“I wouldn’t hurt her,” Borne said. “I didn’t hurt her.”
“But you had taken up with them. You’d been out scavenging with them before. Where do you think that would end?” Had I put that girl in danger by my own actions, even as I tried to help? The traps, the traps.
“I was trying to fit in,” Borne said, hurt. “I was trying to make an honest go of it. To show you I can do that.”
An honest go of it. Borne wasn’t a patchwork creature, but his syntax always would be. I’d taken something away from Borne and not replaced it with anything useful. Now he was trying to fill that empty space.
“Who was he? Your body?”
“Just a scavenger, like yourself.”
“And what did you do to him?”
“Nothing. Nothing much. When I came across him, he was dying. He had no family. He had no friends.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Everything dies, Rachel. He was already dying. Would you rather I hadn’t turned back into him? You seem upset.”
“How ‘dying’ was he?”
“Pretty dying, I’d say.”
“You haven’t stopped killing.”
“He was pretty dying,” Borne repeated.
I said nothing. I did not move. The ghost was returning because the living, breathing person couldn’t figure a way out. I still cared about Borne, still cared what happened to him, but I also felt a chill. I wondered what myths might grow up around Borne as they had once grown up around Mord, and how similar they might be.
Borne was too smart not to read some of that in my face, too na?ve to remain silent.
“I have an idea, Rachel,” Borne said. “Don’t say no yet. Just listen.”
“Borne…”
“I try to only kill evil people, Rachel, and people already dying. I’m getting it under control. I’m going to get it under control. And if I can stop, maybe I could come back to the Balcony Cliffs. Maybe you and Wick would let me? I would clean for you and I would make traps and even maybe help Wick with his biotech. I could come back with you now and we could try it. I promise I’ll be good, Rachel.”
Now it was my turn to ignore him.
“You can’t use this disguise again, Borne. Your cover is blown. Someone told me about you. You weren’t fitting in. People were beginning to guess.”
“Okay, Rachel,” Borne said, but his dour mask crumbled into something more like contentment, as if I’d agreed to something. Maybe it was enough that I’d sought him out.
Borne in travel mode stood before me soon enough, but much bigger than before, and all I wanted was to have never gone out, to be back home, but once there I knew I would think about being out in the city again, talking to Borne.
“You can’t come back yet,” I said, and then wished I’d been firm and said, “Never. You can never come back.” Why couldn’t I? What held me back? That I couldn’t suppress that last tiny bit of love for him? Of human sympathy? Of pity?
Borne went silent and there was a noticeable slump to him, and the ash kept falling from the sky onto both of us. I wiped at it, and it stained my shirt gray.
“Rachel … will I die someday?”
“Yes. Everything dies.” He knew the answer already. Call-and-response. We had done this.
“What about the people inside of me? The animals?”
“They’re already dead,” I said. No matter how many times I said it, Borne would never understand.
“No, they’re not dead, Rachel. I killed them but they’re not dead. You’re wrong. I don’t think they will ever die.”
“In whatever way was important to them, Borne, they are dead.” But I didn’t believe that when Borne said “dead” or “killed” he meant what I meant. To him, on some level I’d never understand, there was no death, no dying, and in the end we stood on opposite sides of a vast gulf of incomprehension. Because what was a human being without death?
“Do you still like lizards?” I asked, after a pause. There was no point in hammering him about the rest.
Borne made a sound like a chirp. “I still like lizards. But they don’t like me.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“I like the Mord proxies more now, though,” Borne said. “I’m hunting them down because they want to kill you. They’re hard to kill, but I am trying. If they were all gone, the Balcony Cliffs would be safe again, Rachel. You wouldn’t have to hide as much. Maybe I could see you more and we could talk more. You could come down with me to the river. You could go with me lots of places.”
Borne, trying to find a back door leading into the Balcony Cliffs.
“It’s dangerous to hunt the proxies. You shouldn’t do it. There are too many of them.”
I had to ignore the rest of what he kept pushing for. I had to. I had to be strong and snuff out the idea of clandestine meetings, of leading some kind of double life behind Wick’s back. If I remained resolute, maybe this meeting would inoculate me, cure me.
“I have to do it,” Borne said. “I have to. Everything will be better. You’ll see. You’ll see.” Agitated, narrow of focus, a monster pledging his allegiance to my well-being.
“I have to go,” I told him.
“Can’t you stay longer? Just a little longer? Please?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t.”
Borne nodded in a way only Borne could nod. “I know. But it was so good to see you again, Rachel. So good. So good.”
He extended a tentacle and I shook it like a hand with only a moment’s hesitation. Smooth, soft. Like a person.
“I won’t abandon you, Rachel,” he said. “You think you’ve abandoned me, but I know you haven’t. Not really. And I won’t abandon you. Ever. You’ll see. You’ll understand.”
The ghost was falling to pieces inside and wanting to be like mist or dew or anything but a creature able to receive what Borne was telling me.
Then Borne changed shape into something huge and tremulous, but also something long and low and streamlined and snakelike. He sped off at such a frightening pace that he was just a thick blurred black line zigzagging across the roof and then gone, over the side.
“I won’t do anything to those people you saw tonight,” Borne had told me. But I knew Borne’s memory palace was vast and deep and full of skulls.
*
Back by the dead, burned bear, someone waited for me. I had never seen him shine so bright, there in the darkness, in the rain of ash. Standing so tall and straight he eclipsed the bear completely. Perhaps I had never truly seen him before. His skin was radiant and his face like something beatific and resolute and ravaged that had been salvaged from the past. A likeness from an old painting, the light illuminating features too perfect to be real.
“Wick…”
“You can never do this again, Rachel. You can never do this to me again.”