Wick no longer talked about giving in to the Magician’s demands, even after the discovery of the graves. Something had changed in Wick with Borne’s absence and our togetherness despite Borne’s absence, so that now her demands made Wick think more and more of the Balcony Cliffs as a fortress or redoubt against her. While, for me, I would just do what Wick said and make the words come out of my mouth that supported Wick’s vision, because I had no vision of my own.
Work consumed us—thankfully. It drove most other thoughts from my head, and we welcomed that and we rejoiced, or at least I did. We could not predict the city, but we still had the Balcony Cliffs. We still had them, and we toiled once more to make the Balcony Cliffs ever more impervious to the scenting of random murder-bears, labored unspeaking side by side at that hard work.
The most ingenious was rigging the fireflies in our apartment, using pheromones. It had a time delay of about thirty seconds, but if anyone other than us tripped the bioreceptors at the entrances into the Balcony Cliffs, the fireflies on the ceiling would start to die out in clusters. Least ingenious: clearing the air duct above the bed as an escape of last resort.
We were preparing for some catastrophe, the form of which we couldn’t see. Because the networks and hierarchies had yet to become clear, and we had no real allies. Because the Mord proxies had learned to use tools, and Mord, vulnerable now, had become cunning and deployed them more like a general ordering his troops. We took stock of food packets, even though I’d rather have eaten live insects than the runny, goopy, long-expired lumps in those packets. Chicken salad congealing. Beef-carrot stew. We had twenty-three, which meant in terms of days we had about fourteen. Rainfall had been intermittent and largely toxic, so our water supply extended a meager week beyond our thirst. From what Wick jury-rigged to collect from the morning condensation, we could potentially keep that week in reserve. From what Wick could cannibalize from the swimming pool, we could gain ourselves another week or two of food. If we included the remaining memory beetles, which had a particular crunch and a sourness that made them another food of last resort.
“Food packet or memory beetle?” Wick asked me, holding up one of each.
“Food beetle?”
“Not on the menu.”
Other things were back on the menu, though. The lizards had already crept back in, and the spiders, and I had witnessed three huge silverfish careening across a corridor floor, leaving a trail in the dust as if having a race. Every time I saw a living creature inside the Balcony Cliffs, I thought of Borne.
In our “spare” time, Wick and I sat side by side in a tunnel, in a room, in a corridor, shoulders touching, password-protected. Was this you? Was that you? Was that Borne? We were still reconstructing what we had actually said to each other, what he had not said, when I had not been there. As we removed the falsehood, as we built up the truth, damaged places became restored, whole rooms inside flickered with at least a semblance of light, and we cast the intruder farther out into the cold.
But I was not ready to cast out the intruder for good.
WHAT I TOOK FROM THE NOCTURNALIA
I began to walk out into the night a month after we lost Borne—several times. I told myself I was still a ghost, and no one would be able to see me because I was a ghost. Or I told myself it was recon to help out the Balcony Cliffs, or I told myself whatever lie would work. Because I needed a lie. Because Mord had become a more deadly predator and the Magician was resurgent. The Magician had found more recruits to join her medicated army; the Mord proxies had discovered their venomous breath could set fires, given the right accelerant. Mord vulnerable had lost a measure of awe, of dread, but that had not ended his rule. He had just become a more fearsome predator, adopted ruthless tactics.
Now, too, patterns began to emerge. There were people who seemed to just disappear, and the city had no answer for this except rumors—murmurs of an invisible killer from the tattered remnants of Wick’s contacts and my contact with a handful of fellow scavengers. At first these disappearances had not registered as unique. Already the city lay open like a treasure for psychopaths. People disappeared all the time. People were dying with some frequency.
Yet, exchanging rumors with an old woman on a street corner, or a young boy at the places Mord proxies had just abandoned … it became clear something new was happening. Mord was terrible and horrifying and frightening, but this new thing could become shadow. It became what it ate. It could be your neighbor or your friend, some said. Rumors pinned the blame on various sources. One theory went that this was some new tactic on the part of the proxies—that to spread even more fear, they had taken to burying their kills instead of leaving them as a bloody warning. Or that just one Mord proxy, cleverer than the rest, had become psychotic and was acting like a serial killer rather than a bear.
Another theory held that the Magician, injured and deranged from Mord’s assault on her strongholds, roamed the city at night, garroting the unwary and hiding (or eating) their bodies. Or, worse, that she had begun to use them for her biotech creations. But by far the worst rumor was that the Company had done the disappearing—that Mord’s destruction of the upper levels of the Company had led to mysterious rulers in the lower levels to begin kidnapping people at night and brainwashing them and making them into zombified, deranged biotech.
I knew the truth.
*
I said nothing to Wick about my roaming, not even that I would be gone, and once outside I imagined Wick in the halls of the Balcony Cliffs calling out the name of a ghost, but no ghost would appear, and I would sustain myself with this meager hope: Every time I thought there could be no further breach of trust that our relationship could withstand, that Wick and I would be driven apart never to come back together, we discovered our limits were elastic, that we had so much more room to mistrust each other the worse it got out in the city.
But underneath my excuses, this ghost wanted to see Borne, no matter what the danger. Or perhaps because of it. The ghost wanted to see Borne and find some way to fix it. The ghost was confused, and the ghost knew that if Wick knew, he would not understand, so he could never find out. The ghost believed that she had put in the work being responsible and helping out around the Balcony Cliffs, and that she was only risking herself. Perhaps the ghost didn’t care what harm might come to her. Perhaps deep down the ghost thought that without Borne there, Wick had no right to say where she wandered or did not wander.