Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  * * *

  Wick, delirious. Wick, head full of cotton and razor blades, speaking to me from the bottom of an old well. Imagining Mord taking a personal interest where nothing personal lurked. Peering down into that closed-off chasm, all I saw was a space too dark and cool and dusty.

  “Listen to me, Wick,” I said. “Mord didn’t do that. Mord couldn’t have done that. It’s too precise and old. This doorway was blocked off a while back.” With too much intent.

  Wick slumped against the wall, head bowed, surrounded by all that useless salvage. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  I could see in the far-off flicker in his eyes the loss, the utter despair, at the idea of climbing back up, clawing our way through the crack-passage back to the holding ponds. He’d never make it in his condition. I didn’t know if I could, either.

  I splashed water in his face, even though we had so little. I made him take a sip from the canteen, open and eat an entire food packet, although only some of it stayed down.

  Then I left him there, protecting our pack, looking emaciated and old, with the shadow of a beard. He was staring off into space as if he needed to not be in the world for a time.

  While I looked for another way in. Because if the stairwell collapse was old, then perhaps with the shift of everything else, the piling on of catastrophe, some other entry point existed, might be revealed with a thorough search.

  I pulled away a table from the wall. Nothing. I peeked in the space between a wall and a broken column that must have plummeted here from a higher level. Again, nothing.

  Over and over again, nothing.

  Wick ever more distant.

  I thought of Borne, hiding things in closets. I ticked through Wick’s own hiding places, my preferences when I had to disguise some good salvage out in the field because it was too big to bring back without Wick’s help. I came up with nothing.

  “Wick,” I muttered, “you have to come out of it. You have to help me here.”

  Then I noticed the head of a fox staring out at me from about twenty feet away, protruding from the wall as if a trophy. First thought: The fox is ghosting through the wall, the fox is uncanny. I’m dying. This is a hallucination. There will be a white light soon, following behind.

  But then I realized I was looking at the fox peering out of a hole in the wall, and not so much the confirmation of fresh air below as air being pulled into that hole, and after the crack-passage, that hole would be more than sufficient … if it led the same place as the stairs.

  The fox disappeared. But we would be going down into her den. We would be following those teeth, those jaws, that bright, animal-wary stare.

  I considered that a moment.

  “Wick—come over here. Bring the pack,” I said.

  No response. He wasn’t far, but he’d sagged, as if sleeping, and when I went over I found he was barely conscious. Somehow I got him awake again, if delirious, made it clear we needed to go down into that hole. I told myself the nod he gave me meant he thought the hole might indeed lead to the same place as the stairs. I had a sick feeling in my stomach that wasn’t just hunger. Because I couldn’t know for sure. Because I don’t think Wick would have known if fully alert.

  But we weren’t going to climb back up. We weren’t going to stay where we were and wait to die. If I left Wick behind to explore, I couldn’t be sure I would make it back up. If I left Wick behind, I might never see him again, and he might die alone.

  “Wick, you understand, don’t you?” I was just speaking to reassure myself. “We have no real choice. I know you’re sick, but stay with me.” Stay with me, Wick, a little longer.

  Wick had to go first or I couldn’t nudge him awake or push him forward if he became comatose. The pack had to go in front of both of us given the tight fit.

  If we plummeted to the center of the earth, that might take care of all of our problems.

  WHAT LAY WITHIN THE COMPANY BUILDING

  We found the seventh level. The hole did lead there. We snuck in like mice, but in the dust the tracks of so many animals I would have guessed a menagerie or army had passed through there. Clandestine or not, that tunnel had been in use, but I saw no sign of the fox. We came out into a wide, high, featureless space with the blocked-off entrance behind us and an archway ahead leading to a warren of passageways and rooms.

