“I used to dream that this was real,” the Magician said. “I used to dream it was real and I would be able to pass through to the other side. But there is no other side now. What a terrible pity. I could have done even more over there. Still, studying it may be of some use.”
No, the Magician had come right here. This was the treasure for her. She wanted another chance at resurrection, she wanted another chance. And that took more biotech, and here we were, standing in a cavern on a level that, even stripped of most things, still contained enough treasures for someone like the Magician to start over. With a little help.
“Who knows what will happen out in the city, Rachel,” the Magician said. “No one can know what we’ll return to. But I know you, Rachel. I know your life. We could make common cause. You could help me. I can protect you. I can make sure you want for nothing. You deserve that for leading me here.”
Would she next ask me to abandon Wick? Was she that desperate? I couldn’t tell you. She stood there before me in her tattered cloak and asked me to join the same cause that destroyed children, that experimented on children, and told the world that there was a good reason, the way the world always wanted to be reassured, because that was the easier path. And the terrible thing is that it wasn’t such a bad choice for me, looking at it with the eyes of a scavenger, a cutthroat. It was what had gained her so much power—providing security, food, territory. It had made her a leader, no matter what you thought of who she led and how. No matter that she was on the run—she was still alive.
“And I could tell you much more about your past, Rachel, than you even know. Those blank spaces, what you don’t know. I know what they should contain.”
What would you have done, reader, who has been able to follow me like the Magician followed me, invisible and ever-watchful and without consequence?
*
It is hard to explain how much I hated the Company when I saw that place with the frozen mirror. My hatred had grown all through the journey and Wick’s faltering, and how he still paid fealty in his way. Now it had become like my own fear within me, or like a wave that kept running through me as if for the first time, with the intensity of the first time.
They had made us dependent on them. They had experimented on us. They had taken away our ability to govern ourselves. They had sent out to keep order a horrific judge grown ever more unmanageable and psychotic. They had dehumanized Wick. They had, in their way, created the Magician, because everything she did and everything she created was in opposition to the Company in some way. And, in the end, the remnants of the Company had walled themselves off from us when they were done with us, when it became too dangerous, leaving those remnants to fend for themselves and negotiate with Mord an increasingly dangerous and impossible cease-fire, one that would never hold.
All I would ever know of the heart of them was this fading, injustice of a place. Was it somehow the future exploiting the past, or the past exploiting the future? Was that mirror scene from some other, thriving part of the world? Was it another version of Earth? I don’t know. All I know, or believe, is that it was a door to elsewhere—that the Company had come from some other place and been formed and deformed by it, and yet would always be embedded in our deepest history, against our will. Long after Mord died or was finally defeated. Long after I was ash or rotting meat or buried in one of the Magician’s graves.
We were on our own. We had always been on our own. We had no recourse, and I cannot tell you how much some part of me had wished to not be on my own, had hoped there would be some person, someone, down in the depths of the Company who would have an answer, who still existed to explain it all, and who, if we asked them to, pleaded with them, would pull a lever or push a button to fix our situation, reset it, and bring forth everything afresh.
But there wasn’t. There was only, after a time, the recognition that the Magician still stood beside me, that we were standing there, among all the animals that had gotten in through the cracks, had dug their way in, had come back into the place that had created their destroyed and destructible lives. The rats in the walls, who were in the process of rewiring everything, changing everything. They were the future, but the Magician hadn’t realized it. She thought she was the future.
The cascading silver wall, this door that only worked one way, showed an enticing snow globe of a scene by a mighty river, with docks and piers and a dazzling blue sky with birds frozen in mid-flight amid the first signs of spring and bright, modern buildings on the land beyond that had never suffered war. A scene that would fill anyone from our ruined city with such yearning and, perhaps, recognition.
It was so obvious a trap.
*
The Magician was still talking. The Magician in that cavern was still trying to tell me things. Why I should join her. What this all meant. How the city could be saved from itself.
But I heard no more from her. I hit the Magician with a rock until she was dead, and the animals did nothing to stop me. Perhaps they would have done it themselves if I hadn’t. But I did. There was no future for the city with the Magician still in it. I may have been at my limits when I decided that, but my mind was clear.
Funny, how the Magician thought she knew me, how careless she was around me because of that. But she didn’t know me. She didn’t know me at all, no matter how much she knew about me.
And she couldn’t know one other secret: I had already read Wick’s letter, so, really, you could say the Magician never had a chance.
*
But there was more than even Wick knew, and one thing he still hid from me, despite his letter. Wick had come here for a cure, for medicine. The Magician had come here for biotech, to once more launch herself into the ambition of ruling the city. And I had been here as Wick’s ghost, the person who haunted him every day of his life.
We had all been too small in our thoughts, too small to realize what might be revealed to us if we really looked, if we really saw.
Those spilled-over crates from the Company contained a variety of items. Restocking of supplies to reassure the remnants. Raw material for creating more biotech to be shipped back. Food packets. Dead embryos to seed the city with more alcohol minnows.
But the last shipment from the Company had been Borne—many Bornes. Hundreds had spilled out from the containers in front of the slow mirror. Marked as children’s toys, but the diagram on the side of the containers did not match what had rolled out of the crates. Borne pods. Dormant, trapped here by whoever among the remnants had had the foresight to close off the level.
Until the animals tunneled in.