In that temporary shelter, such simple things took on such significance. The way Wick held his head to the side, as if he lacked the strength, propped up against the wall, to sit straight. The many old scars on his hands and arms that came from the bites of his insect biotech. The exposed skin of his neck that had a tautness and a kind of naked honesty that made me want to kiss him there. The way he looked at me direct from that point on, as if we were only a few steps from the end of the world, and he wanted to fix me in memory.
I took off my clothes and used a rag dipped in the well water to clean myself. I washed out my clothes and let them dry on a rock jutting from the wall. Then I told Wick to take off his clothes and I cleaned him as well, washed the grime from his face, gently caressed the bruises and scratches on his body, ran my hands over his chest, his back, his legs.
When we were both clean, I laid my head on his lap there beside the shallow well, and looked up at the moss and cool stones above our heads, and for a long time I said nothing, did nothing, just listened as he talked about the Balcony Cliffs and how much he wished he had managed to hold on to his pack as we escaped through the air duct, how that would make our choices now so different, and how balanced against the fear and loss was the twinge of relief he felt, that without the Balcony Cliffs there was so much less the Magician could do to us, and how clever the Mord proxies must have been to overcome our defenses. This last was Wick trying to be optimistic, trying to hold on to a bit of self-respect, that absolved us in at least a small way.
“This place would’ve been easier to defend than the Balcony Cliffs,” Wick said.
“And takes fewer bears to overrun,” I pointed out.
Just a twinge, wondering what would happen if Borne went back to the Balcony Cliffs and discovered us gone, driven out.
“But there’s nothing here worth overrunning.”
Except the water. Almost anyone might kill for that.
“The Balcony Cliffs was too big for us anyway,” I said.
“Yes, much too big, and full of bears.”
“Infested with bears.”
“Clogged and clotted with bears. This place is bear-free.”
“So far.”
“So far,” Wick agreed.
The bears had been clever, smart, patient. They must have been listening up top, buried in the moss, quiet and hibernating, and aware of our movements, to know where the traps lay, where our fortifications were strong and where weak. Even though this made little sense, even though we had been taken by blind fury and overwhelming speed and force of will, by a disrespect for casualties, and might never untangle just how thoroughly we had failed—and if we had been sold out by the Magician, one of Wick’s clients, or someone else.
Yet there was more to it than that. It was hard for me not to relive the moment of impact—the initial smashing impact of Mord creating an earthquake with no warning, and then the way the air had been sucked away, while at the same time pushing out again to buffet me. The way the sky had spun and gone away and there was only Mord and the certain knowledge I’d be crushed to death.
But Wick was somewhere else, had been circling different memories of Mord, laying the groundwork, thinking the words that might get him to other words he didn’t quite know how to let out of his mouth. Until they just came out, in a rush.
Wick had known Mord at the Company better than he’d let on; you could say they’d been friends. “He liked bird-watching and we ate lunches together and he read so many books. He was curious about so many things.” And because of this, I gleaned from Wick’s confession, Mord had done many different tasks for the Company, even leading a team that studied the chaos in the city—the dysfunction they’d created—and how to overcome it, how to rebuild. “But that was a joke—the Company was already failing and losing perspective. The people in charge, cut off from headquarters, began to get strange ideas.”
There came through then, in Wick’s need to speak, to get this out of his system, a cascade of grotesque images—of “strange ideas” more monstrous than Mord, some of which I had glimpsed in pictures back in his apartment. Digging gap-jawed leviathans that ate the soil and vomited it back out, transformed but also cleansed of whatever had lived there previous. Flying creatures with many wings that blotted out of the sun and patrolled the skies and killed anyone who opposed the Company. Among other ideas that seemed deranged and terrifying and more like someone’s idea of how to torture the city.
But none of it had gotten past the planning stages … except Mord.
“When the fish project failed,” Wick said, “they abandoned the city rebuild as well. They put Mord in an experimental division. As a kind of punishment.” They blamed him for the fish project, even though it wasn’t his fault, while the Magician suffered not at all. “None of us could have withstood what he was subjected to then, Rachel, what he was selected for.” Was that true? Or was Mord always susceptible? I didn’t think Wick had the perspective to know. “He could still speak and understand as they modified him and kept modifying him, until it drove him mad.” The only outlet, the only relief: to keep a record, which Wick had smuggled out in a broken telescope through another employee after Wick left the Company. Along with the plans that had helped Wick become someone who “made” biotech, or at least modified it.
There was more, but no matter how Wick tried to articulate it, some things can only be understood when experienced, and I had not experienced what Wick had experienced inside the Company.
Today, Mord had tried to kill us by crushing us under his tread. Today, he was several stories tall and a monster. Wick was grappling with this, with the shock as much as I was, the wrenching dislocation of trying to make two separate worlds match up, the one that was normal and the one that was grotesque, the old and the new—the struggle to make the mundane and the impossible coexist just as it seemed impossible I had ever trailed my fingers through the water of a pond to let the little fish nibble or watched mudskippers through a school-yard fence or eaten at a fancy restaurant.
He could still speak and be understood.
The truth was, I didn’t want Mord to be more like us. I wanted him to be less like us. To be able to say when he murdered, when he pillaged, that he was a psychotic beast, a creature without the possibility of redemption, with no humanity in him. I wanted something to be the same in the old world as in the new.
So I listened in silence and I nodded and made noises like I understood. Yet my attention was elsewhere. The letter burned. It was like a grenade, there in my pocket, and only I could determine when it would go off. Was Wick telling me this, allying himself with Mord, to prepare me for something in the letter? Or was he telling me this to lessen the impact of the letter? Or was this one last attempt to dissuade me from coming with him?
We did not discuss the letter again, or the plan to go south. That was already set, and Wick knew better than to bring it up again.
*