The circular well that occupied half of the flat stone floor enclosed brackish water recessed a few inches below floor level and perhaps once was contaminated. But biotech filters in the form of fat luminous blue slugs clung to the sides of the well, patrolling back and forth under the water’s surface. That and the electric, burnt-match smell to the water were the best indicators that no one else had ever found this place. Otherwise, they would have been taken by someone long ago.
But it wasn’t Wick’s safe house—instead it was a safe house of the Magician’s that Wick had discovered several months ago, and in that sense not safe at all. Besides, even broken and recessed, to the careful eye it still formed a visible landmark on the horizon.
I had only fragments in my head of what had happened after Mord’s attack—glancing, stabbing memories of falling over, staggering up, of Wick dragging me, of sliding down into the ravine, of hiding there, while Mord strode inexorable past the ravine and into the distance as if he’d never meant to harm us, and maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed us. Perhaps Mord had just been there as a shock to the system, to smash his feet into the ground, bring all the vermin out of hiding. But the Mord proxies prowled near, too, and soon enough we were running through the dead broken trees, through the peculiar gray-and-black rubble that made it seem like the surface of some alien planet. I’d run until I was too weak, whatever shock had suppressed my pain and animated me gone, and I hopped and shuffled and Wick led me along, encouraged me forward. Until I’d fallen unconscious not far from our temporary shelter.
The pack held the usual and no more than the usual: survival rations, a knife, a canteen for water, a couple of shirts, an ancient first-aid kit, a battered pair of binoculars, a gun without bullets, a compass, a few ancient protein bars I could tell already would be as hard as Mord’s fangs.
Wick laid it out in a row like an offering to the god of the cistern.
“Food for a week,” Wick said. “Water forever. Well, at least for a lot longer than the food.”
I had to lean over and turn to hear him, my poor other ear torn and blistered, registering his speech as a faint, hollow clattering.
“Food for two weeks if we go down to one meal a day,” I said.
“Dangerous. We’re already weak.”
“Can we carry this place around with us on our backs while we forage for food?”
“We can’t stay here anyway. I can’t stay here,” Wick said.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“My medicine—those nautilus pills. I need them or I’ll die.”
I just stared at him; it was the most naked thing he’d said to me and until now his dependence had been an abstract thing, lodged only in my head. Mord’s foot was falling again, about to crush me, and Wick alongside me.
“The only place that I might find more is in the Company building,” Wick said. “You should head north, try to make it back to the city, while I head south.”
“You’ll go south and I’ll go north. When did you decide this for us?”
“Or you could stay here and wait it out until I return.”
I snorted at that. “Stay here and wait for the proxies to come and surround this place and kill me? Or the Magician to escape them and drop by? Or any old marauder who sniffs out the water?”
“Then north,” Wick said.
“Stay here and die in the dark with the snails or try for the north and die in the light? Leave you to your fate? I don’t think so.”
But Wick wasn’t done surprising me. He pulled an envelope out of his pants pocket. The envelope was the size of those that people used to send letters in and thick enough to hold five or six sheets of paper. It was filthy with dried sweat and stains and ground-in dirt, had been folded and unfolded several times. He had not written it here, at the cistern. He had written it well before we’d left the Balcony Cliffs and carried it around with him.
“I lied,” Wick said. “I didn’t just bring a bean out of the Balcony Cliffs. Here, take it.”
But I didn’t take it, looked at it suspicious. Nothing had ever seemed more like a trap to me.
“What is it?”
“A letter to you. From me.”
“You forgot your medicine but you took this?”
“The letter was in my pocket. The medicine was in my pack.”
“I don’t want to read it,” I said.
“That’s a lie,” Wick said in a teasing tone. He even smiled. “You do want to read it. Everything is in there, everything I never told you because I couldn’t. But you need to know. If I don’t come back from the Company, read it.”
Wick was light, was making light, because he was: All the weight of him was in that letter, and he was putting it on me.
“There’s only one problem with that, Wick—I’m coming with you. I’m not leaving you.”
“Read the letter first, before you make that decision.”
“No.”
“Take the letter.”
“No.”
He held out the letter.
“No. What if you get sicker along the way? You’ll never even reach the Company building.”
“Why are you making things difficult again?”
“I’m not being difficult. I’m being clear. After you just saved my life, after everything else … you thought you could make me leave you. But it’s not that easy, Wick. I won’t make it that easy.” I snatched the letter from his hand. “So I’ll take your letter, but you can’t stop me from going south with you.”
Wick was quiet then, gathering himself. A quiver of some strong emotion passed through him. But I didn’t reach out to him or acknowledge, knew that if I did confirm the weakness at the heart of him, he would break into fragments. That maybe, too, the letter was the best of him or the worst.
“If we go into the Company,” Wick said, “you may see things you don’t want to see. It won’t be what you expect.”
I laughed, but not without affection. “Oh, Wick, how would that be any different than now?” I was tired of talking things out. I wanted to be on our way, gone south, out of this temporary shelter that in the end would just betray us anyway.
“If we travel together, don’t read the letter unless I’m dead.”
“That doesn’t give me much reason to keep you alive.”
He snickered at that, and I nudged him in the ribs, and he dropped the subject.
But I think the trust Wick was looking for wasn’t about when I might read the letter but something deeper. The truth was, I would never tell him if I read the letter. Wick would never know when I read the letter.
He would only know whether I stayed beside him or abandoned him.
*