Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I told him stories because this made me forget, too, for whole minutes, the truth of our predicament, pushed out against the walls to give us more space. To be truly safe we should have been silent—we did not know what or who could hear us up ahead, or what might follow behind—but to be silent in that darkness seemed the final reduction of self and I would not accept that. I still had a voice. This was not some afterlife. I was not dead. Wick was not dead.

  I told tales of improbable scavengers, of the best biotech finds. I told stories my parents had told me about the origins of the world, of how the earth had once been carried on the back of a sea turtle. I told the tale of shark deities and island men and women who became trees or birds to outwit monsters. I told stories of my adventures in the city, even though Wick had heard them all before. And when I faltered, when a gloom overtook me and I needed to stop, Wick would take up for me, in his worn, ethereal voice, telling me a legend about the city or some rumor he’d heard about the Magician or something he remembered about Mord.

  We spoke between the deepest breaths we could manage, because the air only became staler and thicker, and we both felt as if it was hard to focus, experienced dizziness, and stumbled in our sideways lurch forward. There came, too, a sense of being trapped in a coffin that was moving with me, and only the scrape of our clothing, a snag of elbow against the walls, would remind me this was untrue.

  Then came the moment I couldn’t move forward any more, tripped over my pack, stubbed my toe, and came to rest there, legs half bent, hands on my thighs.

  “Why have you stopped?” Wick’s voice sounded weaker.

  I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want him to know. That we’d failed, that we were done, and I didn’t think I had the strength to go back. That it seemed as if we were trapped again in the air vent at the Balcony Cliffs, that we’d never escaped and everything else had been a delusion.

  “There’s a wall in front of me, Wick,” I said.

  I had wanted to be a ghost once, and now I might get that wish. Except I could feel all too much. I was grimy with sweat and the gravel from the wall and my legs were shaky, my hips so sore.

  Wick had felt my trembling for some time, but he remained surprisingly steady.

  “Climb,” Wick said.

  “There’s no light up there. No hint of a draft. If we climb and nothing’s there…”

  We would fall, or worse, be embraced by the rock. The walls were so close you couldn’t get the proper leverage to shimmy up them. Our effort would exhaust us, wring from our muscles any last effort, and at a certain point we wouldn’t be able to control our legs, our arms. Then there would be no calamitous fall. Instead, we would drop in a slow simulation of mortal injury, buffeted and torn by the walls that held us close, lowered us in agony, would not allow us to just fall into the ground, dash out our brains. We would be so weak that even our meager chance of getting back out would become impossible. Who knew how long we would lie broken and dying in the dark?

  “Climb,” Wick said, and I knew he was admitting to me he didn’t have the strength to turn back, either.

  So we climbed into the darkness and did not look down because we could never return to down, and prayed to whatever gods we didn’t believe in that there would be a light above. Any kind of light.

  WHAT WE FOUND IN THE WRECKAGE OF THE COMPANY

  I had told Wick a lie about Borne early on, because by the time it meant something … it didn’t matter. This was before I had taken Borne out into the city for the first time. Wick and I had been arguing about whether Borne might be a weapon, and I had told Wick there were no indications that Borne was a weapon. But Borne had said that he might be a weapon, in another late-night conversation—the kind I initiated when I couldn’t sleep or the kind that woke me up when I could.

  Borne had been talking to himself again: “I don’t feel like a weapon. I do not look like other weapons. Maybe I was meant to be a weapon, but I came out wrong. I don’t even know where the word weapon came from. I did not have it before. Weapon weapon weapon. Weapon? Wea-pon. Wea. Pon. Weh. Apon.” Digesting the word before it could colonize him.

  His eyes morphed to spikes or ridges and he made himself into a miniature green-blue sea spread out across my floor, the ridges frozen waves.

  “Rachel,” Borne said, “I know you’re not asleep.”

  Of course he knew. My eyes were open and he’d already proven to me more than once that he had preternatural night vision.

