Borne

  We were on our own. We had always been on our own. We had no recourse, and I cannot tell you how much some part of me had wished to not be on my own, had hoped there would be some person, someone, down in the depths of the Company who would have an answer, who still existed to explain it all, and who, if we asked them to, pleaded with them, would pull a lever or push a button to fix our situation, reset it, and bring forth everything afresh.

  But there wasn’t. There was only, after a time, the recognition that the Magician still stood beside me, that we were standing there, among all the animals that had gotten in through the cracks, had dug their way in, had come back into the place that had created their destroyed and destructible lives. The rats in the walls, who were in the process of rewiring everything, changing everything. They were the future, but the Magician hadn’t realized it. She thought she was the future.

  The cascading silver wall, this door that only worked one way, showed an enticing snow globe of a scene by a mighty river, with docks and piers and a dazzling blue sky with birds frozen in mid-flight amid the first signs of spring and bright, modern buildings on the land beyond that had never suffered war. A scene that would fill anyone from our ruined city with such yearning and, perhaps, recognition.

  It was so obvious a trap.

  * * *

  The Magician was still talking. The Magician in that cavern was still trying to tell me things. Why I should join her. What this all meant. How the city could be saved from itself.

  But I heard no more from her. I hit the Magician with a rock until she was dead, and the animals did nothing to stop me. Perhaps they would have done it themselves if I hadn’t. But I did. There was no future for the city with the Magician still in it. I may have been at my limits when I decided that, but my mind was clear.

  Funny, how the Magician thought she knew me, how careless she was around me because of that. But she didn’t know me. She didn’t know me at all, no matter how much she knew about me.

  And she couldn’t know one other secret: I had already read Wick’s letter, so, really, you could say the Magician never had a chance.

  * * *

  But there was more than even Wick knew, and one thing he still hid from me, despite his letter. Wick had come here for a cure, for medicine. The Magician had come here for biotech, to once more launch herself into the ambition of ruling the city. And I had been here as Wick’s ghost, the person who haunted him every day of his life.

  We had all been too small in our thoughts, too small to realize what might be revealed to us if we really looked, if we really saw.

  Those spilled-over crates from the Company contained a variety of items. Restocking of supplies to reassure the remnants. Raw material for creating more biotech to be shipped back. Food packets. Dead embryos to seed the city with more alcohol minnows.

  But the last shipment from the Company had been Borne—many Bornes. Hundreds had spilled out from the containers in front of the slow mirror. Marked as children’s toys, but the diagram on the side of the containers did not match what had rolled out of the crates. Borne pods. Dormant, trapped here by whoever among the remnants had had the foresight to close off the level.

  Until the animals tunneled in.

  After I killed the Magician as the fox watched and did nothing, I ran my hands over the delicate mechanism that once controlled the silver wall. There had been no future for the city with the Magician in it. But there also would have been no future if creatures from a secret shipment meant to absorb and “sample” had descended on the city in their hundreds.

  Had the Company meant to destroy the city? Wipe it clean? Retrieve with the recon of what was absorbed? If so, it had failed. Everything that had spilled from those crates had been spiked, killed before it could live. There were only a handful that could have gotten out, and that could only have happened if the animals around me had wanted it to happen. If the fox had wanted it to happen. Had they tried more than once? Was Borne the first that had awoke? And had they modified him before setting him free? From what I had seen in the other rooms, the fox and her kind had been changing so very much. Those with hands had been helping those without. A quiet revolution sneaking up on us.

  As for what Wick had held back, it was there in the letter to find, I suppose, but also in clues along the way.

  Mord showed me what I was.

  For in one of the rooms I had found what he had hid so ably and so well, lived with for so long: There was a mound of discarded diagrams and models for biotech. Boxes full of withered-away parts.

  Each one had some version of Wick’s face. Crushed. Cracked. Discarded. Tossed aside. Abandoned. Discontinued.

  Wick had never been a person.

  But he had always been a person to me.

  WHAT I FOUND IN WICK’S LETTER

  Dear Rachel,

  I don’t know how to write a letter like this one. This is the first letter I have written to anyone.

  I told you I am sick, and that is true, but there is another sickness, and that is all the other secrets that lie hidden. One of these secrets you asked me to keep, and others I had to keep. But most of them originate from this fact: The first time you remember meeting me is not the first time we met. You didn’t come here from the river. You didn’t come from the north. You came from inside the Company. I found you because you’d come from the Company.

  Your parents died soon after you came here. They died in a terrible way and it left such a mark on you. I found you staggering near the holding ponds at the Company building on a day seven years ago, a few months before your memory of meeting me. You were distraught, far gone in your grief, and you hadn’t eaten in days.

  The holding ponds were a horror show back then, much worse than now. A cynical place that allowed the Company to think of itself as merciful because so much of what it dumped still lived, for a time. This abandonment of experiments occurred at a terrifying pace, and the feeding frenzy of scavengers and animals was murderous.

