“Definitely not!”
“Am I a … fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind.”
I shook my head. “No, not a fox.” Again, Borne was telling tales out of a children’s book. I resolved to give Borne some tomes on economics and politics in the morning. If I could find any. Maybe an airport thriller, except then I’d have to explain “airport” to him. Perhaps that was my subconscious revenge: If he wanted to be an adult, I’d make him become an adult all the way.
“Then … am I a … Borne?”
“Yes,” I said. “You are a … Borne!”
“Oh, good,” Borne said, “because that’s the name you gave me.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
“And I’m a Rachel.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a human being.”
“Maybe I’m a ham bone connected to a finger bone.” Something my mother used to say.
“Does a ham bone have a finger bone? I can see all your bones but I don’t know what they mean.”
Biting my lip to suppress a kind of nervous giggle, I said, “Stop thinking for a while, Borne. All that thinking can hurt your brain. Do you want to hurt your brain?”
“I don’t know,” Borne said. “If I hurt my brain, will I get a bigger one? One that isn’t in my fingertips?”
Too silly for me, so I quit on him, which meant it was time to move on to the part where Borne used a newly formed arm to create the silhouette of an animal and I tried to guess what it was. Then I would do the same with my human hands, so slablike next to his adroit tentacles.
For a long time, even though he didn’t yet invite me over, I guess I thought he was still just playacting, figuring out what it meant to be a person. And I still had the consolation that I was Borne’s confidante—that Wick was still the intruder who had to sneak up on Borne and listen to him talk to imaginary lizards.
That Wick might know more than me about Borne was laughable.
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I TOOK BORNE OUTSIDE ON PURPOSE
Soon enough, Wick would find out Borne occupied another apartment, and find in that fact further proof of threat. But a more immediate problem was that around Borne I had to be careful not to mention the outside, because the concept of the city, of anything beyond the Balcony Cliffs, now captivated him to a worrying extent. In time, whether we lived apart or together, I would have no control—no matter how he might want to keep his word, Borne would be tempted to go out.
“What rhymes with crappy?” Borne would ask.
“Happy?”
“No, shitty.”
“No, that word doesn’t rhyme with crappy.”
“But it rhymes with city, and that rhymes with happy.”
“None of that is true.”
“True rhymes with fact.”
“In a way, I guess.”
“Fact rhymes with city and happy.”
“No, in this case city and happy put together rhyme with opinion.”
“You don’t share my opinion?”
“Borne…” His asymmetrical rhymes were like bad puns in three dimensions—tiring, often scatological, or, as he put it “only natural, which rhymes with cultural”—but always coming to a point. And the point he would generally arrive at was that he wanted me to take him out into the city.
But I exhibited discipline, did not rush to bring Borne along with me, even though that was the only remedy. I ventured out twice more first, although not in the exhilarating, dangerous sense of climbing up onto a sleeping Mord. I bought this time by promising Borne that the third time I went out into the world, he would go with me. I would be his teacher, even though I was still being taught.
Twice, then, I took to the streets alone, and twice I thought of myself as bait. I would not believe in my traps or my ability to see traps. I would see myself as bait, like the dead astronauts, who had never fallen to Earth but looked like they had. To be bait was to think of what or who I was bait for, and what might entice those who might want to take the particular bait that was me.
I was twenty-eight years old and from another country. Someone who scavenged for a living and who, when not searching for spare bits of biotech, took care of a child who wasn’t human. I was good at using weapons. I could sniff out a trap from a distance. I had no formal education, but had been home-taught well and could read at an advanced level. I could, with Wick’s guidance, grow things in my bathroom that I could eat. That was the treasure that was me, and every time I went out I would need to gauge who would ignore the résumé to gather the protein or want the skill set, or want the skill set snuffed out.
When I came back from those expeditions with enough salvage for Wick to take it as a sign that I had fully recovered, and that perhaps our relationship might recover, too … I had no excuse not to take Borne with me.
*
Because Borne was coming with me, I would have to forage much closer to home, which was against the rules, but I didn’t have much choice. I had been circling closer to home anyway, on my own. Mord was a mighty weight that could not disguise itself, but the Magician was the blade slipped between the ribs that you don’t sense until too late. Her signs and symbols were everywhere, and certain neighborhoods had become unsafe swiftly, overrun by a mix of her true believers and her converts in the flesh. A scrawled M on the side of a building might mean Mord or it might not.
I had decided to hazard the factory district to the northwest of the Balcony Cliffs. In that tangled mass of warehouses and rusted industry lay every excuse and promise of a death foretold—inert, empty, silent, vast. Those were the smokestacks that had killed off this part of the world. Those were the assembly lines that had choked us with products we did not need and had to be told we wanted—before the Company had snuck in and shown us our truest, deepest desires.
The district had a deceptive feel to it of dark and calm and quiet. Most of these buildings had structural damage, some even ripped open by the missiles of an ancient war. The route was easy to find but physically difficult—a lot of climbing over stacked and cracked girders. You could trap a foot and twist your ankle, and I was soon sore in all the places where I had been wounded. I was armed this time with a metal bat and a beat-up pair of binoculars. No more spiders to spare, so I had one of Wick’s poison beetles in the pouch on my belt. The beetles burrowed into flesh, opened their carapaces, and twirled around once inside you. The shock alone would be enough to kill.