Back then, Mord wasn’t as large, and he still lived in the Company building. As he rose over me like a living dreadnought, his pelt was golden brown, pristine, and clean-smelling, as if an army of Company employees had done nothing but groom him for hours.
His enormous eyes were bright and curious and curiously human, not as bloodshot and curved as they would later become. The smooth white of his fangs seemed less a bloody threat than the promise of a swift, clean execution. He luxuriated in the feel of the wind against his fur.
I cannot fully explain the effect of Mord on me in that moment. As that silky, gorgeous head glided toward me, as his gaze slid over me and past, with what seemed almost a secret amusement, as that pelt hovered mere feet overhead and the smell of jasmine came to me from his fur … and as I watched that whole vast body pass over me, I fought the urge to raise an arm to touch him.
Some part of me could not decide if I was witness to the passage of a god or, perhaps, out of hunger, a hallucination. But in that moment I wanted to hug Mord. I wanted to bury myself in his fur. I wanted to hold on to him as if he were the last sane thing in the world, even if it meant the end of me.
*
After Mord had passed me, I didn’t dare look over my shoulder. I was afraid. Afraid he would be staring back with a ravenous look. Afraid I had conjured him up out of some dark need and he didn’t really exist. How could Mord possibly fly? By what miracle or what damnation? I didn’t know, and Wick had never offered up a theory. That Mord might once have been human, then, seemed like some distant, remote truth that lived on a mountaintop far from here. But it was this ability that made some in the city believe we had died and now existed in the afterlife. Some purgatory or hell. And some portion of all of those who believed sacrificed themselves to Mord—and not by gaping at him from a lawn chair, munching on a cracker. Because if you were already dead, what did it matter?
I sat there with the last of my crackers, as dusk settled over me and the stars made themselves known. Only after some time did I begin to shiver and take note of strange sounds coming closer, and seek safety for the night.
I had only been in the city a short time. Soon enough, I would meet Wick, and then, after some caution, move into the Balcony Cliffs with him.
*
Even knowing that Borne had killed my attackers—even though I still knew too little about Borne—I could not give in to Wick’s judgment. Wasn’t there so much that was good and decent in Borne that I could bring out, no matter what I discovered about his purpose? This was the essential question that kept coming to me out of the darkness, even if I already had Wick’s answer.
I worked so very hard at accepting Borne in the weeks that followed that I no longer saw him as odd. Even as he grew larger and larger, until he was taller than Wick, even as he kept trying out new shapes—changing from cone to square to globe, and then back again into his inverted squid pose.
Wick was there almost all the time now, still taking care of me. I should have been more appreciative, but I resented his presence more and more. When he was around Borne had to be motionless, voiceless, eyeless—sitting there in the far corner while Wick and I talked. He resembled a giant question mark, and the way in which Wick never looked at Borne made me know just how aware Wick was of my new friend.
But even when Wick left, my conversations with Borne continued to be halting and stilted at first. I had avoided the questions I had to ask at first, but then returned to them because I had no choice. I thought of myself as a shield against Wick, that Wick’s questions would be more invasive, his conclusions harsher.
I returned to the idea of Borne as a machine. I found an old book amongst the wreckage and showed him a photo of a robot and then of a bioengineered cow. How we would long today to find a cow wandering the city!
“See? Like this?”
He reared up, exuding pseudopods as if they were coming out of his pores. “I am not a machine. I am a person. Just like you, Rachel. Just like you.”
It was the first time I had ever done anything to offend him. I’d perplexed him, yes, but not offended him.
“I’m sorry, Borne,” I said, and I was sorry. I changed the subject, a little. “Do you know how you came to the city, then?”
“I don’t remember. There was water, a lot of water, and then I was walking. Just walking.”
“No,” I said patiently. “That’s my memory. That’s something I told you.” This kind of confusion happened more often than it should have.
Borne considered that for a second, then said, “I know things about things that are not mine. But it’s mixed up. I mix it up. I am supposed to mix it up. In the white light.”
I thought of the white light common to tales of death, of dying. I was in a tunnel. I saw a white light.
“What do you remember about the light?”
But he wouldn’t answer that question, defaulted to a common response that he thought pleased me.
“I found myself when you picked me up! I was found by you. You plucked me. You plucked me.”
The word pluck was new, but always and forever amused him; he could not tire of “to pluck” or “plucked.” He would make a sound like a chicken saying it, something I had taught him—“pluck pluck pluck”—and go running down the halls like a demented schoolboy.
But this time when he said it, Borne’s voice got lower and lower and he flattened himself across the floor next to my bed, as he did when talking about things that scared him.
“Do you know your purpose?” I asked.
Borne’s eyestalks, newly budded and continually extending and then retracting into his body, all looked at me quizzically.
“The reason,” I said. “You know—the point of being alive. Were you made for a purpose?”
“Does everything have a purpose, Rachel?”
His words got to me, sitting in the living room, looking up at the mold-stained ceiling.
What was my purpose? To scavenge for myself and for Wick, and now for Borne? To just survive … and wait? For what.
But I was trying to be a good parent, a good friend, to Borne, so I said, “Yes, everything has a purpose. And every person has a purpose, or finds a purpose.” Or a reason.
“Am I a person?” Borne said, and his eyestalks perked up and took special attention.
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Borne, you are a person.”
He was a person to me, but one already pushing on past to other concepts.
“Am I a person in my right mind?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my standard ploy when I wanted time to think. With my right mind.
“If there’s a right mind, then there’s a wrong mind.”
“I suppose so. Yes.”
“How do you get a wrong mind? Is it borned into you?”
“That’s a tough question,” I said. Usually I would have responded with something like “Do you want a wrong mind?” or told him it could happen either way: borned into you, or through trauma. But I was too tired from repairing traps all day.
“Is it tough because I already have a wrong mind?”