“That’s a waste, Rachel,” the voice said. “I never took you as the wasteful sort.”
“Who are you?” I kept my knife out, but I didn’t use another beetle.
“They call me the Magician. Maybe you’ve heard of me.” The voice echoed, came from everywhere and nowhere.
At that time, she was nothing special to me—just another pretender, another grifter, another person deluded into thinking they mattered. A name that would be forgotten soon enough.
“What do you want?”
“You’re direct—good. Just like me,” she said. There was a hint again of the rustling, of the being-in-plain-sight. But I couldn’t see her.
“Say whatever you want to say and leave.” I still had the psychotic scavenger, Charlie X, to worry about.
“Are you happy now, Rachel?” the Magician asked.
Happy? Now? What a strange question. What a self-indulgent, unanswerable question. I wanted to stab the air again because of that question, send my beetles spinning out from me toward all points of the compass.
“What business is that of yours?”
A low, deep chuckle. “You couldn’t know this, but it is my business. So I ask again, are you happy? At the Balcony Cliffs? With Wick?” The smugness there, the hint of secret knowledge, of intimacy, made me hate her.
“Show yourself,” I said. “Show yourself if you want to talk to me.”
“You’re a good scavenger. You have a good mind. I’ve watched you for a while now. Long enough to feel like I already know you.”
“I don’t know you.” The light dulled and brightened over the desolate plains below, as clouds gathered and moved swift. Nothing else moved there. Nothing gave itself away. Charlie X was somewhere out there, wanting to kill me.
“But you could. You could join me.”
“Join you in what?”
“Something more than this.” She gestured at the sky, the sun, the land, as if we had the choice to leave it all behind.
“Why would I want to?”
“Maybe because I’m not like Charlie X,” she said, surprising me. “I’m not stupid. I’m not mad. I’m not living day to day. I’m actually trying to build something here—a coalition, a way forward.”
“What do you know about Charlie X?”
“I know he’s dead, and that I killed him. Just the other side of that cistern, on the hill opposite.”
Relief and suspicion and fear pulled at me.
“You’re lying.”
“I believe he was on your trail. I believe he meant to sneak up on you and take your life. I believe that won’t happen now.”
“You’re lying.”
“After we’re done here, you can find out for yourself. And, you’re welcome.” An incorruptible assurance in her tone, and I did believe her although I didn’t want to.
“What are you planning?”
“A way to defeat Mord. A way to bring us all into the future.”
Such bitter, mocking laughter the Magician might never have heard before. “If you could do that, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“Did you know the Company made abominations much worse than Mord, Rachel? Did you know they’ve meddled in so many things they shouldn’t have? Things that affect your life, too.”
I spat into the dirt. “The rumor is you’re beginning to modify people, and maybe not asking them first.”
The Magician laughed. “Oh, I always ask first. But you should ask Wick for his opinion on that before you judge me. Wick just wants to be left alone. I want to change the city. Bring back what we had before.”
“You want leverage over Wick.”
“I already have plenty of leverage over Wick.”
I thought that might be a lie, but her confident tone rattled me.
“But just not enough to get him to ask me to do work for you on the side, is that it?”
“You know, Rachel,” the Magician said, “being blunt, being direct, is fine sometimes. Other times that quality leads right to the boneyard.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time to leave,” I said.
“Or what? You’ve got one attack beetle left, a spider, and no gun. And you didn’t even know where I was until right this moment.”
In front of me, a person appeared, just far enough away to make stabbing her risky. It was almost as startling as if a tiger had appeared before me—as rare and surreal and mesmerizing.
The cowl to her robes was down or I would have paid more attention to the fact her robes weren’t clothing but a kind of biotech. She had thick dark hair and deep bronze skin and features that were lionesque or in some way regal, but for a scar that ran down her right cheek, hooking into her upper lip. If I was honest, the Magician resembled me more than she should, even down to the glittering eyes and her build. But my skin was much darker, I had no scar, my hair was short, and I had never been animated by that look of being born to command.
Mord could have hurtled down from the sky to devour her right then and she would still have kept her composure, even while finding some way to thwart his appetite.
“Now you can see me,” she said. “What do you think?”
I stuck to my resolve. “I think, one last time, that you need to leave.”
The Magician smiled, and it was as if the rays of the sun burst forth from her features—a radiance I couldn’t deny, and still that dangerous sense of self-regard.
“You’re a valuable commodity,” the Magician said. “You should have happiness, boldness, purpose. You shouldn’t huddle somewhere like a rat in a cage. But I can tell you aren’t convinced. So goodbye for now, Rachel.”
The cowl rose over her head like the living creature it was, and in a kind of glittering dissolve—a whisper, a hint of a flurry of movement—the Magician disappeared while I just watched with my mouth open. A lucky find, perhaps, that biotech, some kind of camouflage that reflected its surroundings, gave to that disguise depth, breadth, so she wouldn’t move like a cardboard cutout across the landscape.
