Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Do you still like lizards?” I asked, after a pause. There was no point in hammering him about the rest.

  Borne made a sound like a chirp. “I still like lizards. But they don’t like me.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “I like the Mord proxies more now, though,” Borne said. “I’m hunting them down because they want to kill you. They’re hard to kill, but I am trying. If they were all gone, the Balcony Cliffs would be safe again, Rachel. You wouldn’t have to hide as much. Maybe I could see you more and we could talk more. You could come down with me to the river. You could go with me lots of places.”

  Borne, trying to find a back door leading into the Balcony Cliffs.

  “It’s dangerous to hunt the proxies. You shouldn’t do it. There are too many of them.”

  I had to ignore the rest of what he kept pushing for. I had to. I had to be strong and snuff out the idea of clandestine meetings, of leading some kind of double life behind Wick’s back. If I remained resolute, maybe this meeting would inoculate me, cure me.

  “I have to do it,” Borne said. “I have to. Everything will be better. You’ll see. You’ll see.” Agitated, narrow of focus, a monster pledging his allegiance to my well-being.

  “I have to go,” I told him.

  “Can’t you stay longer? Just a little longer? Please?”

  “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  Borne nodded in a way only Borne could nod. “I know. But it was so good to see you again, Rachel. So good. So good.”

  He extended a tentacle and I shook it like a hand with only a moment’s hesitation. Smooth, soft. Like a person.

  “I won’t abandon you, Rachel,” he said. “You think you’ve abandoned me, but I know you haven’t. Not really. And I won’t abandon you. Ever. You’ll see. You’ll understand.”

  The ghost was falling to pieces inside and wanting to be like mist or dew or anything but a creature able to receive what Borne was telling me.

  Then Borne changed shape into something huge and tremulous, but also something long and low and streamlined and snakelike. He sped off at such a frightening pace that he was just a thick blurred black line zigzagging across the roof and then gone, over the side.

  “I won’t do anything to those people you saw tonight,” Borne had told me. But I knew Borne’s memory palace was vast and deep and full of skulls.

  * * *

  Back by the dead, burned bear, someone waited for me. I had never seen him shine so bright, there in the darkness, in the rain of ash. Standing so tall and straight he eclipsed the bear completely. Perhaps I had never truly seen him before. His skin was radiant and his face like something beatific and resolute and ravaged that had been salvaged from the past. A likeness from an old painting, the light illuminating features too perfect to be real.

  “Wick…”

  “You can never do this again, Rachel. You can never do this to me again.”

  In his expression I could read such an extremity of loss and hurt and betrayal, so naked, as naked as anything I had ever seen in the city. I knew he had seen everything, listened to me talking to Borne, and I couldn’t withstand it. I was ashamed. I couldn’t stand there and be worthy of it.

  But I wanted to. I wanted to be worthy of it, the way Wick shone so bright, for me.

  I stood in front of Wick and I held his gaze as the girl had held mine in the courtyard. I nodded. I would never do that again. I would never seek out Borne again, no matter what. No matter how that hurt.

  “Humdrum oracle,” I said, to let him know I was real.

  He seemed to vibrate there, his whole body, with the depth of the emotions he was feeling. So rigid and resolute. Standing on a precipice, needing to make a decision. Transfixed by a doubt shining out but also turned inward, as if he still hid something.

  “Botanical garden eel,” he said finally.

  He was so utterly beautiful and so defiant and so ready that it was as if I had never truly seen him before, and even now when I think of my dear Wick, I think of him that way, standing by the dead bear as if he had conquered it himself, his eyes green-gold diamonds, his stance that of a man who believes he might lose everything but still willing to risk it all anyway.

