Where I had stood. Where Rachel had stood.
But that magician’s trick came with a cost. “Rachel” had extended her hand, arm outstretched toward Wick’s wrist, and as she looked at me in alarm, as her features dissolved into the vortex, as I watched myself fall to pieces, and as the eyes multiplied, and as the tentacles grew, they extended toward Wick’s arm—touched his arm.
Wick cried out, stumbled back against the edge of the swimming pool, burned or in some way injured by that touch. As he did so, a sweeping gesture of his other arm, frantic to keep away from Borne’s questing tentacles—and Wick released the beetles swarming around his body. They flew toward Borne in their dozens, meant to burrow into flesh, drill damage into him.
But they never reached Borne. Instead, they met Borne’s surface and melted into him and he let out a great cry, surged out toward Wick like a darkly glittering tidal wave.
Except I was there, then, between them—Borne to the left and Wick on my right, mortal combatants.
“Stop! Stop!” I screamed.
I could have been caught in a crossfire. Either one could have ignored me and given in to impulse.
But, instead, Borne fell back even as he became even more huge and ominous, blotting out the light from Wick’s remaining fireflies because he surged out across the ceiling like an angry surf. While I watched, as frozen as if I were the other Rachel.
Wick’s remaining battle beetles swarmed over his body in defense against the next attack, and there came the slap and croak of creatures in the swimming pool behind him that suggested reinforcements.
But there was no further attack.
There was just Borne, rearing back and rearing back, as if he meant to dissolve into and through the ceiling, all of his surface wide eyes and tentacles that branched off and dissolved like slow-motion water droplets. And an attitude of cringing for forgiveness that became mixed with something still defiant in his posture until I could not read him at all. A stench of burnt butter, rancid liver, fading into nothing.
I play those first few moments over and over in my mind even now. I keep searching for what Borne was thinking, how he was thinking it. I want to stop time. I want time to stop and for Wick to leave and for me to talk to Borne without Wick there. And then I want Borne to leave so I can talk to Wick without Borne there. I need to know that I understood those moments correctly, that I made the right decisions. But I can never know that.
All I know is that I had put my body in front of Wick, in defense of Wick, and I was staring up at Borne, who covered the whole ceiling now and who could like a tsunami thunder down upon us and drown us in his flesh if he wanted to. As I looked up at Borne there were no constellations bright enough to blind me to him as a monster.
I was so close to Wick that I could feel the nervous thumping beat of his pulse against my body and his shaking against my shoulder as he stared off into nowhere. The screaming had stopped. The diagnostic worms were threading through the surface of his skin, doing the best they could against the shock of whatever wound Borne had inflicted, which meant Wick was semiconscious. We hadn’t been able to feed the worms much for weeks, so I worried they’d die before healing him. But there was no blood, just bruising and the shock.
“I didn’t mean to, Rachel,” Borne said, pleading. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wasn’t going to hurt him. You startled me, Rachel. You made me.”
“Did I make you pretend to be me and talk to Wick? Did I make you pretend to be Wick and talk to me?”
I was shouting at Borne. I was shouting and screaming at him because I couldn’t do anything else. How stupid I’d been, how careless he’d been, and now everything was ruined. I could see that even if Borne couldn’t.
“I wanted to help,” Borne said. “I wanted to help. I wanted you both to be nice to each other.” Nice, not nice. But he wasn’t a child anymore. “I didn’t want you to argue about me all the time.”
“That wasn’t for you to decide,” I croaked, done shouting, my throat raw. “That wasn’t right for you to decide.”
I was scared as well as angry. Because something I’d known had been revealed to me. Something niggling at the back of my mind. The times Wick or I had said to the other “I never said that” and put it down to miscommunication or mishearing, or anything other than that the person we were talking to or not talking to was someone or something else. The way that had corroded my relationship with Wick, brought a special kind of insane distrust into our lives. Now we would have to verify every moment of our recent past, piece together our time together and apart, determine what was real.
Borne pleading, Borne trying to explain, and me not really listening.
Had it been Borne I got on top of in the blind and growled at like a Mord proxy the morning the Magician fired her missiles? Had it been with Borne not Wick that I’d planned the defense of the Balcony Cliffs? Had he been Wick when we’d slept together?—
No, that was a violation of trust I couldn’t contemplate. Could not be true. I had to believe I knew the real Wick’s body, that in tracing every scar and every imperfection, in having him inside of me, that there had never been a lie that monstrous.
But I had to ask the question.
“Borne, how many times have you been us? Have you been in my bed, in Wick’s?”
It took a moment, but when he understood the question, Borne recoiled, took on a gray color as he said, “No. Never. How could you think that!”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’re scared of me right now,” Borne said. “But all I did is what you both do.”
“We don’t do that.”
“You went into his apartment, sneaking around. He went into your apartment, sneaking and spying.”
“Borne…” I looked up at him. He looked down at us, a ton of alien flesh with hundreds of eyes.
“I love you,” Borne said in my voice. “But I’m scared of you and can’t trust you.”
“You hurt Wick.”
“He was going to hurt me,” Borne said. “I know he was. No matter how I tried, he was always going to hate me.”
A cold, practical mood came over me, Wick so warm and febrile behind me, reminding me of the truth of some things.
“Should I have let Wick take you for parts, Borne? What are you?”
“Rachel, it’s Borne. Your child. You love me like a child. You said you love me like a child.” And I’d disappointed him, saying that, so why should it save him now?
“You’re not human,” Wick said, in a gasp like he was taking a breath for the first time. And I knew he’d stabilized, begun to recover from whatever Borne had done to him.
“But I am a person,” Borne said. “Rachel told me—I’m a person!”
“A person who pretends to be other people,” Wick said.
“Do you know me the way you know one of those lizards you ate?” I asked.
“No!” Borne protested.