Rachel

Rachel is a 28-year-old survivor of the apocalypse living in an unnamed city in a cloistered apartment building called the Balcony Cliffs. She shares this living space with her friend and lover, Wick. Rachel is a scavenger; she goes into the city seeking out food and useful items, which she brings home and shares with Wick. At the beginning of the novel, she finds Borne, a strange vase-like life form that she believes is a plant at first.

As the novel progresses, and Borne grows ever more advanced, Rachel begins to treat him like a child and to view herself as his mother. She tries to impart wisdom to Borne and protect him the way her parents did for her, failing to understand that the post-apocalyptic urban world she currently occupies is not the world she grew up in, and that Borne is a genetically modified killer, not...