Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(71)

“Yes, but what did she do? What was she up to?”

“Up to?” Grace said, with a little snort of disbelief.

He chose his words very carefully. “Grace, I am already here. I am already in the middle of this. You should just tell me what’s going on.” What was the look that could convey without the reinforcement of words that he had already seen some very strange shit? “Remember, none of this is on the record.”

Grace considered that for a second with what seemed like amusement. Then she began to talk.

* * *

“You have to understand the director’s position,” Grace said. “The first expedition had set the tone within the organization. Even though the original director, by the time Cynthia got here, was trying to change that.” Cynthia? For a moment, Control wondered who Cynthia was because he’d thought of her as “the director” for so long. “The personnel here felt that the first expedition failed because the Southern Reach did not know what it was doing. That we had sent them in, and they had died because we did not know what we were doing, and we could never really make up for that.” The first expedition: a sacrifice to a lack of context. A lament unrecognized as such until it was too late. “And Lowry’s presence here at the agency”—was she reading his mind, did she somehow know?—“from my understanding, only made that worse. He was a living ghost, a reminder held up as a hero when he had just been a survivor. So his advice was given more weight, even when it was wrong. The director only really had a chance to pursue her own agenda after Lowry had been promoted to Central, even though that, too, was a problem. Lowry pushed for more expeditions even though the director wanted fewer, and whereas before she could control Lowry, now he was beyond her control. So we kept sending people in, throwing them up against a complete unknown. This did not sit well with the director, although she followed orders because she had to.”

He found himself being swept along by her narrative. “How did the director get her own agenda through? In what ways?”

“She became obsessed with metrics, with changing the context. If she could have her metrics, then Lowry could, grudgingly, have his expeditions, the conditioning and hypnosis he championed, although over time she came to understand why Lowry pushed the hypnosis.”

Control kept seeing Lowry in the context of the camera flying through the air: Lowry crawling, the camera soaring, and the truth perhaps somewhere in the middle. And then Lowry making Control crawl and soar.

None of this really spoke to the director’s secret mission across the border, though. Was Grace just tossing information at him to avoid talking about it? It was more than she’d ever said to him before.

“What else?” he asked. “What else did she do?”

She spread her hands as if for emphasis and the smile on her face was almost beatific. “She became obsessed with making it react.”

“Area X?”

“Yes. She felt that if she could make Area X react, then she would somehow throw it off course. Even though we didn’t know what course it was on.”

“But it had reacted: It killed a lot of people.”

“She believed that nothing we had done had pushed whatever is behind Area X. That it had handled anything we did too easily. Almost without thought. If thought could be said to be involved.”

“So she went across the border to make Area X react.”

“I will not confirm that I knew about her trip or helped in any way,” Grace said. “I will tell you my belief, based on what she said to me after she came back.”

“It wasn’t the reaction she wanted,” Control said.

“No. No, it was not. And she blamed herself. The director can be very harsh, but never harsher than with herself. When Central decided to go ahead with the last eleventh expedition, I am sure the director hoped that she had made a difference. And maybe she had. Instead of the usual, what came back were cancer-ridden ciphers.”

“Which is why she forced herself onto the twelfth expedition.”

“Yes.”

“Which is why her methods had become suspect.”

“I would not agree with that assessment. But, yes, others would say that.”

“Why did Central let her go on the twelfth expedition?”

“For the same reason they reprimanded her after she went across by herself but did not fire her.”

“Which was?”

Grace smiled, triumphant. At knowing something he should have known? For some other reason?

“Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe.”

* * *

“They had lost confidence in her anyway,” Grace said next, bitterness bleeding into her voice. “What did they care if she never came back? Maybe some of them at Central even thought it solved a problem.” Like Lowry.

But Control was still stuck on Jackie Miranda Severance, Severance for short, Grandpa always “Jack.” His mother had placed him in the Southern Reach, in the middle of it all. She had worked for the Southern Reach briefly, when he was a teenager, to be close to him, she had said. Now, as he questioned Grace, he was trying to make the dates synch up, to get a sense of who had been at the Southern Reach and who had not, who had left by then and who was still incoming. The director—no. Grace—no. Whitby—yes. Lowry—yes, no? Where had his mother gone when she left? Had she kept ties? Clearly she had, if he were to believe Grace. And did her sudden appearance to him with a job offer correspond to knowing she had some kind of emergency on her hands? Or was it part of a more intricate plan? It could make you weary, untangling the lines. At least Grandpa had been more straightforward. Oh, look. There’s a gun. What a surprise. I want you to learn how to use a gun. Make everything do more than one thing. Sometimes you had to take shortcuts after all. Wink wink. But his mother never gave you the wink. Why should she? She didn’t want to be your friend, and if she couldn’t convince you in some more subtle way, she’d find someone she could convince. He might never know how much other residue he’d already encountered from her passage through Southern Reach.