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For Ann

000X: THE DIRECTOR, TWELFTH EXPEDITION

Just out of reach, just beyond you: the rush and froth of the surf, the sharp smell of the sea, the crisscrossing shape of the gulls, their sudden, jarring cries. An ordinary day in Area X, an extraordinary day—the day of your death—and there you are, propped up against a mound of sand, half sheltered by a crumbling wall. The warm sun against your face, and the dizzying view above of the lighthouse looming down through its own shadow. The sky has an intensity that admits to nothing beyond its blue prison. There’s sticky sand glittering across a gash in your forehead; there’s a tangy glottal something in your mouth, dripping out.

You feel numb and you feel broken, but there’s a strange relief mixed in with the regret: to come such a long way, to come to a halt here, without knowing how it will turn out, and yet … to rest. To come to rest. Finally. All of your plans back at the Southern Reach, the agonizing and constant fear of failure or worse, the price of that … all of it leaking out into the sand beside you in gritty red pearls.

The landscape surges toward you, curling over from behind to peer at you; it flares in places, or swirls or reduces itself to a pinprick, before coming back into focus. Your hearing isn’t what it once was, either—has weakened along with your balance. And yet there comes this impossible thing: a magician’s trick of a voice rising out of the landscape and the suggestion of eyes upon you. The whisper is familiar: Is your house in order? But you think whoever is asking might be a stranger, and you ignore it, don’t like what might be knocking at the door.

The throbbing of your shoulder from the encounter in the tower is much worse. The wound betrayed you, made you leap out into that blazing blue expanse even though you hadn’t wanted to. Some communication, some trigger between the wound and the flame that came dancing across the reeds betrayed your sovereignty. Your house has rarely been in such disarray, and yet you know that no matter what leaves you in a few minutes something else will remain behind. Disappearing into the sky, the earth, the water, is no guarantee of death here.

A shadow joins the shadow of the lighthouse.

Soon after, there comes the crunch of boots, and, disoriented, you shout, “Annihilation! Annihilation!” and flail about until you realize the apparition kneeling before you is the one person impervious to the suggestion.

“It’s just me, the biologist.”

Just you. Just the biologist. Just your defiant weapon, hurled against the walls of Area X.

She props you up, presses water to your mouth, clearing some of the blood as you cough.

“Where is the surveyor?” you ask.

“Back at the base camp,” she tells you.

“Wouldn’t come with you?” Afraid of the biologist, afraid of the burgeoning flame, just like you. “A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating.” A hypnotic suggestion meant to calm her, even if it will have no more effect than a comforting nursery rhyme.

As the conversation unspools, you keep faltering and losing track of it. You say things you don’t mean, trying to stay in character—the person the biologist knows you as, the construct you created for her. Maybe you shouldn’t care about roles now, but there’s still a role to play.

She’s blaming you, but you can’t blame her. “If it was a disaster, you helped create it. You just panicked, and you gave up.” Not true—you never gave up—but you nod anyway, thinking of so many mistakes. “I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed.” True. “I should have sent you back to the border.” Not true. “I shouldn’t have gone down there with the anthropologist.” Not true, not really. You had no choice, once she slipped away from base camp, intent on proving herself.

You’re coughing up more blood, but it hardly matters now.

“What does the border look like?” A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.

I’ll tell you when I get there.

“What really happens when we cross over?”

Not what you might expect.

“What did you hide from us about Area X?”

Nothing that would have helped you. Not really.

The sun is a weak halo with no center and the biologist’s voice threads in and out, the sand both cold and hot in your clenched right hand. The pain that keeps returning in bursts is attacking every couple of microseconds, so present that it isn’t even there anymore.

Eventually, you recognize that you have lost the ability to speak. But you are still there, muffled and distant, as if you’re a kid lying on a blanket on this very beach, with a hat over your eyes. Lulled into drowsiness by the constant surging sound of the water and the sea breezes, balancing the heat that ripples over you, spreads through your limbs. The wind against your hair is a sensation as remote as the ruffling of weeds sprouting from a head-shaped rock.

“I’m sorry, but I have to do this,” the biologist tells you, almost as if she knows you can still hear her. “I have no choice.”

You feel the tug and pull on your skin, the brief incisive line, as the biologist takes a sample from your infected shoulder. From a great and insurmountable distance, searching hands descend as the biologist goes through your jacket pockets. She finds your journal. She finds your hidden gun. She finds your pathetic letter. What will she make of them? Maybe nothing at all. Maybe she’ll just throw the letter into the sea, and the gun with it. Maybe she’ll waste the rest of her life studying your journal.

She’s still talking.

“I don’t know what to say to you. I’m angry. I’m frightened. You put us here and you had a chance to tell me what you knew, and you didn’t. You wouldn’t. I’d say rest in peace, but I don’t think you will.”

Then she’s gone, and you miss her, that weight of a human being beside you, the perverse blessing of those words, but you don’t miss her for long because you are fading further still, fading into the landscape like a reluctant wraith, and you can hear a faint and delicate music in the distance, and something that whispered to you before is whispering again, and then you’re dissolving into the wind. A kind of alien regard has twinned itself to you, easily mistaken for the atoms of the air if it did not seem somehow concentrated, purposeful. Joyful?

Taken up over the still lakes, rising up across the marsh, flickering up in green-glinting reflections against the sea and the shore in the late-afternoon sun … only to wheel and bank toward the interior and its cypress trees, its black water. Then sharply up into the sky again, taking aim for the sun, the lurch and spin of it, before free fall, twisting to stare down at the onrushing earth, stretched taut above the quick flash and slow wave of reeds. You half expect to see Lowry there, wounded survivor of the long-ago first expedition, crawling toward the safety of the border. But instead there is just the biologist trudging back down the darkening path … and waiting beyond her, mewling and in distress, the altered psychologist from the expedition before the twelfth. Your fault as much as anyone’s, your fault, and irrevocable. Unforgivable.

As you curve back around, the lighthouse fast approaches. The air trembles as it pushes out from both sides of the lighthouse and then re-forms, ever questing, forever sampling, rising high only to come low yet again, and finally circling like a question mark so you can bear witness to your own immolation: a shape huddled there, leaking light. What a sad figure, sleeping there, dissolving there. A green flame, a distress signal, an opportunity. Are you still soaring? Are you still dying or dead? You can’t tell anymore.

But the whisper isn’t done with you yet.

You’re not down there.

You’re up here.

And there’s still an interrogation going on.

One that will repeat until you have given up every answer.

PART I

RANGE LIGHT

0009: THE DIRECTOR

Lowry’s secret facility, on a dreary part of the east coast, with gravel beaches and stark yellowing grass, has been set up on the bones of an old military base. Here, Lowry has been perfecting his neurology and conditioning techniques—some would say brainwashing. From atop a mossy hill hollowed out for his command and control, he rules a strange world of decommissioned silver harbor mines lolling on the lawn below and rusting gun emplacements from wars fought seventy years ago. Lowry has had a replica of Area X’s lighthouse built and a replica of the expedition base camp, and even a hole in the ground meant to approximate the little known about the “topographical anomaly.” You knew this before you were summoned, and in your imagination this false lighthouse and false base camp were foreboding and almost supernatural in their effect. But, in truth, standing there with Lowry, looking out across his domain through a long plate of tinted glass, you feel more as if you’re staring at a movie set: a collection of objects that without the animation of Lowry’s paranoia and fear, his projection of a story upon them, are inert and pathetic. No, not even a movie set, you realize. More like a seaside carnival in the winter, in the off-season, when even the beach is a poem about loneliness. How lonely is Lowry out here, surrounded by all of this?

“Sit down and I’ll get you a drink.”

Very Lowry, but you don’t sit and you politely decline the drink, staring out at the shore, the sea. It’s a gray, crappy day and the weather reports say it may even snow. The water has an oily quality from offshore pollution, the dull light creating rainbows across its still surface.

“No? Well, I’ll make you one anyway.” Also very Lowry, and you’re tenser than you were a moment ago.

The room is narrow, and you’re standing at the window, behind you a long, low lime-green couch with a steel frame covered by psychedelic orange pillows. Shaped like crude downward-diving breasts, porcelain light fixtures hang in rows of twenty from a ceiling slanted to the curve of the hill. Their glow melts across the couches, tables, and wooden floor in soft overlapping circles. The whole back plate of glass sealing off the room from behind is a mirror, projecting your images and protecting you from the truth that this isn’t really a lounge and you’re here not by invitation but by order. That this is an interrogation room of sorts.

The refined Lowry, so unlike the uncouth Lowry—leaning forward from a chair catty-corner to the couch—has been spending a deliberate eternity prying ice cubes from a bowl on the glass table in front of you into the glasses, one by one, clink by clink. He opens a bottle of scotch with care, and, with a tap of the bottle neck against glass, pours out two fingers.

Lowry, bent over his task, letting the moment elongate further. The mane of golden hair now silver, grown long. The determined, solid head on a thick neck, the landmarks of features upon a face that had served him well: craggy good looks, people say, like an astronaut or old-fashioned movie star. People who have never seen the photographs of Lowry after the first expedition into Area X, that dehydrated unshaven face still imprinted with an encounter with the horrific unknown, Lowry gone somewhere no one else had ever gone. “An honorable guy” back then, charismatic and direct. Even gone to fat a little, a thickness around the stomach, he retains some charm. Even with a left eye prone to wandering as if a tiny planet is straining out of alignment, being pulled to the side by the attraction of something just out of the frame. Those bright, piercing blue eyes. One scintilla more brilliant and all of his charisma would be wasted—the determined nose, the resolute jaw almost a parody, like the coastline of a confident country—undermined by a stare too glacial. But there is just enough warmth in that gaze to preserve the rest of the illusion.

“There, done,” he says, and you’re nervous to the inverse of his calm and reverential care for the drinks.

Lowry’s replaced the bunkers hidden in the adjacent hills with secret labs. Full of higher-order animals, is the ridiculous rumor, brought here to bear the brunt of Lowry’s imagination, as if to punish nature for having punished him. Experiments on neurons, neural linkage, synapse control. Boring, impossible things like that. You doubt he ever brings his fourth wife here, or his children, even though the family’s summer house is conveniently nearby. No tours of Daddy’s workplace.

You wonder what Lowry does for fun. Or maybe he’s doing it now.

He turns, a drink in each hand, dressed in his expensive dark blue suit, his gold-tipped dress shoes. He smiles, holds both the drinks outstretched, the motion doubled, tripled, by the mirror at his back. The gleam of perfect teeth. The wide politician’s smile. A dangerous smile.

It’s hardly even a flick of the wrist, there’s such economy of motion. So compact a movement of elbow and arm that for a moment you don’t realize that your drink is being thrown at you.

The glass that was in his left hand smashes against the window near your head, shatters. As you recoil, sidestep, gaze never leaving Lowry, liquid splashes your shoes and splinters of glass needle your ankles. The window’s bulletproof glass, reinforced. It doesn’t even reverberate. The drink in Lowry’s right hand isn’t even trembling. But, then, neither are you.

Lowry’s still smiling.

He says, “Now that you’ve had your drink, maybe we can get the fuck down to it.”

*   *   *

You recline, uncomfortable against the pillows, looking out at the sea, the lighthouse, the remains of the glass of scotch on the floor. You wonder if he has them specially made so they break easier. Lowry sits in his chair, leaning forward like a predator. You remain very still. Your heart is beating out some secret code you can’t decrypt. Lowry’s broad face up close, the ruddiness caused by alcohol, the abrupt lowering of the thick shoulders, the way the stomach spills onto his lap as he leans forward, his own drink still in hand. You haven’t seen any sign of his staff, but you know security waits right outside the door.

“So you thought you’d take a closer look, huh, Cynthia? Thought you’d use my own security codes and bypass your superiors and take a quick peek. Couldn’t resist seeing what’s beyond the curtain.”

