Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

brought to him. Those eyes saw everything, except, perhaps, how I saw him.

      “I know what it isn’t,” Wick said, serious again. “It isn’t Mord-made. I doubt Mord knew he carried it. But it isn’t necessarily from the Company, either.”

      Mord could be devious, and Mord’s relationship with the Company was in flux. Sometimes we wondered if a civil war raged in the remnants of the Company building, between those who supported Mord and those who regretted creating him.

      “Where did Mord pick it up from if not the Company?”

      A tremor at Wick’s mouth made the purity of his features more arresting and intense. “Whispers come back to me. Of things roaming the city that owe no allegiance to Mord, the Company, or the Magician. I see these things at the fringes, in the desert at night, and I wonder …”

      Foxes and other small mammals had shadowed me that morning. Was that what Wick meant? Their proliferation was a mystery—was the Company making them, or was the desert encroaching on the city?

      I didn’t tell him about the animals, wanted his own testimony, prompted, “Things?”

      But he ignored my question, changed course: “Well, it’s easy enough to learn more.” Wick passed his hand over Borne. The crimson worms living in his wrist leapt out briefly to analyze it, before retreating into his skin.

      “Surprising. It is from the Company. At least, created inside the Company.” He’d worked for the Company in its heyday, a decade ago, before being “cast out, thrown away,” as he put it in a rare unguarded moment.

      “But not by the Company?”

      “It has the economy of design usually only achieved by committees of one.”

      When Wick danced around a subject, it made me nervous. The world was already too uncertain, and if I looked to Wick for anything besides security, it was for knowledge.

      “Do you think it’s a mistake?” I asked. “An afterthought? Something put out in the trash?”

      Wick shook his head, but his tight frown didn’t reassure me. Wick was self-sufficient and self-contained. So was I. Or so we both thought. But now I felt he was withholding some crucial piece of information.

      “Then what?”

      “It could be almost anything. It could be a beacon. It could be a cry for help. It could be a bomb.” Did Wick really not know?

      “So maybe we should eat it?”

      He laughed, shattering the architectural lines of his face. The laughter didn’t bother me. Not then, at least.

      “I wouldn’t. Much worse to eat a bomb than a beacon.” He leaned forward, and I took such pleasure from staring at his face that I thought he had to notice. “But we should know its purpose. If you give it to me, I can at least break it down into its parts, cycle it through my beetles. Discover more that way. Make use of it.”

      We were, in our way, equals by now. Partners. I sometimes called him my boss because I scavenged for him, but I didn’t have to give him the sea anemone. Nothing in our agreement said I had to. True, he could take it while I slept … but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?

      I looked at the creature lying there on the table, and I felt possessive. The feeling rose out of me unexpected, but true—and not just because I’d risked Mord to find Borne.

      “I think I’ll keep it for a while,” I said.

      Wick gave me a long look, shrugged, and said, too casually, “Suit yourself.” The creature might be unusual, but we’d seen similar things before; perhaps he believed there was little harm.

      Then he took a golden beetle from his pocket, put it in his ear, and his eyes no longer saw me. He always did that after something reminded him of the Company in the wrong way, unleashing a kind of self-despising rage and melancholy. I had told him confessing whatever had happened there might bring him peace, but he always ignored me. He told me he was shielding me. I did not believe him. Not really.

      Perhaps he was trying to forget the details of some personal failure he could not forgive, something he’d brought on himself or actions he’d taken toward the end. Yet the job he’d chosen—or been forced into—after leaving could only remind him of the Company hour by hour, day by day. It was hard to guess because I didn’t know much about biotech, and I felt the answers I wanted from him might be technical, that maybe he thought I wouldn’t understand the details.

      If I’d had his full attention, if Wick had argued with me over Borne, the future might have been different. If he’d insisted on taking Borne from me. But he didn’t. Couldn’t.

      WHERE I LIVED, AND WHY

      By the time I found Borne, I was entangled with Wick in so many ways. We were bound by our mutual safe place: the Balcony Cliffs, which existed on the northeast fringe of the city, overlooking the poisoned river. To the west as the city sloped toward sea level lay the territory of the Magician. To the south, across desolation and oases both, the remnants of the Company, protected by Mord. Much of all of this sprawled across a vast dry seabed that extended into the semiarid plain beyond the city.

      Wick had found the Balcony Cliffs and held them for a time without me. But only by inviting me in had he held on to that place. He provided his dwindling supply of biotech and chemical deceptions and I provided a talent for building traps both physical and psychological. Using Wick’s blueprints, I’d reinforced or hollowed out the most stable corridors and the rest now ended in hidden pits or floors strewn with broken glass or worse. I used a terrifying nostalgia: book covers with death’s-heads drawn on them, a bloody cradle never meant to break, a few dozen pairs of shoes (some with mummified feet still in them). The brittle remains of a doglike animal that had wandered in and gotten lost hung from one ceiling, while the graffiti added to the wall opposite would haunt an intruder’s nightmares. If they knew how to read. A horror show linked to Wick’s pheromones and hallucinogens, activated by trip wire. Attacks had come and squatters tried their luck, and always we had fended them off.

      One route we’d made led to Wick’s rooms, another to the stairs in the former lobby that granted access to a blind hidden near the top mulch. Another route came after subterfuge to the converted swimming pool where Wick stirred a vat of seething biotech creations like a mad scientist—and then from there to the cliff where lay the balconies that had given the place its name.

      From the center, near Wick’s workplace, the lines in my head were drawn most urgently to the southern edge of the mound, which faced the Company across the great broken divide of the city’s southwest flank, the confusion deliberately multiplied, my purpose to create a maze for any unexpected visitors … before simplifying again at the exit to three passageways, only one of which led anywhere safe, and before that the door, which from the outside appeared to just be a part of the mound, obliterated by an inspiration of moss and vines. A strong smell of carrion, one of Wick’s most inspired distortion pheromones, grew unbearable closest to the door. Even I had trouble leaving by that entrance.

      Throughout the warren we had made of the Balcony Cliffs there now existed allegiances that felt intimate—more intimate even than our sleeping arrangements. Corridors? Tunnels? Even those kinds of distinctions had been lost under our excavating rule and Wick’s addition of special spiders and other insects. I kept track of my traps with a map, but Wick, Company-savvy, used a flounder-creature in a shallow pan of water as his command and control, an ever-changing blueprint traced delicate across its back.

      At some point, just as our systems of defense had become entwined, so too had our bodies, and that had wrought an unexpected synergy. What had been created from extremes of loneliness, of need, had moved beyond mutual comfort into friendship and then toward some amorphous frontier or feeling that could not be love—that I refused to call love.

      In weak moments, I would run my hand across his wiry chest and tease him about