  A sense of abandonment infected the corridor, the archway, even as a faint white glow from the walls hinted at an illumination via microorganisms that had faded over the years. An antiseptic smell had faded, too, or been driven out by the musty-sharp scent of animal fur. The place had a sense to it of something about to reanimate but stuck—that it would never quite come back to life. Yet there was also a kind of thrum or hum or subtle fracture-like vibration in the background.

  The room Wick hoped would help—with its stores of medicine—was only a corridor and a corner away. I propped Wick opposite the exit hole and followed his directions through the archway to the infirmary … only to find it ransacked. We had gotten there late. Whatever could be carted away had been taken—medical instruments, fixtures, chairs, even the tabletops.

  But I was thorough. In a forgotten corner, I found four of the nautilus pills. They looked old and shriveled. I gently picked them up with shaking hands and dusted them off. As ever, we would limp along, we would endure but not thrive, but I was grateful for that small mercy. One per month. I had bought Wick four months, maybe five, if he survived the venom. I took them along with the other dregs, just in case Wick could use them, too.

  I was only gone twenty minutes. When I returned, Wick still lay there. I got down on a knee and made him take the nautilus pill, which he reached for with gratitude, awareness, drawing in a deep breath.

  “It’s still down here. It’s all still down here,” he said, wheezing.

  “But someone plugged up that stairwell for a reason,” I said. That lost doorway, from this side, looked sealed with cement or stone. Someone had done a thorough job.

  “Did they?”

  Either he’d reclaimed a piece of his former self from the medicine or was more lucid because he had finally found an undamaged part of the Company, a place he recognized as home.

  “Is there anything else down here, Wick?” I asked. “Something I should know about?”

  “No,” Wick said. “Take as many supplies as we can and leave.”

  But that’s when I saw it—in the light. Over the animal tracks, over my boot prints and Wick’s, in that same dust, another pair of boot tracks. And no one else there with us in the corridor.

  “Who was here while I was gone, Wick?”

  “No one.”

  “No one?”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “Did you hear anyone?”

  Wick shook his head.

  There had been the sense of the level all around us as a vacuum bubble—no sound, so still and silent—and I had been lulled by the sudden generosity of air and space. But that feeling was gone now.

  I had only a knife on me. We had a desperate need for more supplies—food, water, anything the place could offer. I couldn’t take Wick with me, would be unable to drag him back to the hole if he lapsed again; he still had bear venom in him.

  And I knew this place, I realized as I ventured farther. I’d walked these halls before—and I told myself it was because of the Balcony Cliffs. The way that Wick, due to some hidden impulse or nostalgia, had mapped our excavations of the Balcony Cliffs almost one-to-one to this level of the Company building.

  Maybe I would never get to the bottom of Wick’s secrets.

  * * *

  I left Wick the knife. I brought him to the infirmary, hid him in a corner so he couldn’t be seen from the doorway. I put the pack beside him, made him put the remaining nautilus pills in his shirt pocket.

  I told Wick I would return soon, and I went exploring. I went to see what that place’s version of the swimming pool might look like. Would it be disgusting? But mostly I was following
the boot prints in the places where the dust revealed them and the light caught on their tread. I didn’t know if it was the right decision, but it was my decision.

  As I went, I picked up the audience I had expected when I had gone to the infirmary. With each room I passed or looked into, I saw further evidence of their plans and their dominion, their furtive steps joined mine. Two, then three, then six, keeping pace beside me, looking up at me in an unnerving way: The little fox that had followed Borne, or its twin. Mouth open, eyes glittering. And her companions, some of them in the guise of foxes and some not. All of these shadows in that shadowed land, and me feeling lucky I was just passing through. That they let me.

  I slipped through those hallways as easily as they did—like I belonged or like I’d been here before.

  But I couldn’t have been here before, could I?

  * * *

  I found her in what I will call the Hall of Mirrors. In another life, it would have held Wick’s swimming pool, with all that fecundity of created life. Instead, there was just an artificial cavern almost like an amphitheater, with a dull metal floor and stone walls and a rounded ceiling that disappeared into murky heights.

