Borne (Borne, #1)

by Jeff Vandermeer

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.

“I won’t do anything to those people you saw tonight,” Borne had told me. But I knew Borne’s memory palace was vast and deep and full of skulls.

So we climbed into the darkness and did not look down because we could never return to down, and prayed to whatever gods we didn’t believe in that there would be a light above. Any kind of light.

Wick, head full of cotton and razor blades, speaking to me from the bottom of an old well.

The cascading silver wall, this door that only worked one way, showed an enticing snow globe of a scene by a mighty river, with docks and piers and a dazzling blue sky with birds frozen in mid-flight amid the first signs of

spring and bright, modern buildings on the land beyond that had never suffered war. A scene that would fill anyone from our ruined city with such yearning and, perhaps, recognition. It was so obvious a trap.