Wick spoke then. There was even sympathy in his voice. “Borne, we’re not going north. We’re going south. And you can’t help us.”
Borne was quiet for longer than made me comfortable. In the silence I could hear a kind of quaking and gentle hissing and a querulous whimper—all from the field of fireflies that was Borne. Wick had receded into the darkness under the pillar, and I knew he was alert to attack, would rally his very last biotech against Borne should we need it. But that’s not where my mind was.
“Are you all right, Borne?” I didn’t mean to show concern, because then I would have to worry about how Wick felt about that concern … but I was tired and I’d raised him and couldn’t help it. Even now, on this hellish plain under the dead moon, headed for an open grave, some part of me felt I owed Borne.
“Oh, Rachel,” Borne said, sounding weary and, for the first time since I had known him, old. “I’m doing okay. I try hard. But the Mord proxies are clever. Even when I disguise myself as them, they eventually flush me out. I defeat them, I absorb them, but there are so many and their bites sting.”
“Show me where you’re hurt,” I told him.
The fireflies faded and dull silver-gray patches glowed all across the broken plain that was Borne.
So many dead patches, so many places the venom had killed the tissue. Borne was too vast now and still growing too fast for it to hinder him much, but he’d suffered wounds, taken a toll. I could not tell looking at him who would win the war of attrition in the end.
“You should stop,” I said, the old motherly concern coming out from under the armor. “You should find someplace safe to hide for a while and heal.”
Borne laughed as if I’d said something ridiculous, ripples and whorls appearing across his surface. Such a human response from a creature that now manifested so inhuman. Borne laughed and the wounds disappeared and the fireflies reappeared, although not so many as before.
A small version of the old him manifested in front of me. The silly, looping vase with the ring of eyes, with the tentacles curving up out of the top.
“I’m too big to hide for long, Rachel. I can’t compress myself into the right space. And I’m so hungry all the time, you know that, Rachel. You always knew that, and you told me and I didn’t listen. Because I couldn’t. The hunger only gets worse the more I eat.”
So many eyes now, looking out at me with a knowing gleam, resignation. One weary veteran talking to another.
“Easier prey,” I said, venturing into dangerous territory.
“No, Rachel, I’ve stopped trying to be good,” Borne said. “It isn’t in my nature. I was made to absorb. I was made to kill. I know that now. And it’s no use.”
“You must try.”
Empty words that agitated him, made him flare up. “I’m telling you, Rachel, I can’t anymore. I’m not built like you. I’m not human. I’m not a person.”
Across the vast sea of him, in amongst the ripples, human heads appeared, like swimmers treading water. Animal heads, too, and the heads of mutant children and Mord proxies. A dozen proxies at least. These shiny, dark heads with holes where their eyes should be. Staring.
But there was no shocking me anymore.
“Stop, Borne,” I said.
The heads withdrew, the sea became gentle and quiet. I smelled the sun on sand and the scent of the surf and all the things he knew lay in my past that I loved.
“You are a person,” I said, because I had to say it. Even with the evidence before me, or perhaps because of it.
“Rachel, you can’t see what I see. I can see all the connections,” Borne said. “I can see where it’s all headed, what it’s headed toward. I just haven’t been strong enough to see it through. I’ve lingered and I’ve delayed. I’ve thought maybe…”
I knew what he’d thought. I’d thought it, too, even after my promise to Wick. Wick was restless behind me. He believed Borne was going to attack us, but we were safe. We had always been safe, even if no one else had been.
“Do as I said and hide,” I said. “Find a place. Disguise yourself.”
But Borne had other ideas.
“Rachel, what happens when we die? Where do we go?”
“Borne—”
“Where, Rachel?”
“Nowhere, Borne. We go into the ground and we don’t come back out.”
“I don’t think that’s true, Rachel. I think we go somewhere. Not to heaven or to hell, but we go somewhere. I know we must go somewhere.”
“Borne, why?”
“Because I came to you to say that I know how to make everything right again. I can see it so clearly, and I can do it now. I can do it. I’ll make things right. You’ll see—and you’ll know I was telling the truth.”
Just an infinitesimal pause then, and if I hadn’t known him so well, I wouldn’t have caught it, or known what it meant.
“And in the end everything will be okay again between us and you can live in the Balcony Cliffs again and I’ll move back in with you and it’ll be like the times we ran down the corridors laughing, or the time you dressed me up and took me out onto the balcony above the beautiful river. It’ll be just like that.”
“Borne.”
All I could say was his name because I couldn’t say anything that really told him how my instincts clashed with my reason. Not in front of Wick. And I thought, too, that Borne was gripped by the false power of remorse, which makes you think that by the strength of your convictions, your emotions, you can make everything right even when you can’t. Remorse and a false vision made Borne say these crazy things, I thought.
“Goodbye, Rachel,” Borne said.
“Goodbye, Borne.”
How I misjudged that moment, and how I regret it. I believed I had to make my heart hard and not give in. I had to stand there and I had to say goodbye and I had to mean it.
“But we will see each other again. I know it,” Borne said.
If I could go back, I would give him permission. I would let him leave having given him my approval, having told him I believed him, whether I did or not, to make him feel some form of happiness in his chosen path. Even given him the lie of a happy life in the Balcony Cliffs. I just hope that something in my face, my demeanor, told him that despite what he had done, I could never abandon him completely.
It happened very, very fast, then, with Wick scrambling up beside me in alarm.