Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The two women looked a little like me, but one was bald and the other had darker skin. The teenage boy was white and, head down, ignored me. The last two were anomalies: a hulking giant of a man and a girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve. Together and yet apart, silent but for grunts or nods, we stepped around the mummified husks of dead dogs and the dried-out shit of some large mammal, and looked for treasures. Curiously, I had noticed the big man last, which made me wonder if he’d stepped out of the shadows just after I’d arrived.

  I knew nothing of these people, except that as scavengers went they had some sense of honor or integrity, for they did not set upon me or drive me out, although I was competition. Most turned to look suspiciously at me and then went back to their searching, which meant my powers as a ghost must be fading. I gave them a hard nod and a lingering stare and hoped both came across in the dim light.

  From long experience I knew that they would get around to the dead dogs and the shit, but taking either apart was messy and would come last. Investigating death and shit also would release foul smells into the air, long dormant and locked in place. You could tell a seasoned scavenger by how numb their nose was, and yet also how agile their hands.

  The girl found a couple of dried-out alcohol minnows by their dull glint and shoved them in her satchel. A few drops of water might revive them, but first she’d have to decide if those drops were more valuable to drink.

  The hulking man wasn’t nimble enough for this game and kept himself apart from the others. They picked the ground clean just as he began to bend over to examine those same surfaces. I wondered how he had survived this long, why he wasn’t gaunt. Perhaps the hulking man had been hoarding a store of supplies and they’d run out, forcing him to scavenge. Perhaps he’d run with some crew or cult and been cast out or driven out by Mord proxies. Refugees who came to the city for sanctuary had often become refugees again.

  “We have a hideout,” the girl said, approaching me.

  We have a hideout. It was a marvel to see a child not yet conscripted to the Magician’s army of mutants. She was slight but steady, and she held my gaze even as, revenant, I circled her.

  “We have food, supplies, and we’re willing to trade.”

  Perhaps something remaining from my ghostliness, or the competence in how I held myself, had sparked that offer. Or some other impulse.

  “Are you inviting me as a trading partner or as meat?” I asked. Maybe I also sought something as simple as a fight.

  The girl laughed. It was so clear and tinkling a sound in that place that it seemed as if it came from the city’s past, before Mord, before the Company. The kind of sound that could bring predators quick. None came, so she must have done a sweep of the perimeter.

  “Neither,” one of the women said. “We’re not like that.”

  “I might be willing,” I said.

  The ghost felt a pull, an enticement. To become a vagabond, to descend to the street and stay there, to take my chances day-to-day, as I once had, and assure my safety by never having any expectation of it. Perhaps that was the best way to become a ghost.

  “It’s not far,” the girl said.

  I took it she was their leader. Perhaps because she was so rare, or because the Magician’s shock troops had elevated the value of the young all across the city.

  “I’ll come if I can bring my partner.” I pointed to the hulking man.

  The ghost had noticed a few disconcerting things about the hulking man, chief among them that although he kept his shape well enough, the shape still changed at times. Not enough to be noticed in those shadows if you weren’t looking for it.

  “Him?” the girl said. “He’s with you? We thought he was alone. He’s always been alone before.” I sensed in the girl’s hesitation not just caution but miscalculation: Had she made an offer she thought I wouldn’t accept?

  The hulking man stood, was staring at the ghost even though he was the ghost.

  “He’s with me,” I said.

  “Are you with her?” one of the women asked the hulking man.

  The hulking man nodded.

  He must have wondered why he should follow a ghost, why I was doing this.

  * * *

  Through old damage—the twisted metal of collapsed machinery and tunnels dug through maelstroms of upended shopping carts and other inventions empty of purpose—we reached their sanctuary: a courtyard with half a roof, exposed to the elements but not, exposed to Mord but not. Seen from above, it would have looked like a ragged triangle of open space. A sliver they must hope Mord would never spy, because even earthbound he towered over almost everything.

  They had makeshift tents arranged under the awning and sentries set at the single entrance. I hoped they were smart enough to have a secret exit. I counted twelve in all, most of them kids, none of them altered by the Magician. All of them were slim and the darkness slid through them, did not attach itself.

  The group had found an impressive sluglike piece of biotech with no discernible head or tail and set it on fire. The creature didn’t mind, let out a contented humming purr as it burned perpetual. The creature had a hypnotic allure, looked like a dancing, living skirt of flesh in the middle of that fire, a deep orange with ruffled lines of red and white running along the edges. It generated enough heat for them to cook food—and all it wanted in return was for them to set it on fire again and again.

  I estimated from the ashes and the pile of fresh garbage that they had been in that spot for maybe three nights, and if they stayed three more they would become predictable and would all be dead. A Magician patrol might sweep them up; a Mord proxy would definitely sniff them out. But even the ghost had a fierce wish that they might survive.

  Four huddled around the living fire, with the hulking man and me on the other side. The hulking man was sending quick glances my way, as if nervous. But what could he be nervous about?

  “So what do you have for us?” the girl asked. I didn’t like her smile now, like she had an ace card.

  “Depends on what you’re offering—are you offering that?” I pointed at the writhing fire creature.

