The Strange Bird: A Borne Story

by Jeff VanderMeer

  That same day, the Magician had undertaken the much more perilous watching of Mord. For under cover of the cloak, the Magician would draw near to Mord’s filthy flank, even when he sat ponderous and huge and feasting on bloody remains; she would stand so close she could have touched him, her scent masked by the stench of blood, and even remain there, silent and vibrating with some secret need—for danger, for death?—as he rose, when another might have run, feared being crushed. But the Magician would just let out a shuddering breath that wracked her body.

  The Magician became methodical about Mord, studied his habits as he grew ever larger and more unhinged. She would follow him back to the Company building he still defended and observe the fraught conversations between those within and the great bear without.

  “It is falling apart,” she might coo, triumphant, on her way back to the observatory from such missions. “He is grown too bloodthirsty, and they are failing. We must accelerate the process. We must make of everything a chaos. We must be the sign of order.”

  Mord held no interest for the Strange Bird now, so many months or years since she had first seen him. His flying felt more like mockery now and his brutality made him of a piece with the Magician. The impossibility of him could not inspire or impress, for so much that seemed impossible had already been wrought upon her. So she clung to the back of the Magician and experienced Mord only when the Magician walked away from him, and thus Mord was always, to her, something large and incomprehensible that became smaller and smaller over time.

  Always as the Magician went about her business, took up her positions, visited her haunts, always the Strange Bird must look the other way, stare out at whatever horizon the Magician had turned her back on, and often the Strange Bird hoped that she stared out at a future unfamiliar to the magician. And that out of that horizon would come a threat, someone or something to kill her, and she did not care if they ripped the Magician’s fine cloak apart to get to her. For she was no fool, even now, and knew her fate was bound up in the Magician’s fate.

  But by then, whenever this was, the Strange Bird did not want to live, or did not know she could live, and that was the same thing in the end.

  The Island

  Sometimes, in the early days of endless despair, the Strange Bird let the Old Man come to her, to crawl up the sand of the island that was her sanctuary, toward the tree. As the Magician pursued some mission or late at night when the bird cloak lay again on the stone table for a time, the Magician plotting or seeking counsel with a spy or underling, or, worst of all, hung in a closet in the dark in the Magician’s secret living quarters deep beneath the observatory.

  The Strange Bird would let the Old Man appear to her and he would call her Isadora and he would call her beautiful, and his “beautiful” was different enough from the Magician’s that for a moment she would find a false comfort and she would see the foxes on the dunes, looking down at the prison. But then she would see Charlie X pulling the Old Man into the ground or the Old Man confessing his secret and she would know the vision for what it was, weakness.

  “Weakness can be a strength,” Sanji told her, but the Strange Bird did not believe her. This form of weakness was a dissolution of the self, a rewriting of history.

  Sanji spoke much more often now and the Strange Bird retreated when lost in her thoughts to the lab island of trees surrounded by the moat of crocodiles. Sanji would sit on a branch next to the Strange Bird’s perch and they would talk.

  The island was weakness, too, but although she never left her perch, never flew, on the island she had wings. Not the Magician’s possession, not Isadora.

  The Strange Bird pondered often the last changes the scientists had made to her before she escaped the lab, for better to think of those changes than the ones the Magician had made.

  “I can guess, just as you can guess,” Sanji replied, though the Strange Bird had not asked the question. “Maybe I gave you a map of the lab. Maybe I put a compass in your talons, wanted you to escape. Because I could not.”

  The Strange Bird didn’t believe that. Sanji could have escaped at any time, like her companion.

  “How? I had no wings.”

  Twinge of panic in the Strange Bird, fought the impulse to flap her wings there on her perch. Feared both that she would be able to and that being able to would unhinge her, drive her mad, and she would never return to that perch, or any perch. But float up into the sky and into the night until there was no scrap of her left.

  Sanji: “You could fly over all that distress and disaster and contamination. You could fly over it and survive it and get somewhere better.” Even as a phantom, Sanji said this too casually.

  Was there somewhere better? Here, inside the dream? Sometimes Sanji had taken her to the lab garden, to the apple tree that grew there, but always after a session in the blood room, so that the gardens, for all their peace and comfort, were tinged red, and she could not even see them for the turmoil raging inside. How could Sanji take her to the garden then? How could Sanji not see what that did to her?

  “But me?” Sanji said. “I was already lost. It was already too late for me. I had put too much of me into you. And I could not reach my companions—the satellites were gone. I had no choice but to trust in you.”

  By this, the Strange Bird realized that Sanji back at the laboratory must be dead, and had been dead many months, or maybe longer, for time moved so differently for the Strange Bird now that she could not tell if she was having these made-up conversations scant hours after the Magician had transformed her, or many years later.

  Here she had not even the clue of a slit of sunlight looking out on a dune. Here, she had only what she sought to push away: the number of operations the Magician had performed on her since her capture. Three or four? To make the cloak perfect. To make her perfect. Five or six or seven?

