The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

reply exhausted her. She would sit staring blankly into space until I left. A few times, flames would appear at her tiny wrists and she would reach out and try to burn the sides of my face. I could not predict her reaction, so at first I always raced to reattach the slug to my spine immediately after my answer, wanting the sure clean rush of extinguished memory. This seemed the best way to avoid punishment. But after a while, the process grew too familiar and I found I no longer really cared about her reaction.
    I mention this because in the six months since Scarskirt had been hired, my Manager had accelerated the rate of these meetings. She called me into her office once each month.
    "Do you love me?"
    "No, I do not."
    "Do you love me?"
    "No. I do not."
    "Do you love me?"
    "No - I do not."
    "Do you love me?"
    "No. I. Do. Not."
    "Do you love me?"
    "No."
    I always wondered what would happen if I replied, "Yes, I love you. With all my heart."
    Could it be worse? Yes, obviously I thought it could be.

    Memories of Mord
    Although harrowing at the time, my two-week vacation in my apartment now seems like a calm respite from all my worries - this even though half a dozen times marauders tried to get through my defenses and the electricity flickered on and off, off and on.
    I've thought of my vacation as the turning point, and perhaps it was, for during the time I was gone Scarskirt and Leer bonded ever more closely. But the more I review the events of the last few months in my head, the more I think the beginning of the end came well before that - when Mord departed from our team.
    Heavy and strong, Mord had a light wit and an engaging manner before he moved to Human Resources. Outside of the company, he often appeared nervous, but while within its walls his assertiveness bound us together.
    I remember that the week before he left us, Mord and I stood in an old stairwell of the company building, one with skylights built into the wall, although they were grimed over with filth and pollution. Outside, in the city, it was almost impossible to find a bird, but the building was so large and had such resources that a bird might survive for years. If it found the right floor.
    Mord liked real animals, hinted that he had had contact with them in his former job. One year he even had a bird count of seventy-five sparrows, more than anyone in the company. He told me he loved the "simple functionality" of sparrows, their durability, their instinct to survive. Me, I just liked hanging out with Mord while the bird watched. Or inviting him and Leer to my apartment to stare at the yellowing grass of my front lawn in hopes a bird would appear there.
    So it came as a shock to me that day when he said, "I'm moving to Human Resources," as the landing beneath us undulated like a tongue.
    "What?" I said. "You can't do that."
    "Don't worry. It won't matter." He stared through his roving binoculars up the twisting stairwell for a hint of flutter, of flight. "Everything will be the same."
    "Will it?" I asked him in a moment of candor. "Will we still be friends?"
    Mord smiled, the binoculars still clamped over his eyes in a possessive grip. "Of course. We'll be friends like we're friends now."

    "And Leer, too?"
    Mord laughed. "Don't worry. That will never change."
    In a weird way, I think Mord meant it. And this at least is true: in my mind it never changed, and that was part of the problem.
    We never found a sparrow, or any other bird, that day, so when we got back to the office Mord and Leer made a bird. It was a strange elongated bird with a tail that looked like a wisp of smoke.
    They set it free in the stairwells and for months we would catch teasing glimpses of it. For some reason, it made me happy every time I saw it. But, eventually, I found it on a step. Someone had crushed its skull.

    Confusion Due to Continued Degradation of Processes
    Before the hiring of Scarskirt, when Leer was still my friend, we used to, as I mentioned, assign projects