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And then I got close enough to see the bright, paternal sain, dressed in a paper gown and waiting to be told that it was time for cookies and juice
"Sally," he said, and while the name he used wasn’t mine, I couldn’t deny the reality of his relief He sounded like a man who had just discovered that Christmas wasn’t canceled after all "You really made it I’d heard rumors, but I wasn’t sure"
"No thanks to you," said Nathan "What is he doing here, Mother?"
"Manners, Nathan; Dr Banks is our guest, at least for the moment," said Dr Cale "He may be our prisoner in a little while I haven’t decided yet You’ve ? You were having him monitored by SymboGen security Of course you’ve met my son, even if I wasn’t always sure he’d met you"
"Hello, Dr Banks," I said I keptmyself look at the interplay between Nathan and Dr Cale They didn’t matter as ht you’d have been arrested for criovern on a way to help them solve their little tapeworm problem, they don’t arrest me It works out well for everyone involved"
"Except the dead people," said Fishy snidely
I didn’t say anything I just looked at Dr Banks
Dr Banks had always been ato it long past the point where anyone else I kneould have abandoned it as a waste of resources That perfection was gone now His sandy hair was er than it should have been, showing how long it had been since he’d been to see a barber He’d lost weight, leaving his carefully sculpted physique less defined than it had been the last ti stained brown slacks and the top half of a pair of medical scrubs The sleeves of his black runner’s top poked out of the shirt, their cuffs a little frayed If the apocalypse was stripping us of ourus for e really were, what did that say about Dr Banks? How much of who I’d always assuht to try to find a solution," he said, apparentlyeasier to explain away than what it really was: understanding I was starting to understand why it had been so easy for him to lie to me all those years, when he looked into my eyes and called
He’d already been lying to everyone else
"Who’s she?" asked Nathan, breaking the brief quiet His gaze had gone to the silent girl standing next to Dr Banks I followed it, really considering her for the first ti, a charcoal sketch that no one had ever bothered to finish filling in Her skin was alh to be translucent, a milky white only a few shades darker than the skins of the tapewor containers down in her lab Her hair was black, falling to ht not have realized they had a color at all if I hadn’t had her hair for contrast She was maybe twenty years old, and stick-thin She looked like she was on the verge of collapse, but sheabout her was terribly familiar I had never seen her before
"Sal,a proprietary hand on the girl’s shoulder She turned to look up at him, her dark eyes filled orshipful adoration He flashed a smile at her--the same warm, intentionally paternal smile that he used to direct at me
In that , too filled with disgust and dis of the druht on by the stress and the realization that Dr Banks had been doing more independent experimentation than any of us had ever suspected And why shouldn’t he? He’d been one of the creators of the Syht as anyone to explore further perversions of science
Dr Banks turned that warm, paternal smile on me, and said, "She’s your sister"
Dr Cale didn’t wait for the rest of us to react to Dr Banks’s procla herself toward the elevator, signaling for the group to follow her "We’rethis to a more secure location," she called Fishy trotted ahead of her, pressing the call button for the service elevator that used to transport entire birthday parties and pallets of boxed candy around the factory Captain Candy had believed firs for as uy Too bad he had never really existed
I was chasing n that I was disturbed by Dr Banks’s proclalances around hiirl that Dr Banks called "Anna" She couldn’t really becould have convincedhu? How could have done that on purpose? Shers he did because he didn’t believe that huht to their bodies than we did Dr Banks was human How could he have done that to one of his own people?