Horizon Ridge you are free from the bonds that bound you

In the face of his breath -- rank, feral, base -- he finds himself fascinated, not morbid but self-destructive, what Freud would've called the death drive or the Todestrieb. 

A bristly chin. This is someone that has lived on the edge of society for so long it's warped his brain chemistry, or maybe that was the way they were all meant to live. The neurons for civil elevator talk die out and are replaced by one objective that burns a white-hot hole through grey matter: to survive.

Miranda always imagined himself and the people around him living on a spacetime manifold. There, mental kinematics -- accelerations, momentum, torque, all worked on their minds in brilliantly terrible ways. Curiosity, he says, offhand. He notes the foreign accent, which might've come from a different solar system to Erzulie's. I come from it. I owe myself to the sea, now.

But the way he stands on the rock face, how his toes grip the surface, is pure gut feeling.