Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

equipment here. I don’t have the time or the ability for anything noninvasive.” The Magician encroached, the supplies wouldn’t last forever—the rhythm that ruled our lives.

      To Wick, Borne was just another variable, something he needed to control to manage his own stress. I understood that, but perhaps the lie created by life inside the Balcony Cliffs was that at some point we might think beyond the next day or the next week. That was the sliver of doubt that had crept into me along with the laughter at Borne’s antics.

      On impulse, I hugged Wick, held him close, even though he tried to pull away. This was business, this was survival, that resistance told me, and I shouldn’t mix our personal relationship with business. But I couldn’t help it.

      And I still couldn’t give him Borne—not out of pity or concern or anything else false. And because I couldn’t give him Borne, I stopped talking about Borne with him. When he asked about Borne, I kept my answers brief and casual. He’s fine. He’s really nothing more than some kind of vegetable. A potted plant that walks. Wick would look at me like he saw right through me, but he didn’t take Borne away from me.

      It was all a test as to whether trust could still exist between us, and every time I extended that trust a little further I expected it would be unable to take the weight, or the pressure of my weight on it, and snap.

      WHAT I FOUND IN WICK’S APARTMENT

      Trust, though, required certain betrayals. Long before the arrival of Borne, I had searched Wick’s quarters while he was out selling his drugs. I assumed he had done the same to me, but who knew? This aspect of trust you don’t talk about with the recipient.

      My betrayal required skill—to un-puzzle locks, to bypass traps, to snuff optics—but in the end it wasn’t worth the effort. Wick’s three rooms did not reveal much about the man. The sum of his existence in that cramped space came to so very little. No family photographs or portraits, few personal items.

      Perhaps, I thought, he chose to live so small to keep whatever secrets he hid out of his mind? I imagined that somewhere buried deep in our Balcony Cliffs midden lay a warehouse full of artifacts Wick kept locked away so he could not be compromised by them. But if that was true, I never found that place.

      I had only the stark evidence at hand, coerced gently from a desk drawer with a little creative lock-picking: a diagram of a fish curled inside the outer tube of a broken telescope and a metal box filled with tiny vermilion nautilus shells, curled up and dry.

      I pocketed one nautilus shell for later, examined the fish diagram. I held the diagram unfolded beneath the dim light of the fireflies Wick had embedded in the ceiling. I knew it was a relic from Wick’s final project at the Company, the one he would only talk about when he was drunk. Certainly nothing like this had ever arisen from Wick’s makeshift swimming-pool vat. Yet.

      Whatever purpose the schematic had served, in the end it depicted an ugly fish, like a huge grouper or carp. A sideways, cutaway view, with lines radiating out from the brain, but also other parts, with numbers and random letters at the end of the spikes. That the fish had a wistful face of a woman with pale skin and blue eyes did not help, the effect ghoulish. It made me wary, as if some mad scientist had decided to make real a figurehead from an old sailing ship.

      Wariness was not the term for the scrawling on the back. The more recent notes around the edges I could tell were in Wick’s handwriting, and amounted to nostalgia: little nudges about how he might re-create the fish project, which had clearly petered out over time. But there was also a second writer, dominating the center space, with what looked like older marks, whose clear passion had increased into madness. The handwriting devolved into sweeping or stabbing marks, less and less legible, and then became gouged dark clouds of scribbles. The damage obscured meaning or told me too much. And what words that did peer through the mess were less than useful. Near the end of legibility, the scrawled words, No more company.

      I put the empty telescope on the bed, continued my rummaging, worried Wick might catch me in the act. But I quickly realized there was nothing left to riffle through. So some scavenger’s sixth sense made me return to the telescope. A patina like mother-of-pearl covered the surface. I held the telescope up to the firefly lights to admire it.

      Then frowned. Something seemed etched on the surface. In fact, up close, the “metal” surface revealed itself as hundreds of tiny hard fish scales forming a pattern so integrated you almost couldn’t see the joins. The surface was still silver shiny, blank, but when I adjusted my grip I discovered that the heat of my fingers had done something to the scales: miniature photographs had formed there. Sneaky, sneaky Wick—although I couldn’t understand the purpose of concealment. The photographs appeared to date from before the city’s ruination, reproduced from old books, but hardly seemed worth keeping secret.

      Curious, I made quick work of the telescope’s surface, heating up every scale with my touch, almost as if playing a musical instrument, and then squinting at the results.

      Most that weren’t photographs of places now destroyed held a record of impressions of the city. There were lists of places under titles like “Reclaim” and asked/answereds like “How do you kill a building? Do nothing.” Some of it appeared to be the equivalent of microfiche containing a rich history of the city before the Company’s appearance. Other fragments were so microscopic I could only guess at their importance, and wondered how Wick could read them, unless he had some viewing device hidden away, too. None of this seemed like the Wick I knew—who was a loner, who had never mentioned the city as it had existed before the Company, and who seemed to have blocked the hope of any future for the city from his mind.

      But I finally understood the need for secrecy when I realized it wasn’t just old photographs and older data. Some scales held monstrous visions of projects never completed that scared me because they made Mord seem mundane. Most important, other scales included a fair number of technical specifications for biotech that I knew Wick had created. None of our enemies needed that information.

      Sometimes I wondered whether I would still find Wick fascinating if I uncovered all of his secrets, if I would even know who he was without them.

      Back in my apartment, I dropped the nautilus I had stolen into a glass of water and watched as it reanimated, turned a brilliant shade of crimson, began to uncoil as it stared at me, almost defiant, and then disintegrated into nothing as if it had never existed. A disappearing trick. An illusion.

      Drinking that elixir of Wick mysteries was impossible for me. I poured the water out, cleaned the glass, tossed the glass onto a pile of dirty old clothes out in the corridor.

       ¤

      My other betrayal was simple: I liked Borne too much. I knew this in my bones, knew I really should give him up. But I also knew it would take something catastrophic for me to do so. The more personality Borne showed, the more I felt attached to him.

      Borne also made it easy to keep him because I discovered he would eat just about anything—any crumb, lowly pebble, or scrap of wood. Any worm of any description that came within reach would disappear, never to be seen again. Borne ate a lot of what I would have discarded as trash and in a sense made a compost pile redundant. I think he would’ve eaten a garbage can if he’d been hungry enough.

      This ease of life with Borne didn’t stop him from continuing to puzzle me. The most basic and troubling puzzle? Even though so much went into Borne, nothing ever came out of Borne. This fact struck me as absurd, even humorously sinister. It actually made me giggle. No pellets. No dung. No little puddles. Nothing.

      Borne was also growing. Yes, growing. I hadn’t wanted to admit it at first, because the idea of growth carried with it the idea of a more radical change, the thought of a child becoming an adult. In how many species did the transformation become radical, the parent so different from the juvenile? So yes, by the end of the first month, although the process had been gradual, I could no longer deny that Borne had tripled in size.

      I also could not deny that I was actively hiding Borne from Wick.