“What happens if you don’t?”
“You understand why I’m telling you? You are the only person who knows.” I knew what he was saying: I still have secrets, but now you have power over me.
“What happens if you don’t, Wick?”
“I’ll die.”
*
I stayed with Wick for several hours, my arm over his chest, in part because I was exhausted, wrung out because of our argument. Not just because we had argued, but relief. That we’d come back, again, from the precipice. That some of the frustration we’d inflicted on each other had come from the knowledge that, in the end, as long as we were shouting at each other we weren’t done, we weren’t over, and thus the sense that even though we weren’t playacting in our disagreement … we were playacting in our disagreement. Where could I go? Where could he go?
I kept turning the new facts over in my head. Wick was sick, evidence of which had been right in front of me all this time, in his thinness, his translucent quality, his need for having diagnostic worms vigilant in his arm at all times. The Magician had been helping keep us alive in the Balcony Cliffs, and Wick had been more dependent than I knew. Our situation remained just as bad as before, maybe worse.
By the time I went back to my apartment to find Borne, he wasn’t waiting for me. Nor was he in his apartment, and after searching everywhere, I realized Borne had gone back out into the night while Wick and I were arguing.
It was clear that what Wick had said was true: I couldn’t control Borne anymore, if I’d ever had that power. Borne would roam the city whenever he liked from now on.
HOW BORNE TAUGHT ME NOT TO TEACH HIM
My parents took me to a fancy restaurant when I was twelve, as a reward for good grades, in our final sanctuary before the end. We had come to that city almost miraculous out of a landscape of lawlessness, fleeing a mad dictator who had taken to cannibalism and random amputations. We had made it through the outer fortifications and barricades, the quarantine of endless questions, because they needed teachers and doctors, and for eighteen months our new home had provided a measure of stability. My mother had a job as a nurse in a clinic and my father used his skills working for a builder.
The restaurant had spotless silverware and bone-white napkins and a server who started each sentence with “sir” or “madam.” They even had hot towels and china finger bowls so you could wash your hands between courses. The walls projected images of the most calming and peaceful nature, from a rippling surf at the edge of a black-sand beach to a mountain view of a forested valley so fresh and clear you could almost feel the wind. Little biotech creatures that looked like fluffy baby birds mixed with adorable hamsters gamboled and chittered and put on shows on the wide window frame. Through the window, past the cute biotech: an ordinary evening scene, with streetlamps, a paved avenue, and even a few cars grumbling along.
My mother loved the biotech, wondered where it came from; something so advanced had to come from a place that had security, that could feed and house people. Biotech, she had come to believe, created a trail—became a kind of clue as to where might be safe.
This was just as things began to fall apart in that city, too, so the question of safety was on our minds. Even as everyone was trying to ignore the situation by attending with ever more vigilance to the finer things in life. I still was going to school, for the first time in ages. I worked hard for good grades. I was treated with no more than the average distrust of strangers. I fit in just enough to avoid most teasing about my frizzy hair and odd accent. What teasing I got came with a good-natured smile because so many children in the schools had come from somewhere else, too. I was proud of my effort, I was proud that I’d managed to adjust, to make my mind leave behind the horrors we had experienced before reaching that place.
My parents gave me a present: a biology book with foldouts showing cross-sections of different environments drawn in detail and in vivid but realistic colors. Jungles came wreathed in vines with tiny monkeys with huge eyes and poison frogs and ridiculously fancy birds. Deserts came with burrows under the sand that held solemn-looking mice and, above them, scaly monsters with flickering tongues and vistas broken by gnarled cactus. It looked new, but I knew my mother had been hoarding it for more than a year, wrapped in a brown paper bag. I’d snuck short reads a few times when my parents were asleep. I didn’t know they’d meant it for me.
The food, when it finally came, was so perfect … it melted on the tongue, the meat like butter, the vegetables cooked just right, the bread rustic and silky inside the wonderfully burnt crust. Dessert was heavier, a sweet and tangy and spongy tower of something, with vanilla ice cream alongside. For dessert, too, the pratfalling biotech came tumbling off the windowsill and did a little dance around my dessert while singing “Congratulations!” I looked at these two creatures with delight, but a year earlier, in the wilderness, we would have caught them, cooked them, and eaten them.
By the time we left and walked home, my parents were agreeably drunk and we sat in the living room talking and laughing until midnight. I had no idea that I would someday lose them, that I would become a scavenger in a nameless city. That I would have dreams of drowning, that I would be a parent to pratfalling biotech that talked back, that challenged and pushed me in so many ways.
I often wished we had just stayed home, skipped the restaurant, because in memory the meal overpowers the evening afterward. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what I said to my parents or what they said to me, yet I can still remember the taste of the ice cream.
“The world is so big, Rachel,” Borne had said to me on the way back to the Balcony Cliffs, after we left the rooftop. “It just keeps going and going.”
“It ends eventually.” I almost said, “It gets smaller,” but bit my tongue.
I didn’t know if my world was getting bigger again after Wick’s revelations. I didn’t know which direction was down and which was up. But I did know I had broken my word to Borne that night and gone through a miserable day pining for him and putting up with a lightness to Wick’s step, even a whistle at times that I resented, attributed to his happiness that Borne was gone, and blunted my sympathy for Wick’s condition.