It was a good plan; it should have worked. You should have been invisible coming back across. But Lowry had spies among the border command, had been alerted, and the best Grace could do was confiscate the materials they brought back, put them in the Southern Reach storage cathedral, mislabeled as from a prior expedition. Lowry’d had you held at the military base, top secret, before flying you up here. Whitby had been debriefed and then placed under a kind of house arrest.

“I already knew what was there.”

A gigantic snort—of contempt, of disbelief. “Typical desk jockey. Thinks just because they’ve read the reports, just because they’re in charge, they know something.” Said without irony.

His breath is sweet, too sweet, as if something’s on the verge of rotting inside him. The eyes are unstable, hostile, but otherwise his expression is unreadable. He looks like a man who, with just one more drink, is capable of almost anything.

“So you saunter across and have yourselves a great little holiday. Relax on the beach, right? Once you were across, got a little kinky thinking about being in that place with your boy toy, Whitby? Wanted a bit of lighthouse on the lighthouse steps?”

Silence is the best response. Central sees the sophisticated version of Lowry. You see the dregs, whatever he can get away with.

“You’ve got nothing to say to me, then. Nothing? No annotation? No further explanation?”

“I turned in my report.”

He’s half up out of his seat at that, but you don’t move at all. Even at the age of nine on the forgotten coast you knew better than to run from a bear or wild dog. You stand your ground, face them down. Maybe even growl. Would you have done the same when the rules changed, when it became Area X? You don’t know. You’re sweating under all those ridiculous lights.

“I’m trying to get inside your head without getting inside your head, if you know what I mean,” Lowry says. “I’m trying to understand how we got here. Trying to see if there’s a good fucking reason I shouldn’t just let Central fire you.”

The Central egg opening up like a mouth to issue an order to make you spontaneously combust or, more likely, evaporate like mist. But this means Lowry’s the main reason you haven’t been fired yet, which gives you back a sense of hope.

“I couldn’t keep sending in expeditions under my orders without going myself.” You couldn’t let them be the only ones to have the experience.

“Your orders? My orders, not your orders. You get that straight.” He slams his glass down on the table between you. An ice cube escapes, slides across the surface onto the floor. You resist the urge to pick it up, put it back in his glass.

“And Whitby—you just had to recruit him for your sad little expedition, too?”

You could reveal that Whitby wanted to go, but you can’t predict how Lowry would react. Whitby’s always been beyond Lowry, a fundamental misunderstanding between tragically different life-forms.

“I didn’t want to go alone. I needed backup.”

“I’m your backup. And involving the assistant director in all of this—that was a good idea, too?”

Grace might hate Lowry, but for some reason Lowry half liked Grace. Which, if she ever found out, would disgust her.

“None of it was a good idea. It was a lapse in judgment … But it’s hard to send men into battle without going into battle yourself.” Grace’s idea for a defense. Keep it simple. Keep it old school.

“Cut the bullshit. Did Grace suggest you say that? I bet she did.”

Have you missed a bug this time around, or is this just a guess?

Again: “You’ve got our reports.”

Lowry is the only one who does have them. The army’s border command knows this but Grace has concealed it from the Southern Reach, at Lowry’s request—“for reasons of morale and security clearance”—pending a final decision. Officially you’re still taking a very long vacation, and Whitby’s on administrative leave.

“Fuck your reports. You’re trying to hide Whitby from me”—not strictly true—“and your findings seem flimsy, incomplete. You were in there almost three weeks and your report is four pages long?”

“Nothing that unusual happened. Considering.”

“Considering bullshit. What did Whitby see? Something real or just another fucking hallucination? Do you understand what could’ve happened by going there? Do you understand what you could’ve stirred up?” The words coming out of his mouth slur together so it sounds like stirrups.

“I understand.” A toy lighthouse suddenly come to life.

Lowry, leaning in then, lurching in, to whisper, in a miasma of that sweet rotting breath, “You want to know what’s funny. What’s so fucking funny?”

“No.” Here it comes. As if he’s somebody’s gramps at a holiday gathering. The same story almost every time.

“Back in the day. Back then, you got it all wrong. If you’d ‘fessed up’ to the old Ess Arr during the interview, the kicker is they might’ve taken you anyway. You might’ve gotten hired. They might have done it, knowing the old director. True, maybe a sick kind of fascination attached, like with some special, intelligent lab animal—a special, particularly magnificent white rabbit, say. True, you’d never have made director, but, fuck, that job sucks, right? As you’re finding out. As you’re going to keep finding out. Problem now, though, is the deception’s gone on too long. So what the hell do we do.”

The problem, from your point of view, is less the past than the present. The time when you could somehow have tried to contain Lowry or influence him is long gone. As soon as he’d ascended to Central, been canonized, you couldn’t touch him.

*   *   *

That person, the person you’d been back before Ess Arr, had been careful—so careful trying to get to the point where you could do something reckless like cross the border into Area X.

Your father had been paranoid about the government, every once in a while took on something shady to supplement the day job as a part-time bartender—a low-level grifter. He didn’t want any involvement. He didn’t want any trouble. So he kept the government out of it, didn’t tell you your mother was probably dead and that you weren’t going back to the forgotten coast ever again until he absolutely had to. Told you to give vague answers to the men who came to interview you about your mother—it would be better for your mother that way. Anything to avoid a light shining on his “business ventures.”

“You don’t know this, ’cause you’re too young,” came the usual lecture, “but politicians run all the big scams. Government’s the thief of all time. That’s why it tries so hard to catch thieves—it doesn’t like the competition. You don’t want that on your back your whole life just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

When he did tell you that she was gone, you cried for a month, even as that look on your father’s face, the gruff warning, the way everything in your constantly moving household operated on caution, indoctrinated you in the merits of silence.

Over time your memory of your mother faded, in the way of not knowing if an image or moment was something you’d experienced or seen going through the photographs your dad kept in a shoe box in the closet. Not in the way of keeping something close rather than pushing it away. You would stare at pictures of your mother—on the deck with friends, a drink in her hand or on the beach with your dad—and imagine that she was the one saying, “Don’t forget me,” feel ashamed when it was the lighthouse keeper’s face that kept coming back to you.

Tentative and then with more determination, you started your own investigation. You learned there was something called the Southern Reach, devoted to cleaning up the “environmental devastation” in what had been the forgotten coast and was now Area X. Your scrapbook grew so fat it was hard to open, filled with clippings from books, newspapers, magazines, and, later, websites. Conspiracy theories dominated, or speculative recastings of the government’s official story. The truth always something vague and out of focus that had nothing to do with what you’d seen, with the sense you’d had of the lighthouse keeper becoming different.

In your first year of college, you realized that you wanted to work for the Southern Reach, no matter what their role, and, with your grifter’s sense of the truth, that your past would be a liability. So you changed your name, hired a private investigator to help you hide the rest, and went on to pursue a degree. Cognitive psychology, focused on perceptual psychology, with a minor in organizational psychology as well. You married a man you never really loved, for a variety of reasons, divorced him fifteen months later, and spent close to five years working as a consultant, applying and reapplying to Central with application-form answers tailor-made to give you a shot at the Southern Reach.

The director at the time, a navy man, loved by all but not hard enough by far, hadn’t interviewed you. Lowry had—still at the Southern Reach back then and with his own agenda. He liked to acquire his power sideways. There had been the formal meeting in his office, and then you’d gone out to the edge of the courtyard and had a different kind of interview.

“We can’t be overheard out here,” he’d said, and alarm bells had gone off. Irrational thought that he was going to proposition you, like some of Dad’s friends. Something beyond his polite demeanor, his well-made clothes, his air of authority, must have warned you.

But Lowry had something more long-term in mind.

“I had my own people check you out. It was a good effort there, all that work to disguise yourself. A solid B for effort, all of that, sure. Not bad at all, considering. But I still found out, and that means Central would have, too, if I hadn’t covered up your tracks. What was left of them.” A broad smile, a genial manner. You could have been talking about sports or the swamp sweltering there in front of you, seeming to simmer in its own thick broth.

You cut to the important bit: “Are you going to turn me in?” Throat dry, it seeming hotter than it had a moment before. Memories of your father being taken off to jail for petty fraud, always with the bravado of a smile and a blown kiss, as if the point after all was to get caught, to have an audience, to be noticed.

A chuckle from Lowry, and you intimidated by what struck you back then as his sophistication despite his failings. His verve. The way he filled out the suit, and the way his face reflected experience, like he’d seen what you wanted to see, been where you wanted to be.

“Turn you in, Gloria … I mean, Cynthia. Turn you in? To whom? The guys in charge of keeping track of fake names and false identities? The forgotten coast truthers? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m going to turn you in to anyone.” The unspoken thought: I’m going to keep you all for myself.

“What do you want?” you asked. Thankful, for once, that being your father’s daughter meant sometimes you could cut right through the bullshit.

“Want?” Disingenuous to the core. “Nothing. Nothing yet, anyway. In fact, it’s all about you … Cynthia. I’m going to walk back in there with you and recommend you for the job. And if you pass training at Central, then we’ll see. As for all the rest of it … that’ll just be our secret. Not really a little secret, but a secret.”

“Why would you do that?” Incredulous, not sure you had heard right.

With a wink: “Oh, I only really trust people who’ve been to Area X. Even pre–Area X.”

*   *   *

At first, the price wasn’t so bad. All he wanted, off the record, told to him and him alone, was an account of your last days on the forgotten coast. The lighthouse keeper, the Séance & Science Brigade. “Describe the man and the woman,” he said, meaning Henry and Suzanne, and all of his questions about the S&SB sounded as if you were filling in pieces of some story he’d already heard part of before.

Within months, the favors asked for and reluctantly given multiplied—support for this or that initiative or recommendation, and when you had more influence, to push against certain things, to be less than enthusiastic, to stall. Mostly, you realize, on certain committees connected to the science division, to undermine or curtail Central’s influence within the Southern Reach. All of it clever and by degrees so that you didn’t really notice the escalation until you were so mired in it that it was just part of your job.

Eventually, Lowry supported your bid to become director. Coming to the Southern Reach had been like being allowed to listen to the heartbeat of a mysterious beast. But as director you came even closer—terrifyingly closer, trapped within the chamber walls, needing time to adjust. Time exploited by Lowry, of course.

*   *   *

Tossed onto the table: the latest satellite footage from above Area X, images from on high reduced to 8½ × 11 glossies. Glamour shots of an inexhaustible resource. This blank mimicry of the normal, marred only by the blurs you might expect to find on photos taken by ghost hunters. Definitive proof of a change, this blurring. As if somehow the Southern Reach is losing the ability to see even the lie.

“Evil advances with good. But these terms have no meaning in Area X. Or to Area X. So why should they always apply to us in pursuit of an enemy to whom they go unrecognized? An indifferent context deserves equal indifference from us—if we want to survive.”

You’re not expected to answer, Lowry taking a break to philosophize as he fills up his drink for a second time. Nor would you know what to answer, for you would never characterize Lowry as indifferent, or as expressing indifference through his actions. As ever, this is part of the deception: the ability to convey authority by instilling in others his own confidence.

Lowry’s already threatened to put you under hypnosis, but the one thing you have resolved, having lived on the outskirts of Lowry’s experiments, is that you will never allow him that. Always hoping that Lowry must have limits, can’t be untouchable, can’t operate without some constraint from above. Surely every action he takes reveals something about his motives to someone somewhere with the power to intervene?

So you’re at what appears to be an impasse.

Then he surprises you.

“I want you to meet someone else who has a stake in this. Someone you know already. Jackie Severance.”

Not a name you expected to hear. But there she is—escorted in by Mary Phillips, one of Lowry’s assistants, through the mirror door to your side of the glass, Severance oblivious to the way her heels are crunching broken glass. Dressed as impeccably as always, still addicted to scarves.