How could I know she was gone? The hilltop felt deserted, even with me still standing there. An absence. In the next few days, when I was paranoid she might still be tracking me, I strained to recover that sense of no-one-there, to know for sure that I was right. She had gone on to other things, other plans, other people. Yet even though I didn’t like the Magician there arose, from the way she stared at me, the uncomfortable and mysterious thought that she did know me, even if I didn’t know how.
I found Charlie X dead where she’d said he’d be, not a wound on him. Just horror splashed across his blurred features, as if he’d seen another side of the Magician. Or her true face.
* * *
Three years later, the Magician’s spirit had snuck right into the room with me, between me and Wick. She might make her headquarters well to the west, in the ruined observatory, but she had found a way to make her influence felt from afar—because we were weak, because our supplies were running low and Wick could see no other way out. She had found a way in because she’d always been there.
Borne had gone quiet above us as our voices had gotten louder, and Wick had gotten more defensive.
“We are not giving up the Balcony Cliffs,” I said. We were not giving up Borne, either. I was tired and drunk, drunk, drunk, but this I knew.
“We wouldn’t be giving them up,” Wick said, with little enthusiasm. “People would move in here, help us fortify it. We live here alone. How long do you think that can last?”
“It’s lasted pretty long already, Wick.”
I crammed another minnow in my mouth. Probably my fifth. We were both acting like if we finished off every alcohol minnow in the land tonight we wouldn’t care.
“We’re lucky we held out this long.”
“Why now? Tell me why she’s asking now?”
“I think she is planning something big. I think her plans are almost set.” Wick’s voice had lowered to a whisper, as if the Magician were listening, which only made me madder.
“The Magician’s not asking. The Magician’s telling. That’s what she does these days—tells people things, and people do them.”
The Magician on one hill and Wick on the other, communicating via hand signals or semaphore.
“Who reached out, Wick? Her or you?”
He mumbled something, stood, wrapped his hands around the sides of his chair, tapped its legs against the floor a couple of times.
“He said he reached out, Rachel,” Borne said helpfully from the ceiling.
“Borne, stay out of this!” we both shouted at him.
“But you said you didn’t hear him and I thought you’d want to know.”
“Go back to my apartment and I’ll come check to make sure you’re all right before you go to bed,” I said.
“Sure, Rachel. I can go back to your apartment.”
Borne sounded dejected, or maybe I just expected he would. Slowly, he slid down the wall, congealed into an upright Borne position, resuscitated his eyes, and left us. If there was a whiff of indignant spider fart left behind, I tried to ignore it, just as I tried to ignore putting Wick’s revelation before Borne’s injuries.
“I wanted nothing except to be left alone,” Wick said. “That’s all I wanted, all I’ve ever wanted.”
Familiar refrain. I’d never asked why he wanted to be left alone, though. That’s Wick, I always thought. Wick likes to be left alone.
“It will destroy us, Wick. How can you trust her?”
“How am I supposed to trust you?” he said. “You brought Borne in here. You won’t get rid of him. The proxies are getting worse—everything is getting worse. We have no choice.”
“You know what will happen to Borne when she takes over.”
Wick shrugged, a shrug that said it wouldn’t be his problem then, and maybe he even hoped once Borne became someone else’s responsibility I would come to my senses, and we would be the “us” and Borne would be one of “them.”
“But that’s not even the worst thing, Wick, and you know it.”
Wick looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“The feral children I saw tonight are the same as the ones who attacked me here in the Balcony Cliffs.”
“There are many terrible people in the city,” Wick said. “Lots of terrible people.”
“The ones tonight acted like a patrol, as if they were working for someone. Do you know who? I think you know who.” I wanted badly to say it.
“You should get some rest,” Wick said. “You should go to bed.” He wouldn’t look at me, even when I shoved myself in front of him. Yet it didn’t matter. The perverse thing was I knew Wick so well, and he knew me so well, that we both understood what I meant. It was almost the least of what we were conveying to each other in that moment. But still I pushed, because it had to be said out loud.
“That night the Magician’s people snuck in and attacked me. It wasn’t something random. They attacked because the Magician was sending you a message—and you knew that, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I never knew,” Wick protested. “I never knew she would do that. Everything I did was so nothing would happen to you. Can you look me in the eye and say you think I wanted that to happen to you? No, never.”
“Wick, you withheld information. You were in trouble with her and you didn’t tell me.” To his credit, he wasn’t trying to deny it now.
“Would you have done anything different in my place?” Wick asked, shouting. “And would you have been extra-extra careful instead of extra-careful coming back that night? No and no. And we’d be in the same place right now. No matter what I did—unless I just handed over the Balcony Cliffs.”
“You didn’t trust me!” I shouted back. “You don’t fucking trust me.”
