The psychologist’s gaze drifted out to sea again. “I saw you, you know, coming down the trail toward the lighthouse. That’s how I knew for sure you had changed.”
“What did you see?” I asked, to humor her.
A cough, accompanied by red spittle. “You were a flame,” she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. “You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, through the ruined village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating…”
From the shift in her tone, I recognized that even now she was trying to hypnotize me.
“It won’t work,” I said. “I’m immune to hypnosis now.”
Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course you are. You were always difficult,” she said, as if talking to a child. Was that an odd sense of pride in her voice?
Perhaps I should have left the psychologist alone, let her die without providing any answers, but I could not find that level of grace within me.
A thought occurred, if I had looked so inhuman: “Why didn’t you shoot me dead as I approached?”
An unintentional leer as she swiveled her head to stare at me, unable to control all of the muscles in her face. “My arm, my hand, wouldn’t let me pull the trigger.”
That sounded delusional to me, and I had seen no sign of an abandoned rifle beside the beacon. I tried again. “And your fall? Pushed or an accident or on purpose?”
A frown appeared, a true perplexity expressed through the network of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if the memory were only coming through in fragments. “I thought … I thought something was after me. I tried to shoot you, and couldn’t and then you were inside. Then I thought I saw something behind me, coming toward me from the stairs, and I felt such an overwhelming fear I had to get away from it. So I jumped out over the railing. I jumped.” As if she couldn’t believe she had done such a thing.
“What did the thing coming after you look like?”
A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: “I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what’s inside me.”
I didn’t believe any part of that fragmented explanation at the time, which seemed to imply something had followed her from the Tower. I interpreted the frenzy of her disassociation as part of a need for control. She had lost control of the expedition, and so she had to find someone or something to blame her failure on, no matter how improbable.
I tried a different approach: “Why did you take the anthropologist down into the ‘tunnel’ in the middle of the night? What happened there?”
She hesitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from caution or because something inside her body was breaking down. Then she said, “A miscalculation. Impatience. I needed intel before we risked the whole mission. I needed to know where we stood.”
“You mean, the progress of the Crawler?”
She smiled wickedly. “Is that what you call it? The Crawler?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What do you think happened? It all went wrong. The anthropologist got too close.” Translation: The psychologist had forced her to get close. “The thing reacted. It killed her, wounded me.”
“Which is why you looked so shaken the next morning.”
“Yes. And because I could tell that you were already changing.”
“I’m not changing!” I shouted it, an unexpected rage rising inside of me.
A wet chuckle, a mocking tone. “Of course you’re not. You’re just becoming more of what you’ve always been. And I’m not changing, either. None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.”
“Shut up. Why did you abandon us?”
“The expedition had been compromised.”
“That isn’t an explanation.”
“Did you ever give me a proper explanation, during training?”
“We hadn’t been compromised, not enough to abandon the mission.”
“Sixth day after reaching base camp and one person is dead, two already changing, the fourth wavering? I would call that a disaster.”
“If it was a disaster, you helped create it.” I realized that as much as I mistrusted the psychologist personally, I had come to rely on her to lead the expedition. On some level, I was furious that she had betrayed us, furious that she might be leaving me now. “You just panicked, and you gave up.”
The psychologist nodded. “That, too. I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed. I should have sent you back to the border. I shouldn’t have gone down there with the anthropologist. But here we are.” She grimaced, coughed out a thick wetness.
I ignored the jab, changed the line of questioning. “What does the border look like?”
That smile again. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“What really happens when we cross over?”
“Not what you might expect.”
“Tell me! What do we cross through?” I felt as if I were getting lost. Again.
There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage. “I want you to think about something. You might be immune to hypnosis—you might—but what about the veil already in place? What if I removed that veil so you could access your own memories of crossing the border?” the psychologist asked. “Would you like that, Little Flame? Would you like it or would you go mad?”
“If you try to do anything to me, I’ll kill you,” I said—and meant it. The thought of hypnosis in general, and the conditioning behind it, had been difficult for me, an invasive price to be paid in return for access to Area X. The thought of further tampering was intolerable.
“How many of your memories do you think are implanted?” the psychologist asked. “How many of your memories of the world beyond the border are verifiable?”
“That won’t work on me,” I told her. “I am sure of the here and now, this moment, and the next. I am sure of my past.” That was ghost bird’s castle keep, and it was inviolate. It might have been punctured by the hypnosis during training, but it had not been breached. Of this I was certain, and would continue to be certain, because I had no choice.
“I’m sure your husband felt the same way before the end,” the psychologist said.
I sat back on my haunches, staring at her. I wanted to leave her before she poisoned me, but I couldn’t.
“Let’s stick to your own hallucinations,” I said. “Describe the Crawler to me.”
“There are things you must see with your own eyes. You might get closer. You might be more familiar to it.” Her lack of regard for the anthropologist’s fate was hideous, but so was mine.
“What did you hide from us about Area X?”
“Too general a question.” I think it amused the psychologist, even dying, for me to so desperately need answers from her.
“Okay, then: What do the black boxes measure?”