Authority. Jeff VanderMeer

of high bushes instead of fences and streets that ran parallel to the ridge of the hill, with some connector streets running straight down. He didn’t mind the winding nature of it—he wanted a good three to five miles. The thick smell of honeysuckle came at him in waves as he ran by certain homes. Few people were still out except for some swing-sitters and dog-walkers, a couple of skateboarders. Most nodded at him as he passed.

      As he sped up and established a rhythm, headed ever downward toward the river, Control found himself in a space where he could think about the day. He kept reliving the meetings and in particular the questioning of the biologist. He kept circling back to all of the information that had flooded into him, that he had let keep flooding into him. There would be more of it tomorrow, and the day after that, and no doubt new information would keep entering him for a while before any conclusions came back out.

      He could try to not get involved at this level. He could try to exist only on some abstract level of management and administration, but he didn’t believe that’s really what the Voice wanted him to do—or what the assistant director would let him do. How could he be the director of the Southern Reach if he didn’t understand in his gut what the personnel there faced? He had already scheduled at least three more interviews with the biologist for the week, as well as a tour of the entry point into Area X at the border. He knew his mother would expect him to prioritize based on the situation on the ground.

      The border in particular stuck with him as he jogged. The absurdity of it coexisting in the same world as the town he was running through, the music he was listening to. The crescendo of strings and wind instruments.

      The border was invisible.

      It did not allow half measures: Once you touched it, it pulled you in (or across?).

      It had discrete boundaries, including to about one mile out to sea. The military had put up floating berms and patrolled the area ceaselessly.

      He wondered, as he jumped over a low wall overgrown with kudzu and took a shortcut between streets across a crumbling stone bridge. He wondered for a moment about those ceaseless patrols, if they ever saw anything out there in the waves, or if their lives were just an excruciation of the same gray-blue details day after day.

      The border extended about seventy miles inland from the lighthouse and approximately forty miles east and forty miles west along the coast. It ended just below the stratosphere and, underground, just above the asthenosphere.

      It had a door or passageway through it into Area X.

      The door might not have been created by whatever had created Area X.

      He passed a corner grocery store, a pharmacy, a neighborhood bar. He crossed the street and narrowly missed running into a woman on a bicycle. Abandoned the sidewalk for the side of the road when he had to, wanting now to get to the river soon, not looking forward to the run back up the hill.

      You could not get under the border by any means on the seaward side. You could not tunnel under it on the landward side. You could not penetrate it with advanced instrumentation or radar or sonar. From satellites peering down from above, you would see only wilderness in apparent real time, nothing out of the ordinary. Even though this was an optical lie.

      The night the border had come down, it had taken ships and planes and trucks with it, anything that happened to be on or approaching that imaginary but too-real line at the moment of its creation, and for many hours after, before anyone knew what was going on, knew enough to keep distant. Before the army moved in. The plaintive groan of metal and the vibration of engines that continued running as they disappeared … into something, somewhere. A smoldering, apocalyptic vision, the con towers of a destroyer, sent to investigate with the wrong intel, “sliding into nothing” as one observer put it. The last shocked transmissions from the men and women on board, via video and radio, while most ran to the back in a churning, surging wave that, on the grainy helicopter video, looked like some enormous creature leaping off into the water. Because they were about to disappear and could do nothing about it, all of it complicated by the fog. Some, though, just stood there, watching as their ship disintegrated, and then they crossed over or died or went somewhere else or … Control couldn’t fathom it.

      The hill leveled out and he was back on sidewalks, this time passing generic strip malls and chain stores and people crossing at stoplights and people getting into cars in parking lots … until he reached the main drag before the river—a blur of bright lights and more pedestrians, some of them drunk—crossed it, and came into a quiet neighborhood of mobile homes and tiny cinder-block houses. He was sweating a lot by now, despite the coolness. Someone was having a barbecue and they all stopped to watch him as he ran by.