So that’s what I did—check the places Borne couldn’t feel anymore—setting aside my books, shelving my thought of “educating” Borne, because it’s not what he needed. Doing what I’d promised to do the night the Mord proxy had attacked him. I felt awful.
That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.
*
What to say about Borne’s body, or my inspection of it. He was all the things he could be—rough in places, smooth in others, bumpy and sandpapery in one area and as worn as river stone in another. The quadrants of Borne, the logic that held his body together and animated him, had a deep awareness of the tactile, and it was through touch that I began to understand his complexity—the circular tension of the suckers he could create, the waving stubby toughness of the cilia, which looked so delicate but were not, the utter indestructibility where he formed ridges, the glassy imperviousness of those eyes, which had a film over them that hardened as soon as the eye appeared and left only a millisecond before the eye was subsumed in the skin.
Everywhere he felt like one thick muscle with no hint of fat, but also he could be diaphanous in places that spread like fans or webbing. Articulated there I found patterns that seemed too filigreed and ornamental to have purpose, and yet they did have purpose.
With each new unfurling, Borne was letting me get closer to the heart of him, while he spoke not a word but let me find the wounds first myself. Nor did he change his scent, left all neutral but the touch of him, and the light … he changed the light so that it streamed from the top of his head like a fountain and sprayed across the ceiling and back down upon us, that I might better see him. Was this what it was like to touch something that no one had ever touched before, or rarely? Like a blue whale or an elephant? To understand that beyond the seeing eye, the knowing eye, there was such a wealth of unique touch? Such a different way to experience what came across in photos as wondrous enough?
I found the defects easily but kept going to ensure that I missed nothing, that I uncovered each broken place. When I was done, I had discovered three hardened areas—a roughness with no give, a stubborn thickness that slashed through areas of rippling motion, paralyzed Borne’s normal functioning. When I had identified them, Borne confirmed they matched the areas he could not feel, and he changed the color around them to a deep burgundy, which leeched the color away from the places where he hurt. This left Borne almost unbearably white across those sections: a stretch of tentacle, a part of the side of his “face,” and then another patch far off on the periphery, on what I would call a skirt of his flesh.
The imprint of Mord proxy fang, Mord proxy claw was clear to see there. The mark of Mord, like a brand. Less clear was the nature of the injury.
“Borne, now I need you to answer two questions. The first is, do you know if that affected flesh is dead?” I meant “necrotic” but didn’t know if he knew the word. “And the second is whether there has been a spreading of the numbness since you were bitten.”
Splayed out like that, fully exposed, under the fountain of light, Borne looked more human than he ever had, for reasons I can’t explain, despite the tentacles spraying out in one direction and the skirt in another and the central column of his presence and also various hunched-over assemblages of flesh under which the cilia writhed. It was in that mode that he felt the most familiar to me, in that moment when I knew him best.
“The flesh is dead. I receive nothing from it. The numbness spread at first, but I sealed off the dead flesh. I sense no other contamination.”
“Borne, do you understand the concept of ‘poison,’ of being poisoned?”
“Yes, Rachel.”
“Do you know if this substance, the contamination, came into your body when the Mord proxy bit you?”
“Yes—it was then and no other time. I was alert to environmental contaminants, sealing them out. But I thought a bite was just dead or lost cells.”
“You’ve been poisoned. I think the Mord proxy’s fangs or claws, or both, were coated in something poisonous.”
As it turned out, I was right, and I had discovered another hazard to take note of in negotiating the world outside: Mord proxies were venomous as snakes. This poison had aided the Mord proxies in their fight with the Magician’s patrol, helped hasten the utter annihilation of the mods and homegrowns.
“What should I do, Rachel? Am I in trouble? Am I going to die?”
“No, you’re not going to die. But you may be in discomfort for a while. If you’re like other animals, it will become scar tissue and go away. But infection could occur, so you need to watch them, and let me know if those areas change.”
“Infected? Change?”
“Become inflamed.”
“Inflamed?”
“You know—like, see this scab.” I extended my forearm. I had gotten the bruises from stumbling on the stairs the night we’d been stuck on the factory rooftop. “See how it’s red and there’s some pus.”
“Pus. Scab. Pussssssssscaaaaaabbbbbuh.” Such not-nice words.
“Some pus is okay, but not a lot of pus. And you need to clean a wound if there’s pus in it, because it means the wound is infected. But you won’t die. But keep an eye on it.”
“Not too much pus,” Borne said, and three tiny stalks extended near each wound and three tiny eyes budded from each to keep watch. Which, from past experience, meant Borne was making a little joke about sentry duty.
“Something like that.”
“Thanks, Rachel. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Borne. Anytime.”
I would worry about him now. I would worry about his safety, because I had no control over it anymore, with no guarantee I could keep him safer if I had control anyway. I would worry about his na?ve sense of trust. I would worry about the gaps, “forget” to take my books back with me because I believed he still had so much to learn.
*
Before I left, Borne said, “I can’t stop, Rachel.”
“Can’t stop what?”
“Reading. Learning. Changing. That’s why I don’t need your books, Rachel. I’m learning too much too fast already. I feel it filling me up, and I can’t stop. So when you want me to learn more, it makes me … makes me…”
“Stressed?”
“Yes! That’s the word. Stressed. There is stress.”
The Magician couldn’t stop what she was doing, I couldn’t stop what I was doing, Wick neither, and now Borne was telling me he couldn’t stop.
“It’s okay,” I said, too relieved that I was back in Borne’s good graces to examine what he was saying. “It will be fine. I won’t force you to learn. But get rid of the dead astronauts.”
“They’re burrowing, but we’re in no danger,” Borne replied.
“What?”
“Mord proxies. I can hear them.”
I could hear nothing, and no one attacked the Balcony Cliffs that day, or the next, or the week after. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t heard them.