Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  We always have a choice, even if the choice is amnesia or your own death. But now, too, I finally understood the extent of the weight on Wick. That this was a secret that could kill him in a different way than his sickness. Something that would make many in the city hate him, even want to kill him. Or, among the Mord worshippers, lift him up in a way that would kill him just as surely.

  Now I knew why Wick kept trying, forgave so much. Because he felt he had so much to be forgiven for.

  But in the end, what it came down to was this: I did not want to remember. I did not need to remember. No one was less dead or more alive after Wick’s letter. Whatever muddle had lived in my head that Wick hadn’t taken away contained at least that knowledge. I had spent years not searching for them but mourning them, keeping their memory alive in my head. I did not want to remember more. You forgive if you can forgive yourself, or live with what you’ve done. If you cannot live with what you have done, you cannot live with what others have done, either.

  Wick’s letter no longer exists. I destroyed it because it was dangerous. But I have not forgotten what he wrote.

  There are parts of that letter I will never share with you.

  THE WAY BACK AND WHAT I WITNESSED ON THE HORIZON

  The way back was no easier than the way there. The way back was harder, and no getting around that—no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left to give.

  The little animals did not help; their purposes were so different from my own. They did not care that Wick was ill or that I was so very tired. They nosed around the Magician’s dead body, and licked her hands and her face, and then left her alone and went on with their business. Perhaps she rotted away there, underground.

  An attrition of steps I took with Wick, or could not take, in the moment, but had to take soon or the will would be gone. The worst thing was that I could not escape any of the passing seconds. Every moment came to me clear and distinct, and no one moment stood for anything but itself. I felt time ache in my body, in my need to get Wick back to some kind of temporary shelter. To fling myself free of the wreckage. I was thinking about my parents, of all the long, forced marches we had taken, how they’d helped me to endure, and how they’d been brave enough to get me here, and how I couldn’t fail.

  At a certain point, I could again hear the distant sound of conflict, and although still trapped in the Company building, I knew this meant the battle still raged between Mord and Borne. But when you can’t escape the seconds, when you are sure you are going to die before you get free, some things don’t mean very much anymore. The sounds I heard came to me through a murky sea of distance and memory.

  I brought Wick back through the debris of the Company, up through that artificial tornado of junk and, sliding, torn skin and bruises being the best of me, back through the crack-passage—and even through the choked relief and gasp of our collapse onto the blood sands of the holding ponds, caressed by those shallow, dangerous waters—shambling our way into the light we thought might kill us, only to discover the guards had left their posts—the proxies gone, and on the horizon the mirage for which we had no conception, no compass.

  Two great beasts fought amid the burning wreckage of a city. Smashed into each other, withdrew, engaged again—exhausted, exhausting, the brutality. Gray smoke drawn up into the sky to linger around the vultures gliding high above the behemoths’ heads like ragged black halos.

  Wick had had a relapse in the narrow space of the tunnel, would have fallen, become wedged there, unconscious and barely responsive, if I had not been vigilant—to prop him up, to push him forward, to hold his head when he vomited. The venom had worked deeper into him; his veins stood out black on the surface of his reddish skin, his lips stained black, his breaths shallow and foul. His eyes remained closed, but fluttered. I could feel his eyelids flutter against my fingertips in the darkness, and that is how I knew.

  At the holding ponds, I gathered the last of my resolve and, staggering, carried Wick toward the desolate plain that was our reward for surviving this far. Toward a city torn apart by monsters.

  There was nothing on that plain, or maybe there was but the sight of Mord doubled had startled them into hiding. We would have been easy prey, and yet, mercifully, nothing approached us. I had taken the Magician’s camouflage biotech but could not bring myself to wear what was clearly in distress, placed it gently in the top of my pack before zipping it up. Maybe dangers lurked and waited but I could not see them.

  “You’re too valuable as salvage to leave behind,” I told Wick.

  “You’re doing fine—you’re getting better,” I said to Wick.

  “You just need to hang on a little longer,” I pleaded with Wick.

  So light, that body, so pliable, almost collapsible, as if the Company had made him that way, and so weak that I was stronger than him, stronger than I thought, his hands still able to grasp at me, involuntary, instinctual.

  “We’ll rebuild the Balcony Cliffs,” I told him, though he could not hear me. “We’ll live there again.”

  I did not say that thing just to comfort him but to comfort me. I meant it. But only if it was both of us. If it was just me, I would melt into the city. I would disappear and give up my name and my past and any hope of a home, and become no one.

  At the edge of the plain, the dark dead forest waiting on the slope, I laid my burden gently on the ground amongst the sparse grass and dropped my pack. Wick’s mouth was closed, his eyes were still closed, and he was cold. A terrible sense of drowning closed over me. Had he died as I carried him? Was he dead now?

  I could not tell if he had a pulse, with my broken fingers, my hands that shook. There was a resting peace to his features I did not want to interpret. But he could not be dead. I would not let him be dead.

