Authority(25)

It had a door or passageway through it into Area X.

The door might not have been created by whatever had created Area X.

He passed a corner grocery store, a pharmacy, a neighborhood bar. He crossed the street and narrowly missed running into a woman on a bicycle. Abandoned the sidewalk for the side of the road when he had to, wanting now to get to the river soon, not looking forward to the run back up the hill.

You could not get under the border by any means on the seaward side. You could not tunnel under it on the landward side. You could not penetrate it with advanced instrumentation or radar or sonar. From satellites peering down from above, you would see only wilderness in apparent real time, nothing out of the ordinary. Even though this was an optical lie.

The night the border had come down, it had taken ships and planes and trucks with it, anything that happened to be on or approaching that imaginary but too-real line at the moment of its creation, and for many hours after, before anyone knew what was going on, knew enough to keep distant. Before the army moved in. The plaintive groan of metal and the vibration of engines that continued running as they disappeared … into something, somewhere. A smoldering, apocalyptic vision, the con towers of a destroyer, sent to investigate with the wrong intel, “sliding into nothing” as one observer put it. The last shocked transmissions from the men and women on board, via video and radio, while most ran to the back in a churning, surging wave that, on the grainy helicopter video, looked like some enormous creature leaping off into the water. Because they were about to disappear and could do nothing about it, all of it complicated by the fog. Some, though, just stood there, watching as their ship disintegrated, and then they crossed over or died or went somewhere else or … Control couldn’t fathom it.

The hill leveled out and he was back on sidewalks, this time passing generic strip malls and chain stores and people crossing at stoplights and people getting into cars in parking lots … until he reached the main drag before the river—a blur of bright lights and more pedestrians, some of them drunk—crossed it, and came into a quiet neighborhood of mobile homes and tiny cinder-block houses. He was sweating a lot by now, despite the coolness. Someone was having a barbecue and they all stopped to watch him as he ran by.

His thoughts turned again to the biologist. To the need to know what the biologist had seen and experienced in Area X. Aware of the fact the assistant director might do more than threaten to take her away. Aware that the assistant director wanted to use that uncertainty to get him to make unsound decisions.

A one-way road fringed with weeds and strewn with gravel from potholes led him down to the river. He emerged from a halo of branches onto a rickety pontoon dock, bent his knees to keep his balance. Finally came to a stop there, at the end of the dock, next to a speedboat lashed to it. Few lights across the river, just little clusters here and there, nothing compared to the roaring splash of lights to his left, where the river walk waited under the deliberate touristy feature of stupid faux-Victorian lampposts topped with globes full of blurry soft-boiled eggs.

Somewhere across the river and off to the left lay Area X—many miles away but still visible somehow as a weight, a shadow, a glimmering. Expeditions would have been coming back or not coming back while he was still in high school. The psychologist would have been transitioning to director at some point as well. A whole secret history had been playing out while he and his friends drove into Hedley, intent on scoring some beers and finding a party, not necessarily in that order.

He’d had a phone call with his mother the day before he’d boarded the plane, headed for the Southern Reach. They’d talked a little bit about his connection to Hedley. She’d said, “I only knew the area because you were there. But you don’t remember that.” No, he didn’t. Nor had he known that she had worked briefly for the Southern Reach, a fact that both did and didn’t surprise him. “I worked there to be closer to you,” she said, and something in his heart loosened, even as he wasn’t sure whether to believe her.

Because it was so hard to tell. At that time he would have been receiving her time-lapse stories from earlier assignments. He tried to fast-forward, figure out when, if ever, she’d told him a disguised version of the Southern Reach. He couldn’t find the point, or his memory just didn’t want to give it to him. “What did you do there?” he’d asked, and the only word back had been a wall: “Classified.”

He turned off his music, stood there listening to the croaking of frogs, the lap and splash of water against the side of the speedboat as a breeze rippled across the river. The dark was more complete here, and the stars seemed closer. The flow of the river had been faster back in the day, but the runoff from agribusiness had generated silt that slowed it, stilled it, and changed what lived in it and where. Hidden by the darkness of the opposite shore lay paper mills and the ruins of earlier factories, still polluting the groundwater. All of it coursing into seas ever-more acidic.