  Perched there on the island, no longer bounded by four glass walls but only water that went on endless, like the world, the Strange Bird could sometimes pretend to know.

  Sometimes, too, she would search the faces of the children who still crowded around the stone table during her operations—for some sign, not just of sympathy but remembrance, a spark in the eyes that said they had been witness to her mutilation, that someone besides the Magician still understood that once she had not been this rag of flesh.

  There was also the beacon probing, probing and hidden inside of her, that the Magician, through carelessness or other defect, had not found and thus not silenced.

  She could not trust telling the time by the children, though, even as their features were transformed by the Magician’s modifications, when they came to resemble Charlie X and were less like themselves. Because the truth was, the children came and went and they were never the same children or the same transformations and so this, too, was unreliable, only a way to keep track of how far along the Magician might be in her plans in the moment, and when she had suffered setbacks or was raging in her triumph.

  What time was it? Time for the Magician to take her out of the closet and wear her into the world.

  “You are the best of us,” Sanji said. “You are better than all of us. I’ve made sure of it. I know the way is long and I know it will be dangerous and you will be afraid. But you must keep trying, must fly on.”

  The last thing Sanji had said to her back in the lab. The very last thing. The worst thing, before the intruders.

  Be gone, the Strange Bird commanded Sanji, and the woman disappeared from the branch.

  But the glowing blue fox head remained, suspended in midair, facing her.

  The Strange Bird thought it odd the fox head never left that place, that it smiled at her with such ferocity and did not bend to her will. As if it were real and not just in her mind, and some days the puzzle of that was all she had left to cling to, in all of her confusion of time, lying exposed to the world so not herself, that she might as well not exist and thus wished that others did not exist.

  Then it would be another morning or ni
ght and she would be the Magician’s protection and secret and they would steal out into the city and on the worst or the best days everything would click into place and she would know the number of years it had been since she lost her wings and she would cry out silent and plead with the god the lab scientists had not believed in that she be able to go back to the place where she could not tell the time at all. The god that nonetheless the lab chaplain had invoked when consecrating the experiments, as if it made a difference to the Strange Bird. For what was anyone who would allow such a place if not a monster?

  * * *

  More years passed, much of it spent on the island, that a yearning to end herself that she could not act on would not drive her far past madness to places worse still.

  She witnessed the rise of the Magician’s army and how the Magician betrayed Charlie X, such that his mice could not save him and he died out in the wastelands, next to an old well, staring up at the sky, looking exposed that far from his trapdoor refuge. How the mice spilled out of Charlie X’s throat in the end, and ran off into the long grass with such an exuberance and speed that she wondered what had bound them to Charlie X for so long, under such conditions.

  She experienced the same terror as the Magician when the Company created Mord proxies: normal-sized bears in Mord’s image, ones who could not fly but were vicious and preternaturally strong … and how little time it took the Magician to adjust. She saw how much the Magician loved and hated the remnants of the Company. She realized that the Magician would do anything to rule the city, take any risk. That she considered it her right and destiny. That the Magician was alone in that, no matter how many stood beside her.

  By then, the Strange Bird’s beacon had grown weaker and weaker, a thready pulse, and some days she would wake blind and only the Magician’s constant needles, the release of foul liquids into her skin, would revive her. She had by then half forgotten what the beacon meant, or that it might once have been a compass leading her southeast.

  Finally, there came the days when she gave up so much of herself, when she relaxed into nothing so perfectly that the comfort was too painful. As the pulse failed the knowledge of this thing existing within her, reminding her of a different life, was worse than if it had been pulled out of her by the Magician at the start.

  The Blue Fox

  And yet. Yet. Beyond the end of her story, of herself … there came one day the patter of quick paws in her head.

  A familiar scent and a calling out to her, to the beacon inside, which was embers now, slowly cooling. The island lay encased in winter ice and no trees grew there. The chessboard, not an ocean, surrounded the island, and the animals on the squares were frozen, even the crocodiles, and their expressions set in agony. She could not keep it straight. She could not conjure up Sanji. The Old Man and Charlie X crept up in the shadows on the far side of the island and she could not stop them.

  Yet there came this distant patter, this scrabbling and digging and from above the blue fox head that still floated above the island smiled and looked down and gave her the light she could not give herself, as if the true sun. What new thing was this, or was it old? Clustered behind the fox’s eyes she knew now peered down many foxes, some of them familiar from the dune outside the Old Man’s prison.

  The blue fox head spoke in yips and barks. They did not speak in what was recognizable as speech, but still she knew the meaning.

  We cannot help you, but we can track you, if the beacon still burns, and it will stop pulsing if you die, and you are close to death.

  With this message came a welter of images the Strange Bird had to pick through to understand—their struggle, their planning, how they had escaped the Company, how they had their own vision for the city and how the Magician was their enemy. It took time to piece this together.

