But it wasn’t Wick’s safe house—instead it was a safe house of the Magician’s that Wick had discovered several months ago, and in that sense not safe at all. Besides, even broken and recessed, to the careful eye it still formed a visible landmark on the horizon.
I had only fragments in my head of what had happened after Mord’s attack—glancing, stabbing memories of falling over, staggering up, of Wick dragging me, of sliding down into the ravine, of hiding there, while Mord strode inexorable past the ravine and into the distance as if he’d never meant to harm us, and maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed us. Perhaps Mord had just been there as a shock to the system, to smash his feet into the ground, bring all the vermin out of hiding. But the Mord proxies prowled near, too, and soon enough we were running through the dead broken trees, through the peculiar gray-and-black rubble that made it seem like the surface of some alien planet. I’d run until I was too weak, whatever shock had suppressed my pain and animated me gone, and I hopped and shuffled and Wick led me along, encouraged me forward. Until I’d fallen unconscious not far from our temporary shelter.
The pack held the usual and no more than the usual: survival rations, a knife, a canteen for water, a couple of shirts, an ancient first-aid kit, a battered pair of binoculars, a gun without bullets, a compass, a few ancient protein bars I could tell already would be as hard as Mord’s fangs.
Wick laid it out in a row like an offering to the god of the cistern.
“Food for a week,” Wick said. “Water forever. Well, at least for a lot longer than the food.”
I had to lean over and turn to hear him, my poor other ear torn and blistered, registering his speech as a faint, hollow clattering.
“Food for two weeks if we go down to one meal a day,” I said.
“Dangerous. We’re already weak.”
“Can we carry this place around with us on our backs while we forage for food?”
“We can’t stay here anyway. I can’t stay here,” Wick said.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“My medicine—those nautilus pills. I need them or I’ll die.”
I just stared at him; it was the most naked thing he’d said to me and until now his dependence had been an abstract thing, lodged only in my head. Mord’s foot was falling again, about to crush me, and Wick alongside me.
“The only place that I might find more is in the Company building,” Wick said. “You should head north, try to make it back to the city, while I head south.”
“You’ll go south and I’ll go north. When did you decide this for us?”
“Or you could stay here and wait it out until I return.”
I snorted at that. “Stay here and wait for the proxies to come and surround this place and kill me? Or the Magician to escape them and drop by? Or any old marauder who sniffs out the water?”
“Then north,” Wick said.
“Stay here and die in the dark with the snails or try for the north and die in the light? Leave you to your fate? I don’t think so.”
But Wick wasn’t done surprising me. He pulled an envelope out of his pants pocket. The envelope was the size of those that people used to send letters in and thick enough to hold five or six sheets of paper. It was filthy with dried sweat and stains and ground-in dirt, had been folded and unfolded several times. He had not written it here, at the cistern. He had written it well before we’d left the Balcony Cliffs and carried it around with him.
“I lied,” Wick said. “I didn’t just bring a bean out of the Balcony Cliffs. Here, take it.”
But I didn’t take it, looked at it suspicious. Nothing had ever seemed more like a trap to me.
“What is it?”
“A letter to you. From me.”
“You forgot your medicine but you took this?”
“The letter was in my pocket. The medicine was in my pack.”
“I don’t want to read it,” I said.
“That’s a lie,” Wick said in a teasing tone. He even smiled. “You do want to read it. Everything is in there, everything I never told you because I couldn’t. But you need to know. If I don’t come back from the Company, read it.”
Wick was light, was making light, because he was: All the weight of him was in that letter, and he was putting it on me.
“There’s only one problem with that, Wick—I’m coming with you. I’m not leaving you.”
“Read the letter first, before you make that decision.”
“No.”
“Take the letter.”
“No.”
He held out the letter.
“No. What if you get sicker along the way? You’ll never even reach the Company building.”
“Why are you making things difficult again?”
“I’m not being difficult. I’m being clear. After you just saved my life, after everything else … you thought you could make me leave you. But it’s not that easy, Wick. I won’t make it that easy.” I snatched the letter from his hand. “So I’ll take your letter, but you can’t stop me from going south with you.”
Wick was quiet then, gathering himself. A quiver of some strong emotion passed through him. But I didn’t reach out to him or acknowledge, knew that if I did confirm the weakness at the heart of him, he would break into fragments. That maybe, too, the letter was the best of him or the worst.
“If we go into the Company,” Wick said, “you may see things you don’t want to see. It won’t be what you expect.”
I laughed, but not without affection. “Oh, Wick, how would that be any different than now?” I was tired of talking things out. I wanted to be on our way, gone south, out of this temporary shelter that in the end would just betray us anyway.
“If we travel together, don’t read the letter unless I’m dead.”
“That doesn’t give me much reason to keep you alive.”
He snickered at that, and I nudged him in the ribs, and he dropped the subject.
But I think the trust Wick was looking for wasn’t about when I might read the letter but something deeper. The truth was, I would never tell him if I read the letter. Wick would never know when I read the letter.
