Authority(66)

“Have you never made a mistake?” he asked, but she ignored him.

Instead she gave him the gift of a motive: “This time, your contact tried to cut me off from Central. For good.” The Voice, continuing to help him in the same way as a runaway bull.

“I didn’t ask for that.” Well, if he had, he didn’t want it anymore.

“You went into my office again.”

“I didn’t.” But he couldn’t be sure.

“I’m trying to keep things the way they are for the director, not for me.”

“The director’s dead. The director’s not coming back.”

She looked away from him, out through the windows at the courtyard and the swamp beyond. A fierce look that shut him out.

Maybe the director was flying free over Area X, or scrabbling with root-broken fingernails into the dirt, the reeds, trying to get away … from something. But she wasn’t here.

“Think about how much worse it could get, Grace, if they replace me with someone else. Because they’re never going to make you director.” Truth for truth.

“You know I did you a favor just now,” she said, pivoting away from what he’d said.

“A favor? Sure you did.”

But he did know. That which was uncomfortable or unflattering she had now off-loaded pointlessly, ordnance wasted, a gun shot into the air. She had let out the rest of the items in her jewelry box of condemnation, and by not hoarding told him she would not be using it in the future.

“You’re a lot like us,” she said. “Someone who has made a lot of mistakes. Someone just trying to do better. To be better.”

Subtext: You can’t solve what hasn’t been solved in thirty years. I won’t let you get out ahead of the director. And what misdirection in that? What was she pushing him toward or away from?

Control just nodded, not because he agreed or disagreed but because he was exhausted. Then he excused himself, locked the cafeteria bathroom, and vomited up his breakfast. He wondered if he was coming down with something or if his body was rejecting, as viciously as possible, everything in the Southern Reach.





018: RECOVERY

Cheney came back to prowl around outside the bathroom—concerned, whispering “Do you think you’re all right, man?” as if they’d become best buddies. But eventually Cheney went away, and a little while later Control’s cell phone rang just as he’d propped himself up on the toilet seat. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The Voice. The bathroom seemed like the perfect place to take this call. Cold porcelain after having slammed the bathroom door shut was a relief. So were the tiny cool blue tiles of the floor. Even the faint whiff of piss. All of it. Any of it.

Why were there no mirrors in the men’s room?

“Next time, take my call when I call,” the Voice warned, with the implication that s/he was a busy wo/man, just as Control noticed the flashing light that meant he had a message.

“I was in a meeting.” I was watching videotape. I was talking to the biologist. I was getting my ass handed to me by the assistant director because of you.

“Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. “Is it in order?”

Two thousand white rabbits herded toward an invisible door. A plant that didn’t want to die. Impossible video footage. More theories than there were fish in the sea. Was his house in order? An odd way for the Voice to phrase it, as if they spoke using a code to which Control did not have the key. Yet it made him feel secure even though that was counterintuitive.

“Are you there?” the Voice asked brusquely.

“Yes. Yes, my house is in order.”

“Then what do you have for me?”

Control gave the Voice a brief summary.

The Voice considered that for a moment, then asked, “So do you have an answer now?”

“To what?”

“To the mystery behind Area X.” The Voice laughed an oddly tinny metallic laugh. Haw haw haw. Haw.

Enough of this. “Stop trying to cut Grace off from her contacts at Central. It isn’t working and it’s making it harder,” Control said. Remembering her care with setting up the videos of the first expedition, too wrung out by lunch to process it yet. Twinned to Control’s disgust at the Voice’s clearly inadequate and extreme tactics was the sudden conviction, admittedly irrational, that somehow the Voice was responsible for sticking him in the middle of the Southern Reach. If the Voice actually was his mother, then he’d be correct about that.

“Listen, John,” the Voice growled, “I don’t report to you. You report to me, and don’t forget that.” Meant to be delivered with conviction, and yet somehow failing.