  The girl laughed and I couldn’t help loving the sound. She looked like a fairy peering over that fire at me and the biotech a fire elemental she’d tamed. The ghost felt tired and old, staring at her.

  “We need that,” she said with an innocence I knew at her age must be false.

  But I took pity on her, because she had to be nervous and I knew the other eight waited in the shadows to jump us if we turned out to be dangerous.

  “I have this,” I said. I placed a battle beetle on my palm, close enough to the flames for her to see it.

  My bulky friend bucked back on his haunches, but I put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not for you.”

  This battle beetle had seen better days. The iridescent carapace was cracked and the inner wings stuck out the back, couldn’t fold properly. But the beetle could still burrow into flesh, compromise the well-being of an intruder, an enemy. It just couldn’t fly very far.

  “Good for close-in defense or combat,” I told the girl.

  “How many can you get?” she asked.

  “This is the only one. But they’re edible, too, and I can throw in a couple of alcohol minnows, depending on what you’ve got. Maybe more than a couple.”

  The girl’s second spoke up, a scattered-looking, wild-eyed boy. “Your friend doesn’t talk much. Why doesn’t he talk?”

  “Accident,” I said, looking at my friend with a smile. “He doesn’t talk much ever since.”

  “He makes me nervous,” the boy said, not realizing he was making the girl nervous.

  “He should.”

  And for a fair amount of time I stared at the boy and he stared at me while my friend tried to make himself look small and examined the ground.

  “So,” I said, switching my attention back to the girl. “What do you have on offer?”

  The girl nodded to the boy, man
aging to toss in a scowl, and he nodded to someone else, and down the line.

  What was on offer was more or less what I had expected. They brought forward the smallest and youngest person there. He was maybe eight or nine, bald against ticks and lice, dark brown skin, some haunting still of remembered baby fat, but his eyes were old and from the rigid set of his jaw, his folded arms over his ragged shirt, I knew he was afraid.

  “For the battle beetle and the minnows, you can have Teems,” the girl said.

  “Why would I want Teems?”

  Something in my tone must have seemed dangerous, or maybe it was how fast I replied. But either way, the girl was very careful in her reply.

  “Because you know the Magician. Because if you take Teems to the Magician you’ll get four or five beetles.”

  I was quiet, thinking about what she’d said, head bowed, with bad things crawling through my brain.

  “Why do you think I know the Magician?”

  “Because you’re Rachel the scavenger. You work for Wick, and Wick knows the Magician.”

  The bad things in my head writhed harder, multiplied, and I tried to douse them in the flames created by the biotech, but it didn’t work.

  I’d been made by a little girl, someone who had only seen me for a few minutes, half cloaked in darkness. She knew enough about me to presume I would want to trade a human being to the Magician for biotech …

  “What’s the catch?” I asked. “You’d give Teems here away for one beetle and two minnows?”

  “They’re not giving me away,” Teems said, arms still folded. A stern look made his face gaunt. “I want to go. I said I’d go.”

  I understood, of course. This group couldn’t find enough food and water to live on, and Teems must be not just the youngest but the least-gifted scavenger, the weakest among them. Lose him, one less mouth to feed.

  Teems’s stake in this arrangement was not to just be cut loose and be on his own in a dangerous place but to be given over to someone else’s patronage. And Teems wanted to own it, to construct a story about his life where he had control, where he had always wanted this to happen.

  I knew I could get Teems for free. It wouldn’t even take a beetle and two minnows. The girl wanted him gone, needed him gone. But Teems would have to take his chances some other way.

  I held out the beetle to the girl and she took it with care from my palm.

  “I don’t want Teems,” I said, “but you can have the beetle if you hold on to Teems another month.”

  Both Teems and the girl’s second were looking at me with a kind of mixed hope, bewilderment, and disappointment. The girl was already trying to figure out what game I was playing, and what that meant to her.

  “I don’t know the Magician and I’m not this Rachel,” said the ghost. “And you don’t want to know Rachel or the Magician, either. Also, you shouldn’t invite strangers to your campfire, pretty though it is, no matter how you want to show it off.”

  The girl had risen, as had I, and Teems retreated, and her boyfriend seemed conflicted, while the eight in the shadows had moved forward.

  “Borne, you should show them as you really are.” I stared at the bulky man, while I could sense the girl trying to decide whether to tell the others to attack us. The look on the girl’s face was not what I would call charitable or forgiving.

  Until she saw Borne in all his glory, for he had dissolved from bulky man to a glowing dragon-size version of their flaming biotech, an enormous fiery slug that loomed over their tents and gasped out flame, and because some part of Borne would always be a show-off, his version had a head and glowing eyes. It had been as easy as peeling a banana for Borne to shed his disguise.

  All of them—the girl, her second, Teems, the others—drew back against the courtyard walls and after their initial gasp stayed very still and silent, as if maybe we couldn’t find them that way. But their faces, touched by the light from Borne’s flames, had a new tension and horror, a realization that the city still held secrets and surprises that could transfix them, strip them of the lie that they had survival instincts.

  The girl held out the beetle and said, “You can take it. You can have it and anything else if you leave now.”

