Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

were you disguised as?” I asked.

      “Nothing much,” Borne said, not looking me in the eye with his eyes, which was quite a feat.

      “What?”

      “A wizard,” he said grudging, bashful. “From one of the old books in the Balcony Cliffs.”

      “Which one?”

      “I don’t know. A lot of them have wizards. They all seem the same.”

      “They all cast different spells, though,” I said.

      “Do they? Is Wick a wizard? Does he know spells?”

      “I’m a wizard,” I said. “The spell I know is how to get you back to the Balcony Cliffs.”

      “That’s not a spell,” Borne said, but he didn’t sound certain.

      Wizards were not magicians, at least. If he ever fell under the spell of a magician, we were all lost.

      “What am I going to do with you, Borne?”

      I asked him because I didn’t know. I’d been stupid to think I could keep him safe from contamination by the city. If there had been time, I would have given him a lecture right then on the dangers all around us. I would have told him what I hadn’t up to that point: That most scavengers would see him as the ultimate scrap. That no one who saw him would think of him as a person but as a thing.

      On the way back, we passed the dead people in their contamination suits one last time, and Borne waved to them and said goodbye.

      As if he’d known them, as if they’d been his good friends.

      A little later, I felt a prickling on my neck, the sensation of eyes upon us. Soon enough I identified the source, hanging back, shadowlike, padding on soft paws.

      “That fox keeps following you, Borne. Should I be worried?”

      “He’s my pet,” Borne said.

      “That fox is not your pet. Do you pet him?”

      “No, because he won’t let me.”

      “Do you know why he follows you?”

      “I told him to.”

      “You told him?”

      “No, of course, I didn’t tell him. That would be preposterous. Unholy. Stupid. Not cool.”

      “Why not sneak up on him and eat him like a lizard?”

      “No, he won’t let me,” Borne said.

      “Even if you lie in wait?” I had nothing personal against the fox, but it and its brethren had begun to bother me.

      “He’s always on,” Borne said.

      “What does that mean?”

      “He’s always on, like a lightbulb. He’s not dim like most things.”

      “What does that mean?” I asked again. No one had lightbulbs anymore. How did Borne know about them?

      Borne didn’t reply, and the next time I looked back, the fox wasn’t there.

      But I still took evasive maneuvers, doubled back, and made sure by the time we took the secret door into the Balcony Cliffs that no living creature could be observing us.

       ¤

      Back in my apartment, I woke with a start in the middle of the night, realizing that Borne might have been talking for a while. He was curled up next to my bed, a self-contained sprawl of short green-glowing tentacles, the myriad eyes darting across his body. Half of them watched me. Half watched the door. I had the fading impression he’d been peering at me from much closer just moments before.

      “… but I don’t know why they were following me and I didn’t know it would be so dusty out there and so big. It was so big out there. There was even sky. A huge sky. Such a huge sky it was like it was going to fall down on me. And all of those … walls. All of the walls. And the little things following me and it was hot. Hotter. It was hotter. Definitely hotter. I wasn’t thirsty, but I could’ve been thirsty. Because it was hot. And wide and big. That’s a city. That’s what a city looks like in person. Like that. Like that.

      “And there were astronauts. Buried in the ground.”

      He would remember the dead astronauts for a long time. In the next few weeks he even took three dolls and pretended to have conversations with them. They’d just come back from the moon and were helping to replant the Earth, or some such nonsense. Borne had so many tentacles, he could’ve put on a complicated play if he’d wanted to.

      I rolled over and tried to ignore his ceaseless patter. Of course it had been sensory overload for him. Of course it had been something new. I’d have to get used to that or Borne’s surprise would always be surprising me. Yet when I did get used to it, I would miss sharing that with him, even as it would be a relief. To be dulled to someone else’s perpetual sense of awe was a kind of gift.

      Then a thought occurred, and I reached over and tapped Borne on what I assumed was the top of his head.

      “Huh? What? Rachel?”

      “Borne, how did you even get out of the apartment? When you followed me.”

      A sluggish, slow response. I had a sense even in answering my questions he was devoting only a little bit of his self, while parts of his body popped and quaked, and continued to be somewhere else.

      “The door was open. It was all the way open and it seemed like that meant you want me to—”

      Propping myself up to one elbow, I cut him off. “No it wasn’t and no I didn’t.” I had locked the door with several kinds of locks, mostly so that Wick could not get in.

      “The space at the bottom of the door was open.”

      I took a moment to digest that. So Borne had made himself pancake-thin and, boneless, then gotten out under the door. Great.

      I let Borne drift back into whatever boundary between watchfulness and sleep allowed him to dream.

      But I was awake now, and so I went to Wick’s apartment, thinking he might be back from his nocturnal wanderings. I wanted to sleep with Wick. Whether I meant sleep or sleep, I didn’t know. But for an hour or a morning, I wanted some kind of oblivion that didn’t mean anything for a while.

      Raising Borne all by myself was exhausting.

      I found Wick next to his beloved swimming pool full of “disgusting” biotech, and I took him right there, on the floor—unexpected and with complete surprise, even stealth, and found him willing. After being outside, after having to be so alert, so in control, I was the opposite of those things—and fully recovered from the attack. I could move in all sorts of ways without pain.

      I’d been outside and nothing bad had happened to me. Or, at least, nothing bad had had a chance to happen to me. And nothing bad was happening to me back inside, either.

      “Not now,” he said, “I’m working!” As per our old rituals, our codes and procedures.

      “Now,” I said.

      “But I’m trying to work,” and the joy in him, to voice the old complaint that meant he’d like nothing better than to be taken from work. To be taken by me, as hadn’t happened for weeks.

      So I took him and kept taking him until he had nothing left and we glistened with each other’s sweat. Our bodies still knew each other, and the Balcony Cliffs still knew that we belonged together. I could still feel those lines of power extending outward, my traps and his surprises intertwined, and here we were at the absolute center of our creation.

      Even if we hadn’t spoken after, whispered those endearments so personal no one else would