I took a good long look at Wick, slumped there in the chair, holding the claw. Oh gaunt skeleton, oh drawn cheekbones and hooded, shadowy quality to the eyes. Seeing him that way, distracted and concerned and so thin, I couldn’t tell him that his first thought should have been to ask if we were okay. That his second should have been to hug me. That his third, if he was smart, was to know from the look on my face that we needed to talk.
“Can’t you find out a lot from the claw?” My grasp of biotech and Wick’s abilities would always be fuzzy, but I had been imagining stupid things, like making a clone of Mord, but a good Mord, a responsible Mord, a Mord that helped us.
“Yes, it’s a claw. From a bear—a Mord proxy. I can do a lot with it. Thanks.”
“What’s wrong, Wick?”
“Do you think it’s a good idea, bringing Borne in here?” He looked up at the ceiling, where Borne was expeditioning some texture, exploring some fireflies, and enveloping a nest of (non-biotech) spiders. “Leave the fireflies alone,” he told Borne.
“You should know,” I said. “You’ve already talked. You’re already friends.”
“Not friends. We talked in the corridor. If I had no choice about him being here, then I should at least get a sense of what he’s up to. I’ve never let him in here before. Have you?”
“Yes, actually,” I admitted. “And Borne and I have walked through all of the corridors and all the secret places, and there have even been places Borne could squeeze into and I couldn’t.” Rubbing our stink on everything, I wanted to say, rebellious. Making sure to rub our stink on everything. “Which means that not only is your question too late but Borne could help us to uncover more of our home. With his help we might find more supplies hidden away under all that trash.”
“Borne this, Borne that,” Wick said, tapping the point of the claw against the side of the swimming pool. “It was bad enough before and now you tell me this. Rachel: There is not now in the entire Balcony Cliffs, except this room, a single living creature other than you, me, and Borne. Doesn’t that tell you anything? I asked you to have him out of here. I—”
“For all I know he’s been bringing the lizards to you, Wick.”
“No, he hasn’t. He’s been bringing them to the mouth he doesn’t need.”
“And neither Borne nor I are listening, Wick,” I said, because I wasn’t. Pests, vermin. Borne was just keeping the place clean. “Because we live here, too. We live here with you. Borne and me. Me and Borne and you. And isn’t he amazing? Can you deny he’s amazing?”
Borne was currently using competing tentacle puppet heads to have an argument above us about the uses of “expeditioning” versus “exploring” and the differences between them, clearly for my benefit.
“A work of art,” Wick said. “A genius.”
Before that I hoped Wick hadn’t noticed Borne muttering about how Wick wasn’t as much of a “stick in the mud” as I’d said. That the swimming pool from above was “really cool but kinda hot, A-OK.” Had he discovered the remains of a treasure trove of teen heartthrob mags in the Balcony Cliffs?
“So I say again, What’s wrong?”
“Send Borne out of here first,” Wick said. “Get him out of here.”
“No,” I said. He hadn’t realized it yet, but I was at the limits of my patience. In addition to being giddy and angry, I was exhausted and feeling the aches of our misadventure, and I needed sleep soon, to come down from the high of escape.
Wick considered that, astonished me by tossing the claw into the swimming pool as if it meant nothing, had no value at all.
“Okay, the hell with it,” he said, sounding so unlike Wick. “Why not?”
He rummaged through a metal box and took out a fistful of alcohol minnows. Now I felt maybe he wasn’t so much drunk as in distress.
“Here, Borne, have a minnow,” he said, and tossed a half dozen up into the air. Not nearly high enough, but it didn’t matter—Borne-bits reached down to pluck them out of the air anyway.
“Ooooh, minnows for a claaaawww!”
“Yes, Borne,” Wick said. “Minnows for a claw. You are generous.”
Borne began to feast with what for him were polite gobbling noises meant to thank us. His slobbering made him sound like an old circus seal, and that annoyed me, too.
“So now you know Borne so well you’re getting him drunk?”
Wick spun his chair around so he was facing me. “They don’t have the same effect on old Borney-o. They just don’t. Biotech’s not the same as you. Most biotech’s unpredictable—more than you realize. Borney-o biotech becomes blotto … some other way. Here, have some,” and he threw a few minnows at me.
The minnows were really more like salted sardines, but when you bit into them a soft minty coolness crept through your mouth, and then the alcohol, or alcohol equivalent, slid in behind, with a real chill to it, and the cold and the tart aftertaste were good. On a hot day, it felt great.
“What didn’t you want to tell me with Borne here?” I asked after I’d crunched down on a couple of minnows. “Just spit it out.”
Another pause, and then he began to launch into it, but in a Wick way: through a side door, through a maze.
“Rachel, it’s too dangerous here now. At the Balcony Cliffs. Too dangerous on our own. You know that yourself from tonight.”
“But you didn’t even ask what happened. You didn’t even ask.” I couldn’t keep the hurt from my voice, though it made me seem like a child.
He winced. “Maybe because you’re safe. Maybe because you’re here and you made it back. Maybe because the Magician just sent me a message.”
The chill of the alcohol couldn’t compete with the chill at the back of my neck, the way that news made me feel claustrophobic and itchy and not-right.
“What did the Magician want?”
“What we get is protection,” Wick said, ignoring my question. “We get supplies, food, water, more and better biotech. I work with her against Mord.”
I was giddy all over again, but it was the giddiness of feeling your stomach drop as you plunged over an abyss, the wild, terrible thrill of everything going the wrong way up or down.
“What does the Magician want in return?”
Wick winced, looked down at his hands. “You won’t like it.”
“Of course I won’t like it, Wick. You don’t even like it.”
“She wants the Balcony Cliffs. And probably Borne-Borney-o up there. Because she’ll want access to all the biotech. Every last bit.”
The Balcony Cliffs. Borne.
The Magician wanted everything, including our souls.