He meant every word. I saw it in his searchlight. The best forgeries are theones who’ve forgotten they aren’t real.

When the necessary damage was done I let Blair fall to MacReady’scounterassault. As Norris I suggested the tool shed as a holding cell. AsPalmer I boarded up the windows, helped with the flimsy fortifications expectedto keep me contained. I watched while the world locked me away for your ownprotection, Blair, and left me to my own devices. When no one was looking Iwould change and slip outside, salvage the parts I needed from all that bruisedmachinery. I would take them back to my burrow beneath the shed and build myescape piece by piece. I volunteered to feed the prisoner and came to myselfwhen the world wasn’t watching, laden with supplies enough to keep me goingthrough all those necessary metamorphoses. I went through a third of the camp’sfood stores in three days, and — still trapped by my own preconceptions —marveled at the starvation diet that kept these offshoots chained to a singleskin.

Another piece of luck: the world was too preoccupied to worry about kitchen inventory.

There is something on the wind, a whisper threading its way above the raging ofthe storm. I grow my ears, extend cups of near-frozen tissue from the sides ofmy head, turn like a living antennae in search of the best reception.

There, to my left: the abyss glows a little, silhouettes black swirling snowagainst a subtle lessening of the darkness. I hear the sounds of carnage. Ihear myself. I do not know what shape I have taken, what sort of anatomy mightbe emitting those sounds. But I’ve worn enough skins on enough worlds to knowpain when I hear it.

The battle is not going well. The battle is going as planned. Now it is time toturn away, to go to sleep. It is time to wait out the ages.

I lean into the wind. I move toward the light.

This is not the plan. But I think I have an answer, now: I think I may have hadit even before I sent myself back into exile. It’s not an easy thing to admit.Even now I don’t fully understand. How long have I been out here, retelling thetale to myself, setting clues in order while my skin dies by low degrees? Howlong have I been circling this obvious, impossible truth?

I move towards the faint crackling of flames, the dull concussion of explodingordnance more felt than heard. The void lightens before me: gray segues intoyellow, yellow into orange. One diffuse brightness resolves into many: a loneburning wall, miraculously standing. The smoking skeleton of MacReady’s shackon the hill. A cracked smoldering hemisphere reflecting pale yellow in theflickering light: Child’s searchlight calls it a radio dome.

The whole camp is gone. There’s nothing left but flames and rubble.

They can’t survive without shelter. Not for long. Not in those skins.

In destroying me, they’ve destroyed themselves.

Things could have turned out so much differently if I’d never been Norris.

Norris was the weak node: biomass not only ill-adapted but defective, anoffshoot with an off switch. The world knew, had known so long it never eventhought about it anymore. It wasn’t until Norris collapsed that heart conditionfloated to the surface of Copper’s mind where I could see it. It wasn’t untilCopper was astride Norris’s chest, trying to pound him back to life, that Iknew how it would end. And by then it was too late; Norris had stopped beingNorris. He had even stopped being me.

I had so many roles to play, so little choice in any of them. The part beingCopper brought down the paddles on the part that had been Norris, such afaithful Norris, every cell so scrupulously assimilated, every part of thatfaulty valve reconstructed unto perfection. I hadn’t known. How was I to know?These shapes within me, the worlds and morphologies I’ve assimilated over theaeons — I’ve only ever used them to adapt before, never to hide. This desperatemimicry was an improvised thing, a last resort in the face of a world thatattacked anything unfamiliar. My cells read the signs and my cells conformed,mindless as prions.

So I became Norris, and Norris self-destructed.

I remember losing myself after the crash. I know how it feels to degrade,tissues in revolt, the desperate efforts to reassert control as static fromsome misfiring organ jams the signal. To be a network seceding from itself, toknow that each moment I am less than I was the moment before. To becomenothing. To become legion.

Being Copper, I could see it. I still don’t know why the world didn’t; itsparts had long since turned against each other by then, every offshootsuspected every other. Surely they were alert for signs of infection. Surelysome of that biomass would have noticed the subtle twitch and ripple of Norrischanging below the surface, the last instinctive resort of wild tissuesabandoned to their own devices.

But I was the only one who saw. Being Childs, I could only stand and watch.Being Copper, I could only make it worse; if I’d taken direct control, forcedthat skin to drop the paddles, I would have given myself away. And so I playedmy parts to the end. I slammed those resurrection paddles down as Norris’schest split open beneath them. I screamed on cue as serrated teeth from ahundred stars away snapped shut. I toppled backwards, arms bitten off above thewrist. Men swarmed, agitation bootstrapping to panic. MacReady aimed hisweapon; flames leaped across the enclosure. Meat and machinery screamed in theheat.

Copper’s tumor winked out beside me. The world would never have let it liveanyway, not after such obvious contamination. I let our skin play dead on thefloor while overhead, something that had once been me shattered and writhed anditerated through a myriad random templates, searching desperately for somethingfireproof.

They have destroyed themselves. They.

Such an insane word to apply to a world.

Something crawls towards me through the wreckage: a jagged oozing jigsaw ofblackened meat and shattered, half-resorbed bone. Embers stick to its sideslike bright searing eyes; it doesn’t have strength enough to scrape them free.It contains barely half the mass of this Childs' skin; much of it, burnt to rawcarbon, is already dead.

What’s left of Childs, almost asleep, thinks motherfucker, but I am being himnow. I can carry that tune myself.

The mass extends a pseudopod to me, a final act of communion. I feel my pain:

I was Blair, I was Copper, I was even a scrap of dog that survived that firstfiery massacre and holed up in the walls, with no food and no strength toregenerate. Then I gorged on unassimilated flesh, consumed instead of communed;revived and replenished, I drew together as one.

And yet, not quite. I can barely remember — so much was destroyed, so muchmemory lost — but I think the networks recovered from my different skins stayedjust a little out of synch, even reunited in the same soma. I glimpse ahalf-corrupted memory of dog erupting from the greater self, ravenous andtraumatized and determined to retain its individuality. I remember rage andfrustration, that this world had so corrupted me that I could barely fittogether again. But it didn’t matter. I was more than Blair and Copper and Dog,now. I was a giant with the shapes of worlds to choose from, more than a matchfor the last lone man who stood against me.

No match, though, for the dynamite in his hand.

Now I’m little more than pain and fear and charred stinking flesh. Whatsentience I have is awash in confusion. I am stray and disconnected thoughts,doubts and the ghosts of theories. I am realizations, too late in coming andalready forgotten.

But I am also Childs, and as the wind eases at last I remember wondering Whoassimilates who? The snow tapers off and I remember an impossible test thatstripped me naked.