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I stared at him, too perplexed by what I was seeing in his memory to know how to respond. He stepped around Barb and threw his arms around my shoulders, pulling me into a human-style embrace.
"I knew it was you," he said. "I just knew it. God, Victoria, where have you been?"
Arguing with him would be harder and more time-consuming than changing my name. I pulled away, already smiling sweetly, noting as I did that he had managed to hug me without touching my bare skin, damn the luck. The kind of revisions I'd been doing on Barb were easy, even from a distance, and didn't require any conscious effort on my part. The longer she spent around me, the more I would rewire her to my liking. If I decided to remain in this house until I got tired of it, I'd leave her drained dry and unable to function without me, too wedded to the version of reality I had spun for her to know what to do when it disappeared.
Conscious adjustments are harder. Cuckoos evolved to be ambush predators, not hunters. On the rare occasions where we make skin contact with our prey, however, it gets easier. If he'd touched me, or if the collar of his coat hadn't blocked me from touching him, I could have blasted this "Victoria" right out of his head, and harvested her location from his memory in the process.
Only room for one cuckoo in a city, even one the size of Burbank. If she was here, she had to go.
"Oh, around," I said. "I go by 'Eliza' now. It sounds better, don't you think?"
Confusion and displeasure surrounded him. "No," he said. "It's not your name, and it doesn't sound better. Did something happen? Did those people you were always worried about catch up with you? God, Victoria, we would have helped."
Now there was a "we"? This kept getting worse. I must have been radiating distress, because Barb--dear Barb, who would die for me if she felt it was necessary--was suddenly beside me, every inch of her screaming caution at our unwanted visitor. He took a step back, startled. Good. The more distance between us, the better.
I wanted skin contact, so I could learn what he knew, and I wanted him to stay away from me. It was a contradiction: most things are. I angled my body, putting Barb between us. If things got worse, she could intervene. She would intervene. She had already been my loyal friend, and now that I was scared and filling the room with that fear, she loved me enough to die for me. That's how things work.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
The stranger's eyes darted to Barb. "Is she one of them?" he asked. "Is she keeping you here against your will? Victoria--"
"Her name is Eliza," snarled Barb.
"Eliza, then," said the man. "It's me. It's Jesse. If something is wrong, you can tell me. I want to help you. I've missed you. We've all missed you."
"Barb?" I whispered.
She nodded, and then she moved.
Humans, by and large, are aware that they're fragile things. They're also smart, an attribute which has served them incredibly well when it comes to dominating their environment, but which turns against them when they're dealing with a predator that works best against smart things. Every ounce of Barb's intelligence was mine to use, and I was twisting it into a tangled mass of protective instinct and utter terror.
Better yet, because they're so fragile, humans have taken steps to make themselves better prepared to fight for their own survival. Barb moved like a striking snake, the side of her hand lashing toward the stranger's throat, and I knew that she'd undergone some of the quaint "self-defense" training so popular with human females.
The stranger dodged. Barb kept pressing forward, and he kept dodging. The concern and confusion that had been rolling off of him was abruptly gone, replaced by a chilly satisfaction that required no translation. I took a step back.
"You're all Victoria to me," said the man, and pulled what looked like a pellet gun from his pocket. He pulled the trigger. There was a soft puffing sound like air being pushed out of a balloon, and Barb stopped fighting. She went still, her face losing its incomprehensible animation, before slumping to the floor, leaving me alone with the stranger.
The chilly satisfaction he exuded was somehow shallow, like there was an artificial floor to his emotions. I took another step back. The satisfaction spiked, deepening into something terrible. I tried to push against it, and found nothing I could grab onto. His thoughts were shielded from me. I couldn't touch his mind.
With Barb unconscious, I couldn't access her memory of a back door--I didn't know how to get out of here. I was trapped.
"She'll be fine," he said. "Not that you care."
He was right: I didn't. If Barb was dead, I could still keep her house, still take advantage of the things she'd left behind. The banks would come eventually--damned humans and their computerized systems for every little thing--but until then, whatever she'd had would be mine, without the added complication of having Barb herself fawning over me every time I turned around.
But Barb wasn't dead. Her mind was still sparking under a thick layer of cottony haze. She might even wake up eventually.
Not fast enough to help me. I needed to stall.
"Who are you?" I demanded. "Why are you here?"
"Because, Victoria, I've been looking for you." He dropped his pellet gun and pulled another from inside his jacket, aiming it squarely at me. His hands were shaking slightly. The shallow pool of his satisfaction deepened again, for an instant, and I saw the way out, if I was quick enough to take it. He wanted to talk. He could have shot me already, if he'd wanted to, but he wanted to talk more than he wanted to see me dead, because he wanted me to understand.
That was his mistake. That was his smartness getting in the way.
"My name's not Victoria," I whispered.
"But you look like her," he said. "You sound like her. You take over the minds of innocent people like her." He nudged Barb's fallen body with his foot. "How long has this one known you? An hour? A day? How long does she think she's known you?"
