Others found their own way out—some could return to families and be forgiven and taken in, despite their physical deformity, despite their psychosis. Others had no such recourse but gave up their old ways and lived in the shadows under bridges and in abandoned buildings. They would never be entirely whole again, and there was nothing anyone could do to remedy that.
But I can stroll down an avenue lined with young trees now, visit a market where people under shelter of makeshift tents barter for goods. I can do that, even if there are still parts of the city I could never visit because too much violence lurks there. At times in the observatory district, we see regular lights, and some are electric, a part of the old world brought back to us. Wells dug or cleaned out, filtered, and communities growing up around them. The planting of vegetables. The rumors of an orchard or two.
There are fewer dead astronauts at the intersections to confuse us. There is only us now, and the monsters, who are both part of history and always with us. In this new-old city, I want no great power, no power at all, only power over my own life. All I wanted is for there to be no great power in the city at all. No Company. No Mord. No Magician. And, in the end, although I loved him, no Borne.
For a time, I saw the little fox outside the Balcony Cliffs. For a time, the fox followed me. The bright eyes, the alert ears, the quick gait. Did you pick me? I would ask her. Did you mean for me to find Borne? Or was it an accident, a mistake, chance? And did you know what might happen when I found him? I never expected an answer, and eventually the fox did not return.
Wick tells me we live in an alternate reality, but I tell him the Company is the alternate reality, was always the alternate reality. The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive. I tell him the Company is the past preying on the future—that we are the future.
A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky.
Was there a world beyond? Is that what the shining wall of silver raindrops meant? A gateway? Or is that a delusion?
It doesn’t matter. Because now we can make one here.
A world.
HOW I LIVE NOW
The Balcony Cliffs lay empty when we returned. We came in cautious, prepared to drive intruders out, but the bears had left and everyone else had been too scared to move in. The Mord proxies had destroyed so much, but what set us falling to the floor laughing was that at first we could not tell the parts they had destroyed from the parts they had left alone, except by the sign of their droppings. So many holes punched in walls by Borne. Seeing the Balcony Cliffs with fresh eyes, we realized we had lived in a tidied-up shithole that needed a more thorough airing than we had ever given it.
“What now, Rachel?” Wick asked me. “What do we do now?”
“Whatever we want to do,” I said.
So we set to work.
*
Wick has never been the same physically, although he has some good days. The left side of his body has seized up and his left arm doesn’t work right. His skin never became pale again but is crisscrossed with black vein lines. He sometimes has a distant look, as if listening to music I cannot hear. But most of the time he is not lost in fugue or memory, or wherever he goes during those episodes. We live, we stand by each other and make do with what we have. He fixed his swimming pool, still makes biotech, found ways to create his medicine before reaching the fourth month and the last nautilus pill.
I never told Wick I killed the Magician—she just never came back. If Wick could carry the heavy burden of his secret for so long, then I could hold on to mine and not burden him with it.
Nor did I tell Wick that I knew his secret, his final secret. We never talked about his letter, although he must know that I read it. To be together, Wick and I needed some secrets from each other, and some things we could not talk about—the talking was the trap. The things we say to each other, thinking they are so important to say, and yet later regret, that become a part of you no matter how hard you push them away, even as you can’t stop thinking about them.
I prefer the old betrayals, the ones based on trust. My presence beside him tells him all he needs to know, and no matter what else he has done in his life, Wick has never killed anyone with a rock. Nor does Wick sell memories anymore.
Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.
Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me—for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person named Wick.
Life is still hard, but it is fair, and there is more joy in it that doesn’t feast on heartbreak.
*
There are also territories not worth holding on to, traps not worth setting.
Other people live at the Balcony Cliffs with us now. Other faces stare at me when I walk these corridors. Most of them we invited in, and many are children with no place to go. We do not ask anything of them except that they scavenge what they can and help maintain the Balcony Cliffs.
Wick creates things for the children, bits of biotech from odds and ends that make them laugh or astonish them. I like to watch Wick at play. I like to hear the children laugh. It is so much better than a fancy restaurant. It is more like the botanical garden on the island. It is almost like that.
Teems is one of the boys here and the closest to being my child. I had the fantasy of finding the girl, the leader, and raising her as my own, but I never found her. Instead, I found Teems, and I took him in. He was the first.
Teems is just an ordinary boy who likes playing catch and hates vegetables and reads my collection of books when I make him. Teems doesn’t mind roughhousing in the mud, and the stubborn set to his jaw always makes him look as if he is objecting to something. But his eyes are large and wide and they take in everything, do not miss the smallest detail. He is honest and respectful and he has honor and courage as he is able.
I teach him only the useful things, the hopeful things. I teach him to be both the things I am and the things I can never be.
I am sure Teems thinks of me, of Wick, as old, as people who are too generous and not hardened enough. People who can no longer see the traps. But did we ever really see them? And we have had our adventures, Wick and I. We have had all the adventures one lifetime could endure, and it is fine that no one knows but us, that Wick and I hold on to those secrets together. There is so little of this account that anyone else in the city would understand or believe, and so little of it they need to understand.
*