Has she been listening the whole time? The dynastic successor to the legendary Jack Severance. Jackie, about fifteen years removed from her last stint with the Southern Reach—a bright star still shining in the firmament of Central’s personal cosmology, despite a dark star of a son in the service that she’s had to rescue more than once. Lowry the outlaw and Severance the insider seem unlikely allies. One’s holding the silver egg in her hand and petting it. The other is trying to smash it with an invisible hammer.

What’s the play, here? Does Lowry hold something over her, or does she hold something over Lowry?

“Jackie is going to be my adviser on this situation. She’s going to be involved from now on. And before we make a final decision on what to do with you, I want you to repeat for her everything that’s in the report—everything that happened to you across the border. One last time.”

Severance smiles the way a crocodile smiles and sits on the couch next to you while Lowry shuffles off to make her a drink. “Nothing too formal, Cynthia. Nothing you need to prep. And in no particular order. You can tell it in whatever order you like.”

“That’s kind of you, Jackie.” It’s not kind—it’s just an attempt to get a different version. Which makes this a ritual of sorts, with a preordained outcome.

So you go back over it all again with Severance, who stops you from time to time with questions blunter than you expected, coming from someone you’ve always thought of as a political animal.

“You didn’t go anywhere else? No shortcuts or other excursions?”

“Excursions?”

“It’s easy to omit what doesn’t seem relevant.”

The same flat smile.

You don’t bother to answer.

“Did you bring anything back with you?”

“Just the usual recovery along the way, of past expedition equipment, as happens with many expeditions.” The story you and Whitby have decided on, because you want to hold on to the plant and phone, test them at the Southern Reach, not have them taken by Central. You’re the experts, not Central.

“What sense did you get of the journals in the lighthouse? Was there an impression or idea you had about them, seeing them all like that? If that’s not too vague.”

No particular sense or impression or idea, you tell her. They were just journals. Because you don’t want to go there, don’t yet want to relive the end of your trip, the things that happened in the lighthouse.

“And nothing there seemed unusual or out of order?”

“No.” You’re selling the simpler story of danger in the tunnel.

Later, leaning in, conspiratorial, just you girls: “Gloria. Cynthia. Why’d you do it? Really?” As if Lowry’s not in the room.

You shrug, give a pained smile.

At the end of your account, Severance smiles and says, “It’s possible that we’ll file this under ‘never happened’ and move on. And if so, you have Lowry to thank.” A hand on your arm, though, as if to say, “Don’t forget I helped.” You get to keep Whitby, too, she says, if Whitby passes a psych eval you personally help conduct at Central, off the books. But. “You are vouching for him. You are responsible for him.” Like you’re a child asking to keep a pet.

The new border commander will be handpicked by Lowry and report to both Lowry and Severance, and they will institute procedures so that, as Lowry puts it, “You and Whitby and any other son of a bitch stupid enough to try another jailbreak thinks twice.”

A few useless pleasantries and Jackie’s left the room as fast as she got there, the encounter so brief you wonder why else she’s here, what other business she has with Lowry. Has she walked into a trap, or has Lowry? Trying to remember the exact date when Severance came to the Southern Reach. Going through a list of her tasks, her duties, and where she was when. Thinking that there is some part of the puzzle you can’t see, that you need to see.

*   *   *

Lowry, there at the center of his secret headquarters, overlooking the sea as snow in thick flakes begins to cover the grass, the sea mines, the little paths. With the geese and seagulls that will never care about Lowry’s plans or your own huddled by the fake lighthouse, as deceived by it as the expeditions have been by the real one. But Severance is out there now, walking by the rocks, staring across the water. She’s on her phone, but Lowry doesn’t see her—just his own reflection, and she’s trapped there, within his outline.

Lowry, pumping himself up, pacing in front of the glass, smacking his chest with one hand. “And what I want is this: The next expedition, they don’t go to Central. They come here. They receive their training here. You want Area X to react? You want something to change? I’ll change it. I’ll coil things so far up inside Area X’s brain, things that’ll have a sting in the tail. That’ll draw blood. That’ll fucking make the enemy know we’re the resistance. That we’re on to them.”

Some trails go cold fast; some trails take a long time to pick up and follow. Seeing Severance walking along the ridge of black rocks near the lighthouse, even a fake lighthouse, raises your hackles, makes you want to say, “That is mine, not yours.”

Lowry’s still standing over you and ranting about what will happen and how it’s going to happen. Of course he wants more control. Of course he is going to get it.

But now you know, too, what you’ve only guessed at before: Beneath Lowry’s bluster, he feels that your fates are intertwined. That he’s more bound to you than ever.

*   *   *

After six months, you will be able to return to the Southern Reach. No one there will know why you were gone so long, and Grace won’t tell them, promises she’ll have pushed them so hard in the interim that “they won’t have time to think about it.”

While you wait out your suspension at home, you have this image in your head of Grace as a tall, stern black woman in a white lab coat and the tricornered hat of a general, holding a saber at arm’s length, for some reason standing in the prow of a rowboat, crossing a strategically important river. When it’s time for her to drop the hat, get rid of the boat, cede control back to you, how will she feel about that?

Single dim thought most nights, after a doctor’s appointment or buying groceries for dinner: Which world am I really living in? The one in which you can hear Whitby’s screams in the lighthouse intermingling with the screams from the first expedition, or the one in which you’re putting cans of soup in the cupboard. Can you exist in both? Do you want to? When Grace calls to ask how your day is going, should you say “Same as usual” or “Awful, like conducting autopsies over and over again for no reason”?

Sitting on a stool in the bar at Chipper’s—that’s the same, isn’t it, after you come back? Perhaps even more so, given you have more time to spend there. The Realtor’s around a lot, too. She talks all the time—about a trip up north to visit her family, about a movie she saw, about local politics. Sometimes the veteran with the perpetual beer in hand dredges up a long-ago memory of his kids, trying to be part of the conversation.

As the Realtor and the drunk talk past and through you, you’re nodding as if you know what they’re talking about, as if you can relate, when all you can see now are two images of the lighthouse keeper superimposed, saying the same thing at different times, to two different versions of you. One in darkness and one in light.

“You’re thinking of your own children, aren’t you?” says the Realtor. “I can tell.”

Your mind must have wandered. The mask must have slipped.

“Yes, you’re right,” you say. “Sure.”

You have another beer, start to tell the Realtor all about your kids—where they go to school, how you wish you saw them more often, that they’re studying to be doctors. That you hope to see them around the holidays. That they seem to belong to a different world now that they’re all grown up. The veteran, standing at the end of the bar, staring past the Realtor at you, has a strange look on his face. A look of recognition, as if he knows what you’re doing.

Hell, maybe you should play some songs on the jukebox, too. Maybe go take a turn at karaoke later, have a few more beers, make up a few more details of your life. Only, the Realtor left at some point, and it’s just you and the veteran and some people trickling in late who you don’t know, won’t ever know. The floor’s sticky, dark with old stains. The bottles behind the bar have water-cooler cups over them, to keep the fruit flies out. There’s a sheen off the bar top that’s not entirely natural. Behind you, the lanes are dark and the faded heavens have risen again, unimaginable wonders across the ceiling, some of them requiring a moment to recognize.

Because the other world always bleeds into this one. Because no matter how you try to keep what happened at the lighthouse between you and Whitby, you know it will leak out eventually, in some form, will have consequences.

At the lighthouse, Whitby had wandered, and you were still drifting through the downstairs when you realized that you couldn’t hear him moving around in the next room anymore. In the stillness and the dust, the way the light through the broken front door made the darkness murky, you expected to find him standing in a corner, a figure luminous in shadow.

But soon enough you realized he’d gone up the lighthouse stairs, headed for the very top. There came the sounds of fighting and the splintering of wood. One voice rising above the other, both curiously similar, and how could there be a second voice at all? So you followed fast, and as you climbed, there was both a doubling and a dissonance, for in memory, the steps had been much wider, the trek much longer, the space inside the lighthouse conveying a kind of weightlessness, the walls once painted white, the windows open to receive the sky, the scent of cut grass brought by Saul. But in the darkness, worried about Whitby, you had become a giant or the lighthouse had become lost or diminished, not just undone by time, but contracting, like the spiraling fossil of a shell, leading you to a place no longer familiar. Erasing, with each step, what you thought you knew.

At the top, you discovered Whitby down in the watch room panting like an animal, his clothes torn and blood on his hands, and the strange impression that the edges of the journals were rippling, enveloping Whitby, trying to drown him. No one else there, just Whitby with an impossible story of encountering his doppelgänger, False Whitby, on the landing, chasing him up to the lantern room, until they had fallen through the open trapdoor onto the mound of journals, off-balance and awkward. The smell of them. The bulk of them. The feel of them around Real Whitby and False Whitby as they toiled in their essential opposition, now in and now out of the light coming through the open trapdoor.

How to verify this story of not one but two Whitbys? Not Whitby punching himself, kicking himself, biting himself, awash in flapping paper, but doing this to another version. His wounds were inconclusive.

But the tableau fascinates you, returns to you during your six months off, even while chopping onions for chili in your kitchen or mowing the lawn.

Sometimes you try to imagine what it would have been like if you had arrived earlier, not in the aftermath, and stopped there, at the top of the steps, peering down into that space, unable to move, watching the two Whitbys struggle. You can almost believe that Whitby birthed Whitby, that in exploring Area X, something in Whitby’s own nature created this paradox, with one version, one collection of impulses, thoughts, and opinions, trying, once and for all, to exterminate the other.

Until two pale hands reach out to choke one pale throat, and two faces stare at each other, inches apart, the face above deformed by a paroxysm of rage while the face below remains calm, so calm, surrounded by the ripped and crumpled journals. The white paper with the red line of the margin, the blue lines to write on. The pages and pages of sometimes incomprehensible handwritten text. All of those journals without names but only functions noted, and sometimes not even that, as if Area X has snuck in its own accounts. Are they shifting and settling as if something huge sleeps beneath them, breathing in and out?

Is that a glow surrounding them, or surrounding Whitby? The Whitbys?

Until there is the crack. Of a neck? Of a spine? And the Whitby pinned against the mound goes slack and his head lolls to the side and the Whitby atop him, frozen, emits a kind of defeated sob and slides off Dead Whitby, awkwardly manages to wriggle and roll his way free … and sits there in the corner, staring at his own corpse.

Then, and only then, are you drawn to wonder whether your Whitby won—and who this other Whitby might have been, who in death would have seemed preternaturally calm, face smooth and unwrinkled, eyes wide and staring, only the angle of the body suggesting that some violence has been perpetrated upon it.

Afterward, you forced Whitby to come out of that space, to take some air by the railing, to look out on that gorgeous unknowable landscape. You pointed out old haunts disguised as your exhaustive encyclopedic knowledge of the forgotten coast. Whitby saying something to you—urgently, but you not really hearing him. You more intent on filling up the space between with your own script, your own interpretation—either to calm Whitby or to negate his experience. To forget about the mound of journals. A thing you don’t want to consider for too long, that you put out of your mind because isn’t that the way of things? To ignore the unreal so it doesn’t become more real.

On the way down, you searched for Dead Whitby, but he still wasn’t anywhere.

You may never know the truth.

But in what Whitby swore was Dead Whitby’s backpack, you found two curious items: a strange plant and a damaged cell phone.

