Borne (Borne, #1)

by Jeff Vandermeer

Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

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

Those were the smokestacks that had killed off this part of the world. Those were the assembly lines that had choked us with products we did not need and had to be told we wanted—before the Company had snuck in and shown us our truest, deepest desires.

was like a constant dark spiral in my thoughts, pulling me away from the moment, from whatever I was doing.

because, deep down, the ghost didn’t really want to die—just maybe come right up to the edge, so that the entire spectrum of colors would click back into place behind her eyes.

As the ghost wandered, she could see that people still cared, and there was a kind of dangerous ecstasy in that—a kind of displaced passion and recklessness from seeing the way people could still care about something dying, dead.

But I was surrounded by a landscape too dirty and yet antiseptic, and I was exhausted by my own obsession with the past.

And I thought, too, that Borne was gripped by the false power of remorse, which makes you think that by the strength of your convictions, your emotions, you can make everything right even when you can’t.

Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe I could forgive myself and we could be people together.

Wick had kept himself apart, had preferred to be alone, to be lonely rather than to be held captive.