(PARASYTE X WORM) CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Taylor still wasn’t sure what she was going to do about Victoria.

She had told the girl everything she knew, or at least everything she could think of, and Victoria had taken it far more seriously than Taylor had expected. That should have been reassuring, especially after spending days wondering whether anyone would believe her if she finally told the truth, but the conversation had left Taylor with more questions than answers.

For one thing, Victoria hadn’t actually promised to bring Panacea to her. She’d said she would think about it, which Taylor suspected was hero-speak for I need to figure out how badly this is going to explode before I do anything. Taylor couldn’t really blame her. If what Kali had told her was true, then Panacea had done something horrifying, and Victoria was apparently caught somewhere in the middle of it.

The problem was that Taylor needed Panacea. She needed the person who had made Kali to figure out how to get it out of her, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could tolerate having something living inside her body. Every time she remembered that, her stomach twisted, although the feeling had become so familiar over the past few days that she barely noticed it anymore.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at her hand. It looked completely ordinary again, which still managed to unsettle her after everything she’d seen it do. There was no strange eye staring back at her, no extra appendage curling around her fingers, and no indication that anything was living beneath the skin.

For several seconds, she simply watched it before sighing. 

“You know,” she said, “I still think this is all your fault.”

Taylor waited, but Kali didn’t answer.

“Kali?” she called, flexing her fingers. 

A moment passed before the familiar voice finally answered.

“I am here.”

She sighed. “Yeah.”

She wasn’t sure why she had expected an answer to the first comment. Maybe she had hoped Kali would apologize, although that was stupid. Kali didn’t seem to understand why Taylor was angry with it half the time, and expecting it to suddenly develop a conscience because she complained probably wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

Besides, she had more important things to worry about.

Victoria knew.

Taylor still wasn’t entirely sure what the girl knew, but she had known enough to take Taylor seriously, and that was something. Maybe Victoria would talk to Panacea. Maybe she would tell her parents. Maybe she would decide Taylor was insane after thinking about it for a few hours.

That last possibility made Taylor’s stomach twist again.

She looked at her hand again. “Do you think she’ll help?”

“Yes.”

Taylor blinked. “You sound pretty confident.”

“I have observed her.”

“That’s supposed to reassure me?”

“It was not intended to reassure you.”

“Right.”

Taylor rubbed her thumb against the side of her palm.

There was something strange about the way Kali talked about people. It understood them, sometimes better than Taylor expected, but there was always a distance to it. It could recognize fear, anger, affection, jealousy, grief, and all the other things that seemed to make humans so complicated, yet it never seemed to attach any particular importance to them.

That had been bothering Taylor for a while, so she finally asked about it.

“Why don’t you care?”

Kali was silent for a moment before responding.

“About what?”

“Emotions.”

“I understand them.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Taylor opened her mouth and then stopped. She hated when Kali did that.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“Then answer me.”

Kali considered the question for longer this time.

“Understanding something does not require valuing it.”

Taylor frowned. She wasn’t sure why she’d expected a different answer.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does.”

“No, it doesn’t. If you understand something, then surely you understand why it matters.”

“Why should it matter?”

“Because…” She hesitated. “Because they’re important.”

“To humans.”

“Yes.”

“I am not human.”

That was probably the simplest answer Kali had ever given her.

Taylor leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling.

“Then what are emotions to you?”

“Information.”

Taylor looked at her hand. “That’s it?”

“They affect behaviour. They influence decisions. They can be changed.”

There was something about the last sentence that made Taylor uncomfortable.

“You really don’t care whether someone loves you?”

“I do not require love.”

“What about being hated?”

“It has no value to me.”

“Fear?”

“No.”

“Anger?”

“No.”

“That’s…” Taylor trailed off, unable to complete the sentence. Then, she sighed, resting her head against the wall.

Kali continued. “Humans place great value on emotion, even when those emotions cause them suffering. They allow anger to guide them. They allow love to guide them. They forgive because of it. They kill because of it. They protect strangers because of it.”

Taylor thought about that. “So you think emotions are pointless?”

“No.”

That surprised her.

“But doesn't that go against what you have been saying?”

“No,” Kali replied. “I am not human, but I understand why it is important to your kind.”

Taylor didn’t know why that bothered her. Maybe it was because she couldn’t imagine a life where emotions were nothing more than information. Even when they were inconvenient, even when they hurt, they were still part of being a person. They were the reason people cared about one another in the first place.

Kali didn’t seem to understand that. Or perhaps it understood it perfectly and simply didn’t feel the same way.

She shifted against the wall.

“Do you think you understand humans?”

“No.”

Taylor smiled slightly. “At least you’re honest.”

She let her head rest against the wall again, thinking about everything Kali had said.

It was strange. Taylor had spent so much time being frightened of what the parasite could do that she had barely considered the possibility that it simply saw the world differently from her. Kali could recognize emotions and understand the effect they had on people, but that didn’t mean it experienced them as something worth protecting. To it, they were useful pieces of information. To Taylor, they were part of what made people people.

She wasn’t sure she could explain the difference properly, even to herself.

What she did know was that she didn’t want Kali deciding that emotions were things it could alter whenever they became inconvenient. Whatever Amy had intended when she created it, Taylor couldn’t let that become an excuse for Kali to start changing other people.

That left her with a problem she hadn’t really considered before.

She still wanted Panacea to remove it. More than anything, she wanted her hand back, her body back, and some assurance that she wouldn’t wake up one morning to discover that Kali had done something she couldn’t undo. If Panacea could fix everything tomorrow, Taylor would gladly let her.

If she couldn’t, though, Taylor couldn’t simply spend the rest of her time hoping the parasite would eventually figure humanity out on its own.

Maybe she could teach it.

The thought seemed ridiculous, considering she was talking about teaching emotions to something that had been created specifically to manipulate them, but she had never expected her life to reach this point in the first place.

Taylor looked down at her hand.

For now, Kali was stuck with her just as much as she was stuck with Kali.

She supposed they were going to have to make the best of it.

And if that meant keeping the parasite from hurting anyone while also trying to make it understand why emotions mattered, then Taylor would have to do both.

It was hardly a perfect plan.

Then again, nothing about this had been perfect from the beginning.