“Close enough,” I said, chuckling. “You won’t be encountering many of those when you’re out in the real world.”
And then I wished I hadn’t said it, because I’d acknowledged that this wasn’t the real world. That we lived in a bubble, of space and time, that just couldn’t, wouldn’t last.
*
I took him to the balcony out on the cliffs, too, but that was a little harder because I felt Borne needed a disguise, to be safe. I found a flower hat with just one bullet hole and a brown bloodstain to match. I found a pair of large designer sunglasses. I had the choice of putting him in a blue sheet or a black evening dress that I’d salvaged from a half-buried apartment. The evening dress was moth-eaten and had faded to more of a deep gray, but I chose it because I had nowhere to wear it and it was several sizes too big for me now.
So Borne reconfigured himself to be a little longer and less wide than usual, sucked in his “stomach” more or less, and put on this ridiculous outfit. Only, on Borne it looked good, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he’d drawn himself up into an approximation of my own body, that I was looking at a crude faux version of myself with green skin.
But it wasn’t complete enough for him.
“What about shoes?” he asked me, and I regretted having gone off on a rant about the value of a good pair of shoes a couple of days before.
“You don’t need shoes. No one will see your feet.” Probably no one would see him, period.
“Everyone wears shoes,” he said, quoting me. “Simply everyone. You even wear them to bed.”
It was true. I’d never gotten over having to sleep in the open so often. When you slept in the open in dangerous places, you never took off your shoes in case you only had a few seconds to gather your things and take off running.
Borne really wanted shoes. He wanted the full ensemble. So I gave him shoes. I gave him my one extra pair, which were really boots, the ones I’d come to the city in.
He made a great show of growing foot-legs and with his hand-arms reached down to put on his new shoes. He’d muted his skin to a shade that mimicked my own. From the aperture at the top of his head, muffled by the hat, came the words, “We can go now.”
But if Borne wanted the full ensemble, I wanted the full human.
“Not until you grow a mouth,” I said, “and a real face.”
“Uh-oh,” he said, because he’d forgotten. In those days, he always said “uh-oh” when he felt he’d made a mistake. Maybe he also was trying to be a little “difficult,” a concept he’d been field-testing, usually in charming ways.
The transformation only took a second. All of his eyes went away, then two popped up where appropriate—never, ever gray anymore—and a nose protrusion that looked more like the head of the lizard he had eaten a few hours earlier, and a kind of crazy grinning mouth. In that hat. In the black evening dress. In the boots.
He looked so earnest that I wanted to hug him, I never for a second understood the gift I’d given Borne. Never realized what other uses disguises could be put to.
We went out on the balcony. Borne pretended he couldn’t see through his sunglasses and took them off. His new mouth formed a genuinely surprised “O.”
“It’s beautiful,” he exclaimed. “It’s beautiful beautiful beautiful…” Another new word.
The killing thing, the thing I couldn’t ever get over, is that it was beautiful. It was so incredibly beautiful, and I’d never seen that before. In the strange dark sea-blue of late afternoon, the river below splashing in lavender, gold, and orange up against the numerous rock islands and their outcroppings of trees … the river looked amazing. The Balcony Cliffs in that light took on a luminous deep color that was almost black but not, almost blue but not, the jutting shadows solid and cool.
Borne didn’t know it was all deadly, poisonous, truly disgusting. Maybe it wasn’t, to him. Maybe he could have swum in that river and come out unscathed. Maybe, too, I realized right then in that moment that I’d begun to love him. Because he didn’t see the world like I saw the world. He didn’t see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.
That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment. And no matter what happened next, I had crossed over into another place, and the question wasn’t who I should trust but who should trust me.
PART TWO
HOW IT HAD BEEN, AND WHAT CAME NEXT
The first time I saw Mord it was twilight six years before I found Borne, on a day when I’d found nothing much except some autonomous meat quivering foul in a ditch next to a half-open storm grate. I knew a trap when I saw one. I marked the area with chalk to remember and made my way far to the west, to the remains of an abandoned highway covered over with lichen and rust and bone fragments. They formed a green-red-white pattern that almost looked purposeful. Not the good kind of lichen, or I would’ve harvested some for later.
The high level of chemicals in the city’s air has always made sunset a stirring sight, even if you were jaded, had become fatally distracted, or just had no room left for poetry. Orange and yellow melted in layers into blue and purple. I checked to the north and south, saw no one. I found a faded deck chair somewhere and sat in it, eating some stale crackers from the week before. My stomach was a tight, aching ball as I watched the sun go down.
I was filthy from climbing through tunnels all day in the semi-abandoned factory district. I stank. I was exhausted. Despite my precautions, anyone could have seen me. Anyone could have attacked me. I didn’t care. You had to let your guard down sometimes or you forgot what that felt like, and I’d reached my limit for the week. That meat going to waste to bait a trap set by a crazy person, a cannibal, a pervert—it had gotten to me.
Mord rose from the cluster of buildings directly ahead of me. At first he was a large, irregular globe of dark brown against the orange edge of the sun. For one terrified moment I thought he was an eclipse or a chemical cloud or my death. But then the “eclipse” began to move toward me effortlessly, blocking out the sun, destroying the sky, and I could see the great furred head in every detail.
I couldn’t run. I should have run, but I didn’t. I should have leapt out of my deck chair and made for a drainage tunnel. But I didn’t. I just sat in my deck chair with a cracker half in, half out of my mouth, and watched as the shadow of the behemoth stole over me.