Borne

  “He’s bigger,” Wick said.

  I said nothing. I didn’t dare. For the first time I realized Wick looked worried or preoccupied for reasons that might have nothing to do with me. I’d managed to keep Wick away from Borne for two straight weeks.

  The beetle had finished its work.

  Wick got to his feet. “You need to rest. I’ve brought food for the kitchen. I’ve put up better defenses. I have to go out for a while, but I’ll be back soon.”

  I understood. He needed to make sure my attackers were really gone. He had to change the locks, make sure no one else could enter the same way. All of which meant eating up more resources we didn’t have, putting us both at risk much sooner.

  The burn, the sting—the screaming agony—of what had happened would not return for hours, as if it was coming toward me from light-years distant. I extended my arm to touch Wick’s cheek, the edge of his mouth, but he was too far away.

  “I should have been here,” he said.

  “If you hadn’t come back, I might be dead,” I said, but this was no comfort. If the city had really wanted to kill me, it would have killed me, as it had so many others.

  “I should take Borne with me,” Wick said, trying to sound casual.

  I winced. “No. Please. Don’t.”

  It would have been better for Wick’s peace of mind if I had shouted it out or said it just as casual. But I didn’t. I said those three words in a small, broken voice, and Wick couldn’t push back against them.

  * * *

  At some point after Wick left, I realized I couldn’t sleep and decided to get up. It hurt but I was already restless, unused to bed rest. I wanted to go see Borne. In my altered state I worried my attackers might have injured him as well. Or maybe I just wanted to be sure Wick hadn’t taken him away.

  He sat on a chair at the kitchen table, pulsing a faint green-gold. Wick had restored a few of my fireflies, but not many, so all I could really see was the glow of Borne.

  Borne stood at least half a foot taller than that afternoon, his base thicker and more robust. On the chair, he came up to my shoulders. I couldn’t see that any harm had come to him—he still had that perfect symmetry. He was beautiful in that darkness. He was powerful.

  “It’s just me,” Borne said.

  I screamed. I stumbled back, looking for a weapon—a stick, a knife, anything. His voice sounded just like the rasp of the boy with the gray eyes.

  “Just me,” Borne said. “Borne.”

  Just me.

  The worms Wick had left inside me struggled to release the drugs that would calm me. I was shaking. I was making an uncontrollable sound.

  “It’s just me,” Borne said again, as if testing out the words.

  I flinched again, stayed up against the far wall. This time he sounded less like my attacker, warmer and more lyrical. What I would come to know as his normal voice, although he could assume many.

  “Rachel,” Borne said. “Don’t need to be. Afraid.” The gray-eyed boy’s voice was completely gone now.

  “Don’t tell me what I need to be!” I shouted at him. “What are you?”

  He began to shamble off the chair.

  “Don’t come closer. Stay the fuck away!”

  I struggled for more words, to fill the space between us.

  Into that gap, Borne said, “Go rest. Please rest. Don’t worry. Sleep.” I could tell Borne had to consider each word carefully before choosing one, unsure how they fit together.

  “Sleep?” I laughed bitterly. “I’m not going to sleep now. You’re talking to me.”

  “I am Borne,” said the thing in front of me. “I talking talking talking.”

  Those words came out in a kind of mellifluous burble that reminded me of how much he had amused me those past weeks. But where did those words come from? Borne still had no face, no real mouth.

  “Is this a dream?”

  “Dream?” Borne said.

  “How did you escape them?”

  “Them?” Borne said.

  “Yes, them—the children who attacked me.”

  “Children,” Borne said. “Attacked me.”

  I was drifting then, drifting against my will, swaying as the medical creatures inside worked on me. I staggered, knew I was sliding down the wall onto my butt. The worms must have decided I needed sleep. Everything became fuzzy, indistinct.

  After a time, I had a sense of Borne’s shape looming over me, of things crawling around inside my veins. I was in my bed. I was on the floor. I was in the living room. Awake. Asleep. Suspended between. Delirious, raving, wondering if I was in a nightmare or just now entering one. All the things in my past that I tried not to think about rose to the surface, spilled out of my mouth, and Borne stood there, listening. I told him everything about me. Things I hadn’t admitted to myself, that had been bottled up for so long I had no control over them.

  I couldn’t know it then, but what I offered up to Borne probably saved my life.

  WHERE I CAME FROM AND WHO I WAS

  Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

  Once, at the age of eight or nine, I had still wanted to be a writer, or at least something other than a refugee. Not a trap-maker. Not a scavenger. Not a killer. I filled my notebooks full of scribbles. Poetry about how I loved the sea. Retellings of fables. Even scenes from novels I never finished and will never finish. Borne could have been a creature out of those childhood fictions. Borne could have been my imaginary friend.

  I rationalized later that this is why I told Borne about my past, why I told him what I could never tell Wick, just as he could not tell me about a diagram, a hidden history of the city, the nautilus biotech. But maybe it could have been anyone, in that moment.

