Authority(44)

A: I’ve told you that nothing happened there. I woke up as if from an endless dream. And then they picked me up.

Q:Do you ever dream? Now, I mean.

A: What would be the point?

Q: What do you mean?

A: I’d just dream of being out of this place.

Q: Do you want to hear about my dreams?

He didn’t know why he had said this to her. He didn’t know what he’d tell her. Would he tell her about the endless falling into the bay, into the maw of leviathans?

To his surprise, she said:

A: What do you dream of, John? Tell me.

It was the first time she’d used his name, and he tried to hate how it had sent a kind of spark through him. John. She had brought her feet up onto the chair so she was hugging her knees and peering at him almost impishly.

Sometimes you had to adjust your strategy, give up something to get something. So he did tell her his dream, even though he felt self-conscious and hoped Grace wouldn’t see it in the official record, use it against him somehow. But if he’d lied, if he’d made something up, Control believed that Ghost Bird would know, that even as he’d been trying to interpret her tells, she had been processing him the whole time. Even when he asked the questions he was hemorrhaging data. He had a sudden image of information floating out the side of his head in a pixelated blood-red mist. These are my relatives. This is my ex-girlfriend. My father was a sculptor. My mother is a spy.

But she had relented, too, during the conversation, for a moment.

A: I woke in the empty lot and I thought I was dead. I thought I was in purgatory, maybe, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife. But it was quiet and so empty … so I waited there, afraid to leave, afraid there might be some reason I was meant to be there. Not sure I wanted to know anything else. Then the police came for me, and then the Southern Reach after that. But I still believed I wasn’t really alive.

What if the biologist had just that morning decided she was alive, not dead? Perhaps that accounted for the change in her mood.

When he had finished reading, he could feel Ghost Bird still staring at him, and she would not let his gaze drop, held him there, or he let her do it. For whatever reason.

* * *

On the way back from the border, a silence had come over Control, Whitby, and Cheney, perhaps overloaded by the contrast between sun/heat and rain/cold. But it had seemed to Control like the companionable silence of shared experience, as if he had been initiated into membership in an exclusive club without having been asked first. He was wary of that feeling; it was a space where shadows crept in that shouldn’t creep in, where people agreed to things that they did not actually agree with, believing that they were of one purpose and intent. Once, in such a space, a fellow agent had called him “homey” and made an offhand comment about him “not being your usual kind of spic.”

When they were about a mile from the Southern Reach, Cheney said, too casually, “You know, there’s a rumor about the former director and the border.”

“Yes?” Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.

“That she went over the border by herself once,” Cheney said, staring off into the distance. Even Whitby seemed to want to distance himself from that statement, leaning forward in his seat as he drove. “Just a rumor,” Cheney added. “No idea if it’s true.”

But Control didn’t care about that, despite the addition being disingenuous. The truth clearly didn’t worry Cheney, or he already knew it was true and wanted Control on the scent.

“Does this rumor include when this might have happened?” Control asked.

“Before the final eleventh expedition.”

Part of him had wanted to take that to the assistant director and see what she might or might not know. Another part decided that was a premature idea. So he’d chewed on the information, wondering why Cheney had fed it to him, especially in front of Whitby. Did that mean Whitby had the spine, despite the evidence, to withhold even when Grace wanted him to share?

“Have you ever been over the border, Cheney?”

An explosive snort. “No. Are you crazy? No.”

In the parking lot at day’s end, Control sat behind the wheel, keys in the ignition, and decompressed for a moment. The rain had passed, leaving oily puddles and a kind of verdant sheen on the grass and trees. Only Whitby’s purple electric car remained, at an angle across two spaces, as if it had washed up there.

Time to call the Voice and file his report. Getting it over with was better than letting work bleed into his evening.

The phone rang and rang.

The Voice finally answered with a “Yes—what?” as if Control had called at a bad time.