Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

Mord cults that religion in the city wasn’t about hope or redemption but about tempting death.

      “Okay,” Borne said, and his eyes formed a kind of reproachful smile. “I don’t always understand, Rachel. I love you, but I don’t understand.”

      Love? He’d just admitted he didn’t know about heaven and hell. What could he know from love? I pushed forward, past it.

      “And what happened next?”

      “I tried to wake up. I tried to wake us all up. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was dead. That’s the word: dead. And I needed to wake up because a door was opening.”

      “Door” to Borne could, again, mean many things that were not doors.

      “What happened when the door opened?” I asked.

      “They would make me go through the door. I don’t want to go through the door, and not just because I am dead.”

      “What’s on the other side of the door?” I asked.

      All of Borne’s many eyes turned toward me, like rows of distant, glittering stars against the deep purple earth tones of his skin. For the first time in a long time I felt as if I didn’t know him.

      “Because I am dead, I do not know what is on the other side of the door.”

      That is all that he would say.

      WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WENT OUTSIDE AGAIN

      My plan had been to try to take up with Mord, shadow him as before. This was still the best way to find useful things—and because the truest test of my recovery was to go right back to his shuddering flank, to risk it all now rather than find out later that I no longer had the nerve, or the skill. But now, that was too dangerous. Instead, I would travel to an area controlled by the Magician.

      I delayed. I woke leisurely, pretended it was just another day in my recovery. But by early afternoon, I was all out of play-pretend and all out of excuses. It was a good time to go. Wick slept very late after having been out longer than he’d planned, to make sure neither the Magician nor Mord’s proxies followed him.

      I prepared my pack, with a small cache of weapons and supplies. Two of our last neuro-spiders that, like bio-grenades, would freeze an assailant’s nervous system. Two memory beetles to negotiate my way out of trouble. A lump of something aged that might’ve been meat or bread but Wick reassured me was edible. A good old-fashioned long knife, a bit rusty, I’d found in the tunnels. A canteen of water, gleaned from condensation from the hole above the bathroom.

      I felt surly and dangerous and powerful.

      Borne discovered me as I was putting the water in my pack. “Do you make do with dew or do you dew with dew or dew ewe make dew with do?”

      It had taken me a while to know what words he was using in which places in that question. “Ewe” had come from an animal-husbandry book.

      “We all make do with dew,” I said, even though it wasn’t strictly true. But by now it wasn’t a question, just a call-and-response.

      “Are you going somewhere?” Borne asked. “People with packs are always going somewhere. People with packs are people with purpose.”

      I’d avoided looking at him and all of those eyes, but now I turned, pack packed, and said, “I’m going outside. I’m going on a scavenging run. I’ll be back before dark.”

      “What’s a ‘scavenging run’?”

      “Doing dew,” I said. “Doing dew for you.”

      “I want to go,” Borne said, as if the city were just another tunnel. “I should go. It’s settled. I’ll go.” He liked to settle things before I could decide.

      “You can’t go, Borne,” I said.

      All the dangers had come back to me, and I didn’t think Borne was ready to encounter them. It wasn’t just the Magician or Mord. My own kind, too, were dangerous: scavengers who hid under trapdoors like spiders to leap out; ones who repurposed what they found in factories and sold it for food; ones who found a good hoard and defended it; ones (few) who had learned to grow a form of food off of their bodies and cannibalized themselves, with ever smaller returns; ones who had half wasted away, because they weren’t smart enough or lucky enough, and whose bones would salt the plain of broken buildings, leave no memory or imprint to worry the rest of us who lived. I didn’t want to end up like any of them, and I didn’t want them claiming Borne as salvage, either.

      But Borne was undaunted by my resistance.

      “I have an idea,” he said. “Don’t say no yet.” Another favorite gambit. Don’t say no yet. When had I ever really said no to him? The number of discarded lizard heads gathered in a wastebasket in a far corner of the Balcony Cliffs was testament to that.

      “No.”

      “But I said you can’t say no!” In a flurry and fury, he expanded in all directions and covered the walls like a rough, green-tinged surreal sea with what now became two huge glowing red eyes, staring down from me at the ceiling. I smelled something burning. He knew I didn’t like that smell. (Unfortunately, he didn’t mind the smell of me farting in retaliation.)

      I was wise to this form of tantrum, and it did not startle me. I had grown accustomed to so many things while recovering.

      “Next time, maybe.” My own favorite gambit.

      He contracted to something the size and shape of a large, green dog, his two red eyes becoming one large, brown affectionate one, and he blobbed down from the ceiling onto the floor. A doglike tongue extended to pant ferociously as he stared up at me.

      “Next time! Next time. Next time?”

      “We’ll see,” I said.

      He went into the bathroom and sulked. He was getting impatient and moody, in part because the food I gave him had become boring but also because he had explored every inch of the Balcony Cliffs, even with the constraint of having to avoid Wick. I’m sure, too, that even though he could become small for a period of time, the tunnels and corridors were becoming claustrophobic. But I didn’t want Borne going outside.

      Sometimes, when my parents had looked at me in an adoring way, I felt the weight of their love and stuck my tongue out like a brat. Now I looked at Borne in the same way.

       ¤

      The brightness of the outside surprised me, shafts of light cutting through at odd angles. I’d taken three or four different shake-off routes and crawled the last hundred feet through a tunnel that bruised my sides just to make sure no one could figure out my point of origin. Emerging, the light made me squint, but I welcomed the blunt heat after so long inside. This might be the Magician’s territory, but unlike the Mord proxies, the Magician did sleep, and her control was more like an insurgency, since she could not combat Mord direct.

      It was a residential neighborhood but looked like it had been bombed or held by an army before the end. Anyone squatting since had left no mark, because to leave a sign was to invite predators. Blackened supporting walls punched full of ragged holes. Doors gone, hinges gone, too. Few roofs. Brittle old telephone poles cracked at the stem leaned up against the walls of rows of dead houses with tiny dust squares for lawns. The poles could have been felled by Mord, all crooked at the same angle. Where the dust and sand had taken the street, the poles helped orient me.

      As I moved across that stillness, I would be vulnerable, even if I stuck to the shadows of those useless walls, kept the sun to my back when I could. I deliberately chose paths where I saw no one, except from afar. A few souls resting on a stoop, the house behind them a litter of fallen beams. Two people running away, looking over their shoulders. A powerfully built man in black robes casually chopping at something with an ax—firewood, flesh? I didn’t linger to find out.

      It