  “Where did you learn the word weapon?” I asked. Borne was used to me asking where he’d learned something, even though he learned many things from me.

  “Oh, you know,” Borne said. “You know—the usual places.”

  “The usual places?”

  “Here and there, hither and yon.”

  I decided that line of inquiry was useless because he was reverting to the language of children’s books. I sincerely regretted gifting him so many children’s books.

  “I doubt you’re a weapon,” I said, drowsy. “You’re too silly to be a weapon.”

  “A weapon can’t be silly?”

  “No,” I confirmed. When I thought about it later, I realized most weapons were silly or silly-looking, just in a different way.

  “But what if I am, Rachel?”

  “Then I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know what? How to stop me? If I am a weapon, won’t you have to stop me? In the books, they’re always stopping weapons.”

  That felt serious. What books? So I sat up in bed, and I became serious. As much as I influenced Borne, he influenced me, so raising myself up in bed and becoming serious felt like changing my shape and making my eyes different.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I said. Another trick I had was making Borne focus on key words—vocabulary I had introduced. Usually, Borne would enter a spiral of repeating the word in different contexts. But not this time.

  “But how would you stop me?” Borne asked. “How?”

  I didn’t want to think about that question, not there in my apartment, in bed, right next to Borne.

  “How do you stop other weapons?” Borne asked, pressing. “Have you killed people to stop them? How do you do that?”

  “Let’s assume you’re not a weapon,” I said. “You’re not a weapon but something amazing and wonderful and useful instead. Discover what that amazing thing is, and then try to be that thing.”

  But I couldn’t sleep after that, vaguely worried. Yet what did Borne know? We were all weapons of some kind. We were all weaponized in our way.

  “Am I a person or a weapon?” Always, he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, “You’re not a person.”

  “You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”

  Now, as Wick and I made our way up toward what we hoped was the light, I remembered that conversation, and part of hoping there was light was also hoping for what I never would have wished for in the past.

  That Borne was a weapon. That no matter what happened to us in that moment of staring into the light, I wanted him not just to be a good weapon but a great weapon. The kind of weapon that could defeat Mord.

  * * *

  But there was no light, because we had been stuck in the crack-passage until almost dusk. We found only a hole, as if left over from the Balcony Cliffs, and were glad for it, cackled to find it and the fresh air blowing out tepid there. Cackled and wiped our filthy faces of dirt and cobwebs, pushed up and out with our last strength to lie next to the huge yellowing vertebrae of some dead beast and, on the other side, a white plaster model of a bear’s head, which made Wick giggle silently, holding his side.

  “Oh, Rachel,” he gasped. “Oh, Rachel.”

  The luxury of such space, of being able to stretch out, to breathe such new air—it was too much oxygen at once, too much freedom.

  We were looking up at a deep blue sky fading into gray, cloudless, with the dead
moon coming into focus. There was a thin but pervasive briny stink that even the wind whipping across couldn’t quite relieve. The smell came from the leviathan Mord had killed, whose vertebrae snaked through the wreckage around us.

  Nothing moved in that place unless touched by the wind. The stillness of everything but us seemed unnatural, and yet nothing jumped out to attack us. It was just an abandoned building and every kind of debris lay around us, from twisted, broken equipment to the remnants of tents and other signs that the Company employees had been like squatters toward the end. All the makeshift last-stand minutia of their days.

  What came to us with the wind was the only sound, as if brought to us from the past when Mord had destroyed the Company building. But Mord had moved on to hating Borne. We could hear him roaring, and the roaring of the other behemoth, and underlying one roar anger and underlying the other some sense of bewilderment, as if one participant still did not know the other’s true nature. This sound—clear, distant, insistent—came from the north, and by this sign we knew that Mord and Borne still fought.

  While we two sacks of flesh lived amid the damage Mord had inflicted on the Company. We were both so covered in grime that Wick looked to me like some cave creature exhumed and brought to the surface not after a day but after years and years. If Mord had still flown, could have observed from above, he would have seen two tiny scraps of meat not worth the effort of killing, lying amid a vast sea of upheaval and disorder bounded by walls that still stood high enough to block us from seeing out. Scraps of meat so delighted with our survival, so deliriously happy in our weakness.

  But Wick was weaker than me. Every muscle in my body might quiver and tingle, my side and back aflame from the friction with the crack-passage wall, but I hadn’t been mauled by a bear.

  I propped Wick up against that mighty vertebrae, rummaged through the pack for whatever aid I could find. Bandages, a painkiller in pill form, some disinfectant.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said, his voice a rasp pulled along a silver thread. “I’m fine.”

  But he wasn’t fine. His hands trembled and his face had a look hooded by shadow that didn’t come from dust, and neither did the yellowish cast under his eyes. The claw marks across his shoulder formed bloated gouges scabbing over but ripe. They bulged as if about to burst. I would have to clean the wounds and dress them, even if I couldn’t take the poison from his system.

  “This will hurt,” I said—pointlessly from the way Wick looked at me. Good. He was alert enough to be annoyed.

  Nor did he cry out as I did what I had to, even though I was ripping at his skin, then pouring fire over it, then wrapping up his shoulder, although not too tight so the skin wouldn’t stick to the bandage. We did not speak about what the wound meant, the possible phases of the venom working through him.

  I gave him a sip of water from our canteen, took some myself, and we sat there for a long moment against the backbone of Mord’s fallen enemy. I was too tired to interpret the stillness in any other way than that we were safe for the moment. But if I hadn’t just come out of a crack in the floor, a place I’d expected to die in, I might have realized the stillness indicated control. The lack of scavengers indicated control. Someone or something ruled this place, despite the sense of abandonment.

  “Do you know where to go from here?” I asked. We had no choice but to plunge on if we were able. My hope now was to find not just Wick’s medicine here but something for the venom.

  “Yes,” Wick said. “If the door hasn’t been buried beneath leviathan bones or girders.”

  There came again a hint of the bellowing from the city, the impression through the loud whisper of powerful voices that the outcome lay in doubt.

  “Whenever you are able,” I said, even though the idea of getting up was like reaching for a land remote and mythical while lying in quicksand.

  “Now,” Wick said, and, gritting his teeth, steadied himself with one hand on the ground and stood.

  I followed, felt dizzy, almost fainted, recovered, the pack swaying like a heavy pendulum from my hand. Wick grabbed my wrist, pulled me the rest of the way up, wincing from the effort.

  “We’re almost there,” he said. “I know the door will still be there.”

  All of our words, everything we said to each other in that place, was so functional, as if it was too late when you came this close to death, to an ending. That anything else we could have said to each other had needed to have been said in the past, before we knew the future.

  * * *

  We found so many signs of abandonment as Wick led me across that broken maze, those puzzle pieces of ripped-out walls and long-forgotten desks stacked like firewood, the spine and skeletal limbs of the leviathan lying over the top like an impotent guardian. The impromptu mounds of papers, covered in ash. The little tents dotting that landscape, with evidence of campfires nearby, and always centered around abandoned laboratories, open to the air, often crushed but with what lay around them undamaged as if Mord had wanted to pay them special attention. Every so often: the husks of dead bodies, under beams or just huddled in corners. This place had been dysfunctional and half destroyed long before Mord had ripped the roof off. Not so much civil war between factions as a rising chaos.

  Most unnerving: bears, everywhere. Photos and pictures of bears, ripped, water-worn, tacked to walls. Crude sculptures of bears, the busts of bears. Bears running, walking, on their haunches, diagrams of bears clearly meant to feed into creating the Mord proxies, all of them thankfully fading into shadow and gloom as night passed its dark hand over us. The extent to which the surviving Company employees had joined the cult of Mord was apparent—or the depths of their need to solve a problem that had no solution. They’d labored here using what knowledge they had left to serve Mord, desperate to serve Mord, and in the end he’d destroyed them anyway.