03: THE ISLAND

Soon enough, the island became a shadow or smudge on the seaward horizon, so I knew it was only a matter of days, even if I had trouble telling how much time was passing. The island that was as blank to me now as my husband had been upon his return. I knew nothing of what I might encounter there, and the reality of this sobered me, made me monitor the brightness more closely, fight it harder, as if, ridiculously, by the time I made it across, I had to be at my best, my most alert. For what? For a corpse I might find if I were lucky? For some memory of a life back in the world that we could now misremember as more placid and comfortable than it had been? I don’t know the answer to those questions, except that an organism’s primary directive is to continue to exist—to breathe and to eat and to shit and to sleep and to fuck, and to otherwise carry on with the joyous repetitions of its days.

I secured my backpack, and I dove into the water.

*   *   *

Anyone reading who likes stories about characters huddled around guttering fires with the wolves waiting just beyond will be disappointed to learn that I was not attacked by leviathans from the depths as I swam over to the island. That, although tired and cold, I easily set up living quarters in the ruined lighthouse waiting on the shore. That I found enough food there, over time, by catching fish and foraging for berries, digging up tubers that while bland were edible. I trapped small animals when I had to, planted my own garden using seeds from the fruit I found, fertilized it with homemade compost.

At first, the lighthouse perplexed me more than anything on the island. It kept striking me as a mirror of the lighthouse on the coast—the way the light glanced off of it—and that seemed to me like some kind of obscure and potentially ruthless joke. It could be just another detail in a host of them that brought me no closer to answers about Area X. Or this confluence, this incomplete synonym, the top caved in and the landing I chose as my stronghold languishing under a trough of wet dead leaves … it could be an unmistakable and massive indicator of some kind.

I took my time, later, exploring the lighthouse, the buildings nearby, the abandoned town, with a systematic and scientific thoroughness, but I felt that my first reconnaissance should be broader: to scour the island for threats, for food and water sources, for any sign of other human life. Not wanting to hope, for I had found no evidence of recent occupation of the lighthouse, which seemed the most likely shelter because most of the other buildings were, even at first glance, dilapidated, had rotted with astonishing swiftness once Area X had imposed its will on this place. There were also signs of pollution, of old scars, but faded so fast into the firmament that I could not gauge how long ago they had been inflicted. Whether Area X was accelerating the erasure of their effects.

This island is about fourteen miles long, six broad, and forty in circumference, containing what I would estimate as about eighty-four square miles or more than fifty thousand acres. The pine-and-oak forest comprises most of the interior, sprawling down toward the shore on the landward side, but the side facing the sea has been assaulted by storms, and there you will find mostly scrub and moss and gnarled bushes. Fresh springwater occurs more frequently than I had expected, from rivulets meandering down from the hills toward the shore. This probably explains the placement of the abandoned town, along with protection from storms blowing in from the sea. But I also found one faucet on the lighthouse grounds that, although spewing forth brown rust at first, eventually settled down to a trickle of something brackish but drinkable, from some hidden aquifer.

Farther afield, I found a rich ecosystem in which a wary rabbit population was held in check by raptors and island foxes, these latter the scrappy small sort that suggested an isolated initial breeding pair or pairs had adapted to the limited range and opportunities of their surroundings. The birdlife was robust as well, from tree swallows and purple martins to vireos and wrens, woodpeckers and nighthawks—along with too many types of shorebirds to catalog. At dusk, the sound of avian life triumphant forms a mighty bursting chorus of voices, such a contrast with the silence of the marshes, whose own richness is more muted, almost watchful.

I wandered the island for many days, both its perimeter and the interior, getting a feel for it and what it contained. As I recorded my observations, I cursed the Southern Reach for not providing us with a map, even if I also knew that I would have tested any map provided to me and wound up doing almost as much work. Not just because I distrusted the Southern Reach, but also because I distrusted Area X. Yet when I was done with this initial inspection, I could not say there was anything preternatural or unusual about the island itself.

Other, perhaps, than the owl.

04: THE OWL

Did I find my husband? In a way, if not in the form in which I had known him. On the far side of the island, in the late afternoon, after I had burst through nettles and scrub and sticker, lacerating long grasses, all of it overshadowed by close-knit copses of wind-gnarled black pines—burst through to a tranquil cove that cupped a white-sand beach and shallows that extended a fair distance before the darkness of deep water took over. On the beach, a scattering of low-lying concrete pilings and rocks, all that remained of an abandoned pier from another age, created a perch for more than a dozen cormorants.

A single stunted pine the height of a person stood defiant amid rocks and cormorants alike, blackened and almost bare of needles. On one outstretched branch, the unlikely silhouette of a common horned owl with sharp tufted ears: rust-brown face with white feathers at chin and throat, mottled gray-and-brown body. My loud approach should have alarmed it, but this owl just perched there, surrounded by the cormorants sunning themselves. An unnatural scene, to me, and it brought me up short.

I thought at first the owl must be hurt, more so when I came closer and it still didn’t move, unlike the whirling circle of cormorants that, complaining bitterly, flew away, a long low line over the water, exiled to rove, restless. Any other owl would have taken wing and disappeared back into the forest. But instead, it remained glued to the ridged, scaly bark of the branch, staring out at the fading sun with enormous eyes.

Even when I stood right beside the tree, awkward on the rocks, the owl did not fly, did not look over at me. Injured or dying, I thought again, but cautious, ready to retreat, because an owl can be a dangerous animal. This one was huge, four pounds at least, despite its hollow bones, lightweight feathers. But nothing I had done had yet provoked it, and so I stood there as the sun began to set, the owl beside me.

I had studied owls early in my career and knew that neuroses were unknown among them as opposed to other, more intelligent bird species. Most owls are also beautiful, along with another quality that is hard to define but registers as calm in the observer. There was such a hush upon that beach, and one that didn’t register with me as sinister.

At dusk, the owl turned its fierce yellow gaze upon me at last, and with the tip of its outstretched wing brushing against my face, the bird launched itself into the air in a smooth, silent arc that sent it off toward the forest behind me. Forever gone, or so I believed, with any of a number of reasons to account for its odd behavior. The lines between the eccentricities of wildlife and the awareness imposed by Area X are difficult to separate at times.

I needed to seek shelter for the night, and I found on the far western edge of the beach a small circle of rocks around the blackened ash of an old fire—above the high-tide mark, set back almost into the beginning of the forest. I found, too, in the last glimmers of light, an old tent, faded by the sun, weathered and crumpled by storms. Someone had lived here for a time, and without daring to think who it might have been, I made camp there, started my own fire, cooked a rabbit I had killed earlier that afternoon. Then, tired, I fell asleep to the sound of the waves, under a soft and subdued canopy of stars.

I woke only once during the night and saw the owl perched opposite me across the fire, atop my backpack. It had brought me another rabbit. I dozed again, and it was gone when I woke.

*   *   *

I stayed there three days, and I admit I did so because of the owl, and because the cove was near-perfect; I could see spending my life there. But also because I wanted to know more about the person who had made the fire, lived in the tent. Even in disarray and so old, it was clearly a standard-issue tent, although it carried no Southern Reach logo on it.

A little ways into the forest behind the tent, I found an expedition-issue sidearm, much like my own, in a rotting holster, amid wildflowers and sedge weeds and moss. I found the undershirt from an expedition uniform, and then the jacket and socks, strewn across that expanse as if given up willingly, even joyously … or as if some animal or person had thrown them there. I did not bother to gather them up, to try to re-create this exoskeleton of a person. I would not find a name, I knew that, and I did not find a letter, either. I would never really know if it might have been my husband who had camped there or some other person even more anonymous to me.

And yet there was the owl, always watching over me, always nearby. Always a little closer, a little tamer, but never completely tame. It would drop twigs at my feet, at random, more as if through some absentmindedness than on purpose. It would bow at me, a typical owl behavior, then spend the next hours distant, almost sullen. Once or twice, it would perch at close to my height, and I would approach as an experiment, only for the owl to hiss at me almost like a cat, and beat its wings and fluff out its feathers until I had retreated. Other times, on a branch high up, the owl would sway and bob, bob and sway, moving its body from side to side while gripping its perch in the same place. Then look down at me stupidly.

I moved on, following the shore, sometimes also shadowed by the cormorants. I did not expect the owl to join me, but I am unashamed to say I was glad when it did. By the end of the second week, it ate from my hands at dusk, before going off to its nocturnal life. During the night I would hear its curious hollow hooting—a sound many find mysterious or threatening but that I have always found playful or deeply irreverent. The owl would reappear briefly toward dawn—once, in a tangle of feathers as it plunged its head into the sand and ruffled out its plumage, giving itself a dry bath and then picking at lice and other parasites.

The thought crept into my head when I wasn’t careful, and then I would banish it. Was this my husband in altered form? Did he recognize me, or was this owl simply responding to the presence of a human being? Unlike the uncanny presence of other animals, there was no such feeling here—no sense of it to me, at least. But, I reasoned, perhaps I had become acclimated by then. Perhaps I’d reached a kind of balance with the brightness that normalized such indicators.

When I came full circle, back to the ruined lighthouse, the owl stayed with me. He tried even less for my attention, but in the twilight would appear in the branches of a tree outside the lighthouse, and we would stand there together. Sometimes he would already be there by midafternoon, if I walked through the shade of the dark trees, and follow me, making great hoot-hoots to warn of my coming. But never earlier, as if he remembered that I hated the unnatural in animals, as if he understood me. Besides, he had his own business—hunting. After a week, though, he roosted in the shattered upper spire of the lighthouse. The cormorants, too, reappeared there, or perhaps they were not the same cormorants, but I had not seen so many of the birds in that place before my explorations.

During the day, the owl would sun himself up there before falling into a sleep that sometimes was accompanied by a low and nasal snore. During the night, I would fall asleep on the landing and above me hear, so faint, the whisper as his wings caressed the air on his flight to the forest to seek prey. In those transitional moments, between day and night, when anything seemed possible, or I tricked myself into believing that this was true, I began to talk to the owl. Even though I dislike anthropomorphizing animals, it did not seem important to withhold this communication because the evidence of his eccentric behavior was self-evident. Either he understood or did not, but even if not, sound is more important to owls than to human beings. So I spoke to him in case he was other than what he seemed, and as common courtesy, and as a way to help with the welling up of the brightness.

Despite this, which might be foolishness, how could I ever truly recognize in him the one I’d sought, ever cross that divide? Yet there grew to be a useful symbiosis in our relationship. I continued to hunt for him, and he continued to hunt for me, although with a kind of sloppiness, as if unintentional—rabbits and squirrels falling from his perch down to mine. In some ways, wordless on his end and based on the most basic principles of friendship and survival, this arrangement worked better than anything back in the wider world. I had still seen no person on the island, but now I found more evidence of a prior presence.

It was not what I’d expected.

05: THE SEEKER & SURVEILLANCE BANDITS

Returned from my exploration, with the owl as my companion, I now slowly took the measure of my immediate surroundings: the lighthouse, the buildings around it, and the town beyond. The town, which must have been abandoned long before the creation of Area X, consisted of a main street and a few side streets that then faded into the impression of dirt roads, the tire ruts overgrown with weeds. All of it empty; I could be the ruler of this place by default, if I wanted to be.

“Main Street” had become a kind of facade, having fallen to a disheveled army of vines and flowering trees and bushes and weeds and wildflowers. Squirrels and badgers, skunks and raccoons, had taken over the remains, ospreys nesting on the ruins of rooftops. In the upper story of a house or former business pigeons and starlings perched on gaping windows, the glass broken and fallen inside. It all had the rich scent of the reclaimed, of sweet blossoms and fresh grass in the summer, with the pungent underlying odor of animals marking their territory. It had also a hint of the unexpected for me, a kind of lingering shock to see these rough, rude memorials to the lives of human beings in a place I had thought largely free of them.

Here and there, I found more signs of expeditions that had reached the island and either gone back across the water or died here and been transformed here. An abandoned backpack with the usual map in it. A flashlight. A rifle scope. A water canteen. These were tantalizing remnants—indicators that I tried to read too much into, for reasons that revealed a weakness in me. It should have been enough to know others had come here first, and that others had sought answers, whether they had found them or not.

