Borne

Someone tall in dark robes was walking toward me. Someone with a pointy, wide-brimmed hat pulled down very low. The floppy hat spun and glittered, and the gait was oddly fluid and disjoined; later I realized it resembled a baby’s clumsy walk but in a man’s body. The arms of the man hung out at his sides and the hands flopped as he walked. The too-pale hands seemed unimportant, as if the torso and legs were real but the arms were just there to complete the illusion.

Trailing this figure at a distance: a small animal, peering and peeking from the corners like I was peering and peeking from the roof. It had outsize tall ears and a rasping pink tongue, and my binoculars confirmed it for a kind of fox, but with strange eyes. A curious creature out wandering? Seeking carrion? Or a spy, a watcher? For whom or what? Whatever it was, it had instincts like mine, and all of a sudden looked up and spotted me, and then it was gone as if it had never been there.

A few more steps of the figure it had been following, and the fear in my gut turned into a wordless chuckle, and then irritation and concern. I knew I was looking at Borne in a disguise. Except he wasn’t wearing clothes—he’d taken it one step further and just grown clothes from his skin. The hat was his head and the stars were his eyes, transformed into a pattern.

I leaned over the roof when he was one house away. I still wasn’t going to stand up and give anyone a silhouette to target.

“Borne,” I said.

Borne, startled, looked up.

“Oh my!” he exclaimed. “Oh my!”

Then he made himself large, larger, spun like a corkscrew, brought himself springlike up to roof level, so the magic hat could stare at me as if nearsighted. I almost lost my purchase on the roof.

“Borne!”

“Rachel!” He sproinged back to street level, looking up at me.

“Borne.” I felt dizzy in the aftermath. He had grown more since the morning, clearly.

“Rachel. You weren’t supposed to see me.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here! It’s not safe.”

A twinge of irritation from Borne, a new thing, from just the past week. “If it’s not safe, why did you go?”

“That’s my business. You disobeyed me. You followed me like someone not nice. Not nice!” Even though Borne still waffled between childlike and adult states, he’d never grown out of “not nice.” Never not wanted to be nice.

“I know.”

Downcast. But was he really? There was still something too elated about him. He’d become elated, and no punishment could un-elate him if the whole wide, horrible world hadn’t. And under my gruffness, there was something too elated about me, out in the world again. Maybe he sensed that.

Borne’s clothes fell away, and he was again a six-foot hybrid of squid and sea anemone, with that ring of circling eyes. I was rattled, drew back, reached for a beetle, stopped myself. He never looked so alien as he did in that moment, naked and alone on the street, even though it was how I knew him back at the Balcony Cliffs. Nothing and nobody has ever looked more like it didn’t belong.

I had the impulse to leave him there, on that dusty street, leap across as many rooftops as possible to get away from him. That my life would be simpler, better, if I let him become someone else’s problem. But the sense of loss that swept in behind almost made me stagger, there on the roof. I couldn’t do it.

The air had a sudden weight to it, which made me think, irrational, that Mord must be drawing near, so I came down swiftly from the roof. And I didn’t want to be out there after dark, either.

“What 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.”