Acceptance(25)

Stitching through the sky, in a terrifying way—rippling, diving, rising again, and there came a terrible whispering that pierced not his ears but all of him, as if small particles of something physical had shot through him. He cursed, frozen there, watching, afraid. “The wavery lines that are there and not there.” A line from Whitby’s report he hadn’t shared because he hadn’t understood it. Images from the video of the first expedition coming back to him.

“Stay still,” Ghost Bird whispered in his ear. “Stay still.” She was sheltering his body with hers, she was trying to make it seem as if he wasn’t there.

He tried not even to breathe, to become so motionless that he was no longer alive. As it curled in and through the sky, he could hear it rippling, diving, rising again, like traces of a sail until, as he risked a look, he saw some impact in the air freeze it in place, and for a moment it was stretched as taut as skin, almost brittle, unyielding.

Then, with a final plunge and ascent, coming far too close, the presence winked out of existence, or slipped out of the air, and the sky was the same as before.

He had no words for it, Whitby’s or his own. This was no dead diorama. This was no beastly skeleton of a man he’d never known. Anything now seemed possible. Anything could happen. He clutched the carving of Chorry tight. So tight he almost punctured his skin.

They remained that way until a storm slipped across a sky Control now thought of as treacherous, and through the dark gray light there came lightning, thunder, and in amongst the raindrops that drenched them, dark, slippery tadpole-like things hurtled down and disappeared into the soil all around them while they tried to take shelter as best they could, soaked under a gnarled, blackened copse of trees with leaves like daggers. The tadpole things were more like living rivulets, about the size of his little finger. He could not help thinking of them as coming from the stitching in the sky, that somehow it had disintegrated into a million tiny pieces, and this, too, was somehow part of the ecosystem of Area X.

“What do you think that will become?” he asked her.

“Whatever everything else is becoming here,” she said, and that was no answer at all.

When the storm passed, the marsh came alive with birdsong and the gurgle of water in the canals, nothing at all amiss. Perhaps the reeds seemed more vibrant, the trees greener, but this was just the quality of the light, from a sun that seemed as distant as the rest of the world.

After a time, they stood. After a time, in silence, they continued on, walking closer together than before.





0006: THE DIRECTOR

There’s a place that as a kid you called the farthestmost point—the most distant you could get, the place that when you stood there you could pretend you were the only person in the world. Being there made you wary, but it also put a kind of peace into you, a sense of security. Beyond that point, in either direction, you were always returning, and are returning still. But for that moment, even now with Whitby by your side, you’re so remote that there’s nothing for miles—and you feel that. You feel it strongly. You’ve gone from being a little on edge to being a little tired, and you’ve come out on this perfectly still scene where the scrublands turn to wetlands, with a freshwater canal serving as a buffer to the salt marsh and, ultimately, the sea. Where once you saw otters, heard the call of curlews. You take a deep breath and relax into the landscape, walk along the shore of this lower heaven rejuvenated by its perfect stillness. Your legs are for a time no longer tired and you are afraid of nothing, not even Area X, and you have no room for memory or thought or anything except this moment, and this one, and the next.

Soon enough, though, that feeling falls away again, and you and Whitby—survivors of the topographical anomaly—stand in the remains of your mother’s cottage. It’s just a floor and a couple of supporting walls with the wallpaper so faded you can’t figure out the pattern. On the sunken splintered deck, a battered and smashed rot of wide planks that used to be the walkway leads to the dunes, and from there to a metallic-blue sea that tosses up whitecaps and drags them down again. Perhaps you shouldn’t have come here, but you needed something like normalcy, some evocation of those days before it all went wrong—days that had seemed so ordinary at the time.

“Don’t forget me,” Saul had said back then, as if speaking not just for him but for your mother, too, and the rest of the forgotten coast. Now truly forgotten, Whitby standing at one end and you at the other, needing the space. He’s unsure of you, and you’re definitely unsure of him. Whitby wanted to abort the mission after the tower, but at no point did you think you should just leave. This was your home, and Whitby isn’t going to stop you, though he might protest, though he might whimper and try to get free, though he might plead with you to return across the border immediately.