  * * *

  In the end, too, there was no magic door, and seeking the lower levels was like being drunk on weakness and sickness and injury and holding each other up just long enough to keep on searching through collapsed ceilings and unstable supporting walls and all the choking dust, less and less concerned when we found yet another corpse.

  For Wick it was like a homecoming to a place he had wanted to see destroyed—but only by him. That anyone else had destroyed it was intolerable, and I only cheered on this emotion in Wick because it lit a fire under him, made him burn purer, cleaner, for a while.

  We went through the stages now of both our search and Wick coming to terms with the wreckage of the Company building. That the place he had been estranged from no longer existed as it had in his imagination, that the people who had lived so large in his mind had probably been dead for years. Lapsing into being mere employee once again, as if a place made the man instead of the man his place.

  As we wandered purposeful, this realization that nothing was as he had hoped for fueled his search, which became a search for the familiar, for the thing changed from when he knew it. While the other knowledge, of passing time, of a clock ticking, came to us through Borne—Borne versus Mord, and how I knew that might make everything else meaningless, even as I helped Wick descend deeper into an unmoving, uncaring maelstrom of junk, of the useless and the mysterious and sad. Soon, we would no longer hear Mord’s roaring, even faint, and we wouldn’t know if it was because we’d buried ourselves too deep or because Mord had won.

  “This was never here,” Wick muttered. “Why did they do that?”

  “This would have been useless,” Wick ranted. “If they ate that instead of using it, they would have been better off!”

  “Didn’t they know such a barricade would not hold?”

  Wick, teetering on the edge of being old, me getting a glimpse of a future him still trapped in the past. Neither of us had control over our monsters anymore.

  * * *

  When that time came, when we reached some threshold—some equation created by the haphazard combinations of girders, wa
lls, collapse, some multiplication of wood or metal or plastic—Wick stopped walking, looked around as if he’d heard a sound. But it was the sound of something having been taken away. Mord and Borne fought on, or they didn’t. But we could no longer hear them.

  Losing that sound made Wick lose that burst of energy needed to complain, to heckle the ruins, and without my clock I was left only with the continued impression of someone or something watching from some hidden vantage. A wearying prickling of my senses, forever on alert. But Wick no longer cared, or under the venom’s spell had lost that ability, and I had to tell him more than once to be quieter, to be slow not fast so we wouldn’t stumble, our passage an echoing racket.

  “It’s near, it’s near,” Wick said a few minutes later, on the scent. At least he had that much left.

  We reached the bottom of the collapse. When I looked up I could see a thickness, a depth to the maelstrom above us, which from that angle resembled a latticework created by a hurricane or earthquake. We had descended a tornado of debris. I can’t say I liked the idea of climbing back up that artificial ravine, but then I didn’t know if we’d get the chance.

  Then Wick was banging his fist on a ruptured door, which led to a stairwell filled in with rubble, and slapping the sides, bashing his forehead into the doorway. I had to stop him, hold down his grasping, scrabbling hands without hurting his shoulder.

  “What, Wick? What?”

  Wick was burning up—I could feel his fever through his palms, and he was sweating, and his eyes had recessed farther into his sockets and I could see a light deep in those eyes like points of deep red flame—intense, alive, but much too bright. His gaze was too fixed, and I wondered if he was losing his ability to see. The atrophied worm stitched into his shoulder had gone from bone-white to black and begun to liquefy into an oily substance that stained his shirt. He stank of that oil.

  “This was the place, Rachel,” Wick said, a terrible panic in his voice. “This place. It was down there. But Mord’s sealed it off. Mord’s sealed it off so we can’t get to it. He hates me. He wants to kill me. He wants to kill me. He wants to kill me.”