Authority(75)

“My side? My side is that I’ve been dropped into a pit of snakes with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back.”

“That’s just a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” said the streak of light.

“Not as dramatic as whatever you did to me at Central. I’ve got missing hours, maybe a missing day.”

“Nothing much,” she said in a bland tone that let him know she was bored with the topic. “Nothing much. Prepared you, stiffened your resolve, that’s all. Made you see some things more clearly and others less so.”

“Like introduce fake memories or—”

“No. That kind of thing would make you such an expensive model that no one here could afford you. Or afford to send you to the Southern Reach.”

Because everyone would kill for this position.

“Are you lying to me?”

“You’d better hope not,” she said with an in-rushing verve, “because I’m all you’ve got now—by your own actions. Besides, you’ll never really know for sure. You’ve always been the kind of person who peels away the layers, even when there are no layers left. So just take it at face value, from your poor long-suffering mother.”

“I can see you, Mother. I can see your reflection in the glass. You’re right around the corner, watching, aren’t you? It’s not just your proxies. You’re in town, too.”

“Yes, John. That’s why there’s that kind of tinny echo. That’s why my words seem to be falling on deaf ears, because you’re hearing them twice. I’m interrupting myself, apparently.”

A kind of rippling effect spread through him. He felt elongated and stretched, and his throat was dry. “Can I trust you?” he asked, sick of the sparring.

Something sincere and open in his voice must have reached her, because she dropped the distant tone and said, “Of course you can, John. You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.”

That didn’t help him at all. “You want me to trust you? Then tell me, Mother. Tell me who the Voice was.” If she wouldn’t, the impulse in him to just disappear into the underbelly of Hedley, to fade into that landscape and not come back, might return. Might be too strong to suppress.

She hesitated, and her hesitation scared him. It felt real, not staged.

Then: “Lowry. God’s honest truth, John. Lowry was the Voice.”

Not thirty years distant at all. But breathing in Control’s ear.

“Son of a bitch.”

Banished and yet returned via the videos that would play forever in his head. Haunting him still.

Lowry.

* * *

“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John.” Grandpa Jack staring at him as he held the gun.

There had come a sharp rapping at the window. It was his mother, leaning over to look in the window. Even through the condensation, Control could tell when she saw the gun on his lap. The door was wrenched open. The gun suddenly vanished, and Jack, on the other side, was out on his ear, Mother standing over him while he sat on the curb in front of the car. Control took the risk of lowering the left rear window a bit, then leaned forward so he could observe them better through the front windshield. She was talking quietly to Grandpa while she stood in front of him, arms folded and her gaze straight ahead, as if he stood at eye level. Control couldn’t see where the gun had gone.

A sense of menace radiated out from his mother that he had never seen in such a concentrated form before. Her voice might be low, and he couldn’t hear most of what she was saying, but the tone and quickness of it was like a sharpened butcher knife slicing, effortless, through raw meat. His grandpa gave a peculiar nod in response, one that was almost more like he was being pushed back by some invisible force or like she was shoving him.

She unfolded her arms and lowered her head to look at Grandpa, and Control heard, “Not this way! Not this way. You can’t force him into it.” For some reason, he wondered if she was talking about the gun or Grandpa’s secret plan to take him to the lingerie show.

Then she walked back to the car to collect him, and Grandpa got in and drove off slowly. Relief swept over Control as they went back inside the house. He didn’t have to go to the lingerie show. He might be able to go next door later.

Mother only talked about the incident once, when they got back in the house. They took off their coats, went into the living room. She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. With her big, wavy hair and her slight features and her white blouse, red scarf, crisp black pants, and high heels she looked like a magazine model, smoking. An agitated model. Now he had experienced another unknown thing beyond the fact that she could fight fiercely for him: He hadn’t known she was a smoker.