But there were sedimentary layers to this information, and some of the older materials, which I believed dated back to just before and right after the creation of Area X, interested me more. People had taken up residence here within that narrow spectrum, and those people went by the initials of S&SB, although I never once found a fragment that told me what these initials stood for. Nor could I recall, either back in the world or during our training for the expedition, ever hearing of such an organization. Not, of course, that the island had been given any thought or attention in that training. By then, any betrayal by the Southern Reach struck me as just more of the same.

In lieu of any other evidence, I called them the Seeker & Surveillance Bandits. It suited what I knew about them from the scraps they’d left behind, and for a time, it occupied my days to try to reconstruct their identity and their purpose on the island.

The leavings of the S&SB, their detritus, took the form of damaged equipment that I identified as meant to record radio waves, to monitor infrared and other frequencies, along with more esoteric machines that defeated my attempts to decode their purpose. Along with such broken flotsam, I uncovered weathered (often unreadable) papers and photographs, and even a few recordings that croaked out incomprehensible too-slow words as I plugged them into a failing generator that gave me only about thirty seconds of power at a time before cutting out.

All of this I found inside the abandoned buildings on Main Street, remains protected by fallen-in supporting walls or in basements where certain corners had escaped flooding. Burn marks existed in places where controlled fires had been started indoors. But I couldn’t tell if the S&SB had started these fires or if they had come later, during some desperate phase before everything had been assimilated by Area X. Looking at all of that ash, I realized that any attempt to reconstruct a sequence of events would be forever incomplete because someone had wanted to hide something.

I took what I found to the lighthouse and began to sort through it, such as it was, all under the watchful but unhelpful eye of the owl. Despite the oblique nature of what I had recovered, I began to piece together hints of purpose, suggestions of conspiracy. All of what I relate here is highly speculative but, I think, supported by the fragile evidence available to me.

The S&SB had begun their occupation of this island not with a mapping of the perimeter but with a thorough investigation of the ruined lighthouse, which meant they had come here with a specific purpose. That investigation had been twinned to establishing a kind of link between the lighthouse on the island and the one on the mainland. There were references to something that “might or might not” have been transferred, suggesting that perhaps the lens in the lighthouse I knew so well had originally come from here. But in context, this “might or might not” seemed almost certain to exist separate from the lens itself—or could exist separate. Torn pages from a book on the history of famous lighthouses, the lineage of lens manufacture and shipping, helped me little.

There also was debate as to whether they sought “an object or a recordable phenomenon,” which seemed to return to the idea of linking the two lighthouses; if a “phenomenon,” then this linkage was important. If an “object,” then the linkage might not be important, and either the island or the lighthouse on the mainland would no longer be of interest. Further, the nature of these fragments was contradictory as to their organization and sophistication. Some S&SB members seemed to lack even a rudimentary understanding of science and wasted my time with scrawlings about ghosts and hauntings and copied-down passages from books about demonic possession. The listing of stages interested me only inasmuch as I could transfer it to the biological world of parasitic and symbiotic relationships. Others among them lay out under the stars at night and recorded their dreams as if they were transmissions from beyond. As a kind of fiction, it enlivened my reading but was otherwise worthless.

Along with this ephemeral superstition, I would also group the lesser scientific observations, which reflected the involvement of third- or fourth-rate minds. Here, it was not so much the accuracy of the observations but the banality of the conclusions. Into this category fell extrapolations about “prebiotic” materials and “spooky action at a distance,” along with already debunked experiments from decades past.

What stood out from what I tossed on the compost heap seemed to come from a different sort of intelligence entirely. This mind or these minds asked questions and did not seem interested in hasty answers, did not care if one question birthed six more and if, in the end, none of those six questions led to anything concrete. There was a patience that seemed imposed and not at all a part of the swirling quicksilver consciousness that surrounded it. If I understood the scraps correctly, my pathetic attempt at playing oracle, this second type not only kept tabs on people living on the mainland, but on certain of its own fellow S&SB members. It did not have only experimentation on its collective mind.

Does the residue of a presence leave an identifiable trace? Although I could not be sure, I felt I had identified such a presence regardless—one that had infiltrated the S&SB late. A shift in command and control toward something more sophisticated, staring out at me from the pages I had found.

In among this detritus, these feeble guesses, the word Found! Handwritten, triumphant. Found what? But with so little data, even Found!, even the awareness of some more intelligent entity peering out from among the fragments led nowhere. Someone, somewhere had additional information, but the elements—Area X?—had so accelerated the decay of the documents that I could not glean much more, even though this was enough. Enough to suggest that there had been a kind of tampering with this coast before the creation of Area X, and my own experience to tell me that the Southern Reach had deliberately excised knowledge of the island from our expedition maps and briefings. These two data points, although more to do with absence than with positive confirmation, made me redouble my efforts looking for S&SB scraps amid the rubble. But I never found anything more than what I uncovered on my first, thorough investigation.

06: THE PASSAGE OF TIME, AND PAIN

I never had a country, never had the choice; I was born into one. But over time, this island has become my country, and I need no other. I never thought to seek the way out, back into the world. As the years passed and no one else reached my island refuge, I began to wonder if the Southern Reach existed anymore—or if it had ever existed, that perhaps there had never been another world or an expedition, and I had suffered a delusion or trauma, a kind of memory loss. One day, perhaps, I would wake up and recall it all: some cataclysm that had left me the only person in this place, with just an owl to talk to.

I survived storms that gusted in suddenly, and drought, and a nail through my foot when I wasn’t careful. I survived being bitten by many things, including a poisonous spider and a snake. I learned to become so attuned to my environment that after a time no animal, natural or unnatural, shied away at my presence, and for this reason I no longer hunted anything but fish unless forced to, relying more and more on vegetables and fruit. Although I thought I grew attuned to their messages as well.

In the lengthening silence and solitude, Area X sometimes would reveal itself in unexpected ways. I began to perceive infinitesimal shifts in the sky, as if the pieces did not quite fit together … and to acquire from the habitat around me a sense of invisible things stitching through, phantoms that almost made me reconsider my antipathy for the S&SB’s emphasis on the supernatural.

Standing in a clearing one evening, as still as possible, I felt a kind of breath or thickness of molecules from behind that I could not identify, and I willed my heartbeat to slow so that for every one of mine the hearts of the tree frogs throating out their song might beat twenty thousand times. Hoping to be so quiet that without turning I might hear or in some other way glimpse what regarded me. But to my relief it fled or withdrew into the ground a moment later.

Once, the sky broke open with rain in an unnatural way, and through the murk an odd light burned at the limits of my vision. I imagined it was the far-off lighthouse, that other expeditions had been sent in after me. But the longer I stared the more the light appeared to be cracking open the darkness, through which I glimpsed for a moment dissipating shadows that could have been peculiar storm clouds or the reverse quickening of some type of vast organism. Such phenomena, experienced off and on these past thirty years, have also been accompanied by a changing of the night sky. On such nights, presaged only by a kind of tremor in the brightness within me, there is never a moon. There is never a moon, and the stars above are unfamiliar—they are foreign, belonging to a cosmology I cannot identify. On such nights, I wish I had decided to become an astronomer.

On at least two occasions, I would define this change as more significant, as a kind of celestial cataclysm, accompanied by what might be earthquakes, and cracks or rifts appearing in the fabric of the night, soon closing, and with nothing but a greater darkness seen shining through. Somewhere, out in the world or the universe, something must be happening to create these moments of dysfunction. At least, this is my belief. There is a sense of the world around me strengthened or thickened, the weight and waft of reality more focused or determined. As if the all-too-human dolphin eye I once glimpsed staring up at me is with each new phase further subsumed in the flesh that surrounds it.

Beyond these observations, I have a single question: What is the nature of my delusion? Am I hallucinating when I see the night sky that I know? Or when I see the one that is strange? Which stars should I trust and navigate by? I stand in the ruined lighthouse some nights and look out to sea and realize that in this form, this body, I will never know.

My survival has also, to put it bluntly, been predicated by hurting myself. By the time I stood on the shore opposite the island, about to swim over, I was using pain to push the brightness back. The ways were myriad and I was precise. You can find methods to almost drown, to almost suffocate, that are not as onerous as the thought might suggest. Ways to suggest the infliction of pain that can fool whatever lies within you. A rusty nail. A snake’s venom. As a result, pain does not much bother me anymore; it gives me evidence of my ongoing existence, has saved me from those times when, otherwise, I might have stared so long at wind and rain and sea as to become nothing, to just disappear.

In a separate document, I have listed the best, least intrusive approaches, which I realize may seem morbid, even though I consider it an absurd method of chronicling my days. I have also noted the rotation of cycles that has proven most effective. Although, given the choice, I would not recommend this approach, you become acclimated to it, like doing the chores or foraging for food.

After so much time, pain has become such a familiar and revisited friend that I wonder if I will notice him more now that I have stopped my regimen. Will an absence of pain be harder to get used to? I suspect that this concern will be forgotten amid so many other adjustments that must be made. For, having found so many ways to put it off, I believe that my transformation will be more radical than it might have been, that I might indeed become something like the moaning creature. Will I see the real stars then?

*   *   *

Sometimes, too, pain comes at you unexpectedly; you don’t have to generate it, don’t have to will it consciously upon yourself. It’s just there. The owl that has been my companion these thirty years died a week ago, without my being able to help, without knowing until too late. He had become an old owl, and although his eyes were still enormous and bright, his colors had faded, his camouflage tattered; he slept more and did not go out to hunt as often. I fed him mice by hand in his redoubt at the top of the ruined lighthouse.

I found him in the forest, after he had been missing for a few days, and I had finally gone out to search for him. From what I can reconstruct, he had become injured, perhaps from frailty or the onset of blindness, broken his wing, and settled on the forest floor. A fox or pair of foxes had probably gotten to him. He lay there splayed out in a mottled flurry of brown and dark red, eyes shut, head fallen to the side, all the life having left him.

My microscope had long since been abandoned in a corner of the lighthouse grounds, overtaken by mold, half buried there by the simple passage of years. I had no heart to take samples, to discover what I already knew: that, in the end, there was nothing a microscope could tell me about the owl that I had not learned from my many years of close interactions and observation.

What am I to say? That I do not miss him?

PART III

OCCULTING LIGHT

0016: GHOST BIRD

The lighthouse rose from fog and reflections like a mirror of itself, the beach gray and cold, the sand rasping against the hull of the boat as they abandoned it in the shallows. The waves came in small and half curling like the froth of malformed questions. The lighthouse did not resemble Ghost Bird’s memory of it, for its sides had been scoured by fire. Discoloration extended all the way to the top, where the lens, the light within, lay extinguished. The fire had erupted from the landing windows as well, and in combination with the bits of broken glass, and all of the other talismans human beings had rendered up to it over the years, gave the lighthouse the appearance of something shamanistic. Reduced now to a daymark for their boat, the simplest of its functions, the one task that, unperformed, made a lighthouse no longer of use to anyone. Made it into a narrow, haunted redoubt.

“Burned by the border commander,” Grace had told them. “Burned because they didn’t understand it—and the journals with it.”

But Ghost Bird caught the hesitation in Grace’s voice, how she still would not tell them exactly what had happened within the lighthouse, what slaughter and deception consisted of, any detailed accounting of what had come at them from the seaward side.

All Grace could offer in its place was a localized pathology—the origin of the orange flags. The doing of the border commander, a cataloging of all that was unknowable to her. Perhaps the commander had been trying to keep separate the real from the imagined. If so, she had failed. Even common thistles had been so marked. Given more time, the commander might have marked the entire world.

