The air seemed to be sucked away, out of the sky, toward Borne. Sound left us.
There came a blinding silver-white light, a radiance that seared out across the landscape in a wave and threw me to the ground, Wick beneath me. A wave of light that emitted no heat. A thunderclap, very close, very loud. A word in my head, I swear, a word, just my name: “Rachel.” Which meant something different than it had meant a moment before.
*
I lay there for a long moment, unsure of what I would see when I rose.
I got up. I looked back across the city. No bodies lay broken and giant across that landscape. No remains. No carcasses for scavengers to feed on.
Both Mord and Borne were gone, as if they had not existed, and the city was still and silent but for the grieving of the proxies and the sinuous smoke that still rose from all that had been destroyed.
But there was no space left in me. I was filled with the grief of that absence, could hardly breathe for it.
He was born, but I had borne him.
I knew Borne was terrified at the end. I knew that he had suffered, but that he had given us this gift of a better life anyway, and I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER AND WHAT CHANGED
There is not much left to tell. So much of the rest is aftermath, the life I lead now.
At the cistern, our temporary shelter, I fed Wick as if he were a rare and fragile hummingbird, as the last of the venom worked its way through his system. I made him drink the water from the well. I dressed his wounds and cleaned them. I talked to him even though he still could not hear me. I held his hand. I kept watch for any enemy, but no enemy came.
As I worked, I told him I loved him, that he was a person. That he was a person. That I loved him. Because I meant it. Because I thought if he didn’t hear it he might die, and, later, I might not be able to say it.
We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us. I don’t know how else to say it. Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.
*
Outside, it rained for three days and nights. That would have been strange by itself, an event, but this was no ordinary rain. All manner of creature dropped from the sky or, at the touch of this rain, sprouted up from the ground. Grass grew fast and wild outside the cistern, created paths of green, and on some of the dead blackened trees down the slopes I noticed new leaves. There were on certain avenues in the city, I would learn, new growths of vines and plants that had been gone for years. Birdsong came lyrical through the storms, and animals long-hidden emerged from sanctuary.
But most of it was biotech, uncanny. On the desolate plain the water triggered the last of the traps and up came vast clouds and explosions of life, even eruptions of bees, or things that looked like bees, out of the marsh, taken up by the wind and scattered. Elongated, elastic creatures dug themselves out from long slumber and, suspicious and almost in their stride apologetic, walked bandy-legged away to dig burrows.
At the holding ponds, the waters swelled and overflowed, and all that lay there flooded the Company building, spilled out across the plain, and even now we do not know how much of the new life among us comes from that moment. In the city itself, torrents of alcohol minnows came to slippery, wriggling life, joined by microorganisms in the rain to populate broken streets and infiltrate cracks and grottoes. There came from across the city, to the astonishment of people used to poverty, such a sense, in that moment … of plenty.
On the third day the torrent ended, and the moisture evaporated or disappeared into the ground, and much of the greenery receded and the new animals died or hid or were eaten. To an observer fresh to the city, it might have looked as broken and useless as before. But it was not. Some new things remained, took root, became permanent. Some flourished. The city had been washed as clean as it could be, and what had been taken away was as important as what had been added.
On the fourth day, Wick’s eyes opened and they were clear, and clean of pain, and he tottered to his feet, looked around the cistern with a weak smile on his face.
I had kept Wick alive. I had failed at so much else, but I kept Wick alive.
He gave me our last password in those first lucid moments, the word that told me he was real.
“We don’t need them anymore,” I told him.
A confusion spread across his face, until he understood.
A lesser person than Wick would have surrounded himself with a fake past, with a personal history, constructed some pretense, handed out lies—or leaned on whatever fake memories the Company had given him. But Wick had not done that. Wick had kept himself apart, had preferred to be alone, to be lonely rather than to be held captive.
“You saved my life,” Wick said, and kissed me, and I let him.
That night, we returned home to the Balcony Cliffs to sift through the wreckage and to begin again.
*
The strange, forgotten animals abandoned by the Company live among us, along with their insatiable curiosity, like Bornes that want nothing from the old world. They need nothing from it. They are their own captains and lead their own lives, although there are still human beings who see them as food, as expendable. In their fearlessness, I find a kind of solace. In how they pursue their own plans, their own destiny, I find relief. They will outstrip all of us in time, and the story of the city will soon be their story, not ours.
The Mord proxies were still a terror for a time, but they had their own terror to face—that their master was dead. Many died within three or four years, and those left were both more dangerous and more civilized. They had their own intricate chirping, huffing language and have begun to develop their own customs. The cubs are far removed already from unthinking violence and act more like bears: wary and clever and more cautious, as if they understand better their place.
The feral children, the ones the Magician created, dissolved into the city. Some were too damaged, and these formed their own outlaw communities, entrenched deep below the factories, and at night the remnants come out to terrorize, to remind us they still exist. But they, too, are much reduced, and they can never again hold territory as they did under the Magician.