My mother asked a lot about the mudskippers, about whether any had strange eyes or acted differently. Or if I had ever seen anything else odd out there. No, I said, none of them did. No, I had not. She said she had heard a rumor about biotech seeking refuge on the mud flats. The biotech left a trail, she felt—and if you could track it to the source, that might be where safety lay. Which was when I guessed the truth: My parents didn’t think that life would last. They thought the island was just a temporary shelter, that we would be moving on soon enough.
It astonishes me now that I could have ever led such an opulent life or had so much leisure time, or have looked at all that protein with a non-predatory eye. Any of that transported to the city I now lived in would have been ravaged and stripped down in half a day or less—the pond in the botanical gardens reduced to an empty pool of cloudy water, the mud flats just a barren plain.
When I had finished telling Borne about the island, he asked, “Is that from a story?”
“No, Borne. That was part of my childhood.”
“So it was a story.”
“No, it was real.”
“Oh yes. From ‘when I was a kid,’” he said, as if he’d been filing away some of what I said as a separate book of fairy tales. I was the old bore who couldn’t shut up about the good old days that had never existed.
“It was real, Borne,” I insisted.
“What’s a dog?” he asked. Sometimes I also told him, if I was up to it, about the dog I’d fed on the island and had to abandon.
“You know what a dog is.”
“A dog is a meal on four paws.”
“Borne!”
“You said that.”
“I said it as a joke.” But there weren’t any dogs left in the city, except on the fringes, distant and wary. No friendly dogs anywhere, because a friendly dog was a meal on four paws.
“Where’s the island now?” Borne asked, as if islands could just float away, but mostly to change the subject.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it still the same?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think it’s not the same now.”
“It could be the same.”
What did Borne know? I remembered thinking. His own brief childhood he’d spent rooted in place as a kind of glorified houseplant. He had never been anywhere.
But Borne had pressed on, not realizing how much it bothered me.
“How do you know it happened?” he asked. “Is it written down anywhere?”
How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.
*
When I woke in Wick’s safe place for the first time, or came to, Wick had propped me up against the stone wall next to him, facing the shallow water of a well. All was in shadow except the water, which emitted a light blue rippling glow. Above, the walls came in toward each other like a steeple, leaving just a small point of light at the apex. It smelled like moss and a clean sort of darkness.
Two of my fingers welcomed me back with a vicious, lancing throb, along with a shoulder laced with shooting pains like an electric spiderweb. My legs were scraped and bloodied through my ripped pants and my pelvis and left hip felt bruised, not right, hurt against the stone floor. A weakness in my ankle could be walked off, but the state of my left ear was more serious. That I might always have to listen out of the other ear, the sound coming to my left side muddy—always have to be alert. I could still feel in my bones the reverberations of Mord’s weight striking the earth, and I was much too aware of my body to even pretend to be a ghost again.
Our shoes were dusty, dirty travesties, perched there defeated on the end of our legs, and I did not want to take mine off for fear of what I might find underneath.
Wick’s wispy hair had become disheveled to mad-genius levels and his face had gotten so dusty it looked like a mask, through which his eyes shone wicked and intense. I didn’t like the redness of Wick’s face, his arms. I had thought him shaken but otherwise uninjured by our escape, but that redness made it seem as if he had been drinking or evoked certain algae when the water’s been poisoned, a bloom that seeks contamination. It astonished me that despite this he was relaxed, lighter, less worried, giving me an impish look.
“Where are we?” I asked.
He told me.
Between us and the well he had overturned an empty crate. A single black kidney bean trembled atop that rough surface, served up on a little plate.
“Can you guess what that is?” he asked me. Playing our old games, except usually I brought the salvage to him.
“A bean.”
“Correct! A bean.”
“But is it really a bean? It could be something better?”
“No. Unfortunately, it is a bean. Of sorts.”
“Where did you get the plate?”
“Never mind the plate.”
“Are we going to eat the bean?”
Wick shook his head. “No, even though that is, technically, our last food. From my pocket.”
Down to a single bean.
“A bean,” I said. “Impressive. Prodigal. The bean returns.”
“I just thought you should know how resourceful we were in our flight, before I open the pack I found here and see what else we have.” He pulled a pack out from the shadows by his other side.
“Open the pack, then,” I said. I was hungry.
“Wait, though. Wait a minute.”
Before us, on the saucer, the trembling bean hatched and a tiny, moist insect emerged glittering, spread diaphanous wings that seemed etched from obsidian. It looked like a dragonfly but much more delicate. A damselfly that shook its wings once and took to the air, spiraled up above the well, and disappeared into the darkness of the stone walls. Maybe it went out the hole atop the cistern, or maybe it decided to live in the cistern. Either way, we never saw our “bean” again.
“What kind of biotech was that?”
“No kind of biotech at all,” Wick said. “I have no idea how it got in my pocket. I have no idea how it got there. No one made it. It was an egg. Something laid it in my pocket. Isn’t that amazing?”
“You let it go.” Mock disapproval, still playing, but after Borne it wasn’t the same.
Wick shrugged, fatalistic. “If there’s nothing to eat in the pack, Rachel, it doesn’t matter anyway. Let a bit of the Balcony Cliffs live on here. Why not?”
*
Our new shelter wasn’t nearly as elaborate as our old shelter. The cistern looked from the outside like a sunken mound or slag heap of stones that must have fallen in and buried whoever had once lived inside. There was access through a movable stone where the mound had relaxed into the hillside and a trapdoor beside the well that led to a tunnel that led to a disguised exit a quarter mile away.