  “Keep it,” I said. “And keep Teems. Don’t follow us. Don’t bring strangers to your sanctuary again. Don’t stay here another night. Don’t come looking for me. Don’t seek out the Magician.”

  Then Borne made himself smaller and less fiery, and I led him out of that place.

  * * *

  I took Borne back past the playground to the roof of the department store, a few blocks from the burned bear. It had begun to snow, but the flakes were gray: ash from places to the west where the Mord proxies had put Magician strongholds to the torch. The ash wasn’t hot to the touch. It wasn’t anything. It was nothing, raining down from the black night sky.

  There on the roof, out of view, Borne slopped over in relief, like someone who had been holding in his gut, streamed out over the ground, made a thick carpet of gentle neon eyes.

  Now that Borne was there, in front of me, the ghost had receded, the urge to find him entangled in the reality. I asked him a question, but I can’t remember what it was, whether it was important. It must not have been.

  “Can I come home now?” Borne asked, ignoring my question. “Has Wick forgiven me?”

  “No.” Wick hadn’t forgiven him. Nor had I.

  “Then why did you come here?”

  To see how he lived. To make sure he was okay. Some bond, an ancient affection. Inflicting self-damage. The reflexive twitching of a dead lizard tail.

  “Did you see something new tonight, Borne?”

  The shape in front of me seethed, frothed, rippled at the edges, retreated into solidarity with the idea of the human, became again the hulking man the girl and her group had known.

  “Is this the start of some lesson, Rachel? You made me leave. You and Wick both. You don’t have the right to tell me what to do now. Or to make me into a … a fireworks display.”

  “Do you see how people live? Don’t add to their misery.”

  “I’d never been to their campfire before. I would have protected them. I would have tried.”

  “They’re all Rachels,” I said. “That girl. The other scavengers.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt her,” Borne said. “I didn’t hurt her.”

  “But you had taken up with them. You’d been out scavenging with them before. Where do you think that would end?” Had I put that girl in danger by my own actions, even as I tried to help? The traps, the traps.

  “I was trying to fit in,” Borne said, hurt. “I was trying to make an honest go of it. To show you I can do that.”

  An honest go of it. Borne wasn’t a patchwork creature, but his syntax always would be. I’d taken something away from Borne and not replaced it with anything useful. Now he was trying to fill that empty space.

  “Who was he? Your body?”

  “Just a scavenger, like yourself.”

  “And what did you do to him?”

  “Nothing. Nothing much. When I came across him, he was dying. He had no family. He had no friends.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Everything dies, Rachel. He was already dying. Would you rather I hadn’t turned back into him? You seem upset.”

  “How ‘dying’ was he?”

  “Pretty dying, I’d say.”

  “You haven’t stopped killing.”

  “He was pretty dying,” Borne repeated.

  I said nothing. I did not move. The ghost was returning because the living, breathing person couldn’t figure a way out. I still cared about Borne, still cared what happened to him, but I also felt a chill. I wondered what myths might grow up around Borne as they had once grown up around Mord, and how similar they might be.

  Borne was too smart not to read some of that in my face, too naïve to remain silent.

  “I have an idea, Rachel,” Borne said. “Don’t say no yet. Just listen.”
>
  “Borne…”

  “I try to only kill evil people, Rachel, and people already dying. I’m getting it under control. I’m going to get it under control. And if I can stop, maybe I could come back to the Balcony Cliffs. Maybe you and Wick would let me? I would clean for you and I would make traps and even maybe help Wick with his biotech. I could come back with you now and we could try it. I promise I’ll be good, Rachel.”

  Now it was my turn to ignore him.

  “You can’t use this disguise again, Borne. Your cover is blown. Someone told me about you. You weren’t fitting in. People were beginning to guess.”

  “Okay, Rachel,” Borne said, but his dour mask crumbled into something more like contentment, as if I’d agreed to something. Maybe it was enough that I’d sought him out.

  Borne in travel mode stood before me soon enough, but much bigger than before, and all I wanted was to have never gone out, to be back home, but once there I knew I would think about being out in the city again, talking to Borne.

  “You can’t come back yet,” I said, and then wished I’d been firm and said, “Never. You can never come back.” Why couldn’t I? What held me back? That I couldn’t suppress that last tiny bit of love for him? Of human sympathy? Of pity?

  Borne went silent and there was a noticeable slump to him, and the ash kept falling from the sky onto both of us. I wiped at it, and it stained my shirt gray.

  “Rachel … will I die someday?”

  “Yes. Everything dies.” He knew the answer already. Call-and-response. We had done this.

  “What about the people inside of me? The animals?”

  “They’re already dead,” I said. No matter how many times I said it, Borne would never understand.

  “No, they’re not dead, Rachel. I killed them but they’re not dead. You’re wrong. I don’t think they will ever die.”

  “In whatever way was important to them, Borne, they are dead.” But I didn’t believe that when Borne said “dead” or “killed” he meant what I meant. To him, on some level I’d never understand, there was no death, no dying, and in the end we stood on opposite sides of a vast gulf of incomprehension. Because what was a human being without death?