Ghost Bird had a vision of the journals impervious, still up there, reconstituted, were they now to enter, walk up into the lantern room, undo the trapdoor, stare down as had the biologist, as had she, so many years ago. Would the reflected light from those frozen accounts irradiate their thoughts, contaminate their dreams, forever trap them? Or was there just a mountain of ashes in there now? Ghost Bird did not want to find out.

It was late afternoon already. They had left the island in the early morning, in a bigger boat Grace had hidden out of sight of the pier. The biologist had not reappeared, although Control had searched those waters with a kind of nervous anxiety. Ghost Bird would have sensed her presence long before there was any danger. She could not tell him, for his own sake, that the oceans through which the biologist now traveled were wider and deeper than the one that led them to the lighthouse.

*   *   *

They trudged up the beach toward the lighthouse, taking a path that minimized the possibility of sniper fire from above. Grace believed everyone was dead, or long since had moved on, but there was always the chance. Nothing arose from the seaward side, ghostlike or otherwise. Things came out of the sea, things like the biologist, but less kind.

From the lip of the dunes, they came up to the level ground next to the lighthouse without incident, lingered at the edge of the overgrown, long-wild lawn beside it. Where nettle weed and snarls of blackberry plants grew: a thorny thicket for them, but a natural shelter for the wrens and sparrows that darted betwixt, between, their cheerful song a discordant element against the overcast quality of the light. The ever-present thistles looked to Ghost Bird like some kind of natural microphone, the stickery domes there to pick up and transmit sound instead of disseminate seeds.

A broken door yawned, beckoned to them with darkness, while the gray sky above, the way it could glint or waver at odd moments, made Control in particular jittery. He could not stand still, did not want Ghost Bird or Grace standing still, either. Ghost Bird could see the brightness flaring out from him like a halo of jagged knives, wondered if he would still be himself by the time they reached the tower. Perhaps he would, if nothing preternatural stitched its way through that sky.

“No point in going up,” Grace said.

“Not even the least bit curious?”

“Do you like walking through charnel houses and cemeteries, too?”

Still evaluating her, and Ghost Bird unable to tell what she was thinking. Had Grace thrown in her lot with them, hoping Ghost Bird was indeed a secret weapon, or for some other purpose? What she did know was that with Grace there she’d had little time to talk to Control in private—any conversations were of necessity between the three of them. This disturbed her, because she knew Grace even less than she knew Control.

“I don’t want to go up,” Control said. “I don’t. I want to cover the open ground as fast as possible. Get to where we’re going as fast as possible.”

“At least no one appears to be here,” Grace said. “At least it appears as if Area X may have thinned out the opposition.”

Yes, that was good, if a cold thing to say, but the look Control gave Grace indicated he could not jettison some essential sentimentality that was of no use here, some mechanism that belonged to the world outside.

“Well, let me add to the collection,” Grace said, and tossed the biologist’s island account and her journal through the open front door.

Control stared into that darkness as if she had committed a terrible act that he was thinking of setting right. But Ghost Bird knew that Grace was just trying to set them free.

*   *   *

“Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.” A sentence Ghost Bird remembered from a college text, one that had lingered with the biologist after her transition to the city, come back to her as she stood in the empty lot, following the silent launch of a sugar glider from one telephone pole to another. The text had been referring to urban landscapes, but the biologist had interpreted it as applying to the natural world, or at least what could be interpreted as wilderness, even though human beings had so transformed the world that even Area X had not been able to completely reduce those signs and symbols. The shrubs and trees that constituted invasive species were only one part of that; the other, how even the faint outline of a human-made path changed the topography of a place. “The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.” A sentence the biologist had excised from her thesis, but one that had burned bright in her mind, and now in Ghost Bird’s, where, even analyzed and kept at arm’s length like all received memories, it had a kind of power. In the presence of the memory of a thousand eyes staring up at her.

As they headed inland, the larger things fell away, revealing the indelible: the dark line of a marsh hawk flying low over the water, the delicate fractures in the water where a water moccasin swam, the strangely satisfying long grass that cascaded like hair from the ground.

She was content with silence, but Grace and Control were less so.

“I miss hot showers,” Control said. “I miss not itching all over.”

“Boil water,” Grace said, as if it provided the solution to both problems. As if Control’s misses were wishes, and he should think bigger.

“Not the same thing.”

“I miss standing on the roof of the Southern Reach and looking out over the forest,” Grace said.

“You used to do that? How did you get up there?”

“The janitor let us go up. The director and me. We would stand up there and make our plans.”

That catch in Grace’s throat, that invisible connection, Ghost Bird contemplated it. What did she miss? There had been so little time to miss anything. Their conversation existed so apart from her that she wondered again what she might do when she met the Crawler. What if she was a sleeper cell for a cause much older than either the Southern Reach or Area X? Did her allegiance lie with the former director, or the director as a child, playing on those black rocks near the lighthouse? And what master did the lighthouse keeper serve? It would have been better if she could have thought of each person in the equation as just one thing, but none of them were that simple.

Perhaps the biologist’s final response was the only response that mattered, and her entire letter a sop to expectations, to the reaction human beings were hardwired to have. A kind of final delay before she had come to embody that correct answer? Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. Even as the Crawler wrote out its terrible message.

Back on the island, there had been one last, unanswerable question, and the weight of it had settled over each of them in different ways. If they now traversed a landscape transplanted from somewhere far remote, then what existed within the coordinates of the real Area X, back on Earth?

Grace had put forward the idea, had clearly been thinking about it, possibly for years now, haunted and frustrated by it.

“We are,” Control had replied—distant, coming to her from afar with an unfocused stare. “We are. That’s where we are.” Although he wasn’t stupid, must know Grace was right.

“If you go through the door, you come to Area X,” Grace said. “If you walk across the border, you go to the other place. Whatever it is.”

Grace’s tone did not admit to doubt, or that she cared whether they believed her or not, an essential indifference to questions, as if Area X had worn her down. A pragmatism that meant she knew the conclusions she had reached would please no one.

But Ghost Bird knew what she had seen in the corridor leading into Area X, the detritus and trash she had seen there, the bodies, and wondered if it might be real and not summoned from her mind. Wondered what might have come through the twenty-foot door that Control had described to her, the door lost to them. What might still come through such a door? And her thought: Nothing, because if so, it would have happened long ago.

The marsh lakes had become such a deep, perfect blue in that uncertain light that the reflections of the surrounding scrub forest on that surface seemed as real as their root-bound doppelgängers. Their mud-encrusted boots churned up amid the rich sediment and plant roots a smell almost like crisp hay.

Control leaned against Ghost Bird more than once to keep his balance, almost pulling her down in the process. Ahead of them now came the smell of burning, and from above, something the others could not see stitched its way through the overcast sky, and Ghost Bird was not surprised.

0017: THE DIRECTOR

One spring day at the Southern Reach, you’re taking a break, pacing across the courtyard tiles as you worry at a problem in your head, and you see something strange out by the swamp lake. At the edge of the black water, a figure squats, hunched over, hands you cannot see busy at some mysterious task. Your first impulse is to call security, but then you recognize the slight frame, the tuft of dark hair: It’s Whitby, in his brown blazer, his navy slacks, his dress shoes.

Whitby, playing in the mud. Washing something? Strangling something? The level of concentration he displays, even at this distance, is of working on something that requires a jeweler’s precision.

Instinct tells you to be silent, to walk slow, to take care with fallen branches and dead leaves. Whitby has been startled enough in the past, by the past, and you want your presence known by degrees. Halfway there, though, he turns long enough to acknowledge you and go back to what he’s doing, and you walk faster after that.

The trees are as sullen as ever, looking like hunched-over priests with long beards of moss, or as Grace says, less respectfully, “Like a line of used-up old drug addicts.” The water carries only the small, patient ripples made by Whitby, and your reflection as you come close and lean over his shoulder is distorted by widening rings and wavery gray light.

Whitby is washing a small brown mouse.

He holds the mouse, careful but firm, between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, the mouse’s head and front legs circled by this fleshy restraint, the pale belly, back legs, and tail splayed out across his palm. The mouse seems hypnotized or for some other reason preternaturally calm while Whitby with his cupped right hand ladles water onto the mouse, then extends his little finger and rubs the water into the fur of the underbelly, the sides, then the furry cheeks, followed by anointment of the top of the head.

Whitby has draped a little white towel across his left forearm; it is monogrammed with a large cursive W in gold thread. Brought from home? He pinches the towel from his forearm and, using a single corner, delicately daubs the top of the mouse’s head while its tiny black eyes stare off into the distance. There’s a kind of febrile extremity of care here, as Whitby proceeds to wipe off one pink-clawed paw and then the other, before moving to the back paws and the thin tail. Whitby’s hand is so pale and small that there is a sort of symmetry on display, an absurd yet somehow touching suggestion of a shared ancestry.

It has been four months since the last member of the last eleventh expedition died of cancer, six weeks since you had them exhumed. It has been more than two years since you came back across the border with Whitby. Over the past seven or eight months, you have had a sense of Whitby recovering—fewer transfer requests, more engagement in status meetings, a revival of self-interest in his “combined theories document,” which he now calls “a thesis on terroir,” evoking a “comprehensive ecosystem” approach based on an advanced theory of wine production. There has been nothing in the execution of his duties to indicate anything more than his usual eccentricity. Even Cheney has, grudgingly, admitted this, and you don’t care that the man often uses Whitby as a wedge against you now. You don’t care about reasons so long as it brings Whitby back closer to the center of things.

“What do you have there, Whitby?” Breaking the silence is sudden and intrusive. Nothing you say will sound like anything other than an adult talking to a child, but Whitby’s put you in that position.

Whitby stops washing and drying the mouse, throws the towel over his left shoulder, stares at the mouse, examining it as if there might still be a spot of dirt here or there.

“A mouse,” he says, as if it should be obvious.

“Where did you find her?”

“Him. In the attic. I found him in the attic.” His tone like someone about to be reprimanded, but defiant, too.

“Oh—at home?” Bringing the safety of home to the dangerous place, the workplace, in physical form. You’re trying to suppress the psychologist in you, not overanalyze, but it’s difficult.

“In the attic.”

“Why did you bring him out here?”

“To wash him.”

You don’t mean for it to seem like an interrogation, but you’re sure it does. Is this a bad thing or a good thing in the progression of Whitby’s recovery? There is no base score assigned to owning a mouse or washing a mouse that can confer an automatic rating of fit or unfit for duty.

“You couldn’t wash him inside?”

Whitby gives you an upturned sideways glance. You’re still stooping. He’s still hunched. “That water’s contaminated.”

“Contaminated.” An interesting choice of words. “But you use it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do…” Relenting, giving in a little, relaxing so that you’re less concerned he’s going to strangle the mouse by accident. “But I thought maybe he’d like to be outside for a while. It’s a nice day.”

Translation: Whitby needed a break. Just like you needed a break, pacing the courtyard tiles.

“What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have a name.”

“He doesn’t have a name?”

“No.”

Somehow this bothers you more than the washing, but it’s an unease you can’t put into words. “Well, he’s a handsome mouse.” Which sounds stupid even as you say it, but you’re at a loss.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” he says. “I’m aware this looks strange, but think about some of the things you do for stress.”

You’d gone across the border with this man. You’d sacrificed his peace of mind on the altar of your insatiable fascination, your curiosity, and your ambition. He doesn’t deserve condescension on top of that.

“Sorry.” You awkwardly lower yourself in the dead leaves and half-dried mud next to him. The truth is you don’t want to go back inside yet, and Whitby doesn’t seem to want to, either. “The only excuse I’ve got is that it’s been a long day. Already.”

“It’s okay,” Whitby says after a pause, and returns to cleaning his mouse. Then volunteers, “I’ve had him about five weeks. I had a dog and a cat growing up, but no pets since.”

