Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(82)

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow.

“What kind of contamination?” Although he thought he knew.

“The kind that cleanses everything. The kind you can’t see until it’s too late.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

A rasping laugh escaped her, like she was trying to cough something up. “What are we going to do, John? Are we going to combat it by starting a mining operation there? Pollute those places to hell and back? Put traces of heavy metals in the water supply?”

He just stared at her, unbelieving. “Why the f*ck did you station me at the Southern Reach if you knew this could happen?”

“I wanted you close to it. I wanted you to know, because that protects you.”

“That protects me? Against the end of the world?”

“Maybe. Maybe it does. And we needed fresh eyes,” she said, leaning beside him against the kitchen counter. He always forgot how slight she was, how thin. “I needed your fresh eyes. I couldn’t know that things would change this fast.”

“But you had a clue it might.”

She kept letting drop bits of information. Was he meant to pick them up, like the gun under the seat, just because she was unraveling?

“Yes, I had a clue, John. It’s why we sent you. Why a few of us thought we needed to do something.”

“Like Lowry.”

“Yes, like Lowry.” Lowry, hiding back at Central, unable to face what had happened, as if the videos were now spilling into real life.

“You let him hypnotize me. You let them condition me.” Unable to suppress his resentment at that, even now. He might never know the extent of it.

“I’m sorry, but that was the trade-off, John,” she said, resolute, sticking to her story. “That was the trade-off. I got the person I want for the job, Lowry got some kind of … control. And you got protection, in a way.”

Derisive, thinking he knew the answer: “How many others are there at Central, Mother? In this faction?”

“Mostly just us, John—Lowry and me—but Lowry has allies, many,” she said in a small voice.

Just them. A cabal of two against a cabal of one, the director. And none of them seeming to have it right. And now all of it in ruins.

“What else?” Pushing to punish her, because he didn’t want to think about the idea of localized Area Xs.

A bitter laugh. “We back-checked the extraction locations of the members of the last eleventh expedition to see if they exhibit a similar effect. We found nothing. So now we think they probably had a different purpose. And that purpose was to contaminate the Southern Reach itself. We had clues before. We just didn’t interpret them the right way, couldn’t agree on what it all meant. We just needed a little more time, a little more data.” Bodies that had decomposed “a little faster” as Grace had put it, when the director had ordered them exhumed.

There was in his mother’s fragmentation the admission that Central’s was a soul-crushing failure. That they had been unable to conceive of a scenario in which Area X was smarter, more insidious, more resourceful.

None of this could obliterate the look on Grace’s face, in the rain, as the director approached—the elation, the vindication, the abstract idea, viscerally expressed across her features, that sacrifice, that loyalty, that diligence would now be rewarded. As if the physical manifestation of a friend and colleague long thought dead could erase the recent past. The director, followed by that unnatural silence. Were her eyes closed, or did she not have eyes anymore? The emerald dust splashed off her into the air, onto the ground, with each step. This person who should not have been there, this shell of a soul of whom he had uncovered only fragments.

* * *

His mother started over, and he let her because he had no choice, needed time to acclimate, to adjust. “Imagine a situation, John, in which you are trying to contain something dangerous. But you suspect that containment is a losing game. That what you want to contain is escaping slowly, inexorably. That what seems impermeable is, in fact, over time becoming very permeable. That the divide is more perforated than unperforated. And that whatever this thing is seems to want to destroy you but has no leader to negotiate with, no stated goals of any kind.” It was almost a speech he could imagine the director giving.

“You mean the Southern Reach, the place you sent me into. With the wrong tools.”

“I mean that the group I’ve been part of has believed for a while now that the Southern Reach might be compromised, but the majority have believed, until today, that this wasn’t just wrong but laughably ridiculous.”

“How did you get involved?”

“Because of you, John. Long ago. Because of needing an assignment to a place near where you and your father lived.” Volunteered: “It was a side project. Something to watch, to keep an eye on. That became the main course.”

“But why did it have to be me?”

“I told you.” Pleading for him to understand: “I know you, John. I know who you are. I’d know if you … changed.”

“Like the biologist changed.” Burning now, that she’d put him in harm’s way without telling him, without giving him the choice. Except, he’d had a choice: He could have stayed where he was, continued to believe he lived beyond the border when that was a lie.