Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(53)

People were staring at him, too, as they crisscrossed the cafeteria. He had to get up.

From the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe.

* * *

Control went from bended knee to the interrogation room with the biologist—after a brief interlude in his office. He had needed some form of relief, some way to cleanse. He’d called up the information on Rock Bay, the biologist’s longest assignment before she’d joined the twelfth expedition. From her field notes and sketches, he could tell it was her favorite place. A rich, northern rain forest with a verdant ecosystem. She’d rented a cottage there, and in addition to photographs of the tidal pools she’d studied, he had shots of her living quarters—Central’s routine thorough follow-up. The cot-like bed, the comfortable kitchen, and the black stove in the corner that doubled as a fireplace, the long spout going up into a chimney. There were aspects of the wilderness that appealed to him, that calmed him, but so too did the simple domesticity of the cottage.

Once seated in the room, Control placed a bottle of water and her files between them. A gambit he was bored with, but nevertheless … His mother had always said the repetition of ritual made pointing to the thing that had been rendered invisible all the more dramatic. Someday soon he might point to the files and make an offer.

The fluorescent lights pulsed and flickered, something beginning to devolve in them. He didn’t care if Grace watched from behind the glass or not. Ghost Bird looked terrible today, not so much sick but like she had been crying, which was how he felt. There was a darkness around her eyes and a slump to her posture. Any recklessness or amusement had been burned away or gone into hiding.

Control didn’t know where to start because he didn’t want to start at all. What he wanted to talk about was the video footage, but that was impossible. The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will. He couldn’t tell any human being, ever. If he let it out, contaminated someone else’s mind, he would not forgive himself. A girlfriend who had gleaned some sense of his job had once asked, “Why do you do it?”—meaning why serve such a clandestine purpose, a purpose that could not be shared, could not be revealed. He’d given his standard response, in a portentous manner, to poke fun at himself. To disguise the seriousness. “To know. To go beyond the veil.” Across the border. Even as Control said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn’t mind leaving her there, alone, on the other side.

“What would you like to talk about?” he asked Ghost Bird, not because he was out of questions but because he wanted her to take the lead.

“Nothing,” she said, listless. The word came out at a muttering slant.

“There must be something.” Pleading. Let there be something, to distract from the carnage in my head.

“I am not the biologist.”

That brought Control out of himself, forced him to consider what she meant.

“You are not the biologist,” he echoed.

“You want the biologist. I’m not the biologist. Go talk to her, not me.”

Was this some kind of identity crisis or just metaphorical?

Either way, he realized that this session had been a mistake.

“We can try again in the afternoon,” he said.

“Try what?” she snapped. “Do you think this is therapy? Who for?”

He started to respond, but in one violent motion she swept his files and water off the table and grabbed his left hand with both of hers and wouldn’t let go. Defiance and fear in her eyes. “What do you want from me? What do you really want?”

With his free hand, Control waved off the guards plunging into the room. From the corner of his eye, their retreat had a peculiar suddenness, as if they’d been sucked back into the doorway by something invisible and monstrous.

“Nothing,” he said, to see how she’d respond. Her hand was clammy and warm, not entirely pleasant; something was definitely going on beneath her skin. Had her fever gotten worse?

“I won’t assist in charting my own pathology,” she hissed, breathing hard, shouting: “I am not the biologist!”

He pulled himself loose, pushed away from the table, stood, and watched as she fell back into her seat. She stared down at the table, wouldn’t look up at him. He hated to see her distress, hated worse that he seemed to have caused it.

“Whoever you are, we’ll pick this up later,” he said.

“Humoring me,” she muttered, arms folded.

But by the time he’d picked up the bottle of water and his scattered files and made it to the door, something had changed in her again.

Her voice trembled on the cusp of some new emotion. “There was a mating pair of wood storks in the holding pond out back when I left. Are they still there?”

It took a moment to realize she meant when she’d left on the expedition. Another moment to realize that this was almost an apology.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

What had happened to her out there? What had happened to him in here?

The last fragment of video remained in its own category: “Unassigned.” Everyone was dead by then, except for an injured Lowry, already halfway back to the border.

Yet for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse.