Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(91)

“It’s funny because there have been many other times … so many other times when I would’ve understood why someone wanted to shoot me.” That was only part of it, the other part being that he had felt almost as if Area X was about to shoot him, and that Area X had been trying to shoot him for a very long time.

“You followed me,” she said, “even though I clearly don’t want to be followed. You’ve come to what most people consider the butt end of the world and you’ve cornered me here. You probably want to ask more questions, although it should be clear that I’m done with questions. What did you think would happen?”

The truth was, he didn’t know what he had thought would happen, had perhaps unconsciously fallen back on an idea of their relationship at the Southern Reach. But that didn’t apply here. He sobered up, hands held high now as if surrendering.

“What if I said I had answers,” he said. But all he had to show her that was tangible was Whitby’s manuscript.

“I’d say you’re lying and I’d be right.”

“What if I said you still hold some of the answers, too.” He was as serious as he had been giddy just moments before. He tried to hold her with his gaze, even through the murk, but he couldn’t. God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thought: There would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

“I’m not the biologist,” she said. “I don’t care about my past as the biologist, if that’s what you mean.”

“I know,” he said. He’d figured it out on the boat, even if he hadn’t articulated it yet. “I know you’re not. You’re some version, though. You have her memories, to some extent, and somewhere back in Area X, the biologist may still be alive. You’re a replica, but you’re your own person.”

Not an answer she had expected. She lowered the gun. A little. “You believe me.”

“Yes.” It had been right there. In front of him, in the video, in the very mimicry of cells, the difference in personality. Except she’d broken the mold. Something had been different in her creation.

“I’ve been trying to remember this place,” she said, almost plaintively. “I love it here, but the entire time I’ve felt like it was the one remembering me.”

A silence that John didn’t know if he wanted to break, so he just stood there.

“Are you here to take me back?” she said. “Because I’m not going back.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, and realized it was true. Whatever impulse in that regard that might have lived within him had been snuffed out. “The Southern Reach doesn’t exist anymore,” he admitted. “There may not be anything we’d recognize out there very soon.”

There in the twilight, no birds now overhead, the smoke fading into the dusk, the raucous surf the only thing that seemed alive besides the two of them.

“How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, deep in thought. “I was so careful.”

“I didn’t. I guessed.” Somehow his face must have given something of his thoughts away, because she looked a little startled, a little wrong-footed.

“Why would you do that if you don’t want to take me back?”

“I don’t know.” To try to save the world? To save her? To save himself? But he did know. Nothing had changed since the interrogation room. Not really.

When he looked up again, she was saying, “I thought I could just stay here. Build the life she didn’t build, that she messed up. But I can’t. It’s clear I can’t. Someone will be after me no matter what I do.”

Now that the sun had truly set there was a glimmer of a light dimly familiar to him coming from deep in the lagoon below.

“What’s down there?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Said too quickly.

“Nothing? It’s too late to lie—there’s no point.” It was never too late to lie, to obscure, to delay. Control knew this too well.

But she didn’t. She hesitated, then said, “I was sick when I got here. One night I came out here and I had a dizzy spell and I was unconscious for a while. I woke up with the tide rising and I wasn’t sick anymore. The brightness was done with me. But there was something at the bottom of that hole.”

“What?” Although he thought he already knew. The swirling light was too familiar, despite being broken by ripples and the thickness of the water.

“It’s a way into Area X, I think,” she said, and now she looked scared. “I think I brought it with me.” He didn’t know how she knew this. He thought it might be true, remembered what Cheney had said about how difficult and enervating that travel could be. Whitby’s horrible description of the border.

Now that the darkness was complete and she was just a shadow standing in front of him, they could both see the lights farther down the coast. Bobbing. Floating. Trudging. Dozens of them. And so far down below, that glimmer, that hint of an impossible light.

“I don’t think we have much longer,” he said. “I don’t even know if we have the night. We’ll have to find a place to hide.” Not wanting to think about the other possibility. Not wanting even a hint of it in his thoughts to invade her thoughts.