  HOW WE LOST WHAT WE HAD FOUGHT FOR

  I had harbored a killer and could not shake free of that, kept turning it over in my mind, kept trying to rid myself of the residue. Borne wasn’t even a killer as I was a killer, but someone who killed the innocent and tried to call them guilty. I thought I had been acting out of kindness, out of a sense of teaching Borne to be good. But would you make a wolf feel guilty for killing its prey? Would you make an eagle feel guilty for flying? The only salvation against the guilt, the only thing I could hold in my hands like something tiny and glittering found in the dirt that might be worthless, was the idea that I hadn’t been able to cast aside my feelings because Borne meant something bigger. That I had continued to believe in Borne because my gut knew something my head did not.

  Maybe that was a delusion, maybe that was wrong, but even as a ghost I hadn’t been stripped of that feeling. Even as a ghost facing Borne in that desolate place in the city, I’d still come away thinking Borne was a decent person beset by a terrible affliction. No matter how I tried to push beyond that to a place where Borne was evil, horrible, a psychopath, I couldn’t do it.

  I went home to the Balcony Cliffs with Wick, no longer a ghost. I went home into a sliver of time I count as happiness before the end, before we lost everything. Wick might recede from me again, or me from him, but in those few days I knew him with an intensity that could not have been prolonged without burning us both out.

  In his apartment, I tore off my dusty, dirty clothes, and then his dusty, dirty clothes, and we fucked with a fury and oblivion that drove out everything else. I did not want Wick gentle, and he did not want to be gentle, and we took each other and kept on taking each other until we were sore and so tired we could sleep without dreams or nightmares—exhausted, and hungry, and with nothing solved but it didn’t matter.

  After, as we lay there, we talked as honest as we could. I told him about the scavengers I’d met and the Mord proxies at the intersection, and how numb and old I felt without Borne in the Balcony Cliffs. I was telling Wick this not to hurt him but to let the monsters out, to have a night without the monsters inside me. His body stiffened alongside me as I told him these things, and then relaxed again, and there was such relief in the ordinary.

  In the aftermath, Wick’s wiry arms around my shoulders, my waist, and then, as if we were addicts, sleep merged with wakefulness and Wick’s hands were roving, busy, just where I wanted them, needed them. He grew hard against me once more, and we made love slowly, and I welcomed feeling diffuse and in pieces, everywhere and nowhere.

  And, for those few days, it was almost normal again.

  * * *

  The fourth night after my return, I drifted off to dreams of the little foxes that followed Borne. They were in the dry ocean bed outside the city. They were playing in the sand and yapping and yipping and taking turns disappearing into the backdrop, only to reappear again somewhere else, as if it wasn’t camouflage but instead blinking from place to place. Then one fox stopped to stare at me, and I knew it was the same one from the astronaut graves.

  I woke several hours later to tiny meteorites hitting my face. I woke up to Wick’s fireflies winking out, not one by one but in droves, swaths going dark, and the dead bodies falling onto the bed. Our alarm system.

  I shook Wick awake.

  “Wick—we need to go. Now.”

  He stared up at the ceiling bleary-eyed, and then he was reaching for his pants and we were putting on our clothes in a frenzy.

  Thirty fireflies were left, then twenty, then ten, then we lived in darkness except for the faint pale glow from Wick and his remaining worms. The bed was covered in little dead dark bodies.

  “Where are they coming from?” I asked, even though I knew. What we didn’t know is who the
intruders were.

  “Everywhere.” A preternatural calm from Wick as he pulled out his emergency pack, gave me mine.

  My heart was a bludgeon trying to get out of my chest.

  We had what we needed to survive. We knew our escape route. It had been maybe two minutes since I’d noticed the dying fireflies.

  Wick threw open the door to his apartment.

  The corridor was full of bears.

  * * *

  A wall of coarse, dull fur given depth by shadow. The glimpse of the massive head of another Mord proxy beyond the side and haunch of the one blocking our doorway. The smell of unconstrained savagery that close poured into the apartment: blood and mud and shit and rotting flesh. The traces of leaves and lichen, the hot, bitter aftertaste of Mord breath that filled up the corridor, finding our new air.

  Half a second before I shut the door.

  Two seconds before Wick fortified it with his last beetles, four seconds before Wick had pushed me up into the air duct, five seconds before I pulled him up into the air duct.

