Borne

Borne
Jeff VanderMeer

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe dark, dangerous, funny and uplifting new novel from the author of Annihilation, the inspiration for the major motion picture directed by Alex Garland.‘Neither of us had control of our monsters anymore’In a ruined city of the future, Rachel scavenges a strange creature from the fur of a despotic bear.She names him Borne.He reminds her of her homeland lost to rising seas, but her lover Wick is intent on rendering him down as raw material for the special drugs he sells. Nothing is quite what it seems, and if Wick is hiding secrets, so too is Rachel – and Borne most of all.

Copyright (#u1537b44c-18ab-5a37-b6cf-e1c3b4aeef46)

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk/)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017

Copyright © 2017, 2018 VanderMeer Creative, Inc.

Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © plainpicture/Westend61/Martin Wimmer

Bestiary illustrations by Eric Nyquist

Jeff Vandermeer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008159177

Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780008159207

Version: 2018-02-26

Dedication (#u1537b44c-18ab-5a37-b6cf-e1c3b4aeef46)

FOR ANN

Contents

Cover (#ue506ed41-ee23-5320-aba4-debcbdfbeb28)

Title Page (#ue8906f08-1334-5691-9e08-87644cb55a22)

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

What I found … (#uffb86fde-fc8f-5b55-ba39-2ef46a9cc22c)

Part Two

How it had … (#udb38465f-8e36-5cd9-be80-43bc741eeee1)

Part Three

What they took … (#litres_trial_promo)

Bestiary

Teems’s Bestiary (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

A Note About the Author

Also by Jeff VanderMeer

About the Publisher

PART ONE (#u1537b44c-18ab-5a37-b6cf-e1c3b4aeef46)

WHAT I FOUND AND HOW I FOUND IT

I found Borne on a sunny gunmetal day when the giant bear Mord came roving near our home. To me, Borne was just salvage at first. I didn’t know what Borne would mean to us. I couldn’t know that he would change everything.

Borne was not much to look at that first time: dark purple and about the size of my fist, clinging to Mord’s fur like a half-closed stranded sea anemone. I found him only because, beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.

Come close, I could smell the brine, rising in a wave, and for a moment there was no ruined city around me, no search for food and water, no roving gangs and escaped, altered creatures of unknown origin or intent. No mutilated, burned bodies dangling from broken streetlamps.

Instead, for a dangerous moment, this thing I’d found was from the tidal pools of my youth, before I’d come to the city. I could smell the pressed-flower twist of the salt and feel the wind, knew the chill of the water rippling over my feet. The long hunt for seashells, the gruff sound of my father’s voice, the upward lilt of my mother’s. The honey warmth of the sand engulfing my feet as I looked toward the horizon and the white sails of ships that told of visitors from beyond our island. If I had ever lived on an island. If that had ever been true.

The sun above the carious yellow of one of Mord’s eyes.

To find Borne, I had tracked Mord all morning, from the moment he had woken in the shadow of the Company building far to the south. The de facto ruler of our city had risen into the sky and come close to where I lay hidden, to slake his thirst by opening his great maw and scraping his muzzle across the polluted riverbed to the north. 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. When he found prey, a ways off to the east, under the scowl of rainless clouds, Mord dove from on high and relieved some screaming pieces of meat of their breath. Reduced them to a red mist, a roiling wave of the foulest breath imaginable. Sometimes the blood made him sneeze.

No one, not even Wick, knew why the Company hadn’t seen the day coming when Mord would transform from their watchdog to their doom—why they hadn’t tried to destroy Mord while they still held that power. Now it was too late, for not only had Mord become a behemoth, but, by some magic of engineering extorted from the Company, he had learned to levitate, to fly.