Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(33)

Her jacket and shirt were covered in blood, but she was breathing and her eyes were open, looking out toward the ocean as I knelt beside her. She had a gun in her left hand, left arm outstretched, and I gently took the weapon from her, tossed it to the side, just in case.

The psychologist did not seem to register my presence. I touched her gently on one broad shoulder, and then she screamed, lunged away, falling over as I recoiled.

“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.

“It’s just me, the biologist,” I said in a calm voice, even though she had rattled me.

“Just you,” she said with a wheezing chuckle, as if I’d said something funny. “Just you.”

As I propped her up again, I heard a kind of creaking groan and realized she had probably broken most of her ribs. Her left arm and shoulder felt spongy under her jacket. Dark blood was seeping out around her stomach, beneath the hand she had instinctively pressed down on that spot. I could smell that she had pissed herself.

“You’re still here,” she said, surprise in her voice. “But I killed you, didn’t I?” The voice of someone waking from dream or falling into dream.

“Not even a little bit.”

A rough wheeze again, and the film of confusion leaving her eyes. “Did you bring water? I’m thirsty.”

“I did,” and I pressed my canteen to her mouth so she could swallow a few gulps. Drops of blood glistened on her chin.

“Where is the surveyor?” the psychologist asked in a gasp.

“Back at the base camp.”

“Wouldn’t come with you?”

“No.” The wind was blowing back the curls of her hair, revealing a slashing wound on her forehead, possibly from impact with the wall above.

“Didn’t like your company?” the psychologist asked. “Didn’t like what you’ve become?”

A chill came over me. “I’m the same as always.”

The psychologist’s gaze drifted out to sea again. “I saw you, you know, coming down the trail toward the lighthouse. That’s how I knew for sure you had changed.”

“What did you see?” I asked, to humor her.

A cough, accompanied by red spittle. “You were a flame,” she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. “You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, through the ruined village. 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…”

From the shift in her tone, I recognized that even now she was trying to hypnotize me.

“It won’t work,” I said. “I’m immune to hypnosis now.”

Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course you are. You were always difficult,” she said, as if talking to a child. Was that an odd sense of pride in her voice?

Perhaps I should have left the psychologist alone, let her die without providing any answers, but I could not find that level of grace within me.

A thought occurred, if I had looked so inhuman: “Why didn’t you shoot me dead as I approached?”

An unintentional leer as she swiveled her head to stare at me, unable to control all of the muscles in her face. “My arm, my hand, wouldn’t let me pull the trigger.”

That sounded delusional to me, and I had seen no sign of an abandoned rifle beside the beacon. I tried again. “And your fall? Pushed or an accident or on purpose?”

A frown appeared, a true perplexity expressed through the network of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if the memory were only coming through in fragments. “I thought … I thought something was after me. I tried to shoot you, and couldn’t and then you were inside. Then I thought I saw something behind me, coming toward me from the stairs, and I felt such an overwhelming fear I had to get away from it. So I jumped out over the railing. I jumped.” As if she couldn’t believe she had done such a thing.

“What did the thing coming after you look like?”

A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: “I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what’s inside me.”

I didn’t believe any part of that fragmented explanation at the time, which seemed to imply something had followed her from the Tower. I interpreted the frenzy of her disassociation as part of a need for control. She had lost control of the expedition, and so she had to find someone or something to blame her failure on, no matter how improbable.

I tried a different approach: “Why did you take the anthropologist down into the ‘tunnel’ in the middle of the night? What happened there?”

She hesitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from caution or because something inside her body was breaking down. Then she said, “A miscalculation. Impatience. I needed intel before we risked the whole mission. I needed to know where we stood.”

“You mean, the progress of the Crawler?”

She smiled wickedly. “Is that what you call it? The Crawler?”

“What happened?” I asked.

“What do you think happened? It all went wrong. The anthropologist got too close.” Translation: The psychologist had forced her to get close. “The thing reacted. It killed her, wounded me.”