Then came a day that felt like a victory and a defeat—the day when Wick and I reached a lull. We had been working on fortifying the Balcony Cliffs with such all-consuming purpose that we could not now see any way to do more. Our muscles always ached and our minds were sore from trying to see the gaps in our thinking. With each hour of preparation, Wick was telling me that he rejected the Magician’s hold over him—the evidence of his labor, his time, his effort.
We were done, but suspicious of being done, and now truly we had a siege mentality. I felt like I was waiting for a great force, a great pressure to burst down the doors, scale the walls, or to give up and go away. Perhaps the real reason Wick and I believed we were finished is that we both, on some subconscious level, understood that the quest to make the Balcony Cliffs safe was futile. There would always be a way in.
Still, we had done everything right—secured our inner ramparts, hoarded supplies, anticipated angles of attack—and yet no attack came. No zone or layer we could monitor with Wick’s beetles and spiders or his informants registered any rumor of attack. Had we overestimated our worth with the city in turmoil? Were we, perverse thought, forgotten? Was this already a kind of aftermath and we would die of starvation or thirst rather than a knife to the gut or our throats ripped out? Our ironic new source of panic was that, in the event, there would be no one to surrender to.
It seemed preternaturally quiet on our borders most days.
“That just means they’re biding their time,” Wick said, not realizing how much Borne had done on his own to “clear out our perimeter,” as Wick put it.
“Not even a lizard left,” Borne had told me, and with nothing in that stretch of land, no scavengers waiting to glean.
But to feel under siege, even with an undercurrent of futility, was better than being under siege, or under outright assault. It could be stuffy and close in our refuge; we had plugged up the hole in Wick’s laboratory ceiling for fear of Mord proxies peering in; and I never went out on the balcony anymore because I envisioned some homemade arrow through the throat or someone climbing up the wall and surprising me. Yet we still held on to what was ours, and celebrated the fact. Four weeks in, and no sign of the Magician, or her ultimatum. Clearly, she had more pressing problems, like being hunted by Mord, or being dead.
The night of the lull, I left Wick at his swimming pool, still reflexively obsessing over how to get the most out of his remaining biotech, and went to bed.
But I woke up with a start less than an hour later.
Wick had appeared at the foot of my bed. There was a moment of panic until I recognized him, and then I relaxed, although unhappy with his abruptness and the late hour. I didn’t like how Borne and now Wick had taken to coming in without knocking or asking permission. It conjured up the past in a way I didn’t want to think about.
“I locked the door, Wick. How did you get in? Why are you here?”
Wick shrugged, an awkward, rough motion. “The same way you get into my apartment.”
Something about Wick’s voice was off. In the bad light, my bleary state, his white skin seemed patchy, there pale and here translucent and in a few places ice-blue, as if he’d had an accident with his chemicals.
“What do you want that couldn’t wait until morning?” I asked, sitting up in bed. Truth be told, I wanted him gone.
“Nothing much. I just wanted to know if you love me, Rachel.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said, exploding. “You wake me up to ask if I love you?” Irritation was the least of it. I wanted to really turn into a Mord proxy and maul Wick. After all we’d done, all that had been done to us, to get our relationship back to some kind of normal, he asked me this.
“But do you love me?”
I did growl, then. “Go get some sleep, Wick.” Sleep it off. “Go back to your apartment.” He’d been suffering insomnia from stress, but I needed my sleep, too.
Wick didn’t hear me or was ignoring me or didn’t care, and, listless, sat down on my bed.
“What about Borne? Do you love Borne? How much do you love Borne?”
We’d come to the edge of this before, the way Wick’s view of Borne bordered on jealousy, but I’d never been asked to state my position quite so baldly.
“I’m like a mother to Borne,” I said with patience. “He’s like my child.” I tried to be calm about Borne with Wick for fear I’d say something reckless and drive more of a wedge between them.
A wry grin, a sad one. “Is that what Borne still is to you? A child?”
“Yes,” I said, lying a little.
What was the word for raising an orphaned intelligent creature? Maybe the word didn’t exist yet. For the first time I dared to imagine if Borne had real parents, and a kind of despair overtook me. This idea that Borne had parents out there, somewhere, in a night that popped with distant gunfire.
“Thank you for telling me, Rachel,” Wick said, and then he left.
I bolted the door behind him.
Yet an hour later, in the middle of the night, I hadn’t fallen back to sleep. I kept thinking about the weirdness of Wick’s visit, the way he had looked wrong. I couldn’t let go of that. He’d been like a ghost. Not ghostlike but a ghost.
I put on some clothes, went to Wick’s apartment, knocked, no answer. I knocked again, loud. Still no answer. Either he was in a deep sleep or out. So I walked down to the swimming pool, just in case.
As I approached the doorway, I heard voices. Borne must be in the room with Wick, I thought. Borne and Wick must be having a conversation. Great. I quickened my pace.
I rounded the corner, burst through the doorway into Wick’s laboratory.
I came in on Rachel talking to Wick.
I came in on myself talking to Wick.
It was a clever fake, a good likeness, and it shook me to the core, to see myself like that. To see me having a conversation with Wick as if my body had been stolen and I was just a wraith.
Wick looked over at me, looked back at the other Rachel, flinched, with defensive beetles now raging across his arm. Apparently he could tell the original from the mimic.
“What are you?” he was shouting at the other Rachel. “What are you?”
But I knew what the other Rachel was.
The other Rachel was Borne.
*
Once upon a time there was a woman who found a creature on the flank of a giant bear. Once upon a time there was a piece of biotech that grew and grew until it had its own apartment. And once upon a time a person named Borne put on the skins of two people he admired and pretended to be those people. Maybe his cause was just, maybe his reasons were sound. Maybe he thought he was doing something right for a change. Maybe.
“Borne,” I said. “Borne.”
At the sound of my disappointment and horror, the other Rachel collapsed into Borne. A spasmodic ripple, a sigh that came from everywhere, echoed in the cavern, and soon: the Borne I knew, but more like a vast whirlpool full of eyes, narrow end attached to the wall behind him, the vortex spinning like a hypnotic illusion.