  I put water to his lips, then mine. I kissed his filthy face and bathed it. I said his name again and again—and again. I paid no mind to anything but his slack, small body there in the yellowing grass. I could not even shake him or in any other way try to bring him back because I was sure the slightest tremor would do him damage.

  I knelt there beside Wick feeling so very light and so very helpless. I was covered in dirt, in blood both mine and not mine. My stomach was a shriveled pebble in my belly, my body so dry I had no tears.

  I calmed myself. I stopped the shaking by holding my right arm in a vise with my left hand and taking Wick’s wrist with my right hand—long enough to convince myself I felt a faint pulse of life there, that he would hold on if I just kept going, if I didn’t give up on him.

  I put my pack back on. I gathered Wick up. I got my legs underneath me, widened my stance, and lifted him.

  Together, Wick and I started up the slope.

  * * *

  There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history.

  As I carried Wick up the slope, there came a sound from the city, a new sound. It was like the reverse of the sound that had left us when Mord lost the power to fly. A snap that kept snapping, as if it had moved through the ground, like an earthquake but not. A sound that made you look up.

  Still far off, but clear above the trees, in the late-morning light, Mord no longer fought Mord. Instead, Mord fought Borne, for Borne had shed his disguise, had abandoned claws and fangs to become even more terrible and complete—like a true god, one who repudiated worship because he had been raised by a scavenger who had never learned religion. The monster I had helped raise fighting the monster
Wick had helped create.

  Such a shock, to see the fur instantly replaced with the Borne I knew, but much, much larger. A glowing purple vase shape, a silhouette rising that could have been some strange new building but was instead a living creature. Borne was failing as Mord, so now he would try his luck as himself. He rose and rose to a full height a little taller than Mord, the familiar tentacles shooting out, while below, at his base, I knew that he was anchored by cilia now each grown as large as me.

  Mord stumbled back, smashing walls of already crumbling buildings, great clouds of dust rising from his surprise. But only for a moment, and when the gouts and storms of dust had settled, I could see that Mord had surged forward to attack newly vulnerable flesh, while the proxies no doubt swarmed Borne’s base.

  There came from Mord’s throat a chuffing roar of purest joy, as if blissful to no longer be fighting himself, to engage with a creature clarified and robbed of disguise.

  For the cost to Borne was monumental, no matter how he altered himself, bristling with spikes and ridges—no matter how he battered Mord with tentacles that Mord tore off only for them to return. He could not stop the truest killer of the two—could not stop Mord from ripping into his flesh. Mord dug into Borne, tore off great curving slices, which shivered and quaked as they fell and as Borne screamed—a sound so piercing it buckled my knees on the hillside and I felt a deep fear, a rending, thinking of what should happen if Mord won, if Borne died.

  Mord leapt again and again, brought Borne close, paws forcing the neck of Borne down as Borne strobed—as rings of eyes appeared and then disappeared, in his distress. Borne shook and flailed, pried at Mord with his tentacles, but Mord held on, trying to deliver a death bite. Ravaged Borne’s throat and tore into him with his claws. Those fangs snapped through Borne with a terrible wrenching and crunching that laid my heart bare. The Mord proxies were dark smudges clambering up Borne’s sides while Mord artfully runneled Borne’s flesh as if it were wax and Mord’s claws were made of flame. More of Borne came away, smashing wetly to the distant ground.

  Borne now flailed in that embrace, being broken down in a way I had not known was possible, in a vision becoming so horrific I kept looking away as I stumbled forward with Wick. But it was no use evading. As Borne’s life ebbed, I could feel his wounds through the gravity of my own.

  Until Borne gave up.

  Until Borne understood, I believe, just what he had to do. He would not win. He could not win. Weapon he might be, but Borne was not, in the end, hardened as Mord was hardened; Mord would keep devouring, would keep seeking the snap, the gurgle, the spray of blood that ended his prey, never retreat, never surrender, as if that meant death.

  What happened next no one in the city could see all of, but all of us could see part of. Yet, in memory, it is complete.

  As Mord feasted on Borne’s flesh, Borne changed tactics. Instead of trying to become taller, he spread out, giving away his height, so that Mord was angled into Borne, tunneling through flesh, sloppy with it, seeking the heart of Borne, that he might tear it out and hold it up still beating for the city to see. But Borne kept flattening and widening the aperture at the top of his body until he resembled an enormous passionflower blossom. Complex and beautiful, with many levels.

  To Mord it must have resembled surrender, as if Borne was dying and that is why the end came so quick, abrupt. Mord rose up, straight up, higher and higher on his hind legs, and then came down, straight down into Borne … but Borne was still opening up and opening up, and so Mord fell straight into Borne and kept falling and falling while the sides of Borne now rose, shot up with an elated speed, and tentacles formed over the top of Mord like bars. Borne lunged toward the sky, closed like a trap, with the head of Mord still visible at the aperture.

