“How did the world get this way?”
“I don’t know. Because of people, Borne. We did this to ourselves.” We were still doing it to ourselves.
“Was it always this way?”
“Not always. There were more people and it was better.” But not because there were more people.
“More people,” Borne said, musing on that.
“Yes. And there were cities all over the world where people lived in peace.” There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn’t lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species.
“Cities everywhere,” Borne said, as if he didn’t quite know what I meant.
We were almost to the concealed door back at the Balcony Cliffs when Borne spoke again.
“Am I alone, like Mord?”
“Mord has proxies now.”
“He’s still alone.”
“You have me, Borne.”
“I mean, are there more like me? Or am I alone? Like Mord.”
“I’m alone, too, Borne,” I said, a little self-pitying. But was I alone because I’d made myself alone, or …
I had no real answer to that question. But I remember I didn’t like Borne comparing himself to Mord. I didn’t know what that meant or where that could lead.
*
I meant to join Borne at my apartment, but halfway there I changed direction and decided to go up to Wick’s apartment and search it one more time. Given he was down at the swimming pool drunk out of his mind, it didn’t seem like much of a risk, but that might have been my own drunkenness talking. It was my own drunkenness talking, my own sense of what I was entitled to after the trauma of that night. I wanted to inflict damage on Wick, find a way to punish him.
But after I’d disabled the couple of defense worms in the door and had turned to the more prosaic defense of the lock, I felt a presence at my back and turned and started—and there was Wick, behind me, in the amorphous darkness of the corridor.
I was tumbling over excuses or explanations as I pulled out the picklock, but when I looked again the corridor behind me was empty. Where had he gotten to? The drunk me decided it didn’t matter and went to work again. Only, as the door opened, as I pushed it open, there was a tap at my shoulder, and there was Wick, reappearing like a practical joke.
This time I jumped up and cursed and fell back into the corridor.
“Oh-ho! Oh-ho!” Wick exclaimed, pointing a finger at me, drunk enough to do a shuffling dance of triumph. “I know what you’re trying to do. Again. You’re trying to break into my apartment. Again.” Smugness broke some illusion or spell, pushed aside his drunkenness to make his thin charm cadaverous or needle-sharp, the angular planes of his face harsh.
“Don’t sneak up on me,” I said, mounting my best defense.
“You know how boring it is when you try to sneak into my apartment without me knowing? So boring. Because I always know. Why wouldn’t I know?”
“Maybe I forgot something I wanted to tell you and maybe I thought you might be in here. And asleep. And couldn’t hear me knock so I, you know…” Motioning at the door, and making the nonuniversal sign for lock-picking.
Wick didn’t understand.
“What’s that? What are you doing? Driving a corkscrew into someone?”
I started laughing at that. For some reason I found that the funniest thing I’d ever heard, maybe because in my mind I was the sneakiest human being on the planet, and Wick was telling me I was more like a cartoon character taking extra-big sneak steps up to a door while the eyes on some painting on the wall moved and saw me.
“Yes, I’m sneaky that way. I’m sneaky. Sneak.”
Wick rewarded me with his own little dry laugh, pushed past me into his apartment. But left the door open.
“Borne showed you sneaky tonight,” Wick said as I followed him into his apartment. “He took on a Mord proxy and survived. Borne can do whatever he wants now. How can you stop him? Claaaaaaw! Claaaaaaw! Claaaaaaw!” Mocking me.
“Shut up.”
Wick jumped onto his bed and lay there propped up on one elbow. I joined him, although with a distance between us.
“Maybe they wouldn’t have lived long anyway,” Wick said. “The Magician’s children. Her charges. Her little people. Whatever they are. Besides being fucked up, because they’re definitely fucked up.” Some of that slurred, so I had to piece it together.
“You shouldn’t talk about that.” I felt cold, exposed, angry all over again.
“I told you—I never thought that the Magician would come after me.”
“And she didn’t! She came after me!”
I hit him in the side, hard. He flinched, wincing, said, “That hurt.”
“It was supposed to hurt.”
Wick turned away from me, staring at the wall. The taut quality, the armor that almost physically sheathed him when he didn’t want to confront something.
I sighed, more like a deep convulsion that relaxed my tight chest, my tensed shoulders. I looked at the ceiling with the firefly lights. So pretty, so like living constellations. But one by one they were going out, at the average rate of two per day, and even with hundreds of clusters stuck there, Wick’s place had become noticeably dimmer. Another few months and it would be dark, but by then we’d be in the thrall of the Magician or forced out by her.
Wick kept too many secrets. It was getting too difficult—occupying the same space but traveling through separate universes of need, of want.
“You owe me,” I said, not angry anymore. “You need to tell me something, anything, about what’s going on. And if you can’t, then this is a lie. If you can’t, then we have nothing.”
“You hit me, remember?” he said. “Just now.”
“You deserved it.”
For a long time, Wick was quiet and very still. When he spoke, it was in a tone that told me not to ask questions about what he was going to tell me.
“The Magician found me because of the fish project,” Wick said. “She’s not from the city. She’s from the Company—last generation before it all began to fall apart. I knew her when I worked on the fish project, and that’s how she knew who I was when she abandoned the Company.
“When she first came to me, we struck a deal. She had access to vast quantities of raw materials. What I stole from the Company had already run out. What she sold me saved me. Since, I pay her off in biotech and salvage. But now she wants everything…”
“What else does she know?”
“Too much. But there’s one thing she doesn’t know.” Wick reached across me into the drawer beside the bed, pulled out the metal box full of the biotech that looked like nautiluses, handed it to me. “I think you’ve already seen these.”
“What are they?”
“I used to get them from the Company,” Wick said. “Now I make them here.”
“But what are they?”
“Medicine. A very specialized medicine that I have to take. I have a condition.”