He would only know whether I stayed beside him or abandoned him.
* * *
In that temporary shelter, such simple things took on such significance. The way Wick held his head to the side, as if he lacked the strength, propped up against the wall, to sit straight. The many old scars on his hands and arms that came from the bites of his insect biotech. The exposed skin of his neck that had a tautness and a kind of naked honesty that made me want to kiss him there. The way he looked at me direct from that point on, as if we were only a few steps from the end of the world, and he wanted to fix me in memory.
I took off my clothes and used a rag dipped in the well water to clean myself. I washed out my clothes and let them dry on a rock jutting from the wall. Then I told Wick to take off his clothes and I cleaned him as well, washed the grime from his face, gently caressed the bruises and scratches on his body, ran my hands over his chest, his back, his legs.
When we were both clean, I laid my head on his lap there beside the shallow well, and looked up at the moss and cool stones above our heads, and for a long time I said nothing, did nothing, just listened as he talked about the Balcony Cliffs and how much he wished he had managed to hold on to his pack as we escaped through the air duct, how that would make our choices now so different, and how balanced against the fear and loss was the twinge of relief he felt, that without the Balcony Cliffs there was so much less the Magician could do to us, and how clever the Mord proxies must have been to overcome our defenses. This last was Wick trying to be optimistic, trying to hold on to a bit of self-respect, that absolved us in at least a small way.
“This place would’ve been easier to defend than the Balcony Cliffs,” Wick said.
“And takes fewer bears to overrun,” I pointed out.
Just a twinge, wondering what would happen if Borne went back to
the Balcony Cliffs and discovered us gone, driven out.
“But there’s nothing here worth overrunning.”
Except the water. Almost anyone might kill for that.
“The Balcony Cliffs was too big for us anyway,” I said.
“Yes, much too big, and full of bears.”
“Infested with bears.”
“Clogged and clotted with bears. This place is bear-free.”
“So far.”
“So far,” Wick agreed.
The bears had been clever, smart, patient. They must have been listening up top, buried in the moss, quiet and hibernating, and aware of our movements, to know where the traps lay, where our fortifications were strong and where weak. Even though this made little sense, even though we had been taken by blind fury and overwhelming speed and force of will, by a disrespect for casualties, and might never untangle just how thoroughly we had failed—and if we had been sold out by the Magician, one of Wick’s clients, or someone else.
Yet there was more to it than that. It was hard for me not to relive the moment of impact—the initial smashing impact of Mord creating an earthquake with no warning, and then the way the air had been sucked away, while at the same time pushing out again to buffet me. The way the sky had spun and gone away and there was only Mord and the certain knowledge I’d be crushed to death.
But Wick was somewhere else, had been circling different memories of Mord, laying the groundwork, thinking the words that might get him to other words he didn’t quite know how to let out of his mouth. Until they just came out, in a rush.
Wick had known Mord at the Company better than he’d let on; you could say they’d been friends. “He liked bird-watching and we ate lunches together and he read so many books. He was curious about so many things.” And because of this, I gleaned from Wick’s confession, Mord had done many different tasks for the Company, even leading a team that studied the chaos in the city—the dysfunction they’d created—and how to overcome it, how to rebuild. “But that was a joke—the Company was already failing and losing perspective. The people in charge, cut off from headquarters, began to get strange ideas.”
There came through then, in Wick’s need to speak, to get this out of his system, a cascade of grotesque images—of “strange ideas” more monstrous than Mord, some of which I had glimpsed in pictures back in his apartment. Digging gap-jawed leviathans that ate the soil and vomited it back out, transformed but also cleansed of whatever had lived there previous. Flying creatures with many wings that blotted out of the sun and patrolled the skies and killed anyone who opposed the Company. Among other ideas that seemed deranged and terrifying and more like someone’s idea of how to torture the city.
But none of it had gotten past the planning stages … except Mord.
“When the fish project failed,” Wick said, “they abandoned the city rebuild as well. They put Mord in an experimental division. As a kind of punishment.” They blamed him for the fish project, even though it wasn’t his fault, while the Magician suffered not at all. “None of us could have withstood what he was subjected to then, Rachel, what he was selected for.” Was that true? Or was Mord always susceptible? I didn’t think Wick had the perspective to know. “He could still speak and understand as they modified him and kept modifying him, until it drove him mad.” The only outlet, the only relief: to keep a record, which Wick had smuggled out in a broken telescope through another employee after Wick left the Company. Along with the plans that had helped Wick become someone who “made” biotech, or at least modified it.
There was more, but no matter how Wick tried to articulate it, some things can only be understood when experienced, and I had not experienced what Wick had experienced inside the Company.
