Then came Borne, and I couldn’t take Borne from you because I had meddled in your life too much already. You kept asking me if Borne was a person. But I didn’t believe I was a person, Rachel. So I couldn’t tell you.
Because what you will learn, Rachel, is that I am not what you think I am. I am more like Borne, and every time you told me he was human, I felt less human, less real, and I don’t blame you for that, but that’s how it is for me, and always will be.
You must understand that I have done nothing that was meant to hurt you. Everything I have done, for many years, has been for you and to keep the Balcony Cliffs safe. Please, I hope you will believe me.
*
I had read Wick’s letter while still in our temporary shelter. I struggled with it every moment of our journey into the Company building. I struggled with it every time I propped Wick up, gave him water, goaded him forward. Every time I looked at Wick, I saw something different, felt something different. He was like a mirror and a window, and the scene kept changing.
When I thought I could be reduced no further, when I thought nothing more could be taken from me, even what seemed to restore something to me became a further reduction. What if I had wanted to be lost? What if my earlier self had been the smartest, the wisest, to want to remove all of that from me? So I could survive. So maybe I could be happy. What if my unhappiness had always been from having remembered happiness?
We always have a choice, even if the choice is amnesia or your own death. But now, too, I finally understood the extent of the weight on Wick. That this was a secret that could kill him in a different way than his sickness. Something that would make many in the city hate him, even want to kill him. Or, among the Mord worshippers, lift him up in a way that would kill him just as surely.
Now I knew why Wick kept trying, forgave so much. Because he felt he had so much to be forgiven for.
But in the end, what it came down to was this: I did not want to remember. I did not need to remember. No one was less dead or more alive after Wick’s letter. Whatever muddle had lived in my head that Wick hadn’t taken away contained at least that knowledge. I had spent years not searching for them but mourning them, keeping their memory alive in my head. I did not want to remember more. You forgive if you can forgive yourself, or live with what you’ve done. If you cannot live with what you have done, you cannot live with what others have done, either.
Wick’s letter no longer exists. I destroyed it because it was dangerous. But I have not forgotten what he wrote.
There are parts of that letter I will never share with you.
THE WAY BACK AND WHAT I WITNESSED ON THE HORIZON
The way back was no easier than the way there. The way back was harder, and no getting around that—no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left to give.
The little animals did not help; their purposes were so different from my own. They did not care that Wick was ill or that I was so very tired. They nosed around the Magician’s dead body, and licked her hands and her face, and then left her alone and went on with their business. Perhaps she rotted away there, underground.
An attrition of steps I took with Wick, or could not take, in the moment, but had to take soon or the will would be gone. The worst thing was that I could not escape any of the passing seconds. Every moment came to me clear and distinct, and no one moment stood for anything but itself. I felt time ache in my body, in my need to get Wick back to some kind of temporary shelter. To fling myself free of the wreckage. I was thinking about my parents, of all the long, forced marches we had taken, how they’d helped me to endure, and how they’d been brave enough to get me here, and how I couldn’t fail.
At a certain point, I could again hear the distant sound of conflict, and although still trapped in the Company building, I knew this meant the battle still raged between Mord and Borne. But when you can’t escape the seconds, when you are sure you are going to die before you get free, some things don’t mean very much anymore. The sounds I heard came to me through a murky sea of distance and memory.
I brought Wick back through the debris of the Company, up through that artificial tornado of junk and, sliding, torn skin and bruises being the best of me, back through the crack-passage—and even through the choked relief and gasp of our collapse onto the blood sands of the holding ponds, caressed by those shallow, dangerous waters—shambling our way into the light we thought might kill us, only to discover the guards had left their posts—the proxies gone, and on the horizon the mirage for which we had no conception, no compass.
Two great beasts fought amid the burning wreckage of a city. Smashed into each other, withdrew, engaged again—exhausted, exhausting, the brutality. Gray smoke drawn up into the sky to linger around the vultures gliding high above the behemoths’ heads like ragged black halos.
Wick had had a relapse in the narrow space of the tunnel, would have fallen, become wedged there, unconscious and barely responsive, if I had not been vigilant—to prop him up, to push him forward, to hold his head when he vomited. The venom had worked deeper into him; his veins stood out black on the surface of his reddish skin, his lips stained black, his breaths shallow and foul. His eyes remained closed, but fluttered. I could feel his eyelids flutter against my fingertips in the darkness, and that is how I knew.
At the holding ponds, I gathered the last of my resolve and, staggering, carried Wick toward the desolate plain that was our reward for surviving this far. Toward a city torn apart by monsters.
There was nothing on that plain, or maybe there was but the sight of Mord doubled had startled them into hiding. We would have been easy prey, and yet, mercifully, nothing approached us. I had taken the Magician’s camouflage biotech but could not bring myself to wear what was clearly in distress, placed it gently in the top of my pack before zipping it up. Maybe dangers lurked and waited but I could not see them.
“You’re too valuable as salvage to leave behind,” I told Wick.
“You’re doing fine—you’re getting better,” I said to Wick.
“You just need to hang on a little longer,” I pleaded with Wick.
So light, that body, so pliable, almost collapsible, as if the Company had made him that way, and so weak that I was stronger than him, stronger than I thought, his hands still able to grasp at me, involuntary, instinctual.
“We’ll rebuild the Balcony Cliffs,” I told him, though he could not hear me. “We’ll live there again.”