Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(39)

When he had finished reading, he could feel Ghost Bird still staring at him, and she would not let his gaze drop, held him there, or he let her do it. For whatever reason.

* * *

On the way back from the border, a silence had come over Control, Whitby, and Cheney, perhaps overloaded by the contrast between sun/heat and rain/cold. But it had seemed to Control like the companionable silence of shared experience, as if he had been initiated into membership in an exclusive club without having been asked first. He was wary of that feeling; it was a space where shadows crept in that shouldn’t creep in, where people agreed to things that they did not actually agree with, believing that they were of one purpose and intent. Once, in such a space, a fellow agent had called him “homey” and made an offhand comment about him “not being your usual kind of spic.”

When they were about a mile from the Southern Reach, Cheney said, too casually, “You know, there’s a rumor about the former director and the border.”

“Yes?” Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.

“That she went over the border by herself once,” Cheney said, staring off into the distance. Even Whitby seemed to want to distance himself from that statement, leaning forward in his seat as he drove. “Just a rumor,” Cheney added. “No idea if it’s true.”

But Control didn’t care about that, despite the addition being disingenuous. The truth clearly didn’t worry Cheney, or he already knew it was true and wanted Control on the scent.

“Does this rumor include when this might have happened?” Control asked.

“Before the final eleventh expedition.”

Part of him had wanted to take that to the assistant director and see what she might or might not know. Another part decided that was a premature idea. So he’d chewed on the information, wondering why Cheney had fed it to him, especially in front of Whitby. Did that mean Whitby had the spine, despite the evidence, to withhold even when Grace wanted him to share?

“Have you ever been over the border, Cheney?”

An explosive snort. “No. Are you crazy? No.”

In the parking lot at day’s end, Control sat behind the wheel, keys in the ignition, and decompressed for a moment. The rain had passed, leaving oily puddles and a kind of verdant sheen on the grass and trees. Only Whitby’s purple electric car remained, at an angle across two spaces, as if it had washed up there.

Time to call the Voice and file his report. Getting it over with was better than letting work bleed into his evening.

The phone rang and rang.

The Voice finally answered with a “Yes—what?” as if Control had called at a bad time.

He had meant to ask about the director’s clandestine border trip, but the Voice’s tone threw him off. Instead, he started off with the plant and the mouse: “I found something odd in the director’s desk…”

* * *

Control blinked once, twice, three times. As they were talking, he had noticed something. It was the smallest thing, and yet it rattled him. There was a squashed mosquito on the inside of his windshield, and Control had no idea how it had gotten there. He knew it hadn’t been there in the morning, and he had no memory of swatting one anyway. Paranoid thought: Carelessness on the part of someone searching his car … or did someone want him to know he was being watched?

Attention divided, Control became aware of wobbles in his conversation with the Voice. Almost like air pockets that pushed an airplane up and forward, while the passenger inside, him, sat there strapped in and alarmed. Or as if he were watching a TV show where the cable hiccupped and brought him five seconds forward every few minutes. Yet the conversation picked up where it had left off.

The Voice was saying, with more than usual gruffness, “I’ll get you more information—and don’t you worry, I’m still working on the goddamn assistant director situation. Call me tomorrow.”

A ridiculous image snuck into his head of the assistant director walking into the parking lot while he was at the border, forcing the lock, rummaging through his glove box, sadistically squashing the mosquito.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea at this point, about Grace,” Control said. “It might be better to…”

But the Voice had already hung up, leaving Control to wonder how it had gotten dark so quickly.

Control contemplated the tangled geometry of blood and delicate limbs. He couldn’t stop staring at the mosquito. He had meant to say something else to the Voice, but he’d forgotten it because of the mosquito and now it would have to wait until tomorrow.

Was it possible he had squashed the mosquito reflexively and didn’t remember? He found that unlikely. Well, just in case he hadn’t, he’d leave the damn thing there, along with its splotch of blood. That might send some kind of message back. Eventually.





011: SIXTH BREACH

At home, Chorry waited on the step. Control let him inside, put out some cat food he’d bought at the store along with a chicken sandwich, ate in the kitchen, even though Chorry’s meal made the space stink of greasy salmon. He watched the cat chow down but his thoughts were elsewhere, on what he considered the failures of his day. He felt as if most of his passes had been behind his receivers and his high school coach was yelling at him. The wall behind the door had thrown him off. The wall and the meetings had taken up too much of his time. Even the border trip hadn’t put things right, just stabilized them while opening new lines of inquiry. The idea that the director had been across the border before the final eleventh expedition had returned to worry at him. Cheney, during their border trip: “I never had the idea that the director agreed with us much, you know? Or, she kept her own counsel, or had some other council, along with Grace. Or I don’t know much about people. Which is possible, I guess.”