Today, Mord had tried to kill us by crushing us under his tread. Today, he was several stories tall and a monster. Wick was grappling with this, with the shock as much as I was, the wrenching dislocation of trying to make two separate worlds match up, the one that was normal and the one that was grotesque, the old and the new—the struggle to make the mundane and the impossible coexist just as it seemed impossible I had ever trailed my fingers through the water of a pond to let the little fish nibble or watched mudskippers through a school-yard fence or eaten at a fancy restaurant.
He could still speak and be understood.
The truth was, I didn’t want Mord to be more like us. I wanted him to be less like us. To be able to say when he murdered, when he pillaged, that he was a psychotic beast, a creature without the possibility of redemption, with no humanity in him. I wanted something to be the same in the old world as in the new.
So I listened in silence and I nodded and made noises like I understood. Yet my attention was elsewhere. The letter burned. It was like a grenade, there in my pocket, and only I could determine when it would go off. Was Wick telling me this, allying himself with Mord, to prepare me for something in the letter? Or was he telling me this to lessen the impact of the letter? Or was this one last attempt to dissuade me from coming with him?
We did not discuss the letter again, or the plan to go south. That was already set, and Wick knew better than to bring it up again.
* * *
That night, evidence came to us from near and far. In the middle of the night, I needed some air and I needed to piss, and we had no bucket. So I snuck out, a scrap of shadow, and squatted over a lucky clump of weeds near the ancient stones. A painful stance with all my bruising.
Way back in the direction of the Balcony Cliffs I could see cracklings of flame licking out over the tops of rocks and trees, and to the northeast and the west other fires had broken out—as if the action taken against us had been part of something larger. Much of the center of the city from that vantage seemed in dispute, but who fought, whose fortunes rose and fell, and in what neighborhoods, lay hidden from me.
I was finishing up when I noticed the perfect stillness of the night, which I had put down to my impaired hearing but might mean something more. I stood, quickly buttoned my pants, climbed up the cistern stones as best as I was able, and searched for hints of movement out in the night. It was all twisted bands of black: the branches of the dead, deformed forest at a slant down to the dead plain that preceded the Company building. Between the trees, for a long distance, patches of lighter shadow shone in the dim light, the clouds above almost blue-violet.
Nothing appeared, nothing moved, but I was patient, let my gaze drift. From the top of the cistern, so much territory spread out below that anything moving there would be in sight for quite some time.
Then, down through the forest, to where it leveled out before one last gentle slope—a rippling of invisible turbulence, a kind of rising through the air as of steam that manifested across those lighter patches. I could not be sure, but my instincts told me someone was running at great speed down the slope and had been visible from that angle for some time. Even if I couldn’t see them. And you only ran like that if you were being pursued.
So I followed a line back from the flustered air, and maybe two hundred feet back up the slope, I found a coarse, moving river, too familiar. Too much like fur. A silent bounding and a wraithlike darkness, a surging, churning bloodlust, all bear in its reckless but joyful trajectory. At least three proxies, in pursuit of … what?
Their prey had lost a step on them, I saw, had stopped as if to think, that whirlpool of shadow, and then a swift turn on the heel toward new coordinates farther south. The shimmer against the trees reminded me of someone.
Then it was all just silence and movements I could not make sense of, and I went back inside.
To my surprise, Wick waited for me, standing as if he had never been asleep. The light from the well water washed over him in shades of electric blue.
“Mord proxies,” I said.
Wick nodded.
I didn’t tell him I thought the Magician might be out there, headed south like us. Even free of the Balcony Cliffs, I felt if he knew he might be influenced in a way bad for both of us.
As we packed, Wick said, “You need to figure out what you want to be after. Other than a scavenger.”
“After what?” I asked.
But he never told me.
WHO WE MET ON THE DESOLATE PLAIN
We headed south, staking our hope on the idea of the Company building as our salvation. In our belief we were now no different than those acolytes who had worshipped Mord. Our rituals and our words were just different. Wick talked of his special knowledge of a side entrance near the two holding pools abutting the Company building. Wick assured me that with Mord now based in the north, the ruined levels would have already been picked clean and the scavengers moved on to other places. I humored him, although it felt less like a plan than the only thing we could do.
“Do you know how to get into the levels below?”
“Yes. Mord showed me, when he was still human.”
“Isn’t that old intel?”
“Nothing has changed.”
Hadn’t it? Wick spoke in such alchemies and distillations of hope that I couldn’t pick out the facts from the fictions, or which he told me to reassure himself.
Deep, deep night we traveled through, in a no-man’s-land between the city proper and the Company building, having exhausted the stretch of dead woods. This expanse had been seeded with biotech by the Company long ago, and over time abandonment had driven the traps deep; if we were lucky we would not set off any living land mines. For now, the buffer zone seemed lifeless except where precarious or perilous life emerged: a kind of mud flats without mud where the broken-up concrete foundations from dwellings long gone shifted beneath a cracked surface of salt and the miasma of pollutions far distant in time. Runoff seeped up through the ground from storage far below. If you were wise, you did not seek out the watering holes created by the runoff, or drink the essence of the once-living, expressed as spontaneous gouts of thick, oily liquid.
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