"'Am I a person?' Borne asks Rachel, in extremis. 'Yes, you are a person, ' Rachel tells him. 'But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.' In a ruined, nameless city of the future, Rachel makes her living as a scavenger. She finds a creature she names Borne entangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic despotic bear that once prowled the corridors of a biotech firm, the Company, until he was experimented on, grew large, learned to fly, and broke free. Made insane by the company's torture of him, Mord terrorizes the city even as he provides sustenance for scavengers. At first, Borne looks like nothing at all--just a green lump that might be a discard from the Company, which, although severely damaged, is rumored to still make creatures and send them to far-distant places that have not yet suffered collapse. Borne reminds Rachel of the island nation of her birth, now long lost to rising seas. She feels an attachment that she resents: attachments are traps, and in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet when she takes Borne to her subterranean sanctuary, Rachel convinces her lover, Wick--a special kind of dealer--not to render down Borne as raw genetic material for the drugs he sells. But nothing is quite the way it seems: not the past, not the present, not the future. If Wick is hiding secrets, so is Rachel--and Borne most of all. What Rachel finds hidden deep within the Company will change everything and everyone. There, lost and forgotten things have lingered and grown. What they have grown into is mighty indeed"-- "From the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy comes a story about two humans, and two creatures. The humans are Rachel and Wick - a scavenger and a drug dealer - both with too many secrets and fears, ready with traps to be set and sprung. The creatures are Mord and Borne - animal, perhaps plant, maybe company discard, biotech, cruel experiment, dinner, deity, or source of spare parts"--

The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory--she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape. But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology--satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself

In the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives--human and otherwise--converge in terrifying and miraculous ways in a city with no name of its own. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth.