* * *
At dusk of the next day, John saw a movement on the rocks, and he trained his binoculars on it. He wanted to believe that the figure was the biologist, that he knew her outline against the worn sky, the way that she moved, but he had only seen her captive. Inert. Deactivated. Different.
The first time, he lost her almost immediately from his vantage some distance from the rocks, couldn’t tell if she was coming back in or going farther out. Rocks and form merged and blurred, and then it was night. He waited for the appearance of a light or a fire, but saw neither. If it was the biologist, she was in full survivalist mode.
Another day passed, and he saw nothing except seagulls and a gray fox that came to an abrupt halt when it saw him and then evaporated into the mist that coated everything for far too long. He worried that whoever he had seen had passed on, that this wasn’t an outpost but just another marker on a longer journey. He ate another can of beans, drank sparingly from the water canteen. Huddled, shivering, beneath deep cover. He was reaching the edge of his woodcraft again, was made more for back roads and small-town surveillance than for living out in the wild. He thought he’d probably lost about five pounds. He kept taking in deep breaths of cedar and every green, living thing as a temporary antidote.
* * *
The figure came out at dusk again, crawling and hopping across the sheets of black rock with an expertise John knew would be beyond him. As he identified her as the biologist through the binoculars, his heart leapt and his blood stirred and the little hairs on his arms rose. A flood of emotion came over him, and he stifled tears—of relief or of something deeper? He had been existing inside himself for long enough now that he wasn’t sure. But he righted himself immediately. He knew that if she got back to shore, she’d disappear into the rain forest. He did not like his odds of tracking her there.
If she saw him clambering after her, though, and he didn’t get a chance to confront her, she’d slip through his fingers and he’d never see her again. This, too, he knew.
The tide had begun to come in. The light was dull and flat and gray. Again. The wind had become harsh. Out at sea, there was nothing to indicate human beings existed except for the rising and falling figure of the biologist, and a deep vein of black smoke opening up into the sky from some vessel so far out at sea that it wasn’t visible even with the binoculars.
He waited until she was more than halfway out, wondering if she’d lost some natural caution because it was still easier to cut her off than it should have been. Then he snuck along the other side of the ridge of rock, hunched over, trying to keep his silhouette off her horizon, although he’d be framed by forest, not the fading light. He had brought the knapsack with him out of paranoia that she or someone else might steal it while he was gone. Although he had stripped it down somewhat, it threw off his balance, made it harder to hold his gun and climb the rocks. He could have left Whitby’s manuscript behind, but this had seemed more and more important to keep in view at all times.
He tried to keep his steps short and to bend his knees, but even so slipped many times on the uneven rocks, slick with seaweed and rough and sharp from the edges of the shells of limpets and clams and mussels. Had to reach out to keep his balance and cut himself despite the cloth he’d tied over his palms. Very soon his ankles and knees felt weak.
By the time he was halfway out, the ridge of rocks had narrowed, and he had no choice but to clamber atop them. When he looked up from that vantage for the first time, the biologist was nowhere to be seen. Which meant she had either found some miraculous way back to shore, or she was hidden somewhere ahead of him.
No matter how he hunched and bent, she was going to have a clear line of sight at him. He didn’t know what options she had—rock, knife, homemade spear?—if she wasn’t glad to see him. He took off his hat, shoved it in the pocket of his raincoat, hoping that if she was watching she would at least recognize that it was him. That this recognition might mean more to her than “interrogator” or “captor.” That it might make her hesitate should she be lying in wait.
Three-quarters of the way and he wondered if he should just head back. His legs were rubbery, matched the feel of the rocks where the kelp swelled over them. The waves to either side struck with more force, and although he could still see now—the sun a quiver of red against the far horizon, illuminating the distant smoke—he’d have to use his flashlight going back. Which would alert anyone on the shore to his presence; he hadn’t come all this way just to betray her to others. So he continued on with a sense of fatalism. He’d sacrificed all his pawns, his knights, bishops, and rooks. Abuela and Abuelo were facing an onslaught from the other side of the board.
In the tiring, repetitious work of climbing on, of continuing on and not going back, a grim satisfaction spread in a last surge of energy through his body. He had pursued this line of inquiry to the end. He had come very far, this thought mixed with sadness for what lay behind, so many people with whom he’d forged such slight connections. So many people that, as he neared the end of the rocks, he wished he had known better, tried to know better. His caring for his father now seemed not like a selfless effort but something that had been for him, too, to show him what it meant to be close to someone.
