A shudder, a recoil, a head-over-heels moment, and again Borne was tight and close, leaving only a globe of air around my head. The light was gone along with all of the fake things he’d created to put me at ease, and I lay there, panting, as the skin of Borne around me, the flesh of Borne, went prickly and rigid again and the cilia that rubbed up against me turned into tiny mouths that screamed into my clothes, arms and legs and hair. Borne was screaming silently into his own body because he could not scream on the outside.
I had a horrible panicking, instinctual moment where I realized that the bear might be able to smell me, inside the rock, and I kicked out, flailed out, then went still because each movement made Borne constrict on me more, and it hurt to breathe.
I could feel the vibration of Mord proxy paws and Mord proxy jaws biting into Borne. I could sense the bear hugging and squeezing and mauling the top of Borne. Excavating the rock. Savaging the rock. And me a dead person in a living coffin, preparing to be revealed as alive, to be face-to-face with the enormous broad furry head of a bear. To meet Mord’s emissary. To meet death.
Came the prying snarl. Came the toothsome growl, so thick and loud it permeated every surface, seemed to shake my bones out of alignment. Came the huffing after.
But then the bear sounds receded and I felt through the floorboards the padding away of a great weight.
When that weight transferred to the stairs, when I could feel nothing, hear nothing, I whispered, “Borne. Borne are you there! Are you all right?”
The cilia had stopped screaming. The flesh had stopped responding. Nothing about the Borne around me seemed alive. I could as easily have been in something inert—in an emergency space capsule ejected from an exploding starship far from Earth or in a one-person submarine deep beneath our deadly river, surviving within a pocket of air that would soon exhaust itself. There was that sense in my lungs of having plunged deep underground, of being so far from the surface of anything that I had no idea how I might emerge. If I would have the sick, terrible task of digging my way out of Borne.
“Borne!” I risked a louder voice.
There came an accumulated reply, a voice from everywhere and nowhere: “I am here, Rachel. I am here. I am still a rock.”
“Are you hurt?” I mouthed.
“Parts of me I cannot feel,” Borne said. “Parts of me are gone.”
“Keep still,” I said. “Keep still until they’ve left.”
“It is easier to keep still now,” Borne said, “when there is less of me to move.”
He sounded odd, not just damaged but puzzled. His own wounding puzzled him.
*
In the old world, when I emerged with my parents from secret rooms or tunnels or caves or closets, we knew what we were returning to—the same place we had left, as dangerous or as safe as before. We had hidden so we could remain in that world, were saying we believed in that world no matter what. Because we had no choice. Because there was no better or worse world, there was just the place we came out into.
But when I emerged from Borne, out onto the rooftop again, I did not feel the same way. We had waited until Borne told me the Mord proxies had truly gone and all that remained below were the kinds of scavengers that would scatter at our approach. The cast-off biotech that could move, well or not so well, that came out nocturnal.
We had waited until nightfall, even then, and so when I stood outside of Borne the world had changed in more than one sense. It was not just that Borne had shielded me rather than the other way around. It was not the change in the sky.
Pieces of Borne had been torn from him by the Mord proxy in its suspicion. These pieces had bounced like rock, settled on the rooftop like rock, but now quivered and flexed like hands opening and closing, reformed as Borne flesh.
The Borne that faced me was, even in that dim light, scarred and misshapen. He had returned to his normal size and shape, the one that looked like an upside-down vase, that combined attributes of a squid and a sea anemone, but he had a slumped, subdued quality that I’d never seen in him before.
I winced to see that his left side was fissured and purpling-black and the ring of eyes, darkly luminous, circled his body in a haphazard way, like a rotting carnival ride one loose bolt away from spinning off into the crowd. He had a smell like turpentine and rotting fish sticks and moldy bandages.
“I’m sorry, Borne,” I said, feeling shaky. “I shouldn’t have brought you out here.”
Somehow they had known. Somehow they had known where we would be—but which ones? The ferals or the proxies? I was unwilling to accept that this had just been coincidence or bad luck. And also tumbling through my mind, an awful sense of responsibility: that if Borne hadn’t moved out, if Borne hadn’t pretended to be more like an adult, I might not have taken the chance.
“It’s okay, Rachel,” Borne said. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay.”
Borne’s eyes flashed up at me, and another new thing: anger, and not over me saying no to him. This was a real thing, an adult emotion that had never been there before. It expressed itself through an orange-red glow just visible at the core of him. Who knew if red meant caution to Borne, but he knew it meant that to me.
“It is okay,” Borne said. “I need to learn. I need to know.”
“But not by being hurt.”
“It’s not being hurt that hurts,” Borne said.
Borne might be alien to me, he might have more senses, he might do things no human could do … but I thought I understood what he was saying. (Although, did I, really?) He knew now that he could be harmed. He knew now that he was vulnerable. No joy would be the same for Borne. No playfulness, either. Because behind it would be this certain knowledge: that he could die.
“I’m tired, Rachel,” Borne said. “I need not to move for a while.”
“That’s okay,” I said, and it was. If we had to make this rooftop our home for a few hours, I was prepared to do it.
It had cooled as the sun disappeared and the stars came out across an unusually cloudless sky. We were silent for a long time, and I made no move to go downstairs to recon. Borne needed my attention, but I also think we both dreaded going downstairs. Neither of us wanted to experience the aftermath up close, even in the dark. But Borne was also looking up at the stars, all of his attention drawn there.
Borne was reaching out a tentative tentacle, as if to touch the stars.
He must have known he couldn’t, but I still said, “You can’t touch them!”
“Why not? Are they hot?”
“Yes, they are. But that’s not why. They’re very, very far away.”
“But my arms are so long, Rachel. My arms can be as long as I want.”
“That might be so, but…” I trailed off when I realized Borne was joking. He had a little tell when he joked—or it was actually a big tell. Some of his eyes would drift to the left, a particular cluster. He couldn’t control that.