Borne (Borne, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

even be people like us, looking up at the night sky. It was what my mother said sometimes—to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

“We’re on a world,” I told him, not knowing what gaps existed from his reading. “We’re on a world that revolves around a star, which is a giant ball of fire. So enormous that if it weren’t so distant we would all be dead—burned up. We call it the sun—and the sun is what you thought wasn’t nice when it shone so bright on you the other day. But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too.”

Most nights now there was some kind of cacophony and a rawness, and such a sense of covert movement. So much noise out there—and echoes of noise—and a keening or growling or the sound of something or someone being killed. That was the sound of a city that no longer believed in one ruler or one version of the future.

“The world is broken and I don’t know how to fix it.”

He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.

Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.