  Ten seconds before the bears burst into the apartment and destroyed it. Swatted at the entrance to the air duct, Wick bringing his legs up to his chest, and then, as I pushed forward, surging almost on top of me to get away from those claws, those questing paws.

  The bellowing and the terrible smell were right below us as we crawled through the air duct. A smashing, splintering sound was a paw punching up through the air duct behind us. Then another. More, following, ripping through the ceiling, clawing their way toward us, others trying to anticipate, get ahead of us.

  We veered off at an intersection, both silent, feeling our bellies exposed as we crawled as fast as we could because the air duct still ran above the corridor. One well-timed swipe from below and the ceiling would cave in and our entrails pour out in a cascade of blood.

  We were both like blind, dumb things burrowing in a panic so absolute that it came down like a dark, deep wall and became something like a great calm. Our packs were abandoned down below. Our minds were down below, being feasted on by the bears. Only our bodies had escaped, kept churning through the tunnel of the air duct reflexively, must soon come to a halt but kept going anyway. Our only urge was to get away, to get away, to get away, and we pushed forward heedless of harm, bruising our shins, scraping off the skin on our knees, because our devotion to escape from the place we had spent so much time defending was so mindless and absolute that nothing else mattered, nothing else registered.

  At first I was in front of Wick, kicking him in the face without meaning to, and then he was in front and I was eating his kicks and yet there was no pain, not then. That came later, along with the lingering ache across our bodies, as if we’d been fish thrashing in a net, half in and half out of the water, unable to drown and unable to live.

  Finally, though, the hot, raw pain of my bloody palm against the grit of a shallow mound of gravel and jagged pebbles brought me back out of my animal self.

  “Wick! Stop!” I hissed, but Wick didn’t hear me. “Wick!” But still he didn’t hear me.

  I caught Wick’s foot, grappled with him, pulled him back into myself, pinned down his arms in that space and felt a shudder run through his body and with it a kind of resignation or surrender, and he went limp.

  “Just listen,” I said in his ear.

  We listened. We could hear the bears in the distance, delivered to us via the acoustics of the air duct as a kind of tinny droning roar. A dim thick digging sound also sounded far away.

  “Where are we?” Wick asked.

  “I have no idea.” If he didn’t know, I definitely didn’t know.

  All I could see was air duct five feet ahead and air duct five feet behind.

  “They destroyed it all. They’re destroying it all,” Wick whispered, thrust into a pain I knew wasn’t all physical.

  The attack had sprung all our traps, destroyed our biotech, had come from so many points of the compass at once that the snapping of those lines, the ease of it, traumatized us almost more than the physicality of the invasion. An intricate map, burned, with no copy. It made it hard to think. It made it hard to breathe. We could not even frame the questions that would come hurtling toward us later, like why and how.

  And we were still in danger, we both knew that.

  “How do we get out? They’ll be watching all the exits.”

  “There’s one way they might not know about. It leads out to the south.”

  “What?” Wick looked at me as if I had said something in gibberish.

  I smiled. He wasn’t the only one with secrets. “I had Borne make a tunnel through the old apartments when we were punching holes in the walls looking for extra supplies.”

  A flicker of hope in Wick’s eyes, then a wince.

  “But if Borne knows, they know.”

  “Borne didn’t betray us,” I said. “The Magician or someone else, but not Borne.”

  Wick wanted to protest that assumption, but another objection had occurred to him.

  “But to the south?”

  That was a problem. For more than a month we hadn’t used the southern exits. The shifting lines of the conflict between the Magician and Mord meant the south was Mord country. To exit south meant we would be behind enemy lines and have to find our way back north to some more neutral territory, or even one in flux. Which meant encountering more Mord proxies.

  “What choice do we have, Wick? We have no choice.”

  “We have no supplies,” Wick pointed out. “We could try to circle back, slip into my laboratory, grab a few things.”

  “They’ll kill us. They’re not leaving. We’re dead if we don’t get out.”

