown any sign of lesions and she had multiple scans. Perks of the job. But no brain cancer is straightforward, per se. The brain is an infinitely strange and complex organ, and we barely understand it.”

  “That’s encouraging.” Dom has been puzzling over the stained-glass window on the landing, which depicts a sea-cucumber-ish thing, vaguely star-shaped with branching tendrils and a fat sectioned tail connecting to another tendrilled star. It takes them too long to haul out their memories of high-school biology and identify it as a neuron. Of course.

  “If you don’t know your own mind, it’s because we literally don’t know our own minds,” Tendayi says.

  “I’m going to quote you next time I’m being indecisive.”

  “Please do.” She smiles back. “I didn’t work with her directly, just so you know, so I’m not sure how helpful I can be.”

  They’ve come out on a corridor painted hospital blue, a row of wooden doors with opaque glass windows and brass name plates, exactly how Dom imagined—a little Raymond Chandler, a little Lovecraft. And oh, look, a sign for the Museum of Surgical History. Tendayi unlocks the door marked 609 NEUROPARASITOLOGY, which opens onto parquet floors scuffed by decades of wheelie chairs. The windows are dingy, propped half open; a Swiss cheese plant is spilling out of its pot, intent on taking over the room. Textbooks and computers, a great hulking machine with something that looks like a Faraday cage.

  “Our patch-clamp rig. It’s where we do the electrophysiological recordings. How much do you know about tapeworms?”

  “I know they’re disgusting. Some idiots have tried to use them as diet pills. They can grow as long as a school bus inside your intestines. Did I mention disgusting already? How does the epilepsy work?”

  “So, adult tapeworms in your intestines is not the problem. You get that from undercooked pork, for example. Pigs eat the tapeworm eggs, which hatch, burrow through the pig’s intestinal wall and into the muscle, and turn into cysts, which humans ingest when they eat the meat.”

  “Oh my God, vegan for life.”

  “The cysts grow into adult tapeworms in your intestines and can cause some gastric symptoms, but mainly they’re just hanging out, and they want you to live so they can live and lay their eggs, which come out your butt in your feces.”

  “But that’s not the problem?”

  “No. It’s when the life cycle gets interrupted. It’s when humans eat something—usually unwashed veggies—contaminated by the feces of an animal or person infected with the adult tapeworms. That means they’re ingesting the tapeworm eggs, not the cysts. Those eggs develop into larvae that burrow their way through the gut, enter the bloodstream, migrate to various organs, including the brain, and become cysts. But, get this: For reasons we don’t understand yet, five to ten years later, the patient develops epilepsy. We think it’s because there’s some kind of protein inside the tapeworms’ bodies that reacts with human brain chemistry, but we’re not sure. And that’s basically what I do here. Try to figure that out.”

  “Por dios. I am scrubbing the shit out of all my vegetables from now on.”

  “Well, exactly!” Tendayi grins. Are the two of them flirting? Dom thinks they might be flirting. “Do you want to see what I do here?”

  “Uh, yes. All the sciencing, please.”

  “Right.” She removes a flask containing a goopy white liquid from the bar refrigerator beneath the counter. “So here are all my little larvae buddies, and I put them through the homogenizer, turn them into mush. I’m not boring you?” She looks at them, self-conscious about her enthusiasm.

  “No, qué foquin cool. Science is hot.”

  Tendayi smiles. “I’ll try to keep it simple. We have a protease inhibitor to stop the important proteins breaking down, and we spin the larvae at four thousand revolutions per minute in a centrifuge machine to separate the cellular membranes, the liquid proteins, and the fat. Like a three-layer cocktail.” She holds it up to show them. “Then you load it into the headstage.” She carefully fills a glass pipette with the mush and attaches it to the back of something resembling a glue gun. “Another headstage with an electrode lets us patch the cell and measure the electrical activity. To do that, you need to suction onto the membrane of the cell and burst through it”—she makes a goofy slurping sound. “That gives us full electrical access. You still with me?”

  “Mostly. There’s no test at the end, right?” On the screen is what looks like a very boring ultrasound.

  “Okay, so if you look at the screen, that thin gray line is the cell’s electrical current, and then on the screen over here, that sharp needle is the micropipette containing the electrode. And then we bring in the micropipette full of tapeworm mush and we’re going to puff it onto the patched cell—rat brain, not human, don’t worry—and record the response.”

  “Poor rats,” Dom says, thinking about Bridge trying to set her mom’s lab rodents free all those years ago.

  “I know, also a vegan over here. I struggle with it a lot, but if you saw what parasite infections do to people who don’t have access to clean water or medical care, especially kids and the immunocompromised—and then there’s the stigma. People with epilepsy in rural communities are accused of being cursed or possessed or doing witchcraft; sometimes they’re forced to flee their homes. Or worse. If I can help them…” She trails off. “We all have to make our own moral compromises. I believe this is the best methodology we have right now.”

  Bridge’s argument right there, Dom thinks. “So I wanted to ask you about something in particular,” they say, unshouldering their backpack. They take out the Tupperware, pop it open to reveal the spindle.

