There was a joyous aspect to Mord in those moments, some sense of liberation to the way he moved that made me wonder if the Magician’s attack, the reflexive action of the leviathan, had given Mord the pretext to maul the Company building. To do what he wanted to do anyway.
Defenses gone, the Company lay open to him and Mord dug deeper, and wrenched his claws through metal, stone, wood, and people alike, every once in a while finding a true treasure trove, and raising his muzzle to let a bolus of screaming, bloody morsels slide down his throat, the better to devour them. Even from our distance, you could now see the red smeared across his muzzle.
We watched, mesmerized and horrified by the torment suffered until, finally, all lay still and, sated, Mord gathered up the leviathan and flung its viscera and spine atop the mess he’d created of the building, a final insult, and flew away.
We could not escape the yowling and moaning of Mord in the aftermath, the way it permeated the air—how it made the blackest night seem to ignite with sparks of a grief and rage the depths of which we could never understand. Seether’s flank. Seether. Mord. The great bear that might once have been human, who would return at dusk to the ruins of the Company for many nights, to sleep fitfully atop its remains, tormented by visions that would turn our own attempts at sleep into squint-eyed insomniac rovings.
While from all over the city Mord’s proxies responded with their own growling, their own “Drrrrrk!”
And it was too much. It overwhelmed. The odds. The odds we’d be alive in a month, or a day. How I dithered in my wishes, thinking that perhaps the Magician’s ultimatum would have been preferable, that if only the missile had hit its mark the chaos in the city would have remained manageable, of a kind we recognized.
The fires from the missiles lasted well into the night. By the next morning the rumor in the city was that the Magician was dead, dragged from her underground stronghold, disemboweled by the Mord proxies, and then eaten by them so that no trace of her should ever again appear upon the Earth.
But I did not believe it.
*
I have tried to do justice to the vast scale of these events in this account, but at the time I was so scared I almost lost my shit watching from the blind, with Wick offering up a muttered commentary the whole time—and for minutes after.
“Is he really going to attack the Company? He is he is.
“How did she acquire missile launchers or missiles? That was clever. All those excavations underground.
“Now will this mean she comes after us sooner or much later? Is she damaged or is she fatal?
“The Company building goes down several levels below the surface—he’s just cut off the head. The body’s still down there. There’s still life down there. Maybe.
“The Company has no control over Mord. None whatsoever. But at least now he’s cut off his supply of Mord proxies. There is no other source. Unless they can breed.”
I had no words with which to reply, not even the words to tell him I had no answers or to dispute the answers he provided. The only person he could reassure was himself. All I knew was that the Magician had proved a dangerous, reckless fool to have set all of this in motion but to have failed, with no evidence of a backup plan, and we would all pay for it in some way. Even if she was dead, her mutant children still roamed the city, and we did not know what might come out of the Company’s now-exposed lower levels.
But we were very close and intimate in the blind, me and my poor sick Wick. I could smell the sweet bone-salt tang of alcohol minnows on his breath again. I didn’t mind, and his hair smelled cleaner than it should have, and my hip was up against his, and my arm against his arm, and it was impossible to just see Wick as sickly or an enemy or an obstacle, not with all the lines and networks and traps radiating out from the Balcony Cliffs—still in place despite what we had witnessed.
“Where do we go if we have to leave the Balcony Cliffs?” I asked.
A naked question, and I could feel his heart beat faster against my skin. He was like a giant tree frog, eyes large, remaining motionless but for the heartbeat that trembled out of him. It confused some instinct in me, some default, that Wick didn’t change color or shape, I had been hanging out with Borne so much.
He did not move, and so I leaned over and kissed him on the lips as his reward for contemplating the abyss. Or maybe because he was still not Mord nor Magician nor proxy, but only himself.
Then I wrestled his wiry form until I was on top of him and there was a severe question or concern in his eyes about what I meant to do, where we had left things after our epic argument.
What I meant to do was to huff like a Mord proxy. What I meant to do was huff and growl and paw at Wick. To nip at him and breathe on him, and in all ways be a bear. Except for the kissing.
Maybe I’d gone a little crazy in the aftermath of slaughter. Or maybe I was trying to break out of my skin, thinking about how my parents had been actors in roles and the roles were to be my father and mother—and the reason I could see those as roles was that in such extremes, in private, they must have let down their guard and expressed their doubts, their fears, the extent of their despair or hopelessness as our situation worsened and the world revealed the outlines of its true harshness. But because of me, there were whole eternities of hours each day when they had to pretend otherwise, and how I wish I could go back and tell them not to do that. That all I wanted was to see their true selves, remember their true selves. These were my thoughts as I looked down at Wick, wanting us revealed each to the other, forgetting that Wick, too, was playing a role. And Borne, too. Our lives were rapidly becoming impossible.
“Mord’s proxies are going to hear you and eat us both,” Wick whispered in my ear after a while, after he’d figured out I wasn’t going to eat him. We were close, so very close.
“You’d like that.”
“No, you’d like that!”
And then giggling—out of humor, out of stress.
He stopped struggling, let me kiss him again and again, let me smell him like a bear. So this was what it was like to be Mord or a Mord proxy. The snuffling, the great strength, the prey that could not get away.
Crouched there on top of Wick, every point of my body against every point of his, I realized, as if for the first time, that happiness never came easy to Wick. I don’t mean happiness in general but moments of happiness. Happiness in the moment eluded him without his alcohol minnows, his memory beetles; he carried too much weight, a weight he was always mindful of, that must be present in his life at all times.
But I could tell me on top of him was a stress, too, because he was so much thinner, and after a time, while outside trails of black smoke rose from the Company building and people in the low country with no shelter tried panic-stricken to find shelter, I dismounted, lay beside him, my arm around his side, my hand on his chest. Such a fragile heart for such a hardened man.