  When I found you, you were walking through scenes of slaughter and desperation—a hell on Earth of Company discards. I don’t know how long you would have survived there, how long before someone decided you were biotech, not human at all, and butchered you or captured you or took you and tried to modify you.

  You were in shock. Your eyes didn’t focus. Your clothing was torn and someone had already taken your shoes off of you.

  You said something to me when I came up to you, as if whatever you were thinking you just said. But flat, disengaged, as if you came from another planet.

  “You’re beautiful. So beautiful. And someone beautiful wouldn’t hurt me.”

  It was nothing like what I thought you would say, nothing like the person you are now, either, and it was the only thing you said for quite some time. I laughed when you said it. It was nonsense. It confirmed your dysfunction, your dislocation. It confirmed you as salvage.

  And it wasn’t true. I did hurt you, just not by leaving you there, and for a very long time I had no idea why. I could not understand why I saved you. I told myself it was because you were the only thing human in that landscape and I saw you so suddenly. Because I didn’t expect you there. Because I didn’t expect you to say that. Because, in a way, I had been discarded, too.

  But back at the Balcony Cliffs, you did not get better, you did not stop being damaged, because of what had happened to you.

  Some people come into the city from inside the Company, not from the outside. At least, they used to. Your parents had come from inside the Company—stowaways in crates, supplies being sent to the city from some other place. If I cannot tell you what that other place might be, it is because no one here in the city knows and most do not guess at its existence.

  But if you came in a supply crate, you weren’t human by Company rules. Instead, you were parts, or biotech. No exceptions. Just some small mercy that someone wouldn’t kill you, a young woman, and they dumped you at the holding ponds instead, to let you die out of their sight.

&
nbsp; But your parents died inside the Company building. They were killed coming out of the crates, murdered, and you had witnessed it, seen it all, and then been thrown out into a bloody wasteland at the edge of a city you did not know, that you had never seen before.

  You couldn’t get your bearings. Your parents had brought you here, so far from any sea, and then been killed in front of you, and it had broken something inside of you that you could not repair.

  And one day just a month after I took you in, once you understood what I did, you sought me out and begged me to take your memories. You wanted your memories scattered to the four winds. You wanted them all gone—not buried or repressed or forgotten like a scar, but gone. Every last bit. You wanted to start fresh. “Fill me up with someone else’s memories,” you said. “I know you care about me, Wick, please do this for me.”

  It was the first time I had seen any emotion in you.

  Because you wanted this, I knew you were out of your mind, but soon enough I also knew if I didn’t give you what you wanted that you would find some other way, go to someone else for it, or worse.

  You continued to be confusing to me. I had left the Company after the fish project, driven out, tossed to the holding ponds myself. Where they expected me to die, like others before me. Instead I made a life in the city. But I didn’t consider myself a person. I didn’t make decisions like a person. I felt, after all I had done and endured in the Company, that I didn’t deserve that. I felt instead that I was lost and would remain lost and all I could expect was to survive. So I had made decisions like someone who wasn’t a person, who just wanted to survive.

  Yet I made decisions about you that didn’t make sense. I should never have taken you from the holding ponds, never been involved. I should have left you to your fate, whatever that might be. It bothered me that I went through these motions of being a person, of letting you into my life. Only now, I had to cut you from my life if I was to give you what you wanted. You would have no memory of me, or anything in the city. For so many reasons, I told you I wouldn’t do it.

  Still you persisted—clung to this idea like it was the only thing that could save you, and I think you were wanting to punish yourself. I think you believed you deserved punishment—for being powerless. But you were also traumatized and hurt and lonely and confused. To have gone from the life you were living with your parents to being without them and in this place …

  So, eventually, I did what you asked … or most of it. I took your memories of the city, your parents’ death, the time right before. I took all of that away, but I left everything else.

  I don’t know if it will be harder for you, the Rachel now, to understand why you asked for that obliteration or to understand why I couldn’t give you everything you asked for. You hadn’t asked me to kill you; you had asked, instead, to become a different person, to be allowed to create a different life, from the ground up. And if I respected you—surely if I loved you—I should have done as you asked.

  But the idea of making you less than a person, a cipher, was not possible for me. You could not know that, but it was the thing least possible for me. Nor could I imagine, except as atrocity, filling you back up with someone else’s memories without your knowledge. So I told myself I would make it up to you, I would find a way, but, really, what I found was a selfishness: a way to still know you even though you no longer knew me.

  After, I set you loose again, to be on your own again. Because what did I know about living with a person, being with a person, taking care of a person? Nothing.

  When you woke, I had made sure it would be near the poisoned river, beneath the Balcony Cliffs, so I could watch you through my binoculars, make sure you regained consciousness and were still safe. I watched you get up, I watched you walk away.

  And I thought that was it—that was the end of it.

