Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

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СКАЧАТЬ came from in Wick. I didn’t care. It was time to get out of bed.

      When Wick had gone, Borne extended a tendril of an arm, to take one of my hands in his own “hand.” A reasonable facsimile, if a little damp.

      “Rachel?”

      “What, Borne?”

      “Do you remember what I said about the white light?”

      “Yes.”

      “Part of me had a nightmare about it while your friend was here.”

      I checked myself from asking all of the questions I could have asked.

       Part of me?

       Just now you were asleep?

       You have dreams?

      I had learned that when Borne used this tone of voice he was about to trust me, was sharing something important.

      “What kind of nightmare?” I asked. How did he know the word nightmare? I hadn’t taught it to him; he hadn’t used it before.

      “I was in a dark place. Only it was filled with light. I was alone. Only there were others like me. I was dead. We were all … dead.”

      “Not alive?” Sometimes Borne said that something was dead if it didn’t move, like a chair. Or a hat.

      “Not alive.”

      “Like a heaven or a hell?”

      “Rachel.” Said with soft admonishment. “Rachel, I don’t know what those things are.”

      I didn’t know, either. How could I know, talking to a cheery monster, living in a hole in the ground, among too many broken things? I laughed as much to dispel that thought as because anything was funny.

      “Never mind. It’s ‘religion,’ which I can teach you … never.” My parents hadn’t been religious, and I’d learned from the Mord cults that religion in the city wasn’t about hope or redemption but about tempting death.

      “Okay,” Borne said, and his eyes formed a kind of reproachful smile. “I don’t always understand, Rachel. I love you, but I don’t understand.”

      Love? He’d just admitted he didn’t know about heaven and hell. What could he know from love? I pushed forward, past it.

      “And what happened next?”

      “I tried to wake up. I tried to wake us all up. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was dead. That’s the word: dead. And I needed to wake up because a door was opening.”

      “Door” to Borne could, again, mean many things that were not doors.

      “What happened when the door opened?” I asked.

      “They would make me go through the door. I don’t want to go through the door, and not just because I am dead.”

      “What’s on the other side of the door?” I asked.

      All of Borne’s many eyes turned toward me, like rows of distant, glittering stars against the deep purple earth tones of his skin. For the first time in a long time I felt as if I didn’t know him.

      “Because I am dead, I do not know what is on the other side of the door.”

      That is all that he would say.

      WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WENT OUTSIDE AGAIN

      My plan had been to try to take up with Mord, shadow him as before. This was still the best way to find useful things—and because the truest test of my recovery was to go right back to his shuddering flank, to risk it all now rather than find out later that I no longer had the nerve, or the skill. But now, that was too dangerous. Instead, I would travel to an area controlled by the Magician.

      I delayed. I woke leisurely, pretended it was just another day in my recovery. But by early afternoon, I was all out of play-pretend and all out of excuses. It was a good time to go. Wick slept very late after having been out longer than he’d planned, to make sure neither the Magician nor Mord’s proxies followed him.

      I prepared my pack, with a small cache of weapons and supplies. Two of our last neuro-spiders that, like bio-grenades, would freeze an assailant’s nervous system. Two memory beetles to negotiate my way out of trouble. A lump of something aged that might’ve been meat or bread but Wick reassured me was edible. A good old-fashioned long knife, a bit rusty, I’d found in the tunnels. A canteen of water, gleaned from condensation from the hole above the bathroom.

      I felt surly and dangerous and powerful.

      Borne discovered me as I was putting the water in my pack. “Do you make do with dew or do you dew with dew or dew ewe make dew with do?”

      It had taken me a while to know what words he was using in which places in that question. “Ewe” had come from an animal-husbandry book.

      “We all make do with dew,” I said, even though it wasn’t strictly true. But by now it wasn’t a question, just a call-and-response.

      “Are you going somewhere?” Borne asked. “People with packs are always going somewhere. People with packs are people with purpose.”

      I’d avoided looking at him and all of those eyes, but now I turned, pack packed, and said, “I’m going outside. I’m going on a scavenging run. I’ll be back before dark.”

      “What’s a ‘scavenging run’?”

      “Doing dew,” I said. “Doing dew for you.”

      “I want to go,” Borne said, as if the city were just another tunnel. “I should go. It’s settled. I’ll go.” He liked to settle things before I could decide.

      “You can’t go, Borne,” I said.

      All the dangers had come back to me, and I didn’t think Borne was ready to encounter them. It wasn’t just the Magician or Mord. My own kind, too, were dangerous: scavengers who hid under trapdoors like spiders to leap out; ones who repurposed what they found in factories and sold it for food; ones who found a good hoard and defended it; ones (few) who had learned to grow a form of food off of their bodies and cannibalized themselves, with ever smaller returns; ones who had half wasted away, because they weren’t smart enough or lucky enough, and whose bones would salt the plain of broken buildings, leave no memory or imprint to worry the rest of us who lived. I didn’t want to end up like any of them, and I didn’t want them claiming Borne as salvage, either.

      But Borne was undaunted by my resistance.

      “I have an idea,” he said. “Don’t say no yet.” Another favorite gambit. Don’t say no yet. When had I ever really said no to him? The number of discarded lizard heads gathered in a wastebasket in a far corner of the Balcony Cliffs was testament to that.

      “No.”

      “But СКАЧАТЬ