You’ve tried to imagine what Whitby’s house looks like, and failed. You can only imagine an endless white space with white, modern furniture, and a computer screen in the corner as the only spot of color. Which probably means Whitby’s house is an opulent, decadent free-for-all of styles and periods, all offered up in bright, saturated colors.

“The plant bloomed,” Whitby says into the middle of your musings.

The sentence has no meaning at first. But when it takes on meaning, you sit up straighter.

Whitby looks over at you. “There’s no emergency. It’s already over.”

You’re quelling the impulse to pull Whitby to his feet and march him back inside to show you what no emergency means.

“Explain,” you say, putting just enough pressure on the word to hold it there like an egg about to crack. “Be specific.”

“It happened in the middle of the night. Last night,” he says. “Everyone else had left. I work very late sometimes, and I like to spend time in the storage cathedral.” He looks away, continues as if you’ve asked him something: “I just like it in there. It calms me down.”

“And?”

“And last night, I came in and I just decided to check on the plant”—said too casually, as if he always checked on the plant—“and there was a flower. The plant was blooming. But it’s gone now. It all happened very fast.”

It’s important to just keep talking, to keep Whitby calm and answering your questions.

“How long?”

“Maybe an hour. If I had thought it would disintegrate, I would have called someone.”

“What did the blossom look like?”

“Like an ordinary flower, with seven or eight petals. Translucent, almost white.”

“Did you take any photographs? Any video?”

“No,” he says. “I thought it would still be there for a while. I didn’t tell anyone because it’s gone.” Or because, with no evidence, it would be more evidence against him, against his state of mind, his suitability, when he is just now getting out from under that reputation.

“What did you do then?”

He shrugs, the mouse’s tail twitching, as he transfers the animal to his right hand. “I scheduled a purification. Just to be sure. And I left.”

“You were in a suit the whole time, right?”

“Sure. Yes. Of course.”

“No strange readings after?”

“No, no strange readings. I checked.”

“And nothing else I need to know?” Like, the possible connection between the plant having bloomed and Whitby, the next day, coming out here with his mouse.

“Nothing you don’t already know.”

A shade defiant again, a lifting of his gaze to tell you he’s thinking about the trip into Area X, the one he can’t tell anyone about, the one that made him unreliable to the rest of the staff. How to evaluate hallucinations that might be real? A paranoia that might be justified? Right after you came back, you remember Whitby saying wistfully to himself, as if something had been lost, “They didn’t notice us at first. But, then, gradually, they began to peer in at us … because we just couldn’t stop.”

You get to your feet, look down at Whitby, say, “Give me a more extensive report on the plant—for my eyes only. And you cannot keep sneaking a mouse into the building, Whitby. For one thing, security will catch you eventually. Take it home.”

Whitby and the mouse are both looking up at you now, Whitby harder to read than the mouse, which just wants to get out of Whitby’s grasp and be on its way.

“I’ll keep him in the attic,” Whitby says.

“Do that.”

*   *   *

Back inside, you visit the storage cathedral, putting on a purification suit so you don’t contaminate that environment or it doesn’t contaminate you. You find the plant, which has a false tag that designates it as belonging to the first eighth expedition. You examine the plant, the area around it, the floor, searching for any evidence of a dried-up flower. You find none, just a residue beside it that later comes back from testing as pine resin from some other sample that had sat there previously.

You look at those test results in your office and you wonder if the plant had only blossomed in Whitby’s mind, and, if so, what that meant. Wonder for a good long while, before the thought becomes buried in the memos and the meeting minutes and the phone calls and a million minor emergencies. Should you ask Whitby if the mouse came with him into the storage cathedral? Perhaps. But what you do instead is put the immortal plant under round-the-clock surveillance, even though both Cheney and Grace give you grief about it.

Whitby just needs a companion. Whitby needs someone who won’t judge or interrogate him, someone or something that depends on him. And as long as Whitby keeps the creature at home, in the attic, you won’t tell anyone about the breach—have recognized by now that just as Lowry’s tethered to you, you’re chained to Whitby.

Playing pool with the Realtor and the veteran on an expedition to the Star Lanes a week later, you’re listening to the Realtor describe some couple that had been squatting in a model home and refused to give her their names when you think again about Whitby not naming the mouse. As if he’d been following Southern Reach protocol for expeditions.

“They thought that so long as I didn’t know their names, I couldn’t call the police. Peering out from behind the curtains like ghosts. There was so much fail in that, not that I felt good about kicking them out. Except I have to sell the place—I’m not running a charity. I give to charities, sure, but why do they have homeless shelters anyway? And if I let them stay then someone else might get the same idea. Turns out the police had a file on them, so I made the right decision.”

Waiting there back on your desk at the Southern Reach you already have the files of candidates for a twelfth expedition. Right on top is the most promising, to your mind: an antisocial biologist whose husband went on the last eleventh.

0028: GHOST BIRD

The Crawler was behind them. The words were behind them. It was just a submerged tunnel on a warm day. It was just a forest. It was just a place they were walking out of.

Ghost Bird and Grace did not talk much as they walked. There wasn’t much to say, such a world lay between them now. She knew that Grace did not consider her quite human, yet something about her must reassure the woman enough to keep traveling with her, to trust her when she said that something had changed beyond the climate, that they should head for the border and see what that something was. The scent of pine pollen clung to the air, rich and golden and ripe. The wrens and yellow warblers chased each other through the bushes and trees.

They encountered no one and the animals while not tame seemed somehow unwary. Not wary of them, anyway. Ghost Bird thought of Control, back there, in the tunnel. What had he found down below? Had he found the true Area X, or had his death been the catalyst for the change she had felt, that manifested all around them? Even now she could not see Control clearly, knew only that his absence was a loss, a sadness, to her. He had been there almost her entire life—the real, lived-in life she had now, not the one she had inherited. That still meant something.

At the moment he had gone through the door so far below, she had seen him and had felt the Crawler’s seekers fall away, the entire apparatus receding into the darkness after him. There had come a shuddering miniature earthquake, as the sides of the tunnel convulsed once, twice, and then were again still. Known that although nothing could be reversed, the director had been right: It could be changed, it could change, and that Control had added or subtracted something from an equation that was too complex for anyone to see the whole of. Perhaps the director had been right about the biologist, just not in the way she’d thought. The words from the wall still blazed across her thoughts, wrapped themselves around her like a shield.

Ghost Bird had walked up into the light to find Grace staring at her with fear, with suspicion, and she had smiled at Grace, had told her not to be afraid. Not to be afraid. Why be afraid of what you could not prevent? Did not want to prevent. Were they not evidence of survival? Were they not evidence of some kind? Both of them. There was nothing to warn anyone about. The world went on, even as it fell apart, changed irrevocably, became something strange and different.

They walked. They camped for the night. They walked again at first light, the world ablaze with sunrise and the awakening of the landscape around them. There were no soldiers, no suggestion of a ribbon stitching through the sky. The winter weather had lifted and it was hot, it was summer now in Area X.

The present moments elongated, once past still ponds and into the final miles. She lived in the present by dint of blistered feet and chafed ankles and biting flies drawn to the sweat on her ears or forehead and the parched feeling in her throat despite drinking water from her canteen. The sun had decided to lodge itself behind her eyes and shine out so that the inside of her head felt burned. Every beautiful thing that lay ahead she knew she had seen at least once behind her. Eternity found in the repetition of Grace’s steps, her sometimes halting steps, and the constant way the light gripped the ground and sent its heat back up at her.

“Do you think the checkpoints are still manned?” Grace asked.

Ghost Bird did not reply. The question made no sense, but enough humanity remained to her that she didn’t want to argue. The hegemony of what was real had been altered, or broken, forever. She would always know now the biologist’s position, near or far, a beacon somewhere in her mind, a connection never closed.

In the final miles to the old position of the border, the sun was so bright and hot that she felt a little delirious, even though she knew it was a mirage—she had water and was still hobbling through blisters and petty aches. How could the sun be so oppressive and yet the scene so unbearably beautiful?

“If we do make it through, what do we tell them?”

Ghost Bird doubted there would be a “them” to tell. She longed now for Rock Bay, wished to see it through the eyes of Area X, wondered how it might have changed, how it might have remained the same. This was really her only goal: to return to a place that had been like the island was to the biologist.

They reached where the old border had been, on the lip of the giant sinkhole. The white tents of the Southern Reach had turned dark green with mold and other organisms. The brick of the army outpost was half pulled down and sunken in as if some giant creature had attacked it. There were no soldiers, there were no checkpoints.

She bent down to tighten the laces on her boots, a velvet ant beside her foot. From what seemed like a great distance, she heard a scrambling huff from the lush vegetation of the sinkhole. For an instant, some odd, broad-shouldered marmot pushed its face through the reeds. Then saw her and hurriedly disappeared with a plop into the creek behind it—while she rose, amused.

“What is it?” Grace asked from behind her.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Then she was walking again, laughing a bit, and everything was pressed out of her except a yearning for water and a clean shirt. Inexplicably, unaccountably happy, grinning even.

*   *   *

A day later, they reached the Southern Reach building. The swamp had crept up to the courtyard and seeped across the tiles, pushed up against the concrete steps leading inside. Storks and ibises had built nests on a roof that looked half caved in. The evidence of a fire that had burned itself out inside the building, somewhere near the science department, showed in scorch marks on the outer walls. From afar, they could see no signs of human life. No shadow of the people Grace had known there. Behind them lay the holding pond and the scrawny pine strung with lights, now two feet taller than when Ghost Bird had last seen it.

By mutual unspoken decision, they halted at the edge of the building. From there, a gash in the side showed them three floors of empty, debris-strewn rooms, and a greater darkness within. They stood for a moment, hidden by the trees, and peered at those remains.

Grace could not sense the way the building slowly took one breath and then another, the way it sighed. She could not sense the echo at the heart of the Southern Reach that told Ghost Bird that this place had built its own ecology, its own biosphere. To disturb that, to enter, would be a mistake. The time for expeditions was over.

They did not linger, look for survivors, or do any of the other usual or perhaps foolish things that they could have done.

But now came the crucible, now came the test.

“What if there is no world out there? Not as we know it? Or no way out to the world?” Grace saying this, while existing in that moment in a world that was so rich and full.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Ghost Bird said, and took Grace’s hand for a moment, squeezed it.

Something in Ghost Bird’s expression must have calmed her, for Grace smiled, said, “Yes, we will. We’ll know.” Between them, they might know more than any person still living on Earth.

It was just an ordinary day. Another ordinary summer day.

So they walked forward, throwing pebbles as they went, throwing pebbles to find the invisible outline of a border that might not exist anymore.

They walked for a long time, throwing pebbles at the air.

000X: THE DIRECTOR

You sit in the dark at your desk in the Southern Reach in the minutes before leaving for the twelfth expedition, your backpack beside you, the guns tucked into the outer mesh, safeties on, not loaded. You will leave it all a mess. The bookshelves have become overgrown, your notes nothing anyone would recognize as an organized pattern. So many things that make no sense, or only make sense to you. Like a plant and a battered cell phone. Like a photograph on the wall from when you knew Saul Evans.

Your letter to him is in your pocket. It feels awkward to you. It feels like trying to say something that needed to be said without words, to someone who may no longer be able to read it. But perhaps, too, it is like the script on the walls of the tower: The words aren’t important but what’s channeled through them is. Maybe the important thing is getting it out on the page so it can be there in your mind.

You agonize for the thousandth time that your course of action is poorly thought out. You have a choice. You can let it all go on as it has before. Or … you can do this thing that in just a short while will take you out of the dark, out of the silence, and on a path from which you cannot come back. Even if you make it back.

You have already said all the things to Grace that you had to say to make it seem like it would be all right. All the things said to the beloved mark, to reassure her. To keep up morale. And you almost believe she believed it, for your sake. When I get back. When we solve this. When we …

A pale, curious head peers in, turned at an angle: Whitby, the mouse peeking out from his shirt pocket, all ears and black little eyes and fragile handlike paws.