  At the far end: the half-light from a silvery wall. In front of the wall a track for some kind of vehicle had been pried up and stacked to the side while in front lay a chaotic pile of upended plastic crates that had spilled open. Like everything on that level, the Hall of Mirrors had a smoothed-out feel, a generic quality as if all built out of a kit. How many other Halls existed in different Company facilities?

  Off to the left side stood the Magician, contemplating that vision.

  I teetered between fight and flight, managed to quell both instincts.

  “Hello, Rachel,” she said, not turning around.

  I would never know if she meant to make herself visible to me or had no choice because her camouflage was dying. What had clothed her from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet now lingered and leaked as a kind of living cloak. It shared attributes with moths and chameleons and bird feathers. It whirred and sighed and clicked there on the Magician’s back, kept shifting and fluttering in a nervous way. It looked ragged and old and failing.

  I stepped closer, but not too close, my boots clacking on the metal floor.

  “Don’t you speak anymore?” the Magician asked, with a familiar note of imperious irritation. “Don’t you want to say something? Ask what this thing is, for example?” Gesturing at the silver wall.

  I didn’t want to look at the wall. I was afraid if I did, I’d lose sight of the Magician. I stepped closer, but still not too close. I could feel the lines of power, the traps waiting for me here, waiting for her here. I was well aware of the creatures at my back.

  Slowly my eyes adjusted to the peculiar quality of that light and to the Magician’s darkness. She stood straight as ever, but she looked rough, and there were smudges on the side of her face and her hair was wild. I wondered if she held herself so still because she was injured and didn’t want me to know.

  “I saw you on the plain,” I said. “I saw you fighting off a Mord proxy. You probably injured your cloak then.”

  “They have it in their furry heads I took away Mord’s wings,” the Magician said.

  “Didn’t you?”

  The Magician shrugged, weary, but with satisfaction in her voice. “Maybe Mord just didn’t want to fly anymore. Maybe he was tired of it.”

  “You were a fool to attack Mord,” I said.

  A twisted smile in the gloom, a predatory look. “I almost got away with it. I may still get away with it.”

  “Yes, it must be going well, your war with the proxies, for you to come all this way in person,” I said.

  “You sound like someone who doesn’t want Mord to die, Rachel.”

  “How long have you been following us?” I asked.

  I didn’t care about the answer; I only wanted to know what she planned to do. But I also wanted a little time to think about what I was going to do.

  That’s when she turned and I saw again her face, but now aged by a decade in just three years—hints of trauma, wear and tear, injuries. She had lost her bearings in some critical way, and I noticed, too, the trembling, the way she clenched her right hand as if making a fist against the pain. She was on the run—I knew the look by then. The Mord proxies had flushed her out around the time they’d attacked the Balcony Cliffs, I guessed, and things hadn’t gone well for her.

  “Long enough,” she said. “Since the cistern, let’s say. Since I gave the bears your scent over at the Balcony Cliffs, let’s say. But that’s not important. This,” she pointed at the silver wall, “is very important, however. Something fabled, something precious, a thing they never talk about in the city, because they barely talked about it inside the Company.”

  I saw that with her other hand she clutched something like a wireless control panel. She pushed a button.

  “So few memories that told me about this place,” she said. “But still the hint. The hint of it was enough to want it to be real.”

  The wall of silver became a river of silver raindrops and then a frozen scene so real I couldn’t accept I was looking at a kind of screen. It was like the holograms in the fancy restaurant from so long ago. But frozen on one scene, and one scene only.

  “I have to hand it to your Wick,” the Magician said. “He kept this from me, and I didn’t think he’d have the nerve. Or that he’d know about it in the first place. I wonder if he kept it from you as well. Do you know how much he has kept from you, Rachel?”

  The little foxes and their kin were slinking all around us by now and winking in and out of view as if slipping into and out of space, of time. She couldn’t see that she was surrounded by a congregation, that she was surrounded by people, of a kind. I had almost missed it myself, had misunderstood for too long.

  The Magician pointed to the screen again. “That’s where it all went. What it was all for. They sent supplies through to us. They took and took from the city, and we sent products back. Not through a railway system or an underground tunnel but through that.”

  It was a pretty-enough scene, from a place undamaged by war, untouched by ruination by the Company. It kept flickering, stayed frozen but never came back into focus. But I could tell it was whole and functional and rich, and all of the other things our city was not and might never be. But it also wasn’t real, and it wasn’t going to save us. Any of us. And I refused to give it agency, allow it into my reality.

  “Things haven’t gone into it for a few years,” the Magician said. “By the time I realized it might exist, this level was just a myth, a rumor. And might as well be now. Although they kept sending things through to us for a while, didn’t they? Like those”—gesturing at the boxes, what had dribbled out of them.

  I didn’t think the Magician had peered into the other rooms. She hadn’t seen even the little I’d seen, what else the fox and her companions had ransacked, brought out into the city or remade as their own. If she had seen all the tunnels dug into this level, from the base of walls, from ceilings, she had ignored that, too. Ways in too small for a human being but not for other beings.

  “I used to dream that this was real,” the Magician said. “I used to dream it was real and I would be able to pass through to the other side. But there is no other side now. What a terrible pity. I could have done even more over there. Still, studying it may be of some use.”

  No, the Magician had come right here. This was the treasure for her. She wanted another chance at resurrection, she wanted another chance. And that took more biotech, and here we were, standing in a cavern on a level that, even stripped of most things, still contained enough treasures for someone like the Magician to start over. With a little help.

  “Who knows what will happen out in the city, Rachel,” the Magician said. “No one can know what we’ll return to. But I know you, Rachel. I know your life. We could make common cause. You could help me. I can protect you. I can make sure you wan
t for nothing. You deserve that for leading me here.”

  Would she next ask me to abandon Wick? Was she that desperate? I couldn’t tell you. She stood there before me in her tattered cloak and asked me to join the same cause that destroyed children, that experimented on children, and told the world that there was a good reason, the way the world always wanted to be reassured, because that was the easier path. And the terrible thing is that it wasn’t such a bad choice for me, looking at it with the eyes of a scavenger, a cutthroat. It was what had gained her so much power—providing security, food, territory. It had made her a leader, no matter what you thought of who she led and how. No matter that she was on the run—she was still alive.

  “And I could tell you much more about your past, Rachel, than you even know. Those blank spaces, what you don’t know. I know what they should contain.”

  What would you have done, reader, who has been able to follow me like the Magician followed me, invisible and ever-watchful and without consequence?

  * * *

  It is hard to explain how much I hated the Company when I saw that place with the frozen mirror. My hatred had grown all through the journey and Wick’s faltering, and how he still paid fealty in his way. Now it had become like my own fear within me, or like a wave that kept running through me as if for the first time, with the intensity of the first time.

  They had made us dependent on them. They had experimented on us. They had taken away our ability to govern ourselves. They had sent out to keep order a horrific judge grown ever more unmanageable and psychotic. They had dehumanized Wick. They had, in their way, created the Magician, because everything she did and everything she created was in opposition to the Company in some way. And, in the end, the remnants of the Company had walled themselves off from us when they were done with us, when it became too dangerous, leaving those remnants to fend for themselves and negotiate with Mord an increasingly dangerous and impossible cease-fire, one that would never hold.

  All I would ever know of the heart of them was this fading, injustice of a place. Was it somehow the future exploiting the past, or the past exploiting the future? Was that mirror scene from some other, thriving part of the world? Was it another version of Earth? I don’t know. All I know, or believe, is that it was a door to elsewhere—that the Company had come from some other place and been formed and deformed by it, and yet would always be embedded in our deepest history, against our will. Long after Mord died or was finally defeated. Long after I was ash or rotting meat or buried in one of the Magician’s graves.