  “Oh.” Tendayi is clearly dismayed. “Is that the dreamworm?”

  “If I say yes, are you going to throw me out?”

  “I wasn’t involved. It was a misuse of university equipment. Jo was up here at strange hours before she lost her access. It’s so sad what happened. To throw everything away like that. Her reputation. Her funding.”

  “Did she tell you about it?”

  “Ugh.” Tendayi is flustered, furious. “Listen, I can’t be linked to Jo’s ‘meltdown scandal.’” She air-quotes too hard, jabby. “It would follow me around for my entire career, especially as a woman, especially as a woman of color, and especially one from Zimbabwe. Visas are still really hard to get even with the Africa Rising policies. Jo did real damage to the university’s reputation. The psychedelic-studies people were pissed, too, because their critics were claiming this was what happened when you allowed people access to psilocybin. I think everyone was relieved when it turned out to be a tumor pressing on her anterior prefrontal cortex.”

  “But you don’t think that.”

  “I don’t have enough information.” She is cagey.

  “If it works the way it’s supposed to, this is a big deal, no? Taking the dreamworm, using music and images to transfer consciousness?”

  “If.” She winces. “Have you tried it?”

  “I did babysitting duty while Jo’s daughter took a trip. I really, really hate to say it, but I think it’s real. And you’re the only other rational person I can talk to about this. Jo’s notes mentioned side effects, but she didn’t say what they were. And she said that the guy who originally gave it to her made it. I’m trying to figure out if that’s like Albert Hofmann cooking up LSD in his lab or maybe—”

  “It’s a parasite?”

  “It’s in the name. Dreamworm.”

  Tendayi throws herself down into a wheelie chair, annoyed but also ready to get into this. “Purely theoretically?”

  “Pure as glacier melt.”

  “If it was a parasite—and I’m not saying it is—you’d have to look at the life cycle. Is there an intermediary host? Is it changing that host’s behavior to help it infect the next host for the next phase? For example, toxoplasmosis makes rats fearless, so they run toward cat urine instead of away from it. There’s a Czech biologist who has data suggesting it also makes men more reckless, impulsive, thrill-seeking. He says you can track Toxoplasma gondii infection rates in humans by the increase in car accidents.” Her earlier irritation is gone, drowned in geeky enthusiasm. “It might even be a factor in schizophrenia—there was a sudden spike of diagnoses in the 1700s in London and Paris that coincided with ‘the cat craze,’ when humans, especially boho poets and artists, started keeping cats as pets for the first time since the ancient Egyptians.”

  “What I’m hearing is you’re a dog person,” Dom says, but they are loving the gruesome parasite arcana. Unless you extrapolate it to their current context, that is.

  “There are at least fourteen hundred parasites on you right now. And yes, some of them, right down to the bacteria in your gut biome, are trying to influence your mind.”

  “So another example would be the cicada thing, where they get a fungus like meth that makes them party till their butts drop off?”

  “Yes! Exactly. It’s the same with rabies—initially, it makes you hypersexual and it makes you bite, which probably accounts for a lot of the mythology around werewolves and vampires.”

  Dom is here for this. “Or Cordyceps—the mind-control fungus that turns ants into zombies, makes them clamp onto tall grass so birds will eat them. It’s in that book.”

  “The one by Merlin Sheldrake?”

  “No, the horror one, The Girl with All the Gifts.”

  “I’ll have to check it out.” Definitely flirting. “Interesting thing about the zombie ants, it’s not like a switch that gets flicked. Cordyceps doesn’t give ants lockjaw and that’s it, they’re done. They cling to the top of the grass stalk, but if they don’t get eaten, they come back down and continue to socialize with other ants, possibly infecting them too. Then at sunrise, they’ll climb back up and wait. It’s a consistent behavioral change, and that’s what makes it so potentially dangerous. Okay, okay, but also Polysphincta gutfreundi, the wasp that lays its egg inside a spider’s abdomen and as the larvae develop inside the spider, they release chemicals that interfere with the spider’s nervous system, forcing it to spin wild three-D designs that are unlike any kind of web they would ever think of spinning.”

  “As much as we can infer spider consciousness and aesthetic choices,” Dom mock-protests, wanting to get back on track, even though they want to ask her if she’s seen the photos of webs made by spiders that were on caffeine and cocaine and acid. “So, I’m thinking, or hoping, that the dreamworm is like a really powerful hallucinogen, like DMT or ayahuasca. But instead of making you hallucinate, it jolts your consciousness across time and space, and… shit, yeah, I know it’s absurd.”

  “It’s not an animal, I can tell you that much.” She leans forward, her hands on her knees, conspiratorial. “Please don’t tell anyone, but after she was banned from the lab, Jo brought that thing in and asked me to analyze it.”

  “Through all the mushing and the spinning and protease inhibitors and puffing with the headstage.” See, paying attention.

