Borne

“What does that mean?” I asked again. No one had lightbulbs anymore. How did Borne know about them?

Borne didn’t reply, and the next time I looked back, the fox wasn’t there.

But I still took evasive maneuvers, doubled back, and made sure by the time we took the secret door into the Balcony Cliffs that no living creature could be observing us.

¤

Back in my apartment, I woke with a start in the middle of the night, realizing that Borne might have been talking for a while. He was curled up next to my bed, a self-contained sprawl of short green-glowing tentacles, the myriad eyes darting across his body. Half of them watched me. Half watched the door. I had the fading impression he’d been peering at me from much closer just moments before.

“… but I don’t know why they were following me and I didn’t know it would be so dusty out there and so big. It was so big out there. There was even sky. A huge sky. Such a huge sky it was like it was going to fall down on me. And all of those … walls. All of the walls. And the little things following me and it was hot. Hotter. It was hotter. Definitely hotter. I wasn’t thirsty, but I could’ve been thirsty. Because it was hot. And wide and big. That’s a city. That’s what a city looks like in person. Like that. Like that.

“And there were astronauts. Buried in the ground.”

He would remember the dead astronauts for a long time. In the next few weeks he even took three dolls and pretended to have conversations with them. They’d just come back from the moon and were helping to replant the Earth, or some such nonsense. Borne had so many tentacles, he could’ve put on a complicated play if he’d wanted to.

I rolled over and tried to ignore his ceaseless patter. Of course it had been sensory overload for him. Of course it had been something new. I’d have to get used to that or Borne’s surprise would always be surprising me. Yet when I did get used to it, I would miss sharing that with him, even as it would be a relief. To be dulled to someone else’s perpetual sense of awe was a kind of gift.

Then a thought occurred, and I reached over and tapped Borne on what I assumed was the top of his head.

“Huh? What? Rachel?”

“Borne, how did you even get out of the apartment? When you followed me.”

A sluggish, slow response. I had a sense even in answering my questions he was devoting only a little bit of his self, while parts of his body popped and quaked, and continued to be somewhere else.

“The door was open. It was all the way open and it seemed like that meant you want me to—”

Propping myself up to one elbow, I cut him off. “No it wasn’t and no I didn’t.” I had locked the door with several kinds of locks, mostly so that Wick could not get in.

“The space at the bottom of the door was open.”

I took a moment to digest that. So Borne had made himself pancake-thin and, boneless, then gotten out under the door. Great.

I let Borne drift back into whatever boundary between watchfulness and sleep allowed him to dream.

But I was awake now, and so I went to Wick’s apartment, thinking he might be back from his nocturnal wanderings. I wanted to sleep with Wick. Whether I meant sleep or sleep, I didn’t know. But for an hour or a morning, I wanted some kind of oblivion that didn’t mean anything for a while.

Raising Borne all by myself was exhausting.

I found Wick next to his beloved swimming pool full of “disgusting” biotech, and I took him right there, on the floor—unexpected and with complete surprise, even stealth, and found him willing. After being outside, after having to be so alert, so in control, I was the opposite of those things—and fully recovered from the attack. I could move in all sorts of ways without pain.

I’d been outside and nothing bad had happened to me. Or, at least, nothing bad had had a chance to happen to me. And nothing bad was happening to me back inside, either.

“Not now,” he said, “I’m working!” As per our old rituals, our codes and procedures.

“Now,” I said.

“But I’m trying to work,” and the joy in him, to voice the old complaint that meant he’d like nothing better than to be taken from work. To be taken by me, as hadn’t happened for weeks.

So I took him and kept taking him until he had nothing left and we glistened with each other’s sweat. Our bodies still knew each other, and the Balcony Cliffs still knew that we belonged together. I could still feel those lines of power extending outward, my traps and his surprises intertwined, and here we were at the absolute center of our creation.

Even if we hadn’t spoken after, whispered those endearments so personal no one else would have known what they meant, it would have been good. It would have felt good, would have let me know that whatever had come between us that was wrong could be put right. But that led to me letting down my guard, perhaps because Wick in those moments after we had sex always seemed more playful than usual.

Wick got up, put on some ragged shorts and an old T-shirt, and went to the edge of the pool. He leaned on one knee, fishing something scaly and metal-gray out of the pool’s fetid depths while, around one pale, thin, but muscular haunch, he looked back at me with those magnetic eyes.

“You’re putting us both in danger, Rachel,” he said cheerily. Wick looked naked from that angle, exposed and rangy. There was an almost insect-like humming and buzzing to the way he moved. That’s when I knew for sure he’d taken something to make himself feel calm, or taken one of his own beetles and part of him was now far away from this place.

“With sex?”

Wick laughed, a higher-pitched sound than usual given the acoustics of that cavern, and padded around to the other side of the pool, some glint or glimmer driving him to use a stick to stir up the goop.

“Borne followed you out today,” Wick said. “Because of him, you came back early. Borne continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, Rachel.”

So there it was, said out loud. I opened my mouth to protest that he’d been spying on me, but what was the point? I’d snuck into his apartment and gone through his things.

“Shouldn’t you be more concerned about Mord—and the Magician?”

“Borne is not your friend, Rachel.”

“I never said that, Wick.” Although he was now.

“You stood right here and told me that, told me to accept it.”

I sidestepped that. “I never said that to you. Not that way.”

“You told me I had to accept Borne.”

One step more and all we’d be doing is denying, denying, denying. I never said that, I never did that, the way couples do.

“But why can’t you accept him?”

“Because you’re wrong. Because I can’t go against the facts. I can only work around them.” He was telling me that belief in Borne was like a religion. “Like the fact nothing ever comes out of Borne.”