The way became less arduous once we were in the middle of the warren; there were narrow streets and pathways, and not always blocked by broken machinery or the remains of trucks, tires long gone. Torrents of rocks and concrete girders to the left, the highway of dust through it, and the factories on the right. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Pillars, pillars, pillars. All smashed to hell. I always felt small in that place, amongst the cathedrals of that age.
Trailing a little behind me, Borne was a large rock that bumbled to a stop, soundless, when I looked back. Almost stealthy.
I kept walking, with a quick glance back every once in a while, since I couldn’t persuade Borne to walk beside me.
Soon I was no longer being followed by a rock but by a giant undulating worm, very similar to the ones that broke down waste in my apartment.
Then, for a brief time, an enormous fly nervously buzzed forward—most unlikely of all!—but my stalker soon realized that such an organism stood out like a sore thumb. Given what I knew about Borne’s sense of humor, I would not have been surprised by then if the next time I had looked back and seen a sore thumb. Instead, the next incarnation just confirmed what I already knew about Borne: that he loved lizards, even though they did not love him.
A giant lizard, roughly human-size, clambered across the terrain behind me. An apologetic lizard. An embarrassed and socially awkward lizard, with huge bulging eyes and protruding tongue, a reptile that progressed in stops and starts, peeking out from behind boulders. Checking to make sure I hadn’t gotten too far ahead of him. It was hideous and amazing all at once, and that bothered me. I was continually being taught by Borne how to “read” him, and yet what did this mean except that I was supposed to accept the impossible?
It was then I stopped and, bat balanced over my shoulder, faced down the lizard.
The lizard morphed back into a rock, close enough now I didn’t have to shout to talk to it.
“Borne. I can see you. You came out here with me. I know that it’s you.”
Silence.
“Borne. You’ve been a rock, a worm, a fly, and now a lizard. Do you think I’m stupid? Even if I hadn’t brought you out here?”
The rock moved from side to side a little.
“You are the wrong size to be a fly or a lizard. And you look disgusting. Like a swimming pool.”
“I am a rock,” Borne said, muffled, as if from some orifice now underneath him. “I am a rock?”
“Oh, you’re a rock all right. You’re a great big fucking rock. You’re a boulder. Change back right this instant!”
I was seething. Was this a joke to him? It wasn’t a joke to me. I did not like his style of camouflage—crude and almost comic, but not on purpose. Or, if on purpose, even worse. Amazing, maybe, but the opposite of camouflage. A changed context could kill. And maybe I was paranoid, but I thought I’d caught another glimpse of that fox following us.
“Borne, I need you serious,” I said to the boulder.
The boulder mumbled something to itself. I wasn’t sure if he knew I meant it or not.
“I raised you from a pod. You know I did.” We shared this myth because it was simple and easy, even though he’d not really been a pod and the “raising” had been all of four months, not exactly a lifetime. But maybe it felt like a lifetime to him.
“Yes,” the boulder admitted. “You raised me from a pod.”
“And you know I want only the best for you?”
The boulder became a lizard again, but its skin matched the dull dust color everywhere around us. From a distance, I had no doubt that it looked like I was arguing with no one, with nothing.
“The very best,” Borne said, “or the best you know how. How do you do, Know How?”
I ignored that rebellion, sidestepped it as my mom always had raising me. “Out here, Borne, you cannot be playful. You can be clever, watchful, resourceful, but you cannot be playful.” All words he knew, that I’d taught him. “You can only be playful inside the Balcony Cliffs.”
Borne became Borne again, which still managed to startle me.
“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Borne said.
“Can you please try to look like a person?” I asked. “Please?”
“Yes,” Borne said, and became as person-like as he could, without a wizard hat but instead a “normal” one, even though it was made of his own flesh and skin. That meant cowboy-style, something he’d discovered in a tattered comic book, a Western. I wish he hadn’t—it was foreign to me and meant less than nothing.
We’d agreed on robes as his camouflage because that meant he didn’t have to grow feet. He hated feet more and more as he grew up, maybe because his architecture, his physicality, made it uncomfortable. God forbid he couldn’t have a thousand cilia propelling him forward over that rocky ground!
*
More than anything, though, Borne’s antics had thrown me off, cut the connection between me and my surroundings, and I was having a hard time getting that awareness back. I should have marched him right back to the Balcony Cliffs. But instead I decided to press forward.
Seeing an open doorway ahead, I ducked into a building at random: a large, four-story place with a buckling steel frame and not a window unbroken. Maybe someone had tried to live here once, but what we called Company moss grew along the sides. You could eat Company moss if you were starving, and its presence usually meant an abandoned place.
Inside, spread out across the vast floor of the factory: the corroded remains of machinery, enough dust to choke ten of me, pools of liquid rust, a series of ladders and stairs along the side wall leading to the roof, and nothing worth scavenging. We needed what could be burned or bled or transformed.
Borne, once inside, couldn’t stay still. In an instant, he reverted to a kind of converted “travel” mode: shorter, about five feet tall, with an expanded base for support. At the top the aperture had also widened out, the tentacles multiplying in number, but shorter and thicker, except for one that slowly rose like a periscope for a better vantage. The eyes that appeared occurred at the end of the tentacles and peered out in all directions like sentinels. He called this mode being “layered thick.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“Exploring with you?”
“Just because we’re inside doesn’t mean you can be Borne again. You have to stay Person Borne as long as we’re outside the Balcony Cliffs.” I had told him this plenty of times before we’d left.
None of the eye-tentacles would look at me, but I didn’t get the sense he was embarrassed or concerned. More that his attention was elsewhere.
“Yes, Rachel. You’re right. But they’re coming. They’re coming soon and you want to be ready. I think. I think you do?”
They’re coming soon.
That put the fear into me, quick. That and the sound of running feet. Many running feet.
They were coming right then—the sound close and fast and I couldn’t tell from where. I just knew someone or something was coming. The only way out was up. So I ran with Borne—up the ladders, the stairs, to the roof, Borne once more a lizard so he could scuttle faster.
Me and my lizard-monster, lunging up the stairs to the roof.