“Come on, Wick! Faster!” Either I was saying that or I was just screaming or I was silent and focused on trapping myself farther in without tearing up my palms again.
“Pick one thing to concentrate on—the most important thing—and put all the rest aside,” my mother was saying. On a ship. In a broken city. Through the long grass as we hid from men with guns.
“Are you hurt?” I was asking Wick. I couldn’t see if he was hurt.
“My shoulder,” Wick said. “Blood.”
Venom.
We were mindless crustaceans dead-alive. Forever reduced to a force that tumbled forward away from the jaws snapping at the entrance. Not even autonomous, butting my pack with the top of my head to move it forward, it a terrible obstacle and behind us the sounds of the bear frantically tearing at the walls, pulling chunks away and scrabbling at the widening space while “Drrk! Drrk!” rattled around our skulls and sailed over us and rumbled from on ahead to put fresh fear in our reptile brains about phantom bears awaiting us.
*
Wick had gone silent and limp, and I didn’t know if that meant he was dead or unconscious, but with a gasping lurch he reanimated and I think that meant his last diagnostic worm had done something to stop the bleeding. I reversed myself enough in that tight space to look back with Wick now inching right into me, up my body, about to crawl over me if I didn’t inch forward, too, which I did. I could see in the light not taken from us by the bear’s silhouette that Wick’s shoulder had been shredded by the swipe: four claw marks stretched across, tearing away the fabric there, the welling of blood slower than it might have been, unable to see in that dim light how deep or shallow the damage might be. How seeded with dirt and the dead flesh of other prey.
The claws carried the same venom as the bite, but not every bear had venom. I could see that the last worm had died, forming a flowing white fringe around the wound. Had it died from encountering the venom or because it was weak and Wick had put too great a strain on its capacity?
The bear had ceased its demolition of the wall. The murderous eye held to the widened crack to pin us with its stare. Bloodshot, self-aware, taking our measure. I couldn’t look away, even as I kept sidling, contorted. “Drrrk. Drrrk,” and a kind of snarling sneer.
Then the eye was gone and the shadow of the bear’s great weight removed itself from the crack.
Wick had regained his senses, come to rest there halfway across my lap, and I had stanched the last bleeding with a piece of cloth torn from the end of my undershirt.
“Fast,” he said. “They are so fast.”
“You’re hurt. We need to get to someplace secure.”
“Venom,” Wick said, echoing my concern.
“You don’t know that.”
“I can feel it. The worm knew it. The worm always knows it,” he said.
“You can survive the venom.” People did. People had been known to. But not people already sick. Not people who had already gone through so much.
We were only twenty or thirty feet inside the passageway.
The bear had disappeared altogether. We could hear no sounds of growling. The strip of sky enticed us, a pure whitish blue. Such a hopeful glare, beckoning to us.
“I don’t think he’s gone,” I said. “And I think there’s a second one now.”
“Throw a pebble,” Wick said. “I can’t.”
But neither could I—even after eight tries in that cramped space, because I had to throw underhand. On the ninth try, the pebble flew true, and nothing swatted it from its trajectory. Nothing came roaring back to snuff out the light.
“The bears are still there,” Wick said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, but we can’t risk it.”
“This passageway is deeper than I thought,” I admitted.
“What if it dead-ends?”
“We come back. Risk it. But you’re hurt.”
“I can get up. I can walk.” Although “walk” was a laughable proposition in that fissure, that fault line.
“Crack of light or crack of darkness?” I asked.
“You build traps,” Wick said. “What do you recommend?”
“That we wake up from this bad dream.”
Wick laughed. It was the sound of a man resigned to whatever might come.
“Dark crack, then.”
“Passageway.”
“Crack.”
“Crack-passage, because if I die I don’t want my last words to be wasted on an argument about this.”
Neither of us for a moment thought that hint of blue sky came without great cost.
Nor could we forget what we had seen in the far distance as we escaped the bears. For there, wreathed by smoke and fire, lamented by a chorus of distant screams and explosions, two behemoths had battled—mirror images—Mord versus Mord, and no doubt that Mord would win. And no doubt that Mord proxies milling bewildered at their feet must choose a side, and perhaps choose wrong. The two great bears up on their hind legs, grappling, drawing apart, chasing each other, then in reverse, and biting, swiping with massive paws armed with lethal claws, and most deafening even from here were their bellows and roars and exertions.
Borne fought Mord for the control of the city while we took our chances inside the Company building, and we did not know which god would be revealed victorious when we returned once more to the surface.
*
We headed into the darkness.
It was a miserable passage. The pack continued to be a misery even as we needed it—held out in front until my arm tired, or shoved along in what was like a kind of prison shuffle. The sky went from a thin line to a gray floating fissure and then was gone even as an optical illusion. I did not know how far up the crack extended, had no sense of a ceiling.
A sheen came off of Wick, an unhealthy angry red glow. But even this uncertain light helped me reassure myself by the pattern on the wall that Wick followed—that the slight hand in mine wasn’t an illusion, as it sometimes seemed, when my hand went numb.
Sideways we advanced, and if the crack-passage had dead-ended I don’t know what we would have done. We might have despaired and given up. At times the crack narrowed so that I was pushing against both walls to progress, afraid I’d get stuck. But it always eased up again, so that what I’d thought before was intolerable and narrow became a gift of generous space.
My eyes adjusted, but there was nothing to see. The walls harbored not a hint of biotech, not even Company moss. This emptiness pressed down on my chest, filled my lungs, and I fought off episodes of a scrabbling panic and nausea, a kind of succumbing to mindlessness that would have been so much easier than this continued condemned shuffle, one-two, one-two, one-two, push the pack, one-two, one-two, one-two, push the pack.
I talked to Wick as we pushed on, to keep his mind off his wound, and he would murmur back or squeeze my hand or make some other signal he had heard me.
“What was I like back then?” I asked him. “When you first met me?” A complicated question.
“Happy, distant, beautiful.”
“Not like now. Unhappy. Accessible. Ugly.”
“Just like now,” Wick said. “Right now.”