Borne

“I am not complete,” Borne said. “I was not complete. I am not complete.” He tried “put together,” which didn’t help, finished his sentence with a kind of frustration for words that caused the feathery pseudopods to straighten like spikes.

“Now you are complete? Aware?” I didn’t want to use the word activated, because it scared me.

“More complete,” Borne said.

“You killed them,” I said, calm. But not before they hurt me, came the raging, screaming thought behind the words.

“Kill?”

“Cease to be. No longer alive. Dead. Not here.”

Confusion shuddered through Borne. “I know them now. I know them.”

“Killing is bad,” I said. “Killing should never happen. Don’t kill.” Unless someone attacks you. Unless you have to. But I didn’t think to make the distinction to Borne, because I didn’t have the strength.

Those eyes no longer seemed beautiful. They looked ever more trapped and horrible. Was it my imagination, or was one of them a familiar gray? I turned away from Borne then, and drifted into unconsciousness for a while. It was easier than facing what he’d said.

And yet why would I turn away unless I felt safe?

¤

The seventh night, I slept in Wick’s quarters, and Mord, far above, slept over us, sprawled across the sea of loam and debris that covered the Balcony Cliffs. We experienced his breathing as a haunted depth charge that tumbled down through the layers, the beams, and the drywall, the supporting columns and the cracking archways. The sound of it permeated the atoms of a dozen ceilings, vibrated through our bodies. We felt it in our flesh after we heard it in our ears, and it lingered longer under the skin.

The stench came to us, too, faint, carried by the ducts and the thousand imperfections in the sediment above us, carried by the subterranean tunnels of worms and beetles. Like the thunder after lightning, it came to us late, but then wrapped around our throats. It was the stench of every living thing Mord had killed in the last week. Could Mord smell us down here? Could he smell us mice? Us little human mice?

Wick lay frozen, unable to move, terrified that somehow this was not random, that Mord knew he was there, that come morning Mord might start to root us out. And so, for a time, we whispered and moved in slow motion and in all ways acted as if we were submarines and Mord a destroyer above, seeking us. Even to whisper, Wick would put his mouth right up against my ear. He could not stop talking about rumors of Mord proxies being seen, searching in the city and the hinterlands beyond. Searching for what? Wick wouldn’t say, but I had the sense he knew.

Then we didn’t even whisper, as Mord began to moan in his sleep. His moans sounded like gnashed, crushed words, filtered through the dirt, and we could not understand them. I knew only that they felt like anguish.

Some hours later we felt his weight leave us, the Balcony Cliffs almost seeming to spring back up around us with relief. When we examined the spot above in the morning there was a deep depression from Mord’s weight. If he had spent the whole night there, would he have fallen through, smashing down level by level until, still sleeping, his body bulged through our ceiling? The stench remained for a day or two, and whenever I smelled it I felt a pressure pushing down on my head.

I had come to Wick’s place so he wouldn’t come to mine and be reminded of Borne, but Borne is the subject he raised as soon as Mord had left. I almost wished Mord was still there to silence him.

“I could still take him,” Wick said.

“Who?” I asked, although I knew.

“Borne. It’s time. I should just take him and figure him out. While you recover.”

“You don’t need to.”

He hesitated, about to say more, thought better of it, and seemed to accept what I had said. He hugged me close and, as if I were his shield against Mord, soon enough snored quietly against my shoulder. I let him, even though it hurt; the price of peace. Because it was simple. Because it helped us both.

But I could not sleep. I was thinking about the silly conversations Borne and I were having because Borne didn’t seem to know much about the world, had only fragments that didn’t quite fit together.

Borne: “Why is water wet?”

Me: “I don’t know. Because it’s not dry?”

Borne: “If something is dry, does that mean it’s not wit.”

Me: “Wit or wet?”

Borne: “Wit.”

Me: “Wit is in the eye of the beholder.”

Borne: “What?”

I tried to explain wit to him.

Borne: “Like grit in the eye? Is wit like dust?”

Me: “Yes, dry.”

Borne: “I’m thirsty. And I need a snack. I’m hungry. I’m hungry. I’m hungry.”

Conversation would fall away again while I tried to find a snack for Borne, which, again, wasn’t hard. He especially liked what you might call “junk food,” even though that concept had become obsolete long ago.

Maybe, too, I liked Borne so much because Wick by then was almost always serious. For the longest time, Borne didn’t know what serious was.

In the morning, with Mord and the weight of Mord just a bad dream, Wick tried again.

“I can do it in a gentle way,” he said, but that didn’t reassure me. “I can return him the way he is now.”

“No.”

His weight went taut against my back.

“I shouldn’t have to ask. You should know it’s the best thing.”

“It’s not.”

“You know something’s not right, Rachel.” Now he was almost shouting.

Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else. So I said nothing.

But he wouldn’t let up. “Give me Borne,” he said.

I refused to turn to look at him.

“You need to give him to me, so we know what he is. He lives here, among us, and you protect him in a way that’s unnatural. This thing you know nothing about.”

“No.”

“He may be influencing you using biochemicals,” Wick said. “You may not know your own mind.”

I laughed at that, even though it could be true.