Endosymbiosis

3. Parasites

"Then you can get me out of him." He suggested, as if it were that simple and I could just take a saw to split him in half to solve the problem.

"It's much easier to take a parasite out of a human than a human out of its host... Humans are the most efficient parasites in the galaxy."

"But how can I be the parasite?"

"It's a complex cycle... When you were swallowed by the fevino your body was dissolved, but your nervous system got tangled with his." I tried to summarize. "Your fear led the fevino to do everything he did, so, in fact, you are both guilty of the crime..." He looked at me as if he couldn't understand, but the panic in his face told me he did. "When the fevino was outside he used his own resources to re-produce you under his skin, and when you were no longer in danger, his body peeled away like a cocoon to free you again. Right now he's hibernating under your skin... To emerge when you're in danger again."

"So you're saying I was rebuilt?! It cannot be possible." I would have found it impossible too if I hadn't gone through an entire course in college just studying human as parasites.

I lifted his shirt and pointed to those defined muscles in his abdomen.

"No belly button." He stared at himself as if an alien was exploding from there. "Your body was rebuilt. So there are no scars." At that moment, taken by so much terror, he started to scream for a help that would never come, when I flew my hand in his mouth. "But I can help you... If you help me."

I pulled my fingers away from his lips as if disarming a bomb and, when he opened his mouth, I swore he was going to blow me up:

"What do you want?"

"To go to the galaxy's core."

And he laughed.

Until he saw the seriousness in my face.

"Are you serious?! We are at the farthest point in the galaxy from the core!"

"I know."

"And there are many beasts on the way."

"I know."

"And there's nothing there!"

"Well, this..." I leaned forward. "I do not know. And neither do you." He didn't strike me as the kind of creature that passed through the core... The dead kind. The long sigh he let out also confirmed my speculation.

"All right. I'll take you." He surrendered, opening a smile on my face that made him a thousand times grumpier. "If you do your part."

"I'm a human of my word."

I approached his feet and used the ID card on my arm as a key to free his ankles, which he moved as if using them for the first time. I let go one of his arms and went to the other while he snapped the knuckles of his free hand - a hand that could hold me to the edge of a cliff... Or push me.

When I released him from his last handcuff, he smiled.

His fingers gripped my arm, pulled me onto the hospital bed, and, with reflexes as fast as a beast's, he locked the cuff around my wrist.

Just like that, I was stuck where he shouldn't have been freed from.

"But I'm not." He purred, playing with my stolen bracelet. "You'll have more luck with some other species."

Then he turned his back on me.

I had forgotten how much humans betrayed each Other... And that a human was the last being I could trust... But I really needed his help.