“Diabolical,” he said, still captivated by what lay above. “Diabolical. Deadly. Delirious. Deep.” Four new words he’d been trying out. Except he had not learned “diabolical” from me, and I felt a twinge. Some book, some other source.
A normal night sky, but I was attuned to Borne in that moment and I saw it from his eyes—like a rush or an onslaught. Because as far as I knew, he had never seen the night sky so unguarded before—glimpses, maybe, from the Balcony Cliffs at dusk or in his books. So many stars, so little light from the city to disguise them. It was just like I remembered it from our island sanctuary so long ago. Walking down the beach and not needing a flashlight because the stars were so strong.
A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky. It was what my mother said sometimes—to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.
Borne’s many eyes became stars as he watched them, and his skin turned the color of velvety night, until he was just a Borne-shaped reflection. So many eyestalks arose from him that his body flattened away to nothing, into an irregular pool of flesh across most of the roof, the edge lapping up against my boots. I could still see how he had been injured, because he looked like a circle that had had a bite taken out of it. Each eyestalk ended in a three-dimensional representation of a star, and the stars clustered until he was a field of stars rising from the rooftop, forming nebulae and galaxies, and a few fireflies like meteorites across the depth and breadth of him.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, from across the star field of his body. “It’s beautiful.”
For once what he thought of as beautiful really was beautiful. It was as if we had become closer even as he exhibited more alien attributes, but I quashed that with an instant of wariness. Was he truly without guile? Wasn’t this repetition because of my reaction about the polluted river? But even if I suspected “beautiful” was just him making conversation or in some other way for my benefit, I knew that he’d taken this form to begin to heal, that there was something comforting about it, something that helped him.
“What are they?” Borne asked. “Are they … lights like in the Balcony Cliffs? Or … electrical lights? Who turned them on?” So whatever he’d seen in books hadn’t explained stars. At all.
“No one turned them on,” I said, realizing after I’d said it that I’d just discounted thousands of years of religion. But it was too late to turn back.
“No one?”
“We’re on a world,” I told him, not knowing what gaps existed from his reading. “We’re on a world that revolves around a star, which is a giant ball of fire. So enormous that if it weren’t so distant we would all be dead—burned up. We call it the sun—and the sun is what you thought wasn’t nice when it shone so bright on you the other day. But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too.”
My eyesight had gotten blurry telling Borne this, the aftershock of our ordeal hitting me.
“All of them? Every single one? But that’s like hundreds.”
“Thousands. Maybe millions.”
Across the star fields of Borne’s body there coalesced one great sun in the center, also atop a stalk. Heretical was his astronomy at this point. He’d become metaphorical or metaphysical or just silly.
“But that’s incredible,” Borne said, quietly. “That’s amazing. That’s devastating.”
Then something began to blot out the stars, to turn that glittering, shining brilliance into a great and final darkness.
“And what is that?” Borne asked, as if it was something normal, something else he didn’t know about yet, and he trusted me to tell him, to let him know what to think about it.
I was speechless, because for an instant I thought the world was ending, that fate had conspired to put us on that roof to watch the end of … everything.
Then I realized what we were seeing, and I couldn’t help a stifled chuckle. Oh, this was rich! Because it was the end of the world.
“What’s so funny, Rachel?” An edge to that voice as Borne withdrew from the edge of my toes, drew himself up into his normal form, still sagging, still wounded.
“That’s Mord,” I said.
Yes, it was Mord—floating and diving across the night sky, high up, so huge that even from a distance he blotted out the stars. Across the night sky the giant bear Mord glided, seething, and we could hear faint rasps and roaring from the stratosphere, the choking gasps of his rage. Snuffing out first this constellation then that one, his form as it occluded the stars making me aware of them again. His was the greater darkness, and although I feared him and hated him and despised him, Mord was still, in that moment, the purest reflection of the city.
“Moooooorddddddddddd,” Borne said in a kind of hissing way, and I saw even in the reflected light that every inch of Borne’s unscarred surface had become sharp, jagged, pointed like spears and spikes, and the eyes now revolving tracked Mord’s obliterating progress like gun emplacements tracking aircraft. Strafed Mord’s position with analytics and calculations and trajectories.
“He’s very far away,” I said, in a soothing tone. “He can’t hurt you.” Neither statement was entirely true.
“That is what you mean by Mord proxy,” Borne said. “This is the source.”
“Yes.”
“They are his children.”
“In a way, yes.”
“Why would he let his children do that to other children?”
I didn’t have a good answer for him, but I was sure that Borne had absorbed enough about Mord from me and from Wick that he had an idea of what he was looking at. We had turned Mord into the boogieman in his imagination, the monster under the bed. Don’t go outside, don’t do this, don’t do that because: Mord. But now Borne had been mauled by one of Mord’s emissaries, and he was trying to understand Mord. The real Mord.
Mord continued to dip and glide and wheel and drop across the sky like a god.
“Mord is beautiful,” Borne said with disdain. “Mord is strong. Mord is not nice.” From his tone, I believe Borne was beginning to parody his own innocence.
“Mostly not nice. Remember the not-nice part. Avoid him.”
“He kills the stars,” Borne said. “He kills the stars and brings darkness.”
“The stars all come back, though.”
“But not the people down below.”
You killed four of them yourself, back at the Balcony Cliffs, I wanted to say. But didn’t.
WHAT WE BROUGHT BACK TO WICK