Acceptance(42)

He twisted onto his back, sat up, and shoved up against the wall catty-corner to her, the window between them. The raucous birds that had briefly woken him at dawn were quiet now, probably out foraging or doing whatever birds did. Could it be as late as noon? Ghost Bird lay curled up in a camo-patterned sleeping bag, had throughout the night made little jerking motions and sounds that reminded Control of his cat in the grip of some vision.

“Why the hell did you go through my pockets?” Somehow the accusatory tone abandoned the words as he said them, relieved to find his dad’s carving still in his jacket.

She ignored him, leafing through Whitby’s last words, lingering between a smile and a frown, intense but uncommitted. “This has not changed since the last time I saw it. It’s even more full of shit now … probably. Except back then the author was a crackpot. Singular. Now we’re all fucking crackpots.”

“Fuck?”

A quizzical look. “What’s wrong with ‘fuck’? Area X doesn’t give a crap if I swear.”

She continued to read and reread the pages, shaking her head at certain parts, while Control stared, still feeling possessive. He was more attached to those pages than he’d thought, afraid she might just ball them up and chuck them out the window.

“Can I have those back?”

A weary amusement, something in her smile that told him he was transparent. “Not yet. Not just yet. Get some breakfast. Then file a formal request.” She went back to reading again.

Frustrated, he looked around the space. Compulsively tidy, as he’d thought on first glance. Lock-action rifles in a precise row against the far wall, next to her sleeping space, which was a mattress covered with a sheet and blanket she had tucked in tight. A creased wallet photo of her girlfriend, propped on a ledge, curling edges smoothed out. Cans of food lined up against the long side wall, and protein bars. Cups and bottles of drinking water that she must have gotten from a stream or well. Knives. A portable stove. Pots, pans. Lugged all the way from the Southern Reach building or scavenged from the ambushed convoy on the shore? How much she had found on the island he wouldn’t want to guess.

Control was just about to get up and pick out a can when she spilled the pages on the floor between them, right on a spot damp from rainwater.

“Dammit.” He scrambled forward on all fours to retrieve them.

The muzzle of Grace’s gun dug into the side of his head near his ear.

He remained extremely still, looking across at where Ghost Bird slept.

“Are you real?” she asked, in a kind of rasp, as if her voice had gone gray along with her hair. Should he have divined something more profound from her boot, her bandaged toe?

“Grace, I—”

She smacked him across the forehead with the muzzle, shoved the mouth of the gun harder into his skin, whispered in his ear, “Don’t use my fucking name. Don’t ever use my name! No names. It may still know names.”

“What may know names?” Stifling the word Grace.

“Shouldn’t you already know?” Contemptuous.

“Put the gun down.”

“No.”

“Can I sit up?”

“No. Are you real?”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, as calmly as he could. Wondered if he could move fast enough to get out of the line of fire, push the gun from his temple before she blew his brains out.

“I think you do. Tampered with. Spoiled goods. A hallucination. An apparition.”

“I’m as real as you,” he said. But the secret fear behind that, the one he didn’t want to voice. Along with the thought that he didn’t know what Grace had endured since he’d seen her last. That he wasn’t sure he knew her now. Any more than he knew himself now.

“What script are you running off of? Central or the L-word?”

“The L-word?” Absurd thoughts. Lie? Lighthouse? Lesbian? Then realized she meant Lowry. “Neither. I cut off hypnotic suggestion. I freed myself.” Not sure he believed that.

“Should we run a test?”

“Don’t try it. I really mean it—don’t.”

“I wouldn’t,” Grace said, as if he’d accused her of high crimes. “That’s L’s kink. But I know the signs by now. There is a pinched look you all get, a paleness. The hands curling into claws. His signature, written all over you.”

“Residual. Just residual.”

“Still, you admit it.”

“I admit I don’t know why the living fuck you’re holding a gun to my head!” he shouted. Had Ghost Bird heard nothing, or was she pretending to sleep? And there, as if to call him a liar anyway: what Ghost Bird called “the brightness,” curious, interested, questing. It rose now as a tightness in his chest, a spasm in his left thigh as he remained on all fours being interrogated by his assistant director.