  * * *

  I was born on an island that fell not to war or disease but to rising seas. My father was a politician of sorts—a member of the council that ruled the largest island of the archipelago. He liked to fish and build things in his spare time. He collected old nautical maps and liked to find the errors. He had a boat that he built himself called The Turtle Shell. He used to take my mother out for “floating picnics” while he courted her, land just a dot on the horizon.

  “I must have trusted him,” my mother said when he told the story. “I must have really trusted him, to go so far out at sea.”

  My mother had been born on the island, too, but her people came from far away, from the mainland, and it was a scandal when the two of them married because it wasn’t ever done. That scandal gave me my name, Rachel, because it came from neither family but from outsiders. A compromise.

  My mother was a doctor who took care of infants. She was quick to smile and laugh, perhaps too quick because she would laugh when nervous or distressed, too. I could see my father observe her carefully, perhaps to make sure of the difference. She liked the spicy food of her family’s homeland and took up making little models of ships. She would playfully mock my father’s fascination with boats using her models. Scale versions with toothpicks. Like my father, she loved to read and books surrounded me growing up.

  We had what we wanted and more. We knew who we were. But that could not stop the rising seas, and one by one the smaller islands around us winked out of existence. We could see their lights at night with our telescope, standing on the shore. And then came the nights when we could no longer see those lights. We had known before that, but after that we put away the telescope.

  I was only six when we left, boarding a ship as refugees. I remember because my parents told me the stories as I grew up. They told me the stories even as we continued to be refugees, moving from camp to camp, country to country, thinking that we could outrun the unraveling of t
he world. But the world was unraveling most places.

  I still have vague memories of the camps. The ever-present mud churned to muck by overcrowding, of mosquitoes so thick you had to keep your mouth shut, of extreme heat balanced later by extreme cold. The fences and guard dogs that always seemed better tended to than the tents. The new papers we needed to apply for, the old ones that were never good enough. The cast-off biotech they shoveled into troughs for us and the way phones and other devices became extinct over time. The feeling of always being hollowed-out and hungry. Sickness, and always having a cold or being feverish. The people on the outside, the guards, were the same as us, and I didn’t understand why they should be on the outside and we should be on the inside.

  But also I remember my parents laughing and sharing things about our home as I became old enough to appreciate them. Photographs, a ceremonial bowl my father insisted on lugging with us, my mother’s handmade jewelry, a photo album. Every time we moved and started over, my father would build things: tents or enclosures or vegetable gardens. My mother would pitch in and tend the sick, even though the countries we lived in didn’t recognize her medical license. Was it selfless? They were fighting for their lives, their identities. So, no, it was not selfless, but it helped people.

  My father must have been cheery for my sake, for my mother’s sake. She might one day be able to return to a homeland. He could not, and it was rare we met anyone who had lived on the island. The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.

  Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.

  * * *

  Once, we found a kind of peace. My father led us to another island: not the same, not at all, but whether from an impulse futile or courageous or both, he meant to re-create what he had known. We had a good life there for almost two years. A city to live in, a beach to walk on, a botanical garden, a school, playing with children who looked like me. We lived in a little two-room apartment and my dad built in the backyard an outrigger canoe with a cannibalized motor. My mother became a doctor again, working in return for goods.

  Every so often information came from the mainland that whatever might have been bad was getting worse, but my parents withheld any news from me for as long as they could, as best as they were able. Until, one day, shock: We were herded by soldiers via a crowded, diesel-spewing ferry to the mainland and another camp. The green-blue water and my father’s boat and our apartment were gone.

  It got worse after that, not better. It got worse and kept getting worse until we didn’t even have the camps. It was just us, trudging across a land that held pockets of sanity and insanity both. Kindness and cruelty, sometimes from the same source. My father carried a knife in his boot and took turns with my mother holding on to a small revolver. We were as likely to come across burned and half-buried bodies in a ditch as a farmer and his sons armed with shotguns. Once, a grinning man invited us into his house and tried to rape my mother. My father had a scar across his left arm after that and we would stay off the main roads.

  We starved at times rather than join the ranks of those marching toward an illusion, that slow, tired trudge. The back roads we took would become reduced to gray snakes against the blackness of forest or scrubland. In the distance, lights of a cabin or of a town would invoke in us dread and then caution, followed by avoidance.

  Months after we had stopped believing in refuge, there appeared on a distant hill a city so miraculous it looked at dusk like a huge crystal chandelier that had fallen to Earth or a stranded ocean liner listing on its side. I could not keep my eyes off of it and pleaded with my parents to go there. They ignored me. They were right to. It lay on our horizon for several days, and during the night of the ninth day, having rounded its eastern side, still fighting our way through forest and plain, it caught fire, all of those sparkling lights taken up in a huge conflagration that burned the darkness away for miles around.

  There came the blinking red hazard lights of bombers flying away from the city, and we so far down below marveled at the sight because it had been years since we had seen a plane of any kind. Something so old and so new. We wondered if airplanes might mean some resurgence, that some resurrection of a normal life might be upon us. But it was just an illusion. It meant nothing.

  We made our way quickly more eastward still, fearing the exodus of the survivors as if it were a wave that might drown us, and yet they were no different than us. Then came the thick, powdery black smoke during the days, gathered up in the sooty rain that fell, and out of the ground came writhing worms and rabbits and other dying things.

  Soon we would think back kindly on those days. But throughout it all, my parents held on to hope, kept trying to find a safe place. They would not give up. They never gave up. I knew that, even now that they were gone.

  * * *

  There was more that I told Borne, but I can’t bring myself to write it, because it is too terrible to put into words. And it pushes up against the one thing I couldn’t remember: how I came to this city, what had happened to my parents. My last memories from before the city were of floods and makeshift rafts and the expanding silence of people dead or dying in the water—and a hint of land on the horizon. My last memories were of going down for a second, third time, my lungs full of silt.

  But when I came to, I was in the city, walking. I was walking by the river as if I had always been there.

  Alone.

  WHAT I DID NEXT, EVEN THOUGH IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WRONG

  For every clear-eyed view of my room that took in the lack of running water, the mold that had begun its war against the constellations of fireflies embedded in my ceiling, the half-collapsing wall with the window that looked out on a mountain of dirt … for all of that, and the scenes out on the streets of one tired and dirty person fighting another person who was just as tired and dirty over a scrap the old world would have found useless or disgusting … for all of that, I still could imagine a time when the small things we used to love might be returned to us.

  “It’s just me,” Borne said and for a long time huddled on my bed, trying to recover, I didn’t answer. Not really. I just spewed words at him, lost and rambling. Wick appeared next to him from time to time and winked out again. Sometimes I would feel Wick’s arms around me. Sometimes I would see him staring at me with an expression of guilt and, I thought, of suspicion.

  Was the suspicion because of Borne? Since the attack, Borne had changed again. He had abandoned the sea-anemone shape in favor of resembling a large vase or a squid balanced on a flattened mantel. The aperture at the top had curled out and up on what I chose to interpret as a long neck, sprouting feathery filaments, which almost seemed like an affectation. The filaments, with a prolonged soft sigh, would crowd together and then pull apart again like bizarre synchronized dancers. He was tall enough now that the top of him loomed a good two feet above the bed. Colors still flitted across his body, or lazily floated in shapes like storm clouds, ragged and layered and dark. Azure. Lavender. Emerald. He frequently smelled like vanilla.

  As I lay on my side and stared at him—half curious, half afraid—I could see that Borne had developed a startling collection of eyes that encircled his body. Each eye was small and completely different from the others around it. Some were human—blue, black, brown, green pupils—and some were animal eyes, but he could see through all of them. They perplexed me because I didn’t know what they meant. I decided to think of it as a kind of odd adornment, Borne’s equivalent of a belt.

  When Borne saw me staring at him, he would make a sound like the startled clearing of a throat, and his flesh would absorb all of the eyes except two, which would migrate higher on his body and away from each other. Sometimes they would slip back down to his hips, but once in positio
n on his torso they became larger, took on a sea-blue color, and grew long, dark lashes; they moved independent of each other.

  He must have thought he looked more normal that way.

  * * *

  On the sixth day, I felt more lucid, woke with only a slight fuzziness. Wick had gone out again, reluctant, to conduct business. He hadn’t found my attackers, and I knew he probably never would. We hadn’t talked again about what had happened, or about much of anything. I even pretended to be asleep when he came in. I had energy only for Borne.

  From my bed I asked Borne a question. It was really the only question—a dangerous question to match a dangerous mood. I was still on the worm-drugs and I wanted to be of use, to do anything but just lie there.

  “What are you?” My heart beat faster, but I wasn’t afraid. Not really.

  “I don’t know,” Borne said in a rough yet sweet tone. For a confused moment I thought he’d spoken in the voices of both my parents at once. Then, sincere and eager: “Do you know what you are?”

  I ignored him. “Let’s play a game to figure out what you are.”

  Borne went quiet for a second and his colors dimmed. Then he flared up.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay!”

  “Then you have to be honest with me.”

  “Honest.” Turning the word over in his head.

  “Tell the truth.”

  A ripple of vibrant purple traveled across his skin.

  “Honest. I can be honest. I am honest. Honest.”

  Had I upset him or triggered some other emotion, or was he just testing out the word?

  “You know a lot about me,” I ventured. “But I know nothing about you. The game is about questions. Will you answer some questions?”

  “I will answer questions,” Borne said, uncertain. Did he understand the word question?

  “Are you a machine?” I asked.

  “What is a machine?”

  “A made thing. A thing made by people.”

  This puzzled Borne, and it was a long while before he said, “You are a made thing. Two people made you.”