  Do you understand?

  There, under the moonlight, imprisoned by the Old Man, the Strange Bird had let them into her mind, and they had never really left. They could track her, but not help her, and she did not care that they could not help her. No one could help her, but it was enough that they could track her. That if she held on, they would know where she traveled at all times. That if she consciously allowed them in, the signal would grow strong. That she must not die, that she must let them in.

  Yes, she said. Yes, I understand, and realized her fondest memory, one of her only good memories, was the cheer and mischief of the foxes on the dunes so long ago.

  The ice melted from the island and Charlie X and the Old Man receded and the chess squares with their terrible cargo became the ocean again and the blue fox head smiled down and warmed her tired and forgotten soul.

  * * *

  Now as the Magician went about her war, her task of conquering the city, the Strange Bird could feel the foxes beside her, shadowing. They were the creatures from the broken places. They were the insurgents that no one could see. They schemed in the desert and danced and yipped for the joy of it because they were free and no one saw that they meant their dance to be the city’s dance and for the city to be free. That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt.

  She took hope in this as the Magician fought the Mord armies, fell back, lost the observatory after an ill-fated offensive, retreated underground to make her child warriors more fearsome still. The alterations ever more vicious and ever more meaningless; Mord’s army was all predator, and their instincts created no hesitation, and their bloodlust could not be contained, and their questing, snuffling progress through building after building, trying to root out the Magician’s mutants, left no trace behind, because they ate the dead and cracked their marrowed bones.

  The Magician became more isolated, alone, lonely. She became more paranoid. They moved quick and traveled light, and never spent a second night in the same place.

  She spoke to the Strange Bird more and more, not knowing that the Strange Bird betrayed her now just by living.

  “Their monster is out in the city, spreading havoc, but I will let Mord deal with him. Their monster is young and knows so little,” and the Strange Bird knew she spoke of what she called “Wick’s creation,” Borne, the one Rachel had kept close, the creature that could change shape and size and the Magician suspicious of even her most trusted lieutenants among the children. For now she put them through all sorts of tests before she would allow them close, and even at times hesitated before putting on her living cloak.

  “Mord must tire. Mord must falter. I will bring him low just by outwaiting him,” the Magician would say, and the Strange Bird knew from the puzzled tone that it was the Company that had taken away Mord’s ability to fly, not the Magician, that his rage at being earthbound was directed at the wrong enemy.

  “They’ll never leave the Balcony Cliffs without a push,” she would say, and the Strange Bird knew she worried at the redoubt created by Wick, so it was no surprise when she gave Wick up to Mord’s army and they were flushed out.

  “When this is over, I will rebuild the city in such splendor no one will recognize it from before. There will be trees and schools and libraries and grocery stores and all the ordinary things a city should have,” the Magician said, and the Strange Bird would ignore her, for this was the speech she gave to her child army, the vision she laid out for them even while her head was full of dead worms and living spiders and more corpses than Charlie X had never known.

  The Strange Bird was just a filthy old rag by then, draped across the Magician’s shoulders, but even as a rag there would be no convincing her of the Magician’s grace or mercy.

  The Magician left piles of skulls behind her now and burned bodies, and the altered children that had once followed from an ecstatic bloodlust and killing joy now obeyed out of a taut fear—and the Magician preferred it that way.

  The Last Days

  Then a thing happened that confused the Strange Bird, for despite the desperate hope brought to her by the foxes, she was faded and dull and worn, had bee
n through too much, kept enduring beyond what any living being should have to endure. She could not see well or hear or smell. She had only the echo of voices in her head, and the hope that among those voices the foxes still spoke to her.

  So the Strange Bird could only feel what happened from the steel intensity of the Magician’s body, how one moment she was relaxed and the next she held herself stiff and still and must be sore from the way that her muscles were so rigid, her shoulders so set, and the injury at the core of her, the shock. Then the frantic flight, the running down stairs, through tunnels, the chill of the underground and not of the light. That she spoke to no one around her as she hurried, because there was no one to speak to, which must mean the children were gone, in hiding, or defeated, and everywhere, surrounding her, the Mord proxies.

  South they went after that, the beacon within told the Strange Bird. South and further south, so that she knew their destination must be the Company building, while the foxes pulled at the frayed edges, urging her to wake up, so the beacon would pulse more strongly. Even as her initial surge of hope had faded with her health and it was less and less a matter that concerned her, locked inside her own brain, and she drifted, drifted, expected that she might soon wash up on a hillside beside Charlie X and perhaps be glad of it.

  Twice, as the Magician approached the Company building, they fled Mord proxies, who meant to force them north and west and out of the city. The reek of them penetrated even to the Strange Bird with her failing senses, and just as they reeked they could smell even the faintest scent of the Magician, or so she thought, and so stopped to rub mud on her face and offal on her boots, to throw them off.