But this didn’t encompass the full arc of her thoughts, of her analysis. There was not just the question of whether she was really alive but, if so, who she was, made oblique by her seclusion in her quarters at the Southern Reach. Then, examining the sense that her memories were not her own, that they came to her secondhand and that she could not be sure whether this was because of some experiment by the Southern Reach or an effect caused by Area X. Even through the intricacies of her escape on the way to Central, there was a sense of projection, of it happening to someone else, that she was only the interim solution, and perhaps that distance had aided her in avoiding capture, added a layer of absolute calm to her actions. When she’d reached the remote Rock Bay, so familiar to the biologist who had been there before her, she’d had peace for a while, let the landscape subsume her in a different way—let it break her down so she could be built up again.
But only when they had burst through into Area X had she truly gained the upper hand on her unease, her purposelessness. She had panicked for a second as the water pressed in on her, surrounded her, evoked her own drowning. But then something had turned on, or had come back, and raging against her own death, she had exulted in the sensation of the sea, welcomed having to fight her way to the surface—bursting through such a joyful hysteria of biomass—as a sort of proof that she was not the biologist, that she was some new thing that could, wanting to survive, cast out her fear of drowning as belonging to another.
In the aftermath, even resuscitating Control on the beach had seemed undeniable proof of her own sovereignty. As had her insistence on heading for the island, not the lighthouse. “Wherever the biologist would have gone, that is where I will go.” The truth, the rightness, in that had given her hope, despite the sense that everything she remembered she had observed through a window opening onto another person’s life. Not truly experienced. Or not experienced yet. “You want a lived-in life because you don’t have one,” Control had said to her, but that was a crude way to put it.
There had been little new to experience since. Nothing monstrous or unusual had yet erupted from the horizon in almost three full days of walking. Nothing unnatural, except for this hyperreal aspect to the landscape, these processes working beneath the surface. At dusk, sometimes, too, an image of the biologist’s starfish came to her, dimly shining, like a compass in her head that drew her on, and she realized again that Control couldn’t feel what she felt here. He couldn’t navigate the dangers, recognize the opportunities. The brightness had left her, but something else had stepped in to replace it.
“Counter-shading,” she’d said when he’d confessed his confusion that Area X looked so normal. “You can know a thing and not know a thing. A grebe’s markings from above are obvious. You cannot miss a grebe from above. Seen from below, though, as it floats in the water, it is practically invisible.”
“Grebe?”
“A bird.” Another bird.
“All of this is a disguise?” He said it with a kind of disbelief, as if the reality were strange enough.
Ghost Bird had relented, because it wasn’t his fault. “You’ve never walked through an ecosystem that wasn’t compromised or dysfunctional, have you? You may think you have, but you haven’t. So you might mistake what’s right for what’s wrong anyway.”
That might not be true, but she wanted to hold on to the idea of authority—didn’t want another argument about their destination. Insisting on heading for the island was protecting not just her life but his, too, she believed. She had no interest in last chances, last desperate charges into the guns of the enemy, and something in Control’s affect made her believe he might be working toward that kind of solution. Whereas she was not yet committed to anything other than wanting to know—herself and Area X.
The light in that place was inescapable, so bright yet distant. It brought a rare clarity to the reeds and the mud and the water that mirrored and followed them in the canals. It was the light that made her feel as if she glided because it tricked her into losing track of her own steps. It was the light that kept replenishing the calm within her. The light explored and questioned everything in a way she wasn’t sure Control would understand, then retreated to allow what it touched to exist apart from it.
Perhaps it was the light that got in the way, too, for theirs was a kind of backtracking, stuttering progress, using a stick to prod the ground in front of them for treachery, the thick reeds forming clumps that at times were impenetrable. Once, a limpkin, grainy brown and almost invisible against the reeds, rose so near and so silent it startled her almost more than it did Control.
But eventually they reached the rag tied to the reeds, saw the yellowing cathedral beyond, stuck in the mud and sunk halfway.
“What the hell is that?” Control asked.
“It’s dead,” she said. “It can’t harm us.” Because Control continued to overreact to what she considered insufficient stimuli. Skittish, or damaged from some other experience entirely.
But she knew all too well what it was. Sunken into the middle were the remains of a hideous skull and a bleached and hardened mask of a face that stared sightless up at them, fringed with mold and lichen.
“The moaning creature,” she said. “The moaning creature we always heard at dusk.” That had chased the biologist across the reeds.
The flesh had sloughed off, runneled down the sides of the bones, vanished into the soil. What remained was a skeleton that looked uncannily like the confluence of a giant hog and a human being, a set of smaller ribs suspended from the larger like a macabre internal chandelier, and tibias that ended in peculiar nub-like bits of gristle scavenged by birds and coyotes and rats.
“It’s been here awhile,” Control said.
“Yes, it has.” Too long. Prickles of alarm made her scan the horizon for some intruder, as if the skeleton were a trap. Alive just eighteen months ago, and yet now in a state of advanced decay, the face plate all that saved it from being unidentifiable. Even if this creature, this transformation of the psychologist from what Control called “the last eleventh expedition,” had died right after the biologist had encountered it alive … the rate of decomposition was unnatural.
Control hadn’t caught on, though, so she decided not to share. He just kept pacing around the skeleton, staring at it.
“So this was a person, once,” he said, and then said it again when she didn’t respond.
“Possibly. It might also have been a failed double.” She didn’t think she was a failed double like this creature. She had purpose, free will.
Perhaps a copy could also be superior to the original, create a new reality by avoiding old mistakes.
“I have your past in my head,” he’d told her as soon as they’d left the beach, intent on trading information. “I can give it back to you.” An ancient refrain by now, unworthy of him or of her.
Her silence had forced him to go first, and although she thought he still might be holding things back, his words, infused with urgency and a kind of passion, had a sincerity to them. Sometimes, too, a forlorn subtext crept in, one that she understood quite well and chose to ignore. She had identified it easily from the time he had visited her in her quarters back at the Southern Reach.
The news that the psychologist from the twelfth expedition had been the former director of the Southern Reach and that she had thought the biologist was her special project, her special hope, made Ghost Bird laugh. She felt a sudden affection for the psychologist, remembering their skirmishes during the induction interviews. The devious psychologist/director, trying to combat something as wide and deep as Area X with something as narrow