Acceptance(43)

A pause, an increased pressure of the muzzle at his head; he flinched. Then the pressure was gone, along with her shadow. He looked over. Grace was back against the wall, gun still in her hand.

He sat up, hands on his thighs, forced a deep breath in, out, and considered his options. It was the kind of field situation his mother would’ve called “an either without the or.” He could either find some way to smooth it over or go for the rifles against the wall. Not a real choice. Not with Ghost Bird out of action.

Slowly, carefully, he picked his three Whitby pages off the floor, willed himself to move past the danger of the moment: “Is that your usual welcome?”

Her face a kind of impassive mask now, daring him to challenge her. “Sometimes it ends with me pulling the trigger. Control, I am not interested in bullshit. You don’t have any idea what I’ve been through. What might be real … and what might not be real.”

He slumped against the wall, holding Whitby’s pages against his chest. Was there something in the corner of his eye?

“There’s nothing to this world,” he said, “but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can based on that information.” Even though he didn’t trust the world anymore.

“There was a time I would have shot first, before you even left the boat.”

“Thank you?” Putting as much punch into that as possible.

A curt nod, like he was serious, and Grace shoved the gun back in its holster on her right side, away from him. “I always have to be careful.” He noted the tension in her upper arm and heard the sharp click as she toyed with the clasp on the holster. Opening it. Closing it.

“Sure,” he said. “I see someone got to your big toe. That kind of thing could make a person paranoid.”

She ignored that, said, “When did you get here?”

“Five days ago.”

“How long since the border shifted?”

Had Grace lost track of the days out here, by herself? “No more than two weeks.”

“How did you get across?”

He told her, omitting any detail about where the door under the sea might lie. Omitting, too, that Ghost Bird had created it.

Grace considered all of that for a long moment, nursing a bitter smile that rejected interpretation. But he was on high alert again; she’d taken out her gutting knife with her left hand and was creating circles in the dust beside her. This wasn’t just a paranoid debriefing. There were higher stakes and his own analysis to undertake: Had Grace just been rattled by something here on the island, or suffered the kind of shock that rearranged your thought processes, forever impaired your judgment?

With as much gentleness as he could muster: “Do you mind if I wake up Ghost Bird now?”

“I gave her a sedative with her water last night.”

“You what?” Echoes of a dozen domestic terrorism interrogations, all the symbols and signs.

“Are you her new best friend now? Do you trust her? And do you even know what I mean?”

Trusted her not to be the enemy. Trusted her to be human. Wanted to say, I trust her as much as I trust myself, but that wouldn’t satisfy Grace. Not this version of Grace.

“What has happened here?” He felt betrayed, sad. To have come so far, but that old dynamic—sharing a smoke in the courtyard of the Southern Reach—had turned to ash.

A shudder passed through Grace, some hidden stressor coming to the surface, moving through and past, as if waking only now from a nightmare.

“It takes getting used to,” she said, staring down at the patterns she’d made in the dust. “It takes getting used to, knowing that everything we did meant nothing. That Central abandoned us. That our new director abandoned us.”

“I tried to—” I tried to stay; you told me to go. But that clearly wasn’t how she saw it. And now they were at the very edge of the world, and she was taking it out on him.

“I tried to blame you, at first, when I was getting things straight in my head. I did blame you. But what could you have done? Nothing. Central probably programmed you to do what they wanted.”

Going over those horrific moments again, jammed together in his memory, wedged in there at odd angles. The look on Grace’s face in that moment of extremes, as the border advanced on the Southern Reach, weighing the possibility that he’d said nothing to her at all. Hadn’t been as close to her and hadn’t put his hand on her arm. Just thought he had.

“Your face, Control. If you could have seen the expression on your face,” she said, as if they were talking about his reaction to a surprise party. The wall of the building becoming flesh. The director returned in a wave of green light. The weight of that. The fingers of his left hand had curled around the carving of Chorry in his jacket pocket. He released his grip, pulled his hand out, let his fingers open up. Examined the white curved indentations, fringed with pink.