I hadn’t known I was so fragile, so delicate in motion. I didn’t know Borne had loved me quite so much.
The sight nearly broke my heart all over again, I can’t lie, and there was an indelible, floating moment when I felt as if I was down there, looking out through Borne’s eyes, and not up on the balcony in my own skin.
The feeling faded, and Borne, as if he knew I was watching, became himself again, free to be himself again, in that moment, and I saw that strange animals followed in his wake again. The little foxes and the rabbits and the things that looked like foxes and rabbits but were not.
He was just another part of the city now, I tried to tell myself, but the loss was too raw to think of him as just another obstacle, threat, or opportunity. That I could never do.
I thought the animals might be chasing after him, but, no, it became clear soon enough: Borne was leading them. Borne was somehow leading them. All the forgotten and outcast creatures, beneath the notice of the city.
While the river continued on its course, carrying all of us with it.
PART THREE
WHAT THEY TOOK FROM MORD AND FROM US
A few days after we cast Borne out, Mord lost the power to fly. Whoever had taken that away from Mord must have hoped it would happen in mid-glide over the city, and that he would plummet from a great height and die in an ocean of his own blood. But it did not happen that way. He just woke up one morning and could not fly. Was this a relief? It should have been, but somehow it seemed foreboding, a sign along with all the other signs that the things we depended on were changing.
Mord sat in the apocalyptic splendor of his own fur across the cement of an empty parking lot, surrounded by his huffing, grunting, snorting proxies, and he could not fly. He could not float or soar or hover, though he tried. Such puzzlement in Mord’s snarls, these snarls like hissed-out question marks, and then the titanic bellow to follow, that expressed in heavy breath his rage and his outrage. Mord could not fly and a dozen cults across the city must have collapsed and their followers fled in confusion or disbanded or killed themselves. God was God no longer. God would have to walk the Earth like the rest of us. He had lost something he had come to believe he would always have and relied on to be there, and its absence came as a shock.
Still, Mord tried to become a god again. He hurled himself at the sky, only to lurch and stumble and catch his balance with his front paws smashing against pavement. Drawing himself up to full height, a tension to his body as if with every muscle tightened he could will himself into the air … he stood there while the Mord proxies milled underfoot in a chorusing “Drrk-drrk” of confusion.
Mord tried again and again, offering himself to the sky—each time, rejected, no matter the method. A full running start, on all fours, a cautious expedition from the top of a three-story building crumbling beneath him even as he jumped from it. Another run, this time on his hind legs, but to no avail. Half a morning spent by the great bear, launching himself, seeking to recapture the magic, to restore the Company tech that had allowed him to ease his great bulk through the sky. He took to what came instinctual again: bounding on all fours through new wreckage and old, smashing everything in his path, splintering houses, collapsing smokestacks that fell out to the side like paltry straws.
No matter. Mord was trying to achieve an escape velocity he’d never had, or needed, and came rough-tumbling back down after a handful of breath-catching moments when it appeared he had once more achieved separation from the ground, when there could be seen a space between his belly and the earth, his paws and the earth … only for it to prove an illusion, and he fell, sometimes heavily, to bruise bones and muscles, with an impact that leveled a courtyard or apartment complex.
From the dust clouds of such destruction, Mord would rise, staring toward the horizon as if it held some answer. But mostly, as he came to accept this new limitation on his powers, Mord sat. Mord sat and pondered. Mord sat and pondered and swiveled his great head from side to side, surveying his domain, curious as to who would be the first to challenge him in his reduced condition. Mord looked as if his brain was full of murder, because he recognized what was to come—and he was ready. But he also looked like a bear cub, left to fend for himself amid the huge pile of bones that was the city.
I had seen Mord hungry and thirsty. I had seen him possessed of a secret anguish. I had seen him injured, favoring a paw or a muscled shoulder, but I had not seen him with his back to the wall or desperate or mortal. No one had, and yet we were about to, a fear and opportunity both. The perverse question in that city, for all of us, was what would bind us together were Mord ever to die.
“The Magician’s back,” Wick told me. “The Magician must be back.”
“Is that it?” I replied, although I had little interest.
Wick still had a nose for information, even as his contacts thinned. Among the rumors that came to us in the days after: that some of the Magician’s people had infiltrated the Company building, had gotten through the gauntlet of proxies, had flipped a switch or destroyed a mechanism, and this was the source of Mord’s diminishment. Others believed Mord’s earthbound status was a time-delayed effect of his mauling of the Company building, which had damaged a mechanism that had finally given out—or a sign that his cult within the Company had lost faith in him.
Whatever the truth, what did I care now whether Mord did or did not fly? I had suffered a terrible shock and an absence that could never be made right. This was the city, and we had to go on like it didn’t matter, could not show weakness or we were lost. All that mattered, like Mord on a smaller scale, was making the effort to look around me to see what might next come at me in my new weakness, my time without Borne.
*
As the days passed and it became clear that Mord would never fly again, a sound we did not know we had been hearing removed itself from the city. A sound like a secret manipulation of the air, something that left so little trace I find it hard to describe. Because it had been a sound so invisible, so smooth, so without texture or taste or smell that all we knew was that we missed it now, even if we could not recall its nature. But this I knew in my gut: It had been the sound, the underlying subliminal hum, that meant Mord could fly.
I thought of Borne and his extra senses. I thought of the Company and Mord, and I wondered what else in this city we could not hear, would only hear when it was taken from us.
*