“You aren’t. This is part of your debriefing.”
“But I can’t leave.”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But you will.” If only to another facility; it might be another two or three years, if all went well, before they allowed any of the returnees back out in the world. Their legal status was in that gray area often arbitrarily defined by the threat to national security.
“I find that unlikely,” she said.
He decided to try again. “If not thistles, what would be relevant?” he asked. “What should I ask you?”
“Isn’t that your job?”
“What is my job?” Although he knew perfectly well what she meant.
“You’re in charge of the Southern Reach.”
“Do you know what the Southern Reach is?”
“Yesss.” Like a hiss.
“What about the second day at base camp? When did things begin to get strange?” Had they? He had to assume they had.
“I don’t remember.”
Control leaned forward. “I can put you under hypnosis. I have the right to. I can do that.”
“Hypnosis doesn’t work on me,” she said, disgust at his threat clear from her tone.
“How do you know?” A moment of disorientation. Had she given up something she didn’t want to give up, or had she remembered something lost to her before? Did she know the difference?
“I just know.”
“For clarity on that, we could recondition you and then put you under hypnosis.” All of this a bluff, in that it was more complicated logistically. To do so, Control would have to send her to Central, and she’d disappear into that maw forever. He might get to see the reports, but he’d never have direct contact again. Nor did he particularly want to recondition her.
“Do that and I’ll—” She managed to stop herself on the cusp of what sounded like the beginning of the word kill.
Control decided to ignore that. He’d been on the other end of enough threats to know which to take seriously.
“What made you resistant to hypnosis?” he asked.
“Are you resistant to hypnosis?” Defiant.
“Why were you at the empty lot? The other two were found looking for their loved ones.”
No reply.
Maybe enough had been said for now. Maybe this was enough.
Control turned off the television, picked up his file, nodded at her, and walked to the door.
Once there, the door open and letting in what seemed like more shadows than it should, he turned, aware of the assistant director staring at him from down the hall as he looked back at the biologist.
He asked, as he had always planned to, the postscript to an opening act: “What’s the last thing you remember doing in Area X?”
The answer, unexpected, surged up toward him like a kind of attack as the light met the darkness: “Drowning. I was drowning.”
Just close your eyes and you will remember me,” Control’s father had told him three years ago, in a place not far from where he was now, the dying trying to comfort the living. But when he closed his eyes, everything disappeared except the dream of falling and the accumulated scars from past assignments. Why had the biologist said that? Why had she said she was drowning? It had thrown him, but it had also given him an odd sense of secret sharing between them. As if she had gotten into his head and seen his dream, and now they were bound together. He resented that, did not want to be connected to the people he had to question. He had to glide above. He had to choose when he swooped down, not be brought to earth by the will of another.
When Control opened his eyes, he was standing in the back of the U-shaped building that served as the Southern Reach’s headquarters. The curve lay in the front, a road and parking lot preceding it. Built in a style now decades old, the layered, stacked concrete was a monument or a midden—he couldn’t decide which. The ridges and clefts were baffling; the way the roof leered slightly over the rest made it seem less functional than like performance art or abstract sculpture on a grand and yet numbing scale. Making things worse, the area coveted by the open arms of the U had been made into a courtyard, looking out on a lake ringed by thick old-growth forest. The edges of the lake were singed black, as if at one time set ablaze, and a wretched gnarl of cypress knees waded through the dark, brackish water. The light that suffused the lake had a claustrophobic gray quality, separate and distinct from the blue sky above.
This, too, had at one time been new, perhaps back during the Cretaceous period, and the building had probably stood here then in some form, reverse engineered so far into the past that you could still look out the windows and see dragonflies as big as vultures.
The U that hugged them close inspired no great confidence; it felt less a symbol of luck than of the incomplete. Incomplete thoughts. Incomplete conclusions. Incomplete reports. The doors at the ends of the U, through which many passed as a shortcut to the other side, confirmed a failure of the imagination. And all the while, the abysmal swamp did whatever swamps did, as perfect in its way as the Southern Reach was imperfect.
Everything was so still that when a woodpecker swooped across that scene it was as violent as the sonic boom of an F-16.
To the left of the U and the lake—just visible from where he stood—a road threaded its way through the trees, toward the invisible border, beyond which lay Area X. Just thirty-five miles of paved road and then another fifteen unpaved beyond that, with ten checkpoints in all, and shoot-to-kill orders if you weren’t meant to be there, and fences and barbed wire and trenches and pits and more swamp, possibly even government-trained colonies of apex predators and genetically modified poison berries and hammers to hit yourself on the head with … but in some ways, ever since Control had been briefed, he had wondered: To what point? Because that’s what you did in such situations? Keep people out? He’d studied the reports. If you reached the border in an “unauthorized way” and crossed over anywhere but the door, you would never be seen again. How many people had done just that, without being spotted? How would the Southern Reach ever know? Once or twice, an investigative journalist had gotten close enough to photograph the outside of the Southern Reach’s border facilities, but even then it had just confirmed in the public imagination the official story of environmental catastrophe, one that wouldn’t be cleaned up for a century.
There came a tread around the stone tables in the concrete courtyard across which little white tiles competed with squares of clotted earth into which unlikely tulips had been shoved at irregular intervals … he knew that tread, with its special extra little dragging sound. The assistant director had been a field officer once; something had happened on assignment, and she’d hurt her leg. Inside the building, she could disguise it, but not on the treacherous grouted tiles. It wasn’t an advantage for him to know this, because it made him want to empathize with her. “Whenever you say ‘in the field,’ I have this image of all of you spooks running through the wheat,” his father had said to his mother, once.
Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he’d thought a change of setting—leaving the confines of the concrete coffin—might help soften her animosity. Before he’d realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.
“You interviewed just the biologist. I still do not know why.” She said this before he could extend even a tendril of an opening gambit … and all of his resolve to play the