We found so many signs of abandonment as Wick led me across that broken maze, those puzzle pieces of ripped-out walls and long-forgotten desks stacked like firewood, the spine and skeletal limbs of the leviathan lying over the top like an impotent guardian. The impromptu mounds of papers, covered in ash. The little tents dotting that landscape, with evidence of campfires nearby, and always centered around abandoned laboratories, open to the air, often crushed but with what lay around them undamaged as if Mord had wanted to pay them special attention. Every so often: the husks of dead bodies, under beams or just huddled in corners. This place had been dysfunctional and half destroyed long before Mord had ripped the roof off. Not so much civil war between factions as a rising chaos.
Most unnerving: bears, everywhere. Photos and pictures of bears, ripped, water-worn, tacked to walls. Crude sculptures of bears, the busts of bears. Bears running, walking, on their haunches, diagrams of bears clearly meant to feed into creating the Mord proxies, all of them thankfully fading into shadow and gloom as night passed its dark hand over us. The extent to which the surviving Company employees had joined the cult of Mord was apparent—or the depths of their need to solve a problem that had no solution. They’d labored here using what knowledge they had left to serve Mord, desperate to serve Mord, and in the end he’d destroyed them anyway.
*
In the end, too, there was no magic door, and seeking the lower levels was like being drunk on weakness and sickness and injury and holding each other up just long enough to keep on searching through collapsed ceilings and unstable supporting walls and all the choking dust, less and less concerned when we found yet another corpse.
For Wick it was like a homecoming to a place he had wanted to see destroyed—but only by him. That anyone else had destroyed it was intolerable, and I only cheered on this emotion in Wick because it lit a fire under him, made him burn purer, cleaner, for a while.
We went through the stages now of both our search and Wick coming to terms with the wreckage of the Company building. That the place he had been estranged from no longer existed as it had in his imagination, that the people who had lived so large in his mind had probably been dead for years. Lapsing into being mere employee once again, as if a place made the man instead of the man his place.
As we wandered purposeful, this realization that nothing was as he had hoped for fueled his search, which became a search for the familiar, for the thing changed from when he knew it. While the other knowledge, of passing time, of a clock ticking, came to us through Borne—Borne versus Mord, and how I knew that might make everything else meaningless, even as I helped Wick descend deeper into an unmoving, uncaring maelstrom of junk, of the useless and the mysterious and sad. Soon, we would no longer hear Mord’s roaring, even faint, and we wouldn’t know if it was because we’d buried ourselves too deep or because Mord had won.
“This was never here,” Wick muttered. “Why did they do that?”
“This would have been useless,” Wick ranted. “If they ate that instead of using it, they would have been better off!”
“Didn’t they know such a barricade would not hold?”
Wick, teetering on the edge of being old, me getting a glimpse of a future him still trapped in the past. Neither of us had control over our monsters anymore.
*
When that time came, when we reached some threshold—some equation created by the haphazard combinations of girders, walls, collapse, some multiplication of wood or metal or plastic—Wick stopped walking, looked around as if he’d heard a sound. But it was the sound of something having been taken away. Mord and Borne fought on, or they didn’t. But we could no longer hear them.
Losing that sound made Wick lose that burst of energy needed to complain, to heckle the ruins, and without my clock I was left only with the continued impression of someone or something watching from some hidden vantage. A wearying prickling of my senses, forever on alert. But Wick no longer cared, or under the venom’s spell had lost that ability, and I had to tell him more than once to be quieter, to be slow not fast so we wouldn’t stumble, our passage an echoing racket.
“It’s near, it’s near,” Wick said a few minutes later, on the scent. At least he had that much left.
We reached the bottom of the collapse. When I looked up I could see a thickness, a depth to the maelstrom above us, which from that angle resembled a latticework created by a hurricane or earthquake. We had descended a tornado of debris. I can’t say I liked the idea of climbing back up that artificial ravine, but then I didn’t know if we’d get the chance.
Then Wick was banging his fist on a ruptured door, which led to a stairwell filled in with rubble, and slapping the sides, bashing his forehead into the doorway. I had to stop him, hold down his grasping, scrabbling hands without hurting his shoulder.
“What, Wick? What?”
Wick was burning up—I could feel his fever through his palms, and he was sweating, and his eyes had recessed farther into his sockets and I could see a light deep in those eyes like points of deep red flame—intense, alive, but much too bright. His gaze was too fixed, and I wondered if he was losing his ability to see. The atrophied worm stitched into his shoulder had gone from bone-white to black and begun to liquefy into an oily substance that stained his shirt. He stank of that oil.
“This was the place, Rachel,” Wick said, a terrible panic in his voice. “This place. It was down there. But Mord’s sealed it off. Mord’s sealed it off so we can’t get to it. He hates me. He wants to kill me. He wants to kill me. He wants to kill me.”
*
Wick, delirious. Wick, head full of cotton and razor blades, speaking to me from the bottom of an old well. Imagining Mord taking a personal interest where nothing personal lurked. Peering down into that closed-off chasm, all I saw was a space too dark and cool and dusty.
“Listen to me, Wick,” I said. “Mord didn’t do that. Mord couldn’t have done that. It’s too precise and old. This doorway was blocked off a while back.” With too much intent.
Wick slumped against the wall, head bowed, surrounded by all that useless salvage. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
I could see in the far-off flicker in his eyes the loss, the utter despair, at the idea of climbing back up, clawing our way through the crack-passage back to the holding ponds. He’d never make it in his condition. I didn’t know if I could, either.
I splashed water in his face, even though we had so little. I made him take a sip from the canteen, open and eat an entire food packet, although only some of it stayed down.
Then I left him there, protecting our pack, looking emaciated and old, with the shadow of a beard. He was staring off into space as if he needed to not be in the world for a time.
While I looked for another way in. Because if the stairwell collapse was old, then perhaps with the shift of everything else, the piling on of catastrophe, some other entry point existed, might be revealed with a thorough search.
I pulled away a table from the wall. Nothing. I peeked in the space between a wall and a broken column that must have plummeted here from a higher level. Again, nothing.
Over and over again, nothing.
Wick ever more distant.
I thought of Borne, hiding things in closets. I ticked through Wick’s own hiding places, my preferences when I had to disguise some good salvage out in the field because it was too big to bring back without Wick’s help. I came up with nothing.