In his expression I could read such an extremity of loss and hurt and betrayal, so naked, as naked as anything I had ever seen in the city. I knew he had seen everything, listened to me talking to Borne, and I couldn’t withstand it. I was ashamed. I couldn’t stand there and be worthy of it.
But I wanted to. I wanted to be worthy of it, the way Wick shone so bright, for me.
I stood in front of Wick and I held his gaze as the girl had held mine in the courtyard. I nodded. I would never do that again. I would never seek out Borne again, no matter what. No matter how that hurt.
“Humdrum oracle,” I said, to let him know I was real.
He seemed to vibrate there, his whole body, with the depth of the emotions he was feeling. So rigid and resolute. Standing on a precipice, needing to make a decision. Transfixed by a doubt shining out but also turned inward, as if he still hid something.
“Botanical garden eel,” he said finally.
He was so utterly beautiful and so defiant and so ready that it was as if I had never truly seen him before, and even now when I think of my dear Wick, I think of him that way, standing by the dead bear as if he had conquered it himself, his eyes green-gold diamonds, his stance that of a man who believes he might lose everything but still willing to risk it all anyway.
HOW WE LOST WHAT WE HAD FOUGHT FOR
I had harbored a killer and could not shake free of that, kept turning it over in my mind, kept trying to rid myself of the residue. Borne wasn’t even a killer as I was a killer, but someone who killed the innocent and tried to call them guilty. I thought I had been acting out of kindness, out of a sense of teaching Borne to be good. But would you make a wolf feel guilty for killing its prey? Would you make an eagle feel guilty for flying? The only salvation against the guilt, the only thing I could hold in my hands like something tiny and glittering found in the dirt that might be worthless, was the idea that I hadn’t been able to cast aside my feelings because Borne meant something bigger. That I had continued to believe in Borne because my gut knew something my head did not.
Maybe that was a delusion, maybe that was wrong, but even as a ghost I hadn’t been stripped of that feeling. Even as a ghost facing Borne in that desolate place in the city, I’d still come away thinking Borne was a decent person beset by a terrible affliction. No matter how I tried to push beyond that to a place where Borne was evil, horrible, a psychopath, I couldn’t do it.
I went home to the Balcony Cliffs with Wick, no longer a ghost. I went home into a sliver of time I count as happiness before the end, before we lost everything. Wick might recede from me again, or me from him, but in those few days I knew him with an intensity that could not have been prolonged without burning us both out.
In his apartment, I tore off my dusty, dirty clothes, and then his dusty, dirty clothes, and we fucked with a fury and oblivion that drove out everything else. I did not want Wick gentle, and he did not want to be gentle, and we took each other and kept on taking each other until we were sore and so tired we could sleep without dreams or nightmares—exhausted, and hungry, and with nothing solved but it didn’t matter.
After, as we lay there, we talked as honest as we could. I told him about the scavengers I’d met and the Mord proxies at the intersection, and how numb and old I felt without Borne in the Balcony Cliffs. I was telling Wick this not to hurt him but to let the monsters out, to have a night without the monsters inside me. His body stiffened alongside me as I told him these things, and then relaxed again, and there was such relief in the ordinary.
In the aftermath, Wick’s wiry arms around my shoulders, my waist, and then, as if we were addicts, sleep merged with wakefulness and Wick’s hands were roving, busy, just where I wanted them, needed them. He grew hard against me once more, and we made love slowly, and I welcomed feeling diffuse and in pieces, everywhere and nowhere.
And, for those few days, it was almost normal again.
*
The fourth night after my return, I drifted off to dreams of the little foxes that followed Borne. They were in the dry ocean bed outside the city. They were playing in the sand and yapping and yipping and taking turns disappearing into the backdrop, only to reappear again somewhere else, as if it wasn’t camouflage but instead blinking from place to place. Then one fox stopped to stare at me, and I knew it was the same one from the astronaut graves.
I woke several hours later to tiny meteorites hitting my face. I woke up to Wick’s fireflies winking out, not one by one but in droves, swaths going dark, and the dead bodies falling onto the bed. Our alarm system.
I shook Wick awake.
“Wick—we need to go. Now.”
He stared up at the ceiling bleary-eyed, and then he was reaching for his pants and we were putting on our clothes in a frenzy.
Thirty fireflies were left, then twenty, then ten, then we lived in darkness except for the faint pale glow from Wick and his remaining worms. The bed was covered in little dead dark bodies.
“Where are they coming from?” I asked, even though I knew. What we didn’t know is who the intruders were.
“Everywhere.” A preternatural calm from Wick as he pulled out his emergency pack, gave me mine.
My heart was a bludgeon trying to get out of my chest.
We had what we needed to survive. We knew our escape route. It had been maybe two minutes since I’d noticed the dying fireflies.
Wick threw open the door to his apartment.
The corridor was full of bears.
*
A wall of coarse, dull fur given depth by shadow. The glimpse of the massive head of another Mord proxy beyond the side and haunch of the one blocking our doorway. The smell of unconstrained savagery that close poured into the apartment: blood and mud and shit and rotting flesh. The traces of leaves and lichen, the hot, bitter aftertaste of Mord breath that filled up the corridor, finding our new air.
Half a second before I shut the door.
Two seconds before Wick fortified it with his last beetles, four seconds before Wick had pushed me up into the air duct, five seconds before I pulled him up into the air duct.
Ten seconds before the bears burst into the apartment and destroyed it. Swatted at the entrance to the air duct, Wick bringing his legs up to his chest, and then, as I pushed forward, surging almost on top of me to get away from those claws, those questing paws.
The bellowing and the terrible smell were right below us as we crawled through the air duct. A smashing, splintering sound was a paw punching up through the air duct behind us. Then another. More, following, ripping through the ceiling, clawing their way toward us, others trying to anticipate, get ahead of us.