  The bear sounds had only come closer as we talked, and proliferated, as if every room, every pocket of air, were in the process of being occupied by the proxies.

  Wick, adjusting: “There’s a safe place to the south. A hidden cistern. A little room next to a well.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll head,” I said. “We have no choice.”

  It sounded like a last stand, but so be it. Soon we would know for sure if Borne had betrayed us. I thought of the twelve-year-old girl. I thought of the biotech burning blissful in the flames.

  I kissed Wick on the mouth, pinned him with my gaze. “We’re alive. We’re still alive.”

  I didn’t know how to interpret the guarded look on Wick’s face. I didn’t realize that leaving the Balcony Cliffs might be a death sentence for him.

  * * *

  The way was clear. We managed to find the entrance to my secret exit without being seen, even as the sounds of pillage, the roars, and the “Drrk! Drrk!” echoed too loud for fear to leave us. But I didn’t want to lose that fear.

  Saving our lives became about passing through a series of large holes Borne had punched in the walls of the homes of those long dead. The holes were big enough for a hunched-over person to crab-walk through, or to crawl through on all fours. Many were consecutive, so you could look down through a row of irregular holes in rooms and have time to wonder what waited in ambush. Others I’d hidden, to confuse any intruder. So sometimes we had to move a table or broken-down dresser out of the way first. To find the mousehole to the next place, which might double back or surge forward only to double back. A convoluted path because I had determined to only use areas of the Balcony Cliffs that were not part of Wick’s diagram.

  The consecutive holes—their gaping emptiness, the frisson of unease—meant a commitment to scuttling through, putting our heads into a number of ragged guillotines and submitting to whatever evil might want to take us.

  But the other rooms made us stop and realize what we were losing, what we were leaving, all under the weight of so much personal history, the remnants of so many old, dead lives. I had been in these rooms—despite their number, I still remembered what they held that I hadn’t scavenged. I was prepared to some extent. But it took a greater toll on Wick, to keep appearing in these rooms, to have to remain there, unable to escape ot
her people’s memories as we patiently prepared our escape to the next room, and the next and the next.

  We were caked in dust and grime. Our hands blistered. Our joints sore, knees ever more scraped.

  * * *

  After a time, we could hear the Mord proxies barely at all, and despite the ghoulish mausoleum-like lurch and repetition of our progress, we could tell from a downward slant and a new, fresher quality to the air that we were headed in the right direction. There was the feeling, unspoken between us, that although hungry and thirsty, we would make it out. That though our hands shook from the aftershocks and when we sat to rest our minds were full of bears, we had a goal and a shelter waiting: Wick’s safe place. Food and water awaited us. That was motivation enough. We were almost free.

  The last doorway led to a stairwell heading down and I knew that at the bottom lay a disguised door and on the outside no hint at all but fallen rock, fallen branches, and a light covering of lichen.

  We stood there teetering at the top of the stairs, far older than we had been just hours before. About to leave our home. About to be tossed out into the world we’d taken such pains to keep at arm’s length, to only meet on our terms.

  “Are you ready?” I asked Wick, his arm around me. The blood on his hand was smudging warm and moist onto my dusty shirt and I didn’t care.

  “We’ll be like hermit crabs without their shells,” Wick said.

  “We’ll find new shells.”

  A long, drawn-out, trembling sigh from Wick, an exhalation almost like a death rattle.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  Thus diminished, we left the Balcony Cliffs.

  WHAT FREEDOM MEANT

  Some landscapes in the city let you play pretend for at least a short time, and that is a good thing: to control in your thoughts what you can’t yet control in reality. The terrain we emerged into, wincing and squinting from the harsh sunlight of midday, might in play-pretend land have resembled a slanted field of weeds that led down to a gentle ravine lined with pine trees and the tops of buried buildings. You might even have imagined the ravine had been formed by water erosion and that down in its glistening dark depths water still bubbled out, churned across jagged rocks, and then ran its course to a destination farther down, where the ravine flattened out to the desolate plain that defended the approaches to the Company building.