Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(65)

“Jack used to say that if you don’t give an operative all the information they need, you might as well cut your own leg off,” he said. “Your operation is screwed.”

“But your operation isn’t screwed, John,” she said, with some force. “You’re still there. You’re still in touch with us. Me. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Good point, except I don’t think that ‘we’ means Central. I think you mean some faction within Central, and not an effective one. Your Voice made a mess trying to take the assistant director out of the mix. Give her another week and I’ll be Grace’s administrative assistant.” Or was the point to waste a lot of Grace’s time and attention?

“There are no factions, just Central. The Voice is under a lot of stress, John. Even more now. We all are.”

“The hell there aren’t factions.” Now he was Jack, hard to throw off topic. “The hell there aren’t.” “The hell there isn’t.” “The hell you say.”

“You won’t believe me, John, but I’ve done you a favor placing you at the Southern Reach.”

Everyone had forgotten the definition of favor. First Whitby, then Grace, now his mother. He didn’t trust himself to respond, so he didn’t.

“A lot of people would’ve killed for that position,” she said.

He had no answer for that, either. While they’d been talking, the woman had disappeared, and the storefront was deserted. Back in the day the liquor store had been a department store. Long before Hedley was built, there had been an indigenous settlement here, along the river—something his father had told him—and the remains of that, too, lay beneath the facade of the liquor store.

Down below the store, too, a labyrinth of limestone cradling the aquifer, narrow caves and blind albino crawfish and luminescent freshwater fish. Surrounded by the crushed remains of so many creatures, loamed into the soil, pushed down by the foundations of the buildings. Would that be the biologist’s understanding of the street—what she would see? Perhaps she would see, too, one possible future of that space, the liquor store crumbling under an onslaught of vines and weather damage, becoming akin to the sunken, moss-covered hills near Area X. A loss she might not mourn. Or would she?

“Are you there, John?”

Where else would he be?

* * *

For a long time now, Control had suspected his mother had taken someone else under her wing as a protégé—it seemed almost inevitable. Someone sculpted, trained, and deployed to correct the kinds of mistakes made by Control. The thought reoccurred whenever he was feeling particularly insecure or vulnerable, or sometimes just because it could be a useful mental exercise. Now he was trying to visualize the perfectly groomed protégé walking in and taking over the Southern Reach from him. What would this person have done differently? What would this person do right now?

While his mother continued to talk, plunging ahead with what seemed like a lie.

“But I was mostly calling for an update, to see if you think you’re making progress”—this his mother’s attempt to subvert his silence with an apology. Slight emphasis on progress.

“You know exactly how it’s going.” The Voice would have told her everything It knew up to the point he had derailed It.

“True, but I haven’t heard your side.”

“My side? My side is that I’ve been dropped into a pit of snakes with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back.”

“That’s just a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” said the streak of light.

“Not as dramatic as whatever you did to me at Central. I’ve got missing hours, maybe a missing day.”

“Nothing much,” she said in a bland tone that let him know she was bored with the topic. “Nothing much. Prepared you, stiffened your resolve, that’s all. Made you see some things more clearly and others less so.”

“Like introduce fake memories or—”

“No. That kind of thing would make you such an expensive model that no one here could afford you. Or afford to send you to the Southern Reach.”

Because everyone would kill for this position.

“Are you lying to me?”

“You’d better hope not,” she said with an in-rushing verve, “because I’m all you’ve got now—by your own actions. Besides, you’ll never really know for sure. You’ve always been the kind of person who peels away the layers, even when there are no layers left. So just take it at face value, from your poor long-suffering mother.”

“I can see you, Mother. I can see your reflection in the glass. You’re right around the corner, watching, aren’t you? It’s not just your proxies. You’re in town, too.”

“Yes, John. That’s why there’s that kind of tinny echo. That’s why my words seem to be falling on deaf ears, because you’re hearing them twice. I’m interrupting myself, apparently.”

A kind of rippling effect spread through him. He felt elongated and stretched, and his throat was dry. “Can I trust you?” he asked, sick of the sparring.

Something sincere and open in his voice must have reached her, because she dropped the distant tone and said, “Of course you can, John. You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.”