At the end of the ridge, he came upon a deep lagoon of ever-rippling encircled water, roughly cradled by the rocks. Lagoon was perhaps too gentle a word for it—a gurgling deep hole, whose sharp and irregular sides could cut hand or head easily. The bottom could not be seen.
Beyond, just the endless ocean, frothing to get in, smashing against the closed fist of the rocks so that spray flecked his face and the force of the wind buffeted him. But in the lagoon, all was calm, if unknowable in its dark reflection.
She appeared so close, from concealment on his left, that he almost jumped back, caught himself in time by bending and putting out a hand.
In that moment, he was helpless and in steadying himself he found that she had a gun trained on him. It looked like a Glock, like his own, standard-issue. He hadn’t expected that. Somehow, somewhere, she had found a gun. She was thinner, her cheekbones as cutting as the rocks. Her hair had begun to grow out, a dark fuzz. She wore thick jeans and a sweater too big for her but heavy, and high-quality brown hiking boots. There was a defiance on her face that warred with curiosity and some other emotion. Her lips were chapped. In this, her natural environment, she seemed so sure of herself that he felt awkward, ungainly. Something had clicked into place. Something had sharpened her, and he thought it might be memory.
“Throw your gun into the sea,” she said, motioning to his holster. She had to raise her voice for him to hear her, even this close—close enough that with a few steps he could have reached out and touched her shoulder.
“We might need it later,” he said.
“We?”
“Yes,” he said. “More are coming. I’ve seen the lights.” He did not want to share what had happened to the Southern Reach. Not yet.
“Toss it, now, unless you want to get shot.” He believed her. He’d seen the reports from her training. She said she wasn’t good with guns, but the targets hadn’t agreed.
So there went Grandpa version 4.9 or 5.1. He hadn’t kept track of the expeditions. The sea made it disappear with a smack that sounded like one last comment from Jack.
John looked over at her, standing across from him while the waves blasted the rocks and despite the gray and despite the wet and the cold, despite the fact he might die sometime in the next few minutes, he started to laugh. It surprised him, thought at first someone else was laughing.
Her grip tightened on the gun. “Is the idea of me shooting you funny?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s very, very funny.” He was laughing hard enough now that he had to bend to his knees to keep his balance on the rocks. A fierce joy or hysteria had risen inside of him, and he wondered in an idle, distant way if perhaps he should have sought out this feeling more often. The look of her, against the backdrop of the swell and the fall of the sea, was almost too much for him. But for the first time he knew he had done the right thing in coming here.
“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.
“It will be high tide soon,” she said. “You have to get off the rocks.” But not her? Even though he could not see her face, he knew the expression that must be etched there.
“We both have to get off the rocks.” He wasn’t sure he meant it. He could hear the helicopter now, could hear boats again, too. But if she was unhinged, if she was lying, if she didn’t actually know anything at all …
“I want to know who I am,” she said. “I can’t do that here. I can’t do that locked up in a cell.”
“I know who you are—it’s all in my head, your file. I can give you that.”
“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m never going back.”
“It’s dangerous,” he told her, pleading, as if she didn’t know. “It’s unproven. We don’t know where you’ll come out.” The hole was so deep and so jagged, and the water beginning to churn from the waves. He had seen wonders and he had seen terrible things. He had to believe that this was one more and that it was true and that it was knowable.
Her stare took the measure of him. She was done talking. She threw her gun away. She dove into the water, down deep.
He took one last look back at the world he knew. He took one huge gulp of it, every bit of it he could see, every bit of it he could remember.
“Jump,” said a voice in his head.
Control jumped.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my editor, Sean McDonald, and everyone at FSG for their expertise, passion, sense of humor, and, above all, patience. Thanks as well to everyone at the Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Canada, Blackstone Audiobooks, and my foreign-language publishers. Thanks to my agent, Sally Harding, and my wife, Ann, for helping me find the mental space to write these novels. Thanks to Black Dog Café, All Saints Café, the Fermentation Lounge, San Luis Mission Park, and Shared Worlds for giving me physical spaces to work in. Thanks to Eric Schaller, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Ashley Davis for science discussions. Finally, thanks to my first readers for their help, including Brian Evenson, Tessa Kum, Greg Bossert, Jeremy Zerfoss, Karin Tidbeck, Craig Gitney, Berit Ellingsen, and Adam Mills.