“I can’t feel my hands,” I said.
“I can’t feel my feet … with your hands.”
Hysterical laughter. Or just hysteria.
We sang songs. Stupid, ridiculous songs, in our terrible, ragged voices, which we made up on the spot. Or old tunes my parents had known, that I had to teach to Wick.
I told him stories because this made me forget, too, for whole minutes, the truth of our predicament, pushed out against the walls to give us more space. To be truly safe we should have been silent—we did not know what or who could hear us up ahead, or what might follow behind—but to be silent in that darkness seemed the final reduction of self and I would not accept that. I still had a voice. This was not some afterlife. I was not dead. Wick was not dead.
I told tales of improbable scavengers, of the best biotech finds. I told stories my parents had told me about the origins of the world, of how the earth had once been carried on the back of a sea turtle. I told the tale of shark deities and island men and women who became trees or birds to outwit monsters. I told stories of my adventures in the city, even though Wick had heard them all before. And when I faltered, when a gloom overtook me and I needed to stop, Wick would take up for me, in his worn, ethereal voice, telling me a legend about the city or some rumor he’d heard about the Magician or something he remembered about Mord.
We spoke between the deepest breaths we could manage, because the air only became staler and thicker, and we both felt as if it was hard to focus, experienced dizziness, and stumbled in our sideways lurch forward. There came, too, a sense of being trapped in a coffin that was moving with me, and only the scrape of our clothing, a snag of elbow against the walls, would remind me this was untrue.
Then came the moment I couldn’t move forward any more, tripped over my pack, stubbed my toe, and came to rest there, legs half bent, hands on my thighs.
“Why have you stopped?” Wick’s voice sounded weaker.
I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want him to know. That we’d failed, that we were done, and I didn’t think I had the strength to go back. That it seemed as if we were trapped again in the air vent at the Balcony Cliffs, that we’d never escaped and everything else had been a delusion.
“There’s a wall in front of me, Wick,” I said.
I had wanted to be a ghost once, and now I might get that wish. Except I could feel all too much. I was grimy with sweat and the gravel from the wall and my legs were shaky, my hips so sore.
Wick had felt my trembling for some time, but he remained surprisingly steady.
“Climb,” Wick said.
“There’s no light up there. No hint of a draft. If we climb and nothing’s there…”
We would fall, or worse, be embraced by the rock. The walls were so close you couldn’t get the proper leverage to shimmy up them. Our effort would exhaust us, wring from our muscles any last effort, and at a certain point we wouldn’t be able to control our legs, our arms. Then there would be no calamitous fall. Instead, we would drop in a slow simulation of mortal injury, buffeted and torn by the walls that held us close, lowered us in agony, would not allow us to just fall into the ground, dash out our brains. We would be so weak that even our meager chance of getting back out would become impossible. Who knew how long we would lie broken and dying in the dark?
“Climb,” Wick said, and I knew he was admitting to me he didn’t have the strength to turn back, either.
So we climbed into the darkness and did not look down because we could never return to down, and prayed to whatever gods we didn’t believe in that there would be a light above. Any kind of light.
WHAT WE FOUND IN THE WRECKAGE OF THE COMPANY
I had told Wick a lie about Borne early on, because by the time it meant something … it didn’t matter. This was before I had taken Borne out into the city for the first time. Wick and I had been arguing about whether Borne might be a weapon, and I had told Wick there were no indications that Borne was a weapon. But Borne had said that he might be a weapon, in another late-night conversation—the kind I initiated when I couldn’t sleep or the kind that woke me up when I could.
Borne had been talking to himself again: “I don’t feel like a weapon. I do not look like other weapons. Maybe I was meant to be a weapon, but I came out wrong. I don’t even know where the word weapon came from. I did not have it before. Weapon weapon weapon. Weapon? Wea-pon. Wea. Pon. Weh. Apon.” Digesting the word before it could colonize him.
His eyes morphed to spikes or ridges and he made himself into a miniature green-blue sea spread out across my floor, the ridges frozen waves.
“Rachel,” Borne said, “I know you’re not asleep.”
Of course he knew. My eyes were open and he’d already proven to me more than once that he had preternatural night vision.
“Where did you learn the word weapon?” I asked. Borne was used to me asking where he’d learned something, even though he learned many things from me.
“Oh, you know,” Borne said. “You know—the usual places.”
“The usual places?”
“Here and there, hither and yon.”
I decided that line of inquiry was useless because he was reverting to the language of children’s books. I sincerely regretted gifting him so many children’s books.
“I doubt you’re a weapon,” I said, drowsy. “You’re too silly to be a weapon.”
“A weapon can’t be silly?”
“No,” I confirmed. When I thought about it later, I realized most weapons were silly or silly-looking, just in a different way.
“But what if I am, Rachel?”
“Then I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know what? How to stop me? If I am a weapon, won’t you have to stop me? In the books, they’re always stopping weapons.”
That felt serious. What books? So I sat up in bed, and I became serious. As much as I influenced Borne, he influenced me, so raising myself up in bed and becoming serious felt like changing my shape and making my eyes different.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I said. Another trick I had was making Borne focus on key words—vocabulary I had introduced. Usually, Borne would enter a spiral of repeating the word in different contexts. But not this time.
“But how would you stop me?” Borne asked. “How?”
I didn’t want to think about that question, not there in my apartment, in bed, right next to Borne.
“How do you stop other weapons?” Borne asked, pressing. “Have you killed people to stop them? How do you do that?”
“Let’s assume you’re not a weapon,” I said. “You’re not a weapon but something amazing and wonderful and useful instead. Discover what that amazing thing is, and then try to be that thing.”