  “Yes, and I ran a gel matrix to separate out the proteins, but there weren’t any. In layperson-speak, that means it’s not biological. Or the sample was so hopelessly degraded—as in very much super-dead—that it wouldn’t show. Jo wanted me to stain it with fluorescent markers, get it under the confocal microscope, but it was enough, you know. Jo was… sick. I thought if I indulged her any more, I’d be hurting her. Playing into her delusion. Sometimes you don’t want the answers, even if you’re a scientist. Jo didn’t want to believe her experiences were caused by the brain tumor. And I can’t tell you what to do…”

  “Because you’re not Toxoplasma gondii.”

  She gives the faintest whiff of a smile. “No. But if it were me, I’d destroy that thing.”

  “Or… can I ask you a favor?”

  “You want a tour of the Museum of Surgical History?” Trying to divert. “It’s wonderful. Even more disgusting than parasites.”

  “I would on any other day. But if I could ask you to look at—”

  “I knew this was coming.”

  “Bridge is my friend and she’s a fucking moron, but I love her and as far as I can tell, this is a real deal. I need to know. If we can get any closer to understanding—”

  “Give it to me.” Tendayi holds out her hand.

  “Let me cut off a piece,” Dom says. They’re not trusting the spindle with anyone, even a scientist with a slight, extremely cute gap between her teeth.

  “I’ll do it, actual lab equipment here.” She gets a scalpel, a glass slide. “I’ll use the confocal microscope this time.” She looks tired. “I’ll let you know what I find—if anything.”

  “And… another favor.” Dom squirms.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “It seems to be related very strongly to music, so maybe if I sent you some files, you can examine it while the songs are playing.”

  “I will have you know this is a reputable science laboratory and not a nightclub!” Tendayi puts on a very British accent, hands on her hips, playing it up. “As in yes, that sounds intriguing, actually.”

  “And maybe I could take the scientist-slash-DJ for a drink sometime to say thank you?”

  Tendayi smirks, playful. “You should know I only go to those hipster bars where they serve cocktails out of test tubes and beakers. I like to be in my element.”

  Dom groans at the pun. “It’s a date, then… if you want it to be a date.”

  “Let’s see how it goes.” The mischief in her smile is encouraging.

  AMBER

  Jackpot

  One of the Ourmind has found a lead entirely unrelated to Aiden Lyleveld and his iterations, three of whom are unfortunately already dead, taken care of by vigilant Ambers who’d moved before they decided on their new strategy: to root out the source of the rot.

  One is under a fresh layer of new concrete at a construction site in Los Angeles, his body riddled with threads. Another is half-buried under cardboard in a meth house in Albuquerque, burned beyond recognition. Only a slim harvest there. Not someone the original source returned to; who would want to revisit a junkie? The third shot in the head, blood splattered over the windshield of his Mercedes, in what would hopefully look like an attempted carjacking outside Portland. No signs of infection, but his zealous slayer felt it was better to be safe than sorry. And of course, Amber has already killed the one in her universe, fed him to the gators. Minus a hand washed ashore.

  Luckily, the others are finding ways to interrogate the remaining Aidens. Many of the Ambers are cops or former cops. You can talk your way right in the door most times. Excuse me, sir, we’re canvassing the neighborhood to ask if anyone saw something on Saturday night. An attempted murder. You can get a long way on other people’s curiosity. If she were a man, people would be more mistrustful; they might phone the station to check on her. But she is five foot five and middle-aged and charming, and most people reckon they could take her. They’re wrong, but she’s not going to correct them. Not until she has to.

  Sometimes you can follow them, learn their routines or engage them where they are. There are a number of musicians among the Aidens, and in those instances, it is easy for the Ambers to reach out to them about playing a corporate gig, writing a jingle for a grandkid’s video channel.

  They do their research. Amber has always been a reader. She likes books that tell her about the ways the world works, who people are, history and sociology and criminology, how gangs and the military and failed utopian lesbian communes and Japanese feudal structures are all prone to weakness, mean-spiritedness, the fear and goddamn incompetence that unravels them. The Ourmind will never let that happen. They are united in their purpose.

  She has firsthand experience of the bungling, the supply-chain snafus, the bullies and the idiots in the military.

  She remembers that shit-heel Parker in her battalion, the guy who’d tried to climb on top of her in the middle of a nighttime mortar attack. Hellfire raining down on them in their tents. She’d punched him in the throat to get him off her. Later, she and Chris ambushed him as he came out of the showers. Chris hit him in the gut to drop him low enough so she could clap her hands over his ears and burst his eardrums.

  The medic attributed it to the mortar fire because Parker was too ashamed to admit he’d been taken down by the “unrape-able” cunt and the skinny faggot. She was twenty-seven, Chris was only nineteen, a little brother to her, and they already knew they were the only people they could count on. Lucky to have each other’s backs through two tours. She was supposed to look out for him. Protect him.

  But later the doctors said it was PTSD that was causing Chris’s out-of-body experiences, his personality changes, the dislocation. Maybe a brain injury. He tried to show them the yellow threads he’d pulled out of his arms, but they dismissed him or shrugged and said it might be a parasite he’d picked up in one of the hellholes he’d served in.