Should it continue across the plain toward the horrible wonder of Borne-as-Mord, who had now reached a broken cluster of buildings and continued to dominate our line of sight? Or should it pursue us?
It slowed as if encountering a stiff wind. The beast turned, thoughtful, lingered there, then came back toward us, eating up the plains at a gallop. Looking through the binoculars, checking landmarks, estimating speed, I told Wick I couldn’t be certain but thought the proxy would reach us in less than ten minutes.
Roughly, if we did not find the door within five minutes, we would have to abandon the attempt and be driven farther south, out into the desert. From there we would have little chance of curling back to the city through the devastated west. We’d join the dance of foxes for a time, out in the dust bowl of the ancient seabed. And then we’d die. Of thirst. Or predators. Or the bear would catch up to us.
In the near distance, the lake and all that tragedy of half-lives, of the mysteries of existence and why we did the things we did, to each other and to animals. And us, struggling through the difficult purchase of the artificial sand that we might make it to the side of the Company building, find a door, get inside before we became a bear’s dinner.
In the middle distance, the dead plain and across it, the bear closing in, and then the living blot marks of bobbing, lumbering bears that had been drawn to Borne, stragglers who were still behind him in his disguise, but not very far. Some would succumb to the last of the buried biotech that had risen; those defenses appeared like smoke, like emerald-and-azure dust with purpose. Shimmering displays that disappeared into the wind at a thin angle, then reappeared as sheets of undulating microorganisms. We had seen a bear caught in that net buckle and fall, spasming, jaws spread wide, as if it could not breathe. But then the net broke, the bear rose, the old defenses revealed as ghosts, the Company without dominion.
In the far distance, things began to occur that we could not quite believe but could with the binoculars see well enough. Perhaps it was a mirage. Perhaps we thought it shouldn’t be a thing you could glimpse in daylight, but for a long time we tried to deny it.
Wick laughed at the sight, and the sheer ridiculous intensity of the venomous bear approaching fast, the diaphanous beauty of the biotech over the plains. It did not go unnoticed between us, the irony of that—or that to escape the lesser threat we must take the greater risk. The oppression of that was like a heat on our necks, a knife at our throats. We had lost the Balcony Cliffs. We had given up our temporary shelter. We’d lost the city proper. And now we were about to lose the surface. Apparently we’d been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive.
But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion? For there was the care with which Wick guided me across the shallow part of the sand bridge between the two holding ponds, the ground-up shoals of refuse, the rotted plank some clever soul had laid down in shallow water, the uncertain route to the edge of sanctuary.
There was hope in that gesture, and a letter in my jacket pocket.
*
Funny what you remember and what you don’t. I remember how the wet sand was engulfing my feet like it wanted to suck us under and I remember the unhinged look on the bear’s face, the almost human disregard for its own safety as it careened through the sand at the far edge of the first holding pond, snarling with each step. I remember what Wick was saying but not why he was saying it, and I was caught in amber or was a ghost again. I was watching the bear as if transfixed by the sight of my own death approaching. All I could do was stand there, hoping a side door would open.
The bear bounding, full of life, full of fire, and us, alone and small, so small, next to it. And something true about that, something I couldn’t quite see.
While down in the holding pond, almost at our feet, a large brown boulder down in the depths beneath the dead astronauts, covered with dead reeds, began to reveal itself, as huge bubbles quaked on the surface.
Wick found the door.
The door was jammed shut.
The door wouldn’t save us.
The bear was almost there.
But there was a crack in the wall nearby. A crack big enough to form a passageway. A crack big enough for us but not for a bear.
It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a nightmare. This was the thing happening to us. I remember how tired we were, from lack of sleep and fatigue and rationing our water. We weren’t prepared, not fit, not ready to meet our deaths with furious, desperate resistance. There were the pools we’d scavenged from and the Mord proxy rampaging toward us—and us clinging to the strip of land more like wet and porous sand, stuck between a bear and a crack in the wall. Bear or a crack, a seam.
We still had time. I thought we had time.
The Mord proxy’s mask of anger and hatred and bloodlust, and maybe I had no argument with that. Maybe there was no real answer to that. But I was human, and I’d rather die lost in the dark than with my neck ripped open, face bitten off, entrails falling out.
*
The hidden bear, the one waiting for us, erupted from the holding pond as I grabbed Wick and pulled him into the crack with me, pulled Wick into that tiny chance at salvation—and that bear, silent in its intent, slammed into the wall outside, the impact so great dust welled up and the water from the bear’s fur lashed me with wet, dirty drops.
Wick was inside the building. I could see that he was inside the building with me. But a rush of brown fur eclipsed the opening, the light, and there came a blast of carrion stench, and I knew it wasn’t far enough. It wasn’t far enough.
The static cry from Wick, the narrow stomach-churning claustrophobia as I ripped my way farther in, rough, raw rock against my cheek, Wick screaming, the bear swiping at him.
I grabbed Wick with one arm painful around his waist, and I wrenched him on top of me, and he stumbled, and fell backward into the crack and the great bear’s claws swiped down and Wick shrieked again and then we were on the floor, pushing off blindly into the greater darkness.
*
I barely fit, my butt against one wall and my hands pushing out in front against the other, and sidling along crablike as fast as I could, so fast I was tearing my clothes, my skin, shoving our pack in front of us with my hand and then, when it fell, lodged below, the roar of the bear so close. The air close and thick, filled with dust and cobwebs.
Wick shoved in beside me, bumped up against me, a fast-shuffling push farther in. I wanted to run, to scramble, desperate to go in deeper, to go in so deep the fangs, the claws could not get at us, but there was no such thing as speed in that place. It was too narrow. You could not run. You could barely sidle.