so he would know how to bolster our defenses. I was alive, and from past experience I knew in time I would forget enough to again pretend that we could someday be free. Of the city, of Mord, of all of it. I don’t know if that was hope. Maybe it was just stubborn inertia.
“And they took Borne, too,” I said a little later, not sure my words were coming out right. Borne being gone was a concept I had to think around or I wouldn’t make it.
Wick frowned from the chair next to my bed. “But they didn’t take Borne.” He nodded toward the living room. “He’s right in there.”
Even through my numb discomfort, the beetle crawling across my torso, I felt an overwhelming confusion and relief.
“Did they bring him back?”
“I don’t think so. He was in the hallway by the door. Your attackers got away. I brought him back in.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing that might not have been an easy decision.
“He’s bigger,” Wick said.
I said nothing. I didn’t dare. For the first time I realized Wick looked worried or preoccupied for reasons that might have nothing to do with me. I’d managed to keep Wick away from Borne for two straight weeks.
The beetle had finished its work.
Wick got to his feet. “You need to rest. I’ve brought food for the kitchen. I’ve put up better defenses. I have to go out for a while, but I’ll be back soon.”
I understood. He needed to make sure my attackers were really gone. He had to change the locks, make sure no one else could enter the same way. All of which meant eating up more resources we didn’t have, putting us both at risk much sooner.
The burn, the sting—the screaming agony—of what had happened would not return for hours, as if it was coming toward me from light-years distant. I extended my arm to touch Wick’s cheek, the edge of his mouth, but he was too far away.
“I should have been here,” he said.
“If you hadn’t come back, I might be dead,” I said, but this was no comfort. If the city had really wanted to kill me, it would have killed me, as it had so many others.
“I should take Borne with me,” Wick said, trying to sound casual.
I winced. “No. Please. Don’t.”
It would have been better for Wick’s peace of mind if I had shouted it out or said it just as casual. But I didn’t. I said those three words in a small, broken voice, and Wick couldn’t push back against them.
¤
At some point after Wick left, I realized I couldn’t sleep and decided to get up. It hurt but I was already restless, unused to bed rest. I wanted to go see Borne. In my altered state I worried my attackers might have injured him as well. Or maybe I just wanted to be sure Wick hadn’t taken him away.
He sat on a chair at the kitchen table, pulsing a faint green-gold. Wick had restored a few of my fireflies, but not many, so all I could really see was the glow of Borne.
Borne stood at least half a foot taller than that afternoon, his base thicker and more robust. On the chair, he came up to my shoulders. I couldn’t see that any harm had come to him—he still had that perfect symmetry. He was beautiful in that darkness. He was powerful.
“It’s just me,” Borne said.
I screamed. I stumbled back, looking for a weapon—a stick, a knife, anything. His voice sounded just like the rasp of the boy with the gray eyes.
“Just me,” Borne said. “Borne.”
Just me.
The worms Wick had left inside me struggled to release the drugs that would calm me. I was shaking. I was making an uncontrollable sound.
“It’s just me,” Borne said again, as if testing out the words.
I flinched again, stayed up against the far wall. This time he sounded less like my attacker, warmer and more lyrical. What I would come to know as his normal voice, although he could assume many.
“Rachel,” Borne said. “Don’t need to be. Afraid.” The gray-eyed boy’s voice was completely gone now.
“Don’t tell me what I need to be!” I shouted at him. “What are you?”
He began to shamble off the chair.
“Don’t come closer. Stay the fuck away!”
I struggled for more words, to fill the space between us.
Into that gap, Borne said, “Go rest. Please rest. Don’t worry. Sleep.” I could tell Borne had to consider each word carefully before choosing one, unsure how they fit together.
“Sleep?” I laughed bitterly. “I’m not going to sleep now. You’re talking to me.”
“I am Borne,” said the thing in front of me. “I talking talking talking.”
Those words came out in a kind of mellifluous burble that reminded me of how much he had amused me those past weeks. But where did those words come from? Borne still had no face, no real mouth.
“Is this a dream?”
“Dream?” Borne said.
“How did you escape them?”
“Them?” Borne said.
“Yes, them—the children who attacked me.”
“Children,” Borne said. “Attacked me.”
I was drifting then, drifting against my will, swaying as the medical creatures inside worked on me. I staggered, knew I was sliding down the wall onto my butt. The worms must have decided I needed sleep. Everything became fuzzy, indistinct.
After a time, I had a sense of Borne’s shape looming over me, of things crawling around inside my veins. I was in my bed. I was on the floor. I was in the living room. Awake. Asleep. Suspended between. Delirious, raving, wondering if I was in a nightmare or just now entering one. All the things in my past that I tried not to think about rose to the surface, spilled out of my mouth, and Borne stood there, listening. I told him everything about me. Things I hadn’t admitted to myself, that had been bottled up for so long I had no control over them.
I couldn’t know it then, but what I offered up to Borne probably saved my life.
WHERE I CAME FROM AND WHO I WAS
Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.
Once, at the age of eight or nine, I had still wanted to be a writer, or at least something other than a refugee. Not a trap-maker. Not a scavenger. Not a killer. I filled my notebooks full of scribbles. Poetry about how I loved the sea. Retellings of fables. Even scenes from novels I never finished and will never finish. Borne could have been a creature out of those childhood fictions. Borne could have been my imaginary friend.
I rationalized later that this is why I told Borne about my past, why I told him what I could never tell Wick, just as he could not tell me about a diagram, a hidden history of the city, the nautilus biotech. But maybe it could have been anyone, in that moment.
¤
I was born on an island that fell not to war or disease but to rising seas. My father was a politician of sorts—a member of the council that ruled the largest island of the archipelago. He liked to fish