“It has nothing to do with trust,” Wick said, exasperated, pained. “Nothing at all to do with trust.” He said trust like it was a corrosion.
“If I had known, Wick, it would have helped. You would have been more open with me, you wouldn’t have seemed so closed off, secretive. Don’t you see that the Magician drove a wedge between us, that she wanted you to protect me from her demands? To cut you off from me?”
“You cut yourself off from me. You did that all on your own—by bringing Borne into our lives and not letting go of him. By clinging to him. You did that. You did that!”
“Did you know the Magician tried to recruit me three years ago?” I asked. “Did you know that, Wick? Of course you didn’t. I kept that from you because I didn’t want the Magician to have more leverage over you than she already has.”
A cry of frustration from Wick. “How in the name of fuck is that different than me trying to protect you by not telling you things? It’s not different at all! No difference! And I don’t even care!”
We were screaming at each other, pointing at each other, but we couldn’t stop.
“The difference is, Wick, you’re hiding other things from me. You’re hiding why the Magician has leverage over you in the first place. You’re hiding secrets in your apartment you think I don’t know about.”
That brought him up short, but then he realized I couldn’t know his secrets—I just had clues—because he’d been so careful.
“I don’t have secrets!” he lied. “I don’t have any secrets you need to know about.”
“You don’t have any secrets I need to know about,” I repeated. “Do you know how stupid that sounds? Well, maybe in the morning you’ll remember some secrets I do need to know about. Like the fish project. Like a broken telescope or a metal box full of biotech. Like not ever telling me about your family. Maybe in the morning you’ll realize just how much I might need to know if we’re going to live together.”
Wick got up, started furiously stirring the crap in his swimming pool with a long piece of wood, his back to me.
“Isn’t there somewhere else you need to be? Someone else you need to be with?” Accusing, stabbing, but also hurt. I could tell he was hurt, too.
We were locked into these positions from the beginning. Wick trying to shield me and do the right thing, conflicted about what that meant … and me naïve enough to think I could believe in Wick and Borne at the same time. Corrupted by that. Both of us aware, from some remote position looking down on ourselves, that regret, guilt, even arguing distracted us from getting on with the business of trying to survive.
I stalked out, intending to join Borne like I’d promised.
HOW I LET BORNE DOWN
Yet my attention was in the wrong place, focused on the wrong things, and in my anger I didn’t go right to my apartment to check on Borne. My world had gotten smaller and smaller, seemed set on the borders of the Balcony Cliffs and holding on to territory I had thought was already hard-won and secured. It didn’t strike me until later how Borne might feel, what he might be experiencing under his upbeat exterior. What it might have felt like to be told to go back to my apartment alone after being wounded, when he had sat vigil by my bedside while I recovered from my attack.
Borne’s world had expanded in one day to encompass his own mortality, the horrors of the world, and the great expanse that existed beyond us. He had watched Mord rage and roar. He had been told that the Earth revolved around the sun and that the lights he saw in that black sky were all distant stars, around which revolved still other Earths with their own monsters, their own destroyed cities. No explorer in far-distant times had ever traveled so far, so fast. No astronaut circling the Earth had ever had to acclimate to more. None living or dead had had to experience that while also learning to speak and to think and to feel. Was it too much? Had he been built to withstand the weight of such great pressure? Just how much could he absorb?
On our way down from the roof that night—Mord now gone from the night sky—we had lingered o
n the factory floor amid the carnage because I still needed intel. I had to know more about the mutant children, who in their feralness seemed chaotic but in their discipline had acted like a patrol. I also wanted a sample from a Mord proxy if I could get one, and it was Borne who found the torn-off paw, who “tasted” the paw so severely that all he left for Wick was the claw. I tried to convey to Borne that he should be mortified but dropped it when I realized I was admonishing someone who might be in shock.
But I found something else. A smashed and slaughtered feral, with a jacket not so ripped I couldn’t rifle through it looking for papers, for identification, for anything.
What I found was the insignia of the Magician. What I found was her seal and symbol. And with that evidence, the near-certainty that it was Wick’s rival who had snuck ferals into the Balcony Cliffs to attack me, it all felt too close to home, like a way of sending a message.
Even my conversation with Borne on the way back to the Balcony Cliffs had seemed to converge, to have significance to my own situation, in mysterious ways. The words grew large in the night air, kept expanding, until I felt they were important beyond measure.
“How did the world get this way?”
“I don’t know. Because of people, Borne. We did this to ourselves.” We were still doing it to ourselves.
“Was it always this way?”
“Not always. There were more people and it was better.” But not because there were more people.
“More people,” Borne said, musing on that.
“Yes. And there were cities all over the world where people lived in peace.” There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn’t lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species.
“Cities everywhere,” Borne said, as if he didn’t quite know what I meant.
We were almost to the concealed door back at the Balcony Cliffs when Borne spoke again.
“Am I alone, like Mord?”
“Mord has proxies now.”
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