After I killed the Magician as the fox watched and did nothing, I ran my hands over the delicate mechanism that once controlled the silver wall. There had been no future for the city with the Magician in it. But there also would have been no future if creatures from a secret shipment meant to absorb and “sample” had descended on the city in their hundreds.
Had the Company meant to destroy the city? Wipe it clean? Retrieve with the recon of what was absorbed? If so, it had failed. Everything that had spilled from those crates had been spiked, killed before it could live. There were only a handful that could have gotten out, and that could only have happened if the animals around me had wanted it to happen. If the fox had wanted it to happen. Had they tried more than once? Was Borne the first that had awoke? And had they modified him before setting him free? From what I had seen in the other rooms, the fox and her kind had been changing so very much. Those with hands had been helping those without. A quiet revolution sneaking up on us.
As for what Wick had held back, it was there in the letter to find, I suppose, but also in clues along the way.
Mord showed me what I was.
For in one of the rooms I had found what he had hid so ably and so well, lived with for so long: There was a mound of discarded diagrams and models for biotech. Boxes full of withered-away parts.
Each one had some version of Wick’s face. Crushed. Cracked. Discarded. Tossed aside. Abandoned. Discontinued.
Wick had never been a person.
But he had always been a person to me.
WHAT I FOUND IN WICK’S LETTER
Dear Rachel,
I don’t know how to write a letter like this one. This is the first letter I have written to anyone.
I told you I am sick, and that is true, but there is another sickness, and that is all the other secrets that lie hidden. One of these secrets you asked me to keep, and others I had to keep. But most of them originate from this fact: The first time you remember meeting me is not the first time we met. You didn’t come here from the river. You didn’t come from the north. You came from inside the Company. I found you because you’d come from the Company.
Your parents died soon after you came here. They died in a terrible way and it left such a mark on you. I found you staggering near the holding ponds at the Company building on a day seven years ago, a few months before your memory of meeting me. You were distraught, far gone in your grief, and you hadn’t eaten in days.
The holding ponds were a horror show back then, much worse than now. A cynical place that allowed the Company to think of itself as merciful because so much of what it dumped still lived, for a time. This abandonment of experiments occurred at a terrifying pace, and the feeding frenzy of scavengers and animals was murderous.
When I found you, you were walking through scenes of slaughter and desperation—a hell on Earth of Company discards. I don’t know how long you would have survived there, how long before someone decided you were biotech, not human at all, and butchered you or captured you or took you and tried to modify you.
You were in shock. Your eyes didn’t focus. Your clothing was torn and someone had already taken your shoes off of you.
You said something to me when I came up to you, as if whatever you were thinking you just said. But flat, disengaged, as if you came from another planet.
“You’re beautiful. So beautiful. And someone beautiful wouldn’t hurt me.”
It was nothing like what I thought you would say, nothing like the person you are now, either, and it was the only thing you said for quite some time. I laughed when you said it. It was nonsense. It confirmed your dysfunction, your dislocation. It confirmed you as salvage.
And it wasn’t true. I did hurt you, just not by leaving you there, and for a very long time I had no idea why. I could not understand why I saved you. I told myself it was because you were the only thing human in that landscape and I saw you so suddenly. Because I didn’t expect you there. Because I didn’t expect you to say that. Because, in a way, I had been discarded, too.
But back at the Balcony Cliffs, you did not get better, you did not stop being damaged, because of what had happened to you.
Some people come into the city from inside the Company, not from the outside. At least, they used to. Your parents had come from inside the Company—stowaways in crates, supplies being sent to the city from some other place. If I cannot tell you what that other place might be, it is because no one here in the city knows and most do not guess at its existence.
But if you came in a supply crate, you weren’t human by Company rules. Instead, you were parts, or biotech. No exceptions. Just some small mercy that someone wouldn’t kill you, a young woman, and they dumped you at the holding ponds instead, to let you die out of their sight.
But your parents died inside the Company building. They were killed coming out of the crates, murdered, and you had witnessed it, seen it all, and then been thrown out into a bloody wasteland at the edge of a city you did not know, that you had never seen before.
You couldn’t get your bearings. Your parents had brought you here, so far from any sea, and then been killed in front of you, and it had broken something inside of you that you could not repair.
And one day just a month after I took you in, once you understood what I did, you sought me out and begged me to take your memories. You wanted your memories scattered to the four winds. You wanted them all gone—not buried or repressed or forgotten like a scar, but gone. Every last bit. You wanted to start fresh. “Fill me up with someone else’s memories,” you said. “I know you care about me, Wick, please do this for me.”
It was the first time I had seen any emotion in you.
Because you wanted this, I knew you were out of your mind, but soon enough I also knew if I didn’t give you what you wanted that you would find some other way, go to someone else for it, or worse.
You continued to be confusing to me. I had left the Company after the fish project, driven out, tossed to the holding ponds myself. Where they expected me to die, like others before me. Instead I made a life in the city. But I didn’t consider myself a person. I didn’t make decisions like a person. I felt, after all I had done and endured in the Company, that I didn’t deserve that. I felt instead that I was lost and would remain lost and all I could expect was to survive. So I had made decisions like someone who wasn’t a person, who just wanted to survive.