The pads of Mord’s foot were cool and dark and comforting and very, very close.
But very close too was a word being shouted into my good ear, my own name: “Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!” It sounded ridiculous, like the cawing of a crow. With the word came a dragging sensation, a bumpy sliding drag, and I was moving over the ground fast as the foot continued to come down toward me.
The darkness spread but my face was in the light and I could see sky again. The darkness was very close. My chest was in the light, but my legs were in shadow. That seemed peculiar to me, as if it were raining on just one side of the street.
One final wrenching, jolting pull on my arms and I was flipped through the air by the impact of some monster stamping on the skin of the world and Rachel was set down again and was rolling downhill, rolling and rolling with some other creature attached to her back and still shouting the name of a ghost: “Rachel!”
The world went dark, but if I was dead at least I could hear again, and not just the voice in my head. The rumble and roar, screams, and imagined “Drrrk! Drrrk!” while a sack of flesh was dragged and thrown about.
Somewhere close was a river of fur that became a dark, dry river full of rocks and chemicals, and that’s where I washed up, waiting for someone, anyone, to find me.
HOW WE FOUND TEMPORARY SHELTER
Once, as a bedtime story, though he never truly slept, I told Borne about my island of refuge, the place my parents brought me to when I was six or seven. There I had experienced a hard-won two years without upheaval, without war or refugee camps. On that island, I had begun to think I might live out my life. It had the same false sense of permanence as the Balcony Cliffs, only more so.
We lived in an apartment in the harbor capital, but I remembered with such vividness not our home or the buildings in the city but the botanical gardens and its decorative pond with a dead fountain in the center. Water lilies covered the surface with butter-yellow blossoms and round green lily pads with a raised edge that replicated the circular gray granite wall that surrounded the pond. The wall was just the right height that I could, on tiptoe, reach into the water and trail my hand there, tiny fish nibbling at my fingertips. In the silty water swam also carp, ponderous goldfish, and brown, mysterious eels with gills like explosions of lace. Fat ugly frogs stood sentinel on the lily pads and turtles the size of my thumb sunned themselves in that miniature world. Snails whose gray shells were transparent so you could see the darkness of their coiled bodies hid against the wall, and I had to be careful before leaning so I wouldn’t crush them with my awkward, clumsy human body.
Nothing that had been altered lived there; biotech had been banned from the gardens, with the government set to classify artificial animals as akin to espionage. Malformed animals or rare ones could incite panic, and the newspapers ran articles about suspected biotech cornered and hacked to death by men with machetes.
But my mother would say at dinner, my father rolling his eyes, that biotech was already out in the world more than people knew. That it was pretending, trying to blend in, to escape notice.
*
After school, my friends and I would play at the gardens, overseen by one of the mothers or my father. We would climb the labyrinthine trees that overhung the pond, the ones with the intense strands of bright red blossoms that made me sneeze, the wind off the sea from across the road bringing a hint of salt and fresh coolness to our sweaty endeavors. Then we would be walked down the sea road to the harbor, and home. Along the way, when I had money from chores, we would run into the corner store and get salted plums and rice candy. The old lady behind the counter never smiled but would give me, free of charge, the little decorative umbrellas people used to put in drinks.
Most days, if it hadn’t yet gotten dark, my parents would go down to the beach with me after dinner. We would look for shells or wade in the shallows with our shoes off. I liked to watch the grumpy-looking sand-colored fish sway back and forth under the surf. Then it was back home to do schoolwork, and before bed my father would read to me from a children’s book or maybe even an adult book, or poetry with pictures alongside it. No one made printed books on the island anymore, and electricity was on-again, off-again. But I didn’t notice that, didn’t think anything of it. I was going to live on the island forever. Each day would be just like the last, and each night also, with the ocean breeze surging like the sea was surging, with wind crackling gentle through the palms and, sometimes, the little foot-patter of rats or mice that entranced me but sent my father into frenzies of mousetrap building.
In the mornings, a man who had grown up on the island and sold, among other items, boiled, filtered water in glass jars would keep an eye on me and the neighbor kids as we walked to school in our brown leather sandals and the badly made itchy gray uniforms the school recycled year after year. We’d do our language arts, our math, our science, and then be released into recess. The school was across the road from the beach, and we’d rove wider than was prudent, blunder, explore the very limits of our territory—to uncover a huge palm crab or some wayward crayfish taking a walk from the nearby river.
We rarely made it all the way to the sea without some adult calling us back. But I sometimes made it to the fence, to watch the mud flats where the river fed into the sea. I liked to observe the mudskippers—soft, slimy, puckish creatures with bulgy eyes and fins that doubled as a way to walk on land. I didn’t even notice the marsh reek all that much, I liked the mudskippers so much—and the cautious fiddler crabs that would cover the mud when I was in the middle distance but then disappear down their holes leaving behind an empty ghost town when I was at the fence.
The mudskippers didn’t even blink, though, remained behind like gray statues, unmoving but for a delicate flutter around their amphibious gills. Gulp, gulp, gulp they’d go, before, at their own pace, plopping back into the water. Some of them acted like sentries, and others seemed to enjoy goofing off. It was hard to tell the difference, though.