“The old man told me he was digging for food, but all I saw were roots down there.”
“Maybe he was too old.” Maybe he was digging his own grave, had the dignity to sense his future and plan for it.
“He also told me you have to give up something to get somewhere. That’s what he told me. So that’s what I’ll have to do. If I want to get somewhere.”
“Haven’t you noticed? Everyone is out there trying to create their better future. Especially old men digging holes.”
“Sarcasm?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He asked that one-word question now, and so I wasn’t sarcastic very often.
“Come help me, Borne,” I said, sobering up, remembering who I was to him, and because I didn’t like his jaded tone. “You should help me with the Balcony Cliffs.”
“I guess I could spare an hour here and there,” Borne said, as if his social calendar was full of appointments.
I just had to come up with a task for him that might keep him occupied and help us at the same time. Maybe keep him out of the clutches of old men digging holes.
*
Most nights now there was some kind of cacophony and a rawness, and such a sense of covert movement. So much noise out there—and echoes of noise—and a keening or growling or the sound of something or someone being killed. That was the sound of a city that no longer believed in one ruler or one version of the future. And, indeed, Mord at times would growl in a kind of disgust at this new version of events, and above us the proxy bears would dig where Mord had laid his head or maybe it was the Magician’s men pretending—and that was the other confusion: one side trying to make their kills look like the work of the other side.
Although the Magician had more luck in this regard; the proxies were not dainty. Another sound in the night: the strangled agony of people dying on the street who had escaped the proxies but not the poison of their bite. Soon, too, the Magician’s mutants not only came with harder carapaces but with their own poison, which shot out through their fingernails in a vain hope of piercing thick bear fur. With these “improvements” came a shorter but more intense life, their speed unnerving.
Borne coined the term Nocturnalia, for the way that life now welled up in unexpected ways whenever darkness slid over the city. There had always been a life out there in the blackness that did not include us and that moved to its own rhythm. But added to that now, what made the night both opportunistic and perilous, were the others lurking, so many out in it, thinking the night gave them cover. We couldn’t interpret these others, hardly knew where they had come from, could not grasp, either, their allegiances, or the eruption of those who worshipped Mord in the aftermath of the Magician’s failure, who sided with the great bear and chose to give their fealty and foolishly thought this made them immune.
Gunfire in the night was the barometer of our desperation—bullets so scarce in the city that each single shot that rang out, whether near or far, signaled a last stand. On nights when we heard more than a dozen, it was difficult to believe we would not be swept away by some inexhaustible wave of slaughter. Lights at night were traps, too, in a way they weren’t before. Little pools and points of life, and nothing good could come from investigating.
The Magician had not returned, but her innovations were a tell, I thought. In her absence, too, myths had grown up around her, new stories, as if she had become a martyr. Borne brought one back to me as if it were valuable salvage. In this story, a strange bird with beautiful plumage had found its way to the city. A very strange bird that had come from far away. It flew around, lost and disoriented, trying to figure out the city. Where it was, exactly. What it was supposed to do.
But it wasn’t supposed to do anything. On the second day, someone tried to catch it and broke its wing. The bird got away, kept flying as best as it could. Then a bit of walking biotech caught it, killed it, ate it. Then the Magician killed the biotech and used it for parts, and once again the strange bird flew in the city, but now at the Magician’s behest, and no one would touch it, for it was the emissary of the Magician, and it was clear to everyone why the strange bird had come to the city.
Because the Magician had willed it.
And even if the Magician died, her strange bird would live on.
*
The stories about the Company building weren’t much better. The Mord proxies patrolled the perimeter, and Mord had dug out a place to sleep on its flank, and a kind of refugee stream of bizarre biotech still came out of the damaged places to join the Nocturnalia. I did not like to glimpse these half-dead things, most gobbled up by Mord proxies, that crawled when they should have walked, or rolled or hobbled …
Nor could I stop thinking of the perfect little biotech slaves that had paraded themselves around my special cake in the fancy restaurant. In my mind, they kept spiraling that cake for years, as it decayed into black mold and then nothing, and they had to keep trudging around that cake, around and around, singing, until they died in mid-step and their flesh rotted and then faded away, revealing their sad, delicate skeletons.
Which kept dancing.
HOW I TRIED TO HELP BORNE BY HAVING HIM HELP ME
The way I tried to keep Borne out of trouble was to enlist his help exploring more of the Balcony Cliffs. I would have him along to punch a tentacle through the exterior walls of apartments and rooms we couldn’t reach through the rock slides and other impediments. With my ability to scavenge outside severely curtailed, this was the only way to bolster our supplies.
Trying to break through in a normal way was nearly impossible with a hand-cranked drill, and more dangerous. But Borne had a knack for it using his own body, because when necessary his tentacle could become either diamond-hard or more vinelike, negotiate existing cracks, and then pulverize that part of the wall necessary to peer in. I had created a very long, narrow telescope out of the parts of three or four telescopes, so if Borne could make a fairly regular hole of a certain diameter, I could push the makeshift telescope through and take a look for useful salvage. Or, if it was a thin wall, I’d just eyeball the contents.
When that didn’t work, Borne grew an eyeball on the end of a tentacle and told me what he saw. If there was something valuable, we’d widen the hole or risk blasting through enough of a doorway to retrieve the contents of the room. Borne and I played a game where we tried to predict what was in the room before we tunneled into it. Borne got them all right at first, and then started to get them wrong, on purpose I thought, sometimes ridiculously so.
“Spatula, kitchen table, bowls, dead fridge, some chairs, a sculpture of a giant bird.”