  But I kept thinking about you, what you were doing, if you felt better now. If what I had done was a good thing or a bad thing, or neither.

  I could not help myself. I started to seek you in the city, and when I finally found you, for a time I just observed, thought that might be enough. But then, one day, the meeting you remember: back down by the river, where I sought you out and I lied to you. I pretended I didn’t know you, offered you what I could offer.

  I asked if you wanted memories of a better time. I could provide those. It’s what I did. You said no. If you had said yes, I had resolved to do it, and then walk away and never seek you out again. In a way, you would have gotten what you wanted before.

  I could never tell you what I had done. I was too afraid, and then, eventually, too much time had passed. I was living in the center of a lie. Even if, before, we had known each other such a short time, I felt ashamed of using what I knew of you to my advantage. Despite a terrible, unworthy elation beneath: that second chance, that moment, when you had stayed, and then we were partners, fortifying the Balcony Cliffs. Living there.

  The Rachel without the Company, without her parents’ death, was confused, yes, sad, yes. But you were also more sure of yourself, and you had lost that desperation, that agitation to the eyes that had told me of some deep wound. I began to wonder if I might be capable of being a person after all—there, at the moment of my greatest betrayal.

  That is the most ironic thing; that I thought betraying you was a form of being trustworthy, as if the world were upside down.

  But that is not the only thing I had done. Before we met again, before you began living again at the Balcony Cliffs, there was something else I never told you.

  You wanted oblivion. You wanted not to exist. But there was a price for that. I sold your memories to the Magician. That was my price, the price you agreed to without knowing. The memories from inside the Company. The memories of me. Of your parents’ death. How you had gotten to the access point.

  The Magician had taken an interest in me, as she did in all creatures of the Company, especially people she had known in the Company. People she thought knew more than she did about the Company. She asked questions. She infiltrated. She discovered the survival of the fish project because I went to the holding ponds and she saw me there.

  She used that information to figure out even more.

  * * *

  You must understand: I did not really care about you when I first saw you. I did not care about you except as salvage. I did not care about anyone. Caring came later. And I didn’t see the harm. I didn’t think I would ever see you again. I thought the Magician would fade. That she would be one of those who got killed or was never heard from again. Nothing at that time except a certain ruthlessness, a coldness around the eyes, could have told anyone she would rise so far. Not given her opposition to the Company.

  But the Magician knew about Mord from her other sources, and she was already using that to blackmail me, to extract. I gave her what I thought compromised me least, and in return she stayed silent and sold me the supplies I needed.

  Because, it’s true, what she found out: I helped create Mord. The Company used what we had learned from the fish project to build Mord. But the Company wasn’t building him from scratch. Not putting a human face on an animal, as happened with the fish. No, they wanted to create an animal around a human being.

  Maybe I didn’t realize what the Company planned to do to him, but that is no excuse. I should have found a way out, or found a way to get Mord out. Except there was no choice. Not really. I was the one who did that, as the fish project wound down. I made the transition for him when asked to; I held his hand as it began, before he no longer really recognized me. At the start, I don’t think he understood what was going to happen.

  And then I was gone, discarded by the Company, and I could do nothing for Mord, not even comfort him.

  * * *

  I could not even save the fish—all I could do was put it out of its misery after it languished for a few months in the holding ponds. The only good thing it seemed that I’d done was salvaging you. I knew what you had really asked for, and
what I had done, but I thought it would all go away, become nothing, not even history, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. It only lay submerged for a while.

  The Magician had not just the knowledge of my role in creating Mord but then, when I brought you back into the Balcony Cliffs, that further knowledge of your history whenever she needed something. Until she asked for the Balcony Cliffs, and that was too much.

  Then came Borne, and I couldn’t take Borne from you because I had meddled in your life too much already. You kept asking me if Borne was a person. But I didn’t believe I was a person, Rachel. So I couldn’t tell you.

  Because what you will learn, Rachel, is that I am not what you think I am. I am more like Borne, and every time you told me he was human, I felt less human, less real, and I don’t blame you for that, but that’s how it is for me, and always will be.

  You must understand that I have done nothing that was meant to hurt you. Everything I have done, for many years, has been for you and to keep the Balcony Cliffs safe. Please, I hope you will believe me.

  * * *

  I had read Wick’s letter while still in our temporary shelter. I struggled with it every moment of our journey into the Company building. I struggled with it every time I propped Wick up, gave him water, goaded him forward. Every time I looked at Wick, I saw something different, felt something different. He was like a mirror and a window, and the scene kept changing.

  When I thought I could be reduced no further, when I thought nothing more could be taken from me, even what seemed to restore something to me became a further reduction. What if I had wanted to be lost? What if my earlier self had been the smartest, the wisest, to want to remove all of that from me? So I could survive. So maybe I could be happy. What if my unhappiness had always been from having remembered happiness?