The Southern Reach Trilogy author’s next novel hits shelves May 2, 2017.
Rachel feels a growing attachment to Borne, a protectiveness that she can ill-afford.
He was born, but I had borne him.'
Credit: Kyle Cassidy
To me, Borne was just salvage at first.
I didnt know what Borne would mean to us.
I couldnt know that he would change everything.
I found him only because, beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half-minute or so.
No mutilated, burned bodies dangling from broken streetlamps.
If I had ever lived on an island.
If that had ever been true.
The sun above the carious yellow of one of Mords eyes.
No one but Mord could drink from that river and live; the Company had made him that way.
Then he sprang up into the blue again, a murderer light as a dandelion seed.
Reduced them to a red mist, a roiling wave of the foulest breath imaginable.
Sometimes the blood made him sneeze.
Even on his side, Mords outline rose three stories.
Mord had claws and fangs that could eviscerate, extinguish, quick as thought.
But to me at his flanks, human flea, all he stood for was good scavenging.
Some of these things may have been placed there purposefully, as Wick always warned me.
They could be traps.
They could be misdirection.
But I knew traps.
I set traps myself.
Wicks Be careful I ignored as he knew I would when I set out each morning.
For these reasons, I did not risk much more than exploratory missions along Mords flank.Seether.
Mord.His names were many and often miraculous to those who uttered them aloud.
Nothing that simple this time.
And there, entangled in the brown, coarse seaweed of Mords pelt, I stumbled upon Borne.
It had not yet become he.
Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin.
The texture was smooth as water-worn stone, if a bit rubbery.
It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers.
I dont think I could have stopped myself.
Snoring and palsying in sleep, acting out a psychotic dreamsong.
And there was Borne, defenseless.
Borne beat against my chest like a second heart.
Anonymity amongst all the wreckage of the Earth, this is what I sought.
And a good pair of boots for when it got cold.
And an old tin of soup half hidden in rubble.
These things became blissful; how could we let names mean anything next to the power of that?
Yet still, I named him Borne.
