Reduced them to a red mist, a roiling wave of the foulest breath imaginable. 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. Then he sprang up into the blue again, a murderer light as a dandelion seed.

No one but Mord could drink from that river and live the Company had made him that way. 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. 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 sun above the carious yellow of one of Mord’s eyes. 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. The long hunt for sea-shells, the gruff sound of my father’s voice, the upward lilt of my mother’s. I could smell the pressed-flower twist of the salt and feel the wind, knew the chill of the water rippling over my feet. 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. No mutilated, burned bodies dangling from broken streetlamps. I found him only because, beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.Ĭome 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. I couldn’t know that he would change everything.īorne 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 didn’t know what Borne would mean to us. I found Borne on a sunny gunmetal day when the giant bear Mord came roving near our home. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida. VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor, and the author of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy- the first volume of which, Annihilation, is being made into a movie to be released by Paramount in 2017-and the coeditor with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, of The Big Book of Science Fiction.

The following is from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, Borne.

Borne jeff