You feel suddenly old and helpless and everything seems very far from you—the chair, the door beyond, the hall, and Whitby a canyon yawning wide miles and miles away. You let out a little sob, a little attempt to draw in breath. Reeling there in momentary panic in the garbage heap of your notes. And yet, under that, a core that must not yield.

“Help me up, Whitby,” you tell him, and he does, the man stronger than he looks, holding you up even as you lean into him, looming over his slight frame.

You sway there, looking down. Whitby has to stay behind, even as it all falls apart. As Whitby falls apart, because no one can withstand that vision for months, for years. But you have to ask it of him. You have no choice. Grace will run the agency. Whitby will be its recording, its witness.

“You have to write down whatever you see, your observations. It might still be important.”

You can hear the surf in your ears. You can see the lighthouse. The words on the wall in the tower.

Whitby says nothing, just stares with his large eyes, but he doesn’t need to. The fact that he stands there, silent, by your side, is enough.

When you take the first steps toward the door, you feel the weight on your back and the weight of your decision. But you ignore it. You walk into the hallway. It is very late. The fluorescent lights seem dim but a sickly heat comes off them, or from the vents, passing across the top of your head like a whisper. An unrecoverable reality.

The night will be cool and there might be the scent of honeysuckle in the air, even a half-remembered hint of salt spray, and it will seem to take no time at all, the familiar ride there, under the clear half-moon, and through the dark, submerged shapes of ruined buildings. With the other members of the twelfth expedition.

*   *   *

At the border, you enter the white tents of the Southern Reach mission control, and the linguist, the surveyor, the biologist, the anthropologist are escorted to their separate rooms for the final decontamination and conditioning process. Before long you will be at the border, will be headed with as much grace as your tall, broad shape can manage toward the luminescence of the enormous door.

You watch them all on the monitors. All but the linguist seem calm, movements relaxed and without evidence of jitters. The linguist is trembling and shivering. The linguist blinks at a rapid rate. Her lips move but no words come out.

The tech looks over at you for direction.

“Let me go in there,” you say.

“We’ll need to restart the process for her if you do.”

“It’s all right.” And it is all right. You have enough resolve for both of you. For the moment.

Carefully, you sit down across from the linguist. You are trying to banish thoughts of your first trip across the border, of how it affected Whitby, but it’s Whitby’s face you see right now, not Saul’s, not your mother’s. The human cost across the years, the lives lost and broken, the long grift. The contortions and the subterfuge. All of the lies, and for what? Lowry, back at his headquarters, unable to see the irony, lecturing you: “Only by identifying the dysfunction and disease within a system can we begin to marshal a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves.”

The linguist has been placed on a regimen of psychotropic drugs. She has been operated on, reconditioned, broken down, brainwashed, fed false information that runs counter to her own safety, built back up again, and all of this she has on some level known about, volunteered for—Lowry finding in her story of lost family members on the forgotten coast the closest thing to a Gloria surrogate. It’s a kind of taunt to you, a kind of petulant message, and, Lowry believes, the ultimate expression of his art. His coiled weapon—so tense that she’s unraveling right here in front of you. The last eleventh’s psychologist all over again, just from a different direction.

Her face reflects a confusion of impulses, the mouth ticking open, wanting to speak but not knowing what to say. The eyes are squinting as if expecting some kind of blow, and she will not meet your gaze. She’s scared and she feels alone and she’s been betrayed before she’s ever even set foot in Area X.

You could still use her on the mission, could find a dozen ways to deploy her, even damaged. Fodder for whatever is waiting in the topographical anomaly. Fodder for Area X, a bit of misdirection for the other expedition members. But you want no distractions, not this way. It’s just you. It’s just the biologist. A plan that’s really a guess in the dark, finding your way by feel.

You lean close and you take the linguist’s hand in both of yours. You’re not going to ask her if she still wants to go, if she can do that. You’re not going to order her to go. And by the time Lowry finds out what you’ve done, it will be too late.

She stares at you with an eviscerated smile.

“You can stand down,” you tell her. “You can go home. And it’s going to be okay, it will all be okay.”

With those words, the linguist recedes from you, gliding back into darkness, her and the chair and the room, as if they were merely props, and you’re above Area X again, floating over the reeds, down toward the beach, the surf beyond. The wind and the sun, the warmth of the air.

The questioning is over. Area X is done with you, has taken every last little thing out of you, and there’s a strange kind of peace in that. A backpack. The remains of a body. Your gun, tossed into the surf, your letter to Saul, crumpled and tumbling across the dried seaweed and the sand.

You are still there for a moment, looking out over the sea toward the lighthouse and the beautiful awful brightness of the world.

Before you are nowhere.

Before you are everywhere.

Dear Saul:

I doubt you will ever read this letter. I don’t know by what means it might get to you or if you could even understand it now. But I wanted to write it. To make things clear, and so that you might know what you meant to me, even in such a short time.

That you might know that I appreciated your gruffness and your consistency and your concern. That I understood what those things meant, and it was important to me. That it would have been important even if all the rest of this had not occurred.

That you might know that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anything you did. It wasn’t anything other than bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time—the same way it always happens, according to my dad. And I know this is true because it happened to me, too, even though I chose a lot of what’s happened to me since.

Whatever occurred back then, I know you tried your best, because you always did try your best. And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.

I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light. I never did forget about you; I just took a long time coming back.

Love,

Gloria

(who lived dangerous on the rocks and pestered you true)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my patient and brilliant editor, Sean McDonald, who made it possible for me to write these books knowing someone really truly had my back. Thanks to everyone at FSG for making the experience of publishing this trilogy so wonderful, including Taylor Sperry, Charlotte Strick, Devon Mazzone, Amber Hoover, Izabela Wojciechowska, Abby Kagan, Debra Helfand, and Lenni Wolff. Thanks to Karla Eoff, Chandra Wohleber, and Justine Gardner. Thanks as well to Alyson Sinclair for her excellent work on the publicity side and to Eric Nyquist for great cover art. Thanks again to my stalwart agent, Sally Harding, and the Cooke Agency. I’m also indebted to my publishers in Canada, the U.K., and in other countries for showing such imagination and energy in publishing the Southern Reach trilogy. Blackstone Audio has also been a delight to work with, and in particular Ryan Bradley. Many thanks to the brilliant Bronson Pinchot and Carolyn McCormick for great audiobook performances. Additional thanks to Clubber Ace, Greg Bossert, Eric Schaller, Matthew Cheney, Tessa Kum, Berit Ellingsen, Alistair Rennie, Brian Evenson, Karin Tidbeck, Ashley Davis, Craig L. Gitney, Kati Schardl, Mark Mustian, Diane Roberts, and the Fermentation Lounge. Appreciation for owl observations to Amal El-Mohtar and to Dave Davis for many kindnesses.

In thinking about and writing these books I’ve been grateful for ideas encountered in the Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, and in particular The Coming Insurrection, which had a tremendous influence on Ghost Bird’s thinking throughout the novel and is quoted or paraphrased on pages 241, 242, and 336. I’m also grateful for the works of Rachel Carson and Jean Baudrillard; Taschen’s The Book of Miracles; Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside; David Toomey’s Weird Life; Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea; the works of Tove Jansson (especially The Summer Book and Moominland Midwinter); Tainaron, by Leena Krohn; the nature poetry of Pattiann Rogers; The Derrick Jensen Reader, edited by Lierre Keith; Richard Jefferies’s After London; and Elinor De Wire’s Guardians of the Light. Finally, The Seasons of Apalachicola Bay, by John B. Spohrer, Jr., was like a revelation to me while writing Acceptance—a heartfelt, gorgeous, and wise book that kept me grounded in the places that made the Southern Reach trilogy personal.

Other research meant visiting, revisiting, or remembering landscapes that spoke to me in a way useful for the fiction: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Apalachicola, rural Florida and Georgia, Botanical Beach Provincial Park and the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, the coast of Northern California, and the Fiji Islands, which gave me a certain starfish.

I should also like to thank the many wonderful and creative booksellers I’ve met while on tour this year—you’ve been inspiring and energizing—as well as the enthusiastic readers willing to follow me on this somewhat strange journey. I really appreciate it.

Finally, I’m humbled and my heart made glad by my wife, Ann, who was my partner in all of this. She encouraged me, listened to me, helped me work out knots in drafts in progress, took other work off of my desk, went well beyond the call of duty or anything in the marriage vows to allow me the time and space to write these novels. It wouldn’t have been possible without her.

ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER

FICTION

Authority

Annihilation

Dradin, in Love

The Book of Lost Places (stories)

Veniss Underground

City of Saints and Madmen

Secret Life (stories)

Shriek: An Afterword

The Situation

Finch

The Third Bear (stories)

NONFICTION

Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

Monstrous Creatures

The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (with S. J. Chambers)

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.

PRAISE FOR THE SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY

“Chilling.”

—JULIE BOSMAN, The New York Times

“VanderMeer masterfully conjures up an atmosphere of both metaphysical dread and visceral tension … Annihilation is a novel in which facts are undermined and doubt instilled at almost every turn. It’s about science as a way of not only thinking but feeling, rather than science as a means of becoming certain about the world … Ingenious.”

—LAURA MILLER, Salon

“Successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out.”

—SARA SKLAROFF, The Washington Post

“An enthralling read—trust us.”

—TARA WANDA MERRIGAN, GQ

“If J. J. Abrams–style by-the-numbers stories of shadowy organizations and science magic have let you down one too many times, then Annihilation will be more like a revelation. VanderMeer peels back the skin of the everyday, and gives you a glimpse of a world where science really is stretching the bounds of our knowledge—sometimes to the point where we can’t ever be the same … [Annihilation] will make you believe in the power of science mysteries again.”

—ANNALEE NEWITZ, io9

“[I] finished the entire thing in less than a day, knowing it finally for the strange, clever … altogether fantastic book that it is.”

—JASON SHEEHAN, NPR

“Its deepest terror lies in its exploration of … the human heart, and the terror that can grow from the ways in which we are untrue to each other, and to ourselves.”

—JARED BLAND, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Fans of the Lost TV series … this one is for you.”

—MOLLY DRISCOLL, The Christian Science Monitor

“What frightens you? According to many psychologists, our most widely shared phobia is the fear of falling. Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation taps into that bottomless terror … VanderMeer ups the book’s eeriness quotient with the smoothest of skill, the subtlest of grace. His prose makes the horrific beautiful.”

—NISI SHAWL, The Seattle Times

“Much of the flora and fauna seem familiar, but that’s what’s so fascinating about the carnage that VanderMeer sets loose. He has created a science fiction story about a world much like our own.”

—JOHN DOMINI, The Miami Herald

“Annihilation feels akin to [the] isolated sci-fi terrors of Alien … [It] teases and terrifies and fascinates.”

—KEVIN NGUYEN, Grantland

“In much of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, a kind of radiance lies beating beneath the surface of the words. Here in Annihilation, it shines through with warm blazing incandescence. This is one of a grand writer’s finest and most dazzling books.”

—PETER STRAUB, author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl

“Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent.”

—WARREN ELLIS

“A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and a claustrophobic dread that linger long afterward. I loved it.”

—LAUREN BEUKES, author of The Shining Girls

“A dazzling book … Haunted and haunting.”

—KELLY LINK, author of Magic for Beginners

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.

All rights reserved

First edition, 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

VanderMeer, Jeff.

    Acceptance / Jeff VanderMeer. — First edition.

        pages cm. — (Southern Reach Trilogy; 3)

    ISBN 978-0-374-10411-5 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-374-71079-8 (ebook)

    I.  Title.

PS3572.A4284 A82 2014

813'.54—dc23

2014016962

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