  There came a muffled whimpering and screaming, a howling, a roaring, a blustering, a snapping of mighty jaws. Mord punched out from his prison, still ripping through flesh, struggling to get free.

  The air seemed to be sucked away, out of the sky, toward Borne. Sound left us.

  There came a blinding silver-white light, a radiance that seared out across the landscape in a wave and threw me to the ground, Wick beneath me. A wave of light that emitted no heat. A thunderclap, very close, very loud. A word in my head, I swear, a word, just my name: “Rachel.” Which meant something different than it had meant a moment before.

  * * *

  I lay there for a long moment, unsure of what I would see when I rose.

  I got up. I looked back across the city. No bodies lay broken and giant across that landscape. No remains. No carcasses for scavengers to feed on.

  Both Mord and Borne were gone, as if they had not existed, and the city was still and silent but for the grieving of the proxies and the sinuous smoke that still rose from all that had been destroyed.

  But there was no space left in me. I was filled with the grief of that absence, could hardly breathe for it.

  He was born, but I had borne him.

  I knew Borne was terrified at the end. I knew that he had suffered, but that he had given us this gift of a better life anyway, and I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTER AND WHAT CHANGED

  There is not much left to tell. So much of the rest is aftermath, the life I lead now.

  At the cistern, our temporary shelter, I fed Wick as if he were a rare and fragile hummingbird, as the last of the venom worked its way through his system. I made him drink the water from the well. I dressed his wounds and cleaned them. I talked to him even though he still could not hear me. I held his hand. I kept watch for any enemy, but no enemy came.

  As I worked, I told him I loved him, that he was a person. That he was a person. That I loved him. Because I meant it. Because I thought if he didn’t hear it he might die, and, later, I might not be able to say it.

  We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us. I don’t know how else to say it. Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.

  * * *

  Outside, it rained for three days and nights. That would have been strange by itself, an event, but this was no ordinary rain. All manner of creature dropped from the sky or, at the touch of this rain, sprouted up from the ground. Grass grew fast and wild outside the cistern, created paths of green, and on some of the dead blackened trees down the slopes I noticed new leaves. There were on certain avenues in the city, I would learn, new growths of vines and plants that had been gone for years. Birdsong came lyrical through the storms, and animals long-hidden emerged from sanctuary.

  But most of it was biotech, uncanny. On the desolate plain the water triggered the last of the traps and up came vast clouds and explosions of life, even eruptions of bees, or things that looked like bees, out of the marsh, taken up by the wind and scattered. Elongated, elastic creatures dug themselves out from long slumber and, suspicious and almost in their stride apologetic, walked bandy-legged away to dig burrows.

  At the holding ponds, the waters swelled and overflowed, and all that lay there flooded the Company building, spilled out across the plain, and even now we do not know how much of the new life among us comes from that moment. In the city itself, torrents of alcohol minnows came to slippery, wriggling life, joined by microorganisms in the rain to populate broken streets and infiltrate cracks and grottoes. There came from across the city, to the astonishment of people used to poverty, such a sense, in that moment … of plenty.

  On the third day the torrent ended, and the moisture evaporated or disappeared into the ground, and much of the greenery receded and the new animals died or hid or were eaten. To an observer fresh to the city, it might have looked as broken and useless as before. But it was not. Some new things remained, took root, became permanent. Some flourished. The city had been washed as clean as it could
be, and what had been taken away was as important as what had been added.

  On the fourth day, Wick’s eyes opened and they were clear, and clean of pain, and he tottered to his feet, looked around the cistern with a weak smile on his face.

  I had kept Wick alive. I had failed at so much else, but I kept Wick alive.

  He gave me our last password in those first lucid moments, the word that told me he was real.

  “We don’t need them anymore,” I told him.

  A confusion spread across his face, until he understood.

  A lesser person than Wick would have surrounded himself with a fake past, with a personal history, constructed some pretense, handed out lies—or leaned on whatever fake memories the Company had given him. But Wick had not done that. Wick had kept himself apart, had preferred to be alone, to be lonely rather than to be held captive.

  “You saved my life,” Wick said, and kissed me, and I let him.

  That night, we returned home to the Balcony Cliffs to sift through the wreckage and to begin again.

  * * *

  The strange, forgotten animals abandoned by the Company live among us, along with their insatiable curiosity, like Bornes that want nothing from the old world. They need nothing from it. They are their own captains and lead their own lives, although there are still human beings who see them as food, as expendable. In their fearlessness, I find a kind of solace. In how they pursue their own plans, their own destiny, I find relief. They will outstrip all of us in time, and the story of the city will soon be their story, not ours.

  The Mord proxies were still a terror for a time, but they had their own terror to face—that their master was dead. Many died within three or four years, and those left were both more dangerous and more civilized. They had their own intricate chirping, huffing language and have begun to develop their own customs. The cubs are far removed already from unthinking violence and act more like bears: wary and clever and more cautious, as if they understand better their place.