The Mord proxies had been hunkered down like soldiers in trenches they’d dug and disguised, and as the last light used up the red and extinguished the gold, in the haze of blue-gray heat, we thought they’d peered out and spotted us walking hunched across that landscape, caught a glimpse of us in a shimmer or shadow.
But no: Their eruption and churning gallop from those trenches led them southwest, in a horizontal across our field of vision, kicking up dust behind. We could see no adversary, though, even when they seemed to have cornered their prey, blindly clawing and biting around an invisible source.
At a safe distance, the foxes that were not foxes mirrored the bears, mocked them with their own reversals of direction, their own snapping at the air—using their camouflage to disappear and then reappear in some other place, chasing their tails, and once a proxy stopped and stared at the foxes, as if unsure whether they were enemies.
“Someone’s out there,” I said.
“Someone’s always out there,” Wick replied.
“Rabies? Madness? Play?” I guessed.
“Or the Magician,” Wick said.
“Biting flies?”
As we watched, whatever we couldn’t see eluded what we could see, and the chase resumed far off onto the western reaches of the plain, although the invisible prey kept trying to dart south, dart south again, and as the light disappeared completely I thought I saw one of the proxies stumble, fall, as if receiving a blow, but then it was time to make our escape across the plain.
The foxes became burnt-umber flashes against the setting sun, then silhouettes sitting, watching. Then nothing at all.
*
So we strove on in darkness, across a plain less dead than we might have wished. There came lesser growls than those of bears—and the yap-yip of the foxes and the slither-rustle of what we hoped were snakes, a pitter-patter as of the pink starlike toes of burrowing mammals and even a quark-quark we avoided from a stand of cactus that might have only been a frog calling out for water. Blocks and slabs of black stymied any attempt to know what was threat and what was innocent.
“I don’t remember it being this alive,” Wick complained. But I doubted he had roamed here nocturnal in years.
The moon came out, muffled by clouds, and added a light purple wash to the sky, and with it came a hint of a more forgiving wind. We continued to trudge, then an hour before dawn we stopped in a place where the ground was darker and formed shallow ridges or gouges that carried sound to us undistorted. We made camp in the lee of a huge fallen pillar, as deep into the crevice as we could go, as far as we could override an irrational fear of the pillar rolling over and crushing us, or some midnight bear scooping us out like termites.
We did not know if the Mord proxies might now be headed our way, but tracking their intent had already slowed us, as had the way the night was more aware than expected. We would rest for an hour, and then, in the early morning, we would continue on to where the plain gave way to the holding ponds. Even wrapped, the ankle gave me problems on the uneven ground and Wick had to carry the pack most of the time while my shoulder recovered. I felt like some creaking, ancient creature, old before her time.
Wick and I shared a food packet in silence. After a sip of water from our meager supply, Wick slept while I kept watch, because I could not rest anyway. My hip ached and I felt as if I inhabited an exoskeleton that had been battered by hammers.
The moon from the recesses of the pillar looked dead, poisoned, a special kind of factory gray: the rounded head of a dead robot with the skull half exposed. But still I looked up at it because there was no other light in the sky that bright and nothing else in front of me.
I tried to conjure memories of nighttime on my island sanctuary, to convert the brisk wind into a tropical breeze and the shadows and sand into the play of surf, a fringe of dark palm trees. But I was surrounded by a landscape too dirty and yet antiseptic, and I was exhausted by my own obsession with the past.
My gaze wandered, drifted, and I suppose I almost fell asleep despite myself. I kept seeing the Mord proxies pursuing the invisible across the plain. I kept seeing the pads of Mord’s giant foot descending to crush me, mingled with a peculiar feeling of self-annihilating awe.
When I started back into watchfulness, there was an overpowering smell to the air, like an ancient, waveless ocean buried in its own silt and salt and reflections. The darkness had arranged itself into something that resembled intent. The plain before me that had conveyed even in the murk the sense of its ridges now had smoothed out into a uniform glistening black layer. A kindness, really, a reminder, a memory to soothe: the tiny flashes and flickers of a thousand fireflies, like the ones on the ceiling at the Balcony Cliffs. A soft, golden blinking from the ground that wished for me to be calm.
The lip of this sea of dim twinkling light pushed up to the ledge of broken rock that flumed out from the pillar, peered in at me, inquisitive.
“Shhhhh, Rachel. It’s me.” A familiar voice, this illusionist’s trick.
I went very still and resisted the urge to wake Wick.
“I scared the bears away,” he said. “I sent them away, for a little while.” But which bears?
“How did you find us, Borne?” That question seemed essential.
“Oh, a little fox told me you were here. I’ve been in the city, fighting Mord proxies.”
“What do you want?” I kept my voice low and calm.
Now Wick stirred behind me, and I knew exactly what he would say, and he wouldn’t be wrong.
“Hello, Wick, how are you?”
“Go away,” Wick said.
“Or what, Wick?” Borne said, dismissive. “You’ll toss some worms at me? You’ll call me names? You’ll banish me?”
I glanced back, put a hand on Wick’s chest, whispered, “Let me talk to him. Trust me.”
“I was sad you had to leave the Balcony Cliffs,” Borne said. “That was such a nice place for all of us. Don’t you want to go back to it?”
“Someday, Borne.”
Despite the knife in my pocket, I was searching around for some weapon that might protect me, but I knew there was nothing. Only what would make me feel better in a false way. A rock. A piece of pipe.
He was so vast, covering the ground like an oil slick. I knew he’d been eating, he’d been sampling. If Borne’s true nature came out and he killed us and Rachel and Wick only existed inside Borne, would we be truly dead or would we still exist in some altered state?
“You’re going to the Company building,” Borne said.
“Yes.”
Borne made a clucking sound like he was disappointed in me. “But the Company building is disgusting. Just disgusting. I hate it. I don’t want anything to do with the Company building.”
Hiding an old fear of his, I knew from his journal.