More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Already, almost from the start, the biologists were changing from something human in the eyes of the locals into something uncanny.
How, then, did bodies understand the landscape? How did minds flourish or wither, still tuned to a distant frequency?
By then, the biologists had become embedded in Dead Town, their fate and the fate of Dead Town interwoven, as if they were not an expedition at all, but an outpost, preparing for an assault from some unknown force.
But Old Jim knew. He knew the stranger was a Rogue, and he was inclined to consider this Rogue an agent of sorts—a person who, in Central parlance, would come to mean the familiar unfamiliar, “one who knows us but is not us.”
Such a person moved against the pattern of tides, of stars, of seasons and, in that sense, was not bound by the idea of Time as experienced on the Forgotten Coast. Such a person was dangerous.
A large white rabbit with bloodshot red eyes calmly ate a fiddler crab, crunching on the carapace, gulping it down, and starting on another. The rabbit had a starved look about it, a gauntness under the tangled fur splashed brown.
A story aided by Central tampering with the selection process, so the biologists had been chosen, in part, for their lack of connections to the world. The lack of parents. The lack of siblings. The lack of strong, close friends. The lack of all the normal things that perhaps were less normal than people who had them thought.
“Once, Serum Bliss was an expedition that Central hijacked as an op for mind-control experiments. Now it’s a hunt. For an ‘existential threat,’ in the same place.”
