Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

that you could not always see them or evidence of their movements. Few lived well, few lived happily or long. But we did exist, and when beyond the sanctuary of the Balcony Cliffs I always tried to remember that people slept there, hid there, had burrowed down deep, or were waiting for me or someone like me to venture past—trigger a trap or snare, or shadow me to see if I had hidden food or biotech somewhere.

      I crossed an intersection, running low, bent over, to the next place of concealment. I entered through door-size holes blasted in walls that must have been made to allow safe passage under threat of long-ago sniper fire. Lizards scuttled away from me, and there was just my quickened breath and the smell of sweat and the scuff of shoe against dusty gravel. Just the yellowing remains of someone’s attempt at a vegetable garden, a few clotheslines strung up out of sight of the road that in their tautness seemed new, not old.

      I came to the edge of a courtyard and a peculiar sight. For anywhere but here. Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from those helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away—even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here.

      Then I realized they were not astronauts but only looked like astronauts because the sun had bleached the contamination suits white, and I felt perversely less sad. I couldn’t tell what had happened. Perhaps they’d been doctors sent to fight some epidemic in the last days before chaos and then the Company. Perhaps they’d been something else entirely. But they were planted here now and grew strangeness from their faces, and I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust that they’d been here a month ago. I didn’t trust who had planted them like that, even though they might be long dead or just long gone. Who or what might be lurking down below, in the dirt and sand.

      Approaching was a foolish idea, what created carrion, so I took in the details with my binoculars. So posed. So little like life. The gloves over the bones of their hands were store-plundered and didn’t go with the suits. I thought I saw movement in a faceplate, a reflection of someone behind me, turned, saw nothing. But the feeling remained, and I always trusted that feeling.

      There are tricks to flushing out a watcher. The most obvious is to stop, half-turn, and bend to tie up your bootlaces—enough to catch out an innocent or inexperienced or just incompetent watcher. Or, if they mean you harm, it will flush them out because they think you’re vulnerable, distracted.

      Another hint of movement behind me, coming from the corner I’d just peered around to get to the courtyard. But it stopped immediately or became something else. A strange thought, but I was beginning to trust my strange thoughts again.

      Behind me and to the left lay rows of houses smashed to hell, more single-story houses on the right, the dust road in the middle.

      I took a spider out of my pack, shoved it in my pocket, then, avoiding the courtyard of dead astronauts, quick-turned down the next side road with houses that were still intact, then used a hill of rubble to clamber up onto a gently steepled roof. I needed a bird’s-eye view, even if there was a twinge in my knee and a weakness in my shoulder to tell me climbing was a bad idea.

      I lay on my stomach atop rough tile and splintered wood, a faded, tired heat rising from the roof into my body. The roof was damaged but stable. The sky beyond was a burnt blue, dissolving into almost-dusk. A mirage of delicate fracture lines in the distance promised mountains. But there were no mountains as far as we knew. That was just the sky lying to us.

      Below I could see down the stacked rows of tombstone houses, which along with the roads conspired to form a ragged intersection or X in front of me. At the fringe, I could even see the pupa heads of the dead astronauts in their freakish courtyard.

      I felt exposed despite my vantage, transfixed by a sense of triangulation and old scores to settle—an exhilarating sense of spying, of being a spy, or even a sniper that made me uncomfortable. A height, too, on a roof, that in this city wasn’t what it might have been. Mord could swoop down to pluck me up before I had a chance to pluck something below—or, less poetic, Mord’s proxies clamber up for a frolicking dismemberment.

      So many minutes passed with me as a pretend horizontal statue that there was relief when I saw something I didn’t understand at first: a shape coming up the street. I tensed and made myself smaller against the angle of the roof, staring into the light and shadows.

      Someone tall in dark robes was walking toward me. Someone with a pointy, wide-brimmed hat pulled down very low. The floppy hat spun and glittered, and the gait was oddly fluid and disjoined; later I realized it resembled a baby’s clumsy walk but in a man’s body. The arms of the man hung out at his sides and the hands flopped as he walked. The too-pale hands seemed unimportant, as if the torso and legs were real but the arms were just there to complete the illusion.

      Trailing this figure at a distance: a small animal, peering and peeking from the corners like I was peering and peeking from the roof. It had outsize tall ears and a rasping pink tongue, and my binoculars confirmed it for a kind of fox, but with strange eyes. A curious creature out wandering? Seeking carrion? Or a spy, a watcher? For whom or what? Whatever it was, it had instincts like mine, and all of a sudden looked up and spotted me, and then it was gone as if it had never been there.

      A few more steps of the figure it had been following, and the fear in my gut turned into a wordless chuckle, and then irritation and concern. I knew I was looking at Borne in a disguise. Except he wasn’t wearing clothes—he’d taken it one step further and just grown clothes from his skin. The hat was his head and the stars were his eyes, transformed into a pattern.

      I leaned over the roof when he was one house away. I still wasn’t going to stand up and give anyone a silhouette to target.

      “Borne,” I said.

      Borne, startled, looked up.

      “Oh my!” he exclaimed. “Oh my!”

      Then he made himself large, larger, spun like a corkscrew, brought himself springlike up to roof level, so the magic hat could stare at me as if nearsighted. I almost lost my purchase on the roof.

      “Borne!”

      “Rachel!” He sproinged back to street level, looking up at me.

      “Borne.” I felt dizzy in the aftermath. He had grown more since the morning, clearly.

      “Rachel. You weren’t supposed to see me.”

      “You aren’t supposed to be here! It’s not safe.”

      A twinge of irritation from Borne, a new thing, from just the past week. “If it’s not safe, why did you go?”

      “That’s my business. You disobeyed me. You followed me like someone not nice. Not nice!” Even though Borne still waffled between childlike and adult states, he’d never grown out of “not nice.” Never not wanted to be nice.

      “I know.”

      Downcast. But was he really? There was still something too elated about him. He’d become elated, and no punishment could un-elate him if the whole wide, horrible world hadn’t. And under my gruffness, there was something too elated about me, out in the world again. Maybe he sensed that.

      Borne’s clothes fell away, and he was again a six-foot hybrid of squid and sea anemone, with that ring of circling eyes. I was rattled, drew back, reached for a beetle, stopped myself. He never looked so alien as he did in that moment, naked and alone on the street, even though it was how I knew him back at the Balcony Cliffs. Nothing and nobody has ever looked more like it didn’t belong.

      I had the impulse to leave him there, on that dusty street, leap across as many rooftops as possible to get away from him. That my life would be simpler, better, if I let him become someone else’s problem. But the sense of loss that swept in behind almost made me stagger, there on the roof. I couldn’t do it.

      The