Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(11)

“There’s no reward in the risk of all of us going down,” the psychologist said, and from the inflection I recognized a hypnotic command.

The surveyor’s grip on her rifle loosened. The features of her face became somehow indistinct for a moment.

“You’re right,” the surveyor said. “Of course, you’re right. It makes perfect sense.”

A twinge of fear traveled down my back. Now it was two against one.

I thought about that for a moment, took in the full measure of the psychologist’s stare as she focused her attention on me. Nightmarish, paranoid scenarios came to me. Returning to find the entrance blocked, or the psychologist picking us off as we reached for the open sky. Except: She could have killed us in our sleep any night of the week.

“It’s not that important,” I said after a moment. “You’re as valuable to us up here as down there.”

And so we descended, as before, under the psychologist’s watchful eye.

* * *

The first thing I noticed on the staging level before we reached the wider staircase that spiraled down, before we encountered again the words written on the wall … the tower was breathing. The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat … and they were not made of stone but of living tissue. Those walls were still blank, but a kind of silvery-white phosphorescence rose off of them. The world seemed to lurch, and I sat down heavily next to the wall, and the surveyor was by my side, trying to help me up. I think I was shaking as I finally stood. I don’t know if I can convey the enormity of that moment in words. The tower was a living creature of some sort. We were descending into an organism.

“What’s wrong?” the surveyor was asking me, voice muffled through her mask. “What happened?”

I grabbed her hand, forced her palm against the wall.

“Let me go!” She tried to pull away, but I kept her there.

“Do you feel that?” I asked, unrelenting. “Can you feel that?”

“Feel what? What are you talking about?” She was scared, of course. To her, I was acting irrationally.

Still, I persisted: “A vibration. A kind of beat.” I removed my hand from hers, stepped back.

The surveyor took a long, deep breath, and kept her hand on the wall. “No. Maybe. No. No, nothing.”

“What about the wall. What is it made of?”

“Stone, of course,” she said. In the arc of my helmet flashlight, her shadowed face was hollowed out, her eyes large and circled by darkness, the mask making it look like she had no nose or mouth.

I took a deep breath. I wanted it all to spill out: that I had been contaminated, that the psychologist was hypnotizing us far more than we might have suspected. That the walls were made of living tissue. But I didn’t. Instead, I “got my shit together,” as my husband used to say. I got my shit together because we were going to go forward and the surveyor couldn’t see what I saw, couldn’t experience what I was experiencing. And I couldn’t make her see it.

“Forget it,” I said. “I became disoriented for a second.”

“Look, we should go back up now. You’re panicking,” the surveyor said. We had all been told we might see things that weren’t there while in Area X. I know she was thinking that this had happened to me.

I held up the black box on my belt. “Nope—it’s not flashing. We’re good.” It was a joke, a feeble joke, but still.

“You saw something that wasn’t there.” She wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

You can’t see what is there, I thought.

“Maybe,” I admitted, “but isn’t that important, too? Isn’t that part of all of this? The reporting? And something I see that you don’t might be important.”

The surveyor weighed that for a moment. “How do you feel now?”

“I feel fine,” I lied. “I don’t see anything now,” I lied. My heart felt like an animal had become trapped in my chest and was trying to crawl out. The surveyor was now surrounded by a corona of the white phosphorescence from the walls. Nothing was receding. Nothing was leaving me.

“Then we’ll go on,” the surveyor said. “But only if you promise to tell me if you see anything unusual again.”

I almost laughed at that, I remember. Unusual? Like strange words on a wall? Written among tiny communities of creatures of unknown origin.

“I promise,” I said. “And you will do the same for me, right?” Turning the tables, making her realize it might happen to her, too.

She said, “Just don’t touch me again or I’ll hurt you.”

I nodded in agreement. She didn’t like knowing I was physically stronger than her.

Under the terms of that flawed agreement we proceeded to the stairs and into the gullet of the tower, the depths now revealing themselves in a kind of ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that I could not fully take it all in. But I tried, just as I had always tried, even from the very beginning of my career.

* * *

My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist, was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up. My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing. Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.