“Then how can you pretend to be me.”
“I can look like you, but I couldn’t be you without—”
“Without killing you,” Wick said. He stood beside me now, and from his stillness I knew he was ready to attack Borne again.
“I would never hurt you, Rachel,” Borne said.
“Borne understands,” Wick said. “Borne knows what he is. He’s a killer. We have to take him apart.”
Borne had turned stormy and midnight blue and black. A caustic smell of ink and seared moss. His voice when it came was troubled, uncertain.
“I won’t let you. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I haven’t.”
“I don’t understand,” I insisted. But I understood now. I really, deeply understood although I didn’t want to. Perhaps I had known all along. What Borne had been doing out in the city, his acts disguised by the carnage of Mord proxy against Magician mutants. These people he had told me about, the old man, the others—what had those conversations been like? Had they ended abruptly? Sampling.
“He must have been doing it a long time,” Wick said. “To have learned so quickly. To have grown so quickly.” Across his features some reaction I couldn’t recognize or fathom, a look so alien and wild and yet mechanical that it frightened me, made me feel caught between two monsters.
“Ask him, Rachel,” Wick said. “Ask him. Nothing comes out of him, everything goes in.”
Borne had attained his full expanse across that rough ceiling, head peering down from that expanse like a swimmer in an upside-down ocean. The full, impressive, frightening extent of him. I could see now that the Rachel doppelg?nger still lived as an impression in the middle of him, as if he could always bring her out of storage, like a puppet, and that an impression of Wick lay beside her.
“There is a cost,” Borne said. “A cost for what I am. For what I do. But I love you, Rachel. I love you and I can do better. I can stop.”
I wavered, I’m ashamed to say, and Wick saw it.
“Prove it. Tell the truth. Be honest,” Wick said. “Do you kill people? Do you?”
“I don’t kill,” Borne said. “I absorb. Digest. It is all alive. In me.”
“Kills them,” Wick insisted. “Ransacks their memories. Ransacks their knowledge of the world. Agree. Agree, Borne. It’s for the best. Let me take you apart. You know it. Otherwise, someday you’ll be worse than Mord.”
Didn’t it matter that Borne was conflicted, that he didn’t want to kill? Maybe not. But the fear stole over me, from some almost imperceptible change in Borne’s aspect, that we couldn’t make him agree to die. That he would never agree to be taken apart, and that I would have such a difficult choice then, and Wick would never understand, even though it was about our survival.
“Leave,” I said. “You have to leave and never come back. You have to.”
Banishment. It just came out. But was there ever any other choice? Anything else betrayed Wick, betrayed the Balcony Cliffs, and Borne had made the decision easy. Yet it was one of the hardest things I ever did. The hardest.
Borne became sea-green, and all soft, diaphanous surfaces and reflected light.
“But I love you,” Borne said. “You’re my family.”
“I love you, too, Borne,” I said, and it was true. “But that doesn’t change things.” Maybe the memory of love was enough, maybe the time we’d had together would be enough. Yet, inside, I was panicking already, screaming at the thought of it.
“I’ll have no home,” Borne said.
“I know, Borne.”
“I’ll have no one to talk to.”
I almost couldn’t bear it, but I had to bear it.
“Borne,” I said. “Borne, you have to do this for us. If you love us. I know it’s hard, but it’s not safe for us.”
Why else had Borne moved out? Why else had he told me he couldn’t stop? Why else had he only spent one or two hours at a time with us the past few weeks? He knew. He knew all too well. And he was a murderer.
“I won’t ever know another person like you,” Borne said, and I felt that in my bones, in my heart and my head.
I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we’d run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I’d taught him new words that he’d held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.
“You’ll be better off,” I lied. “It won’t be as bad as you think,” I lied.
Wick was silent. Wick wasn’t part of this and knew better than to speak.
“Will I ever see you again, Rachel?” Borne asked.
“I’m sure we will see each other again, Borne. Of course we will.”
There came another change in Borne’s aspect, something only I could see and could not communicate to anyone else, but it read like stoicism, it read like acceptance. He came down off the ceiling, he became in shape more like the Borne I knew, the Borne that had lived in my apartment and that I had once thought was a plant.
Borne came close. Borne stood next to me, and I didn’t flinch. He reached down to touch my face with one thick, soft tentacle. The orbiting circle of eyes. The body so much like a vase or a squid. The colors strobing there now were confident, bold, but I knew he was just trying to reassure me, and that shook my resolve, left me with doubt. Wouldn’t a true monster, a true killer, have absorbed us or given an ultimatum, murdered us and taken over the Balcony Cliffs?
“I’ll go,” Borne said. “I’ll be better off. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I won’t forget you, Rachel. I won’t ever forget you.”
Then he was surging past me, out of the cavern, and I dropped to my knees, and wouldn’t let Wick near me, heartbroken and unable to accept what had just happened. The siege from within was over. Everything seemed like it was over.
Borne was gone.
WHAT I FOUND IN BORNE’S APARTMENT
After Borne left, I was a wreck. I was a wreck that couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, that stumbled around smashing into things. Into walls. Into furniture. Everything a blur. I wanted to punish myself for what had happened. I wanted to punish myself and I wanted to go search for Borne and tell him I hadn’t meant it and we could reform him, that we could stop his impulses, that he could fight them, that everything would be all right.