Authority(69)

“Raccoons are the worst predators of their nests,” she said. “Did you know that they pre-date the last ice age? Farther south, they roost in colonies, but in this region they’re endangered, so they’re more solitary.”

Control had looked it up and the wood storks should have returned by now if they were going to. They tended to be creatures of habit.

“I can only give you thirty or forty minutes,” he said. Bringing her here felt now like a terrible indulgence, possibly even a kind of danger, although he did not know to whom. But he also knew he couldn’t have left things as they were after the morning session.

“I hate it when they mow it and try to take out the duckweed,” she said, ignoring him.

He wasn’t sure what to say to that. It was just a holding pond, like thousands of others. It wasn’t meant to be a habitat. But, then, they’d found her in an empty lot.

“Look—there are still some tadpoles,” she said, pointing, something approaching contentment on her face. He was beginning to understand that keeping her inside had been cruel. Perhaps now she wouldn’t see the conversation between them solely as an interrogation.

“It is nice out here,” he said, just to say something, but it was nice. It felt even better than he’d thought to get out of the building. He’d had some idea of questioning her, but the strong smell of rain and the way that the distant sky formed dark curtains of downpours fast approaching had defeated that impulse.

“Ask her about the director,” the Voice said. “Ask her if the director mentioned having been across the border before.” Pushed that away. You’re a hologram. You’re a construct. I’m going to throw chum overboard until you’re so blood-enraged you can’t swim properly.

Ghost Bird nudged a large black beetle with her shoe. It was frantic, ceaselessly caroming through the links of the fence and back over. “You know why they do that?”

“No, I don’t,” Control said. Over the past four days, he had realized there were many things he didn’t know.

“They just sprayed insecticide here. I can smell it. You can see the hint of foam on its carapace. It disorients them as it kills them; they can’t breathe because of it. They become what you might call panicked. They keep searching for a way to get away from what’s already inside of them. Toward the end, they settle down, but that’s only because they don’t have enough oxygen to move anymore.”

She waited until the beetle was over a piece of flat ground and then brought her shoe down, hard and fast. There was a crunch. Control looked away. Forgiving a friend who had done something to upset him, his father had once said that she heard a different kind of music.

“Ask her about the empty lot,” the Voice said.

“Why do you think you ended up at the empty lot?” Control asked, mostly to placate the audience. Any one of the three might report back to Grace.

“I ended up here, at the Southern Reach.” A guarded note had entered her voice.

“What does it mean to you, that place?” The same as this place, or more?

“I don’t think it was where I was meant to be,” she said after a pause. “Just a feeling. I remember waking up and not recognizing it for a moment and then when I did, being disappointed.”

“Disappointed how?”

Ghost Bird shrugged.

Lines of lightning created fantastical countries in the sky. Thunder came on like an accusing voice.

Ask her if she left anything in the empty lot. Was it his question or the Voice’s?

“Did you leave anything there?”

“Not that I remember,” she said.

Control said something he had rehearsed beforehand. “Soon you’ll need to be candid about what you remember and what you don’t remember. They’ll take you away from here if I don’t get results. And I’ll have no say in where they send you if that happens. It might be worse than here, a lot worse.”

“Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t the biologist?” She said it quietly, but with bite.

Ask her what she really is.

He couldn’t suppress a wince, even though he had meant it when he had said she didn’t owe him anything for bringing her out to the pond.

“I’m trying to be honest. I’m not her … and there’s something inside of me I don’t understand. There’s a kind of … brightness … inside.”

Nothing in the medical updates, except an elevated temperature.

“That’s called life,” Control said.

She didn’t laugh at that, but said, quietly, “I don’t think so.”

If she had a “brightness” inside of her, there was a corresponding darkness inside of him. The rain approached. The humidity was driven away by a wild breeze. Ripples spread across the pond, and the shed wheezed as the wind pushed against it. The little Christmas pine whipped back and forth.