Authority(95)

“But why did it have to be me?”

“I told you.” Pleading for him to understand: “I know you, John. I know who you are. I’d know if you … changed.”

“Like the biologist changed.” Burning now, that she’d put him in harm’s way without telling him, without giving him the choice. Except, he’d had a choice: He could have stayed where he was, continued to believe he lived beyond the border when that was a lie.

“Something like that.”

“Or just changed as in became more cynical, jaded, paranoid, or burned-out.”

“Stop it.”

“Why should I?”

“I did the best I could.”

“Yeah.”

“Growing up, I mean, John. I did the best I could, considering. But you’re still angry. Even now, you’re still angry. It’s too much. It’s too much.” Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?

He put his coffee down. There was a knot in his shoulders that might never come out. “I’m not thinking about that. That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter now.”

“It matters most of all now,” she said, “because I may never see you again.” Her voice, for the only time he could remember, breaking up.

The weight of that hit him hard, and he knew it was true, and he felt for a moment as if he were falling. The enormity, the impossibility of it, was too much. How it had come to this point, he barely knew, even though he had been there every step of the way.

He brought her close, held her, as she whispered in his ear: “I took my eye off things. I thought the director agreed with us. I thought I could handle Lowry. I thought we would work through it. I thought we had more time.” That the problem was smaller. That somehow it was containable. That somehow she wouldn’t be hurting him.

His mother. His handler. But after a moment he had to let her go. No way to fully cross that divide, to heal everything that needed to be healed. Not now.

She told him one more thing, then, delivered to him like a penance.

“John, you should know that the biologist escaped our custody over the weekend. She’s been AWOL for the past three days.”

An elation, a surge of an unwarranted, selfish euphoria that came in part from having banished her from his thoughts as the nightmare at the Southern Reach played out—and now his reward, that she had, in a way, been returned to him.

* * *

All of the rest of the answers to his questions rose up later, long after his mother had left in his car, after he had packed, reluctantly abandoned the cat, took her car, as she had suggested. But he stopped on a quiet street a few blocks away and hot-wired another car because he didn’t trust Central. Soon he was outside of Hedley, in the middle of nowhere. He felt the absence of his father terribly as he passed where they had lived. Because his father might have been a comfort now. Because now it didn’t matter what secrets he told or didn’t tell.

At the airport about ninety miles away, in a city big enough to have international connections, he left his vehicle in the parking lot along with his guns and booked two tickets. One was to Honduras, with a layover on the west coast. The other had two layovers and wound up about two hundred miles from the coast. The second he bought under an alias. He checked in for Honduras, then sat in the airport bar, nursing a whiskey, waiting for the puddle jumper. Apocalyptic visions of what Area X would absorb if it moved forward came to him. Buildings, roads, lakes, valleys, airports. Everything. He scanned the closed-caption televisions for any news, trying to outthink the people from Central who might be on her trail, might already have picked up her trail. If he was the biologist, he would have train-hopped to start, which meant he might easily catch up with her. From where she’d escaped, she had just as far to travel as he did.

A blond woman at the bar asked him what he did and he said, recklessly, without thought, “A marine biologist.” “Oh, with the government.” “No, freelance,” which sounded absurd after he’d said it. Then spent long minutes putting distance between himself and the subject. Because he wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

“How’d she escape?” he’d asked his mother.

“Let’s just say she’s stronger than she looks, and very resourceful.” Had his mother given her the resources? The time? The opportunity? He hadn’t wanted to ask. “Central suspects she will return to the empty lot because of the lack of contamination at that site.”

But he knew that wasn’t where she would go.

“Is that what you think?” his mother asked.