Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

put on some ragged shorts and an old T-shirt, and went to the edge of the pool. He leaned on one knee, fishing something scaly and metal-gray out of the pool’s fetid depths while, around one pale, thin, but muscular haunch, he looked back at me with those magnetic eyes.

      “You’re putting us both in danger, Rachel,” he said cheerily. Wick looked naked from that angle, exposed and rangy. There was an almost insect-like humming and buzzing to the way he moved. That’s when I knew for sure he’d taken something to make himself feel calm, or taken one of his own beetles and part of him was now far away from this place.

      “With sex?”

      Wick laughed, a higher-pitched sound than usual given the acoustics of that cavern, and padded around to the other side of the pool, some glint or glimmer driving him to use a stick to stir up the goop.

      “Borne followed you out today,” Wick said. “Because of him, you came back early. Borne continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, Rachel.”

      So there it was, said out loud. I opened my mouth to protest that he’d been spying on me, but what was the point? I’d snuck into his apartment and gone through his things.

      “Shouldn’t you be more concerned about Mord—and the Magician?”

      “Borne is not your friend, Rachel.”

      “I never said that, Wick.” Although he was now.

      “You stood right here and told me that, told me to accept it.”

      I sidestepped that. “I never said that to you. Not that way.”

      “You told me I had to accept Borne.”

      One step more and all we’d be doing is denying, denying, denying. I never said that, I never did that, the way couples do.

      “But why can’t you accept him?”

      “Because you’re wrong. Because I can’t go against the facts. I can only work around them.” He was telling me that belief in Borne was like a religion. “Like the fact nothing ever comes out of Borne.”