But I couldn’t sleep after that, vaguely worried. Yet what did Borne know? We were all weapons of some kind. We were all weaponized in our way.
“Am I a person or a weapon?” Always, he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, “You’re not a person.”
“You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”
Now, as Wick and I made our way up toward what we hoped was the light, I remembered that conversation, and part of hoping there was light was also hoping for what I never would have wished for in the past.
That Borne was a weapon. That no matter what happened to us in that moment of staring into the light, I wanted him not just to be a good weapon but a great weapon. The kind of weapon that could defeat Mord.
*
But there was no light, because we had been stuck in the crack-passage until almost dusk. We found only a hole, as if left over from the Balcony Cliffs, and were glad for it, cackled to find it and the fresh air blowing out tepid there. Cackled and wiped our filthy faces of dirt and cobwebs, pushed up and out with our last strength to lie next to the huge yellowing vertebrae of some dead beast and, on the other side, a white plaster model of a bear’s head, which made Wick giggle silently, holding his side.
“Oh, Rachel,” he gasped. “Oh, Rachel.”
The luxury of such space, of being able to stretch out, to breathe such new air—it was too much oxygen at once, too much freedom.
We were looking up at a deep blue sky fading into gray, cloudless, with the dead moon coming into focus. There was a thin but pervasive briny stink that even the wind whipping across couldn’t quite relieve. The smell came from the leviathan Mord had killed, whose vertebrae snaked through the wreckage around us.
Nothing moved in that place unless touched by the wind. The stillness of everything but us seemed unnatural, and yet nothing jumped out to attack us. It was just an abandoned building and every kind of debris lay around us, from twisted, broken equipment to the remnants of tents and other signs that the Company employees had been like squatters toward the end. All the makeshift last-stand minutia of their days.
What came to us with the wind was the only sound, as if brought to us from the past when Mord had destroyed the Company building. But Mord had moved on to hating Borne. We could hear him roaring, and the roaring of the other behemoth, and underlying one roar anger and underlying the other some sense of bewilderment, as if one participant still did not know the other’s true nature. This sound—clear, distant, insistent—came from the north, and by this sign we knew that Mord and Borne still fought.
While we two sacks of flesh lived amid the damage Mord had inflicted on the Company. We were both so covered in grime that Wick looked to me like some cave creature exhumed and brought to the surface not after a day but after years and years. If Mord had still flown, could have observed from above, he would have seen two tiny scraps of meat not worth the effort of killing, lying amid a vast sea of upheaval and disorder bounded by walls that still stood high enough to block us from seeing out. Scraps of meat so delighted with our survival, so deliriously happy in our weakness.
But Wick was weaker than me. Every muscle in my body might quiver and tingle, my side and back aflame from the friction with the crack-passage wall, but I hadn’t been mauled by a bear.
I propped Wick up against that mighty vertebrae, rummaged through the pack for whatever aid I could find. Bandages, a painkiller in pill form, some disinfectant.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, his voice a rasp pulled along a silver thread. “I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. His hands trembled and his face had a look hooded by shadow that didn’t come from dust, and neither did the yellowish cast under his eyes. The claw marks across his shoulder formed bloated gouges scabbing over but ripe. They bulged as if about to burst. I would have to clean the wounds and dress them, even if I couldn’t take the poison from his system.
“This will hurt,” I said—pointlessly from the way Wick looked at me. Good. He was alert enough to be annoyed.
Nor did he cry out as I did what I had to, even though I was ripping at his skin, then pouring fire over it, then wrapping up his shoulder, although not too tight so the skin wouldn’t stick to the bandage. We did not speak about what the wound meant, the possible phases of the venom working through him.
I gave him a sip of water from our canteen, took some myself, and we sat there for a long moment against the backbone of Mord’s fallen enemy. I was too tired to interpret the stillness in any other way than that we were safe for the moment. But if I hadn’t just come out of a crack in the floor, a place I’d expected to die in, I might have realized the stillness indicated control. The lack of scavengers indicated control. Someone or something ruled this place, despite the sense of abandonment.
“Do you know where to go from here?” I asked. We had no choice but to plunge on if we were able. My hope now was to find not just Wick’s medicine here but something for the venom.
“Yes,” Wick said. “If the door hasn’t been buried beneath leviathan bones or girders.”
There came again a hint of the bellowing from the city, the impression through the loud whisper of powerful voices that the outcome lay in doubt.
“Whenever you are able,” I said, even though the idea of getting up was like reaching for a land remote and mythical while lying in quicksand.
“Now,” Wick said, and, gritting his teeth, steadied himself with one hand on the ground and stood.
I followed, felt dizzy, almost fainted, recovered, the pack swaying like a heavy pendulum from my hand. Wick grabbed my wrist, pulled me the rest of the way up, wincing from the effort.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “I know the door will still be there.”
All of our words, everything we said to each other in that place, was so functional, as if it was too late when you came this close to death, to an ending. That anything else we could have said to each other had needed to have been said in the past, before we knew the future.
*