Acceptance(24)

“Are you sure?” she said, coming very close. He could smell her sweat, see the rise of her shoulders, the half-curled left hand. “Are you sure?” she repeated. “Why not inoculate me, if you’re unsure? You’re already caught between wanting me and not being sure I’m all human, is that it? Made by the enemy. Must be the enemy. But can’t help yourself anyway.”

“I helped you back at the Southern Reach,” he said.

“Don’t thank people for doing what they’re supposed to. You told me that.”

He took a stumbling step back. “I’m out here, Ghost Bird, traveling to a place I didn’t want to go. Having followed someone I’m not sure I know.” A beacon to him still, and he resented that, didn’t want it. Couldn’t help it.

“That’s bullshit. You know exactly who I am—or you should have. You’re afraid, just like me,” she said, and he knew that he was. Had no defenses out here, for anything.

“I don’t think you’re with the enemy,” he said, enemy sounding harsh and unreasonable now. “And I don’t think of you as a copy. Not really.”

Exasperation, even as she was relenting, or he thought she was: “I am a copy, John. But not a perfect one. I’m not her. She’s not me. Do you know what I’d say if I came face-to-face with her?”

“What?”

“I’d tell her, ‘You made a lot of fucking mistakes. You made a lot of mistakes, and yet I love you. You’re a mess and a revelation, but I can’t be any of that. All I can do is work out things myself.’ And then, knowing her, she’d probably look at me funny and take a tissue sample from me.”

A roaring laughter came out of him at that. He banged his hand on his knee. “You’re right. You’re probably right. She’d do exactly that.” He sat on the ground, while she remained where she was, stiff as a sentinel. “I’m beyond my skill set out here. I’m totally fucked. Even if we’d gone to the lighthouse.”

“Totally fucked,” she said, smiling.

“Strange, isn’t it? A strange place to be.” Being drawn out of himself, even though he didn’t want to be. Suddenly calmer than he’d been since he’d gotten here, all of his failures muffled and indistinct behind another kind of border.

She stared at him, appraising him.

“We should keep going,” she said. “But you can keep reading.”

She offered him a hand up, the strength of her grip as he got to his feet a greater reassurance than any words.

“But it’s a fucking disaster,” he said. “I’m reading you the last will and testament of a fool.”

“What other entertainment do we have out here?”

“True.”

Control hadn’t told her about Whitby’s strange room or his suspicions about Whitby as a conduit for Area X. He hadn’t told her about those last desperate moments at the Southern Reach as the border shifted. And in not telling Ghost Bird these things, he had come to understand his mother’s lies better. She had wanted to cover up the core of her decisions by hiding facts or watering them down. But she must have been wise enough to realize, no matter her motivations, no matter the labyrinth, every omission left some sign of its presence.

“‘How does It renew Itself if not through our actions? Our lives?’” Whitby asked, living on through Control when the man himself was probably dead or worse.

But she wasn’t listening; something in the sky had caught her attention again, something he knew couldn’t be storks, and he had the binoculars this time, scrambled to find what she was staring at. When he found it, he adjusted the focus a few times, not sure he’d seen correctly.

But he had.

Across the deepening blue, high up, something drifted that resembled ripped and tattered streamers. Long and wide and alien. Its progress so far up, so far away … Control thought of an invisible shredded plastic bag, eviscerated to elongate and drift through the sky … except it was thicker than that and part of the sky, too. The texture of it, the way it existed and didn’t exist, made him recoil, made his hand twitch, become numb, skin cold, remembering a wall that was not a wall. A wall that had been breathing under his touch.

“Get down!” Ghost Bird said, and forced him to his knees beside her in a stand of reeds. He could feel the brightness in him now—tight, taut, pulling like it was his skin being pulled, drawn toward the sky that wasn’t just the sky anymore. Drawn to it so much that he would have gotten up if Ghost Bird hadn’t forced him down again. He lay there grateful for her weight beside him, grateful he wasn’t out here alone.