Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

He had abandoned the sea-anemone shape in favor of resembling a large vase or a squid balanced on a flattened mantel. The aperture at the top had curled out and up on what I chose to interpret as a long neck, sprouting feathery filaments, which almost seemed like an affectation. The filaments, with a prolonged soft sigh, would crowd together and then pull apart again like bizarre synchronized dancers. He was tall enough now that the top of him loomed a good two feet above the bed. Colors still flitted across his body, or lazily floated in shapes like storm clouds, ragged and layered and dark. Azure. Lavender. Emerald. He frequently smelled like vanilla.

      As I lay on my side and stared at him—half curious, half afraid—I could see that Borne had developed a startling collection of eyes that encircled his body. Each eye was small and completely different from the others around it. Some were human—blue, black, brown, green pupils—and some were animal eyes, but he could see through all of them. They perplexed me because I didn’t know what they meant. I decided to think of it as a kind of odd adornment, Borne’s equivalent of a belt.

      When Borne saw me staring at him, he would make a sound like the startled clearing of a throat, and his flesh would absorb all of the eyes except two, which would migrate higher on his body and away from each other. Sometimes they would slip back down to his hips, but once in position on his torso they became larger, took on a sea-blue color, and grew long, dark lashes; they moved independent of each other.

      He must have thought he looked more normal that way.

       ¤

      On the sixth day, I felt more lucid, woke with only a slight fuzziness. Wick had gone out again, reluctant, to conduct business. He hadn’t found my attackers, and I knew he probably never would. We hadn’t talked again about what had happened, or about much of anything. I even pretended to be asleep when he came in. I had energy only for Borne.

      From my bed I asked Borne a question. It was really the only question—a dangerous question to match a dangerous mood. I was still on the worm-drugs and I wanted to be of use, to do anything but just lie there.

      “What are you?” My heart beat faster, but I wasn’t afraid. Not really.

      “I don’t know,” Borne said in a rough yet sweet tone. For a confused moment I thought he’d spoken in the voices of both my parents at once. Then, sincere and eager: “Do you know what you are?”

      I ignored him. “Let’s play a game to figure out what you are.”

      Borne went quiet for a second and his colors dimmed. Then he flared up.

      “Okay,” he said. “Okay!”

      “Then you have to be honest with me.”

      “Honest.” Turning the word over in his head.

      “Tell the truth.”

      A ripple of vibrant purple traveled across his skin.

      “Honest. I can be honest. I am honest. Honest.”

      Had I upset him or triggered some other emotion, or was he just testing out the word?

      “You know a lot about me,” I ventured. “But I know nothing about you. The game is about questions. Will you answer some questions?”

      “I will answer questions,” Borne said, uncertain. Did he understand the word question?

      “Are you a machine?” I asked.

      “What is a machine?”

      “A made thing. A thing made by people.”

      This puzzled Borne, and it was a long while before he said, “You are a made thing. Two people made you.”

      “I mean something made of either metal or of flesh. But not through natural biological means.”

      “Two people made you. You are made of flesh,” Borne said. He seemed agitated.

      “Why didn’t you save me from those boys?”

      “Save?”

      “Rescue. Help. Stop them from hurting me.”

      There came a long pause and everything about Borne shut down until he was just a gray shape. Even the eyes went away.

      Then the colors came back in an explosion of reds and pinks and a roiling, turbulent green. The eyes popped up as a rotating halo embedded in the skin near the top of his aperture. “But I did help! I helped! I helped Rachel. I helped.” This said in an anguished tone.

      I tried to control the trembling of my voice. The spirit of Mord filled me up.

      “Those boys hurt me for hours.” I spat out the words. “Those boys did that and you did nothing. They hurt me badly. And you could have done something.”

      Silence again, then, in a whisper, “I could not. I did not. Help. Until.”

      “Until what?”

      “Until I knew them.”

      I realized knew wasn’t the word he meant. That the word he sought might not exist, that he was trying, perhaps, to tell me two or three things at once.

      “Knew them how?”

      “I am not complete,” Borne said. “I was not complete. I am not complete.” He tried “put together,” which didn’t help, finished his sentence with a kind of frustration for words that caused the feathery pseudopods to straighten like spikes.

      “Now you are complete? Aware?” I didn’t want to use the word activated, because it scared me.

      “More complete,” Borne said.

      “You killed them,” I said, calm. But not before they hurt me, came the raging, screaming thought behind the words.

      “Kill?”

      “Cease to be. No longer alive. Dead. Not here.”

      Confusion shuddered through Borne. “I know them now. I know them.”

      “Killing is bad,” I said. “Killing should never happen. Don’t kill.” Unless someone attacks you. Unless you have to. But I didn’t think to make the distinction to Borne, because I didn’t have the strength.

      Those eyes no longer seemed beautiful. They looked ever more trapped and horrible. Was it my imagination, or was one of them a familiar gray? I turned away from Borne then, and drifted into unconsciousness for a while. It was easier than facing what he’d said.

      And yet why would I turn away unless I felt safe?

       ¤

      The seventh night, I slept in Wick’s quarters, and Mord, far above, slept over us, sprawled across the sea of loam and debris that covered the Balcony Cliffs. We experienced his breathing as a haunted depth charge that tumbled down through the layers, the beams, and the drywall, the supporting columns and the cracking archways. The sound of it permeated the atoms of a dozen ceilings, vibrated through our bodies. We felt it in our flesh after we heard it in our ears, and it lingered longer under the skin.

      The stench came to us, too, faint, carried by the ducts and the thousand imperfections in the sediment above us, carried by the subterranean tunnels of worms and beetles. Like the thunder after lightning, it came to us late, but then wrapped around our throats. It was the stench of every living thing Mord had killed in the last week. Could Mord smell us down here? Could he smell us mice? Us little human mice?

      Wick lay frozen, unable to move, terrified that somehow this was not random, that Mord knew he was there, that come morning Mord might start to root us out. And so, for a time, we whispered and moved in slow motion and in all ways acted as if we were submarines and Mord a destroyer above, seeking us. Even to whisper, Wick would put his mouth right up against my ear. He could not stop talking about rumors of Mord proxies being seen, searching in the city and the hinterlands